Originally published in http://www.swinemagazine.co.uk/ Dec 08
Best LP Jonathan Coulton - JoCo Looks Back
Some would say your life isn't complete until you've heard an arresting love song which was written from the point of view of a giant squid. I would be one of those people.
Runners Up : Flight Of The Conchords – Flight Of The Conchords, Laura Marling -Alas, I Cannot Swim
Best Live Act Jonathan Coulton and Paul & Storm – Manchester Uni – 29.10.08
All seated, full of people who laugh at references to the computer game Fable, songs about fractals and fighting nuns. Sounds like the world's worst gig but was actually the world's greatest.
Also featured a cameo from Neil Gaiman, reading lyrics about a creepy doll.
Runners Up : Edwyn Collins, Serj Tankian
Top 5 Singles
5. Lightspeed Champion – Galaxy of The Lost
4. Black Kids – I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You
3. Laura Marling – Ghosts
2. Estelle - American Boy
1. Vampire Weekend – Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa
Best Club Strangeways @ The Library, Leeds
No point in explaining because I bet no-one's ever been there but this IS the best club night of 2008.
Runners up : Jamm, Brixton ; The Cabin Club,Liverpool and its foetal DJs
Best Film The Dark Knight
Almighty hype + Recently dead young actor usually = overrated but TDK was bombastic, brooding and surprising.
Runners up : The X Files : I Want To Believe (Yes, honestly)
Best TV Heroes (BBC 2)
To all the naysayers who have been complaining about a drop in quality, Sylar is the best character on television, and Sylar is in Heroes, therefore, Heroes is the best thing on television. www.endofshow.com/thelist is my Heroes podcast BTW.
Runners Up : Dead Set (Channel 4), The IT Crowd (Channel 4)
Best Radio Russell Brand
Well I think the loss of the show is a loss to BBC 2, and seeing as I can't vote for myself…
Runner Up : Me on End Of Show (HCR 92.3) (Balls to humility)
Best Book Stephen King – Duma Key
Chilling return to horror from the spookiest looking author of all time. Seriously, he looks like one of his own monsters.
Runner up : Stephen Fry In America
Best Footballer Cristiano Ronaldo Who am I to argue with everyone else in the world?
Best Event San Diego Comic-Con 2008
Attendees may be pegged as huge geeks but Comic-Con is the breeding ground of everything you will see on a screen for the next year. The media kingmakers' convention.
Best Weather Girl/Boy
Dianne Oxberry, watch the featured locations on the map, she spells out swear words with them – seriously, one week it was Chester, Urmston, Northwich, Trafford.
Tomasz Schafernaker – eye candy, the only thing worth watching on BBC News 24. Gives me a warm front every time.
Saturday 20 December 2008
Saturday 20 September 2008
What I Did In My Holidays
Originally published in www.swinemagazine.co.uk Sep 08
One of my finest school moments came in the first week of 2nd year juniors when we were asked to do a project entitled ‘My Summer Holidays’. As we did this every September while teacher’s blood alcohol level returned to normal, I had planned diligently and spent my summer holiday in Palma Nova collecting things that I might stick in my project book when I got back. Unfortunately for my parents and to the delight of my male classmates (and Laura Shaw, always wondered about her) I had been collecting flyers for wet t-shirt contests and Spanish prossy cards from phone boxes.
Our family holidays were just that, the whole family of uncles, cousins, aunties, nanas, great nanas and assorted school friends who’d somehow gotten the impression that this would two weeks of whores and nipples. We’d go on two of these a year, one with my mum’s side and one with my dad’s. We did once talk about assembling the entire clan into one nightmarish holiday but that fell through due to the lack of 28 bed cottages in South Devon. Mum’s side of the family are all noticeably calmer and less nuts than the Walkers so that holiday was usually at the latter end of the summer, like a gentle pear sorbet after a skunk balti.
Departure day on Walker holidays was always a bit like the opening scenes of Home Alone, with half a dozen mental kids belting around my nan’s house screaming whilst Dad, uncles and granddads got pissed and argued about the best way to drive. Satnavs have removed this problem but in 1990 it was just four blokes and a 1956 AA road map trying to decide which A road to go on to find the Dead Zone, otherwise known as our holiday destination. Because there were nearly 20 of us we could never find a big enough house and so ended up in some weird backwater with some questionable ‘rooms’ which were clearly cupboards before we arrived.
One house we stayed in was known as ‘the spooky house’ by the locals because it was a foreboding gothic mansion with 5 floors and sat on top of a hill overlooking Perranporth. It looked like the previous occupants had just been shipped in from Transylvania in wooden crates with a bed of their native earth. All of the door handles fell off, leaving you regularly trapped inside rooms, and all seven of us kids were placed in the top attic room which had no stairs, just a step ladder and a paper sign saying ‘Stairs Broken’.
In some posh hotels and villas there’s a lovely welcome basket with locally sourced produce laid out for your pleasure. In Castle Dracula Perranporth my mum opened the fridge to find a whole sea bass staring back at her and was informed that the people in the house before us had been on a fishing trip and that we were welcome to enjoy this bounty. The woman showing us round told my Aunty Janet to ‘whack its head off and just boil it’. Once she’d gone to feed the wolves my uncles went and slung it into the sea and it really did take two of them, wobbling down the hill with the creature from the deep while the townspeople laughed their tits off .
First on the agenda for any holiday taken in the UK was to find a pub with a skittle alley. For some reason my dad and his elder brothers prioritised this above all else, I have a theory that it was because it was cheap entertainment that everyone could get involved in and was just gay enough to stop them coming to blows during the inevitable final round grudge match. In Stogumber, Somerset, we had a local pub which advertised its skittle alley, but we were dismayed to learn that it was in an outbuilding that was full of tractors. The landlord promised to clean it out if we came back the next day, and sure enough we played skittles in a barn with a row of tractors staring at us and rats scuttling about whilst my nana screamed to God to save her from these unholy minions.
Holidays abroad were always just as chaotic, with the added trump card of an international airport. My uncle Stuart would always find what he called ‘a smashing hotel’ by only booking places which were advertised in German. He had an inkling that these would be the best because Germans are so stereotypically demanding, and he had a point, we stayed in some nice places. The most obvious exception was the Don Bigote, which we thought must mean ‘Mr Bigot’. It was half finished, looked nothing like its picture in Das Ferien and was packed to the rafters with German businessmen. One night we were all playing Trivial Pursuit (not even the travel version, the big original box which my grandad insisted on bringing everywhere) on the balcony of the biggest room whilst a few metres below a few dozen Germans were waiting for a coach. They kept looking up at us with suspicion every time we laughed, and at one point grandad was taking ages to ask the question on the card he had. When challenged he got flustered and started whispering “Which German city took most allied damage during the second world war?” Giggling ensued and through some fluke every question that followed was about the war, leaving the Germans below glaring as the words Kristallnacht, Goering and Rhineland floated down to them punctuated with hysterical laughter.
