The Souls Of Black Folk:Angeline Morrison @ Cecil Sharp House.

"Won't you bury my body down. Down in the cold, cold ground" - The Hand Of Fanny Johnson.

Last week I took a bit of a chance on a gig. My friend, and former PRS colleague, Dave Fog asked me if I'd be interested in joining him at Cecil Sharp House to hear the black folk singer Angeline Morrison and her band run through their new album The Sorrow Songs:Folk Songs of Black British Experience. 

Released recently, on Topic records, it's a project that came about when Morrison, a songwriter and academic residing in Cornwall but born in Birmingham to a Jamaican mother and a Scottish father, realised that though many black people like, love, folk music often folk music doesn't love them back. At least not in the form of songs and stories about their own life.

She decided to rectify that and, via what appears to be very extensive research, she discovered stories about the black British experience and tales of black people who had lived in the UK in centuries past. Most of the stories she discovered weren't fully realised so she's had to use a bit of artistic license to put the songs together but that simply adds to both the charm and power of the project.

Morrison's got a great voice and a commanding stage presence. She plays the autoharp and she's backed by a three man band consisting of Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne (anglo concertina), Clarke Camilleri (banjo and guitar), and Hamilton Gross on violin. Each one of them chips in on backing vocals, as well as some good time folky clapping along, and each one of them is uniformly excellent.

On the album, there are interludes where white British people of days gone by express their racist views but, probably thankfully, that's not part of the gig. Instead we just get Angeline introducting the songs, telling us where they're from (there's at least a couple from Wales and one from Redruth in Cornwall) and then the band playing the songs. Sometimes accompanied by enthusiastic clapping and singing from the crowd.

It is, after all, a folk gig. Songs like Unknown African Boy, Cruel Mother Country, and Mad Haired Moll O'Bedlam are tender to the point of almost unbearably poignant while slightly more uptempo tunes like Black John can hardly fail to get the foot tapping (it was a sit down gig). Others, like Cinnamon Water are simply and plainly gorgeous.

The Hand Of Fanny Johnson was the most rambunctious and infectious song of the night (and something of an earworm to boot) but perhaps the most powerful part of the set was the closing coda of Go Home (a common phrase that racists like to use) and Slave No More. Go Home was played at an almost funeral pace as Angeline's band intoned the title while Angeline herself told of Britain being the only home that she, or the person whose spirit she was evoking in the song, had ever known.

Slave No More almost felt as if a spiritual. Though a spiritual birthed in the West Midlands and grown up in Cornwall rather than the cotton fields of Alabama. It, of course, ended in a standing ovation and a quick encore of a Ewan MacColl song whose title, annoyingly, escapes me now. In an hour and a half performance, though one that built on over a year's work, Angeline Morrison managed to write a new chapter not just for British black folk music but for British folk music in general. Both the album and the gig were, and are, as vital as they are necessary.

Thanks to Cecil Sharp House (a fantastic venue), thanks to Maddie Morris (above) for a brilliant and enthusiastic supporting set, thanks to Namaaste for tasty zardaloo kofte beforehand, and thanks to Dave F for both the gig tickets and paying for the meal (crucial to me at a time I'm beginning to find myself in financial dire straits) as well as being top company for a lovely night out. Thanks, most of all, though to Angeline Morrison and her fantastic band.

 

A Well Planned Nightmare:The Suspect.

How can a television programme be both completely compelling and absolute shit at the same time? You'd not think it possible but ITV Hub's recent The Suspect (written by Peter Berry, adapted from a Michael Robotham book, and directed by both James Strong and Camilla Strom Henriksen) managed to be that show!

It was shit because the acting was, for the most part, dreadful. Many of the cast are fine actors whom I've seen in other things acting very well. But, for some reason - and I began to suspect it was intentional, here they're mugging it up as if they're part of an amateur dramatics society putting on a production of Pirates of Penzance. Virtually no scenery in The Suspect remained unchewed.

