Tag: The Clash

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I Am The Resurrection to I Found A Way

A FORMER colleague took a risk this week with an article on signs with grammatical errors.

Focusing mainly on missing apostrophes – and ignoring the erroneous A in the name of my home village in a sign opposite the office – it really is poking the bear.

Readers do not need much excuse to point out errors or call an article’s news worthiness into question, so putting your head above your parapet and highlighting any grammatical faux pas is asking for criticism of any mistake, imagined or not.

Once received a letter listing 10 errors in an article (among many others, the writer explained). Had to resist the temptation to write back and explain he was wrong on all but one of them and could easily have made a longer list of errors from his letter.

Was not as slow pointing out errors – grammatical or factual – in my years as a sub, but then that was my job. Until a couple of weeks ago.

That job included stewardship of the office style guide – we did not have a physical one like the ones waved at me by subs as a young reporter, but a series of weekly emails running through common errors (how to refer to a councillor tops the list), spelling issues and settling debates.

Often two options are both right but the house style is to stick to one for the sake of consistency.

It may come as a surprise, but this blog has its own style guide, tucked away in a corner of my mind. Which has the advantage of being endlessly flexible so when the need arrives, the rules can be bent to suit the needs of the blog.

Which it really needs to be for this stretch of the A-Z journey through my iPod.

One of the simple rules is to avoid the first person wherever possible. It will come as a shock to a couple of ex-colleagues whose (lengthy) pieces were littered with I this, I that. Gave up counting in one opening paragraph when it reached double figures, all of which were subbed out.

Have broken that rule a couple of times in posts but they were personal tributes. It would have been odd to write them any other way.

And for the next few paragraphs, will have to break that rule again or this post will become impossible as it takes in the very long run of songs beginning with I (by far the most common opening word of this entire, expanding journey).

This section takes us from a second outing for The Stone Roses’ debut album finale to First Aid Kit.

There has been, seemingly inevitable at the moment, a fair amount of The Beatles with I Am The Walrus (twice) and I Feel Fine (three times) as well as, less inevitably, a blast of The Stones, although this was a rather different version of (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction – bereft of chorus – by Cat Power.

The Clash popped up once with I Fought The Law, but with two different versions by Joe Strummer, while there were welcome visits from the Arctic Monkeys ( I Bet You… can probably work that one out), Sun Kil Moon (I Can’t Live Without My Mother’s Love), Idlewild (I Don’t Have The Map), The House of Love (I Don’t Know Why I Love You) and Altered Images (I Could Be Happy).

There was (probably, it was a while ago, been a bit busy) screaming along to I Bleed by Pixies, who provided a very welcome soundtrack in session on the radio while cleaning my flat ahead of moving out. Very jealous of anyone seeing them in-store at Spillers in Cardiff.

As a believer in coyotes and time as an abstract, always great to hear I Believe by REM from Life’s Rich Pageant – probably edging ahead of long-time favourite Reckoning as my favourite REM album.

They have featured quite heavily as my musical intake has embraced the ability to raid the whole of Apple’s library since the decision was finally made about whether to upgrade my iPod for travelling.

The trusted Classic will add overlanding around South America to Africa on its list of places visited but this time merely as a back-up to a new Touch with instant access to a huge selection of music new and old (been adding a load of vintage stuff ahead of departure).

It is not perfect. Much prefer the wheel control than everything having to be touchscreen digital, the battery life seems shorter and it does not give updates on tracks in the collection – or exactly how many hundreds of I songs we have to wade through – but getting used to it.

And have plenty of time to do just that over the next 31 weeks as the A-Z journey goes into hibernation while travelling.

It became clear very quickly in Africa that keeping the A-Z going alongside blogging from on the road was too much to ask – I blog because I am travelling, not the other way round (to break the rules one more time).

The travel pieces (starting tomorrow from Heathrow. Probably) may well take a diversion into what is soundtracking the trip, but the A-Z is taking a few months off.

This time by design, not just because I have put it off. Again.

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The Great Big No to Gypsy Death & You

THERE is an odd phenomenon which happens some time before the clocks go forward each spring.

Quite when depends on how bleak the previous few months have been but around the point at which it becomes pretty easy to remember the rest of Gloucester’s fixture list, the end of the rugby season cannot come soon enough.

It has not always been like this, but when egg chasing on and off the pitch infiltrated the bulk of my working life, the end of the season increasingly became  a moment to savour.

