The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg is used to showing oil paintings and military artefacts from many centuries ago, i.e. not what the kidz are into. But to win over the youth, they put on a collection of contemporary British art, including a print of Cher Guevara, and a log stuck in some railings. They wanted more though, they wanted to bring over a band to make the kids hip to Catherine the Great’s palace and its unrivalled collection of lace, goblets, and a 2000-year-old solid gold comb. My step-gran works there and so I got involved as a consultant on what the kids are into. The kids are into These New Puritans, who are fortunately on my label, so they went to play a show and I got to have a free holiday in Russia.

These are some photos that I took for viceland.com. I thought I’d be arty and use an old Soviet Lomo camera. But as I’d never used one before, the pictures were out of focus, over-saturated and largely unusable. However, I also had a Yashica T4, a disposable camera, a shitty digital camera, and a blackberry. Here are the photos. Enjoy!

There are lots of soldiers everywhere in St. Petersburg. They don’t seem to have much to do though, so there’s a lot of loitering and smoking.

There’s also a lot of cats there. Here’s one that Sophie TNP befriended.

We were taken out for dinner, but there was no vegetarian food, so…

A Russian TNP fan.

Me on holiday.

A very nice Russian lady we met. We had pancakes. Here she is with her dog, Cherry.

Pop stars.

Rock stars.

Loads of cars had this art sprayed on them that looked like Simon Taylor’s wardrobe in 2007. Oh, and next to that is a military vehicle with two soldiers asleep in it.

WORDS AND PICTURES (EXCEPT THE ONES HE’S IN): JOE ANGULAR

Stop the press! I just found this on Google. Someone’s cut the mix of the new These New Puritans album, “Hidden” which you can get on their site, over Malice in Wonderland, a film which we wrote about ages ago. It’s pretty cool.