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Happy Deathday, Dr Davies
Before Saturday’s shenanigans got underway I knew it had the makings of a messy weekend. For one thing, it was Dr David Davies’s Deathday Party. The good doctor, who built Bryngolwg in 1847 as a home and surgery, died on 17 March 1910. In true Hogwarts tradition, I decided to mark his deathday by posting a photo of the man himself on our Facebook page. My friend Dr Colin Rees (historian and researcher par excellence) had unearthed it and sent it to me during the week. It was the perfect occasion to share it with the world.
With the decisive Grand Slam fixture in the middle of a three-match extravaganza, the Irish half of me was longing for an Irish victory. On the back of that, Wales vs France might have seemed like a bit of an anticlimax. But for Ireland to clinch the Grand Slam on St Patrick’s Day at Twickenham is surely a cause for celebration, whatever your genetic heritage. Unless you’re English, of course.
Carl Harvey from Cripplecreek turned up with his kit just before the Ireland game kicked off. As Barrie was removing our kit from the stage, I said, ‘Don’t tell me – another fussy bastard drummer!’ Barrie laughed and told me Carl hadn’t realised we’d had our gear refitted. Now he’s seen it, he won’t bother bringing his own kit in future. Yet another point to Jac’s, and another reason to remind you of Rule 23: Drummers are a pain in the arse.
By half-time in the second match, Barrie had to call the replacements into play. By which, I mean the extra furniture from upstairs. When the anthems finished for the final game of the tournament, I think every table and chair in the place was occupied, and people were still coming in. By the time the match kicked off it was standing room only. I’d even had to explain to a couple of new customers that the long table near the bar was for the half-time food.
On the subject of the half-time food: how many pub landlords/managers/whatever will go to the trouble of making a one-off dish for the only known vegetarian among the regulars? Well, Barrie and Amanda had done it for the second week in a row. Last time that happened was in the White Lion about ten years ago. Not many people would make that effort for a single customer. It’s an unexpected act of kindness when they do.
The second phase of Dr Davies’s deathday party could have been slightly marred by Fake News. Tim from Trevor and the Sprouts had got his wires crossed (again) and told people that Cripplecreek were playing at the rugby club. An expert rapid rebuttal by your humble reporter set the record straight, but it takes time for word to get around. Especially when the architect of the fake news item is a few months older than me and less prepared for life in the 21st Century. Trevor and the Sprouts themselves won’t be appearing at my Anthony Nolan charity night in May because Tim had been left in charge of the diary. He’ll be at the Chelsea Flower Show that day. Go figure!
To open for Cripplecreek, any band must fulfil at least one of the following criteria:
1) be stupendous
2) be so well established they’ll pull a crowd anyway
3) be brave
4) be foolhardy
5) to show such promise that they’ve been invited to play.
I think Indigo Glitch probably fell into the fifth category.
I’m not kidding you when I say that I own books that are older than some of Cripplecreek. Well, I own a bookmark that’s older than half of Indigo Glitch. In fact, I wasn’t sure whether one young person who kept bobbing about during their set-up was male or female. Hey, it’s the 21st Century and everything’s changing. Maybe Barrie’s seemingly radical idea about unisex toilets might not be too wide of the mark. Anything to reduce the queue in the gents’ on match day would be a welcome innovation.
Se – to use Dr Timothy Leary’s pioneering gender-neutral pronoun – turned out to the bass player. There were two guitarists – one male, one female – and a drummer who bore an uncanny resemblance to a certain Carl Harvey.
Rule 32 is adapted from Cravats frontman the Shend:. Being in a band is fun. Being in four bands is four times as much fun.
Indigo Glitch had a clean, melodic, fairly riff-based sound, with nice harmonies over a solid foundation. At first listen they didn’t have anything to distinguish them from the current Indie scene – or even the Indie scene since the C86 explosion – but there was definitely some decent ability on show. If a young band is playing music you think you might have heard before, it betokens one of two things: either they’re playing covers, or they’re doing their best to sound like someone else. But when you hear something that’s a bit off-kilter, it suggests that these (mostly) young people are surveying new territory. They may not have made landfall yet, but at least they’re looking further than the edge of the map. In fact, I’d venture to suggest that they’d go down well at a Blowout night – if only to chip away at the almost solid wall of testosterone that characterised the last one.
Towards the end of Indigo Glitch’s set, one of my Birthday Twins walked in. (We weren’t born in the same year, and one is female, but we share 18 March as an excuse to get pissed.) You can tell that Dai and I are twins because of our long lustrous hair, our complete lack of tattoos, and the fact that we’re both in happy marriages with 2.4 children apiece. Not. As for Hannah … well, that’s another story entirely.
It was only 8.45, but a succession of very late nights from last Friday through to Tuesday (including being a human trampoline for Rhian’s cat after her birthday on Monday) were catching up on me. I’ve never knowingly baled on Cripplecreek. In fact, I once travelled to Hereford to see them on a Sunday night, and still – somehow – made it to work on the Monday. The closest I’ve ever come to leaving one of their gigs early was at the District Club in Pontypridd. They’d blown legendary Welsh space-rockers Man into a parallel pocket universe – where, as far anybody knows, they remain to this day. Only the good sense of my late pal Paul Evans persuaded me not to walk home and to wait for the minibus instead. (Believe me, ‘good sense’ and ‘Paul Evans’ aren’t phrases you often read in the same sentence.)
But two weeks of birthday parties, gigs, 60,000 words of a fairly mind-stretching science fiction novel … it was all catching up on me. I had my own birthday to consider as well. While I was enjoying Indigo Glitch, I felt that they were running out of things to say. And I was rapidly running out of steam.
Rule 33: Always have a full clip and one in the chamber. When they think you’ve given everything you’ve got, you can get them in the arse.
And that was where I went wrong – by not having anything in reserve.
Rule 34:
I have done it. I once slept through a fair proportion of Wolfsbane’s set in Bogiez in Cardiff. I’d had a long day in work before we even set out for the venue. The Almighty, their Scottish support band, were OK. Wolfsbane – the great white hope of post-Goth British metal – sent me off to Never Never Land.
Which is where, I fear, you’d have found me on Saturday night. Thus it was, with great regret, that I baled out of Dr Davies’s Deathday Party. I’ll catch the full Cripplecreek experience at my charity night, after all. And it would have been daft to miss out on my birthday.
