Post by sweezely on Apr 30, 2010 13:03:48 GMT -5
The following is something I meant to write ages ago, about my journey to one of the Hoxton gigs in 2007. Please read/ignore, hurl abuse/criticism/comments etc. Be warned, it's long (2500 words).
Drugs, death and the law
The room was moving in an unpredictable way, much in the same way as it does when you’ve been drinking the previous night and wake up while still drunk. I had been drinking, but that wasn’t it. As I lifted my head and promptly banged it on the plastic ceiling, everything became clear. I was hung over, and on a boat.
To explain, James, in their infinite “let’s make things as awkward for our fans as possible” wisdom had decided to quite rudely schedule a couple of gigs right when I was on holiday. The gits. Specifically, they had scheduled two gigs with a special, brand-spanking-new setlist of unreleased material, in London, September, 2007, around dinner time. In James terms it was big, so big that I had to cut short my stay in Holland and drive all the way back. My plan was as simple as a really simple thing: do it in one day. This was that day, and the following is the true (and only slightly exaggerated) account.
Still in something of a daze, I shoved my various belongings into my bag and tentatively staggered onto the car deck to discover that I had completely forgotten where I had parked the previous evening. The boat itself was a fairly colossal but drab, depressing thing, halfway between an opulent cruise ship and a pedal powered boat shaped like a swan. Searching the other four-hundred decks, stopping occasionally to feign epiphany so the onlooking Dutch truck drivers wouldn’t think “another stupid English tosser who can’t find his car”, I eventually found it about four feet from where I thought I’d parked it in the first place. And then also found that I’d left the keys in my room.
Driving out of the ferry, and down some sort of assault course that could only have been there as part of some insidious insurance scam, out of the long line of cars calmly passing without incidence through customs, a balding, chinless man in his forties singled me out. I have no idea why. A solitary man in his 20s, bloodshot eyes and guitar on the backseat, returning from the Netherlands is not suspicious at all. With his beckoning taking a more sinister turn he diverted me to an abandoned warehouse full of tables that, only an hour ago, looked like they’d probably had bloodstained straps and bits of flailed-off flesh on them. He peered through my window with the kind of disgust reserved for watching someone tucking in to a bowl of their own poo.
“Get out of the car please sir.” My rucksack, bottle of whiskey protruding incriminatingly from the top, was shuffled away into a small shack for further rummaging. “Do you usually drink whiskey while driving?” It was one of those loaded questions: answering yes would be bad (and not even remotely accurate), but even answering no would imply that I still did it occasionally. More packing, coverings and things I didn’t even know existed were taken from my boot, until nothing but the jack, spare tyre and baffling Japanese instructions were visible. “Why is there Japanese writing in your boot?” “It’s a Toyota” was the best I could answer. Attention turned to the guitar on the back seat. “Do you play in a band?” “No.” “Do you normally take your guitar on road trips?” “No.” Things were looking worse all the time. He paused, almost for dramatic effect. “We need to test you for drugs.” This was it. Any minute now some stubbled, gold-toothed government-sanctioned rapist would emerge from the shack, naked save for one latex glove. “We need a skin sample,” he elaborated. Presumably, he thinks the way you take drugs is by mixing them with margarine and spreading it on your skin like basting a turkey with garlic butter. For all I know that’s actually how you do.
Tired, annoyed but thankfully yet-to-be raped, I rejoined the stream of equally un-violated passengers out into the unremarkable port of Harwich. Harwich is one of those unusual places that only earns its inclusion on the map by existing solely to get you somewhere, anywhere else, and even then is given a run for its money in noteworthiness by a coffee stain. Harwich’s football team currently plies its trade five divisions below the Football League, William of Orange intended to begin The Glorious Revolution here only to be blown off course, and even Daniel Defoe described it as “not much of gaiety and pleasure”. The only remotely interesting thing I personally discovered about Harwich is that it has a Morrisons. Nevertheless, it’s always interesting driving near a port. The ratio of foreign cars goes through the roof, yet they never seem to go anywhere other than the direct vicinity of the port. You never see them parked in Morrisons car parks or up on bricks by the canal, just vaguely milling about, three feet from where they disembarked. Where do they go? It must be fear of the outside world. I mean, who would ever need to leave Harwich? There’s a great Morrisons, after all.
