Wednesday 26 September 2012

A Life-Shaped Memory



I haven’t written anything in ages, mainly because I’ve been working shifts for a while and we haven’t been doing half as much as usual but, at least partly, because I just haven’t felt like it.  So, apologies to Jo Caulfield (the Cellar at the LBT last Christmas) and Sarah Millican (the Town Hall) – fantastic shows both, but the words just weren’t there.

It has been far from an uneventful year though and, finally getting back to some sort of normality and lying under my favourite Canary Island sun, some thoughts began to take shape.

The shape of a life.  Because it’s not just the famous who deserve an obituary.

 The tiny village of Manish stands by peaceful blue waters.

Economic migration is nothing new; the inter-war years saw an exodus of young people from the Outer Hebrides to begin new lives on the mainland or beyond.

At the beginning of the 1930s, Malcolm Mackinnon took his fledgling family from their blackhouse in the tiny coastal village of Mànais (Manish) on the Isle of Harris and settled in Scotland’s industrial heartland amid the coalmines and blast furnaces of the “Iron Burgh”, Coatbridge.

When war broke out in 1939, Margaret, the second of four daughters and a couple of sons, was 10 years old.  Consequently, while Malcolm worked in reserved occupation on the railways, she and her sisters spent a significant proportion of their adolescence in Anderson shelters.  However, although nearby Clydebank was blitzed, the Coatbridge ironworks which supplied the shipbuilders never came under direct attack.  

Wedding Day, 21 October 1949

By the end of hostilities, she had left school and was doing her bit for the family by working in a series of shop and office jobs.  A natural flair for numbers meant she always seemed to find herself in the cash office; so began a lifetime, as she joked herself, of counting other people’s money.

They may have been austere and trying times, but young love and hormones tend to find a way.  Margaret married Matt in 1949 and they began their own family with the arrival of Malcolm in the new decade.  Matt (Jnr) and Tina were to follow before the dawn of the 60s.

The new decade brought new attitudes and new possibilities.  The family were moved to a new, modern maisonette on the other side of town and the site of their original house was cleared to make way for tower blocks.  The biggest surprise of the decade, though, was the arrival of Tommy on a bitterly cold January morning just around the time the Beatles were discovering hallucinogens.

Her own mother died after an extended, painful illness and Margaret lost her faith in any higher power.  Where her other children had Presbyterian upbringings, Tommy would be guided but allowed to find his own way. 

Never having had the opportunity when she was younger, Margaret enrolled at night school and passed (comfortably) her Higher English exam.

By the time her youngest was going to school, her eldest was eyeing his own path, but it was around now that husband Matt began to suffer health problems with the first of a number of small heart attacks.  The optimism of the sixties seemed to crumble and, in sympathy, the masonry of the maisonettes, as collapsing mineworks caused subsidence and forced another house move.  

Silver Wedding
Margaret – increasingly “Maggie” – was undaunted; approaching every setback as a challenge.  By the time Tommy reached high school, she was grandmother to three and was helping Tina put the finishing touches to her wedding plans.

The 80s recession (which, her family never tired of telling her, she helped bring about by voting for her namesake in 1979) hit Scotland’s steel industry hard and husband Matt – whose company had found a suitable role for him as his health deteriorated – lost his job.  A latter day cottage industry soon sprang to life with Matt operating the knitting machine and Maggie sewing up customised items for, it seemed, every kid in Lanarkshire.  Tebbit, Thatcher and Heseltine would have been appalled at such black market activities, but fuck ‘em; Matt and Maggie knitted scarves and cardigans for a few pence over the cost of the wool, they didn’t order the sinking of  the Belgrano, the assault of striking workers at Orgreave or the Hillsborough whitewash.

Tommy left home at 21 and parted from his parents on Glasgow Central Station’s platform three with the words, you can have your lives back, now.  They’d invested 38 years in raising their family and deserved some belated quality time together.  When they got home, Maggie made dinner.  Matt scraped the cabbage into the bin saying I’ve set a good example for forty years, but I hate this stuff.  Never again, you hear me?!

