'I saw Billy Nomates at The Boiler Shop last night. I went alone.' Geddit? No, I know it's not funny.
I had a really great morning, Monday. I generally do these days weekdays. Happy as a pig in shit until one in the afternoon. All summer I'll be teaching online. A wonderful group of Chinese students in China. All in their early twenties, who, if they pass the course, (and they should really if there's any justice), will be coming to Newcastle where I am, in the autumn.
They're a joy. I wish I could tell you about them all but I don't imagine that's why you're here. I've been teaching for 33 years now since I graduated. It's pretty much all I've done work wise. I've had management and training jobs during that time and enjoyed some of that, but teaching is the essence of it all and I'm so glad I returned full time to it about three years back. I'm good at it too. I'm not generally boastful but I'm pleased to say I know I am.
But it's my students who are really good this term and that's making it easy for me these days. They're smart, they're focused and they're funny too. All I need to do is set them going, give them a task that does what it needs to and leave it to them. Last Friday I asked them to give short presentations about a book that inspired them. They chose books by, among others, Hesse, Hemmingway, Stendhal, Helen Keller, Defoe and Conan Doyle and they talked the hell out of them. They made me feel like I was seventeen again. I found it really inspiring myself.
At one I called my mum. Then I went across the road under a darkening sky and had a chat with Sam. He was listening to Leonard Cohen. Sam is generally listening to Leonard. Or else Syd Barrett, Lee Hazlewood or Lou Reed, I'm happy with any of them. Semi depressive masters.
He's being stalked. By a short Australian man who bought one of his paintings and then turned up from Australia and told him he loved him and when that didn't get the reaction he'd hoped for threatened him with terrifying violence. I tell no lie. It's funny but not really. Sam's band No Teeth are off on tour and he's sure this guy is going to show up at some point. I brought him my copy of Ian McEwan's Enduring Love after he told me, because its scenario seemed alarmingly similar to his own. Something to read on the tour while wondering if the guy is going to show up, staring at him from the lip of the stage.
Then I walk to work through the city centre and the sky darkens further. It starts to rain. By the time I get to The Monument it's plummeting. By W.H.Smith's a deluge. You know that film with Russell Crowe playing Noah who was building a huge boat for reasons of his own, much to everyone's bemusement. It was just like that. I'm not exaggerating. Well, only a bit.
This wasn't funny anymore. I wasn't even wearing a jacket. I ducked into Primark. I was only about three minutes from work but I risked getting there resembling a drowned rodent. I needed an umbrella.
But the queue was like the one that the animals eventually formed in that Russell Crowe movie. Except they were people in it and not in pairs. I couldn't face it and it had probably stopped raining anyhow. I went outside. It had. I walked the rest of the way, still feeling somewhat bedraggled.
As it turned out I didn't really need to go to work. But it pays to show your face once in a while. I talked to a couple of people then left without getting the Billy Nomates ticket I'd partly come in here for. I didn't think it would be sold out. The Boiler's Shop is vast.
It started raining again virtually as soon as I left the building. I went into the mall wondering whether I fancied eating out. Again. I've saved no end by cutting down on alcohol in recent months and this has led me to find myself in restaurants scattered round town gazing at menus taking photos of what arrives and winding up social media friends by posting them. At least I hope I wind people up. It's one of the great joys of late middle age.
Today I reject the mall. I've always hated malls. Soulless airless and slightly scary places, despite the great food options in the one near me. I go instead to Insieme which is a strange Italian restaurant on Westgare Road, just round the corner from me. Strange in that despite the fact that the food is excellent, there are never ever any other diners apart from me. Just a slightly mournful Albanian waiter who always gives the impression that he would really rather be anywhere else apart from here even though his service is attentive and beyond reproach. It's never ideal being served by someone who appears to have a depressive condition.
Anyhow, the food is excellent, as it always is, but the weather hardly inspires joy so much as a kind of melancholy and I'm missing company. I make my way home and put on Billy's first album to prepare myself for a night of entertainment ahead.
I first discovered Billy in 2020 as Lockdown descended. She immediately stood out as the kind of thing I go for. Insolent, non-conformist. Herself. She reminded me of a young Patti Smith in that she seemed to be raising a middle finger at expectations. and had a distinctive Punky snarl. I think she played The Cluny during those strange other-worldly months and I didn't go. Still she's here now.
