The Daily Rivet

Memory, the Unconscious and the Big Three

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 20:29:32 +0100

Don’t believe a thing you have heard; in early 1963, in Liverpool, in soon-to-be-swinging England, the best band was The Big Three. For the Beatles, world domination was months away, when they would fly up, up and away out of Liverpool with a cloned frenzy of Pacemakers, Searchers, Fourmosts, Merseybeats, Cillas and Tarbies hanging on like grim death to the starry, beatle’d jackets of the Fab Four. But this is not about the Beatles.
This is about The Big Three, and me, and remembering. I can still remember the sweated excitement of their now legendary E.P. Live At The Cavern. For those who don’t know, an E.P. was longer than a single and shorter than an L.P. or album as they later came to be known in the starry-eyed days of hippiedom. If my memory re - collects itself, the Big Three E. P. contained four tracks performed, of course, live at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, as it’s title would suggest. After a short introduction by Bob Wooller, the club’s resident D.J., the Big Three tore into the Ray Charles classic What’d I Say in a manner in which the blind American singer should always have performed it - if only he had been backed by The Big Three. Next they charged through a killer version of their debut single Some Other Guy before ripping in to the Burl Ives/Disney classic Zip A Dee Doo Dah , re-worked into a snarling rhythm n blues concerto for guitars and drums, how did you feel about that Walt?
The other track still eludes me. What’d I Say, Some Other Guy, Zip A Dee Doo Dah, and what??? I know it’s still there, twelve barring away in what has been termed the unconscious, the re-pository of everything forgotten and never even membered. I wish I could re-member it but, for the moment, it will have to remain unconscious. I do know there were four tracks and that there should have been more except for a Decca engineer’s cock-up that denied the world a whole L.P. (album) of the Big Three Live At The Cavern.
The Big Three were big Johnny Gustafson, big Johnny Hutch(inson) and an even bigger bloke on the drums who looked like he was one of their dads, and who probably had a van.
It’s all a memory - scratchy, vinyl, 45 revolutions per minute on a Dansette two tone record player complete with carrying handle and a device that allowed records to crash clumsily on top of each other so that the music never stopped. Whatever happened to those revolutions? Were they just in our heads? That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be a revolution, but only as loud as Marshall speakers and tiny amplifiers would allow it to be. Have you seen the film of the Beatles at Shea Stadium? Thousands of screaming kids drowning out the noise produced by equipment that would nowadays sit quietly in a corner of the modern teenager’s bedroom. It was an almost silent revolution.
It’s all a memory, fuelled by the distilled essence of what it was like to be a teenager then, probably the first generation of teenagers that roamed the planet. Suddenly we had shops catering for us, Ben Sherman shirts and Pierre Cardin suits with ten foot slashed vents at the back. The moped became an icon with its underpowered lawnmower engine topped by a shimmering eldorado of silver and a hall of mirrors that looked forward to a future that was sharp, in focus - not blurred and straight and smelling of too-long-boiled cabbage and brylcreem. The future was bright, wasn’t exactly orange but certainly wasn’t grey, it was frying tonight, sizzling, and as sharp as the needle on a Dansette record player.
In 1963, I was fourteen years old, can remember spending summer with my gran, out in the country, reading Kit Carson comics, riding farm horses down country lanes that don’t exist anymore. They had high banks topped with hedges and, though I didn’t appreciate them then, the thought of them now often makes me weep silently for a reason I can’t explain. Is it nostalgia? is it sentimental? Words which nowadays have a perjorative character, as if even our memories should be controlled by the thought police and fleeting fads of a fucked-up present. Perhaps it is the present itself denying access, a present ashamed of itself, jealous of a past that makes people like me cry. The weight of the present lies like a suffocating blanket over our minds, creating an un-conscious that can only gasp for a memory of a cleaner air in which we can dream of another time, another place, another time, another place, another time, another place.
I must have been about fourteen when I first went to the Cavern. Unconscious of the journey there, of the vast mass of the city itself, indeed of any consequences whatsoever, Clive and I merely told our respective parents that we were staying at each other’s house. Simple as that, easy, a doddle, hitched the 40 miles to Liverpool along roads that just led somewhere, somewhere else, somewhere out of Preston, roads neither more or less travelled than any other, just roads we all travelled. Nearly 40 years later we have ‘self help’ books to tell us how to travel these roads, how to do it with a massive self-consciousness, a consciousness of self that borders on the psychotic in which the massive, sophisticated, fearful, urban introspection of Johnny Ego has taken over from the somehow despised rural simplicity of Johnny B. Goode who lived in a log cabin made of earth and wood and carried his guitar in a gunny sack.
But that’s what Clive and I did, we just carried our guitars in our gunny sacks and didn’t look back and, like Robert Johnson, pursued our future down a railroad track. Nowadays there are so many roads, so many trains to ride, and the old maps and timetables no longer work. Nowadays, the one true path is prescribed, by American psychiatric gurus and middle class women who spent a weekend with some dodgy Red Indian. The future is mapped out, the past is explained in terms of oppression and abuse, and lack, and a sort of negation. Re-collections and re-memories are re-created in the fucked up selves of the present and sent like steel tipped shafts of guilt to re-inhabit and re-make a sort of sense of the past that can then re-define who we are today. We’re big on blame and guilt and re-crimination, so much so that the past becomes no longer a different country but an entirely different multiverse that is continually changing due to the needs of the present, like the holo-deck in Star Trek manipulated by Americans in space. Not only do these Americans want to dictate the popular culture of the world, they also want to colonise our minds. It’s an invasion of the mind snatchers through words, through literature, through self-help, in which the insane help the oppressed to sort out the problems created by the insane in the first place. It’s an insane asylum populated by the sophisticated of the world while the rest of the world can go to hell and not even have enough clean water to drink.
The signs have changed and it seems as though we all need some kind of professional help to follow the new ones. Like Tonto in The Lone Ranger, we used to be able to read the signs, in a world which was black and white. Now our world is in blazing technicolor complete with special effects, and that which once seemed simple has become ‘problematic’. Today’s Space Ranger is no longer able to read the signs and is propelled through a cold and uncaring universe inhabited by the phantoms of his deepest nightmares. This space is of the deepest Freudian complexity and no longer of an Indian simplicity. Tonto’s Expanding Head Band now plays all the tunes and the drummers and chanters have turned to dust.
Anyway, I was 14 and Clive and I went to the Cavern. Inside, the heat, the sweat condensing straight on to painted brick walls that then perspired just like everyone else. I think the Escorts were playing - the same songs every other band played - Fortune Teller, Walkin’ The Dog, Dizzy Miss Lizzy, Money, My Babe, Roadrunner - it was teenage heaven and as hot as hell, listening to this far-away American music written by a load of black guys who we had never heard of. But it didn’t matter then, any mop-topped scally with a cheap leccy guitar could learn them, form a band and play them - and it seemed the entire male teenage populaion of Liverpool had done just that. It seemed that thousands of lads had suddenly emerged from their teenage bedrooms and formed bands with other starry eyed dreamers - they just bloody did it, no fuss, no big deal, no music industry hype. They were ahead of the hype. As in San Francisco a few years later, the music industry’s big guns came to them, begged them to sign for their labels, labels that were going nowhere and which, unlike nowadays, needed something more than just the name of the bloody label to make their fortunes.
Anyway, I was 14 and Clive and I went to the Cavern - unselfconsciously, the whole innocent beauty of being that age. An unselfconsciousness that never questioned the hows and whys of life, just the moments of the very essence of living itself. And the Cavern was exactly the place where one such moment happened. Immersed in the uncomplicated slipstream of teenage existence, I heard for the first time the brand newly released ‘You Really Got Me’ by the Kinks. This was it, a defining moment as you can call it in later life although I certainly didn’t then. A spaceship from the planet Rock ‘n’ Roll had just touched down and I was instantly abducted. Hours of listening to Radio Luxembourg beneath crusty bed sheets had led me to this sublime moment of epiphany. Hours spent listening to an American Top Ten populated by the weird and the wonderful, by ‘The Monster Mash’ by Bobby Pickett and the Cryptkickers, by surfing birds and wipeouts and pipelines and dead man’s curves and Ronnettes and Crystals and Horace Batchelor from Keynsham, Bristol. All this suddenly made a huger kind of sense. Watching live groups smashing out sweet and sweaty versions of the American Dream was brilliant enough, but how much more brilliant to hear the Kinks doing the same in English. We were dancing in English and the world would never be the same again.
I guess you couldn’t tell me the first English group to have a number 1 hit in America. It was the Tornados, blowing away the dross with the almost perfect ‘Telstar’, written and produced by Joe Meek. Joe Meek, the first real record producer, made great sounds in his front room on equipment that had no right to produce great sounds. He created beauty from the banal, from old valves and bits of domestic appliances. Hearing ‘Telstar’ on Radio Luxembourg probably stopped me in mid wank, and changed my life forever. ‘Telstar’ is the only record that remains a constant in my ever changing choice of records for when I make my appearance on Desert Island Discs. It is the one fixed point of reference in a constantly changing constellation of music that I have heard and loved since. Joe Meek blew his brains out. Rock ‘n’ Roll, heh! But for a short while the Meek truly inherited the Earth!
The thing is, music still blows my brains out. After all these years I can hear stuff that makes me cry out in approval. Robert Johnson didn’t love in vain, didn’t live in vain, didn’t die in vain and the joint has never stopped rocking ever since, the beat goes on and so it goes..... on and on, same as it ever was.