Maggie retired from her final job (at Asda, in the cash office, inevitably) and they took their first foreign holiday (Matt had done his national service on the continent but neither of them had travelled overseas otherwise).  Then, finally, (in the 1990s!) they upgraded to a colour television.

Ruby Wedding
They “downsized” to one of the flats built on the site of the original family home, but then Matt’s health began to deteriorate rapidly.  He succumbed to cancer in 1994.

Living alone for the first time in her 65 years, Maggie did what she always had and drew strength from family.  Three of her four children and their children lived within ten miles; her branch of the family tree now spanned four generations. 

Not only that, but her siblings still all lived within the town and, once the initial grief was overcome, the four Mackinnon sisters became travelling partners, holidaying together around Europe.
Shortly after the turn of the millennium, Maggie saw her final child married, but her own health had begun to deteriorate.  Stroke did not debilitate her, but unforgiving, undiscriminating Alzheimer’s gradually robbed her of the faculty to look after herself, even with the help of her nearest and dearest.  Eventually, regrettably but unavoidably, she needed more specialised assistance than any or all of the family could provide; she saw out her final years in nursing homes.

It’s polite to gloss over the worst details of an illness which, by its very nature, is debasing of its victims, but Maggie’s latter days weren’t regrettable.  As her memories – all eight decades of them – collapsed into the present and she lost perception of time and history, as her always-fertile imagination embellished half-memories with impossible details, there were many moments of happiness; both for her and for those with whom she shared her stories.

When the end came it was quick and peaceful.  Maggie died on 22 March 2012.

She’d have been 83 today.   Happy birthday, mum.  Sweet dreams.



I wandered today to the hill, Maggie,
To watch the scene below.
The creek and the creaking old mill, Maggie,
As we used to, long ago.
The green grove is gone from the hill, Maggie,
Where first the daisies sprung;
The creaking old mill is still, Maggie,
Since you and I were young. 

They say that I'm feeble with age, Maggie,
My steps are less lively now than then,
My face is a well-written page, Maggie,
And time all alone was the pen.
They say we have outlived our time, Maggie,
As dated as songs that we’ve sung,
But to me you're as fair as you were, Maggie,
When you and I were young. 


Friday 3 June 2011

Huddersfield's Got Talent

Jimmy Carr - Laughter Therapy Tour - Huddersfield Town Hall, 2 June 2011

Jimmy Carr’s been in the business for over a decade, now, touring almost constantly. For the last five or six years, he’s performed about 250 shows per year in venues which hold between one and three thousand people. Where his peergroup (many of whom are unfit to recycle his cast-offs) have “graduated” to performing a handful of shows in horribly impersonal arenas, Jimmy has remained true to his craft and continues to deliver his material in an intimate setting on a near-nightly basis.

But, today, he might be regretting it because, this morning, Jimmy Carr woke up, gazed at his hotel ceiling, and remembered the night he was upstaged by a clockmaker, a pharmacist and a woman from the social security.

The Laughter Therapy tour rolled into town and proved to be a far more interactive affair than previous shows. For sure, Jimmy delivers the six-jokes-a-minute repartee that keeps us going back year after year, but both halves of this year’s show are built around his new experiments in audience participation; an interview with someone with an interesting job (enter Andy the clockmaker, a ball of alcohol-, adrenaline- and pure nervous energy-fuelled neuroses, to tell us about the £26k special limited edition he’s been making for Wills and Kate) and a contest to turn a punter into a comedian (Susie, the woman from the social would have won on any other night, but she had Benal (or Ben-Al, or maybe Bin Al – apparently his dad couldn’t spell it, either) to deal with.

As seen in The Huddersfield Examiner!