The makers of the show also had an overbearing penchant for zany camera angles and when they didn't seem sure how to end a scene they'd simply fade it out or turn the camera sideways and move out. It got quite annoying. Less annoying, but equally pointless, was the long panning shots over London and Liverpool, the two cities in which the action takes places.

A recognisably grey, if geographically inaccurate, London consisted of well known landmarks like The Shard, the BT Tower, the Walkie Talkie, and London Bridge. You could play spot the sight. Ooh, look it's Coal Drops Yard near KX (complete with converted gasholder), it's Tower 42, and it's Mario's Cafe in Kentish Town. As made famous by Saint Etienne.

It's the same for Liverpool. There's both the cathedrals either end of Hope Street, there's Albert Dock, and there's the Radio City Tower. None of this really helps with the story but as I love both London and Liverpool I found the shots quite enjoyable.

The story was anything but. It started dark and got darker as the five episodes went on. Following a vaguely superfluous, but exciting and vertigo inducing, introduction we begin with the discovery of a dead body in a cemetery. Not one that has been legally interred there either.

It's that of a young woman, Catherine McCain (played in flashback by Tara Lee), and she's been buried in a shallow grave. There are twenty-one, apparently self-inflicted, stab wounds in her body and the thrust of the drama will be trying to find out who is responsible for her murder. Which already sounds confusing if the stab wounds are, as we've been told, self-inflicted.

The storyline beggars belief but, perhaps because it is so far fetched, it soon becomes rather addictive. I might have turned off but I had to find out what happened. Investigating officers DI Ruiz (Shaun Parkes, perhaps the hammiest cop I've seen on telly since Cop Rock was aired back in 1990) and DS Devi (Anjli Mohindra somehow manages to wear a leather vest and still look cool) call on the services of clinical psychologist Dr Joe O'Loughlin (Aidan Turner) and it is O'Loughlin who becomes the very heart of the drama.

O'Loughlin is both successful and celebrated in his field of work but he's recently been diagnosed with early onset Parkinson's (at just 42 years old) and he seems to be using that as an excuse for some very strange and suspicious behaviour. Mind you, it's not as if anyone else in The Suspect doesn't act suspiciously.

It soon transpires that O'Loughlin knew the victim in at least a professional context and she had even made accusations that he had sexually assaulted her. Something he brushes off as part and parcel of his work. O'Loughlin, however, is morally ambiguous at best and his wife Jasmine (Camilla Beeput) is fully aware of that.

Soon the evidence against O'Loughlin starts to become overwhelming but he remains determined to prove his innocence and find a way out of what he refers to as a "well planned nightmare". One of his patients Bobby (Bobby Schofield who seems to excel in playing troubled youngsters) has both an obsession with the number '21' and a fascination with hurting women (as well as a belief that air can scream in pain) and O'Loughlin starts to suspect that Bobby may know something about Catherine's murder.

But is O'Loughlin simply setting Bobby up as a fall guy? Has O'Loughlin even convinced himself he's not guilty? Is Dr Jack Owens (Adam James) really O'Loughlin's friend or does he have ulterior motives? Is the inclusion of O'Loughlin's business partner Fenwick (Sian Clifford) and friendly plumber DJ (Tom McKay) to the story anything more than padding and exposition?

Or is there something very different going on here? It's to the makers of The Suspect's credit that we find ourselves in a place where we can't trust anyone. As the story unfolds, and multiple coincidences pile up on top of each other, it starts to get very weird and even pretty eerie. What is the relevance of the carved whale or the smell of chloroform? 

The Suspect took us to a very dark place in the end and the fact it was able to do so with such dreadful acting chops made it, in some way, even more of a curious watch than it may have been if the cast had been asked to act properly. A disturbing view. In more ways than one.

Lies And Betrayals, Fruit Covered Nails:Pavement @ The Roundhouse.

20th April 1992. Over thirty years ago. That's when Pavement's debut album, Slanted and Enchanted, came out and, with the possible exception of Underworld's Dubnobasswithmyheadman and Big Black's Song About Fucking, could an album ever have been more aptly named?

