Mike’s Pop Pilgrimages No.3 - Athens, Georgia

REM of course. And the B52’s. And Pylon I suppose, but REM mostly. I’ve wanted to visit for years. I remember old interviews with the band where they raved about the city. I grew up on REM and I stick by them even now, in their run-out-of-tunes twilight.

Athens is technically a city, but with the feel of a town. The vast campus of the University of Georgia sits downtown and the place fans out around it. I could tell it was a university town because I was the only one about at eleven in the morning and, sadly, the only one getting ready for bed come eleven at night.

In Starbucks the barista asked my name. I was caught off-guard and (in typical English reserved formality), I said, ‘Mr Gregory’. This produced behind the counter mirth, “Can I get, ahem, Mr Gregory a tall latte to go, please?” He bowed stiffly as he handed over my coffee and I left in red-faced embarrassment.

Athens has attractive suburbs. Away from the buzz of the university, hilly residential districts hide wonderful homes. I discovered pristine antebellum houses framed by manicured lawns and arcaded porches. There was a tree that owned itself and a great vegetarian grocery, and behind the cash register, the prettiest girl.

I did the REM sites. Weaver D’s Café with its Automatic for the People sign (now placed well out of nicking it reach), Peter Buck’s old house, the 40 Watt club. Outside the club a guy stopped me and introduced himself, “I’m DJ Zee” He was handing out flyers for the weekend with his buddy. He asked if I had heard of him and I said I hadn’t. He looked upset, so I told him I was from England. He relayed this data to his mate who looked thoughtful for a moment, then asked me if I knew someone in Swindon called Kenny.

Mike’s Pop Pilgrimages No.2 - Leonard Cohen, Chelsea Hotel, NY

Mike’s Pop Pilgrimages
No.2 - Leonard Cohen, Chelsea Hotel, NY

The man on reception seemed a bit put out, but reluctantly conceded we did indeed have a booking. “How did you hear about the hotel?” he asked. I said something that I don’t normally say to hotel receptionists, “From the Leonard Cohen song.” He nodded and brightened up, “We were trying to get Len (Len!) back for his 70th birthday. Not sure he can make it what with the Buddhism.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. A rest stop for rare individuals says the website which doesn’t explain much. It was the only place I wanted to stay in New York, but the online reviews didn’t exactly sell it. “I was scared to walk the corridors in case I got mugged” said one, “I got electrocuted by the shower” said another. I netted these minuses against a whole load of plusses from pop history. Dylans Bob and Thomas both had rooms here, Sid killed Nancy in another and Janis Joplin gave Len (as I now always call him) head on the unmade bed.

The whole place is stacked with art, it hangs on every landing and in many of the rooms. Some of it is great, but much of it is not great at all. Guests are encouraged to hang their own creations and the quality threshold leaps and dives on an ongoing basis. It is certainly unique and I spent one elevator ride trying to work out if the person squashed against me was male or female. There was barely enough room for two people, let alone his/her four yapping dogs.

We were up high on the sixth floor and the windows opened behind the neon sign, level with the ‘O’ in Hotel. I asked if anyone famous had lived in our room, “a writer” the receptionist said, but he couldn’t remember the name. The room was lined with empty bookshelves and decorated in faded everything. I asked a maid if she knew who the writer was. She thought he wrote science fiction and I was a little disappointed.

Mike’s Pop Pilgrimages No.1 - Nick Drake, Tanworth-in-Arden

Mike’s Pop Pilgrimages
No.1 - Nick Drake, Tanworth-in-Arden
I sat on a bench opposite the pub. An elderly lady was sunning herself. “Are you here because of Nick Drake?” she asked. I said I was, um, how did she know? “We can usually spot them,” she said as if there was a collective noun for pilgrims traipsing around Warwickshire looking for dead singers. She pointed out the church and Drake family home and told me about her new hip.

Tanworth was a one-bus-a-day kind of place. Pub, church, village hall. The pace of life was unhurried and the shops shut on Sunday. Sturdy Georgian cottages surrounded a tidy green, a war memorial sat in the centre, winter roses curled around its base. The village was almost the definition of slightly posh, Mail-on-Sunday England; the flesh of Nick Drake’s songs.

