Wednesday 9 November 2016

Spotify the dog






I am and forever will be an anti-establishment kind of bean even at the expense of my own happiness and convenience. I hate chain stores, I hate supermarkets, I hate online dating and hate large corporate monopolies.
I hate monopolies so much that if I play monopoly I just head straight to jail, wait it out. Safe in the knowledge that I am not engaging in a system that tries to place a monetary value on the basic human right of housing, and where 2nd prize in a beauty contest will only win you £10. That’s probably why no one plays with me.
Saying that, I do love Spotify.
I get that some people hate it, ‘It’s killing music, they pay musicians a pittance’ stick it to the man, fight the power, Corbyn for PM’, but even with all that righteous anger brimming in my ears I still think it’s great.

It’s not that I’m opposed to buying music. I spent all my formative years buying CDS. When others spent their money on more practical things like driving lessons and drugs I bought CDs.
I had lots, all the greats and I very much defended the position of buying music. Before Spotify, when folk had to download music from the internet illegally I recoiled in horror. How very dare they. The swines, purloining from the pockets of those poor hard working musicians, and why when I try to do the same is my computer smothered in a stable full of malicious trojan horses?
I didn’t want any knock off Nigels, or Hooky henrys I wanted to real Mccoy, the physical artefact in my hand with a coloured booklet to peruse at my leisure.

However, by the age of 26 I figured that I had heard everything and owned every CD I needed to own and I was bored of music.
Trying to discover new music before Spotify was like looking in a wool factory
for cotton buds.
Once you found a band you liked, mainly through happen-stance. You then researched what bands they liked or other more tenuous links like finding out who the bassoonist was that played on the final track of their coveted D-side album. Then you trawled the markets and record shops. Breadcrumbing your way in search of these hallowed new bands, return home, play the CD, feel disappointed, return to the shop and swap your Clash ‘London Calling’ CD for the best of the Cranberries. In hindsight this wasn’t a good swap but we didn’t have hindsight back then we had the best of the Cranberries.
Sometimes this process was sped up by a compilation CD. Many new bands discovered through the glory of the Shine Indie CDs but it was all so time consuming and ball breaking and by my mid twenties I couldn’t care less any more. Happy to play the same albums on a loop until that final karaoke gig in the sky.
Spotify rescued me from this Sisyphus drama. It really is a dream for those that wish to devour the fruits of new music. Their weekly compilations based on tracks you already like is a marvel. I pick and choose my faves, usually only one or two but then by the end of the month I’ve discovered 10 new acts without even exerting any effort whatsoever.
There’s also the Spotify trail where you start with a band you like, it then suggests 20 other similar bands, you follow them and build it into your own playlist and hey presto. Suddenly you are in a position where you know what classical composers are not shite and you know all their greatest hits.
‘Do you like Debussey’s Clare de lune oh you should try Christian Sindig’s Symphony no3 III movement: Allegro’.

That’s some solid smarty pants party repartee you’ve just learned to guff out of your mouth. That’s the brown triangle of trivial pursuit covered all because of Spotify.
And it doesn’t stop me purchasing music. It’s just now, music has to be exceptionally good. I don’t just settle for any old average tosh. I’ve already had to listen to each track a 100 times before I can then unequivocally say it’s the bee testicles and I need it in several different formats including on a key ring.
The only irritating thing is the adverts but when have the Mcdonalds, Tesco, Greggs Sports direct, adverts ever ruined anything really?



It's got leather seats and a CD player player player



"It’s got leather seats, and a CD player, player, player..."

The best place to listen to music is in a car. Apart from maybe live, if the band is good and no one is spilling beer over you, and some jerk isn’t rubbing his sweaty gut into your back, and there’s a chair nearby. Sod it, the best place is in the car.

Not everything is better in the car. Sex seems like it would be fun, but ends up with the gear stick risking becoming an unintended sex aid and there’s nowhere to stretch either party’s legs comfortably. Music, however, is better.

Cars and music seem to have to grown up together, a mutual individual experience intertwined into each other’s lives. I mean, where would Bruce Springsteen be without an automobile and a stretch of open road? His output would be reduced to a song about cream cheese and being born in the USA.

In a car, on your own, music just sounds better. Partly because you are the DJ, spinning the disks in a mobile disco of one, but also because you listen more closely. You focus more on the rhythms, the words. You sing louder, not holding back from those lung-busting numbers, safe in the knowledge that on the motorway no one can hear your flat F sharp. Plus no one cares, everyone wrapped up in their own little bubble. Unless you get too close to their little bubble, at which point they make you fully aware of their presence, and never with a song.

A car without music is like a swimming pool without water. God knows what people do without a radio in the car. I can’t think of a greater horror than being stuck alone, on a motorway in an endless traffic jam, with nothing but my own thoughts to occupy me. You can’t sleep it away, you can’t chat on the phone, you can’t read a book, and you can’t really engage with deep conscious thought because half of your brain is occupied with the task of not driving the car off the edge of the road, even though secretly you have a twisted desire to do so.

Without music or anything else to occupy you, you would have to acknowledge one of the most difficult existential dilemmas: aloneness. The haunting feeling that you are separate from other people, living out a solipsistic existence where no one else really exists but you. No place is this feeling more present than while driving alone.

