Sat 11 Nov 2006
His Eyes Were Ker-azy!
By jrwi
OK, I’ve fallen a bit behind with all this blogging lark, and I’ve completely failed to write about some real primo blogging material that I’ve been experiencing or thinking about in general. One such subject was the Sparklehorse gig I had the pleasure of catching at The Royal Northern College of Music (or The Royal College of Northern Music as was suggested by Ian, and which I can’t stop thinking of it as since he mentioned it). The gig was weeks ago (20th October as a quick glimpse at the ticket still magneted(?) to the filing cabinet next to me reveals), and I’m no reviewer even when the events are still fresh, so I won’t be able to give an objective and insightful criticism of the gig here, but I will say that it was fucking great. I’d been reading some live reviews of the latest tour before we went, and they’d been widely slated as being lack-lustre with poor sound, but that’s not the impression I got. The sound was great (as you might expect for a gig at the Royal College of Northern Music, for fuxsakes), and the gig seemed to be over before it had really got going, which is only a good sign if, in fact, it had actually got going. A time check showed that they’d probably played for a good hour and a half, giving a wide range through the back-catalogue plus a good chunk from the latest album.
The thing which struck me most about the music was how different the songs were from the recorded material in most cases, with the possible exception of the new songs from Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain
There’s a long story behind why we didn’t catch the support slot at the gig, but it’s quite embarrassing and the short version is that we’re incompetent at many things and in this particular instance it was cartographical incompetency which was a major contributory factor, although inability to follow simple instructions also helped (or hindered, whatever). To give you a flavour, we started badly by failing to follow the AA route which really should have taken us directly to an NCP car park about 100 yards from the venue, and ended up parking in the NCP at the MEN Arena. Ian was confident that this was the best plan, as we could then easily hoof it to the venue using his intimate knowledge of the rain-swept streets of happy town to get us through the city centre, whereas we may never find our way off the ring-road ever again if we didn’t take our chance and park there… As anyone reading this, even those who’ve never even heard of Manchester or the MEN Arena (whatever that is) will already be very aware, the NCP at the MEN Arena (the what?) is as far away from the RCNM venue on Oxford Road as it’s possible to be and still be considered actually in Manchester City Centre, so this was a bad start. Then, it turns out that Ian’s encyclopedic knowledge of the city centre is actually more wikipedic and based on a handful of unlikely adventures around Canal Street whilst, presumably, poppered off his ample tits and pretending to be a gay lord. Anyway, even once we’d found Oxford Road, which, to be fair, didn’t take any longer than about an hour and a half, could we find the venue? Obviously not. Oxford Road actually goes to Oxford, it turns out. It is the longest road I have ever seen, long enough to reach the moon and back twice. We know this because we traipsed up and down it’s length probably 4 times or so. Our friend, Dan, whom we were meeting at the venue in the original plan, was having similar troubles and had also ditched his car *somewhere*. After several phone calls and asking a police man the way, we agreed to meet him outside the BBC near the city centre end of Oxford Road, a rendezvous to which we trudged wearily after stopping for a fortifying rest-and-whisky at what I’ll loosely describe as a pub, about 4 miles from the town centre (actually, I suppose it was more like 1/2 a mile, but, you know). We’d eventually reached the BBC and waited for a few minutes (now approaching the time that we happened to know the band, that is, Sparklehorse, were due on stage) when Dan called back again.
- Dan: I’m at the venue!
- Me: Oh, right, well, where is it?
- Dan: I don’t know…
- Me: Huh? Well, how did you get there?
- Dan: I got fed up and got a taxi!
- Me: WTF?! You were supposed to be meeting us! OK, so, what can you see?
- Dan: Nothing.
- Me: Oh, Christ. Well, can you see… [runs through a list of obvious local landmarks, such as fuck-off massive hotels with blazing neon signage and gargantuan and vulgar nightclubs with slappers stood nearby - Dan never misses slappers]?
- Dan: No
- Me: Well, is it near the BBC?
- Dan: I dunno. Oh, the band are starting now!
Gee, thanks. Why the fuck didn’t he pick us up in his taxi en route you and I are asking ourselves.
So, we got a taxi, too. It didn’t quite drop us off 20 yards along the road from where we hailed it, like something out of the Simpsons, but it wasn’t far off. It turns out that the main entrance we needed wasn’t actually on Oxford Road at all, although the building certainly had one side on the road. It turns out we’d walked past it and the large sign on the side several times, but the whole Oxford Road facia was completely shrouded in scaffolding, utterly obscuring the sign to us as we walked below it. Also, and here’s the cartographical balls-up previously alluded to, as we’d been walking down Oxford Road there were the occasional local maps on the side of bus shelters, with the RCNM clearly marked – just keep going along here, past the university campus and on the left. No problem, easy, we were on the right road and everything. Erm, except that the map was upside down. Yes folks, at 33 years old, we haven’t got a fucking clue.
So we missed the support band. I have however bought their album, The Bells of 1 2
edit: I’m just listening to the album again now. You should buy it even if it’s just for the track ‘Slo Fuzz’. Seriously. Buy it.
