ICMP Tutor Showcase 2013

The Institute Tutor Showcase is the annual opportunity for willing and available instrumental and vocal faculty members of the Institute to perform to a room full of students getting more and more drunk. It’s always fun. And tonight I have the privilege of drumming for Lee Hodgson’s Hoo-Has, along with Holly Petrie, Atar Shafighian, Alan Mian and David Combes. I can’t wait!

Atar and I leave Kilburn early, find the last remaining parking space in Camden, and both carry my gear (the price for bumming a lift with a drummer) half a mile to the Dublin Castle. Although our sound-check is meant to be at 5.30, it’s 5.20 and there is no drum kit anywhere to be seen. Lee Hodgson has been here for forty-five minutes already, has set up his three guitars, and has them tuned and polished, on stage, ready to go. Lee has also brought and distributed colour photocopies of his stage plan for the band, which features photos of each musician along with our names and illustrations of our respective instruments. Lee is using his own microphone, rather than an in-house SM-58, so he has a picture of precisely that model of mic next to the image of himself on the stage plan.

The drums arrive, courtesy of Mike Newman – Institute alumnus, singer, percussionist and go-to-guy for making stuff happen. He apologises for being late as he hurls cases across the floor of the venue. Soon the headline act sound-checks. This is protracted, and everyone tries (with a modicum of success) not to show their irritation that none of the XLR inputs on-stage appears to be working. Eventually, though, everything sounds wonderful – full, clear, and thrilling. Running 2 hours behind with sound-checks appears not to bother the overly diligent sound assistant, who, once the drummer of the next band is seated at the kit, proceeds at length to test the sound of each individual drum. Again. It’s the same kit, with the same mics, in the same places as for the first band! Lost for (inoffensive or non-sarcastic) words, I practise my double stroke rolls on my thighs.

By 7.30, when the doors are due to open, Lee mentions quietly to someone that he’s been there waiting since 4.30, and an empathic stage manager permits him a line-check as the audience file in. Before long the venue is full of students clutching pints and talking sufficiently loudly to all but drown out the gorgeous, virtuosic guitar duo of Gianluca Corona and Maciek Pysz. These two go at it for about twenty minutes; after each song there’s a pause while everyone notices the lull, claps for what they collectively hope to be an appropriately respectful time, and return to their conversations. These guys would have fared better in the middle of the running order, like When Zeppelin used to do an acoustic set in the middle of a three-hour epic Rock-Out. Anyway, I give up trying to hear them properly when a colleague engages me in conversation and amidst the general din I feel it would be ruder to ignore him than to talk over the band. I feel guilty, but for the four or five minutes I manage to snatch of these guitar masters I’m utterly impressed, spellbound – they are dynamic, tight, fluid, totally on the money. Sorry, chaps.

Next is Atar Shafighian’s band with their brand of West-Coast (of the US, not Pembrokeshire) jazz-inflected smooth yacht-rock Steely-Dan-Michael-Franks homage. The group is reduced from previous appearances – no female BVs today, and no horns. However, with Nathan Williams on bass, Ben Barritt on guitar and backing vocals, and Steve Green on drums, they do not disappoint. As Atar strikes the first chord of opening number, I shout an enthusiastic “yeah!!”into the silence (the audience, for reasons of their own, are now all listening in rapt attention). The girl next to me throws me a startled look, which I address by advising her that she just heard the first chord of an epic tale in contemporary jazz-rock fusion, the story of The Rise and Fall of Danny Chevron. By the end of the second tune, the band is simmering, and they pile on the class through the culminating “Weimar Superstar” a dancy tribute to none other than Father of Western Harmony, JS Bach. Pretentious? Maybe. But also righteous.

It is the turn of Lee Hodgson’s Hoo-Has. I take ages to scrabble around and change over cymbals, replace the snare drum, secure the kick pedal, put the ride cymbal stand somewhere I can reach it, lower the hi-hat stand and screw some memory locks in place with finger and thumb because my Allen key is at home. But we get there. Lee launches into the first song, and I notice that I can hear nothing of his guitar or vocals, or any of the rest of the band in my monitor. I ask for this to be addressed at the sound desk, and it isn’t, so I resort to guesswork, counting, hoping I’m hearing the harmony right over the drums. I finish our opening number,  “Rock Me Baby”, one beat after the rest of the band. We then play funky Prince tune, “I Feel for You”, showcasing the soulful vocals of Holly Petrie, followed by country ballad “Love Will Keep Us Alive”. David Combes sings Biffy Clyro’s “The Captain”, through which I relish the opportunity to batter the crap out of the kit (loud is my default setting). We close with Albert Lee’s classic hoe-down shred-fest “Country Boy” (featuring Lee Hodgson in a silver Stetson) to rapturous applause. After the set a handful of people compliment me on my suit and tie. My wife has assured that they probably mean simply “I see you’re wearing a suit, and that tie looks ridiculous”.  Atar tells me she’s almost certainly right. Anyway, I finished our ripping version of “Country Boy” on the same quaver as the rest of the band. Thank you, Alan Mian, for keeping me in time.

Following the Hoo-Has is Ben Jones’s Down and Dirty. I’m sure they’re very funky, but I don’t catch a note of their set. I am too busy rehydrating with lager after my exertions, and fielding questions from the senior management propping up the bar. Ben concludes his set as I reach the bottom of my second pint – I return to the heaving sauna of the back room to trailing applause.

Nate Williams’ set is basically perfect. Forty minutes of gorgeous contemporary R ‘n’ B featuring Karme Caruso on keys and Holly Petrie and Tor Hills on BVs. It is beautifully arranged, and expertly performed by the whole ensemble with an understated virtuosity to every subtle melodic turn of phrase and chromatic harmonic shift. This is mature, grooving soul music. Rookie guitarist James Wiseman nails every song, and the rhythm section featuring Marijus Aleksa and Adam Kovacs make even me want to dance. Man of the Match is Nate, though – the voice of an angel, wafting mellifluously over the bass lines he delivers with conviction. If Prince and Sting were both one bearded Welshman, they would sound a lot like Nate.

