The Northern Monkey is essentially still a pub. Once upon a time known as The Dog and Trumpet and latterly by another name that totally escapes me because I hardly ever go into town these days and if I did I probably wouldn’t wander up this way for a drink because mainly it’s bars that charge over 3 squids for a bottle of lager that you could buy for 80p if you stayed at home and went to ASDA instead.

Anyways, it’s discovered a new lease of life as a live venue. And luckily for us, the guy who promotes there was in the year below us at school. So after a bit of uhhming and ahhhing you got our shit together and booked ourselves in for a gig.

It’s quite a cool room, if a bit unusual. Very high-ceilinged and not enormous, it puts you pretty much face to face with the audience (assuming you have one, of course). Tonight the place was packed. Not really for us especially – the band after us – and I will have to apologise for not knowing their name – were on a UK tour.

In the modern manner, there were 4 bands on. Now, I think that’s one too many bands, frankly. Everywhere does it these days, and it means that you only get 40 minutes onstage or so and there’s not much room for everyone’s gear and… suddenly I’m sounding like my dad so I’ll shut it.

The first band up (whose name I have also forgotten) reminded me of us when we were kids all those years ago. A little bit loose around the edges perhaps, but giving it plenty of welly and  making a pretty decent racket. But you’re not here for them, you’re here for us… and you’re itching to know how well it went.

The answer: really good. The crowd seemed to dig the sound and we were fucking loud. But tonight had another significance… the first time I’ve played a keyboard! My keyboard fingers are, frankly, fat and clumsy. Richard Clayderman I ain’t – although I’d love his jacket and twinkling smile. Basically I know my way around the chord shapes and fake it from there, which is all I need to know for the purposes of what we do. Even so, it was pretty nerve-wracking sitting down and playing while singing in this way. I’m used to being able to throw my guitar around a bit, but sat there on a couple of beer crates, below most people’s eye level was a tiny bit odd. Maybe I need a dramatic staircase which I can ascend to play the keyboard from on high like ELP or something.

I survived the ordeal though and – a few bum notes aside – it was fine. I don’t have much else to add, except that every one of the band totally loved the gig and I think (false modesty to one side for a second) we sounded pretty fucking awesome. We’re definitely back! If you came, thanks for coming and I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did

Setlist

1. In The End
2. Substitute (The Who)
3. I Still Don’t Understand
4. Everything I Want
5. Here Come The Mandarins
6. Tin Soldier (The Small Faces)
7. Until Tomorrow
8. You’ve Got it in You

I didn’t stay to see the final act, but the bands either side of us were both great in their own ways. The band after us were astonishingly well-drilled and a reminder that however good we might get in our own little sphere, there’s still a gulf when you step up to the Serious Touring level. Luckily, we never will!

It would be easy to be terribly downbeat about these things and put it down to some kind of modern malaise – practically a free opinion-piece for the Daily Mail there. In one of these cases, the counsellor could, for all he knows, have got the message from someone on the point of suicide or killing their kids. In the other two cases, I’m literally trying to give them some money – potentially lots of it – and my efforts are greeted with silence. In the final one, I’m contacting a man elected to represent my concerns in Parliament and to take account of them when making decisions on how to vote in Parliament. He too, cannot it seems answer an email.

It’s hardly uncommon. But I don’t blame any kind of general decline in personal values. I do think however that the ease of communication which has wrought so many benefits in so many ways also comes with a degree of “communication fatigue”. My own inbox is full of enquiries after my health from friends and family that go unread and unanswered for days… weeks, even. And who amongst us hasn’t worked in an office where an appreciable portion of the working day is actually spent doing nothing more than making calls and answering emails? It’s easy to get sick of it.

Even so: just answer the bloody phone!

In case the excellent iplayer embed script doesn’t work, you can see it here.

However, I have had a brush with weirdness.

So last Friday I was minding my business and pottering around the internet doing “stuff” as you do, when my vision was suddenly filled with spiralling patterns and zig zags and flashes. Minutes later I was struck with blinding pain and retired to a bedroom to try and clear my head where eventually I fell asleep. When I awoke all was well again so I put it down to some kind of borderline migraine and carried on with my legitimate activities.

Since then, 3 or 4 times the flashing has returned for periods of 10 or 15 minutes each. It starts as a small circle of  sparkling patterns in the centre of my vision which then spreads outwards till it more of less fills my vision. And then as suddenly and as mysteriously as it arrived, it leaves.

Anyway, if you were – hypothetically speaking – to be looking at a picture of Megan Fox during your attack, this is a not-really-all-that-accurate-but-you-get-the-idea kind of thing you’d see.

Megan Fox Nude. Except for knickers. As seen by someone with migraine aura.

