“Wait, what does Selena Gomez sing again?”
Following the sweat-fest that was The Subways, I’d spent most of the week in bed, suffering from a deadly sickness. This was no man flu, there was vomit and everything. Rumours of Diarrhea are not to believed, I always change my boxers twice a night. And for such a severe illness, what could be a more perfect cure than a gig? Yep, medicine.
Our second gig of the week involved a trip to Bristol to see golden oldies Gomez rather than the Bieberphile herself at the O2 Academy. Sandro and I were once more in the illustrious company of Gavlova, and the revered P.Mushy (he’s won awards you know). The four of us took a train to Brizzle and met the delightful Cousin Bish near his workplace (a street corner). We let him finish off his last customer, and headed for a quiet drink at The Shakespeare Inn, a tiny but historic pub around the corner. Apparently, Andy Shakespeare himself once drunk a pint of ale there. I know, I don’t believe it either.
As I was still slightly ill, I was sensible enough to stay off the dodgier sauces, such as the ominously named Butcombe Bitter, and instead joined Cousin Bish in a gentle, rough cider. We then made the smart decision to go and sit outside another historic pub in Bristol’s Centre called The Old Duke in the pouring rain. Once we were suitably soaked we went across the road for a slice of the green, green grass of home at the leaning Llandoger Trow, which somewhat surprisingly, is an historic pub. Wetherspoons eat your heart out.
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Even more interestingly, we then ate at Subway before dodging the rain and settling around the corner from the O2 at a place called The Greenhouse, which is neither a greenhouse or particularly historic. I started to have a sneaking suspicion that this was turning into a bit of a bar crawl, so I downed my pot of soil, and we headed into the venue. My misgivings proved well founded as we discovered we’d missed Gomez’s first song.
Sandro has been a Gomez fan for as long as I can remember (since yesterday) and saw them for the first time over a decade ago, which is a sign of his and their age if nothing else, while P. Mushy and Gavlova are both in love with Ben Ottewell and his gravelly voice. The lovable Merseysiders also boast two other great singers in Ian Ball and Tom Gray, and a great deal of variety in their music, with an experimental edge and elements of blues, folk, indie, indie-folk-blues, bluesy-folk-indie and other genres that I don’t know the name of but could probably make up.
The band released their seventh album, Whatever’s on Your Mind, just a few days earlier, and they unsurprisingly turned to it tonight more than any of their others, including their mercury prize winning debut album Bring It On. There was room for material from each of the seven with an early highlight of the set being How We Operate’s ‘See The World’, complete with a crooning Ottewell, which saw P. Mushy’s underwear flying towards the stage. I was a little disappointed not to hear Tom sing ‘Girlshapedlovedrug’, which is a personal favourite of mine from the same album, but perhaps more surprisingly there was also no room for fan favourite ‘Get Myself Arrested’.
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Overall Gomez were very impressive musically, and are clearly a much more experimental and complex band than The Subways are, but the gig didn’t quite have that same spark that there was at The Globe last Saturday. Of course, it was always going to be a very different atmosphere and it would have taken a fool to expect to see half-naked men smashing into each other like bumper cars, but I am a fool, and I was kind of hoping for such scenes. I can appreciate a mellower mood and musical talent as much as the next man, but when the next man is Sandro, you just want a bit of craziness.
Things definitely picked up toward the end of the gig with recent single ‘Options’ leading into ‘How We Operate’, before an awesome rendition of ‘Whippin’ Piccadilly’ to close the main set. They returned and finished for the night with another oldie from Bring It On in the form of ‘Get Miles’, which meant more huskiness from Ben and further attempts by Gavlova to get his knickers off. We left with a dilemma: to go home to the comforts of Cardiff, or brave the bustle of Brizzle. We made the right decision and went to The Hatchet, a pub opposite the O2 with a beauty of a beer garden.
After some heavy drinking that left Cousin Bish in tatters, we found ourselves in a race to catch the 1:30am train home. The alternative was to wait until 6am for the next one, and I didn’t fancy spending the night in Start The Bus. Despite my best efforts to leave Cousin Bish behind (he was propped up in the beer garden sleeping soundly), Sandro heroically clambered through the hazardous bush and raised him.
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The clock was against us. It was nearing twenty past one and it looked for all the world as though we would miss the train, but then from nowhere two bright lights shone out. Could it be? Was it a mirage? Was that sick on Cousin Bish’s shirt? Yes, no, and yes. It was a taxi! It would still take a bit of luck and reckless driving to make it to the station in time, but this taxi driver’s middle name was Luck. And his surname was Reckless Driving
With three minutes to spare we arrived at the train station, and I turned to our saviour. “Thank you Luke Luck Lan Reckless Driving! I take everything negative I’ve ever said about your race back,” I said,
“You’re a racist? But I’m white too,” he replied,
“I mean taxi drivers,” I told him,
“What’s wrong with taxi drivers?” he replied, sounding offended, but I had no time to explain, so I just threw a generous tip of twelve pence in his face and ran.
All of us except for the watchful Gavlova were asleep within minutes once we’d boarded the train, and our safe journey homeward was underway. Unfortunately there was still a twist in the tail. As I’d found out as long ago as week 5 in our epic adventure, a 1:30am train to Cardiff from Brizzle is no place for drunken sleeping, the conductors don’t like it when you wet yourself, and you will be kicked off the train once it terminates. A taxi home at 2:30am can be even more perilous as Cousin Bish found out the hard way. The journey claimed the single thing that he plays with more than anything else: No, not Lengthy, it was his iPhone.
When he woke the next morning stinking of sweat, beer, vomit, and presumably urine, he realised what he’d lost, and was devastated. More importantly, the real loser was me (as Sandro keeps saying). Cousin Bish is due an upgrade of his iPhone in a few months, and he’d generously promised me his current handset, and thus a chance to offload my Nokia 0010 once and for all.
Once I found out the terrible news I sent him an unsympathetic and furious text, but the selfish bastard didn’t even reply. . .
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June
4-10 - The Subways & Gomez - ✓
11-17 -?
18-24 - Glastonbury
25-1 - Glastonbury
4-10 - The Subways & Gomez - ✓
11-17 -?
18-24 - Glastonbury
25-1 - Glastonbury
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