Drake lies buried beneath a beech tree in the churchyard of St Mary Magdalene. The gravestone was weather-battered and decked with dying flowers. The epitaph is simple, Nick Drake, remembered with love and the years of his life. The names of his mother and father are chiselled below, recent additions. Etched on the back are the words, ‘now we rise and we are everywhere’ two lines from the closing song on Pink Moon. I startled a cat, asleep against the gravestone and it followed me into the church. A brass plaque above the organ commemorates Nick’s life and music. The church was beautifully silent. The cat curled up on a pew, yawned and returned to sleep.

From the church, I walked to Far Leys, Nick’s boyhood home and the house where he died. Behind lie the Warwickshire hills, rolling middle England. The building is huge, austere; red bricked with thick square chimneys. It seemed too large and a little impersonal. Nick’s sister, Gabrielle always insisted their childhood was idyllic. I wondered how close a family could be in a house with so many rooms.

Serendipity in the West Midlands

Serendipity in the West Midlands
The discovery of art in the provinces is my 2005 ambition. Fuelled by finding a gallery devoted to GF Watts in a small Surrey village, I’ve started looking elsewhere for small-town galleries. So I went to Walsall.

Women called me ‘love’ which I liked, although I called them ‘mate’ back. In a caf’ I asked if the vegetable curry was vegetarian. The woman sized me up and said, “no it’s got a donkey in it, love.” Walsall also has a funky bus station full of glass and a podlike canopy. I gave the leather museum a miss.

The art gallery is four years old and purpose built to house a permanent collection. That collection is built around 40 sculptures and paintings from Jacob Epstein, augmented by a lovely Modigliani and hundreds of woodcuts and antiquities. Space is set aside for temporary shows, but the floorplan on these upper levels is too open and the canvases looked timid and out of proportion. The roof terrace confirmed my first impression of Walsall as a bleak industrial town.

New Kitkat Bar

New Kitkat Bar

Released on 7th March. It’s full of mango and passionfruit and I’m not sure what to make of it. The taste is confusing. It reminds me of the first time I watched the Crying Game and said, “phoar, wouldn’t mind a go on that” only to discover that all wasn’t as it seemed.

It’s a limited edition in a pink wrapper.

February:

February:
Teams: Boavista vs Leira
League: Portuguese Superliga
Entry Price: EUR 20
Programme: Dunno, guv
Stadium Architecture: Sturdy EURO 2004 Refurb

My new year’s resolution is to visit a new football ground every month. New means new to me rather than some newly-constructed soulless concrete box. But for February I combine the two, a newly-constructed soulless concrete box, but one I haven’t visited before.

Boavista are one of only two teams to win the Portuguese league outside the ‘big three’. A history that makes the Scottish league look like a free for all. They are the city of Porto’s second team and squarely in their shadow again after winning the title in 2001.

The stadium gleams on the outside, but inside is a little grim; anonymous backstairs, unpainted corridors, all drained of colour. A miracle at the bar, beer cans! But what the lord giveth, the dude taketh away. Sin Alcohol says the label and I howl into the night.

Electronic advertising hoardings delimit the entire pitch. They are thick and sturdy and attached to boot-up units, blinking furiously behind. I wonder if they distract the players and remember a Soccer AM third eye showing a sub warming up as an electronic car advert raced him down the touchline. I’ve never seen them from the back before and find them fascinating.

Boavista play in black and white checkerboard shirts in a stadium of white and black checkerboard seats. Perhaps when full, it wouldn’t matter, empty it makes your eyes dizzy. Euro 2004 came along with a big bag of cash and Boavista bypassed any architect fees and spent the whole lot on concrete and paint. It seems to have created a white elephant, albeit one with black checks.

The game is a nothing nil-nil and I try to remember the last time I went to a football match and could still feel my fingers and toes at the end.

First Love

Last lesson on a Friday is woodwork. In the workshop, thick with sawdust and the piercing whine of a circular saw, my heart is jumping. I am thirteen and have a date. Lisa is in my English class. She looks a little like Clare Grogan and that’s all I ever want in a girl. I watch the woodwork teacher and wonder what plans he has for the weekend and how dull they must be compared with mine.