Trapped in a metal shell, surrounded by other people in their own metal shells, on a journey that you can’t escape from. There’s no freedom, only the illusion of freedom. Yes, you choose the roads, but you are tied to where those roads go, stuck on journeys that are pre-determined.

It is a unique feeling of solo drivers. Maybe you’ve felt that isolation at other times, sitting at home staring at Facebook profiles of cats, or in a club surrounded by drunk people when you are the designated dickhead. But with those scenarios there are ways out. There are solutions. There are no such options when driving on a motorway. You’re stuck until the torture ends, trapped in a mechanic malaise.

Heavy stuff to ponder when driving back from a mid-Welsh town where you have been pretending to be a French waiter all weekend to perplexed members of the public. The only spiritual remedy is music.

This awareness of your own separateness can be curbed through music. Music can distract, it can lift you and help remind you of something bigger than yourself. This is why people fill their boots with massive stereo speakers: to block out the noise of their despair.

Yet music can also aid in the acceptance of this realisation. Cars can be cathartic spaces, where you shut out the world around you and allow yourself to feel, letting emotions flow out like milk across a linoleum floor. Music helps turn on the taps.
This is why I have sympathy for Jeremy Clarkson. It’s not driving he loves, but an opportunity to feel something, to vent emotions he feels too twisted up to acknowledge in life outside of cars. Clarkson is probably the world’s saddest man. All his racist and steak dinner violent dramas are actually calls for help, a desperate plea for someone to rescue him from his own vast melancholia.

So if you have a car, ride out in it. Drive long into the night, until the motorways are empty and you are alone. Let those feelings in, those otherwise dangerous thoughts. Let yourself experience delicious sadness and learn to be comfortable with it.

Music, gently whispering over the sound of an engine, will never sound as sweet.

Stan Skinny

Thursday 25 August 2016

Francis Drake's Pop Armada





Francis Drake Pop Armada

I have been cast adrift onto a tiny floating island made from Adidas popper trousers, Fat willy t-shirts and Sony Walkmans. Stretching out into unknown, uncharted, mythical waters, away from a mainland that was once so familiar. Forced into a maritime exodus all because of the Pop star and fellow seafarer Sir Francis Drake and his recent seizure of the Music charts, which has now become a distant sun to me. 

For how the hell have I not heard a song that has been No1 for 16 weeks. How? How can the most popular song in the country that has surely been played thousands of times on the radio, that has been sung along to on mobile phones at bus shelters, that on the evidence of a 16 week chart domination, a sizeable chunk of the population must know and love. How have I not come into contact with it?
Have I been counting Acolytes in deep caverns for the past 4 months? No. Have I spent the last four months inspecting my ears with my fingers while humming the Coronation Street theme non stop? No. Have I been in a coma after a foolish decision to ride a baking tray down a flight of stairs? No

So how has this happened? How could I be that much out of the loop of popular consensus? Surely a 16 week no1 song is inescapable, unavoidable slipping perniciously into the public consciousness like a celebrity sex scandal. Played relentlessly in every shopping centre, television montage and aerobics fitness class.
How have I missed this and isn’t Francis Drake dead? I thought he died of dysentery, fending off the Spanish navy somewhere near Panama? When did he launch both a thousand ships and a hit record? When?
It’s not that I’m immune to historical figures having smash hits. I remember the Robin Hood song. I remember it well. Massive it was, everyone sang it, you couldn’t escape it. 18 weeks at No1. ‘I know it’s true, everything I do, I do it for you’ ruining every 90’s wedding going, but I knew it.
Also it’s not that I’m adverse to the big hits. I was there with the Wet Wet Wets, ‘Love was around me’ that summer. Four weddings but the song refused to die. And I knew Rhianna’s song about selling umbrellas. All over that like a rash, bought a ton of umbrellas that summer, and a Parasol.
And it’s not that I was completely out of touch with the Modern charts even without Top of the Pop tarts I still had a foot in.
I knew the recent Justin Bieber songs. I may have hated myself for liking them so much, but fling enough shit at someone and eventually they forget their own smell. So, Why am I not covered in the content of Drake’s dysentery ridden bowels? Why?
And why sea shanties? How did that become the latest music trend? Maybe I could learn, ‘Ro Ho Ho, and a bottle of Rum’ and all that, I could try.
Oh who am I kidding? I’m a lost dog holding his missing poster, there’s no hope left. I’m so far off the musical map now, I buried deep in the page crease.
All because of a Sailor, a dead sailor, whatever next?

The only option now is to drift off to find new shores. Search for a forgotten time. Where hopefully there are people that when you ask them do you know Timmy mallet, they don’t look at you perplexed that there was once was a man that hit you with a foam hammer and that was children’s entertainment at it’s finest. Somewhere faraway where Robin hood is still No1.








Look back in Anger.


Out they shone, like two silver bullets, irreverent and derisive. Poking through the see through black shirt that barely covered the torso. Two small round nipples on Brett Anderson's pasty, lithe body that announced the arrival of Brit Pop.

Suede's 1993 Brit Awards performance was, apart from Jarvis cocker's mooning of Michael Jackson, the defining image of Britpop. Forget Liam and Patsy in a bed sheet. The dangerous, androgynous sexuality of Suede, gloriously perturbed much of Middle England. Here was a new generation, confident, sexually ambiguous, and definitely not the Beatles.