Headlining the night is Herne the Hunter. Front man Ross “The Boss” Bicknell, slung with guitar and poised over synths, introduces a set of “Heavy Psych Jams”, which the trio delivers with intensity, taking the audience on a sonic journey into the abyss where we encounter a searing blend of Hendrix, QOTSA, Mogwai and a late ‘90s (ca. THRaKaTTaK) King Crimson. Ross, Andre Hitsøy and Mike Stokes take no prisoners as they lunge and swell, ebb and flow, and lure us in to the vortex. Herne the Hunter is contagious, rocking the joint with the most in-the-zone musicking of the show.

So, this was a great night. The question tugging at my mind on the way home, though, is “where were all the women?” Holly and Tor did a great job of BVs, but aside from this the evening’s performances were a wholly manly affair. There were plenty of women in the audience, so it would only be fair to let some more on to the stage too, wouldn’t it? Maybe we can persuade the Dixie Chicks, Imogen Heap or St. Vincent to join the faculty in time for next year’s Tutor Showcase.

Choking on Fruit

It was Wednesday afternoon, and having half an hour or so to myself between one driving lesson and another (I was working as a driving instructor – it was not my habit to receive motoring tuition), I decided to take the opportunity of walking to the bank and back, hopefully remembering to pause briefly at the altar of capitalist enslavement to deposit some cheques. I had for breakfast (and, I confess, also for elevenses) eaten a mince pie (one on each occasion). It was only mid-October, and while usually I was wont to reject utterly any intrusion of Christmas into my life until early or even mid-December, mince pies and gig offers were (and remain) notable exceptions. And since no-one called to offer me a seasonal gig while I was waiting for the kettle to boil, then it had to be a mince pie. Both times. To placate my conscience and hopefully appease my digestive system it was now, being the middle of the afternoon, time for some fruit.

I had purchased five Granny Smiths two days previously, and now felt like a perfect moment to tuck into one of them. I actually harboured a secret dislike for this brand of apples, as they were often a little too sharp; but the namesake instilled in me an unreasonable sense of extended-family pride, so I persisted stubbornly in making the elderly ladies my apples of choice. Presumably in order to protect myself from the blazing sun and the unusually temperate autumn day, I donned my black, full-length leather trench coat, plus Fedora, and set out. So that I might advertise to passers-by the brief but righteous dietary direction in which I was headed en route to the Broadway (and also because my Grandad used to do it, so I thought it looked cool) I conspicuously polished the apple by rubbing it vigorously against my trousers most of the way up the hill from my flat.

I was fewer than five minutes into my brisk, fruity stroll when my every instinct for ingestion, developed as they had been over thirty-some years, rose up in revolt and collaboratively ensured that I not swallowed but instead inhaled a sizeable piece of peel. I coughed – but without obtaining the desired result. Life had taught me to be patient, however, in the face of such insolence. So, with a mild itching in my throat and my ability to breathe regularly becoming all the while more impaired, I pretended to wait patiently. I should mention that as well as the issue of what I imagined to be the obscuring of about three quarters of one lung by an audacious piece of apple-skin, there was more to trouble my heightened consciousness. For the last year or so, every time I’d eaten an apple my mouth and lips and occasionally my throat had swollen up and annoyingly itched, sometimes for up to an hour. Consequently, I had avoided eating a great many apples, but every now and again I would be overcome by a raging desire to take on my fruitiest of foes and prove just who who was the furthest up the food chain – I would not, I vowed repeatedly, be defeated by an apple. Or by any number of them. In this matter I was determined, I was to be master of my own destiny; after all, Day of the Triffids, while frightening, had not been real. On this particular Wednesday afternoon, though, I found pricking away at the back of my consciousness (not to mention throat) a burgeoning uneasiness in this regard, even as the matter of most pressing urgency remained how to sustain the ability to breathe without sounding like an asthmatic in seizure or drawing any undesired attention to my frankly ridiculous and ostentatious attire, and, now, at-least-as-noisy predicament.

I continued with the soft-touch, lightly coughing approach to the alien presence in my respiratory system until I had reached the bank, whereupon I swiftly and with uncharacteristic efficiency deposited all of the monies which I had brought. Upon leaving the bank, however, the fruit was firmly staking out what it apparently and quite mistakenly believed to be its territory, and I was getting cross. I would yet win the day, and I would do so this before Clarrissa’s driving lesson. I had twenty minutes.

Exiting the bank I again tried to clear my throat, hoping that the change in direction (we were now heading north) and the release of my monetary burden might also have a combined appeasing effect upon the apply aggravation. But my hopes were in vain; the fruit remained malevolently in situ. I coughed a few times until a couple of people on the Broadway noticed, and I returned their stares with a look that I hoped would strongly convey my incredulity at their apparent surprise over the dark weirdo in a trench coat hacking away in a syphilitic frenzy. Indignantly I crossed the road, heading directly and uncomfortably home, and began in earnest to cough harder and harder in order to dislodge my oppressor. This technique, it soon became clear, was doomed to fail, so I contrived to surprise the apple with a random selection of coughs, splutters, and various other odd but hopefully eventually-effective noises.

By the time I was half-way home, I no longer cared. Clarissa’s lesson was almost upon me, I still could not easily breathe, and I was beginning to crack under the paranoia that perhaps I would fail in my determination no to lose out in this life to an apple. My mouth and lips were still blissfully and miraculously free from irritation, but this was hardly the point. I shouted. I sang. I sang loud and with abandon. I sang all three verses and a triple final chorus of “The Fields of Athenry” and bellowed “Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer”. I made noises like Darth Vader in heat, like a demented human chain-saw, like a hardened phlegmatic smoker. I recalled and in my mind resembled Rajesh, my chain-smoking Cardiff ex-housemate, and his routine of disgorging daily what sounded like half his innards; and I spotted a lady across the road from me shielding her three children from the looming terror in Hammer Horror regalia scaring them out of their wits. O boy.

