Tuesday 20 July 2010

More Flailing of Limbs

Done more running around haven't I?
Oooh exciting. (Not really)

Saturday 17th July, Reading
Got in to Reading in a FOUL MOOD, schlepped myself and my suitcase a mile up a hill before realising that I was gone up the wrong SIDE of the fucker and the venue was way back down on the other side of the pissing bastard hill (1).
Bumped into Francois and Rozi who KNEW where they were going because they got lost too.
Dragged into the venue and found it a nice arts centre with a weirdo school-hall vibe in one room and a dark gloomy concert hall setup in the other - I was gonna play in the school gym cube, went in to check out the PA, there was another noise dude playing - you could hear his pedals clicking on and off and good heavens I thought..."fuck".
Sank some whiskey and waited until I was hungry enough to cash in my lunch voucher
LUNCH: Deeeeeeefuckinlicious chicken in tomato sauce dish with fuckin YES spinach as the veg side, all on a massive pancake kinda bread - Ethiopian cafe it was wasn't it.

Then I ordered a coffee. Ouch. Forgive the following ramble. Actually don't, because I'm fucking right and it's a problem I encounter FAR TOO OFTEN and hell I don't give a slimy dogegg if anyone gives a rat's nip on it.

WHY THE "IT'S GOT TWO SHOTS IN" LINE IS NOT A VALID COMMENT:
Ok right, so COFFEE - I love it, this much is evident, and it is NOT HARD to make.
Proportion and scale is key here. "Two Shots" can mean anything, if it was two shots of espresso with some milk, this would suit me fine, providing that they were actually shots and not just a few bits of soot, as is so often the case.
Consider you were making a cup of tea in a sink. You wouldn't put one bag in now would you? FUCKING RIGHT YOU FUCKING WOULDN'T. It doesn't matter that there are "Two Shots" of coffee in my cup, it's the size of a fucking lake you dribbling horse's end! If you were to pour a bottle of squash into a river, nobody would rejoice and shout "HOORAY, LET'S ALL DRINK DELICIOUS ORANGE CRAP", the would probably wonder why such a fine bottle of squash had gone to waste. I'm exaggerating to prove a point.
Large coffee should equal MORE COFFEE, it's simple, so amazingly simple that it should be like telling a postman that letters go THROUGH the letterbox - yet a staggering amount of hamfisted shiteels manage to make this mistake, which just leaves me wanting to shower them with hot streams of scorched tasteless black water.
Ok then, WATER. Veeeery easy. Most of the time there is TOO MUCH water in the cup, it is TOO HOT or the water goes on FIRST. All of these things are wrong. Coffee shouldn't be as hot as ten nuclear blasts in an eggcup, it should be WARM. More on the hot-side-of-warm but still not hot. You can regulate the temperature on the espresso machine. Again... "s i m p l e". I maintain that there is no lost art of making coffee. It's fucking easy. REALLY. FUCKING. EASY. I digress.
You pour scalding hot water ontop of espresso and you'll burn it. If I tell you it's burnt don't give me an incredulous look like I've just ran into your front room and spraypainted "GO EGG BIBLE FLEECER" on your wall whilst singing the words "NATIONAL ANTHEM" over and over again in less and less convincing variations on the Australian accent. NO. Scorching happens. Don't let it happen by being a first-class horse. If you put the coffee on TOP of the water, letting it cool slightly, then things will be different and we'll all have a nice big party to celebrate you not being a total and complete fucking tool.
The coffee in this country is atrocious in terms of value for money and quality. Utter pig's hats.
Sorry to be a snob of pan-galactic proportions, but in Europe, coffee is generally short, strong, cheap and more to the point it actually tastes like something. Filter coffee is longer, but it's still damn fine.
Two more annoying points to make for which I will not apologise:
1) If I ask for a coffee that doesn't taste like witch's tears, don't fax me some rotten warts about it having "Two Shots", and for the love of anything with even a passing resemblance to god (teapot, giant dog, roundabout etc) don't feed me this line about how you've been doing it for 16 years. You've been doing it WRONG. These things happen. I can help you. Please accept my help, or accept this bucket of brown lava over your nice clean smug face.
2) Stop charging £2 for a FILTER COFFEE. It's just absurd. How about you only sell peanuts to people with doctorates in anthropology too?