Sadly, Suede's beautiful revolution was overtaken by the louder, more obnoxious Oasis, who brought with them a barrel of tedious guitar bands all with shaggy haired, gobshite, lead singers, that flooded the pop charts.

Lad culture was born. Where emasculated males caught in arrested development prolonged their eventual decline into the morose responsibilities of adulthood. Instead opting to suck Hooch up through a straw out of Bozzer's backside. While their mates belted out 'Wonderwall' and tossed each other off to FHM, or other PG pornography, claiming 'it's all banter'.

The great dawn it was not.

I wasn't old enough to be Mad for it. I just remember wearing a shirt that nearly reached my ankles, purchasing a bucket hat and doing a Jimmy Saville impression, before we knew the horror, but looking back most of the Brit pop music was a great turd sandwich, that left kernels between the teeth.

So many dodgy bands, including Dodgy who were dodgy. If you want proof that it was all ass treacle just think of the last time you actually pulled out an Ocean colour scene CD, or a Shed Seven, or a Cast. Your brain knows even if you haven't caught up.

However, there is a saving grace, and that's the criminally overlooked female indie groups that were the real heroes of Bripop.
In the 90's you were spoilt for choice for fantastic girl indie rock groups from Elastica to Sleeper, Echobelly, PJ Harvey, Catatonia, Bjork and so many more. All with these ballsy, grungy, punk inspired lead singers in men's shirts. Singers that weren't made up models doing pretty dance routines, these were real women with wit and gusto and 'I couldn't give a fuck', air about them.

Writing songs that challenged patriarchy with umbrageous self- assurance; Garbarge's 'Stupid girl', Hole's 'Celebrity Skin', or even Shania Twain's 'Man I feel like a woman', where the video inverted the Robert Palmer 'Addicted to love' video by having all the male backing musicians being fawned over instead.

These were indignant women re-defining their gender roles. Taking big doctor martin boot strides towards equality while men cowered. Trapped in a Lost boys escapism. Looking to Liam Gallacher for inarticulate yob, guidance.

Unfortunately, like all subversive movements that look to unsettle the apple cart, the initial angst driven energy is soon subsumed and mollified by the mainstream. Just like when they started selling ripped safety pin t-shirts in BHS and you knew that punk was officially dead; it was inevitable that this movement would meet a similar end.
So it was that this new empowerment was cast off as 'Girl power', and the Spice girls were born, a sugared down form of protest that was easier to market and less incendiary than the female indie bands.
'Girl Power', which proudly declared that women could be whatever they wanted as long as they fitted into a tight British flag dress and an easily recognisable category that succinctly wrapped up their entire personalities.
The rightfully angry female voice became infantilised in the form of Baby spice, or made a parody of with Scary spice.

All fitting in line with male fantasies, and we all too quickly returned back to standard gender roles; Christina Aguilera ass chaps and boys in leather jackets chugging their guitars, a distant world apart and utterly dull.



Now watching X-factor and seeing the lengths that women have to go, or the items of clothing they have to loose still to have a hit records you can't help but wonder what could have been.
When Oasis return to the Brit awards wearing see through tops and g-strings then I'll no longer look back in anger.

Wednesday 9 March 2016

Libraries gave us power



They are trying to sell my old local library and probably turn it into a Netto or an office for Nettos.
The same Library that in my youth was our sanctuary. A happy Shelter from bullies, a forcefield of learning keeping them out. Misfits like me would sit in them pretending to read books, or do 'research' on the computers. As long as we kept our voices hushed we could happily while away the hours, in the warmth. As rain lashed the windows.
After school, I`d often meet up with Dave in this library and we'd rummage the music hire section. Long before Spotify, this was the only option for frugal pockets. Then we'd stuff rucksacks full of books that would take our fancy; self help books, Norwegian dramas, big novels with fancy titles, instruction pamphlet for blinds.
We'd never read any of them, but we liked to think we would. The promise of improvement enough, and when you could borrow up to 8 books for a month for nothing, what was the risk? Invariably, the slim volume of Icelandic poetry or such, would conveniently get lost between the cracks, and like weeds in the guttering the fines just grew and grew. 
If they became too high to hack away with paper round wages we'd get new cards, never too young to learn the arts of gentle fraud.
At one point in our lives Libraries were our everything. We'd make plans there, dream dreams, and oddly make tentative steps into the adult world of romance. My brother being a champion of this. His precocious boldness  and lack of fear led him to many a date with strangers he'd charm between glances of biology revision guides.

I never had such success. Too shy, I never really tried. Apart from one tragic episode.
I had spotted a girl that had made my face flush, bookish but sexy, just my type. 
She was busy revising, nose deep in a psychology text book.
I was stuck on a rather lengthy, arduous passage about Shakespeare's use of farmyard animals or something and naturally my attention was a little divided.
Inspired by my brother's lead in the matters of romance, I inwardly declared that I would ask this girl out, affirming that this was the moment I asserted myself, but inexperience and nerves made this a troublesome sandwich to swallow.
I'm sure most sensible mortals wouldn't agonise over such trivialities, mainly Americans, but I was at a complete loss as to how to even begin the conversation. How the hell did you just go up to a stranger, in a public environment, without the aid of alcohol and invite them to potentially love you?

