Distort XXIII Vol. 3: Life Stinks I Liked The Kinks

For the past decade I have occasionally published Life Stinks I Like The Kinks, a magazine of writing about popular music, obsessive personality, drunkenness and cruelty.

I was recently approached by a publisher with a request to compile this writing into a book. The book will collect material from the six published issues of Life Stinks, some personal correspondence, hate mail, words I’ve observed scrawled on the wall above urinals and operating tables, cryptic lines muttered under the breath of robed lunatics who have been following me on my nightly walks through Kings Cross…

As I began work on the book, it became clear I still had a couple of issues of Life Stinks to publish before I could fall on the sword of my Kinks obsession and make it a complete body of work. I began writing on every Kinks album released between 1964 and 1993 to be published in three final issues.

This issue covers some of the material from their first decade, from 1964 to 1973. Over the next couple of months I will publish two more issues, and from these I will edit it all into a book over Summer… and never speak of The Kinks again…

Card cover with lino cut print, numbered individually /23.

Printing Jan '24.

Distort mag started in 2003 to document kvlt hardcore and World War III. The contents of Distort have been dominated by impulse, excess, insomnia, stimulation. No editor, no proofread, no nerd.

Out of the 2000+ pages published over the past couple of decades I am skimming the C.R.E.A.M. into an archival book.

I'm raising funds to print this by making backissues available again via PDF here.

I'm also kicking off a project called the XXIII Project, of which this is the eighth volume.

XXIII will publish 23 mags total. These will be available only in two editions of 23 copies each.

The first edition I will be selling via Prop, Lulu's and the Distort mailorder (here).

The second edition was a unique subscription edition to this project. Now sold out.