The Pogues, Birmingham Academy, 16th December 2007

I went to see The Pogues the other week. Really, I did.

I suppose I should write a review or something, but it all seems a bit redundant. A Pogues gig is everything you'd expect a Pogues gig to be, only moreso. It was boozy, bawdy, boisterous and - by bloody bejaysus - it was a whole lot of fun.

This wasn't the first time I'd seen them live, and it won't be the last. At least, I pray God it won't be the last. Shane turned 50 on Christmas day and has spent most of those years living on a diet that would make Dr Gillian McKeith question her faith. He and the lads [sadly minus the great Philip Chevron, recently diagnosed with throat cancer] belted out their Anglo-Irish splicing of Irish folk and punk rock like they've always done: with demented passion and shambolic gusto.

They'd mixed things up a bit since the last time I saw them. This time around there was less reliance on their excellent mid-80s masterpieces Rum, Sodomy & The Lash and If I Should Fall From Grace With God. Amongst other things, the capacity crowd were treated to blistering renditions of 'Boys From The County Hell' and 'Streams of Whiskey' from Red Roses For Me, 'Summer in Siam' and 'Sayonara' from Hell's Ditch and 'Rainy Night in Soho' from 1986's Poguetry in Motion EP. There were others, I'm sure, but I'm relying on memory here. This was, after all, a Pogues gig. You don't take notes at a Pogues gig, let alone remember much.

But while there was a welcome extension to the catchment area of their setlist, in all other respects it was business as usual. They're not the kind of band who do radical reimaginings of their classics. You won't hear 'Fiesta' delivered a capella or a 180bpm drum'n'bass 'Dirty Old Town'. No, The Pogues give their audience exactly what they want - and why shouldn't they? This was, after all, a nostalgia gig. And don't be getting sniffy about that: if a man can't wallow in unbridled nostalgia at this time of year - with the band who were responsible for The Greatest Goddamn Christmas Song Ever - than when can he?

The atmosphere, of course, was wild and incandescent. It always is when The Pogues play, but this time it felt even more intense. At times it seemed more like a football match than a gig, although that might have something to do with the recurring chants of "One Shane MacGowan, there's only one Shane Mac-Gow-an" to the tune of the Macarena. You get a lot of that at Pogues gigs.

You also get a lot of drinking. Not that I'm being judgmental: I did a lot of drinking, too. It wasn't really an evening for the cappuccino crowd. But as I found myself caught up in the booze-fuelled, slam-and-embrace-the-bystander carnage, I couldn't help but feel a sudden twinge of irony. Was I turning into a caricature of myself? Were we all turning into characters from a Pogues' song?

Maybe, maybe not. Who cares? I was having fun. Everyone else was having fun. As soul searches go it wasn't exactly thorough. In fact, you couldn't call it cursory.

Brother Younger and I took our dear oul' mum to the gig. Now, I wouldn't normally be so irresponsible as to encourage a senior citizen (however feisty she may be) to go to a spit-and-sawdust, Rock-and-Roll venue like the Birmingham Academy. But The Pogues mean a lot to the Lennon family. Long ago and far away I got my Dad into the Pogues and my Dad got me into Johnny Cash. I like to think of that as a perfect, mutually beneficial cultural exchange programme. Dad passed away twelve years' ago but Mum, Brother Younger and I still have vivid memories of family holidays in the Lake District with a soundtrack made up of 'Sick Bed of Cuchulainn', 'Drunken Ira Hayes' and 'Sally MacLennane'. Like I said, The Pogues mean a lot to us.

The Academy is a standing-only venue and Mum has a slightly dicky knee, so she got herself a seat in a zoned-off disabled section with a perfect view. Mum's very resourceful like that. While she was there she got talking to a middle-aged couple, a lady on a wheelchair and her able-bodied boyfriend/husband/significant other. Mum's very good at introducing herself to strangers, too.

Anyhow, as the night progressed the man got more and more wasted. After a minor altercation with a bouncer, eventually and inevitably he chucked his guts up all over the feet of his wheelchair-bound significant other. She had to clear it up after him.

If that isn't a scene straight out of a Pogues song I don't know what is.

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I've been quiet again

Enjoy the silence, because it won't last. There's a reason for this, of course. There's always a reason.

I'm hammering the keys of my bruised and woe-begotten laptop at 3.15 am on Christmas morn. There's a reason for that, too, but it's not what you might think.

