What I Did Last Night - Ulrika Spacek at Zerox, Newcastle

 

                                                   The Zerox, Newcastle Quayside

I guess we're all looking for spiritual homes all our lives. Places where we we feel safe. Perhaps an actual home. With partner, kids, pet and well kept lawn, the option most of us hope and plump for. It might be a group, a gym, a church, a dungeons and dragons group. 

Or in my case a pub where everyone knows my name, a club which looks like the club we dreamed of chancing upon all our lives and making a date with to return to at the end of the working week. A place where we can be ourselves. The low door in the wall, behind which adventures beckon. I think I've found another one.

                                            My mate Norman. He's the really old one.

I had a wonderful day yesterday. Not much work that had to be done. Some mental planning for an input session I'm due to give.. A walk into work to show my face and chat to colleagues. On the way I bumped into one of my favourite people, Norman, browsing second hand books at the Salvation Army second hand bookstall, and a chat while he walked me to The Canny Goat, my current chosen tea room.

Then after a soak in the sauna at the Royal Station Hotel swimming facilities where I'm a member. On to The Telegraph and a cider and a chat with Chloe and Courtney and some songs on the jukebox. This time I play a Beyonce tune, she's playing down the road at the stadium for a couple of nights. Beyonce in Sunderland. Fancy. It seems a bit incongruous. I imagine she probably won't be checking out the town. Going for a pint with her people. Back to The Sunderland Hilton I suppose for a foot massage..

Then down to the Quayside. I'm going to a gig. I've been doing this quite a bit this year. It's given me a new lease of life. Newcastle looks sensational in late Spring sunshine. Actual summer is not far off and the city I love so much is responding with a spell of bonny sunshine. The football team have qualified for the champions league and everyone seems happy. I see lots of smiles tonight. 

I'm going to a new venue. Xerox next to William Armstrong's Swing Bridge. An engineering wonder and a reminder of when Newcastle was a pioneering hub, ahead of the pack, a forging and prosperous city. The envy frankly of the world. I never cease to marvel at this marvelous place. I'm so glad to be here and have no plans to go anywhere else.

I've heard mixed things about Zerox. Full of posy young people apparently, and an ex working behind the bar, who someone doesn't want to cross paths with any time soon. This begs a question for me. Why on earth should young people not be posy. Isn't that exactly what youth is for? Bowie was posy in his youth. So was Eno. We should all be posy in our youth and try to remain so. Growing up is overrated. And besides, there's an enormous amount in adult life that needs to be resisted. My own list grows every day.

I'm immediately taken by Zerox as soon as I go in. There's a cool and friendly young woman outside the door with pinkish hair who ushers me in as I can't work out where the entrance is. Inside the bar there are lots more friendly young barstaff, and an impossibly cool slightly older bloke in black at a table on a laptop, with a great wave of silver greyish  hair, looking like a member of Japan or else Jon Savage. Great things to be both.

I wile a way the time I have before the support comes on, chatting to the impossibly friendly barmaid. I keep trying to work out who the Ex to be dreaded is. They mostly all seem impossibly friendly and impossibly lovely though there's one who seems slightly more daunting and intimidating. I bet it's her. She's not someone I'd mess with. I'll have to ask the person I assume she dumped.

                                                                         The support band

Anyway, the barmaid I'm with is just great and she really makes every effort to chat. She's not posy. Just young. A big smile,  great mop of curly dark brown locks, a colourful array of tattoos which we chat about. Her name's Zen, impossibly. I feel like I'm in some scene in a Tarantino, set in Newcastle instead of Los Angeles. Next to The Suspension Bridge instead of in the shadow of The Hollywood Sign.

Me. Enjoying myself despite appearances.

 I chat to the guy with the silver hair too. He's Christian and he owns  the place. I tell him how impressed I am by it. How it's just what The Quayside has needed for ages. What it's needed since The Cooperage tragically fell into neglect and disrepair ten years back. He's really great too and like me can't understand when I say that I've been warned that his place, and the people who frequent it are posy. He says they all try to be friendly. I agree. Frankly Newcastle is the  friendliest place I've ever lived in. I wouldn't expect anything else.

Zerox loos. Even the loos are cool. 

I have time to admire the decor and do so. Take some snaps. Cool long tables, spattered like Jackson Pollock paintings with what appears to be candle wax. Collages of black and white photos of the Rock and Roll cool set. Bowie, Basquiat, Patti, Clash, Johnny, Miles. There's so much thought and love behind it. It's a shrine. To wonderful things which deserve a shrine.

