Kakistocracy XL:I'm A Lying, Murdering, Piece Of Shit, Get Me Out Of Here.

It's the kangaroos and ostriches I feel sorry for. Them and all the insects and the grubs that are slaughtered for fun so gawping Brits can watch celebrities, major and minor, eat them and have them poured over them in so called 'bushtucker trials'. I don't watch Ant & Dec's annual festival of televisual animal torture and murder, I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here, because I'm against animal cruelty in any form but the fact it is so popular really says a lot about how low our society has sunk.

This season's most notable jungle dweller is former Health Secretary, infamous adulterer, and crocodile cryer Matt Hancock and though it'll be fun to watch him choke on an ostrich's cock or spew out a kangaroo anus we shouldn't forget that he isn't actually a celebrity. He is a paid, and sitting MP, for the seat of West Suffolk and he's supposed to be representing his constituents at a time of the most serious cost of living crisis in living memory.

Instead, he is being paid nearly half a million pounds, on top of his salary as an MP, to do this and being given a chance, presumably/hopefully one he'll fail - he has a strong record of failure, to rehabilitate his public image when, in a sane world, he should be stripped of his job as an MP (he's skiving work to do another job), and then taken to court and investigated for his care home failures during the pandemic that cost the lives of thousands of elderly and vulnerable people.

Ideally, he should be in prison. Though it's hard to see Ant and Dec commentating on that. Imagine being a kangaroo that is killed for I'm A Celebrity. It'd be bad enough to be eaten by Boy George or Jill Scott but even Chris Moyles would be preferable to Hancock. Imagine having to die so that you can be eaten by Hancock who has been paid to do it and then in some way helping him restore his image. Even the creepiest of crawlies deserves better than that.

On the subject of creepy-crawlies, let's turn for a moment to Gavin Williamson and his pet Mexican redknee tarantula, Cronus, which he keeps in his parliamentary office. Because of course he fucking does. Not totally sure which one is the creepiest or crawliest (of course I am, it's Williamson) but it seems that Williamson is so loathed, even by his own party, that Nick Watt revealed on Newsnight recently that a group of junior Tories hated Williamson so much they launched a plan to break into office, release his tarantula, and stamp it to death.

Which is not on. It's not the poor spider's fault that Williamson is such a vile and useless piece of shit. Following his sackings by both Theresa May and Boris Johnson, he was, quite remarkably, appointed to cabinet by Rishi Sunak as Minister of State without Portfolio. Whatever that means.

It didn't last long. He was soon found guilty of sending threatening text messages to staff and colleagues. He called one lady "physically disgusting", threatened to slit a civil servant's throat, and told another to jump out of a window. He's resigned from his cabinet position, before he could be sacked, but remains an MP. What did the people of South Staffordshire do to deserve Williamson?

Ah yes, they voted for him. Imagine threatening to slit a colleague's throat and keeping your job. It's virtually impossible for anyone else to survive that except for Tory MPs. I have no idea what kind of kompromat Williamson holds on the other leading lights of the Tory party but it must be pretty bad.

All of this reflects rather badly on bland, and serious sounding, Cop27 ditherer Rishi Sunak whose appointments have proved him to be as much of a wanker as Truss and Johnson before him. While everyone with an even one iota of human decency celebrated Jacob Rees-Mogg quitting as Business Secretary before he was fired, any of the credit Sunak may have got for that was lost with the appointments of Williamson, Suella Braverman (we'll come to her), and Kemi Badenoch as Equalities Minister. As well as the return to cabinet of such lost causes as Dominic Raab, Oliver Dowden, and Terese Coffey. As Environment Secretary ffs! Coffey's only suggestion on the environment so far is that we could do as she does and use the same mug for our tea and coffee multiple times.

Out of the box! Who'd have ever thought of something so genius? It feels like the only mugs here are the British people for putting up with this shitshow. Kemi Badenoch's appointment to that particular position had an old Basingstoke acquaintance of mine, one Mat Winser, observing, eloquently on Facebook:- "fuck this government directly in the eye socket" and I don't think I can top that comment so I'll just let it stand.

