Another exciting weekend in Leeds

once again here i am throwing my efforts into kick starting the perpetually still-born offspring that is my blog.

this weekend, as with most, i was in leeds visiting maz and friends. we got off to a good start on the friday; a short but sweet trawl through a miniture mutated otely which ended up at the brude and then subculture for some much needed idioteque. not too shabby. happy birthday to gareth by the way and thank you for an epic excuse for such a knees up!

saturday rolled round as did an eventful day of food and frolics. we headed off to popinas for some breakfest. we'd originally set ourselves the challenge of getting down for food at 11am, ignoring the our heroics of the night before. we ended up getting down for 1ish only to find bryony (of maz's, soon to be renamed band, little bear fame) tucking in having waited for half an hour for us. we were, and still are, terrible, terrible people.


popinas is a magical place and home to some of the best unhealthy but very delicious full englishs a student can afford. popinas is also home to the mega challenge breakfast. before i describe what this is, what it is made up of and that i took the challenge upon myself and bettered it like some obese greed fiend i must, for reasons of mild embarressment and memories of a tubbed up childhood, broadcast this personal notice of excusement. i was very hungry and hadn't eaten properly for around, if not over, a week. it was pretty much life or death stuff. honest.

so the challenge itself as described in ridiculously ebellished detail; a whole pig (3 sausages, 3 rashers of bacon), a field of baked beans in an ocean of tomato sauce, two slabs of friend bread, a hattrick of eggs, a wheel of black pudding with a forest floor's worth of mushrooms and a tower of toast. i also got a cup of, i mean... one vat of, tea. sadly, it wasn't as huge as i am making out and though i managed to demolish it without too much effort there was a fair bit of embarressed guilt lodged between the oil assaulted bread and squeeling former farm yard resident. i realised the two family holidays to florida from a good few years back had severely and permenantly damaged me as a human being. that my eyes were not shocked at the, by all rights and laws, giant plate of food now pouring it's cholestoral-led form throughout the best parts of my arteries, was a grand illustration of the post traumatic stress-esque, vietnam veteran-a-like, cold, desensitisation upon my appetite after the massacres i had witnessed, first hand, at the war torn abattoirs of the american highway-side breakfast buffet diners. i still wake up in a cold sweat some nights with my mouth tasting like icing coated beef and sprinkles. you weren't there mannnn.....

once the plate was cleansed with my weapons of mass consumption (a knife and fork) i watched the board on the wall be corrected. now, 251 people out of the 640-something who had attempted had completed the challenge. someone played a trumpet and we held a short silence in honour of those who had not made it before me.

i retired from the field of conflict a victor and set off to bradford for the day with our assembled motely crew. getting off the train i thought i'd fallen into a leeds based artist's impression of central manchester. like picadilly gardens smudged with millenium square. we headed off to the film museum which, although a really great and interesting excursion, was surprisingly free of any film although there was a hell of a lot of exhibits on the history of tv and animation which was quite entertaining. the museum shop was full of shelves upon shelves of unrelated rubbish yet we all seemed to spend more time and attention to each individual product than we did with any of the sets, props or machines on offer in the museum proper.

before we set off to our final destination, a friend's gig at the university of bradford, we went for a curry at omar's. i couldn't reccomend the place enough. they have naan breads so big that they could, and almost did, drive a man insane. we accidently purchased so much naan we had to fill a bag with the massive surplus which we later used like some doughy, breaded alternative to popcorn at the journeys to and from, and at, the gig.

bradford university is quite an odd place. a bit like the scarborough campus i frequent but both more established and developed yet also less polished and prepared. the accomodation blocks look like old people's homes and the SU bar is like those weirdly tense vistor's canteens at bad hospitals and infirmaries. the venue we were walking too was down a hill that looked more like a dry ski slope in a converted mill. our friend, mike, was playing under his banner of model warships supporting vic goddard who was apparently a big deal in 1976 having played with the pistols and the clash.

