MIDDLEMAN AT SOUTH BY SOUTH WEST FESTIVAL

Monday 15th March 2010

After the hoop-jumping, back-bending, how-high palaver of securing US Visas, we leave Leeds towards London, ready for our flight the next morning, and a red van starts changing lanes without looking. It swerves just before smashing into us as Lee holds the horn down. Our hearts are now banging out about 180bpm and we have to go straight back to Krish’s cause I’ve left my passport and money at his house.

Tuesday 16^th March 2010

At 4:30am We leave Lee’s sister’s for Heathrow, drive past long term parking 3 times and then hit the car we’re parking behind. Slurpy’s bass drum case is stuffed to the brim with his cymbals, click track, snare, and all of our clothes and it weighs about two hernias. He carries it like an empty handbag.

The plane is packed with bands and music industry going to South By South West. Huw Stephens is asleep just behind me to the left and I consider seeing how much stuff I can pile on him and take photos before he wakes up, like Buckaroo for grown ups, but I decide there are too many people awake and aware who would think I run a weird fetish website based on innocent but inconvenient real life recreations of childhood boardgames.

We land, obviously, to Susan Boyle singing Wild Horses, and get our connecting flight from Dallas to Austin. The captain seems to have a rare form of turrets based partly on his own hunger and partly on his desire to be a Roy Lichtenstein painting. At the end of the first announcement he pauses briefly, then says ‘toast!’ and stops. At the end of the next announcement, regarding takeoff, he pauses at the end, then goes ‘Zooooom!’ When we hit the runway in Austin we don’t get the ‘Bosh!’ I’m hoping for. I leave my passport in the pocket of the chair in front and cause a bit of a security panic when I try to go back onto the plane.

We go to the wrong Doubletree Hotel, have to call another cabbie, who has a big bag of weed in the front and doesn’t seem to want to charge us, and we get to the right place. We head downtown for something to eat and find a Chinese restaurant with massive horse sculptures in it and a friendly waiter. He asks what we’re all having and then whether we want white or brown rice. We all want white. He points at Lee and says ‘white’, then at Slurps, ‘white’, then at me and says ‘white’, and finally at Krish and says ‘brown’. It’s hard not to shout ‘racist’ at him, but he might miss the irony, and it’s our first night.

Krish smokes the night away after making us swear we wouldn’t let him, but me and Lee can’t be bothered getting into a fight with him and having to smash his beautiful little face in, so we just remind him he’s a disappointment to everyone he knows.

Wednesday 17^th March 2010

We wake up and get breakfast in bed. We’re not used to American portions so, after the equivalent of an English breakfast, each bite of the super-absorbent, half-inch thick pancakes is like trying to choke down a dirty, damp flannel. Lee does a phone interview for the Yorkshire Evening Post and we head downtown to check out the venue and eat burgers. The traffic’s so bad we have to head back to the hotel to get our gear straight away. We watch The Temper Trap film an acoustic session by the hotel pool till the next shuttle bus comes.

We drop our gear at the venue and hand out some flyers. Some American girls immediately become our street team in order to hang around with us and look at our beautiful faces and listen to our magical accents until the gig starts. Nearly all American girls here are called Lisa, Laura, Laurie, Lauren or Lindsey.

Thursday 18^th March 2010

We arrive at The British Music Embassy at 10am as requested and discover we won’t be needed for an hour and a half. It’s just like in England, but not nearly as bad as having to get to the venue last night at 6pm and not being needed for five and a half hours. We get smoothies from a smoothie bar and you can choose one ‘power shot’ to go in it. There’s one for energy, one for immunity and so on. Lee orders invisibility and soon feels himself disappearing from the crotch down. I want the ability to pause time but they don’t have that.

After sound check we flyer 6^th Street and I get distracted by some girls hoola-hooping in bikinis in order to get customers into the bar they work at, which is called Bikinis. I spend a while telling them they’re shit at hoola-hoop and asking why they haven’t been trained properly and I know they really appreciate my constructive criticism, especially when I tell them the drunk bearded guy asking for a go is sexier than all of them. The sound at The British Music Embassy is amazing and immediately after the gig we’re ploughing through the free drinks.

Local news reporter Jade Mingus interviews me just before I’m no longer capable and by the time Slow Club are finished we’re Oliver Stone. By the time The Crookes have played we’re Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas and by the time The Grammatics come on stage we’re so flammable there’s a danger I’ll spontaneously combust every time my throat rasps as I shout at Owen that he’s fucking well cool. Our gear has been removed from the venue and piled up outside. I head off to see Mike Snow and the others head back to the hotel.