In a library it felt almost sordid to ask someone out, you could read about such things but you must keep it quietly to yourself.
I looked up and down the room, trying to engage eye contact with her but the awkward chair and table arrangements made this a difficult task, and added a risk of a potential neck injury.
I was stuck, desperate and incompetent, a winning combination. I was about to concede defeat when my eyes fell upon a six pack of cherry bakewells I had in my backpack. These were intended as sugary treats to aid and encourage me in my revision, but staring at them an idea crept in my mind that maybe these iced pastry treats could be the key to unlocking my potential love's interest, or at least break the ice.
The idea was that I would casually walk up to her and say 'hey would you like a bakewell tart?' Then let the romance flourish.
It seemed simple enough and from that, I hoped, innocent, and inauspicious beginning I could initiate further conversation and from there I wasn't entirely sure, but I was hoping my brain would take over and come up with something.
Very simple in theory, harder in practice. I toyed with the foil wrapping of a bakewell, eat one for the energy boost, and stared over at her with a mouth full of munched up icing and pastry. Sexy.
I ruminated, pondered, eat another bakewell, tried to motivate myself to go over and just do it, but I was held back, reluctant and not fully behind the plan. Like a soldier asked to jump over the trench line.
This delaying didn't help matters and eventually my procrastinating had gone on so long she was now setting off to leave.
I had missed my chance and chided myself for my failures but as she packed her items into her satchel I roused myself for one final push.
I quickly packed up my items apart from one solitary bakewell tart that I kept in my hand and began to hover over to her.
Unfortunately she had turned the other way and began making her way around the library. I duly followed, quickly improvising a new plan where I would simply tap her on the shoulder and say 'I think you dropped this?' Then present her with the tart, Ingenious. I had seen a film scene of something similar with jewellery, and that had worked perfectly. 
Fate had other plans and  had also decided to bless her with rather a pacy walk. I followed  swiftly after her, bakewell held aloft in my outstretched hand.
Blissfully, I ignored the fact that I was now following a girl around a library with baked goods, and this was definitely not a normal thing to be doing, and certainly not your standard or desired romantic gesture.
Her pace quickend, as I'm sure her subconscious picked up on the potential threat of diabetes that was ambling to be thrust in her face.
I continued to follow for a good 5 to 10 minutes, until we reached a  pelican crossing and my better sense and a ford KA stopped me.
From this moment on, the town of bakewell always sends a shiver up the spine but I will always be fond of Libraries. For where would us weirdos go?

Friday 4 March 2016

The campaign against Loneliness



So you're lonely, probably why you've got time to read this, but don't let your isolation bring you down into oceans of tears. Loneliness is a gift that frees you from the shitty demands of other people. Embrace it, for there will be times when you desperately crave it and it will be denied you, like if you get married, or end up in prison, (a similar fate).
If there are, though, occasions when you do long for the company of another oxygen stealing life form, here's some things to consider.

Firstly, are you really lonely?

You may think you have no friends, and yet you have over 1000 facebook friends, and 100's of telephone numbers. Well, don't be stubborn bunny, waiting for them to pop their head down your
warren. Ring them, visit them, arrange things.

As we get older, people's lives get busier and they get lazier, content to sit inside their houses and vegetate, exhausted by the capitalist, cogged machine. Social occasions may have to be arranged weeks in advance, just to schedule in with the new series of Game of Thrones.
Also, people's interests change, pubs and clubs are not for everyone. Some are quite pleased that adulthood means they no longer feel forced into social occasions just to supplicate the ferocious group mentality.
Try being more creative in your social activities. If you are inviting them out to the same pub they've been to a thousand times, they are more likely to politely decline, or lie and say their mother is visiting, so they can spend the evening watching the female volleyball finals. Sex will motivate a great many choices.
Instead pitch to them something more exciting; a monster truck rally, a football match, rolling skating or things they may enjoy like an all male sauna.
You can't complain that you feel lonely if you're unwilling to put in effort with your friends. Relationships, like house plants require nurturing, and water, and plant food, and the occasional trimming of their leaves.

Why you are lonely?

The reasons for this could be varied. You could be absolute cunt and not be aware of it. Try and take time to look at yourself in the mirror, not to much though if you're a narcissist, for this won't help matters.
Do you irritate people? Is your sense of humour at odds with people around you? Are you prone to pontificating your opinions on the government, dismissing opinions of others with a waft of your hand, like a complete bell end?
Things like these won't do you much favours. While you want to be yourself around your friends, there are probably occasions when a bit of diplomacy wouldn't be a bad thing.
This can include moaning. Of course you want to be able to share things with your friends, your concerns, your worries, but no one wants to be stuck with a constant moaning Myrtle.
If a friend feels like a therapist all the time, as you unburden your constant dramas upon them, they will soon feel emotionally drained, and no one wants to feel that. People want to feel uplifted by their friends, and people want to be around happy people because it makes them feel better.