As with regards to equality, Foreign Secretary, and living proof that nominative determinism is a myth, James Cleverly has reminded gay football fans planning to attend the World Cup in homophobic Qatar that it might be a good idea to be a bit less gay and Home Secretary, actual Home Secretary, Suella Braverman's has spoke, with complete intent to offend and whip up hatred, of an "invasion" of migrants on Britain's southern shores.

Not remotely incendiary talk, and clearly you can't link it with the terrorist incident in which far right extremist terrorist Andrew Leak threw three petrol bombs into a migrant processing centre in Dover, killing himself as he did so.

Nothing's changed since Sunak took over. Nothing at all. The culture wars continue to speed up, the hate talk is ramped up, the problems facing the country continue to pile up on top of each other, and, at PMQs, Sunak has no answers at all to Keir Starmer's, ever more pressing, questions. Three weeks in a row Sunak has brought up Jeremy Corbyn who is no longer the Labour leader of even in the Labour party.

Sunak, and this is something he shares with some of the more lunatic fringes of leftism, desperately wants Corbyn to be Labour leader. To the extent it appears he's in denial of the fact that he isn't. As the nurses vote to join railway workers on strike, as people struggle to buy food or warm their houses, and as the Brexit cows come home to roost and lay Project Fear shaped cowpats, Rishi Sunak has no answers on how to even start solving any of these problems. Because of this, he should call a General Election immediately. But he won't. Because like every Tory, he cares more about his party than he does about the country and he cares more about himself than he does even the party. With an estimated £720,000,000 in the bank we probably won't even get the satisfaction of seeing him choke on a wallaby's testicles. I'm a British citizen, get me out of here!

Fleapit revisited:Don't Look Now.

"It's like a city in aspic. Left over from a dinner party and all the guests are dead and gone. Too many shadows. We're almost there" - Heather

Nicolas Roeg's 1973 film Don't Look Now (adapted from a Daphne du Maurier story and shown recently on BBC1 - presumably due to Hallowe'en, while still being available on iPlayer) is rightly regarded as something of a horror, or thriller, classic. I'd seen it, for the first time, about twenty years ago in a cinema in the West End of London and it thoroughly chilled me.

It scared the shit out of me. But watching at home, especially when I already know what's going to happen, could it possibly have the same effect? More or less, yes. It still felt incredibly eerie, it was still chilling, and it still made me jump. The final ten minutes or so were just as brilliant as I'd remembered them - and I hadn't even remembered them correctly!

The film begins in a large idyllic English country garden. A child, Christine (Sharon Williams), dressed in a bright red coat is playing on the edge of a lake with a ball and a talking Action Man. She is the daughter of John (Donald Sutherland) and Laura Baxter (Julie Christie) and soon she will fall in the lake and drown. Changing, it seems, John and Laura's life forever.

That all happens in the first six minutes of the film. We next meet up with John and Laura at some unspecified time in the future. Still grieving, they've moved to Venice (a masterclass in peeling paint and faded glamour if that's your thing, it is mine) where John has accepted a commission from Bishop Barbarrigo (Massimo Serato) to restore an ancient church.

While dining out, Laura meets with two peculiar sisters:- Wendy (Clelia Matania) and Heather (Hilary Mason). Heather is blind but she can, she and Wendy claim, "see" in other ways. She is psychic and she certainly seems to know enough detail about Laura's daughter and her untimely death to convince Laura of her powers.

This, once Laura has fainted, provides comfort to Laura and though John is far more skeptical he is pleased, at least initially, that his wife is finally starting to feel a little bit better. But when Heather and Wendy invite Laura to a seance in which they hope to contact Christine, it becomes apparent, if they are to be believed - and there are plenty of reasons to both believe and not believe them, that John himself is in danger.