Benal’s a locum pharmacist who missed his vocation because a sizeable chunk of last night’s sold-out audience would pay good money to see him again.

Jimmy? He was Jimmy. If you read the HateMail or the Express, you think he’s the anti-Christ. Those of us who are already wondering when next year’s show will reach us just know he’s a contender for funniest -- and unquestionably the most consistent -- comedian of this golden age of stand-up.

Sunday 27 February 2011

Sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I got home from work on Friday, pottered about a bit then turned on the computer and pulled up Firefox.

My home page had changed.

Instead of the familiar red, black and white page which has greeted me every time I've gone online for over a decade, I was faced with multicoloured text and a message my brain couldn't process.

I read it again. And again. I looked for some handle on the joke. Then I realised there wasn't a handle because it wasn't a joke.

Then I swore. Lots.

No, I wasn't infected by a virus; my browser had not been hijacked.

The BASTARDS had closed us down.

The FUCKING BASTARDS had FUCKING closed us FUCKING down.

No FUCKING warning, nothing. Just FUCKING switched FUCKING off.

Guardian Talk, GUT, simultaneously the most interesting, stimulating, intellectual, trivial, infuriating and utterly insane website on the entire English-speaking web. No FUCKING more.

Our affair began in the same year I met my wife; millennium year. Internet access was a new thing at work and I was reading a story about the government's NHS plans on The Guardian's website when I found a link inviting me to "Talk About It Here!"

The Brave NewLabour World was young and what lay behind that simple order was a brand new soapbox where unrepentant, unreconstructed lefties like me could shout and scream to our hearts' content about and at liberals and conservatives, with and without capitals.

After lurking for a while, my first post was to answer a question about the Reynolds Girls on one of the quiz threads. "Tommy" was taken so I appended my favourite wrestling reference to create the user name I've used all over ever since. EvilWillow was the first poster to "talk" to me. One of my earliest posts was to ask what "Googling" meant (Alta Vista being the only search engine I knew).

Over the years I crossed metaphorical swords with worthy opponents (Hyuey of the ridiculous spelling; I never could remember what combination of "u"s, "y"s and "e"s to search under), utter wankers (PatLogan; an opinion on everything and knowledge of nothing), eccentric geniuses (Coshipi; who created an alternative persona which fooled everyone and then wrote a book about it - The Reminiscences of Penny Lane by Clive Semmens), thoroughly decent coves (JohnKnoxLives; churchman, Caley Thistle fan and pie aficionado), bizarre fantasists (BYFSeagulls; football casual or bored schoolboy, you decide), soulmates (uberpedant, with a gig attendance history to die for) and dozens upon dozens of good eggs (Kerebus, DirtyOrigamist, Tolstoy, BoogieBabe, Snazz, Moog & Princess, Policywatcher, Myrtletree, Jani, Culder, the late SueGeeGee and too many more to mention).

TommyDGNR8 was banned after an ill-advised comment about the reason for Sir Alex Ferguson's red nose but a "new" poster called SizeOfAnElephant mysteriously appeared and carried on discussions in his place. That is until mods' pet Rory grassed him up . A similar fate awaited CareCaseInAPaperHat, but TheScotsman (the diarist at that paper stole many of his stories from the football thread over the years) lasted until the (very) bitter end.

Our little community saw births, marriages and deaths; a genuine microcosm of the real world. The planet changed; 9/11 brought an influx of mad American republicans; the NewLabour dream turned sour; every twist, every turn was reflected in and filtered through GUT.

X-Factor was more fun when dissected online; Albion Rovers talk was as welcome if not moreso than Manchester United drivel; the regulars in the IT folder could solve just about any computer problem; there was always some trivia or nonsense to while away a dull half hour.

People suffering from depression, teetering on the edge of nervous breakdown, struggling with drink or drugs problems or coming to terms with bereavement; all were there, all were helped.

And at 5.30pm on Friday the 25th of February 2011, they turned it off.