In 1983, if you have a date with a girl who looks a little like Clare Grogan, you dress like this: Sta-Press trousers, chunky digital watch, button-down shirt and (fake) Sergio Tacchini jacket acquired from my dad’s mate, George. The aftershave doesn’t sting, because no shave precedes it.

I meet my mates first. We stand at the edge of the school fields, sucking on Marlboros and planning the weekend. We chat about our first love, football. Tomorrow morning we have an important game against Doddinghurst and our season hinges on its outcome. We walk slowly to youth club, not saying much, nervous and chain smoking. We understand the idea of arriving fashionably late and measure our step.

I scan the faces but Lisa hasn’t arrived. I think she has mastered this fashionably late thing. The room smells of its daytime function, all burgers and chips and grease. We hang around the DJ. The cool kids dance to the Selector and my polished brogues tap along, although really I prefer Haircut 100.

“There’s Lisa,” says my mate, nodding towards the Galaxian machine. Our eyes lock and I look away. In fact I take this aloofness thing too far and ignore her until the end of the evening. Then Lionel Ritchie comes to the rescue, and I pluck courage from the depths of my soul and ask her to dance to his crappy ballad. We shuffle around and touch lips. My first kiss. Hmm, feels OK. Euugh, she just put her tongue in my mouth! The lights come on and it is over too soon.

In the morning, Doddinghurst beat us five-nothing and I can’t care less.

GF Watts

GF Watts
Among the green waves of the North Downs and straight outta the tiny village of Compton is the GF Watts Gallery. No more than a coaching post between Guildford and Godalming, it is a quiet rural place with an extraordinary gallery. ‘Celtic Art Nouveau’ says the leaflet. We laugh, but cannot describe it better.

Watts was a product of the Victorian era. In the context of the times, his heart was in the right place and his wallet backed it up. He donated money to the poor and established Postman’s Park in a London churchyard; publicising tales of local heroics. He was once dubbed the English Michelangelo, something that pleased him initially and then stalked him forever.

As a painter he was prolific, churning out portraits and landscapes. He was a contemporary (and friend) of Ruskin, Burne-Jones and Morris and the Pre-Raphaelite style is in every pout and chiselled cheekbone.

The gallery and family chapel are both Arts and Crafts designs; every stone ripe for decoration and each door laced with iron. Watt’s second wife added the chapel after his first forage into marriage (with the actress Ellen Terry) was annulled. She was 16 and he, a little more experienced at 47. It didn’t last long.

Considering its location, on Saturday afternoon the gallery is packed. I’ve always thought this style of painting has an unfashionable stigma around it. Something to do with the forced morality behind some paintings or because Andrew Lloyd-Webber likes it. Here it works, perhaps because the last thing you expect to find in a village on the North Downs is a gallery full of Victorian melodrama.

Football Poetry

Football Poetry

Not sure if this has been linked before. Some of them are absolute cock, but not all.

THE FT TOP 100 SONGS 89.5 Skeletal Family - “Promised Land”

THE FT TOP 100 SONGS
89.5 Skeletal Family - “Promised Land”

The first of more than forty goth records in the top 100, this track was unanimously agreed upon by everyone at Freaky Trigger in some pub around Christmas. Two even sported tattoos of the band.

Skeletal Family were from Keighley in the West Yorkshire delta. They were never a Champions League goth band and most of their other records were tuneless arse. I know this because I have them.

As was the custom, the Skeletals were often asked if they were a goth band “No,” they said, “we write the kind of doomy music and silly bollocks lyrics that pleases us and if any socially inept bangle-arm freaks buy it, it’s a bonus.”

It was around the time of Promised Land that I came out. I asked my parents to switch off the TV, “Look, I’ve got something to tell you.” They shuffled together and smiled, their fingers entwined, “Mum, dad, I think I’m a goth.”

They were fine about it and had suspicions anyway. Their friends’ kids didn’t paint their nails black or listen to Gene Loves Jezebel.

Promised Land is a cracking song. It even dented the danker regions of the charts and the world was theirs for the taking. Well, not the world but a prestigious support slot on the Sex Gang Children tour. It all ended in tears and runny mascara as various band members listened to their own records and left the band in embarrassment. The crimped-up singer went on to form Ghost Dance who, she insisted, were not a goth band.