It did not last long. Within weeks – often within days – we had replaced spending Saturday afternoons covering matches or producing pages based around that coverage with going to the pub to watch the summer Test matches over a few beers.

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And before you knew it, that gap on a Saturday afternoon needed filling (to say nothing of the sports page which don’t just vanish all summer) and the countdown was on until the first match.

Rugby – and sport in general – forms only part of the day job now. More of a watching brief than the heart of the role. Writing about it and designing pages about it has been replaced by watching it. As a fan.

The same still applies. By around March, the end of the season cannot come soon enough – not that you would have heard any complaints if Gloucester had managed to extend their season into the play-offs (two heavy defeats to end the league campaign made sure that didn’t happen, but we were seriously in the running until then which made a refreshing change).

It’s not the rugby. You wouldn’t find me anywhere else than in The Shed for any home game or in front of the TV for any televised away match. It’s just that you start to crave a weekend that doesn’t have to be planned around the game (and the getting there early to save a place in The Shed).

Was certainly desperate for the season to end as Gloucester, down to 14 men, were hanging on into the final couple of minutes of the European Challenge Cup final (our third in four years) against a Cardiff Blues team that really should have been buried before the break.

Season’s end came little more than 60 seconds too late, a last-ditch penalty bringing the kind of finale Gloucester fans have seen all too often in recent seasons. It’s got to the point where it is hard to accept we have hung on for the win until you’ve seen it on the TV highlights.

By the end of that night in Bilbao (the venue needs an explanation nearly as long as some of the journeys it took to get there), rugby could just go vanish.

For three days. Right up to the point when Gloucester signed Danny Cipriani.

Unlike the influx of South Africans (more may have arrived by the time you read this*) and Matt Banahan from Bath – akin to Liverpool signing Gary Neville in his playing days – this was not rumoured for weeks, debated and ranted about by the keyboard warriors who would find something to complain about if Gloucester went the whole season undefeated. There had been the odd whisper which over the course of a weekend became a roar.

Popular rantings on forums and social media over the past season included opposition to the renaming of The Shed (it is officially, shock horror, The Greene King Shed although you will not hear anyone call it that), one woman’s crusade against players not spending enough time thanking fans at away games, the selection of beers (much of it supplied by the same sponsors), unsuitable headwear and the club not announcing any new signings.

Whether there was any to announce or not and regardless of whether the player had signed or any agreement between his old and new club over a big reveal. Never mind any of that, somebody had mentioned it on the forum, why had the club not announced it?

Cipriani’s signing – by my reckoning, the biggest name since at least the capture of All Black lock Ian Jones the best part of 20 years ago – was met with almost universal support. Almost.

There were those fretting about his wages and those about what was going to happen to our existing outside-halves. Because clearly we are going to play the same 15 players in every game next season. And one of our No 10s didn’t really play inside centre for Wales in the autumn.

But the keyboard complainers did not have too long to wait. Little more than 24 hours later and they hit the mother load.

Word got out of an announcement – people were invited, people talk, however much the club try to keep it quiet – and the amount of times two plus two came to totals other than four was astonishing.

More signings (complete with mixed reviews, despite not knowing who they were) and a rebranding as Gloucester Lions were presented pretty much as fact. Opinion on Twitter, after all, is confirmation of the truth these days.

And that opinion, particularly about the rebrand, was not a welcoming one – no matter how many times the club denied it. Even after the event. You fear for the king of the jungle around these parts if we ever have a referendum to take back control from cats.

The truth barely caused the complainers to draw breath.

Yes there was a lion. In a new badge. On a new shirt. But no, we remain Gloucester Rugby. We Are Gloucester Rugby as the branding repeats.

Personally, like the shirt (first current one bought since about the time Ian Jones was playing for us) while really cannot get excited one way or another about the badge. Far more concerned about things that actually matter, like what’s happening on the pitch.

And the number of bobble hats in The Shed (probably the favourite issue all season which has become something of a running joke).

But the complaints rolled in. They hated the shirt, declaring it was destined to sit unloved in the club shop (early evidence suggests otherwise) if it was even in the shop before the season started (it was later that day), the lion on the logo had no connection with the club (bar the lions on the old crest and that of the city) and it looked just like Leicester Tigers.

Which, as more than one wag pointed out, suggests they would be easily confused at West Midlands Safari Park.

The shirt’s fine. Some are better than others, if you don’t like it wear an old one and we’ll have a new one soon enough. At least it’s not dayglo, highlighter pen yellow. Or blue, black and white.