In the end I usually have to end up paying extra to have another shot put in to make it just about bearable. I'm PAYING MORE money because schmucks can't make the damn stuff RIGHT. I am going to time travel and fire darts at all of you as children. You will run and I will giggle with glee, except this time I will bring my own thermos.

Ok, rant over.

Saturday 17th July, Reading (cont)
After sobbing for hours about a terrible coffee (2), I sat with Rachael Aggs and Ros Ray Murray Rumours of the REALLY GODDAMN GOOD Trash Kit and just well, sat there while they talked to each other, which was nice really.
I went back to the venue and watched I'm Being Good, who are always a BLAST, even one member down. I want to be in a band like that. Goddamn yes, riffs all over the place.
Back in the main hall there was a guy called "House of John Player" who was a man with a loop pedal who wasn't appalling. Psychedelic chkchk and washphase sunblasts come squealing out of the speakers with a sweet little girlyvoice in check too. Kinda like Skaters-lite, without that being derogatory.
Drum Eyes were on, but it was my turn to start shitting myself about playing my own set in the MAGICAL HAUNTED GYMNASIUM OF ENDLESS SPLENDOUR

Huzzah! Loudness abounds! The first part of my set entailed a man who so desperately looked like he wanted to live life like a greaser off Twin Peaks doing backspins. The set was a swirly hypnotic mucky mess and ended with my flinging all the drumsticks I had borrowed all around the room on account of my being too excited about playing the drums to play the drums. Never mind, it all worked I THINK and that's the main thing, isn't it? The answer is a resounding "yes" so shut the thing in your face that gets fed pies and yams and etcetera.

Shaking and sweating and with my eyes burning sore from dripping hairy sweat into my tearducts, I sat outside and downed 1/4 of my whiskey bottle and a pint of water before continuing on to a pint of the local ale, FULL CIRCLE, which is TWO THOUSAND PERCENT OF FLAVOUR. Vanilla drones stab me in the buds like a stale cake in a bottle. Fucking lush.
Ade talked about his dog, which made me feel very sad, his voice sounded like puppy-dog eyes when he talked about it. It also made me realise how much I need a hound in my life. Fuck off all of you. None of you are dogs, and if you claim to be, your claim invalidates itself because dogs cannot talk or type or communicate verbally in the English language. So stop it. You will never reach the level of canine perfection so either send me some growling barrel of love or get on a buss to NOT-HERE.

When I regained consciousness, I went to watch the EVERMIGHTY TRASH KIT OF YOUR WILDEST DREAMS, who as per, were stellar awesome and everyone should agree with me if they like having limbs. There was a casualty as somebody agreed with me a little too much and their afro-psyche-punk-spazz-joy was a bit too much to take in one go and passed out, smashing his face on the shiny wooden floor. Ouch
Anyway, there was a TK quilt that Agg's gran had made, and she was wearing a PSYCHEDELIC DRESS that I actually wanted a bit, the pattern looked like a vortex of puke and broken wine bottles sneezing out cosmic halos (3). Rad.

Dancing like the pathetic honky I am to Silver Columns, trying in vain to stay drunk for more than five minutes a go(4) was the last bit of the festival that happened, before sneaking into the hotel room that Francois and Rozi (4) were staying in, staying up a bit too late and talking toot about somebody getting married after a month and hip hop and a whole load of gumph with the aforementioned and Ros MurRay Rumours.

Sunday 18th July, Reading/Southampton

Woke up at Decent o Clock and went downstairs to steal a hotel breakfast, which is one of my favourite things in life. I'm glad I don't have one every day because I would be the size of a whale's cottage if I did. Still it was a welcome feast, although there was a couple sat next to me who decided that a fantastic buffet breakfast that I was trying to enjoy was the perfect time to end their relationship. It's hard to concentrate on the deity that is scrambled egg when somebody growls "I never wanna see your face again" a metre away from you. Behind closed doors, PLEASE.
ITEMS CONSUMED:
2x Sausages
2x Rashers of bacon
Scrambled egg
2.5X Hash Browns
3x Miniature pastries
Croissant
Fat free strawberry yoghurt
2x Rounds of toast, 1x Marmalade and 1x Honey
3x Glasses of orange juice
4x cups of coffee

1x massive fucking feast that meant I couldn't pronounce the word "food" until 8pm.