I won’t go into the myriad ‘incidents’, the goose stepping by my 6 year old brother in the dining room, my mum being thrown out of the Green Parrot bar in Magaluf for taking a swing at a guy selling photos with a chimp, and the night at the Spanish Evening which we now refer to only as ‘Black Fiesta’. Suffice to say that I managed to make ‘My Summer Holiday’ a thrilling read, and it eventually passed the censors with an 18 certificate for nudity and chimp related violence.
One of my finest school moments came in the first week of 2nd year juniors when we were asked to do a project entitled ‘My Summer Holidays’. As we did this every September while teacher’s blood alcohol level returned to normal, I had planned diligently and spent my summer holiday in Palma Nova collecting things that I might stick in my project book when I got back. Unfortunately for my parents and to the delight of my male classmates (and Laura Shaw, always wondered about her) I had been collecting flyers for wet t-shirt contests and Spanish prossy cards from phone boxes.
Our family holidays were just that, the whole family of uncles, cousins, aunties, nanas, great nanas and assorted school friends who’d somehow gotten the impression that this would two weeks of whores and nipples. We’d go on two of these a year, one with my mum’s side and one with my dad’s. We did once talk about assembling the entire clan into one nightmarish holiday but that fell through due to the lack of 28 bed cottages in South Devon. Mum’s side of the family are all noticeably calmer and less nuts than the Walkers so that holiday was usually at the latter end of the summer, like a gentle pear sorbet after a skunk balti.
Departure day on Walker holidays was always a bit like the opening scenes of Home Alone, with half a dozen mental kids belting around my nan’s house screaming whilst Dad, uncles and granddads got pissed and argued about the best way to drive. Satnavs have removed this problem but in 1990 it was just four blokes and a 1956 AA road map trying to decide which A road to go on to find the Dead Zone, otherwise known as our holiday destination. Because there were nearly 20 of us we could never find a big enough house and so ended up in some weird backwater with some questionable ‘rooms’ which were clearly cupboards before we arrived.
One house we stayed in was known as ‘the spooky house’ by the locals because it was a foreboding gothic mansion with 5 floors and sat on top of a hill overlooking Perranporth. It looked like the previous occupants had just been shipped in from Transylvania in wooden crates with a bed of their native earth. All of the door handles fell off, leaving you regularly trapped inside rooms, and all seven of us kids were placed in the top attic room which had no stairs, just a step ladder and a paper sign saying ‘Stairs Broken’.
In some posh hotels and villas there’s a lovely welcome basket with locally sourced produce laid out for your pleasure. In Castle Dracula Perranporth my mum opened the fridge to find a whole sea bass staring back at her and was informed that the people in the house before us had been on a fishing trip and that we were welcome to enjoy this bounty. The woman showing us round told my Aunty Janet to ‘whack its head off and just boil it’. Once she’d gone to feed the wolves my uncles went and slung it into the sea and it really did take two of them, wobbling down the hill with the creature from the deep while the townspeople laughed their tits off .
First on the agenda for any holiday taken in the UK was to find a pub with a skittle alley. For some reason my dad and his elder brothers prioritised this above all else, I have a theory that it was because it was cheap entertainment that everyone could get involved in and was just gay enough to stop them coming to blows during the inevitable final round grudge match. In Stogumber, Somerset, we had a local pub which advertised its skittle alley, but we were dismayed to learn that it was in an outbuilding that was full of tractors. The landlord promised to clean it out if we came back the next day, and sure enough we played skittles in a barn with a row of tractors staring at us and rats scuttling about whilst my nana screamed to God to save her from these unholy minions.
Holidays abroad were always just as chaotic, with the added trump card of an international airport. My uncle Stuart would always find what he called ‘a smashing hotel’ by only booking places which were advertised in German. He had an inkling that these would be the best because Germans are so stereotypically demanding, and he had a point, we stayed in some nice places. The most obvious exception was the Don Bigote, which we thought must mean ‘Mr Bigot’. It was half finished, looked nothing like its picture in Das Ferien and was packed to the rafters with German businessmen. One night we were all playing Trivial Pursuit (not even the travel version, the big original box which my grandad insisted on bringing everywhere) on the balcony of the biggest room whilst a few metres below a few dozen Germans were waiting for a coach. They kept looking up at us with suspicion every time we laughed, and at one point grandad was taking ages to ask the question on the card he had. When challenged he got flustered and started whispering “Which German city took most allied damage during the second world war?” Giggling ensued and through some fluke every question that followed was about the war, leaving the Germans below glaring as the words Kristallnacht, Goering and Rhineland floated down to them punctuated with hysterical laughter.
I won’t go into the myriad ‘incidents’, the goose stepping by my 6 year old brother in the dining room, my mum being thrown out of the Green Parrot bar in Magaluf for taking a swing at a guy selling photos with a chimp, and the night at the Spanish Evening which we now refer to only as ‘Black Fiesta’. Suffice to say that I managed to make ‘My Summer Holiday’ a thrilling read, and it eventually passed the censors with an 18 certificate for nudity and chimp related violence.
Saturday 14 June 2008
KW Senior
My dad is stood on the doorstep in the rain with a dazed look on his face and a sprig of privet hedge in his hand. He looks up, with his usual visage of incredulity and gives the feed line to what I know will be a night full of coffee drinking and gasping for air as the laughter stitch leaves us both bent double and crying ; “You’ll never guess what just happened to me!”
My dad’s blond with blue eyes, and I am not. Because of this, throughout my life I’ve been told that I’m ‘exactly’ like my mother. I am not. If you have to draw parallels between parents and their offspring you have use a better starting point than their colouring because it’s the personality traits that really hit people. Anyone who really knows me knows that I am virtually the same person as my dad. This is immediately evident to anyone who sees us drinking together. I’m basically him in a dress, which is a chilling visual to say the least.
When I was born, my dad was 19 years old. I’ve got a picture of him with shoulder length hair and a cheesecloth shirt which was taken when I was about two months old and he looks barely out of nappies himself. He was at art college studying photography, a job he does to this day. I think a lot of the foibles I picked up from him were a symptom of his youth; the obsession that he had for The Beatles and Paul McCartney fed my obsession for Suede (my Dad used to have a guilty stash of magazines that I used to think were porn but were actually issues of Record Collector) and the reason that I have always found it so easy to embark on hare-brained schemes definitely comes from his attitude of “What’s the worst that could happen?”.
Dad’s schemes ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. He’s good with this hands (something I haven’t inherited in the slightest) and once made my grandparents a wardrobe. He then decided that this would be a first rate business venture, though that one wardrobe was all he ever produced. For a whole summer in about 1993 he helped his friend set up a crazy golf course next to Pickmere Lake, which was functional but lacked aesthetic value, in fact it looked like something from Disneyland Chechnya. It was made completely of unfinished concrete and you risked serious injury in trying to retrieve wayward balls because of the bits of broken glass and nails that were lurking inside every hole.