I met my Clarissa at her front door for the driving lesson, greeting her with a Miles Davis-esque, throaty “hello”. Another cough-like-a-toilet-bowl-full of Rajesh’s innards, and I sounded more like me, but by now my chest was utterly shagged from the energy expenditure and could not possibly recover that day. I could not tell apple skin from lung, or whence derived the grating sensation overtaking my torso. Throughout the lesson I apologised, coughed, soliloquised, ranted and rasped on account of that perfidious piece of fruit. Eventually it must have gone. But it left behind the mere shell of a man.

Not Being Famous: A Short Rant

I play in a punk band that has released four albums in the last five years. The first of these was a concept album, loosely concerned with the fictitious destruction of the world by alien invaders and humans’ failed attempts to repel the attacking force. The album concludes with a gratuitous song about skateboarding, but we got plenty of airplay out of that one. The second recent record is called Seduce and Destroy, and it features a cartoon lady on the album cover and lots of flames. The songs are about partying and rock. And the opening track is a drum solo. Our other albums are cool too. My best mate Steve’s second album came out this year, with me drumming on it. We’re also recording a stoner rock album at the moment – so far it’s taken four years, but we’re getting there – and I am about to embark on a short tour with a wonderful band playing ethereal cinematic pop. I am also engaged to play panto season in Chelmsford – five weeks of family fun! As well this, I teach at a famous music school and online for a world-class university. I teach people to play drums; I give lectures on popular music history, philosophy and history of music education; and I guide undergraduates through the process of researching and writing their dissertations. I published a book earlier this year, and am working on two or three more. I don’t have to be on tour all the time to promote my music. I play gigs on my terms. They’re never in massive venues, but universally people accept that the sound and experience of an awesome band is better in an intimate space anyway. I can play properly as well as hear what I’m doing.

Advertising my music on a grand scale is virtually impossible. Unless people see your name on TV, they generally assume you’re crap. And when they do see you on TV they often just assume that you’re brilliant. People in general seem to have no real way of judging quality, mistaking it too frequently for familiarity, spectacle or hype. I hope I know when I am being sold a pup. I hope I also know when I am in the presence of an incredible musician or band (Brighton Jazz club, 1994 – Jim Mullen with Gary Husband, Gene Caldarazzo with anyone at all; Wayne Krantz and Keith Carlock in Cardiff jazz club, 1997.) The thing about the best gigs I’ve ever been to (Allan Holdsworth, Jazz Café, Camden 2008; Martyn Joseph, every concert of his I’ve ever attended in a community centre or church hall; Atar Shafighian, Lauderdale House, 2012) is that the tickets have all cost me under £15 (Albert Lee, the Borderline 2006). At the O2 the sound is pretty much always appalling. Now, Christine Tobin at the Vortex in Dalston, 2007 – bugger me, that was insane! Gillian Glover at the Bullet Bar, also 2007 – sublime.

Real music, proper, actual good quality ART happens in the bars and pubs that people walk past on a Tuesday night ‘cause there’s a band on they’ve never heard of. Give me a Thursday at the Bedford in Balham or a Sunday afternoon gig at the Underworld over a UK tour in back of a bus, hardly sleeping and never eating properly. The way things are, I get to practise, hone my art and craft in my own time and for my own purposes; I get to write, I get to play in a dozen genres, a handful of bands, and to sleep in my own bed with my wonderful wife most nights of most weeks. When friends of friends come to see me play they are usually blown away by what they hear – ‘you should be famous!’ they say. ‘Why don’t you go on X-Factor?’ Even considering providing responses to these two exclamations tires me now. I can’t be bothered any more explaining to half-drunk acquaintances why they shouldn’t be surprised to find something they like outside of the Radio 1 play list. I would sooner donate all of my internal organs for research before I die, than prostitute myself in front of Simon Cowell or whoever follows him cackling through the firey gates of Hell (where I know they play Coldplay’s and One Direction's albums all day and all night).

The world does not need to see “success” differently than it does. It’s okay for people to endure mediocrity – there’s a lot of it to go around, after all! Those people who seek a better experience will always find it. It might mean saving 90% on the price of a ticket, buying the CD from the band’s guitarist instead of streaming a less-dynamic MP3, and it will certainly mean that they get to hear the music as it was intended – not through a 500K rig in some arena on the outskirts of a city, but in a decent-sized room with a bar you can get a drink from for less than 6 quid. I don’t necessarily want you to come to my gigs. You might hate my music, and that’s fine – we all have different tastes, but I know it’s good. It’s not as good as I’d like it to be, and it never will be; but it’s real and it’s honest. How do you know if a band’s good or not? Because you saw it on MTV? Please… Because your mates told you? Not bad – but go check the music out for yourself. Because the 4 bands on at a random night at the 12-Bar in Denmark Street when you decided to pop in a pay the £6 cover charge sent shivers down your spine and changed your life; now you feel like you know something, you felt something. To my knowledge, the best pianist, possibly the best musician alive in the UK today is Keith Tippett. The day after the best concert I have EVER been to where he performed in a small wooden church in front of 150 people in the autumn of 1998, he said to a group of his students (of whom I feel incredibly fortunate to have been one), ‘there are two types of people in the world – people who were at that gig last night, and people who weren’t’. That, friends, is what music is about.