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ALBUMS THAT CAME FROM NOWHERE, CHANGED MUSIC, BLEW YOUR MIND, No. 2

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 19:52:34 +0100

TROUT MASK REPLICA - CAPTAIN BEEFHEART AND HIS MAGIC BAND.
For a period of about six months in 1968/9 Captain Beefheart locked up a bunch of 18-20 year old talented musicians in a house and cajoled, bullied, browbeat, played mind games with them - moulded, manipulated, mesmerised them into playing a whole new kind of music. Early in 1968 I had bought Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band’s first album ‘Safe as Milk’, without having heard anything by them before. It was the name of the band that did it for me, after seeing a mention of them in the N.M.E. Already intrigued by American psychedelia I guess I expected something along the lines of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane or Country Joe and the Fish. But this was no meandering stoned, sunshine jam or your standard peace ‘n love type San Francisco paean to a kaftanned, beaded and free-loving Utopia. Instead here was a poppy yet quirky band fronted by a guy who sounded like Howlin’ Wolf, singing short, catchy tunes including ‘Dropout Boogie’, a sideswipe at the middle class hippie dream denied to the poor ‘white trash’ families living on the breadline. ‘Strictly Personal’ soon followed. A big change here with eight more lengthy, denser songs more akin to what was known as ‘acid rock’. Howlin’ Wolf on acid growling and shouting and hootin’ and hollerin’ in front of a grotesquely freaky looking band beginning to reach out into new musical dimensions, all that plus added phasing by the bucketload and lyrics even more surreal than early Bob Dylan.
But this was nothing, merely a preparation for the ground breaking opus known to us mere mortals as ‘Trout Mask Replica’. As John Peel said of his response to first hearing the album “You didn’t know what you thought. You suspected that it was crap because it was unlike anything else you’d ever heard in your life. Whoever you are, your value systems are based on comparitive judgements and you can’t listen to something in a kind of state of grace, and ‘Trout Mask Replica’ had no reference points. You could approach it from any direction, you could interpret it in any way, because it bore no resemblance to anything else you’d experienced.” This was the product of the band’s strange six month sojourn in the two bedroomed house on Ensenada Drive, Woodland Hills, on the outskirts of the metropolis of Los Angeles, close to the brooding Mojave desert. This was the music of the edge.
New, young band members had been recruited to join Jeff Cotton and John French, the only surviving members of the ‘Strictly Personal’ band. Before embarking on his notions of playing a radically different form of music, Beefheart heralded his vision by giving new names to the members of the band, new identities to forge in a brave new world. Jeff Cotton became Antennae Jimmy Semens (steel-appendage guitar), John French became Drumbo (drums); of the new members Bill Harkleroad became Mr. Zoot Horn Rollo (glass finger guitar, guitar, flute), Mark Boston became Rockette Morton (bass and narration), and Victor Hayden became the Mascara Snake (bass clarinet, vocals).
Once renamed, Beefheart began to try and change not only the way the band played music but, more crucially, on a deeper level, how they actually thought about music so they could break through the more traditional rock n roll methods of expressing themselves. With no musical training himself, Beefheart set about explaining in extremely esoteric fashion his vision of how he wanted the band’s music to sound. It was then left to John French to attempt to decipher this and then work out with the rest of the band actually how to play it. An arduous task for a bunch of increasingly emotionally and physically drained teenagers, demolishing all known musical structures and constructing brand new ones out of the debris, living off food stamps and practising eight to twelve hours a day songs for which eventually Beefheart would take total credit.
But however they did it, they succeeded. They had succeeded in translating the Captain’s gnomic utterances and deconstructed, some might say deranged, musical vision into something concrete and had become so proficient in playing this new music that it took a mere six hours for them to go into Frank Zappa’s studio and record some twenty odd tunes one after another, no second takes, and then go back home, job done. A shocked Zappa had allotted two weeks of studio time for them to perform this task.
Whatever effect this feat of interpretation had on the members of the band, what effect did it have on those who went out and bought it? (incidentally making it the band’s biggest hit in the U.K., charting at no 21 in the British album charts. None of his albums ever made it into the U.S. album charts. Draw your own conclusions!). Well, I bought it, took it home, turned it up loud and, by the end, only two of us were left out of a starting total of about ten. That’s the thing about Beefheart. Throughout my (ex) married life, I would only play him when my wife was out. You never think of putting him on at parties (unless it’s a meeting of the Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band fan club) and, indeed, you very rarely hear him played on the radio. Since the death of John Peel the chances have become much less likely. If there was such a thing as a Captain Beefheart fan club, John Peel would probably have been the president. In an interview with Mike Barnes, author of the excellent ‘Captain Beefheart. The Biography’, Peel opined that “If there has been anything in the history of popular music which could be described as a work of art in a way that people who are involved in other areas of art would understand, then Trout Mask Replica is probably that work”.
Now, although a lover of music, I know little of its complexities, how it is put together technically, probably because I am a drummer! Hours spent sitting there smoking and drinking while other band members say things like, “it’s in C so you are going to have to play it in F sharp major, Colin.” Like I said, I do not understand this. Music moves me (or not) yet without an understanding of how it is constructed. Like the underneath of Victorian railway bridges. You can look up and silently wonder at the beauty of the elegant curves of brickwork that hold it up yet without any idea of how it was constructed. Although I cannot argue with the idea that if I did understand it would probably enrich my pleasure. This is how I feel about Beefheart’s music.
I saw this particular Magic Band a couple of times in the early seventies. Firstly I was amazed that they could actually play this stuff live. Secondly, I was awe struck that they sounded even better, much funkier, than on the albums. To this psychedelicised punter, the strangely garbed Magic Band all looked as if thet were in their own little worlds, picking away at their instruments, almost as if the others didn’t exist, as if they were all playing their own little tune. Yet, out of the speakers came this roaring, rocking racket that you could not keep still to. How did they do it? Well, I remember reading an autobiography by Bill Harkleroad (Mr. Zoot Horn Rollo) in which he explained in musical terms how they managed to create the sound of the Magic Band. And, of course, it is very technical, yet in a way matches my more visceral experince of the music. The way he explains it is that they are indeed playing their own individual tune, playing in different time signatures so that every few bars they collide before hurtling off into their own little orbits for another few bars.
This is the antithesis of jamming, or free form. It can only work if played with the utmost precision and individual dedication to the whole. Ironically, then, much more communal than the long meandering jams of the Utopian dreaming West Coast hippie bands and the whole endless ego tripping solos of the progressive era. It is the music of total individual responsibility within a collective framework. Is this not the revolution once dreamed of, true anarchy in a social sphere? Utopia regained. No need for governments if people can work together responsibly, each playing their own part for the good of the whole. This is it, this is what they have discovered and put into practice. But no, I forget, I become carried away, it is not true anarchy. It would only work if Captain Beefheart was the President of the World!
For the members of the Magic Band would this be too high a price to pay? When asked, they do all seem to agree that, whatever personal hell they went through locked up in a house with the manipulative, controlling Captain of the ship, they have all gained artistically/musically and could not go back to playing as they did before. A group of largely teenage musicians snatched out of the suburbs to live in a claustrophobic, almost Mansonesque environment learning how to play a form of music never heard before, eventually transmuting themselves into the strange creatures staring into the camera on the back cover of the album. Despite the privations they seem to have no regrets, except financial and not being acknowledged by their leader for the part they played in his musical vision. As it says on the album “All songs written by Captain Beefheart. Words and music copyrighted for the world by Beefheart Music”. As it also states on the cover, they are His Magic Band, instrumental only in assisting him in presenting his unique vision to the world. But they all still seem to have the greatest respect for the the guy behind the trout mask. His genius has rubbed off onto them along the journey and transformed them for ever. In the words of the Grateful Dead “Sometimes the light’s all shining on me, other times I can barely see, lately it occurs to me, what a long strange trip it’s been”.