The logo is OK, if you really care, and with my page designer head on is certainly more user-friendly than the old one. And no, however many forum gurus claim otherwise, we are not changing the name to Gloucester Lions. They are not going to spend all this money on a rebrand and then change the name.

All this means the need for a summer break is desperately needed. Not from the rugby (already looking forward to next season with more than the usual optimism), but from the serial complainers.

My favourite was the unknown guy who, walking home after a draw with Wasps, blamed the defeat on Ben Morgan – partly for missing tackle for one of their tries. After he had gone off.

He then criticised Ruan Ackermann for being granted a short mid-season rest.

How could a pro sportsman earning decent wages need a rest, he argued? Akin to the utterly ridiculous argument – seen countless times in the last few days – that Liverpool goalkeeper Loris Karius can take the mental anguish and quite shocking online abuse following his errors in the Champions League final, just because he earns a lot of money.

Having opted not to run into him repeatedly (there is, even mid weight loss, quite a lot of me) and arrange to do the same on a weekly basis to see at what point he needed a rest, pointed out the still young back-row forward had not missed a game up to that point and had not had a break after reaching the Super 14 final with the Lions in South Africa, my unhappy companion thought for a second and dismissed my observation.

“He didn’t play for the Lions,” he argued. “He couldn’t, he’s South African.”

As he stormed off ahead before my explanation there was more than one Lions, the woman with him turned to me, shrugged, considered an explanation but simply shrugged again, smiled and sloped off in his wake, resigned to a long night.

Gloucester’s season was not the only thing coming to an end. The G section of the A-Z of the iPod reached its conclusion, all 498 tracks from The Lemonheads to The Kills.

It was a relatively short sprint with some old favourites in The Lemonheads, The Clash (Guns of Brixton – twice – and Groovy Times),  REM (Green Grow The Rushes) and Half Man Half Biscuit (Gubba-Look-A-Likes) plus less frequent, but very welcome, visitors in I Am Kloot (Great Escape), Stornoway (The Great Procrastinator), Charlotte Hatherley (Grey Will Fade) and Drive-By Truckers (Guns of Umpqua).

And there was some classic country, two versions of Dwight Yoakam’s Guitars, Cadillacs… which always takes me back to a US road trip and a cover version in a bar during a memorable night in Austin, Texas.

You’ve got to do something when there’s no rugby.

* Two more have been announced between writing this and posting it.

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Come To Dust to Contort Yourself

IN comparison with the ground to be covered across the next nine months or so, the last week has not covered too much distance.

What’s a couple of trips to Bristol, one to Cardiff, a couple of nights out, more shopping (and spending) than you’d normally get me doing in many months compared to 39 weeks travelling overland around Africa?

And what is the relatively short sprint (albeit a considerable distance between musical styles) from Boards of Canada to James White and the Blacks in comparison to the inroads that trip will make into the A-Z rattle through my iPod?

But both musically and elsewhere, it has been a week of covering an awful lot of ground as two journeys – or, at least, sections of them – have neared their conclusion.

For the A-Z, we are entering the final stretch of the C section, almost to the point where D is looming into view and the desire to get through the final 100 or so tracks forms a type of “are we nearly there yet?” mentality – especially as number 2,000 heralds the entry into the home straight ahead of the new letter.

Away from the music, the journey has been through a success of daily to-do lists as the road to heading off to Africa has seen the miles clocked up at an alarming rate.

The final leg of that journey kicked off after leaving work and – once the effects of a later than planned finish to my leaving do had worn off – has seen a lot of jobs ahead of departure chalked off the lists where they have been sitting for some time, waiting for the short spell before the off when getting ready for it has become my full-time occupation.

Those preparations will be covered in more detail in another post (this one coming first purely by chance), but they have now reached the point where, if the call came through saying the trip had been moved forward a week, it would not be a major problem.

The Hold Steady
The Hold Steady

One last shopping trip in the morning for a final few essentials (socks, pants, toothbrush, you know the sort of thing) and all that is really left for the trip is to work out how to cram what currently covers my bed and the best part of two shelves in a cupboard into my newly-repaired rucksack and newly-delivered shoulder bag.

Packing out of the way (and the plan is to pair that with working out how to use my new GoPro camera, so look out for a video on how – or how not – to pack for an overland journey and, if in a charitable mood, you might also get to see my attempts to work out how to tie my new bandana) and the final few days before departure will be given off to packing up my flat.