I was won over immediately. I'd heard of Pavement a few years earlier when The Wedding Present covered Box Elder as a b-side to Brassneck (John Peel, of course, played it) but it was in 1992 they began to seriously impinge on my consciousness. I was already a huge fan of both The Fall and Pixies so when I heard of a band who split the difference between them, and chucked in just enough of their own esoteric charm to keep it fresh, I was at first curious. Soon I became enchanted.

Slanted and enchanted. Summer Babe, Trigger Cut, Conduit For Sale, Zurich Is Stained, Here, Two States. The album was rammed full of instant classics and by the time the second album, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, came out Pavement were firmly entrenched near the top of my all time favourite bands list. A truly inspirational gig at the Windsor Old Trout had played a big part in that.

That second album had its share of instantly grafitying tunes (Range Life, Cut Your Hair, Gold Soundz) but, for me, it was the likes of Silence Kid and Elevate Me Later that proved Pavement were in it for the long run. Wowee Zowee (key tracks:- Grave Architecture, Best Friend's Arm, We Dance) was a messy and ambitious third album and though they settled into more of a groove with Brighten The Corners (Stereo, Shady Lane) and Terror Twilight (Carrot Rope, Spit On A Stranger) they remained a captivating, human, fallible experience until the day I went to see them at Brixton Academy in 1999.

20th November 1999. In the long dark shadow that fell over me following my brother's death, I hardly noticed Steve Malkmus, a pair of handcuffs attached to his mic stand, at the end of the set announcing that said handcuffs represented how it felt to be in a band. Two weeks later the split was confirmed. Pavement were no more, The Fall continued and Mark E Smith grumped about Pavement, and when they did finally come back, for a brief four in 2010 - again they played Brixton Academy and I went with Tina and Pam (who managed to cover a dating guy in Nando's ketchup beforehand) - they came back not as a new band with new songs but as a heritage act.

It didn't matter. They'd earned it. Now, in 2022, they're back again and despite a weird TikTok hit in Harness Your Hopes, they're not offering up new material. They're playing the hits. The hits they never actually had. Around the same time as Pavement's first incarnation, the dreary Hull indie rock band Kingmaker had four top forty hits (Pavement's biggest UK hit was Shady Lane which got to number forty, they never once breached the US charts) but it's hard to imagine them selling out four nights at the Roundhouse or thousands of fans hanging on every word of Eat Yourself Whole.

Pavement, with due recognition of The Velvet Underground and Japan, are the very definition of a cult band. You don't meet a lot of Pavement fans (unless you happen to either work at PRS in the early 2000s or hang around the New Inn in Basingstoke in the early nineties) but the ones you do don't just like Pavement. They love them.

 

So last night's Roundhouse gig was met with eager expectation. The trouble is Pavement, like the Labour party, have an amazing ability to fuck up when everything is going well for them. Surely this bunch of fifty-somethings couldn't screw up now. Could they? Could they?

They didn't. Phew! I knew they'd been changing their set each night so it was a disappointment that I didn't get to hear Summer Babe, Carrot Rope, or Zurich Is Stained but them's the breaks. What they did play was uniformly excellent and, of course - this is Pavement, somewhat charmingly shambolic in places.

A low key intro of Major Leagues led us into some big hitters like Stereo, Two States, Trigger Cut (I joined Adrian in singing along in what became something of a tone deaf gospel chorus), and a fiercely energetic run through of Fight This Generation. Bob Nastanovich, as ever, bounding around the stage with the rabid energy of a man half his age while Malkmus and Scott 'Spiral Stairs' Kannberg, rocking the Geoffrey Boycott/David Rodigan look, coolly flanked the wings with bassist Mark Ibold, as seems to be his role, a cordial buffer between the band's two biggest egos.

 

Serpentine Pad, Gold Soundz, Heaven Is A Truck, and set closer Shady Lane all sounded as deftly, and daftly, brilliant as ever and Silence Kid was simply sublime. Surely one of Pavement's best ever songs. Here, of course, was incredible. The room seemed to stop spinning as Malkmus quietly intoned his lines about dressing for a success that never came (four nights at the Roundhouse, mate?) and the painted portraits of minions and slaves.