He was also adept at spotting new technologies that would become quickly obsolete. He bought a toploading Betamax video recorder in 1982 and quickly amassed a collection of taped off the telly programmes which he carefully labelled and filed. He used to spend hours sat in front of that machine fast forwarding to accurately document what was on the tape and for how long. To this day he insists that Betmax was the higher quality format, and I have to agree with him. He had a carphone in 1988 which my friends thought was the height of sophistication, even thought it was only used about three times because the calls were 50p a minute. In 1992, four years before the first DVD players came onto the market, he had a Kodak PhotoCD player, which was possibly the most useless piece of equipment ever invented. Only professional photographers have ever heard of them for they were designed to play back photographs from files that had been digitised, and only professional photographers wanted to do that. It was never popular and was quickly replaced by a technology we now know as the ‘computer’.
Our computer was an Acorn Electron, which my dad played on for hours. His favourite game was called Sphinx Adventure which consisted of a small, badly rendered elf character trying to reach a sphinx. A typical moment of game play is as follows:
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
>GO LEFT
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
>GO RIGHT
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
>GO FORWARD
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
>GO BACK
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
YOU HAVE BEEN SLAIN BY A WIZARD
GAME OVER
It took him nearly four years to complete, and was rewarded by a screen saying ‘THE END’. He also enjoyed ‘Tree Of Knowledge’, a quiz game where you had to actually input all the quiz data yourself. You could spend hours building a database on Neighbours characters or Manchester City Players 1964 – 1984, only for the game to formulate questions based on this data, which you obviously already knew the answer to.
It would take me a long time to run through all of the things that make my dad my dad. I attempted it when I was best man at his wedding to my stepmum, but the speech ended up being a testimonial to the man and I binned it, thinking that stories about the notes he used to leave in my lunchbox featuring poems about the headmistress’s underwear, or the time he took payment for some photography work in the form of a rabbit would say more about my relationship with him than his with his new wife.
I’ll leave you with the conclusion of the opening paragraph – so there’s my dad, privet hedge in hand and relates to me the following tale;
“I was dropping off some photos at a woman’s house, and came back to find the car was gone. Now, my first thought was ‘The car’s been nicked’, so I went to go back inside and call the police. Just then I saw the car at the bottom of the hill parked in someone’s drive, so I went down there to see what they were playing at. The next thing, this old fella comes out ranting and raving at me, saying that my car’s ruined his hedge. Turns out I must have left that handbrake off and the car’s rolled right down the hill into the guy’s drive and only been stopped by his privet hedge. Before I know it, he’s blocked me in with his car and is getting me to sign a written confession that I have damaged his ‘valuable’ hedge. He wouldn’t let me go until I’d signed it and taken some pictures.”
“So why did you bring some of the hedge with you?”
“This? This is my evidence.”
And so goes another normal night in the life of Keith Walker.
My dad’s blond with blue eyes, and I am not. Because of this, throughout my life I’ve been told that I’m ‘exactly’ like my mother. I am not. If you have to draw parallels between parents and their offspring you have use a better starting point than their colouring because it’s the personality traits that really hit people. Anyone who really knows me knows that I am virtually the same person as my dad. This is immediately evident to anyone who sees us drinking together. I’m basically him in a dress, which is a chilling visual to say the least.
When I was born, my dad was 19 years old. I’ve got a picture of him with shoulder length hair and a cheesecloth shirt which was taken when I was about two months old and he looks barely out of nappies himself. He was at art college studying photography, a job he does to this day. I think a lot of the foibles I picked up from him were a symptom of his youth; the obsession that he had for The Beatles and Paul McCartney fed my obsession for Suede (my Dad used to have a guilty stash of magazines that I used to think were porn but were actually issues of Record Collector) and the reason that I have always found it so easy to embark on hare-brained schemes definitely comes from his attitude of “What’s the worst that could happen?”.
Dad’s schemes ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. He’s good with this hands (something I haven’t inherited in the slightest) and once made my grandparents a wardrobe. He then decided that this would be a first rate business venture, though that one wardrobe was all he ever produced. For a whole summer in about 1993 he helped his friend set up a crazy golf course next to Pickmere Lake, which was functional but lacked aesthetic value, in fact it looked like something from Disneyland Chechnya. It was made completely of unfinished concrete and you risked serious injury in trying to retrieve wayward balls because of the bits of broken glass and nails that were lurking inside every hole.
He was also adept at spotting new technologies that would become quickly obsolete. He bought a toploading Betamax video recorder in 1982 and quickly amassed a collection of taped off the telly programmes which he carefully labelled and filed. He used to spend hours sat in front of that machine fast forwarding to accurately document what was on the tape and for how long. To this day he insists that Betmax was the higher quality format, and I have to agree with him. He had a carphone in 1988 which my friends thought was the height of sophistication, even thought it was only used about three times because the calls were 50p a minute. In 1992, four years before the first DVD players came onto the market, he had a Kodak PhotoCD player, which was possibly the most useless piece of equipment ever invented. Only professional photographers have ever heard of them for they were designed to play back photographs from files that had been digitised, and only professional photographers wanted to do that. It was never popular and was quickly replaced by a technology we now know as the ‘computer’.
Our computer was an Acorn Electron, which my dad played on for hours. His favourite game was called Sphinx Adventure which consisted of a small, badly rendered elf character trying to reach a sphinx. A typical moment of game play is as follows:
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
>GO LEFT
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
>GO RIGHT
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
>GO FORWARD
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
>GO BACK
YOU ARE IN THE ICE CAVES
YOU HAVE BEEN SLAIN BY A WIZARD
GAME OVER
It took him nearly four years to complete, and was rewarded by a screen saying ‘THE END’. He also enjoyed ‘Tree Of Knowledge’, a quiz game where you had to actually input all the quiz data yourself. You could spend hours building a database on Neighbours characters or Manchester City Players 1964 – 1984, only for the game to formulate questions based on this data, which you obviously already knew the answer to.
It would take me a long time to run through all of the things that make my dad my dad. I attempted it when I was best man at his wedding to my stepmum, but the speech ended up being a testimonial to the man and I binned it, thinking that stories about the notes he used to leave in my lunchbox featuring poems about the headmistress’s underwear, or the time he took payment for some photography work in the form of a rabbit would say more about my relationship with him than his with his new wife.
I’ll leave you with the conclusion of the opening paragraph – so there’s my dad, privet hedge in hand and relates to me the following tale;
“I was dropping off some photos at a woman’s house, and came back to find the car was gone. Now, my first thought was ‘The car’s been nicked’, so I went to go back inside and call the police. Just then I saw the car at the bottom of the hill parked in someone’s drive, so I went down there to see what they were playing at. The next thing, this old fella comes out ranting and raving at me, saying that my car’s ruined his hedge. Turns out I must have left that handbrake off and the car’s rolled right down the hill into the guy’s drive and only been stopped by his privet hedge. Before I know it, he’s blocked me in with his car and is getting me to sign a written confession that I have damaged his ‘valuable’ hedge. He wouldn’t let me go until I’d signed it and taken some pictures.”
