A shot across the annals...
I used to review things. Occasionally for money and then increasingly not for money because there was no money for anything as worthless as critique. Here's something I wrote for the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival last year but it might just as easily be this year. They are magnificent and consistent:
"It’s the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival time, and once again it’s been an embarrassment of riches. I lack an embarrassment of riches however, so I have had to pick and choose carefully. Pete Perrett, as good an advert for the sustained and imaginative use of heroin as you could hope for, did an extraordinary show at the Black Box, so much so that I didn’t care that he did hardly any of his old The Only Ones songs at all. A spindly, spidery figure, hatchet-faced behind raybans, his nasal cockney whine has transformed over the years into a commanding and impressive thing: I hear an estuary Leonard Cohen in some of his more deadpan utterances. His band is excellent, young and conspicuously good-looking, and contains two of his own sons. I later find out that they were both in iterations of Babyshambles, but I can forgive them anything after the rousing version of The Beast they ended on. In true punk rock fashion I get into a fight with a photographer who consistently pokes me in the back of the head with a camera. In slightly less punk rock fashion he buys me a pint at the bar to say sorry and we end up having a lovely chat. Rock and Roll.
A word about audiences: I don’t know if it’s just Belfast as I don’t really go out anywhere else, but if you’re at a gig and all you do is talk loudly to your friends all the way through the songs, while absently filming the stage with your phone (to what end?) then please give me all the money you are wasting on ruining gigs and I will spend it correctly, you idiots. It’s always men: big, beery gormless men; men in clumps. And pointy shoes.
Next up was Robyn Hitchcock in the murky confines of McHugh’s cellar – a perfect venue, in fact. I knew very little about Robyn Hitchcock: I knew he was a tall, posh Englishman in a polka-dot shirt who sang whimsical songs, like a less louche Kevin Ayres or a less Australian Robert Forster. What I didn’t realise was he was going to, over the course of an hour long set, become one of my favourite musicians. It’s nice to be old and still find new things to love. Robyn is a man of no fixed accent and he tears up the map between songs, his voice high and squeaking or a low rumble. The between song banter is like Peter Cook assaying Trigger from “Only Fools and Horses”, and at one point he falls in love with the sound of the toilet door squeak, attempting to use it as percussion in a song. And what songs: “The Lizard” “The Abyss” “My Wife and My Dead Wife”, undying classics all. And if you went away unchanged by “The Cheese Alarm” I question your right to own ears.
Afterwards I chat to him about Basingstoke, Brian Eno’s art college days (all three of us went to the same one) and his obsession with antiquated rolling stock. During the conversation I have a stark moment of clarity – I realise that with the dark paisley of my shirt, the black rims of my glasses and my plume of white hair, I look as if I have come to the gig dressed as him: I’m doing Robyn Hitchcock cosplay! I shut up and Robyn to talks to my girlfriend Susie about the width of the high street in her native Stockton-on-Tees until his taxi comes. He is a lovely man, he has an interested mind and he knows about everything.
The next night it’s the comic stylings of Bridget Christie in the Marquee and she is hilarious. I’ve never seen a stand-up being her own support, but she comes on gives us twenty minutes, disappears for another twenty and then comes back and does and hour show. It is a magnificent, spirited defence of feminism in the face of the flailing madness of the modern world: she is a seeker of truth in a world where truth seems to be very much last year’s thing.
She insisted on complete darkness in the Marquee and on the way back from the bar I nearly fall on my arse owing to the surprising lowness of the festival chairs. That’s what it was – the surprising lowness of the festival chair and the darkness. I had only had a couple of gins.
For a week or so this is my life: writing by day, carousing by night. CQAF is a wonderful thing and an ornament to the city but I’m very glad it’s only a week and a bit: my liver needs a lie down in a quiet room, a damp towel on is feverish brow. "
"It’s the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival time, and once again it’s been an embarrassment of riches. I lack an embarrassment of riches however, so I have had to pick and choose carefully. Pete Perrett, as good an advert for the sustained and imaginative use of heroin as you could hope for, did an extraordinary show at the Black Box, so much so that I didn’t care that he did hardly any of his old The Only Ones songs at all. A spindly, spidery figure, hatchet-faced behind raybans, his nasal cockney whine has transformed over the years into a commanding and impressive thing: I hear an estuary Leonard Cohen in some of his more deadpan utterances. His band is excellent, young and conspicuously good-looking, and contains two of his own sons. I later find out that they were both in iterations of Babyshambles, but I can forgive them anything after the rousing version of The Beast they ended on. In true punk rock fashion I get into a fight with a photographer who consistently pokes me in the back of the head with a camera. In slightly less punk rock fashion he buys me a pint at the bar to say sorry and we end up having a lovely chat. Rock and Roll.
A word about audiences: I don’t know if it’s just Belfast as I don’t really go out anywhere else, but if you’re at a gig and all you do is talk loudly to your friends all the way through the songs, while absently filming the stage with your phone (to what end?) then please give me all the money you are wasting on ruining gigs and I will spend it correctly, you idiots. It’s always men: big, beery gormless men; men in clumps. And pointy shoes.
Next up was Robyn Hitchcock in the murky confines of McHugh’s cellar – a perfect venue, in fact. I knew very little about Robyn Hitchcock: I knew he was a tall, posh Englishman in a polka-dot shirt who sang whimsical songs, like a less louche Kevin Ayres or a less Australian Robert Forster. What I didn’t realise was he was going to, over the course of an hour long set, become one of my favourite musicians. It’s nice to be old and still find new things to love. Robyn is a man of no fixed accent and he tears up the map between songs, his voice high and squeaking or a low rumble. The between song banter is like Peter Cook assaying Trigger from “Only Fools and Horses”, and at one point he falls in love with the sound of the toilet door squeak, attempting to use it as percussion in a song. And what songs: “The Lizard” “The Abyss” “My Wife and My Dead Wife”, undying classics all. And if you went away unchanged by “The Cheese Alarm” I question your right to own ears.
Afterwards I chat to him about Basingstoke, Brian Eno’s art college days (all three of us went to the same one) and his obsession with antiquated rolling stock. During the conversation I have a stark moment of clarity – I realise that with the dark paisley of my shirt, the black rims of my glasses and my plume of white hair, I look as if I have come to the gig dressed as him: I’m doing Robyn Hitchcock cosplay! I shut up and Robyn to talks to my girlfriend Susie about the width of the high street in her native Stockton-on-Tees until his taxi comes. He is a lovely man, he has an interested mind and he knows about everything.
The next night it’s the comic stylings of Bridget Christie in the Marquee and she is hilarious. I’ve never seen a stand-up being her own support, but she comes on gives us twenty minutes, disappears for another twenty and then comes back and does and hour show. It is a magnificent, spirited defence of feminism in the face of the flailing madness of the modern world: she is a seeker of truth in a world where truth seems to be very much last year’s thing.
She insisted on complete darkness in the Marquee and on the way back from the bar I nearly fall on my arse owing to the surprising lowness of the festival chairs. That’s what it was – the surprising lowness of the festival chair and the darkness. I had only had a couple of gins.
For a week or so this is my life: writing by day, carousing by night. CQAF is a wonderful thing and an ornament to the city but I’m very glad it’s only a week and a bit: my liver needs a lie down in a quiet room, a damp towel on is feverish brow. "
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