It was matched by another slightly underrated tune in Grave Architecture from 1995's Wowee Zowee. When Pavement play hard they're worthy of comparison with likes of Husker Du and Sonic Youth but, of course, they often prefer to go insular. It's how they ended up garnering comparisons with the likes of Truman's Water and The Archers Of Loaf.

Unlike those bands however, Pavement, and Malkmus especially, know their way round a tune. An encore of Range Life, Spit On A Stranger, Conduit For Sale!, and Stop Breathin' proved that. Last night Pavement had nothing to prove. They'd already proved, many times over, what they're capable of. So instead the gig acted as a celebration, a singalong, and even a bit of a piss up. I had a fucking great time.

Thanks loads to Pam (whose photos I have used in this review), Adrian, Gary, Stuart, Julian, and Other Dave for the company, thanks to BEAK> for a wonderful support set (Neu! meets Hawkwind but with jokes about the Tory conference between songs), and thanks to Pavement for being Pavement. Top night.

Kakistocracy XXXIX:Titanic Deckchairs.

"We inherited a bunch of formulas from Labour that shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas and that needed to be undone. I started the work of undoing that" - Rishi Sunak, speaking in Tunbridge Wells, August 2022.

It's been a whole week since I last wrote one of these Kakistocracy blogs - and, of course, it's been another week of Tory chaos, back-stabbing, and blood-letting. All of it done in the name of either the Tory party or naked personal ambition. None of it done with any attempt to ease the multiple, and growing, very serious problems the country is facing.

The end result is that the UK has ended up with its first ever Prime Minister 'of colour', its first Indian PM, and its first Hindu PM. That, in itself, is something to celebrate. The UK has long been a multi-cultural, multi-faith (and no faith) country and that should be reflected across society.

Sadly, however, I am unable to feel much joy about Sunak's appointment. When Barack Obama became the US's first black president and when Nelson Mandela took over as the leader of South Africa, people across the world witnessed scenes of unbridled joy and celebration at the overturning of centuries of oppression and racism.

Even if it didn't quite pan out like that in the end. In the UK, after twelve long years of Tory misery, there was no sense of celebration. For most the news was met with a weary shrug as the Conservative Party inflicted their fifth consecutive leader on us. Each one, it seems, forced on us with an ever smaller democratic mandate.

While Sunak may not be as egregious as his predecessors Liz Truss (remember her?) and Boris Johnson, it should not be forgotten that he is considered by the party to be to the right of both Truss and Johnson, that he was a committed Brexit supporter (Truss voted remain and Johnson hedged his bets until he could work out which option benefited him personally), and that, despite having a personal fortune of over £730,000,000, he is a firm believer in austerity.

It should not be forgotten either that he was fined for his role in partygate and that, until it became completely untenable not to do so, he supported and enabled Boris Johnson's reign of terror almost until the bitter of end. At least until he stabbed him in the back. It's a small mercy for the country that Johnson was unable to get the support to get him back into Number Ten (even though he, of course, lied that he did - he knows loads of MPs that support him but you wouldn't have heard of them, they go to a different Houses of Parliament) but Sunak may prove to be an equally slippery bastard.

As it stands, Keir Starmer will have a tougher job beating Sunak in a General Election than he would have done with Liz Truss (who he would have obliterated, even annihilated). That's not because Sunak is an honest or decent man but because he will, if his party fall in behind him - which is never a dead cert, be able to look competent as he pursues policies designed to enrich the wealthy and punish the poor.

When Liz Truss took over, I talked about the same old shit band playing the same old shit songs but just with a different singer. We're there again. Except, unlike Truss, this one can sing a bit. But it doesn't change the fact that this Tory karaoke has now been reduced to endless run throughs of turgid shit like Sex On Fire and Mr Brightside. They've run out of tunes so they're playing their greatest hits and, as we all know, their greatest hits suck arse.

