Birmingham

This weekend I went to Birmingham to help a band. I did some driving, carried some gear, but for most of the weekend I was a very expensive spare-gooseberry. There was a young and fresh-faced support band "Nerve Centre" playing their own material who were quite interesting. Unfortunately their front-man lost the ability to sing into the front of his microphone as soon as the song required any tricky guitar playing. They finished on a very good (and to my mind surprisingly clean) punk song called "List of things (I'd do to Kim Kardashian before I'd follow her on twitter)". They also did a brilliant hard-rock version of "Fight for your right to party". If they had learned it that weekend as a tribute to M.C. A's death, then it was absolutely spectacular.

There's a couple of incidents and snippets of conversation that will stay with me:

• The six of us were given three twin rooms, and it seemed so likely that one of the musicians was going to want to entertain a female member of the audience in his room that nobody wanted to share with him. We found the bar's stock of drinking straws and cut one of them down. The bass player literally drew the short straw to figuratively draw the short straw and share a room with the band's boy-slut.
•  In a tribute to health and safety concerns, we decided that it would be my job to clamber up on a wobbly drum stool and take down the backdrop because I'd drunk 6 or 7 pints by then, and everybody else was virtually sober.
•  When I was talking too loudly in public about what I'd seen for sale in a supermarket, the guitarist quietly saying to me "Richard, can you just stop shouting 'cock-ring' ?"
•  The drunk and opinionated singer listening to the DJ and furiously telling me "THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO EXCUSE FOR NOT OWNING 'OGDEN'S NUT GONE FLAKE'".

Richard "Roadie" B