I think this is a funny story. It’s short and to the point – a perfect little thing – and I’ve told it a bunch of times, generally with the desired effect (yuck), but I’ve had to think twice about writing it up here.

It was told first-hand to me by someone who is reasonably well known these days but back before they’d made a solid name for themselves. As best I can recall I wasn’t sworn to secrecy (though I could have been, it all happened years ago and a confidentiality clause may well have been implied at the time of telling – God only knows). So here’s my quandary - is it right and fair to tell the story? Is it just some tawdry tittle-tattle? More importantly, is it a funny story in itself? Does the musician involved lend anything to the tale? Does it work without namechecking them? Does it even work written down?

Regardless, if you know me well enough I’ve likely told you this one anyway, and absolutely including the character in question, in which case this exercise, and indeed the anecdote itself become pretty much pointless. Everyone passes on a story if it’s barely good enough don’t they? But is this yarn good enough? Furthermore I’ve better things I could blog about haven’t I? Why am I wasting time on this crude filmflam?

Oh, I don’t know. I’m likely over-thinking the whole thing.

Ok then, the censored version - treat it as an experiment. Or something.

A FAMOUS BAND played THE VENUE I WAS WORKING AT a couple of times on their way up to larger halls - once with ANOTHER FAMOUS BAND opening if I remember correctly. I’ve a feeling their previous incarnation THE BAND THEY WERE IN BEFORE THEY FORMED THE BAND THAT BECAME SUCCESFULL may have played at some point too.

It’s the second and ultimately final occasion that THE BAND have come through THE VENUE, their soundcheck is over and they have ASCENDED / DESCENDED / WALKED THROUGH to the dressing room where I was working away in a nearby office.

THE BAND are good folk - pleasant, funny and wry – an easy bunch to be around and look after. Remembering me from their previous visit their singer LET’S CALL HIM MR X says hello and I ask him how things are going?

He tells me that he’s actually a little bushed as he’s fresh from helping his girlfriend move house back in THE CITY THE BAND ARE FROM. In fact, he says it’s been an even more fraught relocation than your average house moving as there’s bad blood between his girlfriend and her ex-housemates. The usual kind of thing - unpaid bills, unequal cleaning rotas and vanishing food - all those well documented, and depressing, shared house annoyances. She’s moving while they are out of the house to avoid further confrontation. 

Anyhow, just as they have finished loading up the last of her belongings and are ready to leave, MR X’s girlfriend excuses herself and pops back into the house.

She has one last thing to take care of.

Emerging a short while later she hops into the hired van and they leave. Safely away, she explains what she’s done - she’s left a special gift for her erstwhile housemates. A time bomb of sorts.

Taking the communal margarine from the fridge, she has scooped half out, shat straight into the tub, and then carefully replaced and smoothed over the top half - leaving a foul, buried seam waiting for that inevitable scoop too far.

So there you have it.

Someone shitting into margarine.

Scatological hokum at best I suppose.

But hey, there’s a chance that not a single word of it is true of course. 

Uno, dos, one, two, tres, quarto…

Let’s not get into a discussion about what exactly ‘Pop’ is here, let’s stick with ‘Popular’ and cut straight to the tune in question (as you’d expect, treatise on Pop are mostly dull as ditchwater and the antithesis of what we are focusing on today). I want to talk about a strange little song, by a strange Mexican American, backed by a strange band who travelled show to show in a hearse – ‘Wooly Bully’ by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs is a perfect slice of 60’s Pop and I love it.

Matty told Hatty about a thing she saw. Had two big horns and a wooly jaw…

Like all astonishing Pop Wooly Bully is deceptively simplistic. At just a tad over two minutes this oddball number is brief certainly, yet effortlessly executes it’s Pop goals across a tight, almost off-kilter, 15 bar structure. There’s no filler here, just a couple of minutes of fervent, stabbing Farfisa organ interlocked with a metronomic backbeat alongside Sam’s cracked and guttural hollering; there’s just time for a growling, sleazy, sax solo and we are on the home stretch. Remember, ten minutes of ill thought out avant-garde chicanery will always be a far easier reach than three minutes of verse-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus consummate Pop - and even that handy structure crib won’t really help you pen a classic. It’s like knowing that the much-guarded secret recipe to Coca-Cola has just three constituents but for the life of you mixing it still proves impossible.

