JINX?!

"My car jinx has returned!" burbles Breathe's David Glasper miserably. "After crashing my Volkswagon Beetle six weeks ago- which was like my third ever car crash- I had yet another accident in America. First we did this thing at a radio station called KISS FM, which was really quite appalling because the CD we were miming to decided to start jumping.

"Then after that little disaster we were driving down this road and this car decided to pull out and it smacked into the side of us and we spun round twice and hit a bloody wall! So then along comes a police car and an ambulance- and you know what they're like in America, they completely over-react- they picked me up, grabbed me, strapped me to a board and put me into one of those funny collar things you wear when you've got a broken neck! So off I went to the hospital where they gave me check ups and an X-ray and things.

"And then I went straight from there onto a plane to come back to Britain and when we got to Heathrow Airport, the undercarriage on the plane wouldn't come down, so we had to circle London for about a million hours or something until they got it to work! Then when I got home I found that someone had nicked my mountainbike! I'm really not very lucky at all."

Crikey viewers! Well isn't it a coincidence of "cosmic" proportions then that Breathe's new swangleaway pop tune, "Jonah" should be named after a similarly ill-"starred" biblical bloke called Jonah (hence he name), who had the spectacular misfortune to be eaten by a whale (or something)? Yus!! Especially seeing as David "Gasper" Glasper suspects that he is- glub! - hte reincarnation of Jonah himself!!

"Well I haven't actually been consumed by many ocean-going mammals myself," he dondles, "but you must admit there are similarities as far as luck goes. The story of Jonah in the Bible is that he doesn't do what the Good Lord says. He jumps on a boat and consequently, Him Upstairs starts bringing storms and and makes the boat crash and Jonah nearly gets eaten by a whale.

"If I could get really arty farty for a moment I'd just like to say that I used Jonah as an analogy for the sea and...well that is a bit boring isn't it? Sorry, it's the hangover making me say these things. I was so legless last night..."

And what, pray, might be the reason for these rock 'n' roll high "jinks"?

"We're doing some warm-up gigs before we go on tour with Belinda Carlisle later in the week," pipes David, "We did a brilliant gig last night in Warrington. Killer! The Breathe live experience is, er, good. I think a lot of people will be surprised. We have a hell of a laugh. No, I don't drop my trousers onstage, nothing remotely like that. And we don't have like road signs on stage or Matt, Luke, and Craig written on the wall or anything. Stan, Reg, and Ken more like it..."

Harrumph! So can you tell us any true facts about whales then?

"A true fact about a whale, eh? I don't really know...Um, the whale in Jonah was a Sperm Whale which is a big ugly one with a snout nose. It's like the one in Moby Dick (ancient book about a Captain Birds Eye type bloke and a whale) and it, um, smells of fish. Um, and eats plankton which mustn't taste very nice...and, uh, I'm a bit useless at this aren't I?"

Yes.