When Laura returns to England after her son, Johnny (Nicholas Salter), has an accident at his boarding school, John is left in Venice alone and things, for him, start to get very weird. Strange noises, labyrinthine backstreets, incidences of deja vu, Christian imagery, dolls, grotesque statues, a loose serial killer, canals (of course), vaporettos, and Heather and Wendy appearing almost everywhere.

What is happening to John? What is happening in Venice? Roeg doesn't make it easy for us. Don't Look Now involves cuts that jump backwards and forwards in time, split screens, scenes filmed upside down as if reflected in water, and lots and lots of symbolism. There's also THAT infamous sex scene between Sutherland and Christie and a moment where the sound of a piercing scream merges almost seemlessly into that of an equally piercing drill.

More than anything there is red. I hadn't noticed, first time round, quite how much. There is, of course, the red of Christine's coat but there is also the red of a pair of boots, the red of a dressing gown, the red of a VW Beetle, the red of a sign reading VENICE IN PERIL (!), and even the red of an advert for Fanta. Most of all there is the red of another quite startling outfit seen towards the end of the film and, even more than that, the red of blood that is mostly hinted at but never feels far from coming to the surface.

As Pino Donaggio's score constantly hits just the right note of menace and uncertainty, we see both John and Laura pound the night streets of Venice hoping to solve their own different mysteries while also resolving their shared grief. Will Laura's new found belief in the paranormal provide her with any solace in the face of an unimaginable loss or will John's rational quest for answers help him? You'll have to wait until the very end to find out.

TADS #53:Sudbury Hill to Westbourne Park (or Not The Camden Crawl).

For the first time in three years, TADS were able to complete a full season of walks so even if we didn't make it to the planned endpoint of Camden (and, spoiler alert, we didn't) it would still be something to celebrate. The weather, this Saturday, was probably the worst weather of any 2022 TADS walk but that didn't really matter because the final walk of the season is always a bit of a celebration, something of a doss about. We don't stand on ceremony and I even let people bring games before they break up for winter.

In 2022, we'd had (I modestly say) some great walks. In March we finally put the Tadley walk to bed, in April we strolled from Didcot and back via the Wittenham Clumps, in May we headed along the Thames from Pangbourne to Reading, and then, in June and July, we enjoyed a couple of seaside visits. Firstly Benfleet to Southend and then Cosham to Portsmouth.

Possibly best of all, apart from me & Mo contracting Covid while we there, was August's TADS holiday in Llandudno and though the September walk from Liss to Petersfield and last month's trek from Merstham to Croydon were perhaps a little more low key I feel safe to say that everyone had a good time. I think that's true of Saturday today. 

Which is something of a relief. I woke up with a sharp, acute, pain in my chest (two days later diagnosed as costochondritis - a new one on me but thankfully nowhere near as serious as it is painful, take some codeine and wait for it to go away basically) and led in bed for a while wondering if I'd even be able to make the walk. I've never missed a TADS walk and I didn't want to miss this one. Even though I think they'd have been fine without me. Perhaps because they'd have been fine without me!

So I dragged myself out of bed and found, to my surprise, that what was painful in bed (and especially getting in and out of bed) wouldn't stop me walking. I took a few tubes down to Greenford and called Pam who met me by the canal. With her coat's red hood pulled up and turned away from me I was reminded of Nic Roeg's terrifying Don't Look Now.

We wandered up to Sudbury Hill (a lovely Charles Holden designed tube station, confession:I didn't take any photos so there's a few of Pam's here (ta!) and I've padded out with stock images) and met with Shep, Laura, Adam, and Teresa who had driven up and from there headed down to the Broken Gate Cafe. Most people had nice looking veggie breakfasts but still feeling sore, and anxious - I didn't know what the pain was at this point, I stuck to a cheese roll. I wasn't risking anything further upsetting me. At least not yet!

From there we cut back up past the Busy Bees nursery and into some common ground that I'm fairly certain Pam, Shep, and myself navigated during our Capital Ring odyssey. With fallen trees and paths leading to nowhere we conceded defeat and headed back down Greenford Road to the canal. It would be our constant companion for the rest of the day.