Driving on from the port at about the same time as the sun was waking up and scratching its nuts, I followed the signs for London. Only a morning’s drive, and fortunately the rest passed without incidence, except of course that it didn’t.
As rush hour drew in the traffic increased and I found myself an unwelcome guest amongst other people’s commutes. Chief among them a biker with a death wish, sauntering over the three lane carriageway and pulling off overtaking manoeuvres in-between lanes as if to taunt the Grim Reaper by blowing off in his face. In my mirror, he passed through the nearly-not-there space between two speed-limited lorries, a stunt that was at once both annoying and stupid, and then passed so close to my car I considered opening the door and knocking him off his bike, the idiot. After he passed me, he mostly disappeared around a blind bend, and then completely disappeared from the land of the living.
As a consequence of his rather messy divorce from existence, traffic ground to a halt, with cars now reduced to occupying the one lane his remains didn’t. By the time the police came down the hard shoulder to cordon off the road I had inched all the way to the front, morbidly curious and rubber of neck. It was close enough to gaze on as the ambulance first put a white sheet over a non-descript mass of flesh near the hard-shoulder, and then another over another, more helmet-wearing mass of flesh nearer the undamaged HGV he had presumably died trying to overtake. Still, at least he died doing what he loved – cracking his skull on the side of a lorry.
Slowly, the cars behind started turning and going back the other way down the carriageway, under the command of the various police swarming over the scene. As it was my turn to be informed, one knocked on my window, barked the same set of instructions he had presumably said to everyone else, and then did a slow double take. “On second thoughts…” he said in that sort of calm, collected and unnatural way that policemen say things, “I need to get back to our staging area. I am getting in your car.” I hurriedly combed the detritus of a summer of road-trips off the front seat. “Do not worry - I am not here to test your driving” he said, and then with no sense of irony made me perform a three point turn. As we were driving the wrong way down a main road, he started that sort of “friendly” banter that becomes ball-shatteringly tense when you have bloodshot eyes, a guitar, passport and a half-drunk bottle of whiskey on the back seat. Then followed the awkward questions that all began with “why…”, but he was fortunately cut short when he noticed a police car doing precisely what most other police cars do – sod all. He proposed they take him the rest of the way, a proposal I readily agreed with.
Drugs, death and the law out of the way, the problems now took the form of “where the bloody hell did this guy take me?” With the main road closed to sweep the blood away, the traffic spilled out into the dozens of identikit villages, with me following vaguely in their wake. Everywhere you looked there were: battered, looted non-chain petrol stations; Spar supermarkets frequented by toothless, jobless hooligans; and crucially, signposts to everywhere I’d never heard of. Without much in the way of a map I used the time honoured male way of navigating: saying convincingly “it’s this way” and then rather less convincingly “I’m sure it was this way”. I found the main road three hours later.
Parked in whatever awful London suburb I eventually found, concert ticket and hotel reservation in hand I rode the tube towards my destination. Same night I’d bought the tickets I also booked a hotel for both nights in the centre of London. It was a hotel I’d used several times before, not because of quality, but because it was generally the only place that had any rooms left. Proudly, and with a sense of accomplishment, I arrived at the hotel desk. “We don’t have a reservation for you,” said the refugee from Mordor behind a thick accent. “You obviously don’t check your emails, do you?” I hadn’t, due to not being near a computer for a few days, but it was a bluff anyway. As I would later discover, there was no email. “We don’t have any rooms.” They even showed me a printout of my reservation failure, as if this somehow made them blameless in the matter. It was like being shown an x-ray of the surgeon’s car keys slowly rotting your insides.
