NATURE

 

people always say, “Oh, nature’s brilliant, isn’t it, I love nature,” but, I tell you what, I’m bloody sick of nature, it’s just bloody boring, it’s just the same old bloody stuff day in day out, ooh plants, water, fucking air, it’s shit, oh yeah, and shit, that’s nature, which is fucking shit, and fucking pigeons, I fucking hate pigeons, and fucking seagulls, with that fucking squawking sound they make, it’s just fucking annoying, isn’t it about time we had some new birds, I mean it’s just lazy isn’t it, never doing anything new, just relying on stuff you did in the past, I mean, it’s not like any of us could just say, “Oh, sorry, I’m not doing any work today because I, like, did all my work, like, billions of years ago or whatever, and now I’m just going to sit on my arse, and do fuck all,” I mean, wouldn’t it would be nice, just once, to be surprised, to be like, “Oh, there’s a fucking lion walking down my street!” or, you know, an animal with, like, five faces or whatever, that would be all right, but instead all we fucking get are fucking dogs and cats and fucking pigeons, I wouldn’t even mind if they ever did anything interesting, or helped out a bit, but when did a dog or a cat ever do anything interesting or help out a bit, all they ever fucking do is make more fucking mess, it’s fucking bullshit, you know

YO LA TENGO

YO LA TENGO AT LONDON PALLADIUM – 14/04/23

“It’s nice to hear London accents again,” I say as we walk down Oxford Street. We don’t live in London any more, and so don’t hear London accents as part of our daily lives. Wife, for her part, identifies a way of walking particular to busy London streets, a sort of pacy purposeful parade, as different as it could possibly be to the kind of dithering, directionless dawdle more common in the provinces.

London walk

There’s no support band tonight; YO LA TENGO are playing two sets instead. “Oh, there’s an interval,” says a person, upon seeing the stage times. “I love that!”

No support band

In many ways they are the most unlikely of bands to be filling the PALLADIUM. They’re not cool, or attractive, or edgy, or innovative, they’re not virtuosos, or particularly great lyricists or singers (in fact, they’re not even really singing; it’s more a sort of melodic talking, or even, at times, tuneful whispering), there’s no lightshow, no posing or posturing, no anthemic sing-alongs, no hits. No one cheers when they recognise a song they like. They’re just not that kind of band. So, what is it about them? Is it their honesty, their authenticity, their simplicity, their melodicism, their reliability, their quietness, their loudness, their warmth, their humanity? Yes, I think it must be. All those things, probably. “We’ve been in this band for a long time,” says Ira Kaplin, and, when everyone cheers adds, “Thanks for cheering our longevity.” Maybe that’s part of the appeal too: longevity. The fact that they have kept going. They haven’t stopped or given up or died. They just keep going. And they haven’t lost it. They’ve still got whatever it was they had to begin with. “He never looks particularly happy to be performing,” says wife of Kaplin. “None of them look terrifically happy,” I observe. I couldn’t tell you what any of the songs are called, but they all sound familiar and terribly lovely, like a warm blanket you can wrap around your legs on a chilly day. After a while it begins to have a soporific effect. Wife is yawning. “I’m getting sleepy,” she says. “Have a little nap,” I suggest. 

Soporific

The second half is a bit more upbeat. Well, it’s equally ponderous and unhurried, but louder, put it like that. People are wigging out in their seats. At one point a man gets a bit overexcited, jumps to his feet and starts pumping his fist in the air, as if trying to inspire a sort of mass stand-up. But it doesn’t catch on. It’s just not that sort of thing. One thing that makes me laugh about Yo La Tengo is the way that when they walk on and off stage and when they move about the stage swapping instruments and what have you, there is a real urgency and purposefulness to their movements which is almost entirely lacking when they are playing. But that’s OK. That’s just who they are, and that’s probably why we’ve loved them all these years.

ISHMAEL ENSEMBLE

ISHMAEL ENSEMBLE/JOIN THE DIN AT GUILDHALL, PORTSMOUTH – 13/04/23

It’s a moody sort of evening in the forest. One minute there are splodges of ice splattering on the windscreen, and the next brilliant sunshine, but with rainclouds always looming in the distance, like a graphite smudge. It's like it can’t quite decide what kind of evening it wants to be, caught between multiple possible evenings.

Moody

Multiple possible evenings

In the car park there is a man standing by the meter. He says he needs four pounds eighty for a bus home. He asks me if I can give him some money. I ask him to wait a minute. I might need the change for the car park, I explain. He says it’s a card machine and starts showing me how to use it. “You tap your card there,” he says, showing me where to tap my card. I tell him that I know how to use the machine. “Sorry,” he says. When I’m done I give him all the change I have. It amounts to one pound ninety-five. I count it out for him. “I need four pounds eighty,” he says.

Portsmouth sells itself as “the great waterfront city” and the GUILDHALL is situated in a Barbican-like network of civic architecture, and I think that, really, there ought to be more going on here. Having said that there are two gigs going on tonight at the Guildhall alone. As well as ISHMAEL ENSEMBLE, nineties rocker surf dude types Reef are playing in the main hall, and it kind of amazes me that they can still draw a crowd after all these years. Ishmael Ensemble are playing in a smaller side “studio”. Two Reef fans wander in. “That’s not it,” one of them says. “There’s no way they’d fit everyone in there.” It’s weirdly quiet inside. I stand in the shadows but it’s too dark to see my notepad, so I go and sit in a little pool of blue light by the stage.