Try and have a positive mental outlook, and before meeting people force yourself to think positively. Try writing a list of why a person would enjoy spending time with you, your best qualities and try and emphasize and re-affirm them to yourself. You'll feel more confident and more at ease and people will respond more encouragingly towards you.
Gratitude is also a proven way to help you feel happier, being thankful, you can also send messages of thanks to friends and as long as it doesn't come across as creepy, it can help them feel appreciated, valued and can solidify the relationship.


I'm nice, friendly and good fun why am I lonely?

You think you are a good friend, you're fun to be around, you're a good listener, you're outgoing but still you feel lonelier than a lighthouse keeper on lonely island.
Well it could be because you are surrounded by boring fuckers, a much worse fate.
The fault may fall very much at their feet. They may have settled and are quite content seeing out their days watching Netflix. Or they are always busy, visiting his inlaws, or her in laws, or her grandma or his half cousin twice removed's dog.
Cut them loose. Don't let your social life be left to the mercy of Captain Boring and his wife Tilda Tedious. If you spend the week arranging something and then they cancel on the Friday night, because their Iguana's got a cold, and you're then left wallowing in your house all evening because you can't face going on your own, don't.
Go out anyway, do not be afraid to go out on your own. You never know who you might meet, or what might happen, it's exciting and liberating. You can go where you like, leave when you like, You have the freedom to shape the evening however you want.
If you are feeling in a rut with your social circles find new ones. Join a sport's club, or hobbies club, meet new people and learn new skills, bonus.
Go to a poetry or music night, and if you are brave enough get up on a stage and perform something, because you are advertising yourself to potential new friends and connections.
And if you meet people you like, try and encourage to meet again, casually invite them to another similar event or attend one and you may bump into them again. You will already have similar interests and that's a good basis for any future friendship.
If you feel like you don't have any interests, get some. Try new things, don't be trapped by confirmed ideas about yourself, the mind is a malleable thing, it may turn out you love to Salsa dance.
Just don't accept loneliness there are always options.

Quick tips


If you work on your own, try and find a shared office space, it's much better for your health and happiness to be surrounded by people, you don't even have to be friends just feeling like you're with a group of people will make you feel better.

Offer to cook for people, everyone eats, so you're already on to a winner. Cook someone a meal and they are likely to return the favour. Plus it will make you feel good, and you'll put in extra effort to make yourself a tasty meal.

Don't despair at being lonely, embrace it

Go on weekend breaks alone, You'll have more exciting adventures meet new people. If you go with others, it's unlikely you will talk to anyone else, and will be led by what they want to do. and holidaying on your own is a great time to reflect on your life and think, so embrace it.


Friday 19 February 2016

Charity Ship ahoy


From my dishevelled, worn out, baggy exterior you probably guess that the majority of my clothing is bought from charity shops and you wouldn't be wrong, you bloody big clever bastard you. Apart from it also represents my vulnerable state of mind, so there.

I love a good rummage in a potential bio hazard that is a charity shop. A charity shop to me, is an enchanted wonder kingdom where you never know what you might find.
Often it's a pair of trousers, that would be just perfect work trousers if only it didn't have that darn cigarette burn and exposed just a little bit too much ankle. As a man who has been threateningly shouted at across the street by hooded youths and my own parents with the bon mot, 'your trousers are short mate'. It's a fashion choice I tend to avoid.

Still, I do love second hand clothes.
It's never bothered me wearing someone else's clobber, I like that something has history and once had relevance to someone. I make up stories, like this floral shirt was purchased for a date, that never arrived, or this bobble hat was knocked off the head of a cyclist. Cheerful stuff to keep my spirits up.

When I was younger I always had my older Brother's cast offs; (saying that, I'm still receiving his cast offs) that were always 2 sizes too big and two years out of style. It didn't matter. For a short time I thought I was pretty cool. In my head my brother was the epitome of cool and by wearing his former garments some of that coolness was vicariously passed onto me. This theory was cruelly knocked out of me by Katie Chapwick in year 8, who said my shirt was too big, and I was a tramp or words to that effect. In hindsight it was probably flirtatious, and I shouldn't have 'accidentally' set fire to her hair with a bunsen burner. (this never happened)

From that moment on I ventured to try and buy my own clothes and be a dedicated follower of fashion. Which, at the time, invariably meant beads, spikey hair and rather a gregarious use of the British flag. I was like a camp National Front member that lived by the sea.

On a paper round wage, I never had the money to quite pull it off with any aplomb. The turning point was when I saved for 4 weeks to purchase a jacket, that I thought would help stake my claim as the most fashionable boy in school only to arrive in school and depressingly see 3 other boys also in the same jacket.

I gave up soon after, deciding that my money and time was better spent on something else. Needing to find some solution to the old nudity problem I thought through my options, which were few. I lived in a small city, there were not many clothes shops and Primarks and vintage stores were yet to be a ubiquitous menace.
Unsure if the annual Christmas supply of wollens would see me through the year at some point I was going to find myself a bit stuck.

It was a chance wandering into a charity shop during one of our weekend town jollies, where we largely just rode the elevators up and down in TJ Hughes, (this was a definite thing at one point in my life) that changed everything.

At the time, there was a fierce stigma attached to entering charity shops, possibly mainly in working class schools, where no one wanted to be branded as poor. Materialism bites hardest on the young. Lord have mercy on the child that wears non-branded trainers in school.

