Early on in tonight’s set Patti recalls living on the outskirts of Detroit in the 80s with her late husband MC5 stalwart Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, she reminisces about the neighbouring river regularly flooding their home - the ongoing damage, the lost possessions, sandbags and struggles. Indeed, the wash of troubles endured by Hebden Bridge and neighbouring Todmorden and Mytholmroyd this year, and how these communities rallied together to retrieve some semblance of normality has not only brought Patti to the Trades Club for this intimate flood benefit show but has also informed her entire set.

Plainly Patti is a masterly performer – tonight she dances effortlessly between rapturous anthems, plaintive acoustic numbers, relevant readings, candid anecdotes and unrehearsed new songs and arrangements. She is in sensational voice and hinges her performance on tales of resilience, rebirth, community and remembrance – pitch perfect for the occasion and thoroughly captivating from the get go.

Joined by Tony Shanahan her collaborator for the past 15 years or so, we are treated to vibrant duo takes on a trio of tracks from ‘Banga’ her fine new long player. ‘This is the Girl’ is a touching slow swing paean to Amy Winehouse, whereas ‘April Fool’ is a catchy piece of playful pop and brings out a big voice from the small audience to join in on the choruses. Title track ‘Banga’ an ode to canine loyalty (Banga is Pilate’s dog in Bulgakov’s ‘The Master and Margarita’) recalls the metronomic drive and grit of ‘Citizen Ship’ from 1979’s ‘Wave’, and once again the crowd are hollering along “Say! Banga!”

We hear ‘Pissing in the River’ from 1976’s ‘Radio Ethiopia’, which loses none of its drama when stripped to a core of voice and piano, and elsewhere a breathtaking ‘Because the Night’ rouses the Trades Club audience again - “My Greek chorus” says Patti. It’s worth noting that in most situations singalongs can be uncomfortable, tune-free, mawkish affairs, but not today, not under these circumstances – it’s an irrepressible community joined.

Patti and Tony are clearly loving every second of the show, and Patti explains how captivated she is by this small part of West Yorkshire - she’s undeniably moved to have found Sylvia Plath’s grave in nearby Heptonstall, and a shared love of Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Villette’ will bring her back next year alongside her sister to visit the village of Hawarth.

Later Patti recollects on her youth and romance with Robert Mapplethorpe and reads from ‘Just Kids’ the tender memoir that she promised him she’d pen just days before his death. A selection from ‘The Coral Sea’ Smith’s book of metaphorical prose telling the story of a dying man on a journey to view the Southern Cross constellation, again honouring Mapplethorpe, is stunning, and links perfectly with a poignant version of Crosby, Stills and Nash’s ‘Southern Cross’. But Patti can flip the mood on a beat, jumping from heartfelt prose to a funny recollection of the couple in their unfurnished Brooklyn apartment and her being able to spot Mapplethorpe on acid because he’d chosen to soundtrack his trip with longwinded, 60s psychedelic peddlers Vanilla Fudge.

Closing with ‘People have the Power’ may seem like a given of course, but it’s delivered with such brazen intensity and received with such exhilaration it’s impossible to imagine any other finale - it’s thrilling to experience in close quarters. Tonight, as with the set as a whole the song feels like an extraordinary work of empowerment and bravery.

You can donate to the Calderdale Flood Emergency Fund HERE

Originally published by Louder Than War

This is a cover I did for the free, A7 (and briefly A6) wonder that was Hungry and Homeless (the coda, a skit on ‘please give generously’ etc changed every issue). A series of great artists did covers including somewhat astonishingly Art Spiegelman, and the hastily folded insides were a scrunched selection of 20 word reviews, dirty doodles (Portrait of Thee Artist as a Wanker), dirtier cartoons (Bill’s Bad Bitch Mom) and other irreverent shenanigans - one question interviews (Ornette Coleman!), death lists, blatant movie spoilers, cocktails and advice on where to clandestinely take a piss in Manchester. We generally pulled the thing together while Mike Noon and I were supposed to be hawking comics at a shop in Hanging Ditch and Richard Hector-Jones should have been shifting records across the counter at Eastern Bloc. Oh, and I should stress that Mike and Richard did a lion’s share of the work. Actually, reading that all back Hungry and Homeless sounds like the best magazine ever published. 

A6, it ran for 2, maybe 3 issues before I lost interest. 

I think this was the last strip I did for Deadline magazine in the mid 90’s. The show my sister was actually watching was Coronation Street, but I can only assume I preferred drawing a pair of creepy test card / children’s puppet things instead of someone from the Rovers (which would have been harder of course). Otherwise this is bang on what happened, my old man using a Stanley knife to make good imperfections on some lousily crafted flat pack crap. He was fine ultimately, but it was scary nonetheless. I remember we mopped up the blood with towels and some old cloth terry nappies I grabbed from the linen cupboard. Nice. 

I like this fanzine cover I did, it’s simple, lewd and was drawn to size at A6. And yes, the worm in question is his penis. 

Moral Sense was a music fanzine founded by my friend Mike Noon and so named because of the never ending supply of free badges saying just that in the Christian book shop on Deansgate in Manchester. We took plenty, and gave them away with the first issue. They also sold T shirts that said HELL (in flames) IS NOT COOL (with icicles). I wish I’d bought one. Anyhow I kinda like this, even though the whole alien thing seems a little trite these days and I’ve plainly lost interest by the time I’ve come to draw the feet. That said, he is managing to flick the V sign and the Rock sign at the same time. 

This is another thing I drew for Deadline magazine, again it happened pretty much the way I tell it, though I can tell you that the artsy nom de guerre I adopted was Crispin Taylor (I think I’d been watching Crispin Glover in River’s Edge). But no, I never went and collected my art, what the hell was I going to do with it? 

This is an old cartoon. I drew it for Deadline magazine, which you may remember as the UK monthly that launched Jamie Hewlett’s career amongst other things. I had a page a month that they let me fill how I wished, and for a while it was a pretty sweet deal. I was ultimately bumped for reprints of the Los Bros Hernandez’ Love and Rockets I think, which seems as thoroughly reasonable now as it did then. Anyhow, I like this strip - it did actually happen to me and pretty much the way I drew it; the pub in question being the Moor Top in Heaton Moor. 

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 star.” 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 surreptitiously 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 apologises 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 about the shops so before heading home we call into 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 crossing all 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. 

Oh, and for the record, and about the record - that’s a sensational single. 

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