Wooly bully, wooly bully, wooly bully, wooly bully, wooly bully…

It was a hit. A respectable number 11 over here but a massive, three million copies sold, bonefide, super HIT in the States. It was in fact the best selling song of 1965, sitting in the US top 100 for an impressive 18 weeks and peaking at number two (foiled in it’s advance on the top slot by The Beach Boys’ ‘Help Me, Rhonda’). Indeed, the best selling US song of 1965 was not (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, not Unchained Melody, not Like A Rolling Stone, not I Got You Babe, not My Girl, not Ticket to Ride - it was Wooly Bully. This was the first American record to sell a million copies during the British Invasion and was even nominated for a Grammy; pretty good going for a semi-meaningless, novelty track.

Hatty told Matty, “Let’s don’t take no chance. Let’s not be L-seven, come and learn to dance…

They look bonkers. Turbans, capes, pharaoh costumes (a look pinched from Yul Brynner in The Ten Commandments) and Go-Go dancers – it’s an enchanting and heady mix. Someone said ‘if you want it to sell, it must be unique’ a phrase never more apposite than in great Pop, but we like our Pop music a little unhinged too don’t we? A little freakish perhaps? Nietzsche said “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing.” In one of the lyrics that we can actually decode, Wooly Bully lays it’s cards right on the table “Let’s not be L-seven” – clearly stating let’s not be square or bland.

Wooly bully, wooly bully, wooly bully, wooly bully, wooly bully…

It’s all pretty much nonsense. Of the title, Sam himself said… “The name of my cat was ‘Wooly Bully’, so I started from there. The countdown part of the song was also not planned. I was just goofing around and counted off in Tex-Mex. It just blew everybody away, and actually, I wanted it taken off the record. We did three takes, all of them different, and they took the first take and released it.” Indeed, top notch Pop can be thoroughly nonsensical as long as it forces you to yell along. Oh, and it may well be a risqué track too – some American radio stations banned it outright after detecting something unhealthily lustful within the lyrics.

Matty told Hatty, “That’s the thing to do. Get you someone really to pull the wool with you…

Wooly Bully by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs is the best party song ever written. Yes, this is my idea of perfect Pop.

Wooly bully, wooly bully, wooly bully, wooly bully, wooly bully…

Originally published at www.distantcity.co.uk

In late 1995 I moved into a flat in Manchester city centre, Whitworth Street to be precise. My new flat-mate Pete and I didn’t really know each other that well, so when a mutual friend passed on tickets to a premier screening of John Woo’s Broken Arrow movie we took it as an opportunity to get to know each other a little. The event is at one of Manchester’s first multiplex theatres - the Showcase over in Belle Vue, Gorton, so when the night arrives we both get suited and booted and call a cab.

When we arrive at the theatre it becomes swiftly apparent that this is a more up-market shindig than we had anticipated, though God knows why – it’s a John Woo film. Anyhow, it’s a black tie occasion and the press are out in force, there’s even a long red carpet and everything. The other guests are arriving; footballers, soap actors, comedians and local TV presenters; as we make our way towards the cinema, flash bulbs flare and folk lining the carpet point and chatter - they are mostly saying, “Who the hell are those two?”

The movie is pretty poor, not a patch on Woo’s Hong Kong based output, so after the screening we leave quickly with every intention of heading back to Manchester and perhaps a bar or two, but as we emerge from the cinema we notice that all the other attendees are climbing aboard three big coaches.

They could be going anywhere.

We climb aboard.

Surrounded by dinner jackets, black ball gowns and well, people who are actually supposed to be travelling, we feel pretty out of place, but that’s nothing compared to how we feel when we arrive at our destination.

Luckily for us the coaches aren’t heading anywhere too far a field and roll up at the car park of Bury FC (or was it Bolton FC? I forget, but it was one of those places just outside Manchester beginning with B that has a football club). There’s a gigantic marquee, sweeping floodlights and the like, and the personalities filing inside are all brandishing big Wonkaesque tickets, so I pick someone at random and ask how much the tickets were?

£150 a pop.

Plainly we don’t have a pair of one hundred and fifty pound tickets, so we mingle with a group of soap actors - Coronation Street, Hollyoaks, Brookside - one of those things, and bizarrely are waved right through. Inside, we step into plush surroundings, and as you’d expect copious amounts of free booze and food alongside fifty or so large banqueting tables. Having nowhere to legitimately sit we hug the bar as superstitiously as we can.