But goaded by youthful curiosity, my friends and I entered together giggling, it was a similar process to the first time I entered a sex shop and just as illuminating.
That rush of old damp coat smell, the shelves of random junk, porcelain figurines of old men with sheep, books, so many books, paintings of dogs playing pool, tape decks in the shape of of submarines; it was wonderful.
What I loved most and still do is the utter randomness, no charity shop is alike. Certainly you have to trawl through 20 racks of striped office shirts to find an orange jump suit with fur shoulder pads, but nothing beats that feeling of finding something truly unique that could only be found at this shop and this fixed moment in time.
Vintage shops will always lack that, because they are a formalised style, I know what I'm getting there, flannel shirts, Hawaian shirts, leather jackets, denim jackets, barbour jackets, and they charge four times as much.

From our first encounter we were hooked and would raid the charity shops for items to decorate our bodies with. This meant a lot of cardigans, colourful floral shirts, velvet smoking jackets, and deer stalker hats.

Essentially we started dressing like flamboyant pensioners, but it was never a conscious choice, just one made from necessity and availability.
Fashion was finally fun. You could buy something ridiculous for a couple of pounds, and laugh off any ridicule because it wasn't like you'd invested so much of yourself in it.

Occasionally it would provoke some people. Once we went to a party, an infrequent event in our lives, and we were hassled by some local punks, who found us at odds with them because we were wearing our 'Grandad's cardigans', which in many ways was far more subversive than their Atticus t-shirts, and more in keeping with a punk ethos.


Eventually most of my friends grew out of this stage, it was only a means to an end. As they got older and had more disposable income they discovered new music, art and films, which shaped their future clothing choices. Some became Mods, some existentialists, some rockabilly and I flirted with all these, but I have remained most content in a charity shop jumper and a bright colourful floral shirt that was once treasured by someone else.

I could say this is because, as I grow older, there is a presiding ethical fair trade concern, or that I like to wear unique items of clothing, or I like supporting charitable organisations but as my friend sagaciously put best it's because you're a tight bastard Stan.

Tuesday 16 February 2016

Igloohost



Igloohost 


Dina is a new arts space in what was the Stardust bar on Cambridge street.
The Stardust bar used to have a revolving dance floor upstairs but the only revolving I was doing was on the bar swivel chair. It's a rare to sit at a bar at a club, but one I greatly revelled in. Usually, the music is too loud but shielded by a big red curtain I could hear quite comfortably.
Happily tipping back a can of Red stripe; which I'll never understand its position as the subversive art's event drink of choice, I chatted to various attendees of the night largely from University music society, who were a very agreeable bunch.
I even bumped into a Latvian guy, that worked at the climbing centre next door to the Circus I worked at in London (they are very cramped for space down there). He is now studying robotics, and is heavily into his electronic dance music, made sense really.
It all felt like an episode of Cheers, albeit without any of the cast there, but I was joyfully entertained by Sheffield's eminent artist and all round genius, lunatic Stuart Faulkner. Who unleashed, on the uninitiated music students, a chorus of spontaneous hits from the Poddington's Peas theme tune to songs from his new musical about Hen do gone wrong.

When I did enter the arena of dance, I was impressed. The music was good, a heady mix of electronica, garage, even finding time to squeeze in some Van Morrison. Everyone was dancing wildly, not a hint of ego or pretence just a real good sense of fun. I honestly haven't enjoyed a night more in ages, It had a fine house party vibe, where everyone is loosing their shit on the dance floor rather smoke boxing a bedroom or being passed out on Beaver paracetamol.
I tottered home about 4 in the morning with tired feet happily reciting 'down at the bottom of the garden....

Friday 5 February 2016

Throwing a Dart in a Bull's eye.




A couple of years ago I found myself back living at home, feeling like a turd in a washing machine, making a mess of everything. I had no fixed job, a failed relationship, no prospects, athletes foot but not an athlete's body and a really bad Kim yeong sun hair cut. I was a real Debby Downer. I had lost my way and wasn't sure in what direction I was heading. I'd just mope about the town like Morrissey after being forced to club a seal to death.
I could have quite easily thrown in the town, given up on life, ended it all and become a teacher but I was saved from my certain PGCE fate by discovering a love of darts.

Yes darts, the sport of champions or pork scratching munching, beer swilling, diabetic demi gods. A sport that would change my life.
I had never been particularly fond of darts, occasionally I would chuck a few arrows and they would dangerously wobble in the air bounce off the board and strike a passer bys fleshy parts, but apart from the potential maiming of others it had limited appeal. It lacked the aerobic rush, the physical contact, the close body wrestles of other sports, but then a weekly encounter with the Ockey, arranged by my enthusiastic dart playing friends slowly began to change all that.

