(I started this a while ago and finished it today, which accounts for the temporal confusion of the following intro)
OK, a new blog entry, just to freak everyone out, starting with me… gonna keep it short though.
Gigs with The Fiery Furnaces were great. Was wondering what the point of Pete Um was a little bit just before that so it was a shot in the arm to have a good gig at The Portland, and then a huge boost to be asked to do a short tour. It was a damn shame I couldn’t do all the gigs without enough money to lose, but that’s cool, and I did three out of the five. Would have particularly liked to have played Glasgow because I’ve never been north of the border, shamefully, especially if you’ve heard my song Fuzza Buzza. By the time I’d just decided I couldn’t do it I also then just finished reading Pamela Stephenson’s mildly fascinating biography of her husband Billy Connelly (it was lying around in our loo) and his words of advice at the end of the book included visiting Glasgow at least once in your life. I hope I haven’t fucked up my one chance. Knowing me I’ll bump into Billy Connelly in Guildford within the next month and feel like the world’s sorriest loser. But yeah, the FFs are one of the world’s greatest bands, even without their welcome philanthropic gestures. What I’d heard of the records prior to playing with them, which wasn’t a lot, was a bit too cleverly arranged and songwriterly for my vulgar tastes but of course in a live context you also get a lot of added kickassness that delivers the songs in an altogether different way. Anyway, I would write a love letter to my new pals and tell you tour stories and war stories but I can’t be bothered with subtlety today.
This amused me though. I caught the coach up to Leeds and as it was Day 3 I was somewhat frayed around the edges and afraid in the core and a delayed 6.5 hour coach journey was really fucking with my equanimity. There was this posse of Poles or maybe Russians behind us and they were being quite spirited in a way that us English struggle to do, generally speaking. Anyway they all had pretty strong attachments to nicotine because every time the coach stopped they all sprang up and walked to the front of the coach like the right to fags was enshrined in international law, and then looked like condemned men when they realized they weren’t allowed off. After a while one of them, a pretty heavy looking dude, began to nip into the bogs every hour for a not-so-sly one, as the visual eqiuvalent of trying to conceal the fact that you are smoking at the back of a bus is like trying to hide a zebra or something. This arsey-looking woman got the hump about it, and began banging on the door, but at the time I was more annoyed by her than I was by a bit of fag smoke. Anyway matey had just finished his 2nd or 3rd fag round about the same time Jo looked at me with some concern and asked about the lump she had just noticed in my eye. Of course in my usual macho way I panicked and felt real mortal and so on, and so as Eastern Boy was exiting the loo looking a bit calmer I was freaking out and going in to have a look at this awful eye-tumour. So then, at the point where I’m in this foggy, claustrophobic prison of a wobbling coach toilet, face right up at the mirror, staring fearfully at the eye with the same eye I’m staring at, the coach driver’s mate comes up and starts a massive collective passenger bollocking session, which I leave the toilet to walk straight into. Obviously a sizable portion of the folk onboard assume that I’m the guilty party and of course I start to look the part into the bargain. And, being a complete nazi, what the cunty coach-boy does is lock the toilet and says it will only be unlocked if someone tells him who the offending transgressor is, whereupon they will be thrown off the bus. At this point we are still 2 hours from our destination, which due to delays ends up being three and a half. Funnily enough 60-odd people, including my odd self, take this as acceptable, or are at least feel too Englishly-awkward or generally gutless to tell him that we’re actually all grown-ups and had enough of this sort of bullshit at school. In fact me and Jo heroically stand up to this example of dimwitted fascism by texting the complaints number which is stickered to the window, but all this does is engage us in text conversation with a robot who seems to have no real purpose except to draw our fire. Anyway, for the last hour or so of the journey, in which I am very late for a soundcheck, Smoker Boy behind me is visibly agitated and can only attempt to calm himself by playing really fucking shit eurodancepop through his phone, and I experience a very frustrating sense of being trapped between two distinct types of idiocy. This frustration basically fucks up my mojo for the gig and I have that thing where instead of being able to control time and slow it down to a calibrated Pete Um setting I was just chasing it and had a monumentally average gig compared to the first two. Still, two out of three ain’t bad, as they say.