Hung around with Rozi outside a cafe after failing to find "Smelly Alley" (5) nursing a large milky espresso (6) - She's a funny one, and it's nice to get to talk proper with all these dudes, because I generally don't get to for some reason - This was also the first time I'd actually had proper chats with Ros, who I've been in rooms with many times but never even said hello - I guess I've had no reason to til now..

Dragging my suitcase round reading, which had perished the night before after literally some service got me worried looks as it was just a big silver mess of duct tape with wires poking out of the amorphous corners. Bought a new notebook and missed my first train to Southampton because I had developed a brief habit of writing COCA COLA over and over again in various retarded permutations.

Southampton. Oh yes. Southampton. Oh god. Southampton. Fuck. I remember. I wonder what the suicide rate is round there? Must be high, although there were foghorns blasting a deep doomy minor 3rd upon my arrival, which was a good sign.

Remembering that I was gonna go back to B-Town in the foreseeable future made me also remember the crushing misery I associate with that/this hellpuddle, but that's my other blog that I don't care about and save for misanthropic teenage aphorisms about nothing. I like to think of it as my Chamber of Self Pitying Ventilation - but that's another blog that isn't worth reading unless you like garbled sentences of teenage angst.

The venue, The Hobbit was a nice little place with a beer garden big enough to fit the entire pub in twice. The live room was a tiny little shoebox full of appreciation. There were some bands, but my omnipresent funk and need to fill my stomach with digestible stuff prevailed and I had to high-tail it a stretch of moribund concrete corridor to the nearest tesco to purchase the usual sushi pack and pudding of A BANANA. Sat on the pavement, chewing my mouthfuls of tasty fishy resentment seemed to be the highlight of a young chav's day, laughing and shouting "YEWW ALRIGHT MATE, HAVING A NICE MUNCH ARE YA?!" at me like she was Jimmy Fucking Carr, who is about as funny as hammering cockroaches into my fingernails with an antiquated copy of a Nostradamus non-predictions almanac. Like I said, this is southampton. Huzzah. Praise be.

When I got back to the venue Deadwood was playing, and his set sounded like a mouse throwing its drumkit into a bitcrusher via a woodchipper. It was fucking rad.
I played next, not quite as good as reading, but not AWFUL, similar kind of set except maybe a couple more mournful bits than the night previous, seemed to go down well too, which was nice.
Also there was a fanboy. Oh my.
Unfortunately I missed Spoils & Relics because I had to apply a whole month of duct tape to my corpse of a suitcase and rush off to the train station, but luckily they gave me a really rather nice TAPE, and I love tapes, which is another reason I wanted to see their set, because they used TAPES TAPES TAPES, god I'm so hard for magnets.

Nothing much else happened except for there being a girl in Basingstoke who was literally barking. I don't mean mad, I mean she was actually barking, or it sounded like it, and that was just how she spoke, to anyone in the radius of a hearty lob of her can of Natch. Scum. I wanted to melt her and flick her under a tram. But I didn't as that would have meant transporting her vitriolic hooting near corpse to a place with a tram system, and I didn't want to exist at this point anyway.

Got back and bloody Rozi was in the taxi queue, which was a nice coincidence which ended up making my taxi home "HALF PRICE"! Huzzah. Rejoice. I did. I slept for about 4 years when I got home. The end. If you got this far then you're a schmuck too. GUTTED! BYE BYE!
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1) I'm sorry, I've completely forgotten what this rambling deviation was supposed to be now. Probably for the best.
2) In actuality I just sat scowling at my flavourless volcano of radge.
3) Which is a pretty apt description of Trash Kit's music too.
4) I saw Francois in his underwear and man I got jealous. I wish I had the physique of a humble adonis, not the skeletal hunch of a smashed frog explaining gravity.
5) Which didn't turn out to be that smelly
6) I'd learnt my lesson at this point.

2 comments:

  1. "I'm PAYING MORE money because schmucks can't make the damn stuff RIGHT."

    This reminded me of a really shit film I watched, where a guy argues with a barrista or whatever about his rank coffee, and isn't getting his money back. So the customer (Who's ALWAYS right!) builds a bulletproof suit and goes on a wee shooting spree.

    I don't know if that's your thing, but he totally got away with it!
    He didn't exactly get his money back, but he shot that fucking barrista right in the back. Happy ending.

    Maff.

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  2. Ahh Maff m'dear welcome to the sticky part of the internet (sorry)... mann if I was to embark on a quest of that magnitude it'd be fuckin' DEATH CITY ova theah...

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