liverandlights: February 2018

One Shoe Mickey's a Verbfoot Jack

For the last year I have been working on a cycle

of interrelated texts/songs/lyrics that

purport to have been

written by the mythical One Shoe Mickey.

Mickey is a former refugee who has somehow found his way to

England. Mickey is what the people of London call him,

although I believe he has had many names, and has

existed throughout history.

Like in all the best superhero adventures,
our Micheal has taken a bang on the head and this has

cleared his senses. Now he sees the world for what it really is, a bloody mess.
This he can cure,

he believes, with his miraculously acquired superpower:

Kindness.

Also, In his mixed up brain he thinks that shoes should only be worn

one at a time,

because there is only one god.

He also thinks that gloves are significant; they must be - he sees so many of them

dropped on the London street. He has come believe that they are the souls of all the sons, daughters, wives, mothers, nephews, lovers, friends and kind strangers etc lost on all the long and desperate roads emmanating from the war that never ends. He thinks he can somehow reunite them all, mend them all, all the lost and broken things of the world.

Among the gloves he seeks the One True G’love, a mythical glove that may or may not relate to his own lost family. Maybe its the Universal G’love, containing the last secret of the universe......

Mickey makes many friends here in England, as he trudges from dawn til dusk around the city, some most unexpected, and they all have thier stories too and Mickey is the boy to tell them.

Ian Mckean and I have worked a number of these texts into songs - a whole album’s worth, which we have begun to record. In the meantime I have also been making two books:

Liver & Lights No 56, One Shoe Mickey is a Verbfoot Jack.

This is an entirely hand hand printed book made from a confection of low budget block printing methods and containing one of Mickey’s most pointed observations of the world and its sorry condition. It probably the most labour intensive book I have ever made, a labour of love for all the Mickeys. It is made using 100% recycled materials in a very limited edition of only 40 copies.

Liver & Lights No 57. One Shoe Mickey, a song cycle.

This is an A5 paperback containing the complete cycle of texts and song lyrics written by Mickey; his view of the world, his friends, his journey, the city. The book is profusely illustrated in full colour by Mickey’s ongoing collection of lovingly rendered glove paintings, which I have been intermittently posting on instagram.

Here is his meagre vittles,

but all he meets can share it,

and how the one true glove

will bind them all,

for all can wear it.