14th Nov 2006 - Leaving the UK

Ok then…

By the way, going to have a few last minute drinks tonight for those who couldn’t make the party… 7.30pm at the Green Man in Berwick st…

Monday

Went to do some work experience for the National Student Newspaper who are based in Lincoln at the back of a record shop, they are a very small operation and don’t have two pennies to rub together, hence we sneaked into the Students Union for a very cheap dinner…
In the evening I performed at the open mic night at The Lincoln Drill Hall, I have to say it was the best night I’d performed at so far, great crowd, good mixed bag of musicians and ages, I had a few requests for CD’s then jumped on the bus back to my Dad’s.

Tuesday

Back to the National Student where I discovered they were currently embroiled in a dispute with the Lincoln Students Union. The company also makes a local paper for Lincoln University, and after a change in Communications officer, the Union had got a little rattled with the competition, banning the paper from Campus. So they staged a protest and off we toddled down to take photos and lurk about, my first Student protest!
A little later I returned to the Drill Hall to interview the Hot Puppies, who were very pleasant but a little un-talkative post-soundcheck. Then after finishing off a few reviews for the National Student (Heard the new Jarvis album and the new Long Blondes album, both very good) we all headed down to the gig… The local band were a little dull, as were New Rhodes, but the Hot Puppies were pretty good, especially considering that the Drill Hall is a massive venue… Once again after the gig and a few post-gig drinks with the band, I hopped on the bus and back to Horncastle…

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday

Spent most of these days working on articles, sorting out stuff at my Dad’s house and pottering about…
There was one frustrating moment when I lost one of my freelance web design jobs, and for such a stupid reason, I was waiting for them to send me a design but they seemed to think that I was just wasting there time and money learning the system they were using, but they never asked me to design the site and I don’t know what I was supposed to do without a design, there’s no point making something that doesn’t’ resemble what they want! Oh well, if they’re business practise is like that then I’m probably better off not working for them…
Cooked a very nice dinner for the folks, chilled out a bit and generally enjoyed my own space for a few days…

Saturday and the Party

Firstly I had booked the coach from Horncastle to my Dad’s too late and it was full, but negotiated some craziness getting coaches and then a train, which only cost £4 more and got me in earlier :-)Then dashed down to Brixton to meet Dan, Jim, Arran and pick up some stuff we needed, jumped in a Taxi and off we all dashed to Peckham… Once there we dashed off again to do a booze run where I spent £100 on booze, ouch! Then back to the venue to set up the PA and everything else…
So far, so good, things ran a little late and a couple of the bands / DJ’s hadn’t turned up, so we put things back and kicked of with Dexy at about 8… Now, here’s were something a little confusing happened that made proceedings start to get complicated… You see, there had been another party planned by some friends of a friend in Shoreditch, their venue fell through so they turned up at our party and asked if we wanted to borrow their sound system in return for letting some of their DJ’s play a few tunes later, myself and the guys who ran the squat agreed as long as it was all on our terms and so finally several hours later the new PA finally turned up…
So far the bands had been going well, with slightly ropey sound, but well received and the crowds were reasonable, even though I was spending too much time running about to actually talk to any of my friends who had turned up. At this point things started getting complicated, even though the guys with the sound system seemed fairly understanding of the situation, they brought along a few people who possibly didn’t quite understand that this was our party and started selling their own alcohol and running things to their own agenda, being fairly unreasonable when asked to do things the way we had planned them. Also some of the crowd they bought were a little rowdy, and several scuffles had to be forced outside, creating a few uncomfortable situations for everyone involved…
When things were getting a little too out of control we tried to shut the party down, which wasn’t a popular choice, but finally people seemed to get the idea (there were also a lot of drugs floating about…) and about 3:30 we had finally cleared out.
So, a few lessons learned (Keep things between people you trust, don’t rely on outside parties being the main one) I’m a little out of pocket after paying the bands, but mainly it was just a rather stressful experience from start to finish and I didn’t get much of a chance to hang out with anybody…

Finally… I met ‘Known’…! That may not mean anything to a lot of you, but let me say that ‘Known’ is a tagger around outer South London, his handiwork is everywhere I grew up, quite weird to meet someone like that, and he asked me for a gig!

Chinch out xx