Alright, it’s not going to take too long to spot me is it? Sice is there as well, as is my twin brother, Calum. I can remember all of these names although not necessarily the faces. Mr McCurry (top left) used to be our form teacher as well as managing the school team. He used to smoke all the way through the lessons, lining his butts up on the desk in front of him. I’m convinced my indolence on the football pitch drove him to an early grave. Imagine Berbatov without the talent, that was me - a ‘fanny dancer’. Out there on the right wing I was quick, lightning fast, but easily distracted. I wanted to be good, don’t get me wrong, I just wanted someone to be good for me while I went about more important things, like watching Top of the Pops or reading girls books about gymkhanas and boarding schools.
I didn’t play after 1982. Oh, I would kick a ball around with Sice - I once scored the greatest goal ever scored by anyone within the fading light of a summers evening on a lonesome field in North Carolina. Sice will back me up on this - and we sometimes played a match on tour but nothing serious. Before each game, while somebody was sorting out positions, I would wander out to the right wing, light a cigarette and hope that nobody would pass to me.
Then, somehow, in 1998 Sice and I ended up playing a weekly game run by NME journalists in Regents Park, where, 450 years earlier; Henry VIII had spent many a fine afternoon popping royal caps in deers asses. The day before, I had bought a copy of ‘Michael Owens Soccer School’ video, sneaking it back to my flat for some late night revision. I fast forwarded through the warm up exercises, ridiculous, and drunkenly taught myself the step over with a cushion. On our way to the park Sice and I had to stop off at Oxford Street to buy some footy boots as neither of us had owned a pair for sixteen years. I, of course, bought the most expensive boots in the store. They had lights, three gears and the longest, most brutal metal studs you can imagine. We got to the park, it was a sticky evening, the going was good to barren and my studs were made from plutonium.
I fast forwarded through Sice and the others warming up. Ridiculous. I leant in the shade and smoked a cigarette idly going through the step over technique in my head. Then, while the captain sorted out the positions, I hobbled out to the dusty right wing - moving like I was wearing twenty four high heeled shoes - and waited. I didn’t have to wait long, the ball came to me almost immediately, I pushed it past the defender and ran, pulled a calf muscle, fell over and was sick. As I lay there, pulling bits of puke out of my hair, I saw the scout from Liverpool FC shaking his head sadly and ripping up a contract that had my name on it, slowly walked back towards his car. It was all over..
But then last year ( I didn’t intend to write any of this, I just put the photo up so we could all have a laugh at my hair) while we were staying in London I was strong-armed by my friend Pete to join his weekly Tuesday Night Crouch End Dads Astroturf Game down on Holloway Road. What could I say? It was his house, he held the keys to the fridge. So at the age of 39 I joined in with everyone as they warmed up before wandering out to shiver on the right wing. The ball came to me early again, I collected it, pushed it past the defender and…nothing. I looked down at my legs, wondering why they weren’t pumping down the flank like a pair of Stephenson’s pistons but they stared at me mournfully and shrugged (can legs shrug?) ‘You’re old now la’, they seemed to say ‘now fall over and be sick, nobody will mind’. I didn’t of course, I played on and accepted the fact that my main strength, my burst of speed, had gone - never to return. I played the holding game, even pulled off a couple of stepovers but was generally happy not to be too involved. I turned up for a couple of months until I found an excuse not to. And so into that long dark void of retirement, my trophy cabinet bare and not a punditry job in sight. The end of the road.
I guess that, reading the above on the day between Friday and Sunday, it would appear to be obvious, immutable even, that today was a Saturday but having been a freelance musician/illustrator (or whatever it is I do nowadays) for the past eighteen years every day is Saturday, every night is Friday night. That’s not necessarily a good thing. The weeks and months slip beneath one’s feet, blurring and drifting without the weekend anchor to root you to any kind of calender. The body clock is fucked, birthdays are forgotten and whole seasons are missed. Do we have seasons anymore? Yesterday was warm and sunny, I was waiting for Mary after swimming last night and people were out in short sleeves and the tiny skirts and yet there are Christmas Trees in the windows of many of the bars around Cardiff.