So I’ve been to the docs now and the upshot is I have a “migraine aura”. Somehow related to proper migraines it is in my case unaccompanied by much in the way of pain. Apparently, 15% of migraines take this form, attacks cluster for a short spell, and when this current spell passes I might find it recurs in a few months or simply vanishes never to return.

Now, I’m no student of medicine, but that sounds to me very much like “we’re making this up”.

Anyway, fears of a brain tumour are now scotched and if you’ll excuse me I’m going to find another picture of Megan Fox.

Just. Awesome.

If you’re around my age (*cough* – 35 – *cough*) then you can’t have grown up not knowing about Alex Higgins. When snooker was at its most popular in the 80s and its stars were household names, his was the name that dominated the headlines. Some say that the rise and fall of snooker is more or less tied in with the arc of Higgins’ career. Certainly since the heyday of snooker’s bad boys like Higgins, Tony Knowles, Jimmy White and Kirk Stephens it’s been hard to care about the succession of half-chinned, dead-eyed, dishwater-coloured ’stars’ that have played the sport since (honourable exception being O’Sullivan).

Variously he was stabbed by his girlfriend, fell out of a first floor window, pissed in a plant pot during a tournament, was chinned by Cliff Thorburn and was generally followed by a maelstrom of drink, violence and excess. Very, very rarely is someone’s personal life lived as fully and unapologetically in the public eye. Think Amy Winehouse with better hair.

I can’t recommend the unofficial biography by Bill Borrows enough (commercial disclaimer: I will get about 8p if you buy the book from that link! Woohoo!)

Higgins was – and is – cut from a different cloth. He lives his life without apology however he sees fit. He won vast sums of money in his pomp as a player and blew the fucking lot on women, booze and gambling. After surviving severe throat cancer, he shrugged and went back to the fags. He never stopped hustling for tenners here and there in sleazy pool halls even when he was one of the most famous men in the country. As his lifestyle finally overran the greatest stores of his talents he faded away from the front pages and became a legend. A flickering reminder of a less apologetic era who still occasionally haunts the inside pages of the press whenever he resurfaces.

Today, it would be easy to paint Higgins as a tragic, lost figure. I doubt he’d see like that himself. In very fundamental ways, his life now is no different to what it was 40 years ago – just less scrutinised and possibly better balanced as a result. Here he is being interviewed by The Telegraph recently and he’s still amusingly full of piss and vinegar, albeit alarmingly frail.

A reminder of why he was so fucking magnetic on the green baize. If these few minutes of snooker don’t send a shiver up your spine then you’ll probably never understand the game or the man.

(I mention this partly because of the fallout from the John Terry affair. It’s brought forth a predictable torrent of moralising hogwash from the media because Terry is a “role model” and an “example” and because the England captaincy is “special.” You know what? Fuck dat right there. It wasn’t Terry who made his position into what it is. He’s just a man who happens to be good at what he does. The rest is just froth whipped up by hacks who’d prefer to put a snapshotof a mystery blonde on the front page than, say, a explanation of why the country is more or less bankrupt.

The truth is that journalists are the people with real influence. They are the ones who choose to highlight individuals and their foibles. It is them who enjoy a readership of millions. Dressing it up in moral fancy dress and pretending to wring their hands doesn’t hide the fact that they are only writing about this because it sells papers. Having a morally compromised man as England captain only matters if people know about it. And why do people know about it? Because the press told them.)

Welcome to Cleckhuddersfax

Across the river and halfway up the field that sloped up some hundred-odd vertical feet towards the road, the woman picked the sheep up under her arm and strode on another few dozen paces. Resting herself for a moment on her knees, she suddenly and startlingly started raining blows down on the hapless animal. After a minute of this, she picked it up again and staggered towards the gate in the corner once more. After about an hour of this surreal activity, she and her sheep vanished from view.

Once you get past Halifax you start to expect to see things like this. After all this is nearly Lancashire…

The Calder wends its way through some of the oddest parts of Northern England. Mill towns that arose from nothing to power the industrial revolution cling to the steep-sided valleys in rows of sandstone, punctuated still yet by towering chimneys.

Needless to say, the swiftness of the rise was only bettered by the swiftness of its decline. If you went back a mere 30 years or so, these towns were still proud manufacturing centre. But the firestorm of competition from the East burnt them to the ground. The buildings are still there – great edifices that speak of industrial power – but the industry itself vanished like a ghost, to be supplanted by scattered outposts of commerce.

And as the industry left for the East, the East arrived here in the form of immigrant populations. Swathes of workers arrived from Pakistan to seek work in the mills that were already dying before they got here. So the faded signs for “purveyors of mungo and shoddy” and “bile beans” that are still just visible on the brickwork are as often as not written above plastic signs promising Hal-Al meat.

