...needless to say I had the last laugh...

 One of the best things for me about Goat Songs premiering in The Strand, is that about 100 yards down the road is the Holywood Road Jobs and Benefits Office, where I had to report regularly while I was unemployed, and where they treated me like a fantasist lunatic for claiming I wanted to be a writer.  I would say things like "I have a play on in the Mac. It got a four star review in The Guardian", and they would say "Sure you have, John, but have you thought of becoming a cleaner?" (Later, when I did briefly become a cleaner, they didn't like that either as I wasn't deemed to be getting enough hours, and the shifts I did get were occasional and inconsistent.) 

Now I laugh and crow as the Job Centre shrinks beneath the monstrous edifice of my success - The Strand casts a long shadow down the Holywood Road. 

I mean, its one short film (or five shorter ones), but still...c'mon, allow me this tiny victory over years of ignominy. They gave me masses of shit. 

My friend Ben, the brains behind the band Blasted Heath, who soundtrack the film, wanted to be there but couldn't be, so he sent the next best thing: a Dionysus adjacent compilation CD. It features bacchanalian beauties such as Alice Coltrane, Gil Scott-Heron, Faust, Lal and Mike Waterson and, of course, doughty fan favourites Blasted Heath and Red Atlas, whose "Drink The Young Wine" is mesmeric, woozy and uses the First World War as a metaphor for my drunken depression. Which feels both apt and massively disrespectful as the film was launched on Armistice Day. 

I had hoped to play it in the cinema foyer and put things into an appropriately ecstatic mood (and shit up people there for the Eternals). But they didn't have a CD player. Which is somehow more apt.