We drink, and try to remain anonymous while a few celebrities do turns up on stage; I remember Foo Foo Lamar doing something or other and there’s an expensive raffle – hosted by, I think Chris Barrie. Oh, and Skelmersdale songstress Sonia is plastered and falls over. At some point we spot Collin Welland, and being fans say hello; we talk for a while about Kes, Z Cars and Newton Le Willows, but are interrupted by a glammed-up girl who has wandered over.

“Excuse me.”

“Yes?”

“Are you in a band?”

“Actually I am.”

The girl spins round to face her table where there are ten or twelve of her friends staring in our direction.

She shouts…

“I fucking told you! It’s Radiohead!”

“It’s Thom fucking Yorke!”

Ok then, let’s hold it there.

Thom Yorke and I share the same birthday, same year, same date, but any similarities end right there. I was in a band, but no, not Radiohead, and we don’t / didn’t look very much alike.

The girl whips out a pen, a scrap of paper and a camera and asks for an autograph and a photo, while behind her the table empties and a queue forms. As other party goers from other tables join the rear I have to make a split second decision - own up and admit to not being Thom Yorke and maybe ask “Do you like Gold Blade instead?” or brazen it out.

For some reason I decide to brazen it out. This creates another problem however, as the growing line assumes that my new pal Pete is in Radiohead too, but which member do they think he is? Pete solves this one by making his signature thoroughly indecipherable.

Finally after all scribbles are done and pictures taken things calm down and it looks like we may have gotten away with it - though Lord knows what they thought when they scrutinized the photographs in the cold light of day, or indeed notice that in my haste I’ve signed Thom without the H.

It’s now pretty late, in fact it’s the morning, as early edition newspapers with pictures of the party we are still at are delivered; we find ourselves propping up the bar beside a gruff looking, 50-something bloke who without introduction says…

“Want a drink fellas?”

“Sure, but I think they may have closed the bar.”

“Not to me they haven’t.”

He turns to the barman and asks for drinks, the nervous looking young lad left manning the bar apologizes and says that unfortunately the bar is now closed.

Very, very slowly the man says…

“No, you misunderstand me, I want some drinks for me and my new friends.”

The barman delivers drinks.

As we get to talking it becomes apparent that the menacing guy who’s just re-opened the bar for us is ‘old Manchester business’, he’s an interesting chap to be around, but Pete and I are both dog-tired so say our goodbyes and prepare to leave. Before we go our drinking partner has some parting counsel.

“Fellas, I can tell you’ll both do ok, but let me give you this one piece of advice. It’s the best piece of advice I can ever give you.”

We pause with bated breath.

“If anyone gets in your way in life, fucking crush them.”

It’s a Saturday afternoon in August 1982 and my mother is dragging my sister and I around Stockport town centre. We are all weary from the trudge around the shops so before heading home we call into the Debenhams department store for a customary cuppa.

We’ve been sat for a few minutes when a desperate looking woman rushes across the café towards us. She’s middle-aged, all 70’s beads and bangles, and plainly has something she wants to get off her chest but is so overwrought it takes her a moment to formulate a sentence.

“Please, you have to help me,” she finally says, “I really need 45p.”

There’s a moment’s quiet, and we all stare at her while she shifts uncomfortably on the spot.

The increasingly distraught woman tries again. “You have to help me, I need 45p, it’s really important. Listen, I’ll make a deal with you.”

Tugging at her ring finger, she pops off her wedding ring and hands it to my mother.

“Here’s the deal”, she says, “you loan me 45p and keep hold of my wedding ring as insurance, we can meet up right here tomorrow and I’ll repay you. It would mean the world to me if you’d do this.” Actually, she may have said, “you borrow me 45p,” but you get the idea.

My mother chips in with the question that has already crossed our minds and asks what could be so important that she’d trade her wedding ring with a stranger for 45 pence?

The woman having found her nerve, answers without hesitation.

“I’ve just got to buy ‘Come on Eileen’ by Dexys Midnight Runners.”

Come on Eileen was at number one, and eventually sat there for four weeks, but it wasn’t like there was a dearth of copies kicking around, that song was everywhere, Julien Temple’s video was all over TV and the 7 inch was racked in every record store. This peculiar woman loved that single so much she couldn’t wait another minute – she wanted a copy instantly.  