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Albums that came from nowhere, changed music, blew your mind

Fri, 16 Dec 2005 19:44:28 +0100

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

It was on a ‘package tour’ that I first saw them. In the 60’s there were lots of ‘package tours’, featuring some of the unlikeliest combinations of acts you could ever imagine. The Beatles found themselves on some pretty strange ones in their early days, but then the world turned and ‘package tours’ were a thing of the past, as outdated as radiograms and the Hit Parade.
Anyway, this particular package tour featured the Amen Corner as the headline act. Fronted by the evergreen Andy Fairweather - Low, they had a couple of poppy hits and so were deemed justified to headline a line up featuring (wait for it) the Move at their T.V. - smashing finest, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Nice and the Pink Floyd. The Bournemouth Pavilion has probably never seen a night like it, all for about the same price as a packet of crisps nowadays!
Of course, memory being what it is (or more probably isn’t) total recall of that night in 1967 remains unachievable. However, what does remains memorable is the amazing moment when you hear something you have never heard before, something that does not appear to come from any known musical form you have ever come across. This was the night that the Pink Floyd blew my mind. This was the night that Syd prowled the stage in a long Afghan coat and made the goddamn strangest noises with his guitar I had ever heard in my life.
A few weeks later I bought their debut album ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ and listened to it in stoned amazement. Where had this noise come from? Outer Space? Inner Space? There was simply nothing to compare it with, no trajectory of music that had somehow led to this. It just stood alone, perhaps the only musical artefact worthy to truly deserve the name ‘psychedelic’. As the Grateful Dead were also attempting to do with their extended jamming, this was the creation of a music intended to take the listener somewhere else, somewhere beyond music.
In the spring of 1967 the Beatles were at Abbey Road studios recording their ‘psychedelic’ masterpiece ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ along with George Martin, orchestras, a lavish budget, the latest state of the art recording equipment and a later album cover designed by a real ‘artist’. At the same time, in a small studio in the same building, on a four track recording machine, the Pink Floyd were recording their first album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. The Beatles actually came into their studio and Paul McCartney was very complimentary on what they were trying to do.
So, what were they trying to do? The Pink Floyd Sound, as they were originally called, had been together for a couple of years. Like most British bands who were later to change the sound of the sixties, they began as an r ‘n b band playing covers of the likes of Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bo Diddley etc. Again, like with most British bands of the time, L.S.D. appeared and people’s musical aspirations began to widen. Syd Barrett, the youngest member of the band, took a lot of L.S.D. and became interested in the sounds you could actually produce with an electric guitar, continually experimenting with sound effects, feedback, distortion and improvisation. (Of course, Syd wasn’t alone in this - just listen to Pete Townsend breaking the sound barrier in records such as ‘Anyhow, Anyway, Anywhere’ and ‘My Generation’.) The rest of the group took this up enthusiastically and were soon playing their increasingly free form music at Happenings with light shows and films being projected on to the stage. This was ‘Swinging London’, the ‘alternative’ culture, a social divide defined largely by clothes, music and especially drug use. The Pink Floyd were at the centre of this scene and beginning to define their new experimental ‘psychedelic’ sound, an ‘English’ sound now totally removed from the Black American blues scales and structures that still informed the work of other British groups no matter how ‘alternative’ they were becoming.
I had already bought their first singles ‘Arnold Layne’ and ‘See Emily Play’ and seen the band on Top of the Pops but was in no way prepared for the weirdness of their live performance or the symphony to LSD presented in the grooves of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. From the opening chanted mantra from outer space of ‘Astronomy Domine’ to the disturbing yet hilarious ‘Bike’ ending with the ominous sound of the closing of the door of Syd’s ‘roomful of musical tunes’ which contains the very sounds of insanity itself, this album defies any form of categorisation and stands alone as a masterpiece. Even though the song are Syd’s, the whole band give their all in terms of not just playing, but continually inventing, experimenting, coming up with sounds to add to those pouring out of Syd’s tormented telecaster.
The opening space chant of ‘Astronomy Domine’ gives way to throbbing bass, crashing drums and a four note riff that just explodes into a million pieces. Noises come at you from everywhere, vocal and instrumental. This is the antithesis of the cold, lonely silence of space. It is a voyage that annihilates silence, fills it up to bursting point with noise as the song swoops and dives and races through it all. Then it’s back to the riff and the return of the chant, but where have you been in the meantime? Another strong, taut, riff introduces ‘Lucifer Sam’, immersed in washes of sound accompanied by strong, taut, drumming. It’s the noises again, everywhere, filling up every available space. Then on to ‘Matilda Mother’, a fractured fairy story in which the story itself gives way to the image of the child listening, screaming for its mother, wanting more but left alone, ‘hanging in my infant chair, waiting’ - a chilling image of the formative years. ‘Flaming’ could almost be a bit of 60’s U.S./’garage’ psychedelia before it detonates into an organ led maelstrom of sound that batters you senseless. As in the Grateful Dead’s ‘Dark Star’, the bass kicks in and normal service is resumed just at the moment you think the whole thing is driving you crazy. ‘Pow R Toc H’ is Dudley Moore on acid playing to the inmates of Bedlam, as the cool jazz piano gives way to a nightmare of insane laughter, screaming and guitar pyrotechnics and booming drums. The underrated Roger Waters song ‘Take up thy Stethoscope and Walk’ is next, short stacatto vocals and guitar playing slash through the weirdness and the organ solo rises above the madness thumping away in the background. There is an indescribable energy to the whole thing as it builds up faster and faster to end with the lyrics ‘Music seems to help the pain, seems to motivate the brain’. Wow!
Throughout the album, the ensemble playing of the band has been brilliant, but reaches its peak on the majestic ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, the schizophrenic centrepiece of the album. A crashing proto metal riff dissolves into the floating, fleeting, meandering tides of the unconscious until finally the riff returns, more majestic than ever, to blow away everything. It is only nine minutes long but seems like an eternity spent somewhere else. Suddenly the madness, the noise, disappears and it’s straight into the English, folksy eccentricity of ‘Gnome’, the subtle eastern mysticism of the I Ching set to music in ‘Chapter 24’, a rural hymn of childlike simplicity sung over a plaintive organ sound in ‘Scarecrow’, and ending with the strange catchy comedic quirkiness of ‘Bike’ which dissolves into the sounds of clockwork,chiming clocks and quacking ducks, Syd reminding us here of his quest to experiment with noise itself as an ingredient in his music - to him, these unsettling, jarring sounds are a ‘roomful of musical tunes’. 42 minutes and it’s all over. The strangest trip you have ever been on. Just four blokes, a four track recording machine, and the imagination of Syd Barrett driving everything, making everyone pull out all the stops. The Pink Floyd would never again play at this frenetic pace, would never again be as driven to produce something as breathtakingly new.
This is Syd Barrett’s album, like a comet from the depths of outer space it briefly shines on to our world before disappearing forever back into those very same depths. Just like Syd himself. The album is a record of that moment, a moment the like of which we have never experienced before or since. Syd does stay around a little longer, contributing the beautifully melancholic ‘Jugband Blues’ to Saucerful of Secrets, the band’s second album, and then recording a couple of solo albums which we all like to think are good but are in fact rubbish compared to what he presented us with on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
Even before the second album was relased, a year after the first one, in August 1968, Syd Barrett had been replaced by Dave Gilmour in the band. Something deep within Syd had broken, perhaps prematurely brought on by an LSD infused lifestyle. His increasingly erratic behaviour both on and off stage meant the band could really no longer function. At gigs he would sometimes just stand and stare at the audience, not even playing the telecaster that hung round his neck. The instrument out of which he had wrung so many extraordinary sounds had become, like its owner, silent, lifeless, unplugged. By the age of 22, Syd Barrett had, to all intents and purpose, ceased to exist in the ‘real’ world. The dazzling psychedelic sounds he created for the band, played in front of swirling , mesmerising light shows, for the colourful, strangely garbed ‘beautiful people’ of London and their ‘alternative’ culture remain as the soundtrack of a brief period in time in which ‘mind expanding’ drugs such as LSD seemed to create an endless now in which anything was possible and paradise could be regained. It was not long before reality returned and with it the realisation that a glimpse of Heaven for many was achieved at a very high price. As Philip K. Dick states in his author’s note to his novel ‘A Scanner Darkly’, “This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street, they could see one after another of them being killed - run over, maimed, destroyed - but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were happy for a while, sitting round not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terribly brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it”.
Syd Barrett’s influences remain and can be found in music as disparate as the ‘space rock’ of Hawkwind and the progressive posturings of Yes to the English eccentricity of Pulp and early Blur. The Pink Floyd have become one of the most popular, best selling bands ever yet I would bet the majority of their modern fans have never even heard of Syd Barrett. Although obviously indebted to Syd, the remaining members of the band have ended up ploughing a furrow of well produced safe, corporate, plodding , melodic dirges and finely crafted spectacles for an audience content to settle for that, to sit and be cozily entertained. The adventure, the experimentation, have long gone, along with most of their hair and Roger Waters. What would it have been like if Syd were still there? Perhaps the same as it is now, no one will ever know. The absent Syd is enough of a blank canvas nowadays for anyone to paint their own picture on. Like Dorian Gray, the dead and damaged rock stars are forever young and talented, forever will be. They did not grow old, run out of inspiration, come to make the same pragmatic decisions we have all had to make in the face of our ‘ideological’ belief. Age has not withered them, they shall all remain heroes forever. Perhaps The Piper at the Gates of Dawn was the best that he could do. How do you follow that? Perhaps a realisation of that was just as much a part of his illness as the more lurid acid casualty/ romantic genius accounts that sell books and somehow put peoples’ minds at rest, wrap things up nicely, help us to explain the ‘real’ to ourselves.

