Some good news arrived in my inbox recently. Declan Meade, editor of The Stinging Fly has accepted a short story that I sent him earlier in the year.

Not sure which issue it’ll be in, not the summer one though, maybe November.

All tracks on the first cd are by Hammer legend James Bernard who liked to incorporate the syllables of the movie title into his soundtracks, so the main theme to Dracula went Daaaa . . . Duh . . . Dahhh and the theme to Taste The Blood Of Dracula went Daaa . . . Daaa . . . well, you get the idea. This first cd includes soundtrack excerpts from five Dracula titles, Frankenstein Created Woman, The Devil Rides Out and Kiss Of The Vampire.

Best of the bunch are probably Dracula, Taste The Blood Of Dracula and The Devil Rides Out (renamed The Devil’s Bride in the US because the distributor was worried that people would think it was a western).

The second cd is by Bernard and a variety of others. It has tracks from One Million Years B.C., Hands Of The Ripper and She amongst others. I’d have liked more of the Quatermass II soundtrack, and The Abominable Snowman - only the one minute thirty second main theme is present.

It should be noted that these aren’t the original recordings (some of which are available but becoming hard to track down on cd) but new recordings by The City Of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. For the most part they do a fine job and these new versions are almost indistinguishable from the originals. The Romance: The Young Lovers theme from Taste The Blood Of Dracula does sound quite different though and is not a patch on the original.

But that one small gripe aside, this is a great and readily available selection of Hammer’s best soundtracks and well worth a listen.

Here’s a one minute instrumental version of Neal Hefti’s Batman Theme recorded on a wet afternoon about four years ago. Me on bass, my brother Gerry on guitar, soulless robotic drum programme on drums.

There are five different bass tracks here, played in different positions on the neck and then doubled up, one in to each speaker to give it that weird sound. One of the bass tracks was distorted with an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff pedal, if memory serves.

It took a couple of listens to get in to this one (so did the Grinderman album) but it’s growing on me.

However, there’s something about the 6^th track - We Call Upon The Author that makes my skin crawl, I can’t explain it, it really does make me a bit nauseous.

But fuck it, it’s a new Nick Cave album, and even it was just an audio recording of him shitting into a trumpet, it’d still be better than 99% of the dross that gets released.

Click here, then Murky Stuff, Issues, PDF # 2 to download a free 22-page taster issue of Murky Depths.

Along with my short story, Shit New World, it also includes prose stories from Lavie Tidhar and Sarah Wagner. The original Episode #1 of Death and The Maiden from Richard Calder. Poem from Glynn Barrass with accompanying artwork by Luke Hinchley. Cover by Luke Cooper.

Murky Depths is a quarterly anthology of short fiction, poetry, articles and comic strips and you really should be reading it.

Latest issue, which features my short story The Second Class Jesus is on sale now.

Also features poems and short fiction by Jane Flett, M.E. Silverman, Miranda Merklein, Craig Caudill, Luigi Monteferrante, Christopher Barnes, John Oliver Hodges, Tricia Asklar, Noel Sloboda, Howard Good and Morris Collins.

You can buy the print journal or download a pdf copy here.