First Trip to Ireland with Neck

Details of the band’s arrival in Ireland are hazy to me. I am insanely tired – everyone else remembered to bring little roll-up sleeping bags that fit in tiny cases. They all find chairs, wrap themselves up in these science-fiction cocoons (I didn’t know that this size of sleeping bag was even possible – I still have a massive brown roll-up one from my early teenage trips to Boys’ Brigade camps that is still in the van) – and immediately sleep. I curl up on the floor near the rest of the band, hoping sleep will overcome me eventually. It does, for about an hour. But I can’t work out whether or not I fancy Marion, the fiddle player. Probably. Leeson designates himself Driver as soon as we reach Rosslare. There is no choice in this, I discover – this is for Leeson a pilgrimage, and he, therefore, drives. I sleep in the van, awoken when Leeson finds a newsagent’s; here he must buy and consume a Brunch – a pink-and-yellow ice cream on a stick that he persuades me also to buy. It’s surprisingly good – all about the texture and yellow sprinkles: kind of like a Fab, but infinitely better. I am hooked.

We get to Wexford, find the venue, and play a decent gig  - actually, very decent (although uneventful) – and then we hunt on foot for our hostel. This is hampered by a rowdy, drunk Geoff, who is running maniacally around the otherwise silent streets of sleeping Wexford, shouting at the residents “you’re all a bunch of langers!” over and over in his thick Cork accent. We lose him a few times, although he stays mostly within earshot and manages to wind his way to our accommodation. The hostel is functional, even for Geoff, who has instantly changed moods to exhausted; he wants more whisky, but is content with passing out in his clothes. There are four bunks in the tiny room, for the four guys in the band; the girls have their own room. The guitars that were too expensive to leave in the van stack up in the corner. I could sleep for my country, and immediately drop off.

Neck arises late. We have little to do with our days but play gigs every evening, and get acceptably drunk afterwards (or unacceptably during the gig, in the case of Geoff).  I am awake before most of the others, and wish I had brought more to do. I play Snake 2 on my phone, and hear Leigh, the guitarist, stirring on the bunk beneath me. We all manage to lave the hostel about 90 minutes after Leeson wakes up – this man’s morning routine (plus his petrol station routine, and the leaving-a-gig routine, and the leaving-his-house-even-once-we’re-all-ready-to-go routine) will define the measurement of time in my life on many occasions in the next few years. I eat my first Irish breakfast. It seems (although I don’t dare say this) very similar indeed to an English one, with an emphasis on tea, and the bonus feature of “white pudding”. Unsure what this is, I eat it nonetheless, concluding that it is probably a good deal less distasteful in origin than the black pudding I have already devoured. There is brown sauce too, which makes me happy. Full of starch and carbs, we head for the van. Next stop: Waterford.

As the least hung-over person in the band I elect and am elected to drive. This will become a constant theme during my recurring tenure with Neck. Leeson and I each pick up a Brunch before leaving town. Geoff doesn’t want one because he’s from Cork, and Brunches are not from Cork, therefore they’re not authentically Irish and thus not worthy of his time. By the same rationale, Geoff drinks Murphy’s over Guinness, Murphy’s being brewed in Cork whereas Guinness is from Dublin (which is so un-Irish it might as well be London). We are scheduled to stay two nights in Waterford, to play one gig at the Waterford Spraoi. The organisers had even arranged for us to have three rooms at a hotel! When we arrive there we split up – Geoff and Leigh take one room, Marion and Marie the second, and I share the third with Leeson, who explains to me the Neck Policy on sharing rooms: whoever pulls first gets the room, and if you don’t pull, you don’t get the room. I am not going to pull – history has taught me this, and I am never really sure I want a one-night stand anyway. Leeson, by contrast, appears pretty certain that this is something he definitely wants. The band all heads in to Waterford, to see what the Spraoi is all about.

Our afternoon is punctuated by two epiphanies. Firstly, Marie discovers in the market a handbag adorned with huge pictures of strawberries. She is deliriously happy with her purchase, an acquisition tainted only by the fact that she has not (yet) been able to find the matching shoes or jacket that she is certain must exist. Marie then disappears for 24 hours. The rest of the band is collectively intrigued by a listing on the Spraoi’s programme for The Spurting Man. None of us quite expects what proves to be one of oddest performances I have ever seen. A man in silk a dressing gown takes the open-air stage. Some very dramatic classical music is piped through the sound system (I wish I could identify the composer and the work). The man then spends 15 minutes removing his robe and spurting water in arcs, initially from the palms of his hands, and then from nodes all over a flesh-coloured body suit, moving hardly at all. The music and the spurting cease, and in order to process what just took place I wolf down some fish and chips, and go to watch Austin Powers: Gold Member in the cinema. It’s the second time I’ve seen the film. After this I find the band in a pub. We drink, go to bed late, and are up just in time to take full advantage of the hotel breakfast. We then hang out in another pub, where I drink two pints of orange juice and lemonade – at risk of consuming a third, I suggest to Marion and Leigh that we all go and see the Austin Powers movie, which I watch for the third time.

The night’s gig begins well, with a hassle-free load-in. I love playing with Neck, and I know the songs and the band well enough to really enjoy the performances. This one is longer than we expect, but the surprise few extra songs are somewhere deep in my memory, but annoyingly I keep being told I’m too loud. This makes me cross, so I play worse and forget things, making me angrier and intensifying the downward spiral. “I can’t play quietly with the energy that you hire me for!!!”, I scream in my head at Leeson and the sound man. Seething with energy and frustration, I get stuck into a couple of Guinnesses and then some lager at the bar. I hate hanging around in places where the recorded music is so loud you can’t hear yourself think, especially when I only want to sleep. But Leeson is prowling around after the gig like a bear in heat, desperately wanting to get laid. I can’t go back to the hotel alone, lest I am ejected from my bed by a libidinous Leeson and shag. At around 1.30 our leader staggers forth, arm-in-arm with a woman who needs some help standing; I cannot tell who is propping up whom.

