Author: basgallop

What was your first gig?


…mine was 78/79 Rose Royce at the Cornwall Colliseum in St Austel
my sisters very kindly took me
a Disco Funk, slushy ballards band. They were just fantastic.
we sang along to all the classics ‘Love don’t live here anymore’, oh and ‘Car Wash’!

…more posts….

Dozza… I saw Chumbawumba a couple of times in the late 80’s early nineties, they were such zealots, possibly the least likely band ever to have a hit record.
saw them once in Prague, they played in u Zoufastou (or somfink, the name meant club despair), which was in a basement, cellar firetrap place just of the old town sq, a big pistachio mozart baroque building up top… and a punk club below.

It was an odd place, every time you went back it was twice the size as they’d found knocked down a couple of cellar walls and found a few extra rooms

when i turned up the place was rammed with hundreds of young polish punks.
quirkily Chumbawumba were big in Krakow!
What was her name, alice nutter? came out dressed as a nun and the whole place went bonkers
afterwards half the punks came back to stay, i know it’s a terrible thing to say, but they were so sweet, polite and smiley.
i was tempted to give them lessons in sneering. gurcha.

we had a huge loft, 50 or so of them could kip up there, i suspect some of themn are still up there, like Japanese Prisoners of war, you know, in the jungle on small melanesian islands??!

goth racket

the sisters of mercy as a counterbalance to Eddie VH from the other day

when i was young i went to see the sisters of mercy in concert, they were gawdawful blooming loud
being of sensitive, fey disposition i decided to protect my ears by putting pirces of loo roll in them.
it worked a treat, they sound much better slightly muffled
i could happily get on with pogoing about

next day tho’ i couldn’t hear a thing and had terrible ear ache, lumme must have been louder than i thought!
So off i went to the doctors. ‘i think i have a burst eardrum’
he shone a light in me lug hole, went ‘aha’ and fished out a piece of tissue paper.
embarrased

St Wulfrans

What’s yer favourite church?
I was over at St Wulfrans in Ovingdene yesterday.
a splash of yellow daffs outside the front porch, a yew tree, crows cawing.
I fell asleep. a snooze in the sunshine in the graveyard! Something to do with those commands to ‘Rest in Peace’.
Jumping Jehosophines!

I really like the fact that i can walk out of my front door, through East Brighton park, then, up, up, past the chalk Whitehawk, over the golf course and be completely in the countryside.
there are these amazing plough shire horses, enormous hulking beasts bigger than Sherman tanks!

I’ve never been inside St Wulfrans, always locked, but i really like the name which is blatantly Saxon and maybe part Red Indian
the church is a typical Downs one, built from Flint, which you always find lying about amidst the chalk.

…after the church i bumped into Suzy a dreadlocked mum from the school (her kids called Jacey Blue, yep, they all have weird names), whenever i see her i always think ‘face like the back of a bus!’
actually she’s beautiful, but also one of those people who appear on teh side of Brighton buses, you know, the ones with a slogan, encouraging you to dump your car.
It always spooks me out, when her bus goes by, to see her fizzgog, 12ft high!

…aaah i am rambling about my ramble.. onto the Kipling gardens in Rottingdene, an ice cream and stroll home along the undercliff path… home… just in time for the antiques roadshow

aidan: For a while I was haunted by an old flame adorned on the side of the buses. It would always give me shivers when she would appear, 8ft high right in front of me at a crossing.

12ft high images, kinda reminds me….
….of when i spent a winter in Sheff, in a sprawling student house which backed right out onto Meersbrook park.
The house was full of climbers, pupeteers, artists… and me
everyday in the kitchen, huddled around the 3 bar electric fire, drinking endless cups of tea from a dribbling teapot
Theresa, the artist, her work was figurative, so she spent a lot of time just sketching us all.
Whilst sketching she’d always be asking lots of personal questions ‘tell me all about your first love?’, her theory being that when people talk about themselves, it shows some of their soul.
Felt a bit unfair to me, as she knew i fancied her, just a teensy bit.

In may i went to visit her in her studio, down ‘blast furnace lane’,
a big, old, near derelict victorian warehouse… nowadays, i ‘spect, it’s yuppy loft flat appartments… the whole of the north of England , so i hear!

I brought her a large bag of cherries, so we sat in 2 deckchairs, chomping, then spitting out the pips.
Looking up there was this huge 12ft or so canvas, apparently of me.
Just the head and the hands in detail, the rest barely, faintly sketched in, she claimed ‘the renaissance masters only ever painted teh face and hands, they left the clothes and the backgrounds to their apprentices!’
I was more ‘but he’s got a big nose… he looks nothing like me… he’s, he’s well ugly’
she responded ‘that’s because it’s a representation of your soul… not a likeness of your physique’
ha
Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Sailor, Rich Man, Poor Man….

not one of her piccies, but similar, continuing the cherry theme!

RB:

sleep walking

once i was staying in a hostel in Barcelona, big old mixed dorm room with lots of bunk beds, everyone had been out drinking and was in a boisterous mood.
got woken half way thro’ the night by some oaf stumbling about, looking for the loo. He was clearly a bit drunk and a lot sleep walking.
He stopped and p*ssed all over the poor bloke sleeping in the lower bunk!
Once finished he clambered back into bed, straight to sleep.
Half the dorm was awake by now, flabberghasted, but the bloke he weed on snored through the entire thing.
The next day nobody had sufficient gumption to tell him what had happened. how can you?!

Reminds me of the first cub camp i ever went on, Jeremey Rudge who was in our tent peed in his brand new sleeping bag. Unfortunately the dye wasn’t fast, so the next morning he emerged from his damp, sleeping bag cocoon… and he was bright blue from head to toe!

kite plodder

last weekend my brother and i went with our gaggle of kids away to the jugs in Kingston, theres a play park for the little ones, a lovely 12th Century church and even the chance of pintage
we were flying kites, a stunt kite (fantastic, but a bit of a palaver of rope and string), and our trusty rainbow kite, with the merest puff of wind this one merrily spools away, cloudwards
Sofia whose only 4, accidentally let go of the rainbow kite, yikes!
away it flew , but luckily the handle became snagged in a tree.
rescues and derring do!
my brov hopped up into the tree, but couldn’t reach. A passing local type, very kindly ran off and got a fishing rod. So my brothers got the long long pole and prodding recklessly at the kite handle
I’m on the ground comforting a couple of crying little ones, the melodrama!, but also simultaneously thinking, ‘the branch will never hold his weight’ and remembering a Seamus Heaney poem.

My brother is fishing in the river of the wind that flows through the branches of the trees

Finally the kite is prodded free, zoom it’s off over the roof tops, heading for the downs
I’m hot hoof after it, a Kite runner, well Kite plodder at any rate, getting bogged down on a muddy footpath, then hopping a barbed wire fence into a field.
Then theres the kite, right in the middle of the field, multicoloured wreckage. I stride over to it, feeling much like a world war 1 flying ace whose just crash landed
The kites been rescued by a couple of 10 year old boys, they were suitably amazed, ‘we were sitting in our house, and this thing just flew over’
Together we bore it back in the triumph of rescue!

oh the snippet of heaney (scribbled on a scrap of paper in my wallet)

The Riverbed, dried up, half full of leaves

Us, listenning to a River in the Trees