Note: this piece was originally written for a different website, so the date reflects its original publication date.
Also note: I didn’t do a podcast version of this, but there is a podcast review of the gig here on Music Explorers (then known as Jeffrey Music) that I recorded with my brother Our Gordon.
You can stop noting things now …
We’re told the journey is half the fun, which it probably was when a journey meant a balloon flight across the Alps or a week partying on a steamship. Nowadays, however, as we approach the airport we’re mentally preparing ourselves for a combination of humiliation, waiting and discomfort before being shoved into a seat designed for a child.
But the idea of the journey being the adventurous bit persists. I don’t think of travel as being in a different place, ticking off tourist attractions, accumulating photo opportunities to be shared on social media, I think of travel as getting to a different place.
Even when I was kid I thought the same, despite ample evidence to the contrary.
Most journeys back then involved being hurled around the back seat of the family car as it screeched around a series of tight bends, my Father barely visible through the clouds of cigarette smoke, car sickness never more than an ice-cream away … but still, I reasoned, this could be fun if only we could crack open the window to release the noxious gases, or maybe perhaps just possibly get out the fucking car and on to a train or a boat, surely then we could turn this into an adventure …
… notice I didn’t say plane …
The plane
… and so my journey began, waiting in the station, struggling on to a suburban train, unable to hear a thing as it rattled toward the city, clusters of horrid teenagers screaming with laughter and jumbled conversation, all talking at the same time, meaning my fancy new bone-conduction headphones did nothing but leak the faintest of sounds in my general direction.
I got off in the centre and made it to the Metro, crowded as ever, a couple of tattooed young people, pierced to the nines, snogging like crazy, barely able to avoid full-blown sex. His leopard-skin hat matched his leopard-skin dyed hair which I thought was a nice touch (not shown in the photo below).
Not a great photo, I know, but I am embarrassed to take such snaps in public, so I do it quickly and surreptitiously – don’t complain, this is free.
At the airport I queued to check in, queued to go through security, then queued to go through passport control. We were already being told to get to the gate, so I wandered over and, with every seat taken, I sat on the floor, legs stretched out, feeling young and agile, well … I did until my legs seized up and I had to hobble into an upright position and stamp out the pins and needles. I waited while they called forward those who needed assistance, families with children, gold card holders in Group 1, people in Groups 2 and 3, and at some point in the middle of all that, there was no-one left to board but me. It’s fun to try to be the last person to get on, although my don’t-miss-the-fucking-plane-anxiety means I don’t push this envelope too far.
I wandered forward as two women bundled up and trampled their way past me in a panic, so I politely waited with a polite smile before politely getting my documents checked, then politely walking down the steps to a crowded bus.
We waited politely on the crowded bus for a few minutes until the last passenger made his merry way down the steps having generously decided to join us. We waited while the bus jerked and emergency-stopped its way around the airport before pulling up to the plane. Here we waited until the bus doors hissed open before waiting while the scrum of passengers climbed the stairs and tried to get on the plane – a task seemingly beyond whoever was at the top because we waited and waited …
Eventually, by politely standing back and waiting, I managed to be the last person to get on the plane and shuffled to my aisle seat, squeezing my luggage into a slither of a gap between cases and coats.
The flight – uneventful – meant I could focus on a book I’ve been fighting to read, a good book, cleverly written, but one that hasn’t hooked me in. I want to finish it not so much to know the ending, but so I can read something else.
I get to Gatwick. The tired feeling of an airport thrown together in the seventies persists despite whatever licks of paint they’ve slapped on it over the decades. It reminds me of my next-door neighbour’s lounge when I was a kid, thick orange carpet with a brick fireplace and a huge wall unit, even though Gatwick Airport has none of these things, there’s just something about the dated-ness of both that connects them in my head. The Gatwick Express is on time and not crowded, so for the first time in this journey I can relax for a moment and not feel bustled and bothered.
