to look at stories like this and to think that we passed through half of the places on the map just a couple of months ago. We avoided tropical storm Arlene (downgraded from hurricane just before we arrived) by the skin of our teeth and swam in the Gulf of Mexico at Pass Christian, just beside Gulfport, when the weather had cleared up. It was one of the nicest places we visited and it's saddening to think it's just been hit by another, much worse, storm.
cast a long, long shadow over the weekend. Friday...I just don't want to talk about Friday. Suffice it to say that working until 9pm while feeling that bad is an experience that I don't intend to repeat in a hurry. Or, with luck, ever.
Saturday was another rehearse-and-mix-recordings affair, followed by a cretin-free train home and a mercifully quiet evening with some of the usual suspects in Mather's.
I got up reasonably early on Sunday to go home for a family lunch; Ruth's going to Oz fairly soon, so this was a last toute la famille occasion. Our cousin Kerr, his wife Marie (French) and their two kids (two and four, and effectively bilingual) came along and I felt a little guilty rushing away to make the Pixies concert that evening.
The spare ticket that I'd assumed would practically give itself away turned into a bit of an albatross, necessitating call after call to just about anyone I'd ever accused of being a Pixies/Idlewild/Teenage Fanclub fan, but eventually, as I got off the train in Edinburgh, I'd arranged to meet up with Ally before heading to Meadowbank. I steered McCloy and some of her friends from Glasgow (Dochan of Soul Candy - "Ha! We stole your drummer" - and Sophie the murderous pixie) to the Café Royal to rendezvous with Ally and off we went.
We arrived in time for Teenage Fanclub (my support band jinx is finally overcome) and we found a reasonably central spot to listen from. As ever - I've seen them three or four times now in different supporting slots - the sound wasn't great. The songs, and the sheer feeling behind them, were excellent, but they were finished too soon and the indistinct bass didn't help matters.
Idlewild, it turns out, are a very good live band. Having seen them just once before playing mainly acoustic stuff, I had no idea what they'd be like with a full electric set, but they were just as good this time. I thought they were fairly brave in doing some of the more punky songs from Captain and Hope Is Important, but they knew exactly what they were doing, and even Roddy's floppy art-student angst didn't dull the impact. Excellent stuff.
Finally, just as the light was dimming, the Pixies came on. The Pixies. I honestly thought I'd never see them play. I came late to the whole Pixies thing and I occasionally kick myself for it; I came across them going backwards from Nirvana to Teenage Fanclub and then to the Pixies, via an ex-girlfriend who'd actually been paying attention at the time that they came along.
The Pixies were not there to fuck spiders. They walked on stage, picked up their gear and kicked off. I don't have much to say about the set other than bloody hell; what a band. It was incredible to see them play. They finished on Vamos and the crowd made a shitload of noise until they came back for an encore. What on earth have they got left to play? I thought. They played Gigantic, and it was good.
P.S: Two pointless observations:
what a trial.
It was Jez's birthday yesterday, so I wandered down to the Star Bar to meet up with him and a few of the usual suspects for a quiet few pre-weekend birthday drinks.
Fast forward to 1 am. Jez, despite being only barely able to stand, is dancing on the uplit dancefloor of a bizarre little subterranean club called Garibaldi's. His (married) mate Bertie, immortalised in one of a series of increasingly unhinged notes I found on my phone today as "bertie rocks", is jocularly attempting to insinute himself into a group of dressed-up girls on a night out, dancing in inimitable rugby player style. I'm mostly trying to avoid sliding off the table I'm sitting on.
Jez and Bertie contrive to disappear from under my nose. I sit down at a table of people who have no idea who I am, and chuckle inanely to myself as I send a text message to Jez, which I later find out contains the exclamation "holy god!", presumably in reference to my stunned awe at the speed of the evening's descent.
I go home and fall into a very, very deep sleep.
I'm woken up at 11:30 am by my phone ringing. I feel like death. "So, are you coming to work today?"
"Work? You mean it's not Saturday?"
A bit of failed holiday negotiation later and it transpires that our esteemed clients have a last-minute request that only I can deal with. I stand in the shower for nigh on half an hour, buoyed up on the fumes of the alcohol I'm sweating and get a bus in. The festival traffic is terrible, and the bus sits idling for most of the journey. The problem is that the engine's idle speed matches exactly the resonant frequency of the bus, and I'm mercilessly vibrated all the way here, which is where I still am at 8:15 on a Friday night.
Arse.
The festival's always a bit trying if you live in Edinburgh, but living slap bang in the middle of post-midnight buskers playing either bagpipes* or the same three Oasis songs over and over again is starting to irritate me ever so slightly. So apologies in advance if this entry is a bit on the misanthropic side.