Furiously banging on every hotel door I could find (“we’re full” came the reply from the receptionists who actually spoke English, annoyed gesticulation from the rest), I wore out mine and everyone else’s patience to the point I decided going back to the orcs and having one more grovel might be my only way out. “We have a room available now, for tonight only,” grunted the thing behind the desk at Hotel Failure. This one room was a “double” room, so called because of the price and not in any way related to the size of the bed, and by an amazing coincidence the most expensive room they had. Barely enough time to throw down my luggage I ran to the nearest shop to buy an awful plastic-wrapped sandwich and a petrol-station quality pie, before setting out for the actual gig itself.
Hoxton Square Bar & Grill could only be described as an awful wankers’ paradise. Black furniture, black bar, overpriced “import” alcohol and idiotically decorated. An estate agent may describe the décor as “bijou industrial” but I would call it “concrete fuckery”. It has about as much charm as a marmite air-freshener. Huddled around the outside tables were the typical assortment of the damned, foolish and poor (i.e. James fans) and I sat down with a pint of fake Japanese beer among them, waiting for the band to saunter in. Even for James, an evening of entirely new material was unusual and most fans were preoccupied about whether it would go horribly wrong or horribly right. Only Saul came to join us, subdued by fear (or possibly by my bloodshot eyes and vague stench of death), saying little and quickly scurrying off. Things tonight were as unusual for them as they were for us.
The first few bars of the first new song bellowed from the stage as a few fans looked around, wondering when the punch line was. It was the kind of song that the band plays in the middle of the set to drum up business for the bar. A vague, uneasy round of applause trickled around the bemused masses as if to say “I knew this was going to be rubbish”, but before too long they kicked off again, this time a small, yearning thing (that annoyingly didn’t make it to record) which was fortunately more representative of the rest of the evening. By the time the closing and vaguely sentimental trumpets of Boom Boom had dissipated, all was forgiven. Barring the colossal misstep of Child To Burn, which sounded as painful and horrifying as an actual burning child, the rest of the new material unfolded and soared, much like a paper plane except paper planes are actually folded and... oh shut up you get what I mean. Come on, it’s not like you’re paying to read this.
With the evening’s festivities over, a small group of fans hung around the bar area like a bad smell (in my case death and burning children), with another group of cooler fans talking to the band about various mundane things. When chucking out time came, Larry approached; he informed us of a small club they were going to and sort of invited us along. A short walk down the road and there it was – the place where cynicism goes to die. The horrible pretentious sort of place that the writers of magazines about iPod accessories conglomerate to wank over their skinny jeans and generally be the utter blight on reality that they are. Nevertheless, some of James were inside so there was nothing for it; I took a deep breath and went in.
I hate clubs. Brainless soulless ponces swaggering around as if their balls are on fire, pretending to know the difference between the shit songs that fester on the dancefloor and only ever paying attention to songs any normal person knows in some sort of ironic way that’s insulting to anyone who was actually alive before 1989. The only reason they listen to that awful, awful ear-cancer that oozes from the oversized speakers is because low frequencies, like low numbers, are all their ecstasy-ridden sponge pudding of a brain can physically comprehend. They pretend they’re cool by doing drugs, plastering their heads in enough hair gel to set off the fire alarms and wearing clothes so ridiculous they might as well have “rape me” printed on them, and then have the gall to act as if they reach some sort of Zen-like enlightenment when the turgid drivel of a song goes into the quiet “let’s all look at how massive a cock the DJ is while the bass isn’t melting our face” bit of the song. But they’re all the same as the rest of us. All they’re doing is vainly looking around for a place to die, and in their case it’s the bleak futility of a club toilet, knee-deep in piss and choking on their own sense of self-satisfaction. I hate them.
Inside the atmosphere of hair-gel and date-rape subsided as some informant pointed in the direction of the new guests and suggested to the DJ that maybe playing one of their records would be the kind of thing that an ageing rock star might be able to use to bag a coked-up skank of a groupie, or something. Comical things-flying-through-the-air rummaging later, and Laid blared out of the oversized speakers, the fans overjoyed and the band visibly disgusted. It was everything a night out at a club after spending 24 hours awake should have been.