All of which will be done to the soundtrack of my iPod as the race is on to get through those pesky Cs before leaving (the daily chunks of listening to them on the drive to and from work having to be replaced by other methods).

There’s also a chunk of newly-downloaded ABC tracks to catch up on after an afternoon spent getting my iTunes up to date with new albums, books and, courtesy of the vouchers which made up my leaving present, all five series of The Wire downloaded for re-watching on the road.

Weezer and Half Man Half Biscuit’s new albums will play a major role in that chunk, after The War On Drugs lead the way through the last batch of C songs, courtesy of four tracks starting with Come or Comin’.

But musically, this week has belonged to The Hold Steady.

They may have only cropped up once on this leg of the journey, with Constructive Summer, but they were responsible for one of those trips to Bristol to catch them at the Academy.

Not my favourite venue and, to be honest, the evening had started with a touch of “can we really bothered?” syndrome, but well worth the trip it was as they played a storming set mixing up new stuff with a healthy sprinkling of their back catalogue.

Where White Denim, also in Bristol, felt the need to add any number of flourishes to each track and stretch them almost to – and sometimes beyond – breaking point, The Hold Steady trimmed away any unnecessary flourishes and raced through tracks at a healthy clip, building as they went and heading off before outstaying their welcome.

They wrapped things up joined by support band The So So Glos – who were so-so – for a cover of American Music by The Violent Femmes, who popped up again on my iPod with Confessions, just as the second trip to Bristol (another spot of pre-journey shopping) merged into a sprint along the M4 to Wales to make a meeting with my account manager at the bank on time(ish). Thought it might be a good idea to go through some of the more bizarre transactions that lie ahead in the next nine months.

Elsewhere, The Beatles contributed three versions of Come Together – Primal Scream and Spiritualized chipping in with songs of the same name – while there were two versions of Elastica’s Connection, The Concept by Teenage Fanclub (from their excellent, fairly recently rediscovered Bandwagonesque album), Company In My Back by Wilco and Coming Home from Richard Hawley, someone who has never truly grabbed my attention but is making his mark whenever he appears on this trip.

Shack contributed Comedy, Pulp added Common People and regulars The Lemonheads (Confetti) and New Order (Confusion) popped up again.

As did Complete Control by The Clash, with which my brother in law kicks off his birthday each year.

There’s worse ways to mark getting older.

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A Charm, A Blade to Clint Eastwood

“You mean you forgot cranberry too?”

AND, with the words of The Waitresses’ Christmas Wrapping, the A-Z iPod blog returns from its Christmas break.

Yes, it is only October, but with alphabetical needs overtaking the constrains of the Gregorian calendar on this journey, Christmas popped up heading down some country lanes through Somerset on a glorious early autumn day.

It wasn’t quite Christmas In July (Sufjan Stevens’ offering to the festive selection box) and a lot of it was not even that festive – especially Christmas In Nevada from Willard Grant Conspiracy, which popped up twice and is welcome any time of the year – before The Waitresses wrapped it up with the first real jingle of bells.

That musical detour was excusable. After all, it is just following the rules laid down for the journey.

Far less excusable are the Christmas decorations which have already been hanging from our office ceiling for more than a week.

The view from my desk. In October
The view from my desk. In October

The reason, so we are told, is to inspire the advertising department as they start turning their minds towards sales for the festive period (even though most of them spend very little time in our office any more), but generally only serves to confirm the reputation of editorial as rather less full of Christmas cheer – at least until the seasonal drinks are broken open a lot nearer the actual date.

The decorations’ arrival prompted two responses from our section of the office – either tweeting pictures with exclamations of horror at the early onset of tinsel or digging around desk drawers for the lights and tinsel which were tucked away on Twelfth Night, if only to wrap around the screens of less enamoured colleagues the moment they stepped away.

It also prompted a revival of a long-standing argument with a colleague over the merits of The Waitresses’ festive evergreen – he hates it, while its mix of a good tune, Christmas cheer and healthy dose of cynicism puts it high on my (admittedly short) list of Yuletide favourites (alongside, rather obviously, Fairytale of New York, the more wilfully obscure I Want An Alien For Christmas by Fountains of Wayne and the more recent double entry from Smith And Burrows, When The Thames Froze and, particularly, This Ain’t New Jersey).