                                                                     Ulrika

It's no Roxy or CBGBs though. No dump. The carpets on the stairs are lush and thick, and smell great. No puke trodden into the pattern. There's one of those old style photo booths in the corridor outside the doorway to the gig room. Even the toilets are classy. Art Deco.

The gig room. Space for a couple of hundred I imagine. A bar at one end, a low stage at the other. A sound booth, a merch stand. Great wall deco of artistic squiggles on black. Simple. Artistic. But not pretentiously so. Anyway, the first band are on.

To my shame I can't tell you who they are. I try to get into in my brain over the course of the evening so I can record it here. But I'm 57 and fully aware that memory issues are mounting. They're Mek or Tek or something like that. They're from Manchester and dabble in Industrial Noise. They've got a set of buttons on a desk that they adjust and twiddle plus a guitar. I feel I might be at The Factory in the early days. Cabaret Voltaire or one of the bands on the Factory Label. Great film of warehouses and urban landscapes played on the screen behind them. They're great and I tell them so.

Half an hour to kill before the headliners. I go down to the bar. They're playing Neu! over the system.  One of the impossibly long tracks that you hope will never end. I'm falling in love with this place. I sip my pink cider, crunch on the ice. Check the app on my phone to confirm virtually every song that's playing. Even Primal Scream who generally annoy me, sound great in here. Then it's time to go and watch Ulrika Spacek.

The room is more than busy enough but it's not packed. You can wander in and out of the spaced out and relaxed crowd. There are a few people at the front who are losing it a bit but inside themselves. Inner space.

The band are loud. Impossibly loud. But I choose to place myself right next to one of the enormous speakers at the lip of the stage. I'm a glutton for punishment but I love this sound. Ulrika Spacek have a sound that I can only describe as a ringing sound. It doesn't chime. This has nothing to do with The Byrds,. It bears far more resemblance to Radiohead who are from the same neck of the woods. Ulrika are from Reading, Radiohead from Oxford, a short drive away.

They sound like they're from where they are from. Not the most interesting part of the world, though the countryside is nice. Lots of time spend in cars going somewhere. Not much happens except 9 to 5 and paying off your mortgage. The occasional spate of murders to liven things up, if you believe Morse, which frankly I don't for a moment.

Yes, they're like Radiohead without actually sounding like them. There are five of them. A lead singer who actually looks like he might be a third Greenwood brother. A drummer who seems a bit younger. Dave Grohl type with similar long flowing hair and flailing limbs. He's the dynamo that drives them on. A bald bassist wearing the kind of arty round specs that Howard Devoto favoured when his hair gave up the ghost and he shaved his head in the early Eighties. A second guitarist who looks not unlike a Greenwood brother too. Surely there can't be four of them. A guy in beard and baseball cap who manages a third guitar and also does the keyboard work.

They make one hell of a sound. Their songs are like clockwork, if you broke them down they would resemble the inner mechanics of a clock. The band don't say much. They focus on their work. They are grateful that we're here and the singer says so between songs. They don't take it for granted that we have made the effort to come out and see them. Bands say something like this increasingly I find. Times have been tough during these Lockdown years. It's tough trying to create and keep going these days. To make ends meet.

Anyhow, they're astonishing frankly. I feel I'm witnessing the UK's most underappreciated band. They've been doing this for a few years now, put out a few albums. They're on hipsters radars for sure but few are saying how consistently superb they are.They tour Europe quite a bit. I imagine they're more appreciated there. Britain frankly doesn't deserve Art much these days.

I'm enjoying it thoroughly but I'm also struggling. Feeling my age. My legs are aching and I feel like I'm developing tinnitus. I fear for my ears tomorrow morning. I'm not going to make it to the end of the gig. Much as I'm enjoying it. Astonishing though it is.

I take one last look at the audience. They tell you as much about the band as their actual records do. Everybody has withdrawn within. Some are swaying, even dancing slightly, but everyone has withdrawn into themselves. They're a cerebral band that chart inner space. It's a wonder to behold and experience. 

I head downstairs. Thank the lovely Zen and tell her how much I've enjoyed myself. Thank Christian too and tell him he's got the place just right in every respect and I'll be back. Frankly one of the best gigs I've experienced for years. Ulrika Spacek aren't really getting the credit and acclaim they deserve. But hey, who is. These are the times. Anyway. At least I've found another place to hang. Made some new friends. We soldier on. Terrific evening,

.