It’s happy hour at the hotel bar and Krish, Lee and Slurps ask the bar maid to deliver burgers and more margaritas to the Jacuzzi. Three security guards come to watch/supervise as Lee starts singing at the top of his voice into the tubes in the Jacuzzi. These tubes come out in the pool and amplify his voice around the hotel. He shouts ‘Jesus’ and ‘Vivaldi’ alternately until it’s time to break into the conference room and steal cookies and coke to go with the burgers and margaritas. Slurpy meets some English guys in the bar who’ve never played at South By South West and tells them they’ll be fine for their gig, that the crowd are nice and not to worry or be nervous. He asks what their band is called. It’s called Hole.

After failing to get some porn on the TV, Lee passes out and Krish and Slurpy go back downtown. Slurpy tries to give some money to a tramp and gets rejected by the offended homeless man. Krish rings Lee to come back out saying “I would love you to be here man. We’re on 18^th street. Oh god, we’ve got to get some food, we’re in hell on earth.” Krish puts his phone back in his pocket without hanging up and Lee can hear him telling Slurpy, “I’m serious man, I’m gonna be sick over this bridge.” Slurpy asks where Lee is, Krish remembers, recovers his phone and changes plan, “Things are not good man, stay there, we’re coming home.”

Friday 19^th March 2010

We wake up feeling like we’ve been in a Sahara-Desert-eating contest and we’re all losers. At breakfast the waiter says he saw us on the news last night. It’s a glorious sunny day of interviews at the Convention Centre, along with free massage and drinks in the artists’ lounge. Everyone thinks we’re younger than we are due to our exuberant outlook, our buoyant laughter and our underdeveloped physical appearance.

We bounce between Buffalo Billiard Lounge and Soho on 6^th Street and drink our hands surgeon-steady again before gradually working our way back to old-lady-trying-to-slowly-shake-hands-in-an-earthquake. Going back to Buffalo Billiard Lounge the bouncer asks Lee if he’s having a good time. Lee says yeah, he’s had a couple of drinks; he’s a little bit drunk. A guy from inside the venue runs out and pushes Lee over, puts his knee in his chest and says he’s putting the whole bar at risk. Apparently, in America, you have to be careful what you say about drink to people making their living selling you drink. You can buy their drink, just don’t let it take any chemical effect; tipsiness is as dangerous as atheism here.

What happens next is a blur but it involves putting some Radio 1 employees through their paces, doing forward rolls in the middle of the road, teaching a group of girls the crab dance and explaining how massive it is in England, Krish and Slurps taking a spill in the pizza queue and people treading over them, Krish dancing samba in the street like he’s an instructor in Pineapple Dance Studio, going to Iron Cactus and ordering death drinks and Krish thinking he can’t go on and having to drink some water.

Getting into the shuttle bus home Lee clips his nipple on the door and the driver asks if he needs a medic and launches into a story about nipples, “I know a guy who got his nipple bitten off by a beaver, man.” He says him and his mate were in a car and hit a beaver. His mate picked the lifeless beaver up and said, “Look man there’s not even any blood.” On cue the beaver came round and took his mate’s whole nipple off through his clothes. The driver goes on to speak about racoons, always referring to them as ‘coons’. Maybe he’s mates with the Chinese restaurant waiter. He says that when you harvest rice you do it in a spiral from the outside in, so all the animals hide in the middle. They used to trap the racoons and use them for their fur, and this guy from out of town, this city guy he knew, was having a go at catching a racoon. It jumped up and bit the city guy’s hand and fucked it up. He was trying to shake it off and when it let go it starting chewing his balls, it just latched on. The driver and his other friend laughed so hard they couldn’t help the city guy. Almost incapacitated by laughter, but scared city guy was going to bleed to death, the driver, “had to kick the coon off the guy’s dick.” He just, “kicked the coon right off his crotch!”

Saturday 20^th March 2010

Slurpy is going to try to eat a 4lb burger at Bikinis later in order to try to win a T shirt, and to prove that he can, but it doesn’t stop him having the now quotidian meateggsflannel breakfast. Our manager is going to join him in the challenge. We meet at 4pm at Bikinis and the burgers are the size of a dinner plate and about 3 inches thick including the bun. Slurps is half way through before he starts struggling and Tony decides to dip his bread in his Dr Pepper, screw it up into a ball and eat it like an apple. Slurps struggles not to vomit. After an hour, Tony has had to stop, and Slurpy is working away at the crisps and salad with a pallid, sweaty face and an occasional suppressed gip. He clearly wants to stop, but to paraphrase Macbeth, he has now stepped so deep in meat that to turn back were as tedious as go o’er.