One of the few plus points of Sunak's appointment, other than the fact it is almost certainly annoying Johnson (a man who managed to have three holidays instead of doing anything for his constituents in Hillingdon), is that it's made Nigel Farage look like a total prick. That's not difficult. Nigel Farage IS a total prick so it's hardly surprising that he should look like one but when he emerged from his lair to claim that the Tory leadership race would be a stitch up and that some kind of 'deep state' would ensure a 'remainer' take over he couldn't have been more wrong.

All three contenders, Sunak, Johnson, and Penny Mordaunt, were Brexit voters so there was never any chance of a remainer becoming leader. Despite the overwhelming evidence in front of us now that Brexit was a complete and utter failure and has caused, and will continue to cause, untold damage to the country. At the time of the Brexit vote, the UK economy was equal to 90% of the German economy. It now stands at 70% and that's just the financial angle. What it's done to division in the country and how it has hollowed out viable political alternatives is far more concerning in the long term.

Look at the people we have at the top of government now. Hiding behind the leadership chaos, we've seen the actual Health Secreteary Therese Coffey make claims that she's illegally, and potentially dangerously, shared her prescription drugs with others. Like one of her predecessors, Matt Hancock - you'll remember him, she's completely undermined a vital health message.

We've seen Suella Braverman, or Cruella - the woman who gets moist at the thought of asylum seekers being forcibly flown to Rwanda, then the actual Home Secretary blaming the disruption in the country on, wait for it - you know it's coming, "the Labour Party, the Lib-Dems, the Coalition of  Chaos, the Guardian reading, tofu-eating wokerati, and the anti-Growth Coalition".

Before, the very next day, resigning. Or being sacked. With these cunts, it's never clear. We've seen Christoper Chope, a known Tory extremist previously most famous for blocking legislation on upskirting, appear on Newsnight to call his own colleagues a "disgrace", to call them "hyenas", and say he's "ashamed" of them. So the party's stopped the infighting then!

Most importantly of all, before u-turn queen Truss's ignoble resignation - the day after saying she's a fighter and not a quitter, we've seen Jeremy Hunt become the Chancellor and take over one of the most important jobs in the country despite, as The Guardian's Aditya Chakraborty points out, having a 'mandate' of just eighteen votes, coming last in the summer's leadership election, and attracting the support of just 0.00003% of all of the UK's voters.

Truss's brief reign - at fifty-five days the shortest ever and considerably shorter than her campaign to become leader - has left the UK even more of an international basket case, and laughing stock, than even Boris Johnson managed. As crisis upon crisis piles up on the UK, the Tories have no answer but to rearrange the deckchairs on their Titanic of a party.

A Titanic that was launched with a bottle of Brexit champagne smashed against its side as Boris Johnson put on a captain's hat and uniform and sailed the UK out into uncharted waters and dispensed with the lifeboats before realising he had no idea where he was going. Both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak were happy to join Johnson's crew on this demented voyage so I feel no sympathy for Truss and I wish for Sunak nothing but misery and a short time as PM.

These are ideologues without ideology and populists without popularity. Worst of all, they are humans without humanity. The debate now has gone beyond heating or eating towards safeguarding and suicide watches as so many of the general public have everything taken from them and given to the very rich. The Tories must go - and they must never return.

 

Fleapit revisited:The Banshees Of Inisherin

Dry stone walls, ponies, fiddles, pints of stout, confession booths, donkeys, poteen, The Virgin Mary, and fecking. More fecking fecking than you can fecking believe. Not for one moment will you believe that Martin McDonagh's The Banshees Of Inisherin is set anywhere other than rural Ireland even if the story it tells could, quite easily, be set in any place or at any time.

In 1923, as a Civil War, "a bad do", rages across Ireland, the small island of Inisherin is barely affected. There rural life continues as it must have done for centuries. Farmers tend their animals, waves crash dramatically against the rocks, and every afternoon at 2pm Padraic Suilleabhain (Colin Farrell) calls at his friend Colm Doherty's (Brendan Gleeson) house and the two of them repair to JJ Devine's pub for a few pints of the dark stuff and a chat.