“So why did you bring some of the hedge with you?”
“This? This is my evidence.”
And so goes another normal night in the life of Keith Walker.
Saturday 7 June 2008
A Kick In The Festivals
Drunkenness, class wars, casual racism and a complete rip-off. Yes, the Glastonbury Festival is the most British of events. What escapes me is how the failure of a multi-million pound company to sell out a festival in three hours should be of any concern to anyone, anywhere, at any time.
I’m sick of hearing about Glastonbury. I was sick of it before I even heard of it. Why this overblown monster, this idiot taxation system, this money-grubbing behemoth of corporate whoredom should be greeted with such dewy eyed reverence by the music fans of this country is beyond me. The news that ‘Glasto’ , as it’s bog snorkelling ‘disciples’ insist on calling it, hadn’t sold out in under 4.0 nanoseconds was greeted with more wailing and gnashing of teeth than the death of John Lennon. Could it be that the World’s Greatest Music Festival (TM and don’t you forget it you snivelling internet pirates) was losing its grip on the zeitgeist?
Well hold the phone Martha, Glastonbury isn’t on the cutting edge? You could have fooled me, they even had Shirley Bassey there last year. It was a faux-ironic move that the made the students piss themselves but which was lost on the urban youths of Hackney, which is possibly why this year, when dear Emily Eavis announced - shock horror – Jay-Z as the headliner, the regular Glastonbury crowd started burning their crosses. ‘This isn’t irony, this is just unexpected! This will not stand!’ bleated Effie and Hugo Thorntonley-Smythe as they ditched daddy’s credit card and started making plans to plant cotton fields in Ecuador instead.
Glastonbury has finally been seen for what it is, another hollow ‘experience’ for those with more disposable income than imagination to tick off their Observer Music Monthly ‘Do Before You Die’ list. It’s been a long time coming but finally the wheels have come off the Worthy Farm bandwagon. The ‘Glasto tourists’ have realised that although it might be a mildly diverting after-dinner topic to mention that they’re forgoing the South of France this year and taking the kids to ‘really experience Glastonbury’, they don’t particularly want to spend over £600 to subject Kitty and Basil to ’99 Problems’ while a load of cidered up City boys vomit on their brand new Jeff Banks tent.
The new generation of festival goers are not fooled by Glastonbury and its fake hippy ethos. They have more choice than ever before, more new festivals cropping up every year, and they go not necessarily for the lineup, but for the fun of it. Remember fun? It’s what festivals are supposed to be, a weekend away camping, listen to a few bands you might not normally bother with, have a few drinks, etc. You know, fun? Glastonbury over recent years has become more like a stint in Vietnam than a weekend break. First there’s the ridiculous notion of pre-registering, where you hand over more information to Festival Republic Ltd. than you would to a national census. Then if you’re actually lucky enough to win the ticket lottery you have to plan for the inevitable deluge where your tent and all your belongings are washed away on a river of someone else’s feculence with your only comfort being an acoustic set by The Pigeon Detectives which you can’t even hear properly. Yeah, that sounds like a blast.
Vacuous proto-hippies will claim that the best of the fest is actually away from the music, in the ridiculously contrived Field of Lost Vagueness and the Healing Fields but even they are being ploughed over this year.
The day Glastonbury failed to sell out isn’t The Day The Music Died, it’s the Day That Music Woke Up And Punched Michael Eavis In His Great Big Beardy Face. The fact that organisers believed Kings of Leon and The Verve would offer value for money demonstrates just how clueless and out of touch they have become. The Verve reunion must be the least wanted comeback since legwarmers so why foist them on an audience who were pre-pubescent when they last charted? It’s almost as if they were trying to counteract the boat-rocking signing of Jay-Z with something purposefully bland and inoffensive, like having cucumber dip with your Balti.
However, the headliners can’t be blamed for the lack of interest in Glastonbury, after all T In The Park also have The Verve and Kings of Leon and they managed to sell out, as did Leeds/Reading (The Killers, Rage Against the Machine and Metallica). The fact is that the Glastonbury ‘experience’ which cons so many into going is losing its sparkle year after year, starting with the sell off of the management to Mean Fiddler in 2002, which was brought on by the fence-jumpers and the ridiculously over populated 2001 and 1999 festivals. So in essence it was the freeloaders who killed Glastonbury, trying to force the hippy envelope and take advantage of the naïve security and the ease of spreading the ‘weak fence pole’ hints online.
If Glastonbury truly is a national treasure there needs to be a re-think on what exactly it is there to achieve. If the original aims were trampled during the Battle of Yeoman’s Bridge in 1991 when New age Travellers clashed with police, they certainly haven’t been allowed to resurface since, instead the festival has moved further and further away from the mission of free entertainment and co-operation. Personally I blame Thom Yorke, and until he’s burned in a wicker man on the Field of Lost Vagueness the ‘Glastonbury Highlights’ programme on the BBC will be mis-named.
I’m sick of hearing about Glastonbury. I was sick of it before I even heard of it. Why this overblown monster, this idiot taxation system, this money-grubbing behemoth of corporate whoredom should be greeted with such dewy eyed reverence by the music fans of this country is beyond me. The news that ‘Glasto’ , as it’s bog snorkelling ‘disciples’ insist on calling it, hadn’t sold out in under 4.0 nanoseconds was greeted with more wailing and gnashing of teeth than the death of John Lennon. Could it be that the World’s Greatest Music Festival (TM and don’t you forget it you snivelling internet pirates) was losing its grip on the zeitgeist?
Well hold the phone Martha, Glastonbury isn’t on the cutting edge? You could have fooled me, they even had Shirley Bassey there last year. It was a faux-ironic move that the made the students piss themselves but which was lost on the urban youths of Hackney, which is possibly why this year, when dear Emily Eavis announced - shock horror – Jay-Z as the headliner, the regular Glastonbury crowd started burning their crosses. ‘This isn’t irony, this is just unexpected! This will not stand!’ bleated Effie and Hugo Thorntonley-Smythe as they ditched daddy’s credit card and started making plans to plant cotton fields in Ecuador instead.
Glastonbury has finally been seen for what it is, another hollow ‘experience’ for those with more disposable income than imagination to tick off their Observer Music Monthly ‘Do Before You Die’ list. It’s been a long time coming but finally the wheels have come off the Worthy Farm bandwagon. The ‘Glasto tourists’ have realised that although it might be a mildly diverting after-dinner topic to mention that they’re forgoing the South of France this year and taking the kids to ‘really experience Glastonbury’, they don’t particularly want to spend over £600 to subject Kitty and Basil to ’99 Problems’ while a load of cidered up City boys vomit on their brand new Jeff Banks tent.