I round up the band, relying on Marion – de facto squadron leader – to guide us back to the right hotel. I try first of all to sleep on a handy bench, in the corridor between my room and Geoff-and-Leigh’s – close enough to mine that I should hear if the lay ups and leaves. After nodding off I am curtly moved on by a maid, who accuses me of cluttering up the hallway. I go and knock on the door of my room, thinking that they might be done, and that hopefully she’d be in the shower, readying to leave or to sleep. Leeson asks who it is, and tells me they haven’t finished. I am amazed that either of them is still conscious. I try Geoff-and-Leigh’s room. It is around 4.00, and they are both on their bed grinning, drinking bottled beer and watching TV. Marion is also here, never one to be the first girl to bed (she has out-stayed Marie, so wins this round). I hang with them for a bit, and Leigh graciously offers me the floor. With a “thanks, but no thanks” I return to my own room and try the door again. “HEY, HEY, HEY!!” I am greeted by Leeson and friend who are still, somehow, in the act. At a loss, feeling shamefully tired and soberer by the minute, I trudge back to Geoff and Leigh to lie sleeplessly on the floor, only to find Geoff more animated than he has been since insulting all of Wexford two days earlier. Geoff proposes that I join he and Marion for some cider in the dining room. This seems like utter madness, but here we are anyway – necking canned cider on the steps of the blue-carpeted dining room of a two-star hotel in Waterford while my singer and employer screws the living daylights out of a wasted groupie in my bed. This is the life.

Geoff then suggests that, since it’s been light out for while, we should really go for a walk. So we wander the deserted streets of the city, find a bridge over the river Suir, and play “Pooh Sticks” with twigs. I think Geoff is trying to get Marion to sleep with him – something that most previous members of the band had no trouble in achieving at all (since Marion’s announcement that she would be the Band Slag) – but thus far Geoff has been as successful in achieving his desired ends as he has been subtle in revealing them. By 8.15 or so I have had a basin-full of fucking dawn Pooh Sticks and follow my unconscious back to the hotel and my room. I make one last attempt at entry, only to be greeted for the third time by my Olympian band mate’s rejoinder that he is (still) still at it. He points out to me several hours later before passing out in the van I am again driving that if a job’s worth doing, it is of course worth doing properly. So now I know.

Of Lapsang Souchong

I am drumming on a production of A Slice of Saturday Night, the Christmas show at the Upstairs at the Gatehouse theatre in Highgate, the high point of which (the climax, if you will) is a song called, and very much about, “Premature Ejaculation”. One of the actors, Mike – whose big number “O So Bad” is performed in the gents’ urinal – is in need of a place to stay (his housemates in Palmers Green have made it clear that the room in which he has been living will no longer be available to him, as the girlfriend of one of his cohabitees is returning from a musical theatre tour to occupy it). I consult briefly and persuasively with my own housemates, and shortly Mike is freeloading in our tiny spare room (it’s basically a cupboard where I keep my drums – fortunately for Mike, a lot of these are currently in the theatre) while he looks for a larger, more permanent base. This is the room in which former housemate John would, when in town for gigs, sleep with his girlfriend Lucy, shagging long and loudly into the night. In order to help keep their enthusiastic sexual activities to an acceptable minimum, Steve – who occupies the adjacent room and understandably wishes not to be roused too frequently from his precious slumber by thumping headboards and screaming redheads – devised a cunning plan to adjust the ambience of the room. For reasons he never fully divulged, Steve preserved an old pair of particularly rancid Darth Maul slippers in a plastic bag, which, when unleashed, smelled not unlike a family of decomposing rodents. On a night that he was especially desirous of rest, before Stu and Sophie retired for the night, Steve hid the frightful footwear beneath the bed so that their pungent pot-pourri might distract the would-be-lovers from their amorous inclinations. The pair slept silently that night, and in the morning complained of “a smell, like something rotting, under the bed”.

Mike sleeps little during his stay, instead spending his days drinking lapsang souchong and reading Lord of the Rings (his ninth time) in anticipation of the cinematic release of The Fellowship of the Ring. I am delighted that in Mike I have a friend who understands my father’s Tolkein obsession – the Smith family home bears the name Rivendell, and the dining room proudly displays 24 “collectible” LOTR plates, 38 porcelain figurines, and a wall-sized map of Northwestern Middle Earth. During his second week with us, Matt announces that he’s found somewhere to live that is but a stone’s throw from the pub under the Gatehouse theatre. I am sorry to see Mike go, but give him a lift with his stuff to the new place, where his room contains no drums and enough space to swing a (small) cat. It is with some concern, then, that I see Mike visibly distressed, wandering the corridor (there is only one) of the theatre three evenings in to his new tenancy. Knowing that it isn’t, so asking anyway if everything is all right, I am surprised by the news that the possessions of everyone in his new basement accommodation are, owing to a brief but comprehensive plumbing malfunction, now covered in a thin coating of effluent. The apartment's floorboards have by this time been soaked in shit for 19 hours, and the toilet whence the problems began remains blocked and brimming with sewage. Mike has not fully unpacked yet, so escaped more lightly than he might have done; his bags, however, were far from untouched by events. The waters having now receded, Mike’s possessions are mostly in the theatre dressing room in fresh dustbin bags, ready for pastures new. I ask him for the second time that month if he’d like to come and stay at ours.