Now, I was no teenage jeweller but the ring looks pretty good to me, so I try to surreptitiously encourage my mum to run with the strange offer on the table. My mother however, has other ideas, and being a principled and somewhat wary character politely declines. The peculiar woman makes no further pleas and in a moment has hurried off across the room, in search of another unsuspecting but hopefully more amenable mobile pawnbroker. 

If there was someone working in the Night & Day Café office then the door remained open; visitors simply wandered downstairs, made their way across the tatty dressing room and there they’d find me, sat in the small converted World War 2 bomb shelter that served as my workspace. As you may expect, this open-armed arrangement produced varying results.

On the whole it worked just fine; musicians might swing by, hand across a demo and talk over getting a show; show posters and flyers were dropped and collected and friends came and went. You could count on certain local characters making more-or-less daily visits too; down-and-outs, oddballs, kindly pests and various folk from the venue’s checkered past. Extraordinary people’s poet Carol Batton arrived day after day armed with remarkable poems and stories. Carol’s ode to Glam Rock was simply “Drum hum, not humdrum” (magnificently channeling Glam Rock’s core ethos alongside Tony Visconti’s unique production techniques). I loved that.

But I digress. On occasion, our perpetually swinging door brought less welcome company.

Singer-songwriters would sporadically arrive without notice, sweep into the office and pronounce, “I’ve come to play for you!” I was a little taken aback the first time this happened but not so much that I let them continue.

“Look, we can’t do this.”

“Oh. Why not?”

“It’s really weird and uncomfortable.”

Too harsh you think? Well try to imagine yourself plonked in my old seat, faced by an earnest and often freshly jilted solo artist hell bent on serenading away. It’s just the two of you, the office is cramped and the mounting atmosphere is thick enough to withstand a chainsaw. There’s an elephant in the room all right but he’s covering his ears.

Actually I do remember my first unannounced arrival, which happened way back before we made the bomb shelter office, when anyone visiting had to walk in near darkness past pile after pile of venue junk to a lone desk lit with a solitary bulb in the distance. All very John Gotti. I loved that too.

I’d been working at the venue just a couple of days and was still fighting pandemic chaos, so had opted to listen to Hank Williams in the hope that it would help sooth the slow process of venue resuscitation.

A band wanders in. Now, I wish I could remember which band this was but for the life of me I can’t recall their name. Anyhow, they approach my desk and I assume they are here because they want a show, but before any solicitations take place or heaven forfend any greetings, their spokesperson looks in the general direction of the music emanating from my computer and says…

“What’s this fucking shit?”

“I’ve never really had a hobby, unless you count art, which the IRS once told me I had to declare as a hobby since I hadn’t made money with it.” Laurie Anderson

Opening a live music venue can be a terrible idea. That may sound quite a statement from a chap who’s worked in three - having launched two of them from scratch - so let me qualify it.

I’m talking about those small spaces that specialize in new acts, new talent, new ideas and new energy. I’m talking about those wonderful proving grounds. Those up-close and personal, wild, loud, thrilling, singular and sultry live spaces where – when the stars align - you can even see something life-changing. You may never get the chance to see those acts in such an intense setting ever again, as they leapfrog onwards and upwards career and capacity wise. And therein lies the problem.

It’s these smaller spaces and the promoters that use them that are taking chances with bookings. Here you’ll find enthusiasts promoting things they love, where a glitch in PR or a slight shift in a release schedule can make a world of difference to a show’s success. In fact it can kill a show dead – ‘If only they’d been on Jools Holland’s show a fortnight ago and not in two weeks time’, things like that.

Now the small venue may have made loss after loss on those nascent shows – of course, it’s not for the larger spaces to take those cultural chances - but still they press on. And remember some bands may never make good at these little venues, understandably being eager to move up to bigger, more bankable halls as soon as they get the chance.

But there’s something else at the core of the small live music space that just doesn’t add up and it’s this: the very thing that has drawn people into the building is distracting them from the thing that’s actually keeping the place remotely open.

I mean the show (that wonderful thing blazing away up on the stage over there) is hypnotically and inexorably pulling people away from the bar (that thing in the corner that’s paying for everything).

The better the show, the greater the audience’s disinterest in the cash generating booze machine - “Ay there’s the rub”. Seriously, I’ve seen heaving venues hosting shows sold out months in advance, where the bar has been barely glanced at all evening - it’s just not why people have come out for the evening.