I get a taxi at Victoria Station and arrive at my hotel after 30 minutes of elbowing our way through the Sunday afternoon rush-hour traffic. I am exhausted, I want to go to my room and order room service and disappear into a deep sleep, but I also want to charm the woman on reception, despite me being not-very-good-looking and also exhausted-to-the-point-of-incoherence. I succeed enough to be offered a free bottle of water, which is a significant victory for people-like-me who have historically found that attempts-to-be-amusingly-charming often lead to misunderstandings-that-lead-to-awkwardness-and-upset – so kudos to me for that little bottle of free water, it tasted like victory!
My room is so far from the lifts that I half expect a sea view.
I don’t get one, I get this:
Oh well.
The next evening I walked from my hotel to the 100 Club on Oxford Street (6.6km), through the lovely Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, then through the posh streets of Mayfair before emerging in the garish busyness of Oxford Street.
The 100 Club isn’t far along, but I am starving, and know I can’t enjoy the evening running on empty, so I nip into a Sainsbury’s Local and spend £2 on a cheese and bacon twist. I have to be careful these days, since the op that removed a chunk of my inner bits and bobs, controlling digestion and suchlike isn’t as simple as it used to be, and I wanted to enjoy the gig from the main auditorium, not the toilet cubicle.
The club is, apparently, the oldest independently-owned music venue in the world, and it’s a decent size and shape, being a neat rectangle with the stage along one long side rather than the more obvious short end, next to the dressing room. This allows for a bigger stage and better views, even if the band have to walk through the crowd to get to the stage. I find a pillar to lean against, just next to where I expect William (bass) to stand; he’s usually stage right.
John Mouse
I’m on my own, and still nursing a mild hangover from the previous evening, so I don’t drink anything. I also don’t want to go the bar because I will definitely lose my spot against the pillar which I really don’t want to do.
I crack open my Kindle – still on the same long book – but then the support act starts with a whine of synthesiser. I inwardly groan, expecting one of those new-people-they-have-nowadays who make a computer produce “beats” for 25 minutes while young people applaud, but I am pleasantly surprised, not just because there aren’t really any young people (this is a Cud gig after all) but because John Mouse goes on to sing proper songs that are quite fun, albeit backed by electronic sound rather than real instruments.
He’s quite the in-your-face character, even admonishing one section of the audience for sitting down in seats, his lovely Welsh lilt referring to them as “sitting-down wankers” which didn’t go down too well with one tough-looking hardnut who aggressively gave him the finger. Not everyone wants to dance at a gig, not everyone can dance at a gig. Some people can’t even stand up, at least not for the lengthy waiting-time-plus-support-act-plus-gig that we are forced to endure by venues.
This was a misstep by Mouse, but – even though I am no fan of forcing people to do stuff they don’t want to do – I found him endearing and likeable.
As an introverted self-conscious weirdo who mainly spends his time reading, listening to music and lost in his own thoughts, I am accustomed to people giving me helpful unsolicited feedback on everything that’s wrong with my personality. They also sometimes kindly offer advice on how I should stop having my personality, and instead get a better one, like the one they have, which is the best one, but one thing I have learnt in the decades that I have so far endured on this crazy planet, is that even misfitty oddities like me, people that don’t want to make shapes in the public square, people who take a Kindle to a gig, are also okay. We are not broken, we don’t need fixing, and we can enjoy live music without needing to swing from the lampshades in our shiny pants … so, sorry JM, I liked your set, but I didn’t really want to dance.
John Mouse went down well, he was a good fit for a Cud audience, with similarly catchy non-serious songs. His setlist can be found here.
He sang about people sitting too near him on the train, or about the enjoyable sound of Welsh words, or snooker players, non-serious but relatable themes. Cud are different, they have an eccentric daftness to their lyrics, but they sing about different things, most usually about love, even if the medium of expression is via a prawn in Whitby … although sometimes it can come across as a bit puerile, see I’ve had it with Blondes (my favourite title of theirs) and Purple Love Balloon (my least favourite title of theirs).
