THE ORIELLES

THE ORIELLES/PALE BLUE EYES AT THE ENGINE ROOMS, SOUTHAMPTON – 27/03/23

“How are you?” I say to the woman checking tickets. It’s something I do now: I ask everyone how they are. “How are you?” I say to everyone I come across, but with, I have to say, less and less conviction with each passing day. The woman checking tickets looks at me dubiously. I used to think I could just become a different person but I don’t so much any more.

There’s hardly anyone here when I arrive at almost eight o’clock. They don’t have any ginger beer so I just order some water. The barkeep and I both seem disappointed. “That’ll do,” I say when the plastic cup is just half full. I go and sit by the railings at the front, reciting the ‘To be or not to be’ speech, which I tried to memorise today, in my head. I am the only person anywhere near the stage.

Anywhere near the stage

PALE BLUE EYES are having an infectiously good time, playing their infectiously melodic sort of power pop – I think you’d call it that, though it’s not a term I’ve ever really had much truck with sounding, as it does, like something a cartoon character would do – and it’s so infectiously upbeat you’d have to be a cold, indifferent kind of person not to feel some sort of affection towards it. There’s not a lot not to like, which while not a reason to like it, is at least a reason not to not like it. The singer reminds me of someone but I can’t work out who.

I think it’s Norman Blake he reminds me of, which makes sense.

(“To be or not to be that is the question whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them to die to sleep no more and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to to die to sleep to sleep perchance to dream ay there’s the rub for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause there’s the respect that makes calamity of so long life for who would bear the scorns and whips of time the oppressor’s wrong the proud man’s contumely the pangs of disprized love the law’s delay the insolence of office and the spurns that patient merit of th’unworthy takes when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin who would fardels bear to grunt and sweat under a weary life but that the dread of something after death the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns puzzles the wits and make us rather bear the ills we have than fly to others we know not of thus conscience does make cowards of us all and thus the natural hue of resolution is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought and enterprises of great pitch and moment with this regard their currents go awry and lose the name of action”)

I may be getting this all wrong but there seems to be a kind of tension at the heart of THE ORIELLES. It’s the tension between female poise and restrain and masculine dynamism and aggression; between cosmic dreaminess and earthy rawness; rough and smooth, noise and melody, etc. The kids were watching this video about atoms the other day, all about how the neutrons were negative and the electrons were positive or something like that, and it reminds me of that video. For some reason tonight I can’t stop thinking about neutrons and electrons, about opposing forces and the tension that keeps us together and drives us forward.

Tension

THE COMET IS COMING

THE COMET IS COMING/JOSHUA IDEHEN AT THE ENGINE ROOMS, SOUTHAMPTON – 14/03/23

I caught Covid for the first time last week and was pretty sick. I haven’t drawn or written anything worth a damn since and I’m starting to get worried that the virus has hollowed me out and reduced all my artistry to aches and pains. So tonight is a bit of a test for me. Can I still write a load of passable nonsense about a show? It’s a real concern. 

Spoken word artist JOSHUA IDEHEN is speaking when I arrive, introducing himself to the crowd, congratulating us for surviving thirteen years of Tory rule. He talks about creating a “moment of kindness” and accepting everyone and being nice to everyone and feeling happy, which is lovely and he’s absolutely right about everything he says. No one, in their right mind, could argue with a single word of it. He wants us all to be friends, even insisting that we turn to someone we don’t know in the audience and tell them that they’re “all right”, which reminds me of when you’re at church and you have to shake hands with people and say “Peace be with you”, and he says that all we have is each other, and he’s right, of course, he’s absolutely right about everything. But the whole thing just leaves me craving a does of cynicism, like how you might crave something salty after overindulging on sweet stuff. Cynicism has a bad name these days, especially with the spoken word artists, who always seem to be unfailingly upbeat and full of unconditional love for their fellow man (which is absolutely right and proper, of course) but I like a bit of cynicism. It sometimes seems like the only rational response to this fucked up world. It makes me feel understood, less alone, happy, even. And isn’t that Idehen wants? Us all to be happy? And does it matter how we get there? If cynicism is my path to happiness is that OK? I’ll still be nice to people along the way. I promise.

Upbeat

It’s a really old and blokey crowd here tonight. Looking around everyone seems to be an old bloke. There are some young blokes and women too, but not many. I’m sort of in the middle: a middle-aged bloke. In front of me a couple are doing a crossword on their phone while they wait.