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The Pope's Christmas message to the deluded and insane

Sun, 11 Dec 2005 13:59:49 +0100

Hi there to all my fans in the crazy fucking world of amateur cricket. How are you all? In case you had forgotten, I am the new Pope, not the old tarmac-kissing git with the white hair. No, I am the new, Nazi one. No-one knows my face, my name or number. Anyway here’s my message.
The Three Kings, along with their entourage of soothsayers, scientists, sex slaves and spin doctors, trundled across the vast deserts of Arabia and Persia - blinded by the nuclear light of a sun in its last agonising death throes, far away in time and space. They were looking for meaning, something, or someone, to explain the world they inhabited, as if their very existence was not enough, as if they did not believe enough in themselves. They carried gifts of gold, francincense, myrrh, the finest belgian liqueur chocolates, toblerones, C.D’s, mobile phone ring tones and W.H. Smiths vouchers. They were electric with excitement - batteries definitely included - travelling blind but travelling heavy, like a band of spaced-out Santas on a mission.
They were looking for a Saviour born in a shed, pissing in the sand as they went and crapping in holes in the ground and unknowingly coining the term sandwich, i.e. ‘everything which we put in our mouths is covered in bloody sandwhichgetsinourmouths’. There used to be a reason for headscarves in such an unforgiving climate - a practical one, to keep the fucking sand out, not a religious/dogmatic one to wrap people up in so they disappear along with their identities. So it goes.
Their search led them to a shed. Men later built more grandiose sheds, later to be called churches, and celebrated the birth (and death) of their saviour by singing and chanting and killing anyone who didn’t agree with them. You see, the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. The real intention of the Gospels, as I see it, was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful and love thy neighbour. Surely only machines/robots without any sense of conscience can drop burning jellied gasoline on other human beings below without imagining what horrors they are unleashing on the human beings on the ground. And yet we are told that bad breath or smoking in public places is socially unacceptable. So it goes.
Churches eventually declined into places where old people play bingo and get buried and where young people nick lead, desecrate graves and get married. But modern men still have their own private sheds in which to remember and attempt to achieve redemption (£99.99 and upwards from B & Q. That’s just for the shed though, redemption comes more expensive). A place in which they can meditate, smoke clandestine cigarettes, and dream, alone, surrounded by ancient tins of paint and broken cordless screwdrivers and the remains of the last state of the art lawnmower - alone, wondering how they had arrived here, what had happened to them, did they possess free will, why they had got married, with a crappy job and a mortgage and a car that doesn’t have sideboard protection or whatever and an armoured car to take the kids to school in and a ‘personal’ loan and a love of D.I.Y. and a blind pekingese dog that shits everywhere and they read a newspaper which informs them the country is populated solely by paedophiles, yobs, illegal immigrants and terrorists (no wonder they feel powerless) and a fucking chipboard ‘designer’ kitchen designed by a nazi with irony and a digital washing machine and cruelty free breakfast cereals and bottles of pills that act as antidotes for all the crap we eat and a holiday abroad in Spain every year and a new white plastic conservatory and a new sort of razor and toothbrush coming out on a weekly basis (too much choice, not in important decisions like how to stop world hunger whilst supermarkets throw away millions of tons of food a week, but in banal ones like which fucking razor to buy now they have ones with eighteen blades that shave so close your skin drops off, or what pastel shade of toilet paper to buy) and shampoo that contains more fruit than sunny delight and aloe vera that appears in everything (the vegetarian alternative to David Jason) and a bank that steals from them and a television that hates and despises them and a ‘private’ dental plan and a pension that, like Heaven, promises much in the afterlife but never delivers, trapped forever with a partner who can have multiple orgasms and yet no interest in the World Cup - looking for meaning, looking for a saviour, someone to make sense of it all for them. So it goes.

What about this? There’s this tree right and its sole crop is money, it grows money. It has £50 notes for leaves and its flowers are government bonds and its fruit is diamonds. It attracts human beings who kill each other for its attractions. Their bodies lie among the roots and make excellent fertiliser.

And this. The Jews claim they have always been persecuted by other beings who inhabit this planet along with them. How wrong can they be. If you nail up the son of the Most Powerful Being In The Universe, then you should be pretty sure who it is that’s persecuting you. And you should learn the lesson that, before you kill somebody, you make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected. Unluckily for the Palestinians, they are not well connected.