***
Eventually, when I got home, I was talking with my brother-in-law. He told me “my friend’s brother died in a motorbike accident near Harwich the other day…”
Drugs, death and the law
The room was moving in an unpredictable way, much in the same way as it does when you’ve been drinking the previous night and wake up while still drunk. I had been drinking, but that wasn’t it. As I lifted my head and promptly banged it on the plastic ceiling, everything became clear. I was hung over, and on a boat.
To explain, James, in their infinite “let’s make things as awkward for our fans as possible” wisdom had decided to quite rudely schedule a couple of gigs right when I was on holiday. The gits. Specifically, they had scheduled two gigs with a special, brand-spanking-new setlist of unreleased material, in London, September, 2007, around dinner time. In James terms it was big, so big that I had to cut short my stay in Holland and drive all the way back. My plan was as simple as a really simple thing: do it in one day. This was that day, and the following is the true (and only slightly exaggerated) account.
Still in something of a daze, I shoved my various belongings into my bag and tentatively staggered onto the car deck to discover that I had completely forgotten where I had parked the previous evening. The boat itself was a fairly colossal but drab, depressing thing, halfway between an opulent cruise ship and a pedal powered boat shaped like a swan. Searching the other four-hundred decks, stopping occasionally to feign epiphany so the onlooking Dutch truck drivers wouldn’t think “another stupid English tosser who can’t find his car”, I eventually found it about four feet from where I thought I’d parked it in the first place. And then also found that I’d left the keys in my room.
Driving out of the ferry, and down some sort of assault course that could only have been there as part of some insidious insurance scam, out of the long line of cars calmly passing without incidence through customs, a balding, chinless man in his forties singled me out. I have no idea why. A solitary man in his 20s, bloodshot eyes and guitar on the backseat, returning from the Netherlands is not suspicious at all. With his beckoning taking a more sinister turn he diverted me to an abandoned warehouse full of tables that, only an hour ago, looked like they’d probably had bloodstained straps and bits of flailed-off flesh on them. He peered through my window with the kind of disgust reserved for watching someone tucking in to a bowl of their own poo.
“Get out of the car please sir.” My rucksack, bottle of whiskey protruding incriminatingly from the top, was shuffled away into a small shack for further rummaging. “Do you usually drink whiskey while driving?” It was one of those loaded questions: answering yes would be bad (and not even remotely accurate), but even answering no would imply that I still did it occasionally. More packing, coverings and things I didn’t even know existed were taken from my boot, until nothing but the jack, spare tyre and baffling Japanese instructions were visible. “Why is there Japanese writing in your boot?” “It’s a Toyota” was the best I could answer. Attention turned to the guitar on the back seat. “Do you play in a band?” “No.” “Do you normally take your guitar on road trips?” “No.” Things were looking worse all the time. He paused, almost for dramatic effect. “We need to test you for drugs.” This was it. Any minute now some stubbled, gold-toothed government-sanctioned rapist would emerge from the shack, naked save for one latex glove. “We need a skin sample,” he elaborated. Presumably, he thinks the way you take drugs is by mixing them with margarine and spreading it on your skin like basting a turkey with garlic butter. For all I know that’s actually how you do.
Tired, annoyed but thankfully yet-to-be raped, I rejoined the stream of equally un-violated passengers out into the unremarkable port of Harwich. Harwich is one of those unusual places that only earns its inclusion on the map by existing solely to get you somewhere, anywhere else, and even then is given a run for its money in noteworthiness by a coffee stain. Harwich’s football team currently plies its trade five divisions below the Football League, William of Orange intended to begin The Glorious Revolution here only to be blown off course, and even Daniel Defoe described it as “not much of gaiety and pleasure”. The only remotely interesting thing I personally discovered about Harwich is that it has a Morrisons. Nevertheless, it’s always interesting driving near a port. The ratio of foreign cars goes through the roof, yet they never seem to go anywhere other than the direct vicinity of the port. You never see them parked in Morrisons car parks or up on bricks by the canal, just vaguely milling about, three feet from where they disembarked. Where do they go? It must be fear of the outside world. I mean, who would ever need to leave Harwich? There’s a great Morrisons, after all.