People canoed on it, coots and swans swam on it, we saw a few herons, and Shep and Laura even stopped to buy some bread to feed the birds (yes, there was a brief debate on the suitability of bread as opposed to dried peas). At one point we saw a dead swan covered in blood with its head and neck ripped off (a fox?) and, soon after, we also saw a dead rat. There would be some death on this walk, alright. The amount of cyclists speeding along the towpath only seemed to increase the likelihood of that.

We skirted the edge of Horsenden Hill (where, 2,500 years ago, Iron Age peopled settled - and a place that became a home for an anti-aircraft battery in World War II) and continued to follow the Grand Union Canal (Paddington Arm) through such uncelebrated, and still pretty industrial, areas of London like Alperton and Park Royal.

As the canal passed under Acton Lane, we came off (we'd done at least 9k, more when you throw in all the walking at the start) for a pit stop at the splendid looking Grand Junction Arms in Harlesden. A pub that played classic rock from the old days (mostly good stuff, to be fair) and a friendly enough hostelry for us to exchange stories, and limericks, about our own old days.

Which we did. Possibly for longer than we should have done (slowed down by my embarrassingly slow drinking rate). By the time we got back on the canal it was getting dark and had even started to rain so the next stretch felt longer than it was as we passed along the side of Kensal Green cemetery with train lines and sidings to the south of us and views of Trellick Tower and Grenfell in front of us.

Crap bladders meant it was soon time for another stop so once we'd passed by the Trellick in all its glory we pulled up, in Westbourne Park, to the Union Tavern where, of course, we got comfortable. Aware of the time, and sadly having to disappoint Eamon (or maybe he was fine with it) who had just texted from Camden, we decided we'd end it here.

I'd hoped to read out some spiel about Little Venice, Regent's Park, London Zoo, and Camden but, to be honest - and considering how the day started for me, I was just glad to have done the walk (28,346 steps by end of play so not an inconsiderable stroll) and, even more so, to have completed a full TADS season. Even more I was pleased that I'd been sensible enough to let my friends cheers me up when I wasn't feeling on top form.

We looked for somewhere to eat and found DHABA@49 nearby. Again, aware of my chest pain, I took it easy and just had poppadums, daal, and naan. It was good though and everyone else seemed to enjoy theirs too. Not sure about the gold crockery and cutlery but otherwise the decor was quirky and cool and the staff friendly. By the time we left the place was heaving.

Shep, Laura, Adam, and Teresa took an Uber back to Sudbury Hill and Pam waited patiently as I slowly sipped my Cobra and we took a series of tubes and buses back to South London. I felt a lot better at the end of the day than I had at the start and though it wasn't the most picturesque, or details heavy walk, it was still good fun. I'm sure I'll be back with the spiel and snaps soon.

Thanks to Pam, Shep, Laura, Adam, and Teresa for coming on Saturday and for all the other times they've come along this year and special thanks to Pam for, along with me, being the only member of TADS to turn in a full card this year (though special mention for Shep who turned up for every walk but was beaten by his ankle in Didcot).

Thanks also to everyone who either joined a TADS walk or met us in a pub or a curry house along the way this year. That's (deep breath) .... Pam, Shep, Laura, Adam, Teresa, Joe, Isaac, Jess, Mo, Neil B, Bee, Neil W, Tina, Hannah, Ben, Tracy, Darren, Cheryl, Tommy, Tony, Alex, Grace, Izzie, Vicki, Chris, Gwen, Jim, Catherine, Colin, Patricia, James, Kathy, Carole, Dylan, Tom, Gary, Jack, Rebecca, and Michael. Including myself, that's forty-one people in total (and more than likely I've overlooked someone) but it's not about the quantity, it's about the quality - and you're a quality bunch!

We're back in March with a walk from Hook to Basingstoke which I'm calling Steadfast In Service. Hope to see lots of you there. Roll on spring!

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.