He comes out victorious and wins a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Not tonight ladies. I’m just here for the burgers.’

Sunday 21^st March 2010

We wake up late and decide to sunbathe by the pool. I go down and Lee and Krish aren’t with their stuff so I set myself down amongst the West Virginia cheerleading team, who are here with the basketball team, who are at training. They are soulless materialists who spend their time talking about how they hate this or that celebrity for getting fucking fat. Or how this or that celebrity is a saint because he said he wouldn’t abandon his child once some other celebrity gave birth to it and that he wouldn’t even cheat on her. They are shallow to the point of concavity and I choose to listen to Blur’s Stereotypes on my ipod and enjoy the sun.

Monday 22^nd March 2010

We go to Denny’s after checking out of the hotel, eat a lot, and head to the airport for the long flight back to our other reality.

IT'S NOT OVER YET GUITAR TAB

You've seen the behind the scenes video in my last blog, you've bought the novelty fondu set, you've reorganised your perceptions of time according to when the chorus and then the first verse and then the middle 8 and then etc etc kick in, and now you can play the song, because Me and Krish have tabbed out It's Not Over Yet and it really properly took right well long. Enjoy:

BEHIND THE SCENES OF MIDDLEMAN'S NEXT VIDEO

Bonjour people,

I've been away in India for 3 weeks dancing on the beach for New Year, swimming in waterfalls and chillin with cows. But now I'm back and it's gonna be a good year for Middleman. I know cause I heard a rumour that it said it in someone's horoscope once.

We're playing at South by South West in Texas in March, and our first single from our debut album's going to be out soon after, in late March or early April. Here's some behind the scenes stuff from the video shoot:

AMSTERDAMAGE

I hadn’t been to Amsterdam for 6 years, which is about how old I was when I used to play on my mum’s BBC computer. Bat and ball was wicked, and so were Monsters and Chucky Egg, but it’s Frogger I want to give special mention to in this blog. If you’ve never played it, but you’ve been to Amsterdam, just imagine you’re trying to cross the street there and that you’re a frog, and you’ve pretty much got it. The traffic’s nuts: cars, trams, bikes, buses, lorries, pedestrians using running as a legitimate form of business-man-transport. Legitimate not cause they’re late, just cause they’re Dutch.

My mate Gaz right, when he gets properly on one, there’s no stopping him. He can get knocked down, and he just gets back up again and takes it on the chin and other clichés. He’s like that Chumba Wumba song about Weebles, but less egg-shaped. He spends a while doing what he said was an important dance, a dance that mattered, at strangers in a bar who don’t agree with its significance. Then when the bar closes and he’s not got the audience his dance deserves, he starts telling people he’s Rupert Grint off Harry Potter. He had people taking photos with him all night, and got 3 free tickets into a club, and an apology from the guys on the door for not being able to give him more. By the end of the night he's pushing 13 pence sterling in my hand and saying, "Get me a meat." But than doesn't stop him trying to engage Amsterdam residents in a game of burger tennis using their hedge as a net on the walk home.

During the weekend I wondered something I’ve wondered a few times before. When you’re intoxicated, and things seem amazing or you have a brilliant idea, is it because you’re mind is in a higher, more open state, or is it because your mind is slowed down and so regular things seem incredible. It’s the old, absolute/relative argument. You know the kind of realisation I mean. Like, when music feels 3D with all the layers criss-crossing and you lay back in it like a massive sonic hammock, or when the person on the telly says the same word as you at the same time with the same intonation whilst looking straight at you. Or when you realise for the first time that even though the chicken and the egg are so closely linked, you never eat chicken and egg as a meal. Bacon and Eggs, sausage and eggs, ham and eggs, but never chicken and eggs, or you REALLY appreciate, and are proud of, portmanteau words like Nanslator and Amsterdamage, or your yawns taste like ironic pins and needles, or you decide you’ll make your fortune by selling Disease Monopoly to Hasbro and that the brown ones would be STDS, and the greens and navies would all be terminal illnesses.