Within hours, the Wikipedia entry for Guardian Unlimited carried a memorial;

In February 2011 The Guardian closed down their talkboards which had been online for over a decade. This was viewed as worse than a thousand Hitlers and widely regarded as being the internet equivalent of what Thatcher did to mining communities in the eighties.

It was also the view of most that The Guardian, in closing down the talkboard without warning or consultation, were a bunch of gritpypes.
That sums up the GUT spirit better than I ever could.

Within days, it had been removed, which probably says more about The Guardian.

Their paper's fucking rotten, too.

Sunday 6 February 2011

Death Is Just A Heartbeat Away

Robert William Gary Moore (4 April 1952 – 6 February 2011)

"Can you imagine having a Gary Moore poster on your wall? You might as well have a picture of a welder's bench."

It's easy to forget that the shambling wreck known as Ozzy Osbourne was, many years ago, entitled to say such things; a good looking lad in his day was young Ozzy.

I've never been a huge Ozzy fan, but I did have a Gary Moore poster. It was the promotional poster (you remember those big 6ft x 3ft ones they used to stick on any available surface?) for his We Want Moore! album, part of which was recorded on a freezing cold Valentine's night at the Glasgow Apollo.

Jim Robertson had just bought the Victims of the Future album after I'd played him the flop single Hold On To Love. We tossed a coin to decide whether to see Moore or Saxon. Biff and co remain one of the few bands I've never seen.

Much of Gary's career up until that point - and, consequently, a fair bit of that gig - had passed me by. I knew his Lizzy stuff and Parisienne Walkways but I left the Apollo that night knowing I had a new back catalogue to explore.

I was considerably more au fait with Gary's solo work by the time he returned to Glasgow, but the Apollo was history. The Run For Cover tour played the Barrowland and, in stark contrast to the previous one, was probably the sweatiest, bounciest, most memorable gig I've ever been to.

He was the reason I picked up a guitar. Knowing I couldn't do it like him was the reason I put it down again.

Another couple of hard rocking albums followed before Gary grew weary of the genre and drifted off into his first love, the blues.

In his later years, he distanced himself from the frenetic fretboard gymnastics I loved him for, but I harboured the hope that he might come back to us some day.

He won't.

Gary Moore died in his sleep while on holiday with his girlfriend. It's a rock'n'roll way to go, but he did it far too young.

Friday 4 February 2011

Clearing the Backlog

I've been sitting on a pile of half-hearted notes for weeks now.

I tried to clear my backlog at the start of the month, but my enthusiasm evaporated with the devastating news of Gary Moore's death and, for the first time in my life, I've been wrestling with writers' block ever since.

This weekend, though, this weekend I'm furious and it's helped blow off the cobwebs. Let's get you up to date.

We went to Rochdale (October 29th) to see the Jaggies at the Bar Mystique. When we got there, we found DB and the sound crew installing the PA in the pub downstairs, The Flying Horse. Turns out the staircase was too narrow to get the rig up so it was downstairs or nothing.

The pub wasn't a classic rock pub, the audience being more eight-pints-of-Stella-and-wotchoofookinlookinat? than we're accustomed to. The layout wasn't really live-act friendly, either; the guys being tucked away around a corner such that we could only actually see DB; not one we'd rush back to.







The following weekend saw us in the familiar and much more amenable surroundings of the Ashfield (November 6th); a good gig on the eve of my photoshoot with the band at Owen Towers where Alan's old workshop made an excellent setting for some new promo photos.







2010 was brought to a close with an appearance at Golcar's Junction One (December 5th), another rather-too-intimate venue which would be better suited to an acoustic set should the guys ever feel that way inclined.


Into the new year and Mark Steel (January 26th) started his 47-date "In Town" tour at the LBT. Two hours of solid laughs in which the 20 minutes or so of bespoke material more than made up for the stuff already familiar from his books. Great stuff.



