Supergroup i like cats have been wowing audiences for just over a year, ever since they were gathered together by Charles M Diddy.
Diddy, to be born 2975 and a direct descendant of P-Diddy, will be a music collector specialising in the music of the early twenty-first century. Hearing of the band i like cats through a fellow collector, he will be so enamoured of the name that he will order their entire discography, only to find they were a shitty synthpop duo from Latvia. So in love with the band name will Diddy be, that he will invent a time machine, determining to preserve the name from an unworthy band.
Taking the simplest course, he will return to our time and kill both band members in their cribs. Returning to his own time he will find that his actions have dramatically altered the timeline both future and past. For instance, no one invented the theremin and also there are lots more possums. What will be worse, however, is that when he returns there will be a band with the name i like cats! Attempting to remedy his mistake, he will return again and again to the past, each time murdering a baby and each time returning to a world with more possums and an inferior band with the name i like cats.
“What can I do?” He will cry angrily to the heavens. “And what’s with all these goddamned motherfucking possums?!” After sitting in meditation for five nonyears in the space between time itself, he will realise what he has to do. “I’ve got it! Gathering together the greatest musicians of all time and all times, I shall create a band the likes of which shall never be seen again! And they shall be called i like cats!”
The rest is musical history. (Or it will be. Whatever. You try telling a story set in the future in past tense from a present perspective, see how far you get!) After spending centuries of objective time researching the future and past for the members of his band, he chose five men. Only five, for that is the number most holy to our Lady Eris, and only men, because Diddy was a bit of a misogynistic prick.
Rollo #23derson, guitarist from the year 17974, when the most popular fast food is yak nuggets; Dominico Mercera, cellist from the year 1723, an instrumental figure in the Mapuche uprising in Chile; Bill Stone, drummer gnome from the year 5003, hailing from the town of Muscaria in the Fungal Region, what we now know as Russia; Jaie Gonzalez, bassist from the year 2030, currently dating his mother and soon to father himself; and Dylan Baskind, who is the guitarist from the Winter People.
Bringing together these five in the one room in Stanmore, he dubbed the band i like cats in a special ceremony involving darts and the ritual blowing of the nose. In that room he would carve his greatest sculpture. His greatest ever, for this would be a sculpture born of the purest clay! But mostly because he had never sculpted previously, so by definition it would be his greatest sculpture. It would also be his greatest cake, his greatest poem; every metaphor you can think of that is appropriate, this would be his greatest one of those, and as you can probably tell, that’s a lot of greatest. He’d made capsicum soup before, but the musical soup he would make in that room would still be the greatest soup he’d ever made, and that capsicum soup was pretty frickin great!
Working with the guys for days on end, he gave them the benefit of his musical knowledge. His mental music library spanned millennia; the breadth of his critical knowledge was vast. For hours he would lecture, pouring his wisdom into them like a quite large bucket full of wisdom.
Finally, i like cats were ready for their debut performance. Taking to the stage like huge musical cabbage, they leafed through the minds of their audience like an impatient Mediterranean man leafing through women’s magazines at a doctor’s surgery. The audience, having never had their minds riffled before, went absolutely mad. The show was a fantastic success. Taking their final bows, they called for Diddy to take the stage and share in the glory that he himself had created.
But Diddy was not there. He had been rushed to hospital from his hotel room earlier in the evening. The two fifteen-year-old girls with him at the time said he’d just had too much cocaine but Diddy was pronounced dead on arrival. Tragically, the seeds of hope that Diddy had planted with the massacre of those Latvian babies had finally come to fruition, yet he would never taste his own success.
i like cats first studio album is currently being mixed and can be expected in about six weeks. You can see them live headlining Exquisite Corpse’s enormous first birthday. In memoriam, Charles M Diddy.