Until one day, Colm refuses to answer the door. Peering through the window, Padraic can see Colm sat there, smoking, refusing to move. Colm, it seems, has had enough of Padraic who he considers to be a "limited man" and he no longer wants to be friends with him. He wants to focus on writing music and making, to his mind, the most of the time he has left and he is prepared to go to fairly extreme measures to demonstrate to Padraic, and others, just how serious he is about this.

Colm, understandably, is aghast. He asks his sister Siobhan (Kerry Condon) if he's dull, if he's dim, and, most importantly of all, if he's nice. Siobhan both teases and reassures him but she's got her own life and her own concerns to focus on. Inisherin, it seems, it too small, too judgemental, and too stultifying for her.

Romantic overtures from feeble minded but well intentioned Dominic (Barry Keoghan) are not enough for her and we see her frustration with the island grow as surely as Colm's frustration with Padriac and - later - Padraic's frustration with Colm, does. Dominic, for his part, has to contend with a violent alcoholic of a father in local policeman Paedar (Gary Lydon).

A flippant view could imagine this film to be Father Ted as reimagined by Samuel Beckett but the harsh beauty of the land is echoed in the harsh beauty of those that call it home and The Banshees Of Inisherin is beautifully shot, wonderfully acted (props to David Pearse as an irritable priest and Sheila Flitton as Mrs McCormick - the nearest the film gets to an actual banshee), and, as you may expect with McDonagh, it is brilliantly scripted.

As well as being peppered with ink black humour, the dialogue is sparser than I'd come to expect with McDonagh but that fits with the setting and creates space for us to get to know all the main characters. The Banshees Of Inisherin is, ultimately, a meditation on themes as timeless as friendship, ageing, loneliness, isolation, animal husbandry, and the passing of time. More than anything it asks what it means to be alive, what it means to be a man. Is it more important to be important or is it nicer to be nice?

Thanks to Michelle for joining me in watching this film at Broughton Cineworld and thanks to her and Evie for a lovely weekend of vegan Chinese food, parks, parties, pumpkin picking, and maize mazes.

Marcus Coates:Psychotic Reaction (In Pimlico)

I can suffer from anxiety. Sometimes I don't feel like getting out of bed (though this morning I sprang out of bed at 4.30am - there's two sides to me), afraid to face the day, and, often, I try to avoid my neighbours in case they indulge me in small talk or, worse, ask me something practical about our small residential area and general flat maintenance.

But I've never been scared to leave the house because I thought everybody outside was spying on me. I've never feared that there was a global plot against me and I've never thought that trees and clouds were fake, and real houses were actually Lego houses, all as a part of a worldwide conspiracy that the voices in my head keep telling me I'm the only to know about and that if I tell anyone I will be in very serious trouble.

That's because I'm not, at least not yet, suffering from psychosis. It sounds an absolutely crippling condition and I have complete sympathy for anyone who suffers from it. If you're gonna try and make art about psychosis you need to tread carefully, you need to not just be sympathetic. You need to be empathetic too otherwise it could easily end up becoming indulgent at best and exploitative at worst.

But, under the auspices of Artangel, Marcus Coates - with his new work The Directors, has done just that. It's a site specific art installation, I suppose you might call it an immersive experience, in which you wander the streets of the Churchill Gardens Estate in Pimlico and visit an array of quite surprising venues. Each of which, there's five of them, is showing a film in which Coates himself stars. He's directed by various sufferers of psychosis who try to explain to him, often very successfully - though admirably he's open when he can't quite get it, how the condition affects them.

For it to work we need Coates to be both sensitive to and curious about the lives of his 'directors':- Anthony, Lucy, Marcus, Mark, and John. Which he is. The shortest film is sixteen minutes long and the longest is twenty-seven minutes so you have to invest at least two hours plus all the walking between venues.

Because of that The Directors works far better than it might if it had been on at a more typical gallery. I started my tour, as requested - because that's where you pick up the map and guide, at the Churchill Gardens Residents Association building on Glasgow Terrace. A fairly nondescript concrete building into which we see Coates imaging sitting on a bus, like Marcus, as the world closes in on him.