London Olympics

Owing to a musical theatre production of Kander and Ebb’s Curtains on which I am working in a tiny theatre in Clapham, I am obliged to take public transport to work. Although not a particular chore (nor, be assured, an unparalleled joy) it’s sort of a novelty as I do not ordinarily take the tube all that often. Well, not London often. Probably once a week or so. I mostly cycle, run or drive to work because I have a surfeit of energy, a cash deficit, and a burden of drums. On Mondays, when the theatre is ‘dark’, I now experience the liberating luxury of riding my bike. The middle of the show’s run coincides with the two weeks of the Olympic Games, or ‘London 2012’ as even BBC news readers insist upon calling it (as though nothing else has happened or will happen in the capital this year). I admit that I’ve been dreading this. The government and media have for weeks – months – been urging us Londoners to stay off the transport network for fear of over-crowding mayhem. Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, was featured in announcements on buses for the fortnight leading up to the Games, advising us all that the ‘vast number’ of people visiting the city would mean that the public transport network would be ‘extremely busy’. I found these incursions into my aural solitude highly irritating; indeed, there are perhaps fewer things more grating on the first leg of a morning commute than an old bellowing Etonian interrupting my train of thought every couple of minutes to announce that lots of people will be coming to London to watch a lot of other people running and jumping and shooting in the most over-advertised, media-saturated piece of choreographed public hysteria since Princess Diana died. At least my fellow passengers on the 43 and 134 buses in the mornings had the good manners to shut up, ignore one another, and continue shooting silently indignant glares at the all-too-chic wannabe Hoxtonites seeking to impress with their dull selection of music relaying its high-mids to the rest of the bus through the backs of rubbish default iPod earphones.

One of the first things I notice about the tube during the Olympics, then, is that it is pretty much empty. I can get a seat at just about any station at any time of day or night. The trains and buses are similarly deserted. Well, deserted is a slight overstatement. They are actually quite full, but not the holding-your-breath, face-in-someone’s-armpit-and-elbow-in-someone-else’s-ribs-with-your-bag-hopefully-still-between-your-legs-rammed that the capital’s daily commuters know and love. With most of the seats taken, and the odd dozen or so customers occasionally having to resort to standing, swathes of the city feels as though they have been abandoned. I secretly suspect that this is (as I had long speculated) because the people watching the Olympics are either at home staring at a TV screen, or 10 miles away in a stadium in East London yelling at celebrity cyclists. The notion that sports fans in Stratford would severely impact my journeys between Muswell Hill, Kilburn and Clapham always seemed far-fetched, truth be told.

All is not entirely acceptable on the transport network, though. The oddest behaviour on the tube is people talking to one another. I have occasionally done this with my wife, when either one or – rarest of all – both of us, have forgotten to bring a book, or if I’m slightly drunk and with a colleague who I feel the (almost certainly misplaced) need to entertain. But these folk are just wantonly chatting – as though it were perfectly OK. Some are discussing The Games, others whatever comes to mind. All are unnervingly cheery (but otherwise seemingly normal) husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, couples with kids. Not the usual, head-down-pretending-to-read-the-free-paper-while-listening-to-an-audio-book commuter set. All very weird and disconcerting. An equally unsettling feature of the Olympics is the incidence on public transport of uniformed ‘Games-Makers’ (who, let it be noted, are not creating, designing, taking part in, or in any other way making any games at all). They look (including the women) like a cross between boy scouts and rooky package holiday reps, and always seem more than slightly smug – presumably on account of their free trainers, beige trousers, bags (with obligatory water-bottles), t-shirts and water-proof jackets. I hope they enjoy the bounty while it lasts – they’ll be back in the line for Job Seeker’s Allowance, come the second half of August.

And what the hell is it with those weird, Cycloptic furry robot mascots plastered over every available surface?! The decision makers at Olympic Branding PLC had clearly taken leave of their senses. The robots are almost as bad as that little orange turd (complete with the pinch-finish twist) that power company Eon keeps putting in adverts, popping (or pooping) up all over people’s homes and furnishings. And at least that guy has two eyes. There’s a plush toy version you can buy too – way too close for comfort to Mr Hanky from South Park. And then there’s all these TV presenters fawning like teenage girls over British diving star Tom Daley – ‘wow! Aren’t you happy?! You must be so pleased!’ They must have said ‘bronze medal’ about 18 times in the short interview piece I saw with him this morning. And not once did they ask the question that must have been burning a hole in the minds of every viewer: ‘How does it feel only to have come third?’ It was a very good achievement – don’t get me wrong. I mean, to come from a privileged background in one of the five most economically advantaged nations in the world, with our country’s alleged pride (I didn’t feel a thing, but hey) resting on his diving into water several times in a fortnight, it is very impressive that he is now officially (albeit very temporarily) the third best person in the world at jumping into a pool head-first. But I’ll bet he would have loved a gold medal. Or even silver. Thankfully, though, no-one asks about that. At least not out loud. Or at least not to Mr Daley himself, who is doubtless incredibly chuffed to be nearly as good as two other people at falling from a plank.

I know. I don’t really get it. I believe in excellence and aspiration, but I don’t really understand the competition. I don’t get the Premier League (or the football league system at all, come to that) for the same reasons – so what if such-and-such team wins?! ‘They’ have another chance next year, probably with a totally different line-up of players; yet, miraculously, millions of people will believe it’s somehow the same team playing. Trigger’s Broom all over again, if you ask me. Liverpool Football Club to me seems like a large, sporting (if not necessarily sportsmanlike) version of The Beatles with none of the original members, paid similar wages. But I digress.

The Olympics were probably great. I didn’t watch a single event. Travelling between the places where I was doing things, though, was easy and fun, albeit strange. I enjoyed doing well at something myself rather than sitting, staring passively at elite professional athletes duking it out to see how many 1000ths of a second they could shave off of a world record to attain or retain supremacy in something as helpful as running 400 meters slightly quicker than some of their highly trained and branded contemporaries. As for being bullied by the carpet-bombing media campaign into joining the exaggerated and false euphoria over how many gold medals ‘we’ achieved, it just didn’t work for me: no one I know earned any gold medals – the closest any of them came was to shout, grin and cry with empty, vicarious pleasure over the hard-won and extremely well financed victory of a citizen of one of the richest countries of the world demonstrating the improvements made on his or her genetic and anatomical predispositions to excel at moving ever-so-minutely quicker/further than a handful of others. Yawn…

Needing a Shower

Gareth Dylan Smith

Our Flat
Coppetts Road
London N10

6th February, 2008

Dear Faye,

Re: An issue with my tenancy at the afore-mentioned property (let by Bates's)

I am writing to you out of sheer frustration at the (mis)conduct of your employee, Stephanie Franz. I am not usually one to complain about other people; we are all human, we all err from time to time, and I am just as flawed and fallible as anyone else. However, when it comes to apathy, laziness and sheer unrepentant ineptitude, Stephanie’s achievements are pretty unparalleled. I am self-employed, and if I operated according to a work ethic such as hers appears to be, I am certain that I would retain no clients at all, and would be as unlikely to attract new ones as Northern Rock is to attract investors.