It wasn't long before I was hooked. Wednesday's darts night became the zenith of my week, my sole salvation in the melancholy theatre of life.
The mastering of throwing 3 small metal spears at a coloured numbered board became a glorious regression to a former tribal self. Like the irrepressible urge to drum on tables or toddlers heads; the act of throwing sharpened sticks tapped into a genealogical memory. Where a mono-browed, heavily built me, in a sheep's carcass, battled against a woolly mammoth armed with a bit of old twig.
A time when glory was an arm thrust away. And yes on occasions I'd get a woolly tusk in the guts, but it was a simpler time where purpose and meaning in life didn't involve spread sheets, or deodorants, or haircuts, or blogs, or selfies, or social media, a time
before shoes, carpets, mortgages, furniture, I phones, vegetarianism, gluten free, Netflix, toilet paper and Ocado.
Throwing darts stripped away all that modern nonsense to the simple joys of enacting force on the powers of gravity. Like popping your head out of your mother's womb for the first time and feeling life.

It's also a great excuse to get pissed with your friends midweek.
Friends that shout at you to stop blathering on about being a hunter gatherer, and throw the pissing dart, you prick.
I throw a double twenty, and in my head I've hit a bear between the ribs, raaaaah.








Thursday 21 January 2016

Homes under the Hammer Horror



If you've ever been unemployed and faced a day of dull nothingness. Where the only useful thing you've done is change a loo roll, and nearly messed that up. As you creep into the dark ether of hopelessness. You are probably familiar with Homes under the Hammer, an eerie programme where presenters that look like ex members of Buck Fizz and footballer, and Dube inventor, Dion Dublin,
http://www.thedube.com/ take you around creepy abandoned houses and show you harrowing scenes of pink baths and un-pointed roofs.

The fat medium one, then contacts poltergeist property developers on a plaster Ouji board, with the haunting chant of 'have you checked the legal pack' and 'it's got a lot of potential', as Dion bangs loudly on his percussive instrument.

This stirs the un-dead to rise from out of their crypts and transform characterful properties into generic, ghostly white hotel rooms in exchange for the fresh blood of housing tenants that grey skinned estate agents happily provide.

It's sadly missing Christopher Lee, but it is certainly one of the most frightening of the Hammer series. A real psychological, sleep wrecker. What's most disturbing is that the flesh eating poltergeists are never defeated or stopped in their incessant rampage of blood sucking terror.

Instead they are mawkishly paraded by the possessed presenters, cheered in their onslaught of knocking down walls and building large patio areas, that they will subsequently barbecue their unsuspecting victims on.

It is quite gruesome and completes a day time schedule from the BBC of horror flicks such as
'Escape to the country', where quiet country villages are seized upon by alien life forms that want to build out of period extensions, and holiday cottages for their retirement invasion.

To the graphic, sadistic, possession porn of programmes like Cash in the attic and Bargain hunt, where an evil, moustached devil, in a bright coloured waistcoat, forces people to sell materialist, misery manacles to unsuspecting victims, while competing against other unfortunate slaves, for the chance to free their souls.

By the end of a day watching these programmes I feel queasy, unsettled, physically shaken by what I've seen. I turn the TV off and stare at the walls of my one bedroom flat, with the extortionate rent that has no antiques in it, just a big flat screen telly. And I close my eyes, try to dream of a world that has beauty in it, that has hope, that has love, but I find I've run out of toilet roll.


Pop eat itself and got a dicky tummy




Loathe him or loathe him, part time lover and paint can power pop balladeer Phil Collins is a revelation. Yes, Phil Collins, the ferret faced uncle of pop, with his vocal sack of heartache from his Su Su studio of emotional longing is a living breathing revelation.
Before you start choking on your biscuit shaped prejudice. Yes, I understand that Phil Collins is probably an anathema to everything you believe music should be; soul blah integrity, blah blah, artistic vision blah, but we are talking about pop here, and pop music is a genre that will always be the giant turd on the dance floor of life because the general public are an inordinate bunch of yapping dogs, and you know that you are miles better than them simply by owning a Clash album that isn't London calling. You win, but in the genre of pop music Phil Collins is a revelation, worthy of our respect and admiration.
Why? Because there is something glorious and hopeful that at one point in musical history Phil Collins was the world's biggest pop star.
Phil Collins couldn't dance, couldn't talk, the only thing about him was the way he walked, Ellie Golding or Rhianna he ain't and yet it was probably his song your Auntie Margaret danced to at her wedding to Uncle Peter while wearing that big orange pom pom toilet roll cover dress.
Phil Collins, was hugely popular even though he looked more like a plumber than a pop star. He wasn't cool, he wasn't sexy, he didn't have elaborate dance routines with a harem of scantily clad women, but he did have no1 hits and that was a wonderful thing that seems sadly lost in our current pop climate.

There will never again be room in the pop sphere for another like him, or his ilk, Daryl Hall and John Oates, Midge Ure, Nick Heysaw, Feargul Sharkey, Michael Mcdonald, Billy Ocean and loads more that all looked like depressed Geography teachers. Pop is a too well oiled machine churning out ever younger repackaged models of the same sexually explicit, high tempo music of the beautiful, toned bodied, made up, glamour model kings and queens. I just can't see how the ordinary looking Phil Collins's of the world would ever compete against these Zeus like creatures?

If you think I'm talking nonsense, I have done the maths, poorly remembered GCSE maths, but nonetheless I have worked out that the average age of a singer with a no1 hit single in 1985 was 31, in 2015 it is 25. At least 5 artists were 21.

This is why whenever I look now into the shining bald head of Phil I'm filled with deep despair because a bald head in pop music now, is as likely as a Dodo for Christmas dinner.