The voices in his head tell him everyone's looking at him, everyone thinks he's a freak, everyone thinks he stinks, even that he's pissed himself. He's not sure if he has or not. The voices in his head get louder and louder, faces appear to his side. Soon he's sat on a chair with large red curtain drapes either side of him and he's feeling smaller and smaller. On its own this film was sympathetic enough but it was only when mixed in with the four other films that the wider picture appeared.

I walked down to Pimlico Spice, a former Indian restaurant, to hear the story of Stephen who was not only scared to leave his house but scared, sometimes, to move out of his chair. The crippling nature of his psychosis, when he finally summoned up the courage to leave his flat, was so overwhelming that he walked in a bizarre hunched fashion, repeated in the film by Coates.

The strange gait caused curious onlookers to stare which, of course, only increased the sense of paranoia. Eventually the voices in his head told him he simply had to go home. It was too dangerous to stay out. Later in the series of videos, we hear a similar tale of someone laid so low by it all that they would simply get in their bed and lie in it. 

"We've all done that" you may think - and, indeed, many of us have. I've done it for hours. This poor man would lie in his bed for days on end. It's unclear if he ate or got up to use the loo but I've certainly heard of instances where people don't eat and simply piss the bed because they're so consumed by the illness.

The next, third, stop was perhaps the most bizarre of all. I had to go up to the the fifth floor of a tower block, Chaucer House, and wait outside. A member of Artangel's staff informed us we'd need to either wear bags over our shoes or take them off as the flat was actually somebody's home.

The owners weren't in but, after a short wait, a group of about six of us (the maximum number permitted) were lead to a small bedroom where we sat on a group of chairs, and some on the single bed itself, to watch a film that, rather creepily, appeared to have been filmed in exactly the same room.

Of course, with these walking art tours you keep seeing the same people and, indeed, I did when I arrived at the next port of call. A health centre located on the, all things considered, unfortunately named Lupus Street. 

I presumed it was a former health centre but on entering there were people sat waiting for appointments and rooms for ultrasound scans etc; I felt a bit uncomfortable about this. People's health can be quite private and very personal to them. Sharing with healthcare professionals can be difficult enough but having a load of art enthusiasts wandering around seemed a bit much.

Another part of me, however, felt that this is, possibly, something the world of mental health welcomes and therefore it seems quite apt to hold it in a healthcare centre. As long as nobody gets in the way of more important stuff that goes on there, it seems important that people are educated further about mental health issues, be that via art or whatever.

The stigma relating to mental health is slowly being eroded but there's still a long way to go. People feel more able to talk about their feelings now but there are still plenty out there who think men with issues should just "man up" and the like. That's not worked in the past. It won't work in the future.

I've not written, specifically, about most films and about most cases because as the experience went on I started to see parallels and similarities. These people stopped being outliers and became something of a group. The psychotic experience was unique to each individual but did have many similarities. Feelings of elation and unbridled joy at times followed by crushing lows and suicidal ideation. Voices in the head, sweats, hallucinations. Believing oneself to be both the best person that ever lived and the worst - sometimes simultaneously.

The last film, directed by Mark, was in a back room of the Cave bar on Tachbrook Street. It was late Friday afternoon, early Friday evening and people were having birthday drinks on the terrace outside. I went in and watched a film in which a man walked around Greenwich Park feeling completely invincible before getting swallowed up by his own securities to such a degree it felt like people were punching him as he walked past. Earlier other sufferers had spoken of feeling as if people were pouring water over them.

As I came out of that final film, the birthday drinks were in full swing. I thought that somewhere, not that far away, somebody was probably lying in their bed, sheets pulled over their head, scared to even go outside. It occurred to me that, quite easily, any of these happy celebrants could, like me, find themselves like that one day. Maybe they'd already been there. If Marcus Coates and The Directors made me realise one thing it's that people with mental health issues aren't "just like us". They are us.