Unfortunately she's at The Boiler Shop which is probably the weirdest venue in Newcastle and not The Cluny again which is an artist like Billy's natural home. The Boiler Shop has a distinctly militaristic air. Whenever I'm there I always feel like I'm in some high security prison or training centre for elite troops rather than a place deigned me to encouraging me to relax, kick back and enjoy myself.
This evening is a case in point. A bearded man frisks me at the gates outside and tell me that I can't take my shoulder bag into the venue. I go back to The Telegraph. a regular watering hole of mine, around the corner and leave it behind the bar. Back to the Boiler Shop to find they only accept cash as payment at the door. So I'm back to the Telegraph again for their cashback facility. When I finally get in to the venue they don't accept cash at the bar, only debit cards. I've got my card but still. It seems somehow that they're deliberately trying to vex and intimidate me. It hardly inclines me to want to come back. But of course I will be. As soon as someone I want to see is playing there. Then I'll be back on here to complain again. Dear reader, it's all a big vicious circle. Like so much in life.
But while I'm complaining. When you're in The Boiler Shop waiting for the bands to finally come on, (there's an enormous wait between sets) you almost can't help feeling slightly odd demoralised and dehumanised by your surrounding as if you're sitting in an enormous dystopian warehouse. That's largely because you are in an enormous dystopian warehouse. The one that Robert Stephenson assembled The Rocket in. Kicking off the next chapter of the British Industrial Revolution which was frankly a mixed bag. Good for human progress, rather debatable in terms of human happiness particularly if you were a child forced under a spinning jenny or chased up a chimney.
Buildings have souls. Slightly dubious vibes endure two hundred years on in its current incarnation.. .I've only ever seen one really good gig here. The forbidding atmosphere of the place conspires against it I'd say. Only Go Team! in January this year overcome its grim, forbidding pallor. By completely ignoring it and filling the venue with feelgood beats, ear to ear smiles and non stop abandoned dancing. Sheer happiness and talent. Can Billy work the same trick.
As soon as she gets on stage, with me a few rows back it's evident that she can and is going to. Billy has had it tough recently. A few weeks back she played on a major stage at Glastonbury for the first time. It should have been a triumphant, glorious moment for her. In fact it was anything but. She received a flood of personal abuse of altogether disgusting degree and quality on social media which sickened her to such a degree that she asked the BBC to take down the i player footage of her set and threatened to stop playing live altogether. I don't blame her. It's impossible, and forgive me for sounding prurient on any level, not to be horrified and sickened by incidents like this. It's a gross expression of much modern thinking..
For in her early days, Billy experienced what at the time seemed the greatest blessing but in retrospect has been anything but. She came to the notice and found herself under the wing of The Sleaford Mods, Now the two Mods seem to me like altogether decent, upstanding blokes of the best kind but their core audience cannot really be said to be that by any means. It's almost by definition the fanbase of conflicted, furious middle aged masculinity. The very, very angry no longer young man. Displaced, voiceless, (at least 'til Sleaford Mods came along) and looking for a suitable target to vent their considerable bile upon. And ten minutes with Billy and it's perfectly evident why they picked on her.
Because onstage she's a genuine and liberating expression of creativity the feminine and the free. Barefoot, sensual, sexual and liberated. No band, no onstage instrumentation at all, except when she chooses to pick up a guitar. Just her backing tapes, Allowing her to dance. To express her poetry. Dance Barefoot like Patti. Ugly, angry Sleaford Mods men. She doesn't need you. No wonder they're so enraged.
I can't remember seeing a performance quite like this one. I'm used to guitar bands that hide behind their fringes. There's nowhere for Billy to hide. She's alone on a large stage. Utterly fearless. The crowd are baying, Cheering her on. Mouthing her words back at her. Singing along with verses and choruses. There's nothing quite like a Newcastle audience I've discovered. I guess I'm entitled to buy into some regional pride after fifteen years here.
As has generally been the case this year I leave before the end. This is no comment on Billy whatsoever, merely that I have a class tomorrow and want it to be good.. I do hope Billy reconsiders her decision not to play stage shows after this tour finishes. She's magnificent. A lifeforce. Fuck these people seriously
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