Or you hear a song lyric differently to how you’ve heard it before like:

‘The people you’ve been before

that you don’t want around anymore

they push and shove, and won’t bend to you will

I’ll keep them still” (Elliott Smith Between The Bars)

and you realise that the first bit could mean that you don’t want to be like you used to be, or that you suffered mental illness and want to stay sane, and that the second bit could mean I will prevent these ‘people’ from coming back by keeping them still (inanimate/dormant), or that I will keep them, still. I will still keep them. You realise then that within the 4 different combinations of these various halves there are dozens of different nuances that could apply in each case. Is it, ‘I will still keep them, despite you hating them, because they are part of you, or is it, I will still keep them, so that you don’t have to. I’ll keep them for you, as in the Spanish ‘por’ not ‘para’. I’ll keep them instead of you so that you’re free from the burden. In the first part, if you don’t want to be like before, does that mean you don’t want to act like you used to, or act or think like you used to, or not even have memories of what you were like before?

Here’s a government Ven diagram showing the crossover:

LEICESTER MEN TOP FIT POLL

A friend of mine told me the other day that she read in a magazine that men from Leicester are the fittest in the UK, but she didn't know in which sense it meant. Well obviously, it's both. Leggy men like myself are all capable of being both champion athletes and underwear models.

Take David Attenborough. People know he travels all over the world to look at animals that he could just as easily see on telly without having to wait around for ages. What people don't realise is that he travels exclusively by sprinting non-stop for weeks and weeks over mountains and through deserts. Course he walks or stands still when the camera's on him, otherwise he'd just be a blur of muscle. Sometimes he crouches. Now, gorillas are about 10-15 times stronger than your average man, but just look at this one cower as the man-mountain Attenborough threatens to punch it right in its simian face if it doesn't shut up about his coat looking like a flasher jacket:



Also, I've done a survey and 9 out of 10 girls said they'd get theoretically naked for David back in the imaginary day. That's just how it is for Leggy men. In another survey, 9.5 out of 10 girls said they'd get naked if Gok Wan asked them and he don't even like girls. In case you're wondering, the 0.5 isn't cause I've averaged it out, I asked 20 girls and 2 said they'd get half naked. One said left half, the other said back half.

Having said all that, Daniel Lambert, the fattest man in Britain in the early 1800s (50 stone) was from Leicester, and so was Joseph Carey Merrick, better known as the Elephant Man. Now Danny ain't winning no Tour de France, and Joey's not signing no Hugo Boss contract. And I'm not employing no double negatives.

STICKS AND STONES IS BACK

For those of you who don't know, I do poetry. Me and my mate Adam started a night called Sticks and Stones about 4 years ago at Strawberry Fields Bar on Woodhouse Lane, Leeds. We have one of the UKs top spoken words artists as a guest, and open mic too. Strawbs burnt down early this year so we've been away for 6 months but now we're back! With a Belter! Boom! Bang! Whoosh! Kapowee! DUBIOUS ONOMATOPOEIA!

Below is the e-flyer for the first one of the season. John Berkavitch is the guest. He is a vision of the near future set in 1989. He was the 2007 Glastonbury Slam Champion, the 2007 UK Slam Champion, has performed on radio 1, radio 4, done two national tours, can breathe under water, and hold himself out from a lamppost (or similar), parallel to the ground, thanks to his freakishly overdeveloped latissimus dorsi. Check it out:

SOLVING MYSTERIES, SETTING TRENDS

The mystery of who's been smashing my car up has been solved by deduction. Whilst Ewan was in Hong Kong, my rear windscreen wiper got pulled off, so it must have been Slurpy. We only had two votes on the matter, both saying Slurpy did it, so it's official, you can judge a book by it's vandalizing, sneering, disgusting, bearded cover. Of course, there is the possibility it was someone other than Slurpy or Ewan, somebody else with a massive vendetta against me, like the feminist I held the door open for at the co-op, or that vegetarian guy I offered a block of horse liver to before I knew he was vegetarian, or that racist guy who I was telling that race was not a biological reality, only a social construct, but I'm reaping my revenge on Slurpy regardless. I made him a cup of tea with no sugar in, as I promised two blogs ago, and I've also realised he probably won't look at his passport again until he next travels, so I've done this (I had to photoshop his details out for security reasons, obviously):



Me, Slurps, Ewan and Gaz are going Amsterdam next month but I reckon after Slurps flashes his passport it might just be me, Ewan and Gaz.

We've finished shooting the video for our next single now. Here's a couple of pictures from while we were shooting:



Now I'm not normally a trendsetter but I reckon face scars are gonna be big this season. It's a strong look: