Over the last few weeks, I've spent a considerable time working on ideas for the new album artwork. The music is inspired by the 1950s/60 so-called 'Beat Culture' which included writers such as William Burroughs and Hunter S Thompson, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.

The idea for the album is that it is set in a Las Vegas hotel where these people gather to plot the downfall of the US Government, comment on the social and artistic ruptures of the time and get very, very out of it on a pharmaceutical list which is no longer available to those except the near-dead. All of this done to a soundtrack of Free Jazz and Bebop. Only black music really spoke for this culture in a meaningful way.

The themes and titles of each song are a reference to characters and events which pop up in the books of these guys. As you might imagine, they are an oddball bunch but they represent the extremes of US social and political divides in what was an extremely turbulent period.