A couple of decent Jaggie gigs to get the new year off to a good start, too.

Ings Lane (January 29th) is a thank-god-for-Streetview venue; I'd never have found it if I hadn't recce'd with Google's stalker-cam beforehand! Good venue, too, if a bit too keen on bingo.



The Rock Cafe (February 3rd)? Well, it's the Rock Cafe, isn't it? Drunken women. I got dragged up to dance. It wasn't by Linda. We'll say no more.

Then the Moore news came through.

(Posted 27 February)

Saturday 28 August 2010

Davey's On the Road Again - Jagged Edge Summer 2010



This, otherwise Jaggie-less, summer has been bookended by two outdoor shows.

The first, at Golcar Conservative Club (30 May) marked DB's return to the limelight (or, since it was a Sunday afternoon, daylight).

The car park of Golcar Tory club is about as un-rock'n'roll, as unglamorous a venue as you can imagine. Quite a feat given that it is (a) a car park (b) behind a Tory club in (c) Golcar; somehow, it still manages to underwhelm. They haven't even got the decency to have a picture of our new bum-faced overlord on display so I can recycle the Maggie joke which got me thrown out of the Airdrie and Coatbridge Conservative And Unionist Club in 1982*.

After 2009's no-show "barbeque summer", hopes are not high for this year's weather and we get a taste of what's to come when, about thirty seconds into Higher Place, the sun disappears behind the gathering clouds and leaves us shivering in the late spring winds.

She Don't Know Me is followed by old favourite (well it is for some people) Don't Want To Miss A Thing during which DB just about bursts. "Now I remember why we stopped doing that," he wheezes.

More than one voice inquires, "because you can't sing it?"

Ouch.

It's very much a feet-finding gig for Dave and the sun finally comes out for him again late in the afternoon; not soon enough to stop us freezing half to death, though.

My "Dann sounds even better outdoors" theory, though? Definitely holds up.

And so to the August Bank Holiday (28 August); "Outdoorfest" (how long did it take them to come up with that name? Ten seconds? Less? Did it sound catchy after 13 pints of Yorkshire Blonde?) at the Wills O'Nats. Guess what?

It's fucking freezing.

Seriously, who thought it was a good idea to hold a gig on the moors over Meltham? Even if the sun had been out and we were mid-drought, this was always going to be more windswept than interesting. The Wills O'Nats was specifically built to offer shelter to poor souls trying to cross the Hills. You wouldn't organise a barbeque at a bothy half-way up Ben Nevis, would you? Actually, whoever had this brainwave probably would.

We arrive in time to catch the last few songs from Sheffield's Top Gun. Singer Paul is marvellous and guitarist Mark is pretty damn good too. However, where the former looks like a rock star, the latter looks like an economics teacher (albeit an economics teacher with a Flying V). Musical highlight is an outstanding version of Boz Scaggs' Lido Shuffle, which is just the thing to get feet moving and hands clapping to ward off the cold. Sadly, the rest of their choices are a bit unimaginitive. They help me decide once and for all, though, that it's not the Jaggies' fault, it's just that Bed of Roses is an excruciatingly dull song. I'm shivering.

Good to have a word with Bob Wider who's come along to watch, but - doctor's orders or no - DB's back in front of his band.

He's found the Running Man jacket he last wore three or four years ago. It still looks camp.

Higher Place opens - DB's voice is better than he's sounded in a loooooong time.

By half-way through, my spine has started to contract in the cold.

No Miss A Thing mistake this time; we get...

At bloody last.

If DB had listened to me 5 years ago, Who's Crying Now? would, by now, have been a well-established highlight of the band's set. As it is, I doubt there's a better version of the song on the circuit; absolutely top-notch arrangement; excellent three-way vocals, note-perfect, faithful recital from Dann followed by an extended, improvised solo. It's a work of art, quite frankly, but hasn't Journey-fatigue set in in club land?