In years gone by, such an early onset of decorations, the seasonal aisles which have started to pop up in supermarkets, the first hints of Christmas adverts in the paper and, particularly heinous, the start of the X Factor, would have had me moaning as loud and long as anybody (it was more loud and brief this time round), but this year is not going to be a normal festive break.

For the first time in many years, my Christmas plans remain a mystery.

It will be somewhere in Africa. West Africa to be more precise. And the current provisional itinerary has us crossing from Sierra Leone to Cote d’Ivoire on Boxing Day, so a repeat of the last Oasis Overland Trans-Africa trip’s Christmas Day on the beach in Sierra Leone – complete with pig on a spit – is a possibility,

But anything involving that part of the world is subject to change at the moment.

Wherever we end up, it will be only my second Christmas spent away from the family – first at my parents and, for as long as memory serves now, at my sister’s with the brother-in-law on cooking duties.

The last one was, probably, 1987 when Christmas lunch was eaten in an Austrian mountain restaurant on a school ski trip.

Schruns, Austria. Not that we could see that far.
Schruns, Austria. Not that we could see that far.

December 25 was the only day on the entire trip when the sun came out and we could actually see where we were going – the reduced vision at one point leading to a group of us taking a wrong turn, heading off piste and facing a bit of a drop off the garage roof we were somehow standing on.

Visibility was bad, but not bad enough to mask how big a drop it was.

Skiing trips followed the Christmas breaks for many years – mainly because the first week of the new year is genuinely cheaper – which meant two festive traditions.

Firstly, Boxing Day meant a swift return to work to compile the day’s sporting news and results and free up time off over new year, while, less welcome, the big day provided a signal for my back to go into spasm.

Twice it went while sat at the table for Christmas dinner and left me barely able to get up. It was not, as my sister would probably claim, a way of avoiding the washing up. It bloody hurt and, despite being much better at handling the warning signs, still does when it goes again.

So regular was the Christmas backache and the ensuing rush to get me back on my feet for skiing, my osteopath rang in advance one year to suggest booking an appointment for the day they returned to work. It was needed.

The other annual preparation for a skiing trip was the compilation of some C90 mix tapes, which almost certainly included some of the tracks in the lengthy latest section which carried us from Phosphorescent to Gorillaz.

The Clash London Calling Tower Theater Show 3/6/1980Leading the way in this latest batch of songs were The Clash, who popped up with four different tracks – Cheat, City of the Dead, Clampdown (twice) and Clash City Rockers – while Sufjan Stevens appeared again with the classic Chicago and The Hold Steady (next on the live gig list later this month) surfaced with two versions of Chips Ahoy!

There was two outings as well for Christine by House of Love, a band which never really won me over totally, despite what my companion on many of those skiing trips thought of them. The same can be said about The Smashing Pumpkins and several friends. They contributed Cherub Rock (the Smashing Pumpkins, not my friends).

And there were returns from frequent visitors The Wedding Present (Cherez Richku Cherez Hai), Billy Bragg (Cindy of a Thousand Lives, among others), Arcade Fire (City With No Children) and Echo and the Bunnymen with the epic Clay.

Seasick Steve gave us Chiggers, a cautionary tale of dealing with little bitey creatures.

Let’s hope that’s not one that comes to mind too often come Christmas…

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Ballad of Helenkeller and Rip Van Winkle to Basic Space

And all the grown-ups will say: “But why are the kids crying?” And the kids will say: “Haven’t you heard? Rik is dead! The People’s Poet is dead!”

JOURNALISTS have a strange relationship to death. Do not believe all you read, we are not all heartless monsters who simply don’t care, but the reaction to news of people dying could often come as a bit of a shock to outsiders.

Timing plays a big part – as does just how desperate we are for a front page splash.

Can’t remember too many cheers when news of a death broke (certainly not to rival the ones which greeted the news of Piers Morgan being sacked at the Mirror, but we were in the pub so there was some liquid amplification), yet there has definitely been  a few clenched fists of triumph and strangled cries of “YES” as the search for a big story comes to an end.

That sounds terrible and in nearly quarter of a century in this job – albeit largely watching on from the safe distance of the sports desk or a step removed on subs – dealing with delicate situations and grieving relatives has (almost) always been handled with the utmost sensitivity.

But when news, as it often does with celebrity deaths, breaks close to deadlines, practicalities take over with the job of presenting the story to the best of our ability in a very short time.

My first experience of this came when news of then Labour leader John Smith collapsing at his home broke perilously close to morning deadline (back in the good old days when evening newspapers were put to bed on the day they hit the news stands).