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SLOWLY FALLING TO PIECES

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 23:04:30 +0100

What a wonderful world
Absolutely nothing to do with cricket! hey what a surprise! but a sobering look at the world we inhabit as are fed through our media, a world we are told is the one true world we inhabit, the REAL world - but is it? read on fearless reader.
This is the state of the world on Sunday, October 16, 2005 as presented to its readers by the ‘Independent on Sunday’ (“Britain’s only quality compact on Sunday”, as it proudly boasts). We headline with the revelation that British squaddies are being blown to pieces in Iraq by ‘smart bomb’ technology given (yes, given!) to the IRA by British Intelligence in the early 90’s as part of a ‘Sting’ operation. We do not, however, seem to have received anything in return. A ‘spokesman’ states “It may seem absurd that the security services were supplying technology to the IRA, but the strategy was sound. Unfortunately, no one could foresee back then that this technology would be used to kill British soldiers thousands of miles away in a different war”. Perhaps so, but surely it might have been foreseen that it could (and would) be used to kill British soldiers at the time. Fucking idiots
Such startling idiocy is then followed by the revelation that another startling idiot, President George W., informed Tony Blair just before the invasion of Iraq that Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran and North Korea would be next. Who needs ‘natural’ disasters when we have more than enough lunatics running things to destroy the planet without any help from “Mother Nature”? Fucking idiots.
This is amply illustrated by turning over a few pages to an in depth scare story about bird flu - entitled ‘how scared should you be?’. This helps to confirm a personal theory of mine that the news media exists in order to keep the population in a constant state of anxiety so that we are that little bit easier to manipulate. The old fashioned epidemic has been supplanted with pandemic, causer of pandemonium, the place of all demons in Paradise Lost. We learn that the British Government is expecting upwards of 750,000 deaths. As one of their emergency measures they plan to suspend international flights from infected countries. Presumably to head off any birds wealthy enough and lazy enough to travel by plane. To top it all we find an ‘opinion’ column by one Geoffrey Lean, with the headline “It is a bigger risk than terrorism or anything Mother Nature could throw at us”. So, it’s official then, birds are not part of Mother Nature. I think Bill Oddie would have something to say about this. Fucking idiot.
On page three we find that the prestigious Cranfield School of Management is worried at the lack of top female executives in business. In a survey they conducted among ‘highly qualified women in their twenties and thirties’ they asked who inspired them to achieve success. Top of the pops were Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Marilyn Monroe and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Perhaps that answers the question why there are not more women working at the cutting edge of industry. Fucking idiots.
Next to an advert for the South Asia Earthquake Appeal we have an article informing us that Gays are apparently not welcome in many of Britain’s guest houses. Such ‘hotel homophobia’ is discussed under the highly inventive headline “Wish you weren’t here”. Reminiscent of the Pink Floyd album “Wish you were here” with its famous cover showing David Davis and David Cameron shaking hands. Fucking idiots.
We then have ‘eminent’ judges likening Britain to Nazi Germany in the attempts by the executive to stifle the judiciary. Why then, does the judiciary always end up with a whitewash when asked to investigate the executive in enquiry after enquiry? Surely they are cutting their own throats. Fucking idiots.
What’s next? A piece on Government ministers taking up lucrative appointments from companies that have profited from Government work. A full page advert from a private health company entitled ‘Private patients don’t jump the queue, they shorten it’. So that’s why people go private, not for their own personal ends but to help others receive treatment quicker. Rich , selfish, greedy solipsistic motherfuckers are really nothing of the kind - they are simply being ALTRUISTIC. Aren’t adverts great? Fucking idiots.
More about David Cameron and drugs. Apparently, the Evening Standard thinks that drug addiction is about as catching as bird flu. A relative of Cameron’s is apparently in drugs rehab so that somehow proves that Cameron himself takes drugs - guilt by association.
The new high tech ID scanning system is going to be hopeless, so no surprises here. That is why Star Trek is a fantasy, and not real, because everything works, except Scotty’s fucking engines. He must drink Carling as he is probably the worst fucking engineer in the world. The engines can never take it whenever really needed and he is continually running out nof dilithium chrystals. Fucking idiot. The new computerised ID system won’t work and has more holes in it than the arms of David Cameron’s relative.
E mails apparently make people fat, and doctors in a Nottingham hospital wanted to terminate a granny with flu because her feeding tube kept falling out. Her daughter naturally refused their offer so they had another go at inserting it and she made a full recovery. The tube of Damocles dangles menacingly above all our heads. We are asll at the mercy of fucking idiots.
Janet Street Porter spends a whole page slagging off Madonna. New cars are full of toxic chemicals and the average 18-24 year old is in debt to the tune of £15,000. Much of it no doubt spent on products advertised in the Independent itself. Art itself is just another commodity as revealed in an article on some mega rich American called Larry Gagosian who buys it by the skip load for his rich clients, although the downside is that he has to pose for a photograph with fat, pasty looking, follicly enhanced Reg Dwight. The Changing of the Guard is on full terrorist alert as they now wear electronic anti bomb devices under their busbies. Takes up the space once occupied by brains. Although if they stopped performing such a pointless exercise, there would be no need would there! Fucking idiots.
As the deadly, flu sodden chickens of death wing our way we find Britons flying in the opposite direction for stem cell makeovers. £15,000 (average debt of 18-24 year old, remember?) at a clinic in Barbados buys you an injection in the arm with a syringe full of stem cells gleaned from aborted foetuses that makes your skin look younger. Christine Roberts, a 57 year old housewife sates, without irony “My skin looked a bit tired, I felt I needed a shot in the arm”. We learn that both John Peel and John Hurt were both abused by teachers at their private schools, although the abusers were Christians, so were probably relying on God’s forgiveness for their actions. Fuck personal responsibility, fucking idiots.
A boring, page filling Vox Pop is followed by the revelation that we are wiping out rare creatures of the deep, as well as corals, as we relentlessly trawl the oceans of the world for what we want and chucking overboard all the dead things that we don’t want. Although there is some small glimmer of hope for the world’s fish population as we learn that the fish and chip shop on the Irish ireland of Rathlin (pop. 70) has had to close down.
The bloke who did all the funny, provocative seaside postcards in the 1950’s is buried in an unmarked grave while Brits who buy places in Brittany seem to be living in a ‘Straw Dogs’ universe in which the locals do things like disembowel their horses and poison their dogs and turn off the electric. Apparently it is because ‘they fail to integrate’. I wonder why? Fucking idiots.
Next, to further prove my theory that the media is just a giant plot to keep us disempowered, confused, anxious and worried all the time so we are easier to manipulate, we have a two page spread entitled “Is this the end of the world?”. Apparently it is, as we are taken through the changing behaviour of ‘Mother Nature’. All of Death is here; drought, famine, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, extreme temperatures. Who cares about idiot politicians feathering their own nests and thinking only as far ahead as the next election? It’s the end of the world as we know it, but we don’t feel fine.
More about the hapless Cameron, why we all hate Thatcher, and an editorial about the new look Independent which manages to rope in Che Guevera because he used to play Rugby!! The Pakistan Earthquake and why we never learn how to cope with such disasters. I share the view but think where would I start if I was in charge of sorting out the aftermath of such events. Every bloody helicopter has a film crew on it as we watch them taking pictures of dying kids for whom there is no room aboard. Every British TV and radio station has different crews covering such events. Multiply that by all the TV and radio stations in the world and no wonder there’s no bloody room on board the helicopters or not enough food and water for the victims. The fucking mediavultures are busy scavenging tasty titbits for our TV screens. Fucking idiots, telling us that things are really bad and asking people what it feels like to lose all your family, house and everything. How do you think they feel! Fucking idiots.
That’s it. I have had enough. The day today has proved too much to cope with and I am only halfway through the paper. There is much more, including the obligatory story about someone with cancer and turning it into entertainment, and the usual ‘fun’ questionnaire, this time about ‘have you got what it takes for fatherhood?’. Frankly, after reading about the world today, I don’t think I could be responsible for bringing someone into it. How many more fucking idiots do we need?