I've just finished building my brother Rob's Christmas present. I hope he likes it. My brother Rob - AKA, Brother Younger - is somewhat more practical and pragmatic than me. He's a carpenter by trade, and a very good one at that. He enriches people's lives through the medium of wood and when he builds something he builds something useful like a kitchen or a staircase or a patio. Being somewhat less practical and pragmatic than him, I built him a website. It involved no heavy lifting and I managed to complete it without getting a splinter. Ree-zult.

It's a fairly modest affair, but I'm happy with the results. You can find it at www.roblennon.com.

Initially, I tried to build the site using Notepad, Paintshop Pro and my somewhat rusty grasp of HTML. I say "rusty", but I doubt my web design skills were ever metallurgically pure. In any case, I tried to build a site the old-fashioned way and the results were squonky to say the least. If I left it as it was it would have looked so late-1997 that the Government would probably have slapped a conservation order on it and declared it a Website of Special Scientific Interest.

In the end I cheated and used a rather nifty hosting and website design package called Mr Site's Takeaway Website, and it did exactly what it said on the tin. Granted, I fiddled around with the HTML a bit, but that's just the way I am.

As a brief aside, Brother Younger - when he's not being more practical and pragmatic than me - is also prone to low humour and theological high jinks. It must be a family trait. Like I said, he's a carpenter, and he once told me that: "In this line of work, the next step on the career ladder is Messiah."

If you live in or around Birmingham, if you're partial to low humour and theological high jinks and if you have a home or a business that contains wood, you really should go here and give him a call.

Merry Christmas, by the way.

Retina Burn

Rol tells it like it is:

And finally, why is it that when you get one of the aforementioned crap-headlight types behind you, and slowing down to let them pass has no effect, they're always going to the exact same place as you? You keep thinking, they're bound to turn off here, they're bound to turn off there, but no, they're with you all the way. All the way to your office parking space, all the way home to your very driveway / garage / onstreet parking area. I'm surprised they don't follow you inside and ask for a cup of tea. Or a cloth to polish the dirt off their headlights... just in case they're not dazzling enough.

The National, Birmingham Irish Centre, 6th November 2007

"I wish that I believed in fate

I wish I didn't sleep so late

I used to be carried in the arms of cheerleaders."

- The National: Mr November

"Everything I can remember

I remember wrong."

The National: Daughters of the SoHo Riots

It’s been a long time since I last visited Birmingham’s Irish Centre. I remember going there as a child, my Dad supping a pint of Guinness in the lounge while my little brother Rob and I scoffed vinegar-soaked chips and slurped watered-down Coke and tried to play pool on a table we could barely reach. Back then, Rob was significantly shorter than me and “little brother” was more than just a figure of speech. Ah, simple times.

And, look… there I am again: slightly older, none-the-wiser and now I’m standing outside the Irish Centre. I’m waiting for the coach that’ll take my family and me to Aunt Maria’s cottage in rural County Monagahan - via Hollyhead and the Irish Sea - and aren’t I the sulky wee gobshite! Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan was about to be released on the big screen and I was going to an Irish village with one shop, three pubs and no cinema. There was no doubt in my mind that I wouldn’t get to see Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan in the way that God intended, and this caused me great anguish. But I’d more than make up for it in later years, and – for that matter - in recent weeks.

As I got older, the Irish Centre became a regular fixture in my teenage calendar. I went to numerous gigs there – from late-80s seminal indie darlings like The Sundays to raucous Irish folk bands like the Wolfe Tones. It was also the regular venue for my sixth form college’s end-of-term disco. Yes, we called them “discos” and we weren’t being ironic or post-modern. That’s how O-L-D I am.

I can still remember one end-of-termer during my late teens, as the proper old-school, non-superstar DJ – a middle-aged man known as The Mighty Quinn – put on the obligatory Pogues track and the dancefloor erupted, as Anglo-Irish dancefloors have a tendency to do during obligatory Pogues tracks. It was Fiesta, one of the barnstormers from the classic If I Should Fall From Grace With God album, and it wasn’t long before I found myself entwined in a spinning huddle of drunken bodies. Fast, faster then even faster we spun, like some booze-fuelled, high-octane centrifuge of booze. Faces, lights and sounds melted into a dizzying, synaesthetic blur until, inevitably, I lost my grip, flew through the air and crashed into some vacant tables and chairs parked nearby. Within seconds I was back on my feet - dusting off the booze, ash, glass and bits of table – and launched myself back into the fray with tremendous gusto.

These days, my recovery time is a bit more sluggish. If I was catapulted though the air and crashed into furniture now I’d probably be in a body cast typing this with broken fingers. Or dead. Or possibly a broken-fingered corpse.