I don’t think I’ve ever come across a more aptly named band than THE COMET IS COMING. Like a comet there is a fiery sense of relentless movement and momentum to their music, and like a comet that’s COMING! a sense of real urgency, like, YOU HAVE TO DO SOMETHING RIGHT NOW, THE COMET IS COMING!! And if you don’t the comet will just smash you all to pieces. Well, not quite like that, maybe, but still apt, none-the-fucking-less. Very much apt. And the head of this relentless ball of fire is Shabaka Hutchings, or just plain old Shabaka as he styles himself these days, with his intensely rhythmical, repetitive and trance-like saxophone playing. The other guys are good too, but Hutchings is the thing that gives it drive, that keeps it moving forward. He’s quite a stunning musician. Really impressive. What seems to characterise the band is this sense of always pushing things a little further than you think they can, and whenever you think they are about to stop doing something, they always carry on doing it a little while longer and with a little more intensity, which is something Hutchings also seems to embody and exemplify. By the end of an exhausting set – at least for me – it seems almost ridiculously relentless, like they have taken being relentless to new heights. I had no idea that anything could be quite so relentless. It really is relentlessly relentless.

Relentless

I leave aching and tired, still working the Covid out of my body, but relieved that, for now at least, the passable nonsense still seems to be on tap.

TWO FUCK PARS

 

I

“How old was Emily when you left?” I ask.
  “She was about one and a half,” she replies. “We just didn’t want her going to school round there, really.”
  “How did you find it, moving down here?” I have this thing where it always feels like I’m interrogating people when I have conversations with them. Maybe that’s why it makes me feel uncomfortable. Maybe it’s because they never seem to ask me any questions in return. I wonder why they never ask me any questions in return. I mean, it would have been the easiest thing in the world for her to have asked me how old my daughter had been when we did the same thing that she did when her daughter was about one and a half.
  “It was weird,” she replies. “It’s a bit of a culture shock. The place where I worked before was very diverse, and here everyone’s white, and not just white but British white, like, literally everyone.”
  “I know,” I say, “and everyone’s called Oliver or Charlie or Alfie, or...” I pause to think of a girl’s name, “Emily.”
  The conversation moves on quickly but I have a sensation like spilling a glass of water all over something in my mind. ‘Emily’ is her daughter’s name. I just basically said that her daughter’s name is really common, to the point of tedious ubiquity. There is no recognition in her face, not that I notice anyway, but she must see the realisation in mine. The way my smile drops for a moment, or I appear lost in thought, like I’ve just remembered forgetting something important, or that I’ve left something on I should have turned off. 
  I keep the conversation flowing at pace in the hope that the steady accumulation of words will fall like snowflakes on the driveway of her mind, stopping her from manoeuvring the car of reflection from the garage of memory and driving off down the road of judgement, but I have no idea whether my attempt at distraction is successful or not, and I just have to accept that I will probably never know.

II

“One thing I noticed when we moved down,” I say, “is that everyone here is obsessed with parking.”
  “Yeah,” she says, laughing in agreement, “it’s true.”
  I launch into an anecdote.
  “Our neighbour,” I begin, “has a driveway and so he has a dropped kerb, and he’s totally obsessed with people parking over his dropped kerb, even if it’s just a few centimetres, which I did the other day, and I came out to my car in the morning, and he’d put a little note detailing the law and regulations surrounding dropped kerb parking, that he’d obviously printed off from some website or other, into a little blue cellophane bag and left it on my windscreen.”
  She nods and smiles, encouraging me to continue. 
  “I just think it’s really sad,” I say, “that these people obviously have nothing else going on in their lives, that their lives are just so empty, that they have nothing better to do than put little notes on people’s windscreens. Like they have nothing else in their lives to focus on. It’s just sad.”
  It’s one of those conversations that is really just an exchange of anecdotes. It’s like an anecdote relay and so she takes the baton.
  “Well, we’ve had trouble with our neighbour too,” she says. And she explains the situation. They live in a cul-de-sac – her and her husband and their children – and if their neighbour parks on the road it makes it really difficult to get out of their driveway and one day he parked on the road and they had great difficulty getting out of their driveway and her husband left a note – a polite note – on their car just asking them not to park on the road because it made it really difficult for them to get out of their driveway and the guy – the neighbour – came round and went mental at her husband and now won’t talk to either of them or even look at them when they pass in the street and it takes a while but I think oh my god have I done it again have I done another fuck par it takes a while because I have to try and work it out is she in her story like my neighbour in my story or is her neighbour in her story like my neighbour in my story and I conclude that her story is maybe a little more ambiguous than my story but it could easily be inferred that she in her story is definitely like my neighbour in my story and I think fuck i’ve done it again another fuck par i’ve basically just implied that her life is sad and empty and that she has nothing else to focus on other than where her neighbours park their fucking cars and the more i think about it the more i decide that there is no fucking way that any other interpretation is even possible let alone likely and i wonder why it is that i am constantly fuck parring in this way and conclude that the reason is my pathetic attempts to amuse people or make them laugh or appear interesting or amusing to other people and that this is really the root of my fuck pars and maybe the root of other things too and that maybe that is why important people like managers and politicians and pop stars are so serious all the time because maybe theyve already learned this lesson or maybe just instinctively knew it without needing to learn it and it’s not worth the risk of offending or upsetting anyone and so why even take the chance of trying to be amusing or funny or even interesting if theres even a small chance of offending or upsetting someone its just too much of a risk and its not worth it so whyfuckingbother