Thinking back to the week, I can't actually remember anything noteworthy happening other than going for a decent run (10k, including Arthur's Seat) with Jez. I must have done something else, but it's just not coming back. Your guess is as good as mine. (In fact, my own guess, involving plinking away on the bass and procrastinating about going for another run, is probably close enough to the truth. Add your own ideas below - perhaps something will jog my memory.)
On Friday night a few of us went out for some festival boozing, traipsing from over-stuffed bar to over-stuffed bar and marvelling at the sheer, awesome ineptitude of some of the bar staff. Make no mistake; a heroic few were pumping out booze like it was Iraqi oil, but we seemed to get only the preening, quiffed clothes horses who were happier shining cocktail shakers than deigning to serve us. We wound up in Teviot, the only place not packed to the rafters, and admitted defeat at 3.30 am after roughly one beer per mile travelled. Most unsatisfactory.
A jaunt through to Glasgow for a TM practice filled most of Saturday. We recorded some demos on Doug's new 4-track, and despite a generally plodding session, they're pretty promising. We packed up at 6 pm and set up the 4-track in Doug's flat, spending a wanky but pleasing few hours tweaking equalisation and volume while eating burgers from the incomparable Wishbone café. Such was Saturday, apart from a gruelling train journey home where the carriage was populated half with moronic Rangers supporters (and part-time UVF members by the sickening sound of their idiot singing) and half with sane, normal people willing them to fuck off.
On Sunday I went for a run, had a shower and then sweated copiously for about an hour an a half. Just didn't stop. If I hadn't felt absolutely fine, I would have sworn I was ill. Trying on a pair of sunglasses in a Rose Street shop, I could see the shop assistant looking out of the corner of her eye, thinking "Who is this perspiring cretin? When will he leave my poor shop and cease sweating all over the merchandise?"
I didn't buy the sunglasses, and instead went home until I could move without dripping.
Dave, two of his Kilmarnock mates and I went to see Rob Newman that night. Thought-provoking show: political polemic crossed with The Mary Whitehouse Experience. Good stuff.
[Got to be off now - we have a potential new flatmate coming round. Apologies for the rushed entry. Not often you hear that, eh?]
* Oscar Wilde once defined a gentleman as "someone who knows how to play the bagpipes but doesn't." RF 1, guy playing pipes outside our window at 1am, nil.
consisting mostly of cooking, running and avoiding the pub, the weekend arrived and decided to make its presence throroughly felt. On Friday, Dave, Michelle and I met up with a worse-for-wear Jeff and assorted Mafia types in Hector's (we're becoming terribly gauche in our old age) for a speculative few pints. Vague plans to go to the Pleasance and then the Spiegeltent instead took the hard core of Josh, Jez (J&J from now on), Neil/Doddsy, Michelle and I to Teviot, where Jez smoked a hookah.
A hookah. You filthy people.
A fire alarm went off while I was at the bar - caused by the cherry fug reeking from the hookah lounge, maybe? - and we evacuated to Medina. As you may have guessed, this was the beginning of the end and a few tequilas and some truly awful dancing from yours truly later, we went home.
Saturday arrived, and it was not welcome. I crawled out of bed around 2pm to say hello to Gill's friends Heidi and Kate, up visiting from the big smoke, and after scraping the alcoholic sweat off myself in the shower, headed out into the blinding sunshine* to obtain the last few components of the evening's costume. The combined J&J Airlines birthday flight to Vegas had been chiselled into my calendar for weeks, and all I needed to get was some gold braid and a pair of aviator specs.
This was the easy part. The hard part was doing the actual sewing. Gill had three stripes sewn onto the right arm of my suit in about fifteen minutes flat. I believe she may even have done her nails and styled her hair at the same time.
I visibly aged while doing the left arm. Empires rose and fell in the time it took me to get the bastard things on. Still, I couldn't help but feel a warm glow of achievement as I compared the wonky, unevenly spaced braid I'd done to the arrow-straight bands on the right arm. Job's a good 'un.
We were suited, booted and capped by 9pm and walked up to the Wash to meet the rest of the crew. I already had a permanent smirk on my face - even the neds were saluting us in the street ("That's pure brilliant by the way mate! What are ye? A captain or that?") - and when we got to the pub, with a fucking throng of pilots and air hostesses**, I was experiencing full-on glee.
We walked round the corner to Vegas (in the sweaty Liquid Room as opposed to the camp splendour of Ego, but possibly the better for it) and settled in for the night. We danced the night away with our lovely trolley dollies. I won at roulette (ironic, given that we entirely failed to do so in the real Vegas) choosing the numbers 25-29 instead of namby-pambying around with evens or odds. A slinky young lady purred "Hello, Captain!" to me - at least as much as it's possible to purr when one's entire body is vibrating to Frank Sinatra - to which I replied "Ah. Uh, hello," gawped a little, and made excuse-me-I-dance-like-a-fool noises.
