ROCKHANDS OF THE YEAR: Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer, Damian OK Go and Ben Folds


Damian OKGo, Amanda Palmer, Ben Folds & Neil Gaiman

I love writer/darklord of awesome Neil Gaiman (author of The Sandman comic series, American Gods, The Graveyard Book, NeverwhereCoraline, and my fave (heh), Duran Duran – The First Four Years of the Fab Five, so much it hurts… but in that good way.

The thing about Gaiman is not just his amazing way with words, or that he’s married to the incomparably rad musician Amanda Palmer (I seriously enjoyed watching their relationship bloom on Twitter), or that he has wicked white wolf-like dogs, or that his kids seem ridiculously cool, or that he’s a charitable soul, or that – did I mention his books? – he’s as rocking as a writer can be.

The thing that also makes Neil Gaiman so positive-adjective worthy is that he’s a man of his word, has a great memory, aaaaand SENT ME THE BEST-EVER ROCKHANDS PIC. IN THE HISTORY OF EVERNESS. PLUS 666 EXTRA YEARS.

I’d been bugging Neil on Twitter for a long while. We’d tweet about a shared love of Magnetic Fields – he’s mates with Stephin Merritt – he’d correct me when I called him a liar over when his EP of Doctor Who was airing (this weekend), and sent me a totally bonkers website brimming with rockhands to check out.

He said – nay, PROMISED – that he would, when a time seemed suitable, deliver me a rockhand pic, if I kept reminding him. So I did. And then, literally 15 minutes before I was going to get a new tattoo of epic rockhands (made for me by another genius, my fave artist/designer Pete Fowler), a photo of epic rockhands arrived.

“How’s this? Hands from me, @benfolds, @amandapalmer & Damian from @OKgo“. (And any of you whom cynically think I just found this on t’interwebs, have a gander at Neil’s website…where it’s actually addressed to “BackstageRider” below.)

UMmmm, HOW’S THIS? HOW’S THIS? It’s bloody rocktacular, Neil. You, and the gang of musical genius assembled around you, have my undying love. It was also taken during the recording of Nighty Night, an “8 in 8” project, Neil explained to me, whereby the four above got together and wrote and recorded 6 songs in 12 hours. Buy the EP for a whopping $1 here. Amazing. \m/


One response to “ROCKHANDS OF THE YEAR: Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer, Damian OK Go and Ben Folds”

  1. Totally thought I was the only one creeping their twitter romance. Of course I’m not. I’m building a THIS MACHINE KILLS THE MACHINE ukulele and I’m bringing the top tonight to see if they’ll sign it.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *