A Trip To Trumpton

My beloved and I went to Nottingham recently, to meet with people from the Internet. On the Friday night we saw some local band with them. I can’t remember what they were called, and seem to remember they were a bit bland, but they did look a bit like Right Said Fred, so they can’t be all bad. There was an indie pub quiz after that, but we slipped away with a Brazilian friend to go to a shoegazing club night called Sonic Cathedral. There were a couple of performers due. First up were Sennen, who were a bunch of younger lads playing the crazy shoegazing sounds they heard about from granddad. These were truly wonderful, delivering the kind of stuff you expect from people playing this kind of music – walls of sound, droney relentlessness, and barely noticeable vocals. So we loved them, in contrast to the beered up locals who complained about their not having a proper singer.

The next act was Mark Gardner, that attractive young fellow from Ride. He’s a bit older than he used to be and maybe has let himself go a bit, so I don’t think he’ll be showing up on anyone’s bedroom wall now. The actual performance was somewhat bizarre, in that Gardner was playing on his own, accompanying his vocals on an acoustic guitar. He played a variety of Ride and new songs. As you can imagine, old Ride tunes got the strongest reactions (somewhat to his annoyance), though they do lose something without the effects-driven arrangements of yore. Gardner did nevertheless try to counter all this by sampling his guitar playing and then looping it back and playing more guitar lines over it. This worked well on tracks like ‘Drive Blind’, but in the main I felt that the tunes suffered from the lack of guitar washes. So, oddly, the bunch of no-hopers called Sennen essentially blew their inspiration off the stage.

Then we got a bit *tired* and went back to our hotel. There we watched a bit of some amazingly bad film in which Michael Madsen delivered spectacularly bad dialogue.

The following night saw us attend a disco in the Rescue Rooms. We had our own room, the great unwashed had theirs, but there was some intermingling. Both DJs were a bit variable, but it was nice being able to go somewhere else when ours was playing shite like MJ Hibbett’s cover of ‘Boom Boom Shake The Room’ (unfunny ironist covers bad song by cockfarmer, rubbish results). It was particularly entertaining to join the lower orders while their DJ was playing ‘Seventeen’ by Ladytron, indeed, though we were drawn back to the room of eliteness when the DJs there took a rock direction. Somewhere on the internet there are pictures of me rocking out to ‘Jailbreak’ and ‘She Sells Sanctuary’, but I cannot share them with you.

The next day we met a big shot in Games Workshop for a power lunch, and then bought more records. After that we hung out that Welsh guy we’d met with Marc the last time we were in Nottingham, and to live the dream we made our way to the Olde Trippe To Jesulameee pubbe for pints. This is a very old pub at the foot of the hill on which the castle lies, in which crusaders used to go for a pint.

We also visited Birmingham briefly, checking out that roundy building and generally feeling that we were characters in a Dexy's Midnight Runner video.

There seem to be loads of Real Ale pubs in Nottingham. One day I will get my krewe over there for a real ale pub crawl. Nice.