While the above may be strongly worded, I assure you that it is not in the least disproportionate to the woes my wife and I continue to suffer at the hands and, more harshly, the tongue of Stephanie. I have not the time, the inclination, nor the space to expound fully on the occasions I have had to take offence at Stephanie’s (un)professional conduct. Instead, I will confine this letter to dealing with the incident when she has most recently crossed me. You may, however, be assured that this is entirely typical of my experience of Stephanie’s behaviour.

A little over two weeks ago I came home from work to find a note tacked to the door of the flat that I share with my wife. It had been written by one of the tenants downstairs. In the note, the tenant informed me that my wife and I had been asked by Bates’s not to shower for the present, since when either of us showered, so did our neighbours downstairs – in their kitchen. The note did not bother me especially, except that I would so much rather have heard first from someone (perhaps Stephanie) at Bates’s that those to whom I pay rent for, amongst other things, a functioning shower, would rather I did not for the time being avail myself of that particularly useful sanitary facility. I called Stephanie that afternoon, and she mumbled something incoherent and unapologetic about meaning to call me later… I quickly lost interest in her excuses as to why I had heard about this from the downstairs tenants and not from her. Stephanie, in a voice smacking strongly of irritation, eventually agreed that something needed to be done, and that she would attend to this. I thanked her – after all, such things do come under the job title of agent for the estate of our landlord, no?

After three days had passed and we were still unable to shower upstairs without also washing our non-consenting downstairs neighbours, I called to find out what progress had been made. Stephanie seemed again distinctly annoyed that I had disturbed her frenzied labours – after all it had only been three days that my wife and I had been renting an un-use-able shower. What possible cause could I have for calling her at work, of all places?! She said that she needed to get an estimate from a man qualified to obtain such things. Such a man visited our flat the following day (an eerie coincidence, no doubt, that I had enquired about just such a visit only the previous afternoon). Somewhat naively, I had assumed that this visit would lead unstoppably and even swiftly to our bathroom justifying its (recently substantially increased!) rent. Instead, what happened was (brace yourself)… nothing at all.

This was a Thursday. I called Bates’s twice the following Monday and Stephanie must have been very busy as she was ‘not at her desk’ (neither was I at mine, but I had thought ahead and was using a cordless telephone). In order to catch Stephanie strolling busily around the office, I called in at Bates’s offices later that day to enquire as to how soon I or my wife might reasonably expect to shower. Stephanie said that she needed to get “some estimates”. I asked just how many she needed, and she then accused me of being “picky”. “Not really”, I said, since last week I had been led to believe that one estimate alone would suffice, and indeed we had been visited by only one man whose business was the provision of such things.

Stephanie conceded that, yes, one estimate was indeed enough, but such things take a very long time to organise – the man simply could not be expected to examine the shower, guess what it would cost to repair, and then call Stephanie (who may or may not be at her desk) with a quote for a price. The man needed a whole weekend to type up this quote; in fact, she said, it would be silly to expect him to produce our quote as a one-off – of course he would need to wait until he had a pile of them to complete; that would make his time spent on paperwork all the more worthwhile. The entire situation began to feel utterly surreal.

I left Bates’s feeling conspicuously unwashed, un-showered and more than a little disappointed at the glacial slowness with which the wheels of communication appear under Stephanie’s cautious supervision to move. Indeed, the next time I heard from Stephanie was this morning (nine days pursuant to my visit) in response to a telephone call I had made the previous evening – I had left a voicemail message for her attention. Stephanie told me that she had got some estimates in, had contacted the landlord, and that he had agreed to have the bathroom mended. Hardly surprising, is it? I mean, it’s his house, and Stephanie is or represents, I can’t help reminding myself, the agent of his estate. I would have been pretty surprised to hear that the landlord had said it would be best left as it is.

When I enquired of Stephanie, it transpired (again) that actually only one estimate had been sought. Stephanie told me by way of another weird excuse that the landlord is terribly difficult to get hold of. Not in my experience – he usually answers his mobile right away, or calls back straight away. When I asked Stephanie what had become of her projection (made last Monday when I visited her at work) that the shower would no longer be off-limits by before last weekend, she said “well, that’s how long these things take”, which cleared the matter up nicely. She then had the audacity to “advise” me crossly that, “it’s not hard, Gareth, you can just take a bath”. Despite its epiphanic wisdom, the inconceivably patronising zeal with which this last comment was delivered caused me to raise my voice to Stephanie, at which point she told me that there was no need to shout at her. I am afraid that on this point that I could not disagree more. I have had more cause to raise my voice at Stephanie in the three years that she has been our attentive estate agent than at most other people I have met. She should have been more impressed that I was able to lower it so soon. She did not even apologise.

Please respond.

Gareth Dylan Smith (from the bath).

Stop attacking me and taking my stuff!

I am a musician and teacher. And a cyclist. And a prolific writer of limericks. I moved to London in 2001, to become rich and famous (no, I am neither of these things). In the ten-and-a-half years I have been living in the capital I have been the victim of seven crimes; 5 of these have been in the last 14 months, and 4 of those have been physical assaults. It’s not as if I engage in dangerous behaviours (apart, perhaps, from cycling to work in traffic), and I do not make myself especially vulnerable (I use an old, undesirable mobile phone; I do not pick fights with groups of teenage males; I am not in a gang; I drink in moderation, and I do not frequent night clubs, biker bars or the House of Commons), so I fail to see why I have been attacked so much of late.