Like I said, it had been a long time since I’d last visited Birmingham’s Irish Centre. More than seventeen years had gone by since I’d last made an eejit of myself in the main hall, but when I went to see The National last month very little had changed. The same tricolour flag was hanging in the corner, the same Irish lakeside mural was on the wall and – unless I’m mistaken – the same fittings and fixtures were behind the bar. It was as though the place had been preserved in amber, a weird time-capsule of faded 70’s working class elegance. Nothing had changed, only me.

For me the Irish Centre is still loaded with meaning, and few places resonate with my memories – with my personal history and mythology - in quite the same way. As I glanced around the main hall – at the chipped paint on the Céad Míle Fáilte sign, at the school assembly hall stage with its gold foil drapes - it set off a wild cascade of half-remembered moments. Dreamlike glimpses of lost innocence and lurid triumphs, a nonlinear slideshow of images that all run together and never make sense. The shy 16 year-old gracefully disappears in a room while his boisterous older incarnation raises his heavenly glasses to the heavens. Snapshots from a simpler time, when all the wine was all for me and we were heirs to the glimmering world.

It was the perfect place to see a band like The National.

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Did Morgan Spurlock find Osama bin Laden?

From MSNBC News:

Rumors are flying that filmmaker Morgan Spurlock of "Super Size Me" fame may have done what the United States government has failed to do for the last six years — find Osama bin Laden.

The speculation first began at the Berlin International Film Festival in February, where Spurlock showed a select group of potential buyers 15 minutes of footage from his new documentary, "Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?" The film follows Spurlock through the Middle East in his search for the elusive leader of al-Qaida. According to Slashfilm.com, The Weinstein Co. quickly snapped up the picture after seeing the clips.

Adding to the belief, Daniel Marracino, the film's director of photography, is quoted in Variety, saying of the movie, "We've definitely got the Holy Grail."

BBC News haven't picked this up as yet, and perhaps with good reason. The way I see it, it either has the potential to be the single biggest body blow to the Bush Administration's legacy or it's a misguided cosmic-scale hoax that would put Morgan Spurlock in the Clifford Irving league and potentially wreck his career. But it does present a tantalising prospect: could a likeable documentary-maker who made his name bingeing on burgers have accomplished what the world's only super power and the global intelligence community have monumentally failed to do?

Sometimes a 'WTF?' just isn't enough.

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Brummie of the Year 2007 is....

(Sustained drumroll. Collective gasp of anticipation. Vigorous wrestling with a glitzy-looking envelope.)

...John Tighe, the Landlord of the mighty Spotted Dog pub in Digbeth.

Congratulations to a well-deserving winner. This man has taken a stand against the gentrified hordes, and for that I salute him. You can read about John's valiant efforts at his campaign website. May his commitment to the authentic live music experience continue to upset the delicate sensibilities of irredeemable gobshites and their polite, James Blunt-soundtracked dinner parties.

So say we all.

Commiserations to the runners-up, particularly my good friend and erstwhile gigpimp Pete Ashton. Here's the full results, courtesy of the award's organisers Birmingham It's Not Shit :

Who’s Brummie of The Year 2007?

• Richard Pawley (1%, 10 Votes)
• Condori : Big Chief Busks With Recorder (hats off to the buskers) (2%, 20 Votes)
• Martin Mullaney (2%, 25 Votes)
• Soweto Kinch (4%, 44 Votes)
• Carl Chinn (4%, 48 Votes)
• Catherine O’Flynn (12%, 133 Votes)
• Lisa Meyer & Jenny Moore of Capsule (16%, 186 Votes)
• Pete Ashton (29%, 336 Votes)
  
• John Tighe of The Spotted Dog (31%, 353 Votes)

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Voix pour Pete.

As I mentioned in a previous post, my good friend and erstwhile gig pimp Pete Ashton is in the shortlist for Brummie of the Year. The deadline to vote is midnight tonight, and last time I checked, Pete was in second place.

As I mentioned previously, Pete has tirelessly encouraged, urged and sometimes forcibly coerced the city's artistic community to use the Internet to their best advantage. Pete is a true renaissance man - a world-renowned neurosurgeon, a leading particle physicist, a record-breaking racing car driver and a chart-topping rock star - and many of us feel that his groundbreaking work in cartography has helped put Birmingham on the map

Now, I don't know about you, but I don't think its right that someone with these credentials should end up as number two. It's undignified, and it makes the rest of us look bad.

So - for one last time - I urge you to go here and Vote for Pete.

Yes, you. Don't try to look away. That won't work.