Little pool of blue light

Six-piece JOIN THE DIN are “from London” and seem, to my withered mind, to represent a sort of nexus between the contemporary London jazz scene and the seventies Canterbury scene. Like the best of today’s London jazz they seem to connect different traditions while looking forward with some hope to a brighter future. The bass player looks like a wizard, or one of those people who might refer to themselves as a warlock, and have a drawer full of cloaks and robes and stuff like that. They’ve got two drummers, which is always a good look, and a healthy smattering of tie-dye. So I feel right at home in my double-sided, glow-in-the-dark, tie-dye, giant cat t-shirt. These are my people, I think, and they all seem quite nice, apart from the bass player, who maintains a sinister demeanour throughout. By the end of the set, at one of the drummer’s insistence, people start dancing, which is OK, but someone treads on my toes, and I do generally prefer it when people don’t dance.

My people

There’s a man behind me who keeps commenting after every song that Ishmael Ensemble play. “Unbelievable,” he says after the first song. “Legends,” after the second. “Amazing,” after the third. I like him; I like his commentary. The music is a kind of unlikely amalgamation of disparate strands: jazz, triphop, post-rock, etc. Maybe not so disparate or unlikely, actually, after all, come to think of it. Holysseus Fly’s vocals sit like croutons on top of a muscular soup of beats and synths, like icing on a cake, like a butterfly in a car park, like a deer by the side of the motorway, etc. She makes it for me. The guitarist has the largest rack of pedals I’ve ever seen. It all gets a bit blokey when Fly leaves the stage midway through for a couple of songs. Nothing wrong with that, but is there? Maybe not. I don’t know. But doesn’t it then just become about who’s the hardest, or the heaviest, or the loudest, or the lowest, or the fanciest? Oh well, I just like it when there’s a bit of femininity in the mix these days. It makes a difference, it does. “Absolutely unbelievable,” is the commentary from behind. “Fucking hell,” he adds. “I need a lie down here. Rave central!” Things get floatier and dreamier and stretch out a bit when Fly returns, which is my kind of vibe. I’m just a soft sort of guy, I suppose. But this isn’t about me, is it, except that it is. It is all about me, don’t you see? All this time, it’s just been all about me.

Hello, I accidentally deleted all my photos of Ishmael Ensemble, so you’ll just have to use your imagination. I hope you don't mind. Thank you.

THE TOILET PEOPLE

Sometimes you might catch a sight of them. A blur of light or smudged colour. Like a seagull in a storm. Or you might hear them as they pass. A shriek or speeding obscenity. 

  The toilet people.
  That was what we called them. Or that was what I called them at least. Because wherever they started off they always ended up in the same place: the toilet. 
  Some of them seemed to live virtually their whole lives in the toilet. 
  “What the hell are they doing in there?” said one of my colleagues one day. It must have been a Tuesday though there’s no way to tell.
  “I don’t know,” I replied. “Could be anything.” 
  It was the not knowing that did it for us in the end. So they took the doors off so we could see.
  But the toilet people lived by their own rules. They were as alien to us as rats or beetles and their behaviour just as indecipherable.
  “What are you doing in there?” we would say.
  “Nothing,” they would reply. 
  And that was as far as the conversation, if you could call it that, went.
  But, by God, we loved to talk and speculate and complain about them.
  “If it’s privacy they want, I don’t know why they don’t just go outside,” we would say, and, “Are they eating in there? I think they might be eating in there,” and “It’s bloody disgusting, eating where you shit!” 
  And we all used to get involved. None of us could even feign disinterest. The toilet people fascinated us, compelled and repelled in equal measure. The tension kept us gripped.
  One morning they set off the fire alarm. “One of them was vaping in there, apparently,” a colleague informed me. 
  “I didn’t know that vapour could set off a smoke alarm,” I said, pointlessly.
  “Yeah, it can, apparently.” 
  Everyone was talking about it for the rest of the day; complaining about the toilet people’s selfishness, and speculating about who exactly it might have been. But no one knew and we never found out.
  The next thing was that they installed CCTV in the toilet. Not in the cubicles, we were given to understand, just in the communal area where you were supposed to wash your hands, but where the toilet people, it was supposed, ate their lunches and vaped with such impunity.
  There was a live feed that you could watch. We needed to monitor the situation. It was part of our job. I watched it from time to time, because not to do so was frowned upon. You were seen as not being a “team player” if you never watched it, like you were just selfishly leaving the supervision of the toilet people to your colleagues.
  But you could never see anyone. You could never catch them doing anything wrong. 
  The toilet people eluded us at every turn.
  And then, one day, they were gone. It all went quiet. The wind died down. The seagulls stopped trying to navigate the storm. It went quiet.
  “I wonder what happened to them?” I said.
  “They just vanished, apparently,” a colleague replied. 
  “Here one day; gone the next.”
  Suddenly, just like that, our lives were empty.
  By God, we missed them.

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 dose 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