So in two centuries these places supplanted the traditional rural life of many Dalesfolk, becoming minor versions of the squalor and splendour of the likes of Leeds and Manchester as they grew. A culture of hard work and hard life was born in the shadowy valleys and adopted with grim pride by the towns. And then a wrecking ball was driven through the whole lot.

The river that winds along the bottom of this valley bears witness to these changes. The riverside is punctuated by old mills and warehouses, their broken windows filled from behind by blackness. Of course, some of them are now filled with flats. The river itself is recovering from the years of industry that once turned it black and made it uninhabitable for fish.

We were here for the fishing. Now, I am not a competent fisherman. Any series based around me in the style of Extreme Fishing With Robson Green would feature an interminable amount of footage of me trying to tie hooks onto lines, trying to untangle lines from around my legs and overhanging trees, wincing as I pulled hooks out of my scalp and generally dropping pieces of essential equipment into the river.

All this would be punctuated by the occasional cast of the rod until, inevitably, something snapped and the whole process began anew.

Even getting the gear in the first place was a trauma. Fishing is one of those activities that is steeped in lore and mysticism that only seems to come naturally to slightly taciturn and oddly menacing men. The tackle shop where we bought out gubbins in the morning (after a splendid fried spam sarnie in the Piece Hall) was the nearest thing Yorkshire has to offer to a white separatist militia compound in the Waco mould.

Of the approximately 100 square feet that the shopfloor covered, 80 was given over to frighteningly realistic-looking armaments – BB guns that were indistinguishable from Desert Eagles, Magnums and such… double barrelled air rifles and a lot of knives that could only realistically be used for one thing: making a pelts from the skins of soft lads from the suburbs.

Behind the counter 3 men, locked in the Omerta that characterises the deadly serious, capital-letter Angler. Not for these boys the easy, casual riverside chat that marks out most folk you find on the banks. No, their every utterance carried unspoken riddles and menaces hinted at. Tests of your knowledge were behind every seemingly innocent question. Buying a day ticket and a few spinners somehow turned into a rite of passage that we barely escaped.

But the day stretched out ahead of us in glorious, icy sunshine. The clearest of airs dispelled the parched threat that sometimes veils the fells in these parts. The bare trees and rocky outcrops seemed welcoming and calming rather than menacing and bleak as they often do when shrouded in rain and other climatic unpleasantess.

Kneel before Zod

I even hooked a beauty of a trout on my second cast. A good 14 inches of river-taut muscle clad in deep greens and golds. Alas, then, that it suddenly flashed its back muscles as I tried to disgorge it and simultaneously snapped the line and leapt out of my startled hands back into the river. With the spinner still locked into its jaw, it swam back into the murk to presumably meet a long, drawn out death at the hands of starvation.

In the interests of Karma, the next big fish we (i.e. The D) caught was an egg-bloated female of the darkest river green hue. We admired her on the banks before letting her go back to her lair and continue to refill the river with her brood.

It seems silly to stand in the ruins of a just-vanished industry just 20 minutes drive out of a major town and claim to get a taste of the rhythms of the wilds, but that’s what fishing does. Standing still watching life gurgle slowly past you for a few hours… the flash of a blue kingfisher shooting along the bankside and the occasional tug of a fish on your line reminds you that life doesn’t begin and end in an office and death is ever at hand. He said, right cheery like.

If you’ve never given it a go, you really should. And if you see a woman hauling a half-dead sheep up a hill, ask her what the hell she’s doing.

Add to that the fact that “where there’s blame there’s a claim”, “no win no fee” and a populace stupid enough to come within a whisker of making Jedward the first global megastars of the new century and you wind up with this – a label I believe to be the single lowest point of humanity’s achievements. So without further preamble, I give you ASDA’s allergy advice on its milk.

Well fuck me sideways

Even so, the McDonalds in Ripon must run ads like this during recruitment drives:

Courtesy: The Ripon Horn

We go there once a week and I swear that in 190000 visits, there’s been something missing or wrong in every single one. Today, I ordered a Big Mac… and got a McChicken sandwich. Anthony ordered a plain cheeseburger that took 15 minutes to arrive. 15 minutes! For a burger! In McDonalds!

If there are any would-be Burger King Franchisees in Ripon reading this… please, please, please take the plunge.

[UPDATES: 18:2:2010 - ordered a double cheeseburger, got a single cheeseburger. Antcliffe order fries, got wedges]

If that didn’t tickle your fancy, you could always run along to Vinyl Addiction or the store in the weird ‘indoor market’ part of the Merrion Centre – that unloved outpost of 70s modernism. There in particular you would find a treasure trove of well-thumbed records. Prog records, with their beguiling sleeves that spoke of incense and Emerson… that Roxy Music cover with the two chicks on the front where you could see their pubes through the filmy knickers they were wearing… Iron Maiden records with the iconic Eddie crawling from graves and waving a Union Jack… indie records from bands that were often namechecked more than listened to – The Icicle Works… Durutti Column…

For the hardcord dance fan, you could pop along to Eastern Bloc Records – owned by one of the guys from 808 State and a source of pride to Leodensians as it was their only branch outside Manchester. And then there was Crash… Jumbo… stalls on the market where you might fancy riffling through a stack of awfulness in the hope of finding a rare record for a knock-down rate. Any and all of them preferable to the old HMV on Briggate.