The new generation of festival goers are not fooled by Glastonbury and its fake hippy ethos. They have more choice than ever before, more new festivals cropping up every year, and they go not necessarily for the lineup, but for the fun of it. Remember fun? It’s what festivals are supposed to be, a weekend away camping, listen to a few bands you might not normally bother with, have a few drinks, etc. You know, fun? Glastonbury over recent years has become more like a stint in Vietnam than a weekend break. First there’s the ridiculous notion of pre-registering, where you hand over more information to Festival Republic Ltd. than you would to a national census. Then if you’re actually lucky enough to win the ticket lottery you have to plan for the inevitable deluge where your tent and all your belongings are washed away on a river of someone else’s feculence with your only comfort being an acoustic set by The Pigeon Detectives which you can’t even hear properly. Yeah, that sounds like a blast.
Vacuous proto-hippies will claim that the best of the fest is actually away from the music, in the ridiculously contrived Field of Lost Vagueness and the Healing Fields but even they are being ploughed over this year.
The day Glastonbury failed to sell out isn’t The Day The Music Died, it’s the Day That Music Woke Up And Punched Michael Eavis In His Great Big Beardy Face. The fact that organisers believed Kings of Leon and The Verve would offer value for money demonstrates just how clueless and out of touch they have become. The Verve reunion must be the least wanted comeback since legwarmers so why foist them on an audience who were pre-pubescent when they last charted? It’s almost as if they were trying to counteract the boat-rocking signing of Jay-Z with something purposefully bland and inoffensive, like having cucumber dip with your Balti.
However, the headliners can’t be blamed for the lack of interest in Glastonbury, after all T In The Park also have The Verve and Kings of Leon and they managed to sell out, as did Leeds/Reading (The Killers, Rage Against the Machine and Metallica). The fact is that the Glastonbury ‘experience’ which cons so many into going is losing its sparkle year after year, starting with the sell off of the management to Mean Fiddler in 2002, which was brought on by the fence-jumpers and the ridiculously over populated 2001 and 1999 festivals. So in essence it was the freeloaders who killed Glastonbury, trying to force the hippy envelope and take advantage of the naïve security and the ease of spreading the ‘weak fence pole’ hints online.
If Glastonbury truly is a national treasure there needs to be a re-think on what exactly it is there to achieve. If the original aims were trampled during the Battle of Yeoman’s Bridge in 1991 when New age Travellers clashed with police, they certainly haven’t been allowed to resurface since, instead the festival has moved further and further away from the mission of free entertainment and co-operation. Personally I blame Thom Yorke, and until he’s burned in a wicker man on the Field of Lost Vagueness the ‘Glastonbury Highlights’ programme on the BBC will be mis-named.
Wednesday 30 April 2008
'Darwin's Rottweiler' Needs Putting To Sleep
As a lapsed Catholic there are really only two ways I could have attended the recent Richard Dawkins lecture at the Phil and not lost my saved seat in the afterlife. 1 – stand up halfway through and yell things at him, 2 – go on a comp and claim I was just there for the free bread sticks and a nice sit down.
I chose the latter.
Professor Richard Dawkins is now a major celebrity in the world of airport bookshop theologians. His book ‘The God Delusion’ has been printed in over 30 languages and has sold in excess of 1.5 million copies. Dawkins opens his lecture with these statistics, giving you a taster of how humble and unassuming he is. He follows with a slide showing the many titles which have been written purely in opposition to his work; “The Dawkins Delusion”; “Deluded By Dawkins”; “Intellectuals Don’t Need God and Other Myths”; and so on and so forth into infinity. Dawkins laps up this attention, to him it’s just further confirmation that the religious hate to be challenged. The first ten minutes of the hour long lecture are designed to impress upon any doubters in the audience the importance of Dawkins and his theories in today’s mondo-secular society.
Not that there are many doubters here. Most of them are outside with placards, one was chanting ‘Don’t let Dawkins make a monkey out of you’, alluding to the Professors stance on creationism. Inside the largest of the Phil’s lecture rooms those who don’t fully subscribe to Dawkins’ theories are notable by their absence. Every conclusion he reaches is accompanied by a silent chorus of nods, as if he is intoning some indefatigable truth rather than shooting religious fish in a barrel. I began to wonder why these people were here, paying £20 plus to hear what they already agree with, re-packaged with slides from the book they paid a tenner for.
The myth of Dawkins is more compelling than the fact. I was brought up as a Roman Catholic and though religion still plays some part in my life, usually through family ritual, I was ready for Dawkins to present me with something in the atheist position that I could agree with, or at least relate to. I was expecting this Oxford don to outsmart me in some way, to pose questions that I had no answer to. I was Dorothy, wandering down the yellow brick road to see the Wizard, and to match the analogy, I just saw an old man behind a curtain.
What Dawkins says is easy to say, make no mistake about it. Easier than telling people to ‘love thy neighbour’ certainly. He comes across not as an intellectual, or even a great speaker, but as a self-satisfied bore preaching to the converted. At one point he challenges God to strike him down with a thunderbolt – seeking attention from the deity he’s decrying as if the Almighty has nothing better to do than cut a jumped-up travelling salesman down to size.
Part of Dawkins’ problem is the dichotomy of belief vs. fact which he brings on himself and then can’t escape from. No matter how hard he tries, Dawkins can’t separate God and religion from physics and the universe. Even school aged children soon get over the idea of God as a man who lives in the sky, but Dawkins continues to rattle his bones over the lack of ‘proof’ of God’s existence. Much of his ‘lecture’ is concerned with making cheap digs at the religious, even reducing himself to mocking those who pray for their loved ones to recover from illness, literally sniggering at their belief that God has intervened when the much longed-for upturn in health arrives.
I was bored of Dawkins long before he got to the most distasteful part if the lecture, where he begins to pick away at single Biblical references. He obsesses over the Christian God and tellingly shies away from Allah, Buddha, Ganesh etc. After all, no-one likes the God he describes in ‘The God Delusion’, the Old Testament God who went Old School on the humanity after they started copulating with goats and murdering each others’ children because they were fed up. No, we like Jesus better, he even looks a bit like Brad Pitt in all those pictures and he everyone agrees her was a stand up bloke. Dawkins barely mentions Jesus, or that the basic tenets of Christianity are all concerned with being nice to each other and not breaking the law. He’d rather dwell on Genesis and the startling revelation that it MIGHT NOT ALL BE TRUE!