The box office won’t keep a venue open either, rightfully going in large to band fees plus incumbent show costs. The sliver of the box office actually retained by the venue is barely touching those big bills (rent, staff, insurance, PAYE etc) so a small business can easily find itself dancing on the cusp of profitability. On the face of it, it’s one lousy business model.

So why open a venue? Plainly, the smart money would just open a regular bar and be done with any other aspirations.

Believe me, in this instance there’s far less fun where the smart money is, far fewer moments of jaw-dropping splendor, far fewer unrepeatable and groundbreaking nights, and often a much worse soundtrack.

If you are prudent, inventive and hardy you can find yourself with a solid business as well as a satisfying one. As George Bernard Shaw wrote “Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby.” 

Originally published in the Gig Section edition of The Musician, Extra c/o The Musician’s Union - http://www.themu.org

I met Harvey Pekar once. 

It’s September 2006 and I’m in New York visiting friends.

Leaving where I’m staying in Brooklyn one morning, I head across to Manhattan to pick up my old Mac after a fix by the good people at Tekserve. My receipt says ‘please don’t call us up to ask whether your computer has been repaired as we’ll have to stop repairing it to answer the phone. We will call you.’ Good advice. I plan to wander aimlessly until the call comes in.

‘Walk The Line’ the Johnny Cash movie has just opened so I buy a ticket and settle down in the theatre. The screening is pretty sparsely attended but after a minute or two someone else enters, it’s a woman pushing an old battered pram with a newborn baby inside, they take up residence on an aisle seat a few rows in front of me. The movie starts and she proceeds to rock the pram back and forth for the entire film, sometimes in time to the music. Her pram metronome is mesmerizing.

After leaving the cinema I set off uptown, internally grumbling about the lousiness of the movie, I’m annoyed that I didn’t walk out sooner, in fact I wish that the baby had woken, screamed the place down and driven me out.

A while later I’m walking through Greeley Square, it’s then that I spot a police officer, he’s standing perfectly still and staring into the middle distance. As I get closer I notice a prone figure lying at his feet next to an upturned chair. It’s a man. Middle aged. Large. He’s dead. His eyes have rolled white but he’s still holding a lit cigarette pinned between two fingers which is slowly burning out. People are going about their daily business, bustling past, some barely noticing and plainly there’s nothing to be done – just two grim options - stop and stare or move right along. It was one of the saddest things I’d ever seen.

I go for a drink.

It’s late afternoon and Tekserve haven’t called so I wander towards their Chelsea address. I’m passing Penn Plaza Pavilion when I see a giant window ad.

CARRIE FISHER HERE TODAY!

It’s a comic convention (I think it was the Big Apple Comic Con) so I decide to while away a little time gawping at Princess Leia grown old.

Inside all is as you’d expect, various comic book artists and writers signing, scribbling and being photographed alongside row after row of dealers selling comics, action figures and whatnot. I amble about the place a while but quickly realize that Carrie Fisher has long since left the building; then, across the room I notice a lonesome figure sat at a desk beneath a wonky biro-scrawled name sign. 

It’s Harvey Pekar.

Now some of the meet-and-greet queues are immense, snaking and criss-crossing around the hall but Harvey is on his own and looking pretty bored and crabby.

I can’t walk over to him fast enough. Misery loves company.

Harvey is everything I expect him to be, by measure engaging and obstreperous - he’s magnificent to be around. We talk about American Splendor, Cleveland, Manchester, New York and I tell him how happy I was to hear Joe Maneri on the American Splendor movie soundtrack (the track ‘Paniots Nine’ is really something). As we nerdily talk Jazz some more, Harvey’s mood lightens, he seems much happier talking about the Maneri family than the focus of his current woes - no one has interrupted us but the queues for hasty sketches of barbarians and superheroes stretch on.

Someone from the convention comes across and hands over money for dinner; Harvey hits him for more cash and after he’s left tells me that one of the few upswings has been the free trip and hotel for his wife Joyce and daughter Danielle. He’s hustling.

I tell him about the poor dead fellow I’d wandered across earlier - the arch egotist in me imagines the story being suitably Pekaresque enough to make the pages of American Splendor (but of course it doesn’t).

My phone rings, it’s Tekserve calling me in, so I buy one of his books I already own and say my goodbyes. As I leave I take a look back.