I’m not a massive believer in the notion that Things Were So Much Better Then. Far more likely, I suspect, that most of us have fond memories of times when life was easier for us and give credit for that happiness to things that really weren’t that important.

But, our relationship with music has changed massively.

You had to commit to a band back then. I was an early fan of the Charlatans, based purely (I now recognise) on the haircuts which seemed somehow menacing and cool and grown up from where I was sat in my bedroom in suburban Leeds. I’d taped The Only One I Know from the top 40 and fallen in love with the record, but what I really, really wanted was Indian Rope on 12″. This was their debut single, famed for its relative rarity and also for the songs actually on it. But here was the thing… how could you even hear those songs?

The answer was there, on the wall in Vinyl Tap. Wrapped in cellophane, high beyond the reach of thieving hands with a small sticker saying “£40″.

£40!!!

This wasn’t an uncommon thing. Before music became digitised it was a properly manufactured item. Most bands released their debut single before anyone knew who they were. Consequently, the record companies would only press a small number of copies because obviously not many people were likely to buy it. So when a band actually made it into the charts, their early records were suddenly sought after for bragging rights among the cognoscenti. Anyone who actually owned a record like the 12″ of Indian Rope could be guaranteed the somewhat dubious pleasure of hero worship among local boys and a steady stream of bedroom visitors eager to hear the reputedly brilliant B-sides.

I suppose what I’m moaning about is the death of rock snobbery.

Today, you can dial up almost any song – regardless of obscurity – and for a cost between 0-99p (depending on your piratical bent) start listening straight away. Is it freer… more egalitarian… open…? Of course. But there’s something lost from the quality of the experience. That electric rush of finally finding a record you knew by reputation alone… the weighing up of cost against possible disappointment… the should you/shouldn’t you moment when you picked it up and looked at that £12 price tag, knowing that you could go buy 4 or 5 other singles for the same price. Carrying it home on the bus, wondering whether it would have been worth the money. Finally arriving home and putting it on the record deck with trembling hands.

These were the records we loved fiercely. It went so much beyond the song and the music itself in a way that is difficult to define.

It was an era that was already dying when I was  a lad. CDs were already gaining in popularity and while they were still physical objects they had a kind of impermanence about them. The last band I committed to in the sense of tracking down vinyl was Suede. Somewhere I’ve still got the first half dozen singles on 12″ – mostly bought on the day of release. History hasn’t been too kind to Suede as they were operating at the same time as Nirvana were laying waste to everything and just prior to Britpop. But even now, I can still remember the delight of seeing the cover art for the first time…

From Wikimedia. Mine look nicer than this. And less blurry.

The first time I roasted a chicken, I was mortified when it came to the carving. Everything was rubbery and congealed and covered in unpleasant skin, fat and bone. I could barely get any meat at all from the bird despite increasingly frantic sawing. I rubbed my eyes and looked back again at the instructions… how had I gone  so wrong?

Eventually, I flipped the thing over and realised that I’d been trying to carve it upside down. I was young and not long out of home… how would I know? Epic fail.

I bring this up to make the point that whenever you do something new, there’s no magical way to know you’re doing it right. Today I roast any kind of fowl to perfection without hardly thinking about it (and know which way up it is supposed to be) merely through practice and a better understanding of which end of a chicken is its arse.

Anyway, I mentioned this a few weeks ago when I first found out I’d been accepted, but in case you don’t know I’ll be speaking at Think Visibility in Leeds in March. This is waaaaaay new territory for me! I’m used to standing on stage in front of strangers and singing, playing the guitar (not all that well) and generally making a fool of myself. But normally you can measure the audience in multiples of 3. These are people that have, at most, stumped up maybe £4 to see you. They’re most probably drunk and there are other people on the stage to distract their attention. If you’re terrible, they just won’t clap and will go buy some crisps instead.

For this gig, I’m going to be standing in front of quite a lot of people, who’ve paid good money to hopefully learn something from me. I’ll have to remember my lines… have a structure… enunciate things properly… have a point… sustain an argument… use PowerPoint on an industrial scale. All of this is entirely alien to me and I’ll have to do it all in front of total strangers, some of whom will be better informed than me no doubt.

You will, of course, forgive me for shitting myself slightly at the prospect.