Throughout this lecture, Richard Dawkins never attempts to broach the simplest question of religion. Why do people believe? What exactly is in it for them? He rails against indoctrinisation but wants to indoctrinate us into atheism. He accepts no other belief system than his own, and delights in picking on the easiest of targets, like Ted Haggard, the American Evangelical preacher who was revealed to have a penchant for rent boys. It’s a good job that God hasn’t called an early judgement day because with this reasoning He might have seen Dawkins and junked us all. You can play this game with atheists too by the way, if he can ignore Mother Theresa and Father Damien of Molokai then I can ignore Baba Amte and Margaret Sanger and choose none other than Napalm Death to represent all Atheists. Don’t look so cool now do they?
During the dubious question and answer session (sample question : “Why are you so right, and where can I buy your books?”) a brave woman asked whether the survival of religion into the modern age when so much of it has been debunked by science could mean that religion has an evolutionary advantage. As you might expect, the answer was ‘I don’t know’, but it was preceded by a ridiculously complex and wordy answer which possibly only Dawkins himself will ever understand. I was bamboozled by the reply and so was the woman asking the question, as all other queries had been answered with plain English and very concisely. Dawkins had been rumbled and he pulled his secret weapon of academic waffle out the bag to send the woman back to her seat wondering why she bothered.
Comedian Matt Morgan recently compared Dawkins to Professor Yaffle from Bagpuss, commenting that his dismissal of all religiosity was similar to the woodpecker knocking the organ mice down to size with “It’s not a boat, it’s just a silly old shoe”. This sums Richard Dawkins up beautifully, he doesn’t allow for joy or hope in anything that can’t be quantified and proven. Take him to Westminster Abbey at vespers and he’ll probably prefer his own audio book on the iPod. Show him the Ali Mosque in Cairo and no doubt he’ll be tapping at the brickwork complaining it isn’t properly pointed. He may be the ‘Darwin’s Rottweiler’ to some, but he won’t shake of the Great and Powerful Oz analogy until he takes on some real opposition.
I chose the latter.
Professor Richard Dawkins is now a major celebrity in the world of airport bookshop theologians. His book ‘The God Delusion’ has been printed in over 30 languages and has sold in excess of 1.5 million copies. Dawkins opens his lecture with these statistics, giving you a taster of how humble and unassuming he is. He follows with a slide showing the many titles which have been written purely in opposition to his work; “The Dawkins Delusion”; “Deluded By Dawkins”; “Intellectuals Don’t Need God and Other Myths”; and so on and so forth into infinity. Dawkins laps up this attention, to him it’s just further confirmation that the religious hate to be challenged. The first ten minutes of the hour long lecture are designed to impress upon any doubters in the audience the importance of Dawkins and his theories in today’s mondo-secular society.
Not that there are many doubters here. Most of them are outside with placards, one was chanting ‘Don’t let Dawkins make a monkey out of you’, alluding to the Professors stance on creationism. Inside the largest of the Phil’s lecture rooms those who don’t fully subscribe to Dawkins’ theories are notable by their absence. Every conclusion he reaches is accompanied by a silent chorus of nods, as if he is intoning some indefatigable truth rather than shooting religious fish in a barrel. I began to wonder why these people were here, paying £20 plus to hear what they already agree with, re-packaged with slides from the book they paid a tenner for.
The myth of Dawkins is more compelling than the fact. I was brought up as a Roman Catholic and though religion still plays some part in my life, usually through family ritual, I was ready for Dawkins to present me with something in the atheist position that I could agree with, or at least relate to. I was expecting this Oxford don to outsmart me in some way, to pose questions that I had no answer to. I was Dorothy, wandering down the yellow brick road to see the Wizard, and to match the analogy, I just saw an old man behind a curtain.
What Dawkins says is easy to say, make no mistake about it. Easier than telling people to ‘love thy neighbour’ certainly. He comes across not as an intellectual, or even a great speaker, but as a self-satisfied bore preaching to the converted. At one point he challenges God to strike him down with a thunderbolt – seeking attention from the deity he’s decrying as if the Almighty has nothing better to do than cut a jumped-up travelling salesman down to size.
Part of Dawkins’ problem is the dichotomy of belief vs. fact which he brings on himself and then can’t escape from. No matter how hard he tries, Dawkins can’t separate God and religion from physics and the universe. Even school aged children soon get over the idea of God as a man who lives in the sky, but Dawkins continues to rattle his bones over the lack of ‘proof’ of God’s existence. Much of his ‘lecture’ is concerned with making cheap digs at the religious, even reducing himself to mocking those who pray for their loved ones to recover from illness, literally sniggering at their belief that God has intervened when the much longed-for upturn in health arrives.
I was bored of Dawkins long before he got to the most distasteful part if the lecture, where he begins to pick away at single Biblical references. He obsesses over the Christian God and tellingly shies away from Allah, Buddha, Ganesh etc. After all, no-one likes the God he describes in ‘The God Delusion’, the Old Testament God who went Old School on the humanity after they started copulating with goats and murdering each others’ children because they were fed up. No, we like Jesus better, he even looks a bit like Brad Pitt in all those pictures and he everyone agrees her was a stand up bloke. Dawkins barely mentions Jesus, or that the basic tenets of Christianity are all concerned with being nice to each other and not breaking the law. He’d rather dwell on Genesis and the startling revelation that it MIGHT NOT ALL BE TRUE!
Throughout this lecture, Richard Dawkins never attempts to broach the simplest question of religion. Why do people believe? What exactly is in it for them? He rails against indoctrinisation but wants to indoctrinate us into atheism. He accepts no other belief system than his own, and delights in picking on the easiest of targets, like Ted Haggard, the American Evangelical preacher who was revealed to have a penchant for rent boys. It’s a good job that God hasn’t called an early judgement day because with this reasoning He might have seen Dawkins and junked us all. You can play this game with atheists too by the way, if he can ignore Mother Theresa and Father Damien of Molokai then I can ignore Baba Amte and Margaret Sanger and choose none other than Napalm Death to represent all Atheists. Don’t look so cool now do they?
During the dubious question and answer session (sample question : “Why are you so right, and where can I buy your books?”) a brave woman asked whether the survival of religion into the modern age when so much of it has been debunked by science could mean that religion has an evolutionary advantage. As you might expect, the answer was ‘I don’t know’, but it was preceded by a ridiculously complex and wordy answer which possibly only Dawkins himself will ever understand. I was bamboozled by the reply and so was the woman asking the question, as all other queries had been answered with plain English and very concisely. Dawkins had been rumbled and he pulled his secret weapon of academic waffle out the bag to send the woman back to her seat wondering why she bothered.
Comedian Matt Morgan recently compared Dawkins to Professor Yaffle from Bagpuss, commenting that his dismissal of all religiosity was similar to the woodpecker knocking the organ mice down to size with “It’s not a boat, it’s just a silly old shoe”. This sums Richard Dawkins up beautifully, he doesn’t allow for joy or hope in anything that can’t be quantified and proven. Take him to Westminster Abbey at vespers and he’ll probably prefer his own audio book on the iPod. Show him the Ali Mosque in Cairo and no doubt he’ll be tapping at the brickwork complaining it isn’t properly pointed. He may be the ‘Darwin’s Rottweiler’ to some, but he won’t shake of the Great and Powerful Oz analogy until he takes on some real opposition.