the mill had obviously be turned into the theatre department's block and the room the gig had been put on in was a black walled, de facto drama studio but with some dozen pretty, spartan light blubs dangling over the corner of the room the performers did their thing. it was quite a strange set out. we managed to accidently walk through the back stage and dressing rooms before realising we had to leave the building and find some obscure stairs before we could get anywhere close to the stage room.

model warships opened the night. i'd heard a lot of his recorded material but it was the first live performance i'd caught. it had emotion, drama and a strangely welcome petulance that demanded you at least pay some lip service attention as i imagined much of the vic goddard-waiting bodies were. i however enjoyed it a lot. it was a bold and stimulating performance that ripped an emotional reaction straight out of me. very raw and at times lacking shape but full bodied with a strong character and fire to back up any lapse in concentration or coherent direction. i only wish i had a night i could give him in scarborough where people would actually appreciate it and not get all confused, perhaps scared, start screaming and run to the hills.

i had to leave the room after mike's set. the second act was plastic fuzz or something; a one man band of synths, acoustic guitar and the like who'd completely carbon copied get cape's look whilst musically apeing beck for the entirity of his performance. he had a 4 cd mega album for sale of his stuff. so eager to please yet phoney and fake; such a stark contrast to the first act's honesty. plastic fuzz was just that... a garbled mess of synthetic, artificiallity that you could try to bury in your garden in an attempt to force decomposition, only to find that the PVC outer shell has strangled your plants' roots and killed them all. all you'd have left is the shiny shiny of the PVC jutting out like a crude oil-derived headstone insulting the corpses of the flowers all around.

would you then hand to your loved one the hapzardly excavated imitation plastic in attempt to replace the cold, dead flowers you were going to send instead?

the headliner, vic goddard, was a strange mix. musically terrible but on a personal level, amazing. if you were viewing his set as a purely musical performance it was sloppy, the least tight act i'd seen since my very first local band night. the first saving grace that held my attention long enough for the personal to come out was that their bassist was the spit of matt berry, the man with the greatest voice in the world. bring on the trumpets, volcanicity, you and he were buddies etc. etc. if you don't know of him youtube: "doctor sanchez dark place".

the band's set lurched from vic's early punk stuff from the late seventies, into what is probably his stab at experimentation and expanding and then the final act of a bad chas and dave rip off. the first slice was fair enough. it was rough and ready and very apart but it worked. it was 1st wave punk and it wasn't meant to be technically excellent. i could enjoy it as that. the 2nd portion of the set was when the afformentioned comedy kicked in and was the majority of what he played. i swear one of the songs sounded like something out of the matt berry/rich fulcher show "snuffbox". my suspicions were only reinforced when the matt berry-a-like really seemed to go for it during. maybe this was one of his many hobbies? or community service for whiskey relateed shennagins inflicted on poor old punks?

as the third chapter reared it's unfortunately, half baked rockney head, i headed outside once again for some fresh air. in the process of chilling outside i managed to offend some anally retentive idiot of a security guy due to his age. he asked me whose playing, i explain it's a punk guy from the seventies, we both agreed neither of us were alive back in the seventies after which we should of gone our seperate, pointless small talk deflected ways. instead, i smile, smiling in the way you do to encourage to someone to continue to talk, a small dose of positive feedback if you will to lube up the awkward wheels of conversation with people who obviously have nothing in common with you. this, i find, in the university security management circles of bradford means you're taking the piss. he got all upset and marched inside looked confused. comically retarded.

we head back into vic's set and he's playing a song called blackpool that sounds like a mix between margate and parklife. this just frustrates me as it's not as fun or good, respectively, as either and my brain begins demanding reality turn it into one of the two. all in all, a pretty weird set from a supposed "cult icon" of the punk circuit. it was charming but laughable with no substance or togetherness. more like watching a contrived yet still enjoyable disney-ed up documentary about a man with no finger tips who becomes the international tiddly wink champion due to sympathetic early retirements from the other competitors than actually achieving victory over any of them.

sunday brings us lars van trier's dogsville, bean tajine, red wine and an epic facebook battle against casual racism. all of which were entertaining in varying degrees and forms. i'd reccomend them all for anyway with little to do on a sunday!

that's it for now.