You can't win 'em all.
Or...can you?
About 2am, collapsed in a seat, mopping my brow and having danced myself sober(er), one of the Vegas showgirls appeared and dragged about six of us on stage - three pilots and three stewardesses. Incredibly, we were taking part in the 'best dressed' competition. We blinked in the limelight as two other groups of suave clubbers were introduced to moderate crowd approval, and when our turn came, the towering figure of Josh stood out from our mob on the dancefloor with both arms raised, and the crowd went wild.
We won. As far as I can tell, this is the coolest thing I've ever done. It's all downhill from here on in.
We popped our champagne, drank, and celebrated. Best Vegas ever.
of inward-looking diarism strained through a "wanky filter" (© JJC). Forward the RF!
I don't know whether it's the summer, the festival or the novelty of living above a brothel, but I feel like I haven't stopped going out for bloody ages. And this isn't blowing my own trumpet. More of a cry for help. Or a night off.
On Thursday Cedric, a friend of Vanessa's (he used to go out to a bar she worked at in Brussels - tenuous connection #1), invited Jeff and I down to his swanky Stockbridge flat for a meal. We had a swift pint in Hector's beforehand and I have to admit, it's a little weird to have to organise to go for a drink with Jeff or Josh; for absolutely ages, we've lived in the same flat/cave and having to organise this kind of thing, as opposed to just shouting "Anyone fancy a pint?" is a little odd.
Anyway, the meal was rather good. A load of Cedric's workmates were there, plus a couple of people from our housewarming.
"So how do you guys know Cedric?"
"From your party. Don't you remember?
"Um."
Tenuous connection #2.
On Friday Dave and I had a couple (Christ; more like a skinful) with Andy, Barbara and assorted Bouteloup friends and family to say goodbye before they head off on their pan-African travels. We had the sense to eat before going out but not the sense to call it a night early enough, and I was suffering for my art the next day as I hauled myself onto the train to Glasgow. Fortunately, the practice went pretty smoothly, if I do say so myself.
Mart was noodling away on his guitar at one point, and I played along for a while until I got the hang of what he was doing. Doug came in with a gentle drumbeat and we gradually built up to a fairly rocking, surprisingly improvised tune that lasted for seven or eight minutes. Questions as to whether a seven minute prog rock epic belong in a TM set aside, I think it's the first time we've actually played something that really did sound like Mogwai.
After meeting up with (and subsequently losing to common sense) Davis and the Captain, and after finally eating something far too late to salvage any degree of decorum, Doug and I took a taxi to the west end to meet up with Dave and Claire, a couple of friends of Kate's who Doug has apparently been keeping in touch with since a certain party almost two years ago.
Tenuous connection #3. It was one of those kind of weeks...
(as is becoming traditional) was flat booze destruction day. We went for a curry at Tipoo Sahib just round the corner. I say "Tipoo Sahib" while in actual fact I mean "the 1970s". Incredible place - a '70s time capsule Indian restaurant in a basement, serving a wide variety of blandly identical curries. I recommend - nay, I urge you never to go there. After we were stiffed for our change by our smiling, attentive, mostly deaf waiter, we got out and walked across the road to the Kenilworth. I think that this might become our local; they were kind enough to donate a pint of milk to us just after we moved in and now we must repay them by drinking their beer.
Our housewarming, long planned and anticipated (apart from by the legion of people who begged off because they were in other countries), arrived on Saturday night. The theme - just wear black and/or white - was, I think, an unqualified success. It appealed to the Vegas set, who like to dress up in evening wear as if we're rich and important; to quasi-, ex-, current and repressed goths, who view any invitation to wear black as a blessed relief from being needled for wearing it the whole time anyway; and to the random guy who was likened to a cross between Robert Smith and Edward Scissorhands. Especially to him.
The flat was packed, and it rocked. Tiny Monkey's rhythm section also rocked: you haven't witnessed the awesome power of the Monkey till you've seen a paralytic bassist 'play' along with Doug drumming on the end of an upturned whisky tin. (I might add that someone asked me to play, so it wasn't entirely a self-preening ego trip. Maybe 50/50.)
The next morning's tidy seems to have gone well. The morning did not go so well for me.
Once I was able to walk without fear of a spontaneous stripey laugh, I had a shower. Now it's probably because I haven't shared a flat with any girls for a good few years, but I was alarmed at the number of pink disposable razors gathered along the ledges of the shower basin. I was doing a virtual sword dance in a slippery shower cubicle while almost unable to see.
Fortunately, I still have all eleven ten toes.
P.S: Steve has just posted a nice photo of the Capp on the way back from a camping trip a couple of years ago. Ah, those were the days. Roof down; wind in your hair and money siphoning from the bank account like there's no tomorrow.