Friday 28 March 2008
Cringe When You're Winning
Awards. I never get any. Actually, I once won Best Film at the Lymm Film Festival, beating a short film which had been made by David Yip. Now every time I see him in some marginal TV stereotype role (‘David Yip as Laundry Manager, David Yip as Takeway Manager, David Yip as Chinese Prime Minister’) I have a silent chuckle to myself.
Awards are important in life. They teach us crucial lessons about how to hate, how to seethe and how to gloat. They bring out the most disgusting of human emotions, and that is all they do. They encourage people to compare themselves to others and to spend their every waking moment imagining how a faceless panel, or in the worst cases the ‘public’ – those blithering hateful idiots, will judge the minutiae of their worth against some other hapless soul. As soon as I went to the front of the conference suite of the Park Royal in Stretton to accept my plywood and brass award from the Chairman of Lymm Film Society, I felt superior, like one of God’s own children. One of the older, nice ones too, not the snotty little git he sent down here to Earth to get tortured. During my acceptance speech I longed to say “And finally, thanks to all of the other nominees for being not quite good enough. Enjoy your lives as second best, losers!”
The Brit Awards were decried by none other than Craig David in their run up. I bet they felt like calling the whole thing off and just calling it a draw after he accused them of ‘Missing the 8 Ball’ by not nominating people like him anymore. The Brits mean as little as any other award ceremony because all they measure is ‘goodness’. Is this Mika record good, or not good? Is Kylie good? Who the goodest out of Kate Nash and KT Tunstall. Maybe if they actually gave awards for Britishness, they would become more relevant, and simultaneously give those hopeful immigrants some idea of what it is to be British, so they could stop revising by watching ‘Love Thy Neighbour’.
In terms of ‘Britishness’, the Arctic Monkeys deserve their award. Alex Turner sings like a whiny scal from Sheffield, which he is. They write songs about going to the pub and then getting in a taxi and going home. At the Brits ceremony they dressed up in tweeds and plus fours and thanked their old pals from the Brit School (where they never went). They were indulging in that old British pursuit Taking The Piss, which is a skill that non-Brits have never really honed that well. Americans get a bit obvious and aggressive when they try and Take The Piss. Ditto Australians. Watch and learn all you would be Britishers, this is how the experts do it.
Kate Nash may have gone to the Brit School but she deserved her award too. The likes of Leona Lewis are still aping Whitney and Beyonce with their ‘you may have dumped me but I’m gonna sell your bling and buy handbags’ brand of female empowerment, whereas Nash’s songs tell of her boyfriend being a bit of a knob and being too shy to flirt with someone. “I’ll leave you there til the morning and I purposely won’t turn the heating on’ is as harsh as Kate gets with her wayward men. British through and through.
Take That win on humility alone. They are the first to admit they were on the downs (not the Barlow obviously, he was rolling around in cash and pasties like a proper Cheshire millionaire) but after re-forming, storming through an acclaimed tour and selling 50 gazillion albums they should have rightly spent their time at Robbie’s house, pissing up the walls, stamping on his head and yelling ‘Who’s laughing now you fat loser?’ whilst shoving gold discs up his arse sideways. Instead they shrug and smile and say thank you, rejecting schadenfreude and only enjoying their ‘I Told You So’ moments in the privacy of their private yachts.
Conversely, Amy Winehouse should have her Brit rescinded on grounds of being an Americanised caricature of a pop soul singer with an unhealthy obsession for her ‘incarcerated’ hubbie which comes straight from the trailer parks of New Jersey. Just what is that accent she sings with? Sarf London? Don’t think so. Adele has the dodgy accent going on aswell but she reminds us all of that Great British Paradigm – the chunky barmaid with a good set of pipes. Gawd bless her! Kylie won as International Female on the ‘You Didn’t Die’ ticket and would actually be borderline British if she hadn’t shagged a Frenchman.
Until there are some real independent music awards which are voted for by people who have a clue and are definitely not the derisible ‘public’, we have to put up with the Brits. I hope to be nominated myself next year, hopefully against David Yip. Suck on that loser!
Awards are important in life. They teach us crucial lessons about how to hate, how to seethe and how to gloat. They bring out the most disgusting of human emotions, and that is all they do. They encourage people to compare themselves to others and to spend their every waking moment imagining how a faceless panel, or in the worst cases the ‘public’ – those blithering hateful idiots, will judge the minutiae of their worth against some other hapless soul. As soon as I went to the front of the conference suite of the Park Royal in Stretton to accept my plywood and brass award from the Chairman of Lymm Film Society, I felt superior, like one of God’s own children. One of the older, nice ones too, not the snotty little git he sent down here to Earth to get tortured. During my acceptance speech I longed to say “And finally, thanks to all of the other nominees for being not quite good enough. Enjoy your lives as second best, losers!”
The Brit Awards were decried by none other than Craig David in their run up. I bet they felt like calling the whole thing off and just calling it a draw after he accused them of ‘Missing the 8 Ball’ by not nominating people like him anymore. The Brits mean as little as any other award ceremony because all they measure is ‘goodness’. Is this Mika record good, or not good? Is Kylie good? Who the goodest out of Kate Nash and KT Tunstall. Maybe if they actually gave awards for Britishness, they would become more relevant, and simultaneously give those hopeful immigrants some idea of what it is to be British, so they could stop revising by watching ‘Love Thy Neighbour’.
In terms of ‘Britishness’, the Arctic Monkeys deserve their award. Alex Turner sings like a whiny scal from Sheffield, which he is. They write songs about going to the pub and then getting in a taxi and going home. At the Brits ceremony they dressed up in tweeds and plus fours and thanked their old pals from the Brit School (where they never went). They were indulging in that old British pursuit Taking The Piss, which is a skill that non-Brits have never really honed that well. Americans get a bit obvious and aggressive when they try and Take The Piss. Ditto Australians. Watch and learn all you would be Britishers, this is how the experts do it.
Kate Nash may have gone to the Brit School but she deserved her award too. The likes of Leona Lewis are still aping Whitney and Beyonce with their ‘you may have dumped me but I’m gonna sell your bling and buy handbags’ brand of female empowerment, whereas Nash’s songs tell of her boyfriend being a bit of a knob and being too shy to flirt with someone. “I’ll leave you there til the morning and I purposely won’t turn the heating on’ is as harsh as Kate gets with her wayward men. British through and through.