There’s Harvey Pekar sat on his own with the whole of the comic book world amassed on the other side of the room.

 For more on Harvey Pekar go here - http://www.smithmag.net/pekarproject/

Photograph of Harvey by Seth Kushner - http://www.sethkushner.com

I worked at a casino for a while. It was by measure fascinating, taxing and ultimately dispiriting.

Once, one of my colleagues congratulated me saying, “we wondered how you’d fit in without any gaming background but you’ve settled in nicely”. Well yes, I’d been in casinos, visited Las Vegas and had read up, I even knew a few croupiers so had a pretty sound grasp of just how casinos functioned. I didn’t however feel the same awareness coming in the other direction but that’s another story.

Obviously some casino chicanery is well established; no clocks or windows alongside air-conditioning manipulation, heady noise, lights and booze, all spread across a dizzying layout, but I became particularly intrigued by the casino carpet.

It was horrible.

And everywhere.

Now this casino looked pretty nice and a king’s ransom had been spent on it but this carpet was frightful. Bizarrely it even ended up in the live music space even though I fought tooth and nail for it not to be. I did notice recently that it had been pulled up from in there and replaced with a more realistic (and much better looking) wooden floor. No one likes dancing on carpet. “It is better to learn late than never.” said Publilius Syrus.

The design is hard to describe but thinking back it had a series of rings and lines in purple, burgundy and yellow on a muddy brown base and resembled a tacky version of the timelord script from new Doctor Who. Actually that’s way too flattering a comparison.

So I looked into the background and history of casino carpets a little further.

Beyond their stain-disguising properties the studies I found seemed to argue that they were purposefully vulgar so as to mesmerize punters, appearing welcoming and pleasing to the eye. But that couldn’t be right, this thing I’d been walking on was ghastly.

Reading further, another theory proposed that having a carpet so cluttered and unpleasant made it harder to stare at, therefore encouraging casino customers to look up. The same applied to the ceiling so patrons have no option than to stare to the mid point, that being the tables and slots, and of course other people gambling. That made much more sense.

I went online a while ago and came across David G. Schwartz from the Gaming Studies Research Center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and author of a paper on casino carpet hermeneutics (that’s interpretation theory folks). David says, “Casino carpet is known an exercise in deliberate bad taste that somehow encourages people to gamble. In a strange way, though, it’s a sublime work of art, rivaling any expressionist canvas of the past century. Note the regal tones of Caesars Palace, the bountiful bouquet of Mandalay Place, the soft, almost abstract pointillism of Paris, all whispering, ‘Gamble, gamble’ just out of the range of consciousness as people walk to the nearest slot machine.” 

Over the years people have left behind countless things at the venues I’ve worked in. Some bits and pieces you’d expect, coats, bags, passports, house keys, wallets, phones – oh, plenty of phones.

I’ve found a fair amount of instruments unsurprisingly but often left for surprising lengths of time, their owners never to return in some cases. I’ve never been able to figure why through a simple process of elimination bands didn’t click where that precious guitar was and just call up. Who knows, they may well need it again.

Somewhat more oddly I’ve found underwear, false teeth, porn and also letters, worryingly stalker-like, scribbled to their quarries and then left in the hope that they’d find their mark somehow. Some were directed to customers spied across the venue, others more unsettling still were sinister paeans to members of staff.

Delightful.

But there was one time about a year ago at The Ruby Lounge when something even more recherché turned up.

It had been a long night into an early morning and a venue full of folk dancing to obscure Chinese R’n’B and Hip Hop. Well, I say obscure – it was to me, it could easily have been a set of wall-to-wall chart-toppers of course.

Anyhow, after everyone had filed out we gave the venue its usual once over and began to tidy up a little. After a while someone finds a carrier bag stashed behind a couch with something inside. It’s heavy and smells really, really bad.

A couple of bar staffers take a peek inside but can’t work out quite what the devil it is. The thing is lumpy, roundish and glistens with a brown and yellow hue.

We haul it to the bar and unveil it to get a clearer look.

It’s a pig’s head.

Glazed.

Cooked.

Bagged.

And carried into a nice warm venue for a few hours.  

It’s Valentine’s Day 2006 at Night & Day Café, we have Isobel Campbell playing, and no it’s not a themed evening.

When Isobel takes the stage the venue is full to brimming and as she begins to play a heavy hush falls across the venue. It’s quiet. Really, really, quiet.

