19
Egyptian Hip Hop
Fleece, Bristol
5th March 2013
I have just overheard my dad tell a story on the phone to his old friend. I have never heard this particular story before. It is not a big story, it is an anecdote. A surname that jogged something in my dad and forced him to revisit a rather strange situation.
My dad was in a pub as he occasionally is and he was having a drink as he occasionally does. All was as you would expect, apart from the fact that a man had come up behind my dad and slowly lifted my dad’s coat from the back of his seat. The man then walked slowly away clutching my dad’s coat to his chest and proceeded to leave through the door.
I imagine, although he did not say so, that my dad blinked his eyes heavily in confusion. He eventually got to his feet and followed the man outside. He then watched in disbelief as the man put the coat on and started off into the night. What followed was a bizarre stand-off. My dad was dumb-founded - just why would this strange man so blatantly remove a coat that wasn’t his and put it on. It’s the Wiltshire pub equivalent of being in prison and the head of a white supremacist gang piercing your last potato with his fork. You know what’s happened, he knows what’s happened, you can see that it’s happened, he knows that you can see that it’s happened. The situation screams, “Now what?”
Well, after a few moments, my dad finally managed to speak and, whilst keeping a safe distance, asked for his coat back. The man simply said, “You ain’t going to call the police, are ya?
“I just want my coat back,” my dad replied. I should point out at this point that my dad was in his sixties and not six. There were a few awkward moments, a few stretched silences until eventually the man handed my dad his coat back and walked off.
Later that night, the same man managed to make off with a sheepskin jacket from another pub.
Later still, three weeks later, the man barricaded himself in his home in a village with three shotguns and several machetes. There was a stand-off with the police. “A right bloody brain case,” my dad concludes. I can sense his friend nodding solemnly at the other end of the telephone. A right bloody brain case.
Jagwar Ma - The Throw
Sydney duo Jagwar Ma bring a kaleidoscopic churning of colour to the Madchester sound on new single The Throw. Here’s my write up for Gold Flake Paint .
High School Lover is a paean to missed amorous opportunities and a love letter to the carefree days of youth. It’ll brighten up your day, and might just, like me, make you wish you went to High School.
Cayucas - High School Lover
Words and video for Gold Flake Paint
From Polish photographer Marcin Ryczek comes this, as Colossal aptly puts it, “once-in-a-lifetime photograph of a man feeding swans and ducks from a snowy river bank in Krakow.”
The Angel in Purton is a proper boozer. Located in deepest darkest Wiltshire, it is a local pub for local people. The smell of stale smoke permeates, there is a dartboard, a pool table, golfing trophies arranged proudly on a shelf, a framed Renoiresque painting of a cherubic girl hanging on the wall and several tables scratched with keys and coins in decades-worth of conversational lulls. An old dog, disdainful of attention, mopes her way between feet, not having the energy or inclination to sniff. The Angel only closes when the last drop is drunk: in its confines, blokes are free to sink pints into the double-figures and beyond, with steely determination. It is a place where blue jokes are swapped, where football is analysed, where effing and jeffing, slurs and slaps, laughs and laments are shared. It is not, however, the kind of place where a band called Babies Vs Rabies should be performing a show of experimental rock music.
Babies vs Rabies at the Angel, Purton. Full review published in Spindle Magazine