Take That win on humility alone. They are the first to admit they were on the downs (not the Barlow obviously, he was rolling around in cash and pasties like a proper Cheshire millionaire) but after re-forming, storming through an acclaimed tour and selling 50 gazillion albums they should have rightly spent their time at Robbie’s house, pissing up the walls, stamping on his head and yelling ‘Who’s laughing now you fat loser?’ whilst shoving gold discs up his arse sideways. Instead they shrug and smile and say thank you, rejecting schadenfreude and only enjoying their ‘I Told You So’ moments in the privacy of their private yachts.
Conversely, Amy Winehouse should have her Brit rescinded on grounds of being an Americanised caricature of a pop soul singer with an unhealthy obsession for her ‘incarcerated’ hubbie which comes straight from the trailer parks of New Jersey. Just what is that accent she sings with? Sarf London? Don’t think so. Adele has the dodgy accent going on aswell but she reminds us all of that Great British Paradigm – the chunky barmaid with a good set of pipes. Gawd bless her! Kylie won as International Female on the ‘You Didn’t Die’ ticket and would actually be borderline British if she hadn’t shagged a Frenchman.
Until there are some real independent music awards which are voted for by people who have a clue and are definitely not the derisible ‘public’, we have to put up with the Brits. I hope to be nominated myself next year, hopefully against David Yip. Suck on that loser!
Thursday 21 February 2008
Fairytale Of New Yorkshire
Christmas and rock music go together like turkey and avian flu. When rock musicians try to encroach on the dusty glamour of the festive season it always ends badly, like an office party where the boss leaves at 9, or an attempted family reunion with that uncle who’s out on bail. Put Christmas and rock together and you get The Darkness poncing around a fireplace wearing tinsel. You get David Bowie trying not to trip over Bing’s colostomy bag.You get Bob Fucking Geldof.
Unperturbed by all of this misery, some artists are still trying to the glitz and the guitar solo together, more recently with the idea of Christmas shows. Now these have been rolled out in the past by everyone from Rick Wakeman to Ned’s Atomic Dustbin who even broadcast theirs on the internet, but last December saw the likes of The Wombats, CSS and Jarvis Cocker all set up special festive performances. The king of all these however, was the cutely-named ‘Cribsmas’ – featuring Wakefield punk trio The Cribs and an assortment of their celebrity friends.
Unperturbed by all of this misery, some artists are still trying to the glitz and the guitar solo together, more recently with the idea of Christmas shows. Now these have been rolled out in the past by everyone from Rick Wakeman to Ned’s Atomic Dustbin who even broadcast theirs on the internet, but last December saw the likes of The Wombats, CSS and Jarvis Cocker all set up special festive performances. The king of all these however, was the cutely-named ‘Cribsmas’ – featuring Wakefield punk trio The Cribs and an assortment of their celebrity friends.
Ryan Jarman at the Cribs' Christmas gig at the Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
Originally designed as a fundraising exercise for Cystic Fibrosis, the three night residency at the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds turned into a rampaging behemoth as it became apparent that The Cribs’ ‘special guests’ may well include their old pals The Kaiser Chiefs and Franz Ferdinand, and guitarist Ryan Jarman’s current squeeze Kate Nash. By the time the extended indie-glitterati had realised that this might be a good prospect, the tickets were long gone, snapped up hungrily by superfans and ebay touters alike. At one point the £30 three day passes were being sold at internet auction for over 20 times their value, and The Cribs’ online fan base were desperately scrabbling for spares whilst all the time the lucky few checked their email confirmations over and over, for fear some small print loophole meant they had to recite the reg number of the band’s tour van before being allowed in.
The Brudenell was described by the NME’s Gavin Haynes as “a functioning working men’s club”, as opposed to the hundreds preserved by the National Trust presumably. He gushes about the “tacky seventies furniture” and “weathered carpet” like a cut price Michael Palin describing a kibbutz. In normal people’s terms, it’s a social club, with the only visible concessions to the event being an endearingly half-arsed banner and a t-shirt stand. The regulars are used to the influx of indie kids, as the Brudenell has a tradition of staging seminal gigs and getting the best and brightest from the UK music scene before the NME gets their grubby hands on them.
With the event being staged over three days there’s a kind of festival atmosphere at the Brudenell. There is much hugging amongst people you suspect have never met outside of Facebook or the previously mentioned Cribs forum. People are excited. Really excited. The prospect is this : The Cribs will play everything they have ever recorded. That means demos, b-sides, album tracks, everything. The first night will be occupied by their earliest demos, first album and b-sides from that period, and so the nights will continue. The band are in effect supporting themselves as they will take to the stage first to begin their chronological march across the discography, before making way for the aforementioned ‘support acts’.
Kate Nash supporting on Thursday night at the Brudenell
Something quite strange is happening front of stage. People are talking to each other, they’re milling and laughing and messing about. A couple of likely lads are dressed as Father Christmas and Kate Nash is pulling a fan around by the arm looking to introduce her to Ryan. It’s a bit like an office party, when your boss is also your mate and doesn’t mind you telling him how much you love him. There’s no room for cynicism here. Between sets the promoter of Wire Club’s Strangeways night launches into some Jarman-called bingo. “27, my age but don’t tell anyone!” winks Ryan as he thoroughly enters into the spirit of the occasion. Later there’ll be another round of the pint-pulling contest between band members and bar staff, interspersed with such merriment as a Cribs pub quiz and even musical statues. Cool is out the window, and it was never welcome here anyway.
In a bizarrely heart-warming turn of events the band seem to be dressing in their old ‘costumes’ to harken back to the good old days. Ryan Jarman bloodies his own lip during the ‘New Fellas’ set when this was a regular occurrence. His vintage Gitanes tshirt has already been shredded by the crowd, after surviving a Libertines tour. Drummer Ross has on the glittery waistcoat which was mocked in one of their early live reviews by Leeds Music Scene. They are self-referential, even ‘doing’ lines from their documentary film ‘Leave Too Neat’, but it’s not self-aggrandising, it’s more like a group of (200 plus) old friends reminiscing and telling in-jokes.
Gary Jarman on Wednesday night
When all the festivities are over and everyone has made a hundred new mates, sweated a few gallons and had their turn at slurring ‘”I love you guys canihaveaphotoplease?” it’s off to Wire, probably Leeds’ premier indie hotspot, to hear a DJ set by, you’ve guessed it, The Cribs! The entire Brudenell crowd seem to have decamped here, along with the band and their mates. It’s 5am before the place looks like calming down and even then there’s a glint in the eye of every Cribs fan leaving the place. They look like they’ve been whacked with sweat-soaked cricket bats but you can bet they’d do the same thing again tomorrow, and the next day, and that if the Cribs had 400 albums to get through it wouldn’t be a problem.
Christmas gigs may be de riguer, but this is more than that, it’s a bonding experience between a band who has tasted success and come back to nudge their fans and say “this is alright isn’t it?”. As we leave Wire some fans are hugging the band’s tour manager. When was the last time you saw a gig so good you did that?
Chris 'Shippo' Shipton, the Cribs guitar tech/tour manager
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