Week 40 – Saturday 1st & Wednesday 5th October – Pete
& The Pirates + Gruff Rhys – The Cooler, Bristol + St. David’s Hall,
Cardiff – £9 +£15
Part One - Pete
& The Pirates
“Big Jeff has left the building. . .”
We’ve somehow stumbled into the final quarter of the year,
and began it with a double Gigaweek. Twogigsaweek if you will. Now there’s a
frightening concept.
Everybody loves double Gigaweeks don't they? Both of you. Twice the adventure, twice
the excitement, twice the Sandro? Thankfully not, as the bearded one was only
present for the second of Week 40’s gigs.
The day after Sandro and I had risked a trip to Swansea to
see The Subways, I was back on a
train, this time heading to Bristol with Cousin Bish, to see Pete & The Pirates. They’d
entertained Sandro and I back in April, and since then I’d let their second
album One Thousand Pictures sink deep
into my impressive consciousness.
The recent heat wave had continued, with temperatures in the
mid-20s, so we were lightly toasted on the train. With hardly any windows to
open, dehydration and heat-exhaustion were serious concerns.
Fortunately, I’ve seen my share of Bruce Parry in my time,
so I knew some key survival skills. I opened Cousin Bish’s bottle of water and
shared the contents generously with him, probably saving his life in the
process. We also avoided scurvy by sharing some of my Terry’s Chocolate Orange.
-------
Our destination in
Bristol was a venue called The Cooler
which was new to both of us, and can be found on the steep hill of Park Street.
This was slightly troublesome, as I’d been limping like a pegleg due to a calf
injury. We stopped for a pre-gig rum at the Bristol
Ram, before a very short stroll up the road took us to the venue.
The Cooler’s a fairly small venue, with room for a couple of
hundred or so and it was fairly busy when we arrived. A band called Ulysses were playing at the time,
however our interest was only on the Thatchers Cider we’d quickly bought, so
I’ve no idea if they were any good or not. It was very interesting cider
though.
The next band, Glass, weren’t half bad at all. Cousin
Bish noticed that although the venue was half full (I thought it was half
empty), it was easy to spot a familiar face up front. A huge figure with a
pirate’s beard and barnet, was rocking away wildly on his own in the front row,
putting all other aspiring moshers to shame. It was of course, Bristol’s very
own Big Jeff, shaking his mop without a care in the world.
Cousin Bish and I had
a few cares of our own, particularly regarding transport. The last train to
Cardiff from Bristol was at 11:00 and Pete
& The Pirates left us sweating as they only appeared on stage at ten to
ten, which wouldn’t leave us with a lot of room to manoeuvre.
-------
We’d moved towards the middle of the crowd and were sweating
profusely by this point, even though I’d learned the lesson of the night before
and worn my shortest shorts.
Cousin Bish and I were both equally impressed by the talents
of Pete & The Pirates.
“They’re greeaat!” I declared, dreaming of frosties.
“They’re greeaat!” Cousin Bish agreed.
“Ahoy! They arrrghh!” I added, embarrassingly.
“Ahoy! They arrrghh!” Cousin Bish echoed, before scoffing
down a cracker.
They were on for nearly an hour, mostly playing songs from
their second album, but dipping into their debut for beauties like ‘Mr Understanding’
and ‘Knots’. As we cheered our
approval, Cousin Bish turned to me with a horrified expression on his face. In
turn, I was equally horrified at having to look at Cousin Bish’s face.
He’d clearly seen something that had troubled him deeply.
“What is it lad?” I asked in concern. Cousin Bish then told
a harrowing tale regarding an unidentified member of the crowd.
“You won’t believe it,” he said, suppressing tears. “I just
saw a man at the front, reach into his own nose, claim some green gold and gobble
it up!”
“What’s wrong with that?” I asked, before remembering
myself. “I mean, urggh, I’d never do that at a gig. . . I mean, I’d
never do that.”
Pete (who of course, isn’t called Pete) and co clearly
hadn’t noticed the treasure hunter and continued unabated, finishing their main
set with the wonderful ‘Half Moon Street’.
They left the stage but everybody in the crowd remained, expecting an encore.
Everybody except Big Jeff, who walked the plank and left the
building, his timbers having been suitably shivered.
-------
The Pirates returned for a long rendition of the pounding ‘Blood Gets Thin’ to finish for good, leaving Cousin Bish and I
impressed, but with less than twenty minutes to get back to the station.
We decided against trusting
a taxi driver and travelled on foot instead. I took off my flip flops and peg,
putting on a brave face through the pain, and we ran like the clappers. Slow
clappers.
We found ourselves
two minutes away with only a minute to spare. As we entered the home straight,
a girl with an eye patch who was walking away from the station stuck her oar
in.
“Why are you
running?” she asked intelligently.
“Why are we running
towards a train station? I think we may be trying to catch a train.” Cousin
Bish replied patiently.
“The trains have all
terminated, they’re not running anymore.” she said.
“Why?” we asked in
horror, coming to a halt.
“Because they have!”
she shrieked, which was when we started to lose faith in her reliability as a
source for information, “. . . and it’s late.” She may have been drunk.
“Bore off!” Cousin
Bish replied, starting to run again. “Keep your nose out of it you silly cow!”
he called over his shoulder in gentlemanly fashion.
For some reason she
didn’t take kindly to those words, and called after us with a stream of
unrepeatable abuse.
We sped into the
station at 11:01. We were late.
This, however, was
one of those rare occasions when we were grateful for a train being late too.
Unfortunately, we
didn’t quite have enough time to run back out of the station and barrack the cowardly
cur who’d delayed us, so we raised the Jolly Roger and set sail to Cardiff. On
a train.
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