OVER the holiday I went to my first gig since The Dooleys played Top of the World in 1978.
I went to see a band from my distant youth, two-tone legends The Beat, still going strong after 30 years. What’s more, I dressed for the occasion - pork pie hat, white socks, drainpipe trousers.
Sadly, so did every other 50 something in the venue. It looked like a Mormon convention.
Also on the bill was Bad Manners, fronted by a fat man called Buster Bloodvessel. I saw them in 1977 and was amazed by the athleticism of Mr Bloodvessel who, despite his considerable girth, cartwheeled across the stage.
The girth is still there, the athleticism isn’t, which merely leaves a fat person.
That’s why Bad Manners aren’t big now.
The Beat were bloody old: so old, the teenage tunes seemed ludicrous. ‘Hands Off She’s Mine’ (what are you going to do about it granddad?), ‘You’re Too Nice To Talk To’ (do you honestly think a young girl like that wants to talk to you?).
The audience were bloody old. I felt bloody old. I expected the bar to have Sanatogen in the optics.
And when the bloody old audience danced - me included - we looked like a collection of aged uncles letting their comb-overs down at a wedding reception.
"It was a big mistake," I confided to colleagues in The Drum and Monkey. "I ended the evening feeling positively ancient."
"Not as big a mistake as the Northern Soul convention I went to," said Colin. "I tried to do the dance moves again and ended-up on the sick for three weeks."
Non-news stories of the week....
FROM the Daily Express: "Wayne Ronney's fiancee Coleen McLoughlin carried her dog in Cheshire. Both wore hooded tops."
Western Australia Sunday Times: "Every day outside a Northbridge eatery a postie pokes the mail, one item at a time, through a thin crack under the door. The 'Fishy Affair' doesn't have a postbox."
MY wife had to fill-in a form yesterday. It said at the bottom 'sign'. She put 'Pisces'.
Since I gave up smoking I feel better, smell better and it's a lot safer to drink out of the old beer cans scattered around our house.
TIP of the week... never moon at a werewolf. JUST a thought... if a mute swears, does his mother wash his hands with soap? I WAS raised in a small town - so small they closed the zoo when the chicken died. I WENT to a museum which has a collection of arms and legs missing from statues in other museums. MIFSUD, the Chav cat dumped in a cardboard box on Newbold Comyn, rescued and rehomed in the warm environs of Chateau Lockley, has repaid our act of kindness with a series of ambush attacks on the Master of the House. Believe it or not, that's me. Well, when the wife's not here, anyway.
"You can take the cat out of the cardboard box, but you can't take the cardboard box out of the cat," says Colin, knowingly.
How very wise.
My uncle used to tell me: you can take the wardrobe out of the cardboard box, but you'll never assemble it.
Last week, the demented moggie's brutality reached a new level. She finally succeeded in hospitalising me.
Mifsud leapt from behind the sofa and sunk her claws into my eye. "The cat's got my eye," I screamed, clutching the wound.
"Shut the patio doors or she'll take it outside," said Julie, fearing the worst.
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