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Another riveting article from back issues of Ringwood's premier cricketing/lifestyle publication, featuring drugs, rock n roll, space aliens and a bit of cricket

Sun, 09 Oct 2005 19:08:07 +0200

Ashurst tomorrow and am just recovering from the Toad’s first annual marathon fielding competition in which you have to do a compulsory fielding session of three hours until it is so dark and cold that you begin to feel very dark and cold yourself. While this is happening, a succession of batsmen and bowlers rush in and out and everything takes on the quality of a dream. Actually, it wasn’t a dream it was the Toad’s inaugural Single Wicket Competition, and was won handsomely in the deepening gloom of Carvers by Alex, although Charlie Pierson made him have to work very hard for it. Congratulations to the both of them and also to Alan Corlett who coped brilliantly with the complex administrative details of the whole thing, in the absence of the absent Howard. One good thing about it was that every batsman had to face two overs, which is about one and a half more than many of us usually face in proper matches!
And talking of proper matches, what about Ashurst then? Possibly the best team we play all season and who we have never beaten. Well, this time we almost did. After 45 overs of excellent bowling and fielding including two brilliant run outs by Alex, two catches by Australian debutante Owen and an orgasmic diving catch by Davie Baldwin (yes, he really made me come!), we had reduced the might of Ashurst to the ignominy of 98 (yes, 98) all out.
With Tim Baldwin and Neil taking us to the dizzy heights of 62 for 1, victory seemed at last within our grasp. Even the Toads with a history of near legendary batting collapses could not lose this one, or could they? The sixties proved to be our major downfall, as it had indeed previously proved to be for such as Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix (and, indeed in many ways your humble editor himself who smoked and ingested much of the milk of human kindness ) Well at least we were in good company then. We stumbled through the sixties like a doomed troop of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, high on dope, transistors blaring, lost and confused as they crash their way through a Viet Cong infested jungle and gradually, atrociously, lose their young lives.
Yes, we lost all our lives, young and old, and were shot out for 84 and, to make matters worse, hadn’t even got the excuse of being high on dope. We weren’t actually shot, it was more like a sort of abject ritual suicide. Although I would just like to say here that if Tim Baldwin hadn’t got himself out after making a marvellous 54, then the picture might have been different! Just a thought there Tim for the future.
Over post match drinks in yet another bloody pub that thought it was a restaurant, Alex declared Owen and Tim to be joint men of the match, and then it was back to the Railway to drift away on waves of foaming cider to the harmonica-led music of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band (on C.D. not live in the pub as there wouldn’t be enough room for the darts players then).
And so to our midweek daytime fixture against the touring men of Pirbright. This time it was different, our bowling and fielding were not up to the standard of excellence on which we usually pride ourselves. The weather was exceptionally hot and many of us were still suffering from the nightmare exertion of having to move the cast iron New Forest pony defences that seem to get heavier year by year. Nature certainly has a lot to answer for and the price of cricket pitch conservation certainly exacts a huge toll on its human agents. Meanwhile the horses just stare at you with a withering look of contempt.
Eventually, Pirbright reach the daunting total of 183. True to form we soon lose our first wicket but then Mark joins Charlie at the crease and invisible little spaceships of joy begin to descend on Ellingham cricket ground. The little spacemen get out and run around and place little bits of joy in the spaces the spaceships have missed. We become drunk with joy, and Fosters, as our two batsmen take on Pirbright. Charlie is out for 40 odd and Mark carries on to his maiden Toad century ably helped at the end by a few bludgeoning blows by Stuart Wholikesadrink - and we win by about six wickets and get even more drunk and have a barbecue at the Railway and get even more drunk and then go inside and sabotage Quiz Night and get even more drunk and drop glasses on the floor and get even more drunk and go home and straight to bed as the real world re-starts promptly at 7 o clock the next morning , by which time the little silver spaceships will have left for their tiny planet of joy that exists precariously amidst a cold, uncaring universe.

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Another trawl through the back pages of The Daily Rivet, the lifestyle magazine of the Lord Toad's X1, amateur cricketers extraordinaire

Sat, 24 Sep 2005 14:50:11 +0200

All I wanted was a fucking cheese sandwich (by the way, greetings to all our viewers in far flung parts of what was once the British Empire. I can understand why you all wanted to devolve, leave the mothership in your brand new, re-named pod, as I surely do as well. To pilot your pods into new, uncharted space - although still confined within your well defined, final frontier, some arbitrary line drawn on a map with the blood of dead soldiers. Empire building was once all the rage, but, my friends, if only the consequences could have been foreseen. A world full of people living in countries that suddenly had new names and new oppressors to oppress them, but at least they could make ‘ethnic’ music once more and get to meet Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel and ignorede by Bob Geldof. By the way - who the fuck would want to buy a Charlotte Church CD??)
Anyway back to this fucking cheese sandwich. The Toads had rocked up to some little thatched country pub, conveniently situated right next to the ground, for a pre-match tactical talk and pre-briefing. I was a bit peckish and feeling somewhat delicate after spending the previous evening celebrating the wedding of Dave and Hazel Carter in a sauna somewhere in Ringwood and listening to perhaps the crappest (is that a real word?) disco that has ever dared to call itself a disco. One of those discos where the DJ talks over the records through a P.A. system similar to that used by British Rail, thinking he is being really funny, but in reality he is just a cunt. Sorry Dave, this doesn’t mean my feelings for you are any different, just that the disco failed to bring out the John Travolts that lurks somewhere inside me. In fact there’s plenty of room inside me for quite a few John Travoltas nowadays.
Anyway, I really fancied a fucking cheese sandwich, but after negotiating a path to the bar past a gaggle of gormless hooray-henrys talking loudly, wearing canvas shoes and cravats with matching blonde trophy wives wearing plastic faces and forced smiles, recently disgorged from all the bloody 4X4’s choking up the rustic car park, the menu proved to be a bit of a disappointment in the fucking cheese sandwich department. So I elected for the Coronation Chicken in a baguette option for slightly less than what I recently paid for my new Charlotte Church CD. I remember wondering what the fuck was Coronation Chicken, but then again you can hardly go wrong with chicken can you? although why they choose to live in stinking barns full of chicken piss and shit and dead chickens which they often eat themselves as they stumble around on feet too small for their chemically enhanced swollen bodies in eternal daylight, I have no idea.
Anyway there we were, sitting in the suffocatingly hot pub garden when our food arrived. I was handed a baguette filled with approximately half a gallon of coloured mayonnaise with the consistency of watered down water and four small cubes of what supposedly was chicken. As if that wasn’t awful enough someone had seen fit to deposit half the contents of a small garden over the whole ensemble and it was all gradually drowning in the coloured mayonnaise which was threatening to take over the world by this time. This is the essence of English pub food, and it was truly shit my friends. How the fuck do you eat something like this? I’ll tell you how, by pouring it all over your bloody clothes without attempting to eat it, cutting out the middleman completely. If I hadn’t been covered in mayonnaise I would have gone into the pub and complained but who would have taken a fat, over middle aged bloke covered in mayonnaise and sweat seriously? I know I certainly wouldn’t.
So we then went and played cricket and Spenser’s dad can once more see his son’s name in the Rivet. Spenser hit a glorious 50 and Alan Corlett played another fine Captain’s innings of 43 until he was given out L.B.W. by umpire Dave Baldwin. Unfortunately for us gossips, there was no controversy to report here. So Dave decided to give Neil out L.B.W. next ball. But again there was no controversy, although, at this stage Dave had taken more Toad wickets than the opposition’s bowlers?
134 for 4 - was a collapse imminent?.......... Read on ................... and on ...............
Alex then came on and smashed a short cameo innings of 29 including a huge six that almost demolished the local mayonnaise factory. Our final score was 182 for 8 after a late flurry by Lorne and your humble narrator who almost had to be hospitalised after running up and down the pitch for what seemed like an eternity. On finishing my record breaking innings, I was covered in sweat, had turned bright red and was seeing little green and purple wiggly things swimming before my eyes. Carol told me that drinking tea was good for someone in my condition as it cools you down by making you sweat even more. If sweat makes you cool then I was the coolest guy around for miles! And I hadn’t even had a cup of tea.
H.P.A. (the team of initials, although what they stood for I have no idea) then replied and after the first 18 overs your humble narrator was not only still completely knackered but also on the verge of terminal loss of joy. Despite excellent bowling by Andy Batch who one day will have that elusive quality known as luck, and Alan Bingham who also bowled beautifully for no reward, no wickets had fallen but not many runs had been scored either due to some gazelle like fielding, by Harvey in particular, and the usual competence behind the stumps of the Silver Fox.
But then those elusive little spaceships of joy appeared from their customary position lurking just behind the clouds, and formed themselves into the shape of Alex who proceeded to take the next 7 wickets. Neil chipped in with two and H.P.A. ended up on 130 for 9. Another mighty victory for the in-form team of the moment. As I looked up into the early evening blood red sky and saw the local farmworkers bringing in the sheaves and than looked back at my perspiring team mates, I felt a tear in the corner of my eye that began to trickle down my face at the thought of the end of another season of cricket with the Toads. Although it might just have been sweat!

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The vexed question of drugs in sport

Sun, 11 Sep 2005 20:06:58 +0200

THE ROLE OF DRUGS IN AMATEUR CRICKET
(An in depth report)
There has been much spoken and written by commentators and hacks on the use of drugs in sport. However, it seems to me there has not been much spoken or written by the drug takers themselves. So, your intrepid reporter took it upon himself to delve into this murky world and bring you his findings. This report is brought to you by the makers of Clembuterol - the official drug of the Olympic Games, in association with Crazy Crack - the official sponsors of the Lord Toad’s X1, as well as Scrumpy Jack - the official drink of the Editor of the Toad’s mouthpiece, the Daily Rivet. A hell of a combination! But don’t try this at home kids, leave it to the professionals (or amateurs in the case of the Lord Toads).
So, for today’s match I will be largely experimenting with mind altering substances in order to see if they really can improve performance. Deciding against the Viagra option, I head for the bathroom to begin my quest. A quick search of the cabinet reveals no Clembuterol, indeed it doesn’t reveal very much at all. I don’t fancy getting high on Smokers Toothpaste, but try a bit anyway before settling for half a bottle of Oraldene (the only mouthwash for consenting adults). Next, a handful of milk of magnesia tabs washed down with a few mouthfuls of Kaolin and Morphine, and a couple of very generous lines of Andrews Liver Salts taken intra nasally via a handy tampon applicator. Pausing momentarily for a quick dab of Haemorrhoid ointment on the nose to avoid sunburn and a quick swallow of Tesco Active Toilet Gel to make me more active (and reduce limescale), I stumble, eyes watering madly, out of the bathroom to collect my kit.. There is just enough time to knock back half a bottle of red wine left over from some long forgotten party and it’s time to head off for the match.
It isn’t a very long walk to our home ground, but tonight it is a very strange one. A few passers by stare at me, but I put this down to being recognised as a member of local heroes, the Lord Toad’s X1. I am feelin’ good, free as a bird now, gettin’ my kicks on Route 66, filled with all the confidence a fresh tasting mouth can give you.
It is a beautiful summer evening, wildebeest in nearby fields are quietly grazing and half naked nuns armed with Kalashnikovs lurk somehow comfortingly behind the hedgerows. ‘Let them lurk if they like’, I think, ‘It’s a free country, yeah, a FREE country’. Acting on impulse, I suddenly find myself cramming all the money I have on me into the hands of a startled little bird-like old lady passer by. I don’t need it, and I am sure Mother Teresa (for that’s who it was) could find a far better use for it.
I carry on, feeling strangely strange (but oddly normal), and then suddenly experience the giddy feeling of flight - or am I having a drug-induced out of body experience? Sadly, I am not. I find myself lying spread-eagled in the gutter - I seem to have fallen off the pavement which towers above me like Mount Doom in Lord of the Rings. I just hope it doesn’t take as long to scale it as the eternity it took Frodo and his mate (played in the film by Mathew Hoggard, I think). I have the presence of mind to inform a couple of concerned passers-by that I am merely practising Synchronised Swimming. They nod and continue to pass by.
By the time I reach the ground I am half a million strong, the Andrews Liver Salts are coursing through my blood stream (I make a mental note that I must try their pepper as well next time) and I feel as high as Withnail and I. I embrace a couple of startled team mates, tell them I love them (not in a gay way you understand, but more in the way of being part of a universal brotherhood, oh, and sisterhood as well). Their reply turns into steam and rises slowly into the evening sky. Colours and sounds are creating little soft fluffy clouds that go on forever within my mind I listen to a bird whistling “In the Attics of my Life” by the Grateful Dead (the live version from Winterland 1974, not the studio version on ‘American Beauty’).
Perhaps I have taken this dedication to my sport too seriously and am in danger of peaking far too early, before the game even begins. But no worries there, I have managed to arrive two hours late - but suddenly plunged back into what is commonly termed reality by the news that I am just in time to bat and that we need six to win off the last over and where have you been you fucking idiot. This information overload paralyses all the little connector things in my head that make it work like a brain instead of just a lump of organic stuff that prevents your head from caving in.
With two hastily fitted left pads flapping round my legs, I glide to the wicket. My super-sensitive hearing picking up the sound of the grass growing, and a faint echo of Jimi Hendrix final guitar solo at the Isle of Wight festival. All the fielders are staring at me. I feel a touch of paranoia. All they want to do is get me out, not to know me as a person, it’s not fair. I walk unsteadily to the crease, take guard, and am felled by a full toss that hurtles straight into my crutch. As I lie crumpled on the ground, feeling more pain than the baby Jesus who died to save all our sins and then watched on from above as we turned into a load of murdering wankers, I see the umpire raise his finger to signify lbw! Then BLACKNESS.

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The Toads v Coombe Bissett

Sun, 04 Sep 2005 12:58:11 +0200

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The Toads v Coombe Bissett

Sun, 04 Sep 2005 12:55:21 +0200

Thrill to another extract gleaned from the pages of the legendary Daily Rivet, the official unofficial organ of the Lord Toad’s X1, a team of cricketing amateurs based in Ringwood, nestling in the verdant beauty of the New Forest
NETS have now finished, so the TOADS have at least half a dozen players who can remember how the game works. First fixture of the season is on Sunday 27 April against the humble yeomen of Coombe Bissett, featuring possibly the most sumptuous cricket tea you will enjoy all season, complete with homemade cakes, tea served from an urn by buxom country wenches, and the ubiquitous mini sausage rolls, without which any game of cricket would be the lesser for it. The ground, situated amidst a sea of yellow oil seed rape, as well as some purple stuff, as well as the more normal green stuff, is situated on a slight slope allowing an unsurpassed view of the crumbling ruins of Tinhenge which lie to the East, one of the few local remaining relics dating from the Corrugated Iron Age.
And so it came to pass that, after 40 days and nights of continuous rain, the Toads piled into their cars two by two and thundered off to Coombe Bissett to face their destiny. The first game of the new Millennium was upon them. All the hundreds of hours of selfless devotion spent during the winter in the process of fine tuning their athletic bodies for the rigours of the modern game were about to be put to the test. As we thundered on beneath the true blue skies of Hampshire, I realised that this was to be the first full season without the larger than life presidency of Roger. The president is dead, long live the president - the new presidento of our club, the lovely Jenny Pitcher. She turned up to watch the Toads, in her new posh car that I don’t at all feel envious of! She ate strawberries, mainly.
It was to be a game of two halves. In the first half the Toads were excellence itself. Taking the cue from Nick Guy’s excellent early catch, we bowled and fielded as sweetly as the sweetest sweetmeat offered from a platter of the finest in sweetness by the sweetest of semi-naked virgins. Our bowlers did us proud and our fielding was of the rarest quality, to the extent that if we had been a fine wine we would have been definitely bloody ‘appellation controlee’. After reducing the opposition to a mundane 140 odd runs from 45 overs, we attacked our first (and probably finest) cricket tea of the season with all the gusto at our command, of which there was a plentiful supply. There is nothing like a drop of the old gusto at moments like this, especially if accompanied by homemade cakes and scones of the finest quality - not a mini sausage-roll in sight but somehow that didn’t matter, we were on a high. A mention here must made of the captaincy of Alan Corlett who, in this correspondent’s eyes, was a shining example to our readers of all ages. Not a young man himself, Alan showed a wisdom beyond even his years in his field placings and advice to some of the younger bowlers such as myself. Another mention for an extremely hungover Brian Corlett who performed heroics in his unaccustomed role of wicket keeper.
But the second part awaits, not so much fun, this part. In this part we fail to build on the platform of the first part. In fact the platform of the first part falls down on our heads. The rot begins with the controversial dismissal of Dave Baldwin and wickets begin to fall. Alan is playing well but as soon as Alex suggests he may score a glorious Captain’s 50, he is out. Nice one Alex! who is obviously still rather unsure of how to harness the power of his telepathic thought beams for the good of the team. The highpoints of our largely dismal innings are four glorious sixes by Alan Bingham and a good knock by Mark ‘Ronnie’ Radford who also bowled well and won Man of the Match. We were all out for 80 odd and therefore lost, as that is unfortunately how the rules of the game work.
And so, a drink was in order and off we went to the bloody Fox and Goose, all meals in a basket and happy families sitting round eating hastily microwaved lasagne and listening to Coombe Bissett F.M. at a volume that drowned out all attempts at conversation. So we all went outside and attempted to have a conversation, one that finally ended for me about four hours later in the illicit drinking den known to mere mortals as the Railway. Where else can you get pissed, watch women fall backwards off bar stools, and mime along to Ginger Baker’s drumming in Cream’s over the top rendition of the legendary Robert Johnson’s Crossroads. When I left I felt nearly as drunk as the drunk bloke at the bar. All in all, an excellent end to a good day out. Here’s to many more like it during the course of the season. Toads, give yourselves a big hug.