Christmas Trees? Wasn’t it August three weeks ago?
The reason today feels different is because we’ve had so much work this week. As well as the whole Bandstocks thing, I’ve had my illustration for the Times, a commissioned illustration to finish and a design/layout job for Los Campesinos that we accepted even though we’ve never done any layout work before and it meant having to put ourselves through intensive crash course lessons in various software we’ve never used. we did it though, finished last night which is why I feel light as a feather this morning. That’s not to say I don’t work hard normally, it’s just that my brain was having to work in a different way. We need as much work as we can at the minute, we’re about to go from being a freewheelin’ couple to being a family on low income. It’s exciting though, I remember trudging to work in Birkenhead,twenty years ago, thinking that my entire life was mapped out in front of me in a dismal grey, formless sludge. I was determined to find the escape hatch and I did, not having to go into that office every day, to work for people and concepts that were alien to me, is the single greatest victory of my life and even if I have to go back, if things don’t work out, then at least I have tasted the air on a weekday morning in February, with nowhere to go, no-one to see, no bells to ring and no buttons to push. Somedays I would alight at Hamilton Square Station and walk in the opposite direction, take the ferry over to Liverpool and wander the streets, looking in windows and dreaming in Squares. Is that what I want from my son? I have no idea what I want for him. To be safe, warm and happy, that’ll do for now.
I worked in the red building (top). A place so dull that this was the only image of it I could find on the web.
So this week I’ve been staring at my computer for twelve hours a day, I’ve got a permanent headache and I’m crazier than a shithouse rat but I know things that I didn’t know at the beginning of the week and that’s what it’s all about. I forgot to mention in my last post that I’d seen my friend Adam last week. Adam used to be in a band called Swervedriver who were one of my favourites at the time (’Ravedown’ still sounds amazing) and we are good mates. He’s lived in the States for the last few years and we haven’t seen much of each other but he was in Cardiff to mix his album with Charlie Francis and Mary and I drove over to Roath to hang out for a while and listen to some of the (ace) tracks he was working on. He invited us to the Swervie reform gig at the Scala on Tuesday but, despite us having been in London that day, we didn’t make it. We went back to Cait’s to pick up the last of our stuff and I had a meeting with my manager. We left Cardiff at about six thirty am, got to Cait’s around ten and then I spent three hours packing and loading the van. After tubing it to Farringdon and then Hackney Wick (to view a not very nice flat) we got back to Caits around seven thirty, completely fucked. Cait made us some dinner -she is such a great lady- and then I drove back to Cardiff getting in around eleven. I slept well that night.
Mary had some breastfeeding workshops this week which was good practice for driving to the hospital. Her belly is huge now and she’s uncomfortable but she’s working hard and I’m immensely proud of her. It’s her birthday on Monday and I have no money to take her out of buy her anything nice, that’s not a great feeling. I’ll have to put a ribbon around the cat.
Gareth from Los Campesinos came over on Thursday to go through the DVD booklet that we’re working on. He’s a lovely lad, he was telling us that he’d been watching old Top of The Pops clips on youtube which brought visions of The Regents, Tourists and Pan’s People to my mind but he was talking about Blur and Oasis! Eh? I’m more than twice his age, fuck. He was lamenting the fact that there has been no real credible scene since Britpop which I had always considered a laughable concept. Bad music with no positive or maverick agenda, an establishment scene. But he would have been seven or eight at the time and I was in my mid to late twenties and the whole thing felt very silly. Mind you, I think that Two Tone was a worldwide revolution when in fact it was probably two or three records and some fucking great badges.
A friend of mine is pitching for some monument sculpture thing in the Valleys somewhere and he’s asked me to come up with a six note melody for bells. I’m not even sure what he’s talking about. I said yes though, of course I did. Always say YES!
My friend Miki sent me a couple fo great youtube things this week.