Towards the middle of her set I’m sat in my basement office doing something or other when the phone rings. There’s trouble upstairs at the box office.

I charge upstairs and as the venue is full I elect to run around the outside of the building to the front door. Ever ready to help, my friend Brian Hartley has made his own, less customer-finger-friendly path to the ruckus by running the length of the long Night & Day bar.

The quiet has been well and truly broken.

I arrive out front with Brian. The venue door is locked and missing it’s brass door handle which is now sticking through the our front window. A tacky heart-shaped cushion lies discarded in the street while a heart-shaped balloon is just visible in the sky.

After a spell my colleague Sandy emerges and fills me in.

An overly loved-up, drunken couple has tried to burst in, and after being forcibly locked out the bloke has completely flipped (literally actually, falling backwards into the road after yanking the venue door handle clean off).

We are not happy. The police have been called.

Just then we spot the offending couple escaping somewhere down Oldham Street so Brian and I head off in pursuit while Sandy waits for the cops to arrive. 

We reach Piccadilly and are gaining on them when we spot a speeding police car heading our way. It’s OUR police car racing to Night and Day, so we frantically try to wave it down but the driver has other ideas and swerves past.

It’s at this point I should probably point out that this story has no punch line. No explosive ending. No pratfall. As T.S. Eliot wrote in The Hollow Men it ends “not with a bang but a whimper.”

The romantic and angry couple hop a cab and speed off. We walk back to the venue.

Isobel Campbell poster art by Nick Rhodes - www.switchopen.com

The dramatist Jean Anouilh said, “Life has a way of setting things in order and leaving them be. Very tidy, is life.”

Jean hadn’t set foot in the basement of Night & Day Café.

It’s January 7th 2002, day one of what I’ll sardonically refer to in the future as my 9 to 5 and the effects of deterministic chaos are everywhere. Somewhere a bored barmaid drops a bottle of mascara and a year later the drains explode. That kind of thing.

I get down to the job in hand. Well, the jobs in hand. The many jobs in hand. I decide to tidy.

My memory is hazy of any methodology but I do remember my good friend Brian Hartley pitching in and that we found broken CDs and CD cases just about everywhere. Hundreds of the things in far-flung corners of that dingy, grimy basement office and all shattered beyond recognition.

So we shift books, bikes (one with a satchel full of old men’s ties), Christmas baubles, bar paraphernalia, ancient guitars and a potato-baking stove. Everywhere more and more ruined CDs.

And then I found them.

A squash racket and a tennis racket, both battered to hell and back.

Back in those pre-MySpace, pre-Facebook, Precambrian days CDs were in plentiful supply at the venue and as I’d soon discover they’d arrive relentlessly 20, 30, 40 a day from bands wanting shows.

Keeping up with it all became a mammoth task and my predecessors had become so exhausted from the constant CD barrage they’d found the release that worked for them.

CD tennis.

And while I had my own traditional release care of the Night & Day bar, CD tennis was never far from my mind as I answered, rejected, deflected and encouraged more of the things to be volleyed my way like a tiny, determined armada of UFOs. 

I’ve long forgotten when and where I first heard my favourite gag though Mick Jones gave the best rendition I ever heard on stage at Night and Day Cafe. He may well have been referencing the show I’d booked for him. Anyhow, it goes a something like this…

A man visits his doctor in some distress, and on entering the consultation room says, “Doctor, you have to help me. I’m in total and utter agony”.  The doctor replies “please take a seat, tell me, what seems to be the problem sir?”

The man rolls up his sleeve to reveal his forearm. It’s a wrinkled mass of festering sores from his fingertips up the forearm and there’s a discernible point where the arm becomes completely normal right after the elbow.

The doctor, visibly repulsed by the nasty arm says, “That really does look incredibly painful, but before I can make any kind of diagnosis I’ll need to look into your background and habits. Can I ask, what do you do for a living?”

The man for a moment forgets about his grotesque arm and proudly replies, “Well, I work at the circus!”

The doctor asks what his role at the circus is to which the man answers, “it’s my job to give the elephants their daily vitamin suppositories.”

“Well, plainly” the doctor says “you are experiencing a frightful and virulent reaction to the insides of these animals. My sole recommendation is that you seriously consider a complete change of career”.

To which the man replies…

“What and give up show business?”