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Amateur cricket - proper cricket for proper people

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 15:36:05 +0200

The Daily Rivet
The Porno Magazine of the Lord Toad’s X1Cricket Club
an everyday story of cricket folk August 2005
This month we cut out the pre-shag shower, the steak dinner, the bottle of Parafino Rouge, the invitation to come in for a cup of bloody coffee, the foreplay, and, instead, get right to the meat and spunk of things:
THE MATCH REPORTS
So, stuff your bloody professional game with its fascist insurance company and toxic soft drink sponsors and sponsored bats and sponsored hats and sponsored cars and sponsored bloody stumps with bloody cameras in them and a highly paid management team ensuring everything runs so smoothly that all the players have to do is decide what bloody designer wrap around sunglasses to wear beneath their gelled designer haircuts that cost more than a Tanzanian farmer makes in his entire life. Stuff all the fat, shiny sun tanned ex cricketer presenters in their beige slacks and short sleeved checked shirts wearing bloody ties and droning on hour after hour, and the bloody bloke in the lorry who analyses anything that bloody moves and makes diagrams that are supposed to enlighten but look more like street maps of Hartlepool. Stuff all the adverts after every over for either cars, beer or bloody shaving foam that all enable men to shag women easier. Let’s hear it for the amateurs who have none of this, yet still contrive to have a bloody good drink and a bloody good time. So, here it is, the story of a typical Toad’s game. Proper cricket. Local cricket for local people.
It is to be a Thursday afternoon match against Wimborne C.C. We all rock up to the pub early to watch England about to hammer the Aussies on the first day of the first test (remember that feeling? that optimism? were we all mad? on drugs? victims of tabloid propaganda? temporarily insane? suffering a mass hallucination?). Anyway, after a few beers, it is time to go. Everyone is here except the massed Cracknells who will meet us there. But, no, Cheese is absent. A quick phone call ascertains that he is round a friend’s house watching cricket and knocking back a few early morning tinnies. Will we pick him up? O.K. fair enough. We arrive to find Cheese waiting, but with no kit! Can we drop him off at home to pick up his kit? Yes, fair enough. Halfway there he remembers his keys are in his van, and he can’t remember where he left it! But it’s O.K., he will break in and get his kit. Fair enough. So, armed with a chisel he proceeds to jemmy open a window of his long suffering mum and dad’s house. In he goes, only to reappear and inform us his kit is not there. He has lost it somewhere! Never mind, he can have various bits and pieces of other people’s stuff, the outfit to be finished off by an ancient pair of stinking trainers with half the sole of one of them hanging off.
We finally arrive in time for a couple more pints at the Cricketers. Cheese asks Bingers if he can borrow twenty quid as he hasn’t any money on him. No problem. Cheese then gives the note back to Bingers and asks him to look after it for him as he has left his wallet in his van. Priceless! Then it’s off over the road to the clubhouse and get changed for the game. Despite it being a Thursday, the opposition insist on playing bloody Sunday rules instead of the much simpler 40 overs each. The Toads bat first and sail to the majestic total of 223 for 6 in their allotted time. The boy Cheese, a bit wobbly by now, sets us up with a nice 25 before being caught. Bingers once more discovers that his new found role as captain ensures he does not score any runs, and he is out for 6. But then Ally and Ollie pile on the runs. The former scoring a stylish 63 and Ollie a storming 55, including two mighty sixes (his first ever 50). As time trickles away, in comes Stu who bludgeons a super fast 41. Spenser is left n.o. 8 and the man they call the Boss (more of whom later) is n.o.2.
Tea is taken and it’s out into the baking hot sunshine to field. Gary and Ally bowl their hearts out. A mixture of bad luck and I’m sure what Gary would call shit fielding by a load of idiot bastards ensured no wickets fell. Dougie and Stu then came on but again no luck. Fielders were wilting like small wax models of improbable animals made by even smaller children in the blistering heat as the score moved inexorably on to 143 for 0. Suddenly 223 did not seem a very large total to defend. Cheese’s attempts to buck up the spirits of the toiling fielders didn’t have the desired effect, instead he was just told to fuck off and shut up. A bit harsh I thought!! Although it did not stop him chirping away! The only bright spot was the fielding of the mighty Boss who stopped and chased everything like a demented greyhound on speed pursuing a rabbit that secretly knew it was doomed, fucked, soon to die without ever having seen the setting of the sun in distant Honolulu. The Boss’s wax certainly wasn’t melting, he was made of sterner stuff, probably some sort of titanium alloy that ensures spaceships don’t melt as they turn for the Sun.
But than a decisive decision by captain Bingers. He turned to senior pro Dave Os like a despairing Commissioner Gordon to a fully pumped up Batman in one of Gotham City’s all too frequent crises. This was indeed a job for the Caped Crusader. Pausing only to swallow a last Rennie and thoughtfully unwrap a stick of his favourite gum, Dave Os purposefully strode to the bowler’s end, ball in hand, a city to save, single mothers and children to protect, reputations to preserve. Truth to tell he had not been very pleased with his bowling performances to date this season. It was make or break for the ageing superhero. After his first two overs went for 12 he underwent yet another personal crisis of confidence, and was forced to unwrap another stick of his favourite gum. An ageing man cast adrift in the world of the young. Should he do a Thorpe and announce his immediate retirement from the game, in order to spend more time in his sad, lonely room and perhaps arrange his CD collection in alphabetical order? His mind in turmoil, he made the only decision a real man could in such circumstances. NO, he preferred them in order of date released instead.
That was the turning point in the career of the dark, troubled superhero. In his next over he had number one batsman caught by Ollie, and then proceeded to bowl the next four hapless victims, during which time number two batsman was run out thanks to the lightning reactions of ageing Dougie and young Cheese, bridging the generation gap, working as one, like yin and yang, although I am not sure who was which. At the other end, the boy Connor and the wily Bingers bamboozled the batsmen, and Bingers took a wicket. Sensing an improbable victory, the fielders moved in. Dave Os was taken out of the attack. He had given his all, and more, his personal crisis on hold for another day. But at least he had sorted out his worrying CD collection problem. Gary and Ally were brought back. Under Sunday rules we had to take all their wickets or else the game would be deemed a draw even if they did not reach their target. It came down to the last over, bowled by Ally. They had the task of getting 20 to win with three wickets left. Ally took two wickets, and his last ball missed the stumps by the thickness of an almost invisible piece of very thin paper that had been sharpened by a magic pixie paper sharpener. Game over. A draw. NO. It was no draw my friends. The Toads scored more runs than them and lost less wickets than them, and that sure sounds like a victory to me.

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Welcome to amateur cricket's fab new Blog, the Daily Rivet

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 15:24:03 +0200

This blog concentrates on the fortunes and misfortunes of an amateur cricket club, based in Ringwood, Hants,The Lord Toad's X1. Here you will find a series of match reports ranging from fact to fiction at will, in fact anything that the omniscient and omnipotent editor feels free to commit to paper, or ether, or even both. Yes folks, you will die laughing, or we will come and kill you anyway.

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