Be warned. It will be a while before I get to the point here. The actual gig I went to yesterday evening. So if you don't care for it when I ramble, skip this piece. I've got a few things I'd like to rattle on about and much of this is only tangential to music of any kind. I like a good ramble. I had a good weekend.
But that weekend was about more than how I spent a few hours last night. It was about making the most of Saturday and Sunday rather than just spending them in a pub chasing one pint with another and having the same conversation with the same friends as I've done for years now. Watching another football match. Talking about football. I like football but enough's enough.
We're motoring through July. It feels like I haven't been to a gig in a while. If you discount Johnny Echol's Love at The Cluny about ten days back. It was one I shouldn't have gone to, should have trusted my instinct that I wouldn't see the band that have meant and will always mean so much to me and stuck with the records that impacted on my heart in the first place. Back in the Eighties. Particularly Forever Changes, which I bought when I was seventeen, because Julian Cope told me to, and has meant more and more to me ever since. Oh well, lesson learned.
Still, that's another story. I'm mostly in a very good space and mood these days and I had a wonderful weekend, Friday night, a pint or several with a friend its always great to catch up with once a term on to discuss the increasingly ridiculous state of play in both our workplaces. And drown our sorrows. Or act like idiots. Take your pick. A daytrip to York with a group of Chinese students from that workplace for most of Saturday .Sat next to a Scouse Student Experience secretary who talks in the way that only Liverpudlians can. In relentless, unbroken, never entirely coherent fashion from departure to arrival and who picks up where he left off on the way back until we finally arrive back at Newcastle University.
The gobby Scouser is definitely one of the good guys though. You know this because he always stresses that you use the generous food and drink allowance provided by the company you both work for and reminds you when you bid each other farewell once the students have left the coach to come in to the office on Monday to hand over your receipts. Plus his kindness allows me a place on the coach to York in the first place. I really don't mind if he talks a lot. I like him and enjoy his company.
I always take the opportunity to go to York whenever I can. It's one of those hallowed places for me. Has been ever since I moved to Newcastle fifteen years back now. I love this place but it's like anywhere, you need to get away sometimes. Listen to a Bruce Springsteen song. Bruce tells you that a lot.
There are other reasons why York means so much to me. It reminds me of the best of friends, someone who taught me something about life that I didn't know before and used to visit the city as a child. I also met up with my parents here about eight years back for a week's break, I think about them while I'm here too. It makes me feel I'm not alone. That I'm with precious people.
I had the most wonderful day in York. First to Betty's Tea Rooms. A must visit, a virtual establishment in York, Harrogate and several other Yorkshire towns. I get to the city every few years and always make a beeline straight for it. I do my time in the queue as is only right, wait 'til there's a table in the main lounge upstairs rather than being shuttled off to the pokey basement. I luxuriate over a feast of a breakfast of cakes and savouries for an hour or more with my morning paper. I get in an ongoing chat with a cutie, but highly professional waitress called Olivia who fits me in between her impeccable service of other diner's needs, so we can coo together at the wondrousness of all things Betty's. She's been working here five years already and it's clearly a second home to her now.
Like I say she's a proper sweetie. It's one of those brief encounters that you regret when they're over and you walk out of someone's life. In her early twenties I'd say but with wisdom beyond her years. With a sandy, pinned up bun and a chatty bubbly manner. OK, I fell for her. I confess. But didn't make a fool of myself and make my way back into the throng in search of record shops.
I'm kidding myself when I come to my ever expanding record collection. I use every trip to a town or a visit to see a friend as an excuse to meander into a shop tell myself I need to commemorate the day with a purchase when really I just love buying records. Today I buy Anthony & the Johnson's I am a Bird in HMV and Kevin Coyne and .China Crisis in Rebound. A second hand store on Gillygate of the kind I love most, with a proprietor with an enduring love for Kind of Blue Miles era jazz. He's playing a Cannonball Adderley record when I come in late afternoon to buy my albums which I knew I would own when I saw them five minutes after getting off the coach in the morning. We have a good chat about how timeless this era of Jazz sounds and how evil Miles sounds as if he was while all the time playing like an angel. How cool it must have felt to be able to play like Cannonball Adderley and just being known to your mates as Cannonball. I wouldn't mind if people called me Cannonball.
So that's my Saturday. On to Sunday. I woke early and played my records. I was thrilled with all of them. I am a Bird is just sensational album of course. A one off record in every way. China Crisis reminded me of a precious girlfriend who had it on cassette when we were going out at university together. Kevin Coyne of a very good friend who died and I still miss badly who introduced me to Coyne when we were living and working in Dortmund together. Thirty years back now. Everything seems a long way back now.
Then Sunday stuff. I go to church at St. Andrews, the oldest church in Newcastle which suits me fine. The sermon was about scattering seeds. The congregation and choir sang 'We Plough the Fields and Scatter'. I always liked that one. I find I don't sing. I'm not entirely sure that I can sing anymore and don't want to embarrass myself. After the service I chat to Beryl the Welsh usher in her Eighties about her new medication which is bringing up black blotches on her skin. She seems to be almost amused by it. Last week it was black spots. I said she should have black stripes really given that we're in Newcastle and those are United's colours. She says we'll see what next week brings.