Hurriedly, as we dug around for scant information, two front pages were created – one of which would never see the light of day and one of which could well be totally out of date before it even reached the printers. Time for reflection or sorrow had to wait until after that edition had gone (the sad final news arriving just before deadline).

News of both the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret broke moments after the South Wales Echo’s Saturday night sports edition – the Pink – had headed off to the printers, although we managed to stop the presses (the only time I have managed to shout that in action down the phone) long enough to at least get them on the front of some copies.

Time was not much of a factor as a young reporter on New Year’s Day 1995.

Nursing a hangover having just wandered in during the afternoon to wrap up the holiday sporting action, there were only a couple of us kicking around the Gloucester Citizen office when a photographer wandered over to the sports desk (the duty reporter was out) and suggested putting Ceefax on (that ages this tale).

The top story was simple: “Fred West Found Dead In His Cell”.

Any hopes of a quiet afternoon were instantly dispelled as the phone burst into life. Over the course of a few hours, my role started as the sole source of contact to chasing down reporters across the country, digging through the archives and, eventually, the one who gets sent out to look for food.

Most celebrity deaths are not that dramatic, but at least a couple of them produced a common newsroom response – silence, followed by journalists working out from their colleagues’ reactions as to who had the recently deceased in the office’s version of a Fantasy Death League.

Once common in newsrooms, Cardiff’s version was known as the Coffin Club and involved picking a 11-strong line-up governed by strict criteria, complete with a mid-year transfer window – whoever picks the most celebrities who die over a year scoops the pool.

The black humour involved fits in well with journalism and you did not want to be in my team in one of two winning years when a record seven of my picks shuffled off this mortal coil – the winnings paying for one of the predecessors of the iPod we are currently working our way through.

In all those years, however, a few deaths have prompted a stunned silence and not prompted much in the way of joking for a while (one eventually sparked a lot of joking, but it took a little while to recover from the news).

The first was John Peel, which rocked a newsroom largely populated by blokes of a certain age, while the other came this week with the news of Rik Mayall’s premature demise.

Mayall was, as much as Marr, Morrissey, McCulloch or any number of jingly-jangly indie guitar bands, a huge part of my teenage years.

Twelve years old when The Young Ones first aired, it was instantly the talk of the school – trouble was, it just wasn’t on in my house. My mum had heard about this show and there was no way we were going to watch it.

Until, several weeks into the run, she was out for the night, my Dad was upstairs working and there was nothing else on my elder sister wanted to watch. The TV choice was mine and what it showed was something which had me wide eyed with astonishment.

Party remains one of the finest episodes and although half of the gags went straight over my head, it was unmissable from that point in. He was ours, something our parents just did not get. Yes, there was a lot of nob and fart gags, but it was performed with such energy and refreshing vitality.

Eventually, worn down by a succession of Rik impressions – complete with snorts – and endless quoting, my mum caved in and eventually sat down to watch an episode. Disgusted as she was – remember her being appalled by Vyvyan eating a dead rat – she was also enamoured by this electric presence and, for years to come , “Hands Up Who Likes Me” could reduce her to giggles.

It now looks bit dated at times, but can still happily sit down and rewatch old episodes of The Young Ones when they pop up, just as the music which soundtracked that time (roughly as mainstream chart stuff was being shunted aside for more alternative fare) still crops up encouragingly often.

The latest run through my iPod – from The Moldy Peaches to The XX  – features a few from roughly that era. Four versions of Bankrobber (one by The Clash, two live from Joe Strummer and a cover by someone called Hawksley Workman), Barbarism Begins At Home by The Smiths and three versions of The Band Played Waltzing Matilda by The Pogues (who also managed to upset my mum).

The journey from Ballads… saw John Murry’s lovely Ballad of The Pajama Kid pop up twice either side of another track due to two different spellings (Pyjama), while we careered through a great little bar crawl – Barefoot by The Cadbury Sisters, Barfruit Blues by The Hold Steady, Barney (…And Me) by The Boo Radleys, Barstow by Jay Farrar (who saw live the night before England won the Rugby World Cup, meaning it is all a bit hazy) and Bartering Lines by Ryan Adams.

It all would have added up to a glorious run of tracks if it was not soundtracking both Mayall’s death and Hereford United being kicked out of the Conference into… well, who knows at what low level they resurface in some shape or form

Not a good few days.

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