It's a sad indictment of our culture that with the onset of the music video and the proliferation of the photograph that we are becoming more obsessed with image, and youth and this trend is only set to continue. Today there are very few music acts that work beyond 30, or have exposure in the Pop realm past that age because we simply don't want to look at them, and their crusty ageing faces. There's just no room for wonderful naffness, everything has to be so edgy, and cool, it's tiring.
Back in the 80's there was at least some hope that if you wrote a catchy song with a pleasant melody you could have a hit record, I just can't see that happening now unless it's a novelty push a pineapple up you arse kind of record.
The worse thing is, it's a great loss. For anyone who has ever had a conversation with a 21 year old that isn't 21, will tell you, they're all idiots. Obsessed with drinkin in the Klub, and having fun, and enjoying life, Yuck. What the hell can a 21 year old tell me about the vicissitudes of life and the pitfalls of love? Phil suffered a divorce after his wife had an affair with the painter and decorator, that's real pain.

So, thank your lucky stars that Phil is out of retirement. He is a walking relic of a different age, soon to disappear into the air tonight, and we'll be left with toddlers shouting their incomprehensible nonsense.





Saturday 16 January 2016

In praise of Human heads and giant carrots

There are many wonderful parts and places of Sheffield. I love how many parks there are and how nearly every bit of grassy mound will be home to someone's appreciative posterior. I love Sheffield's thriving poetry and music scene, and it's DIY and independent attitude to Art and commerce like the Forum shops or Access space or new Roco building, or how the old Woolworths is now an art centre.
I could have written in length about the glorious and inspiring views from Norfolk park, or the elegance of Western park or the splendour of Dam house but instead I've decided to write about the carrot sculpture near Firth park.
Before I get to that I wanted to mention a sculpture in Sheffield that for a long time stood at the bottom of my street. For many years I have lived on Ellesmere road in Pitsmoor and one Autumn I gleefully discovered on my journey to work at the bottom of our street that a tree stump had been carved into a Human head. This certainly beat the usual street art offerings of abandoned Sofas and mattresses that aspiring Tracey Emmins left.
This was a skilfully crafted head and it had apparently sprung up from no where, with no warning or big reveal just appearing one day out of the blue. Every day I would walk past it and it would make me smile a big Chesire cat smile, and it really caught the imagination of the street to. He became the street's central figure for festive celebrations. For Halloween they placed pumpkins around him and at Christmas they attached a Santa's hat and beard. It was great.

Unfortunately the council came along one day and had it removed, maybe thinking that we couldn't be trusted with art as it might lead to some anti social watching of the culture show. I was sad to see it go. Not only because it was a beautifully made head but also because I found it so strange to find it at the end of my street and not in some art gallery that no one visits.

But then I discovered the big carrot in Firth park. Or at least I think it's a carrot, it could very well be a tomato. I have never been entirely sure. It's a sort of mutated vegetable that has been tunnelled into by large hungry worms. However, it's not so much the carrot I like but its location. It's just lumped right in the middle of a slab of pavement on the street and seems completely at odds with its environment, as you're left wondering why is it there? Is it a relic from an old park that they now have built houses on, or is it an arts installation by a well meaning local artist or was it health campaign to remind you to eat your five a day?
Yet, it is its incongruity that makes it so great. If it was in a playground or a park it would be insignificant. It would simply be another play apparatus that would be overshadowed by a slide or a roundabout. But here just in the middle of the street it occupies a place majestic wonder. It turns the street into a playground, into an unusual world of giant vegetables, the grey and dull into something fun.
I think it's a fantastic quirky sculpture and in many ways I don't really want to know why it is there. I'm happy for it to be forever shrouded in mystery.

Some might find me flippant for choosing a carrot sculpture as my favourite place in Sheffield but it's this and other quirky things that make Sheffield for me, such a fantastic place to live.
There are so many wonderfully odd sights that so often go under the radar.
Places like the amphitheatre behind the train station, which you can't look at it with anything but complete disbelief that it really exists. As you question why you have never found yourself there before and why when you tell anyone about it they look you up and down like you've snorted Horlicks and reply 'An amphitheatre in Sheffield, behind a train station, yeah right, good one'.
The City is full of strange buildings and curious anomalies in bizarre places; like the huge coloured brick, half moustached, Minor opposite the COOP in castle market, or Sheffield's own Arc di triumph in the Whicker, or the fact that our Morrissons is a castle.
This to me, makes the city what it is. Beautiful and intriguing but always humble to the point of being afraid of showing of it's own brilliance incase it risks turning into Leeds or Manchester, a fate worse than many deaths.

So, I suggest we all continue to find more giant carrots and tree stump heads, they are the treasured gems of the city just don't expect to find them in the likeliest of places.


Stan Skinny is a poet, comedian and writer that has lived in Sheffield for 10 years. His new spoken word show 'Tell me the lies about Love' (part of the Off the Shelf festival) is on the 2nd of Nov at the Sheffield University Union building. Alongside this he runs the Shipping forecast a nautical themed poetry and comedy night at the Riverside on the last Thursday of the month and a weekly comedy quiz Quizarama-rama also at the Riverside every Monday. You can visit his website www.stanskinny.co.uk to find out more or follow him on twitter @stanskinny