Neil Hopcroft

…thankfully I don’t smell like that any more…. A tale of 27 hours on the road, and some other oddities.

Theres a few things to catch up on before I get to setting off yesterday…firstly the Calling on Tuesday night, for which Cat (winolj), stompyboots and timsmith came to Cambridge. Good to see them all again – I’ve been too useless to keep in touch properly since I’ve been back. Though sad to hear of the quietness descending upon Oxford, come on people, theres things to do, just talk to each other…or, better still, come visit me…

Then wednesday I went to Milton Keynes to do some shopping – I start a new job on Tuesday so needed another suit, gotta look the part of highly-paid-consultant…its a strange place, nearly impossible to find sensible business suits, it seems that people these days only wear them to go out of an evening. Maybe thats just the people who shop in Milton Keynes. Eventually I found a handy machine-washable suit with a nice lining and short trousers. An inch short, but I often get annoyed about suit trousers being too long so I thought I’d get some that go the other way…

Depressingly trying on suits made me deeply aware of quite how large my beergut is getting. And I don’t even drink beer :( I knew waistcoats were a good idea. Or maybe I should stop with the pies.

One of the big halls in the main shopping centre there has been given over to hot-tub sellers, with a number of tubs laid out for passers-by to browse around and buy on credit….I sat in the John Lewis cafe watching the reactions of people, you can almost smell the commerce there, people obtaining liabilities and thinking they’re being so sophisticated.

In the evening was the Hibachi Dealers gig at the Moon on the Man, I arrived early enough to catch Didiac, the middle band. They were surprisingly good – a really beautiful dirty blues/rock guitar sound, like something that fell out the 50s in just the right way, following the trail blazed by Link Wray.

The Dealers were on shortly afterwards, running late due to a mammoth soundcheck by the bunch of hippies I missed. They play a nice mix of different songs, defying any attempt to genre-ise them. lark_ascending took to lead vocals very well, though it’ll likely take a few gigs to bed down the audience interaction she was doing a good job after being somewhat dropped in at the deep end.

And yesterday I set off for Stratford to pick up the bus for the gig in the evening. I got lost in east London, causing me to be running over an hour late by the time I got to Johns house. Still, he seemed reasonably relaxed considering. A quick check over the bus before driving it into the city to pick up the rest of the band and their equipment.

The drive north was relatively uneventful, and we arrived in Peterborough for a slightly late load-in. I left the band to it while I wandered off to find some food. And wandered. And wandered. In this town there is nothing but pizza houses full of children and fast food. I got as far as joining the queue in MacDonalds before feeling sick and having to leave. Eventually I found my way over to Asda, where I got some make-it-myself food to make do for the moment, before finding myself trapped in their car park – the arcade through which I’d entered their walled city had closed shortly after I’d entered, leaving no apparent way out apart from dicing it with the traffic or catching a taxi to the other side of the iron fence.

So I found a seat away from the skate kids and ate my lunch looking over the extensive car park – I’m so refined. After a while toripink and dmh came to rescue me from an eternity in the gated city. They took me to the Beehive, where we saw the extent of Daves ironing problem and fortified ourselves for our escape.

Breaking out of the enclave we made our way to the venue. Its an all-ages venue, with over-18s being given wristbands to show their eligability to buy alcohol. Its good to see the idea coming over here – I’ve seen it occasionally but it seems much more common in the States (from what I’ve heard). Indeed, the venue seemed nicely set up – with a large stage and a balcony upstairs (which was acting as backstage area), so many places these days have small stages tucked away in the corner, as if they hadn’t really thought about it until too late.

The first band on were thoroughly ignorable, if a touch noisy. The next guys up were enthusiastic but probably need to figure out how to look like they’re all playing in the same band rather than just having five concurrent soloists. Enthusiasm is no substitute for ability.

Finally Interlock hit the stage – things have moved on a bit since I last saw them. They’re a tight unit now, with wonderful banter going on between songs. And emmelinemay is a more gorgeous, glamous front for the band these days.

The drive back was again reasonably uneventful, though there was some spooky mist across the fields near our destination in Stratford, the moon was looking like something out of a horror film shining down on it.

This morning I drove back home, at last, what a lovely day, shame the aircon in my car is broken. Still, it did give me a chance to wind down the windows and put Carmina Burana on as loud as it would go – there are few better feelings. Though the mood was dampened rather by hitting traffic and crawling along next to a hearse with Johnny Violent blaring out, I didn’t feel quite so cool then.

And the ambient mood of the last few days has been generally depressed by annoyance at O2s inability to actually do anything useful – they were threatening restriction of service ‘cos I’d not paid the bill, but I’d not actually received the bill (lost in the post I fear), then completely ignored what I said when I phoned first time. Then second time they couldn’t find the payment I’d made and texted me to tell me that they were implementing the restriction…what is it with utilities these days, they don’t give you any time to actually make payments – O2 pointed out that I’d been given 48 hours to make a payment before following it up further, but actually most of that was consumed by the post office, and I doubt that even if I made a payment immediately I received the reminder it would have actually reached them within the remaining 24 hours. Its like they assume anyone they send bills to isn’t actually interested in paying them until they’re receiving court summons.

…but lightened again by talking to someone I feared I’d accidentally insulted irreprably to find thats not the case.