I don’t know how to write lyrics because not only do I not know what to write about, I don’t know how to write in a lyrical way. Not too direct, but not too obscure either, poetic up to a point, but not so much that it gets in the way of the music. It requires finesse and a light touch, not doggerel or didactic preachiness. They needn’t work when read on their own, but they must scan to the music. It’s best when it’s subtle metaphor and personal; direct fist-pumping diatribes on politics, or hectoring us on how we should be living our lives, can get very tiresome – yes Steve Hogarth, I’m looking at you.
It’s a fine art, harder than it looks.
Cud
Carl Puttnam (vocals and lyrics) is mostly pretty good at lyrics. There are some ups and downs, some rough-around-the-edges moments, but I like his style and the fact that although they can sound superficial and trite at times, there’s a knowing self-mocking-ness to them, they’re sung with a nod and a wink, reassuring us that they are the butt of their own jokes. This doesn’t always work, sometimes it crosses into silly or juvenile, being too self-consciously Cud-liek (“I reek of chic” for example), but mostly I like Puttnam’s lyrics.
I got back to my Kindle for a bit, but the place was filling up fast and I was being jostled, and I don’t like being jostled, so I stopped trying to read and let my mind wander.
I remember seeing Cud in the Duchess of York in Leeds, way back in 1994. It was their Reading Festival warm up gig (they played the Melody Maker stage on the Sunday) and although they were outstanding, they rather irritatingly arrived on stage after 10pm, perilously close to my bedtime. Fortunately we are all a lot older now, and they hit the stage at a much more respectable hour, looking exactly the level of ridiculous I would expect from them: Mike (guitar) looking cool in his brimmed hat, Carl with fancy shirt and sunglasses, William in fancy shirt, and Gogs (drums) in neon-yellow sunglasses.
They kick off with Oh No Won’t Do, then straight into Neurotica … the rhythm section is better than I remember. I’m close enough to follow William’s fingers as he rocks out the bass lines, and Gogs’s touch on the drums is subtler than I thought. The last time I’d seen them – a decade ago – he’d seemed quite basic and noisy, but either I was wrong then or he’s improved his style. Or I’m wrong now. I suppose any of those could be true.
The gig really jumps up a gear with Hey Boots and Only (a Prawn in Whitby) where the moshing gets proper raucous and we all sing along like in a good proper singsong.
I love a singsong.
This, along with the long outros of funky guitar riffs later in the gig, were my highlights – although it was also good to hear some of their newer material that I was less familiar with, dangling the hope of a new album in our faces.
I was getting a bit annoyed by the man in front of me. He looked like a really nice fella, and I wanted him to be my friend, but he was edging backwards continually and his dancing moves were bringing his head very close to my face, worrying me that the hard bone of his skull might crash wildly into my sensitive nose. It was unbearable. I gentle nudged him in the back so he knew he was getting too close and although he didn’t turn around and lamp me one, he didn’t move any further away either.
I decided to move to the other side of the stage, near the exit and the bar. This is anyway better to see Mike who I hadn’t been able to see from my slither of space between pillar and nice dancing man. This was a mistake, I was stuck at the back, disconnected from the action, and when they play Rich and Strange and I found myself dancing John-Travolta-like, I was on my own near the door by the cloakroom, bathed in the white light of the exit corridor, not in among the dancing sorts, and so I stand out like what I imagine a total idiot might look like … but in that moment I realised I didn’t much care; such is the advantage of being at a gig on your own: no need to be self-conscious about dancing.
The encore was, predictably, Purple Love Balloon, and finally – and less predictably – I’ve had it with Blondes accompanied by the traditional stage invasion.
The gig was unlikely to convince a non-Cud aficionado, but for those us giddily drinking at the fountain of nostalgia, pretending we’re 20 again, pretending we haven’t lost our youth and turned middle-aged, pretending it’s all going to be all right, it was magnificent.
MrJohn 