I'm going to pop round to Newcastle Arms, round the corner, for a cider and some jukebox songs. I'm detained by a very interesting restaurant that has opened next door. An Oriental Kitchen with a fabulous looking and affordable menu. I'm led to my table by a good looking Chinese waitress with teeth braces and an incredibly friendly manner. The decor is great. You might be in Seoul, Osaka or Ho Chi Minh City.
I order a Volcano Tonkotsu Broth and it arrives looking and smelling fabulous with boiled eggs and great hunks of pork floating in what seemed like a bowl of boiling water from the Chao Phraya River. I should know. I've seen it. Despite this resemblance it tastes pretty great too once I get used to its spiciness. I struggle a bit with the spoon and chopsticks and something about it gave me a coughing fit but I get out without making a complete fool of myself, and will certainly be back. Soon.
Beth's in a funny mood next door at The Arms and certainly not in a mood to talk. I put some songs on sit at the window and start my book. I'm feeling good, the sun is shining through the window at me and I'm having a great text conversation with a valuable old friend who I haven't heard from for far too long and I don't have anything I have to do except laundry and calling mum before a great evening of gig going at Zerox tonight.
A few hours later and all that's done and I'm putting on my Miles Davis t-shirt and jeans for the evening ahead. I'm still in a great mood and have had the bonus of Novak Djokovic losing the Wimbledon Final to Alcaraz who seems to have his devious, Dick Dastardly, Covid denying number. Sucks to you Novak. So I'm off to my favourite new place on the quayside at the foot of The Swing Bridge.
I love Zerox. It's the kind of club I'm always looking for and the place that The Quayside has needed since The Cooperage closed its doors ten years back. It's the kind of place that Bowie and Eno would have been happy to hang out in, is full of beautiful young people and cool older ones. It's run by Christian who looks like one of Japan and is incredibly friendly and interesting to boot and the bars are run by beautiful and equally friendly young barmaids who should be models really. It's a nice place to be.
Christian hand slaps me as I come in. Hey I'm mates with Christian! I go upstairs to The Shooting Gallery where the bands play. Walter from Wandering Oak and Chris The Prancey Dog are at the door. These are the gents who supply for the needs of the Indie Community of Newcastle by setting up gigs off their own backs. I'm grateful to them and others should be too
We chat about this and that but then the first band are on and I go in to watch them. It's a guy with long hair and a low slung guitar who goes out in public as Bullion Train and he's playing a song that sounds like a very close approximation of Suicide's Ghostrider. Now that's a truly wonderful song but I heard it far too often when it was held up far too often as the absolute epitome of high cool all the way through the Eighties. So I go downstairs and buy myself another bottle of Berries & Cherries.
Twenty minutes later and Tin Ribs, from Durham are on. They're not really any more to my taste than Bullion Train but put on an authentically Punk show which generally involves the baseball capped singer throwing himself in the faces of the audience in the first few rows and the rest of the band flinging themselves hither and thither and pounding their instruments with the kind of raw abandon that provides solid evidence that they're not entirely wasting their youth. They're good. Just not really to my taste. They don't really offer tunes of any description.
Main support Mother Said prove to be much more my cup of sick. Two very young, very short and highly ebullient Gothy ladies. About half a tall as tall as their three equally young male bandmates. The girls are from Newcastle, the rest of the band from Leeds I think. One of the Gothy girls is dark and a spit for a young Sioux if she'd been short and not scary, the other is bleached and wearing an outstanding necklace of obese pearls. They just must be best friends.
The two have a riveting stage schtik. They're in each others faces throughout the set. Ranting their art inspired Punk poetry of rage and disconnect as if their lives depended on it. It's thrilling stuff frankly and the band provide a suitably dramatic backdrop, Banshees, Altered Images and Au Pairs inspired but also very 'now' in terms of its lyrical concerns.
By the time they leap offstage and curl into foetal balls and simulate actual epileptic fits they have the audience in the palm of their hands. Mother Said are astonishingly good. And I suspect they've barely started.
All evening I've been noticing a quartet of ridiculously assured individuals wandering back and forth who look ever so slightly out of place amongst the callow Geordie youth who make up the clientele of Zerox. It turns out they're headliners Kate Clover and her band of cut-throats.
Like the last gang in town they stride onstage, all insouciant attitude. Not quite young anymore but certainly lived in and certainly cool, they've bought in to a certain attitude and look. It's Rock & Roll frankly. Skinny ties from the guys, skinny dress for Kate
Within three minutes and one song they've laid out their wares and you know exactly what you're going to get. CBGB's and LA Punk stripped down to the bare essentials. The first two Ramones and the first two Blondie albums. In some ways that's all you need if this is what you're looking for.
They're fabulous but I'm flagging. I hang on for as long as I can because I'm loving them then head for the exit, I've got lessons to teach tomorrow. Another fine night.
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