Driving on from the port at about the same time as the sun was waking up and scratching its nuts, I followed the signs for London. Only a morning’s drive, and fortunately the rest passed without incidence, except of course that it didn’t.
As rush hour drew in the traffic increased and I found myself an unwelcome guest amongst other people’s commutes. Chief among them a biker with a death wish, sauntering over the three lane carriageway and pulling off overtaking manoeuvres in-between lanes as if to taunt the Grim Reaper by blowing off in his face. In my mirror, he passed through the nearly-not-there space between two speed-limited lorries, a stunt that was at once both annoying and stupid, and then passed so close to my car I considered opening the door and knocking him off his bike, the idiot. After he passed me, he mostly disappeared around a blind bend, and then completely disappeared from the land of the living.
As a consequence of his rather messy divorce from existence, traffic ground to a halt, with cars now reduced to occupying the one lane his remains didn’t. By the time the police came down the hard shoulder to cordon off the road I had inched all the way to the front, morbidly curious and rubber of neck. It was close enough to gaze on as the ambulance first put a white sheet over a non-descript mass of flesh near the hard-shoulder, and then another over another, more helmet-wearing mass of flesh nearer the undamaged HGV he had presumably died trying to overtake. Still, at least he died doing what he loved – cracking his skull on the side of a lorry.
Slowly, the cars behind started turning and going back the other way down the carriageway, under the command of the various police swarming over the scene. As it was my turn to be informed, one knocked on my window, barked the same set of instructions he had presumably said to everyone else, and then did a slow double take. “On second thoughts…” he said in that sort of calm, collected and unnatural way that policemen say things, “I need to get back to our staging area. I am getting in your car.” I hurriedly combed the detritus of a summer of road-trips off the front seat. “Do not worry - I am not here to test your driving” he said, and then with no sense of irony made me perform a three point turn. As we were driving the wrong way down a main road, he started that sort of “friendly” banter that becomes ball-shatteringly tense when you have bloodshot eyes, a guitar, passport and a half-drunk bottle of whiskey on the back seat. Then followed the awkward questions that all began with “why…”, but he was fortunately cut short when he noticed a police car doing precisely what most other police cars do – sod all. He proposed they take him the rest of the way, a proposal I readily agreed with.
Drugs, death and the law out of the way, the problems now took the form of “where the bloody hell did this guy take me?” With the main road closed to sweep the blood away, the traffic spilled out into the dozens of identikit villages, with me following vaguely in their wake. Everywhere you looked there were: battered, looted non-chain petrol stations; Spar supermarkets frequented by toothless, jobless hooligans; and crucially, signposts to everywhere I’d never heard of. Without much in the way of a map I used the time honoured male way of navigating: saying convincingly “it’s this way” and then rather less convincingly “I’m sure it was this way”. I found the main road three hours later.
Parked in whatever awful London suburb I eventually found, concert ticket and hotel reservation in hand I rode the tube towards my destination. Same night I’d bought the tickets I also booked a hotel for both nights in the centre of London. It was a hotel I’d used several times before, not because of quality, but because it was generally the only place that had any rooms left. Proudly, and with a sense of accomplishment, I arrived at the hotel desk. “We don’t have a reservation for you,” said the refugee from Mordor behind a thick accent. “You obviously don’t check your emails, do you?” I hadn’t, due to not being near a computer for a few days, but it was a bluff anyway. As I would later discover, there was no email. “We don’t have any rooms.” They even showed me a printout of my reservation failure, as if this somehow made them blameless in the matter. It was like being shown an x-ray of the surgeon’s car keys slowly rotting your insides.
Furiously banging on every hotel door I could find (“we’re full” came the reply from the receptionists who actually spoke English, annoyed gesticulation from the rest), I wore out mine and everyone else’s patience to the point I decided going back to the orcs and having one more grovel might be my only way out. “We have a room available now, for tonight only,” grunted the thing behind the desk at Hotel Failure. This one room was a “double” room, so called because of the price and not in any way related to the size of the bed, and by an amazing coincidence the most expensive room they had. Barely enough time to throw down my luggage I ran to the nearest shop to buy an awful plastic-wrapped sandwich and a petrol-station quality pie, before setting out for the actual gig itself.