One of the crimes recently perpetrated against me and my possessions took place when I had, with carefree abandon, chained my bicycle with only three locks to a dedicated bike-parking-rail in Tottenham; I actually half-expected to find only bits of my vehicle remaining after I had played the show in the theatre one night that week, so the area at least did not let me down. On both occasions that my (cheap, old) car was broken in to, however, it was parked in Highgate. Of the four assaults of which I have been a victim, every one took place in East Finchley, Muswell Hill or Highgate. I have had glass bottles thrown at me from Coldfall Wood whilst cycling; I have had eggs hurled at me from a moving car whilst running along East Finchley High Road; I was beaten with a 4-foot wooden pole in a quiet side-street in Muswell Hill when walking home, and I was threatened and robbed at knife-point while waiting for a bus with a friend at Highgate tube station. The place where I feel safest is on the bustling (if threateningly-named) Shoot Up Hill where I work in Kilburn (Kill, Burn – the emptily unnerving – yet strangely comforting – call-to-arms of the borough of Brent).

If my personal rate of crime-victimisation continues to increase at the frankly alarming rate that it has recently begun to do, I will need to consider either giving in to my inclination to stay in bed and read all day, or hiring a bodyguard (and I can definitely afford to do neither of these). My solution? I don’t really have one. Run/cycle/walk/stand there and take it, I guess. Or maybe I should start hanging around in dark corners of middle-class suburbs with a baseball bat, terrorising the vulnerable and undeserved in an attempt to achieve some sense of karmic balance. But I have a lot of work on at the moment. And I could never be convincing as a mugger. Damn.

Quiet Carriage

What the hell is wrong with the people running SouthWest Trains?! I chose to travel on one of their trains from Waterloo to Isleworth recently for a training day on Microsoft Excel. This already threatened to be a day of immense tedium and considerable frustration, but I had braced myself for the long haul by bringing as my companion a dense and unreadable academic tome in which I could immerse myself at lunchtime in order to forget the injustices of my rehearsed incompetencies as a middle manager.

I sat in the Quiet Carriage. Admittedly I did this quite by accident; however, I was rather pleased when I had taken my seat to note the signs on every other window informing me that I was in the designated Quiet Carriage. In order for the carriage to live up to its not-too-lofty aims, each passenger (customer) – the signs pictorially informed us – must conduct her- or himself appropriately, and not use their mobile phones or games consoles (or, one presumes, musical instruments, iPads, or innumerable other potential noise-making gadgets). I was quite content to do my part – I had the aforementioned book at my disposal, my phone was on silent (as it always is – the vibration in my pocket is plenty to grab my attention, thank you), and I had brought my laptop, on which, I considered, I might first turn off the volume and then edit some documents pertaining to an upcoming conference. The train’s staff that morning, though, clearly had other ideas.

SouthWest Trains’ agents proceeded to exercise an extraordinary lack of judgement in or care for their conduct towards those of their customers travelling in the Quiet Carriage. Before the train even departed from Waterloo there was a two-minute continuous assault of epically loud announcements about my impending journey and all manner of issues more or less vaguely connected to aspects of it. The automated, robotic list of stations at which we would be stopping (which, every time it was played, paused unaccountably and annoyingly in the middle for about twenty seconds) would have been irritating enough; it also would have more than sufficed to have stopped following the announcement regarding where I could find the information about my personal safety (oddly, only repeated between every other station and then later petering out altogether, as though customers joining after Putney might as well all be damned). The train Guard’s relentless and, frankly, unnecessarily precise reminders of his precise whereabouts on the train (again, only pre-Putney) could have been the end of it; but no, these people had to invade the otherwise-diligently-observed tranquillity of the Quiet Carriage with the ‘advice’ that passengers all needed to book tickets before boarding the train or else face a fine. I still cannot think of any piece of information less useful to a group of individuals who have, in order even to stand the remotest chance of hearing this ridiculous pronouncement, already boarded the bloody train. If, as possibly the only alternative interpretation of this redundant advice might imply, we needed tickets simply in order not to be forcibly removed from the train or subjected to the levying of a hefty fine, then the fact that this information was routinely delivered almost simultaneously with the closing of all of the doors, only emphasised its purposelessness and impinged all the more on the desperately-sought peace of those of us travelling in the ironically-labelled Quiet Carriage.

Did I get any work done? A bit – after we’d passed Putney and SouthWest Trains had adopted its ‘come-what-may, screw-you-if-joined-the-train-late’ attitude to its remaining clients, I managed to jot down a first draft of this rant…

The Expert

(A poem resulting from earning PhD, and then living for a few months with the consequences)

Redundancy comes not crashing, but pressing

Its weight is heavy on my mind, my spirit, my soul

I don’t believe I have a spirit or a soul

Yet these are what I sense being crushed, squeezed

Like a head-cold

My sense of superfluity surges from somewhere within

Yet is an intruder

Were you always lurking, awaiting your moment

You did not pounce, but rather slunk

And now you threaten to drown or to suffocate

Which, I cannot tell

Your design for me is not what I desire

I am Master of a tiny universe

I am an ‘expert’

But I seem largely to fail

I fail to pass muster

Fail to notice

Fail to remember

Fail to see the point

Fail to win the argument

Fail to make sense, even

Yet I achieved… what?

Who does this help, this PhD?

Not me!

I can’t get a job

But of course, I have a job

Albeit not one I want

Because I don’t know what that is

And no one appears to want me

Although we go through the motions

They go through the motions

Although ‘motions’ overstates what they are

They move with all the power and grace of tectonic plates

Deciding my fate

I have a doctorate

‘Well done, mate’

I’m an expert

So why the hell does everything seem so bleak?

Why can’t I smile?

I need to lie down, or go for a run

Can’t I please just play drums?