By now, my knees are starting to ache.

Thunder, then Dann excels as usual on Blue Collar Man. Big Dave blasts out Separate Ways.

The cold wins. We head for the car.

See you somewhere warm sometime soon, guys.





*Me(pointing to picture of the Wicked Witch of the West hanging behind the bar): I see you've found the right place for Maggie
Steward: How d'ye mean?
Me: Nailed to the fucking wall











Finally, the sun comes out on DB;





Monday 17 May 2010

Jason Manford - LBT, May 2010

Laughter's the best medicine.


If you've been paying attention (you have been paying attention, haven't you?) you'll know I was a bit low, but sometimes things just fall nicely.

We were away on holiday the last time Jason Manford appeared in Huddersfield and I feared we'd missed the last chance we were going to get to see him in the LBT - his star was in the ascendant; he was heading for bigger (and better?) things. Consequently, I wasn't paying attention and didn't notice this warm-up for his Edinburgh Fringe show until it was well on the way to being a sell-out. Our seats are therefore what was left rather than our first choice, but we're facing the stage, even if we're ~ahem~ slightly more elevated than we'd like.

It's a surprisingly long way down from the second tier; Victorian Methodists clearly didn't suffer from vertigo.

Actually, the first pleasant surprise of the evening comes even before we've reached our seats; Jason reckons a £5-per-ticket refund (on the already bargain £14 face value) is in order because the show isn't polished yet. Jessica spends several minutes studying the notes we've been handed, checking for signs of forgery; they're real.

Jason quickly establishes an easy rapport with the audience; there's no fear from the floor, no worry that he's going to humiliate anyone - he's just a mate who wants to chat. A postman on the front row gives Jason a chance to slate "modernisation", a couple of forensic science students from the Uni let him have a gentle dig at Polyversities ("Where did you want to go?") and - courtesy of their absent friend - students in general.

Armed with nothing more than a few reminder notes, he takes us through growing up; touches on politics, football, school, religion; nothing too challenging or threatening but all beautifully observed.

We're invited to offer up our favourite misunderstandings during the interval and this provides the kindling for a very interactive second half. A request for tellings-off from famous people encourages the ginger girl from the Jimmy Carr show...

...STOP PRESS...

I never wrote that up, did I? OK, very briefly then...

JIMMY CARR "RAPIER WIT" - Huddersfield Town Hall, 19 March 2010

Jimmy's Rapier Wit tour started about a week after his Joke Technician tour ended.

We saw him at the Town Hall and he was every bit as good as he was last time.

There was a ginger girl heckler who really didn't know when to shut up, no matter how many times Jimmy told her.

He didn't tell the amputee soldier/paralympic team joke.

But he should have.

Right, where was I? Oh yeah, a request for tellings-off from famous people encourages the ginger girl from the Jimmy Carr show to volunteer her bollocking. This has the effect of getting her heckled by someone else who remembered her. Jimmy Carr is trumped by Brian Clough, which is fair enough.

Jason regales us with his Royal Variety Show experiences then personal hygiene (or rather, lack of it) forms an unlikely subject for a bit. Jason is, in turn, impressed by Huddersfield's Christmas lights being switched on by Patrick Stewart then somewhat taken aback by our blasé dismissal of Jean Luc's "celebrity".

Finally free of the Peter Kay comparisons, Jason has carved himself a potential niche as a new century family entertainer; there's enough "bad language" to give him a little edge, but not so much that you'd hide the DVD from granny or all but the youngest children. Would it be unfair to call him a slightly-less-middle-class Michael McIntyre? Probably, not least because his age means that Jason is younger than the bulk of his audience.

Jason's tour proper is selling out multiple nights at three and four thousand seater venues and each and every person who pays their £20 will leave believing they've had value for money. Tonight, we got over two hours of stage time, with pretty much all-new, extremely funny material for nine quid. That's a bargain in anybody's books.