Hoxton Square Bar & Grill could only be described as an awful wankers’ paradise. Black furniture, black bar, overpriced “import” alcohol and idiotically decorated. An estate agent may describe the décor as “bijou industrial” but I would call it “concrete fuckery”. It has about as much charm as a marmite air-freshener. Huddled around the outside tables were the typical assortment of the damned, foolish and poor (i.e. James fans) and I sat down with a pint of fake Japanese beer among them, waiting for the band to saunter in. Even for James, an evening of entirely new material was unusual and most fans were preoccupied about whether it would go horribly wrong or horribly right. Only Saul came to join us, subdued by fear (or possibly by my bloodshot eyes and vague stench of death), saying little and quickly scurrying off. Things tonight were as unusual for them as they were for us.
The first few bars of the first new song bellowed from the stage as a few fans looked around, wondering when the punch line was. It was the kind of song that the band plays in the middle of the set to drum up business for the bar. A vague, uneasy round of applause trickled around the bemused masses as if to say “I knew this was going to be rubbish”, but before too long they kicked off again, this time a small, yearning thing (that annoyingly didn’t make it to record) which was fortunately more representative of the rest of the evening. By the time the closing and vaguely sentimental trumpets of Boom Boom had dissipated, all was forgiven. Barring the colossal misstep of Child To Burn, which sounded as painful and horrifying as an actual burning child, the rest of the new material unfolded and soared, much like a paper plane except paper planes are actually folded and... oh shut up you get what I mean. Come on, it’s not like you’re paying to read this.
With the evening’s festivities over, a small group of fans hung around the bar area like a bad smell (in my case death and burning children), with another group of cooler fans talking to the band about various mundane things. When chucking out time came, Larry approached; he informed us of a small club they were going to and sort of invited us along. A short walk down the road and there it was – the place where cynicism goes to die. The horrible pretentious sort of place that the writers of magazines about iPod accessories conglomerate to wank over their skinny jeans and generally be the utter blight on reality that they are. Nevertheless, some of James were inside so there was nothing for it; I took a deep breath and went in.
I hate clubs. Brainless soulless ponces swaggering around as if their balls are on fire, pretending to know the difference between the shit songs that fester on the dancefloor and only ever paying attention to songs any normal person knows in some sort of ironic way that’s insulting to anyone who was actually alive before 1989. The only reason they listen to that awful, awful ear-cancer that oozes from the oversized speakers is because low frequencies, like low numbers, are all their ecstasy-ridden sponge pudding of a brain can physically comprehend. They pretend they’re cool by doing drugs, plastering their heads in enough hair gel to set off the fire alarms and wearing clothes so ridiculous they might as well have “rape me” printed on them, and then have the gall to act as if they reach some sort of Zen-like enlightenment when the turgid drivel of a song goes into the quiet “let’s all look at how massive a cock the DJ is while the bass isn’t melting our face” bit of the song. But they’re all the same as the rest of us. All they’re doing is vainly looking around for a place to die, and in their case it’s the bleak futility of a club toilet, knee-deep in piss and choking on their own sense of self-satisfaction. I hate them.
Inside the atmosphere of hair-gel and date-rape subsided as some informant pointed in the direction of the new guests and suggested to the DJ that maybe playing one of their records would be the kind of thing that an ageing rock star might be able to use to bag a coked-up skank of a groupie, or something. Comical things-flying-through-the-air rummaging later, and Laid blared out of the oversized speakers, the fans overjoyed and the band visibly disgusted. It was everything a night out at a club after spending 24 hours awake should have been.
***
Eventually, when I got home, I was talking with my brother-in-law. He told me “my friend’s brother died in a motorbike accident near Harwich the other day…”
Think we saw a car crash on the way home too....
