Grabbing onto memories

A long time ago, what seems like many lifetimes ago there was a club in Rhyl. It was the only place that didn't play the usual chart tunes and bland antiseptic dance music. The carpets were sticky and the beer was quite frankly horrible but the people and the music made it fabulous. It was friendly in a town where friendly didn't count for anything.

The legends around the doorman were that he'd been one of Ali's sparring partners when he come over to the UK for one fight or another. He was certainly old enough but he was built solid and had a shock of white hair, mustaches and a pipe firmly and continuously clamped between his teeth. He very rarely said anything but it was always worth listening when he did. It always amused me this dichotomy of this gentleman in full black tie and dinner jacket surround by scruffy grunge kids moping around the dance floor.

What The Bistro, for that was its name, represented to me was something more than a club, it was the environment where I thought I fitted. Everyone in there was a misfit of one sort or another so I felt right at home. I'd been to dance clubs before but I rapidly found I had nothing in common with most of the people in there, who were there to get drunk, get dancing and get laid or any combination of those three. I've always been a bit strange but that didn't sound like a good time to me and if I was going to have to listen to obscenely loud music I felt it should at least be something I'd like to hear at home.

The bistro played rock grunge, indie, alternative basically anything that you wouldn't hear at a regular club, I remember they had to ban 'smell like teen spirit' because the moshing ** was making the chandelier below swing precariously.

(** moshing:- jumping up and down and into each other with careless abandon trying not to fall over. Surprisingly fun. murder on the ankles though!)

In a way every indie club I went to after that was a echo of The Bistro be it London, Liverpool or Atlanta, that smell of sticky carpets and indie kids always gave me a certain thrill.

And it closed sometime after I left for parts unknown and there was no where for any of us to be anymore.

Theres a reunion planned and I'm in two mind whether to go or not. One part of me wants to drink foul lager and bounce around like a fool for an evening like I used to. The other half of me wants to let the memories stay as they are. We'll have to see when the night comes if I'm still a teenager at heart or pessimistic old sod.

Boston Park.

There's a park in the middle of Harvard University which is surrounded on all sides by coffee shops and book sellers. The park itself has benches and a layer of cigarette butts so deep in places walking through the fag ends and discarded filters is like wading through tar soaked snow. I don't think they've been collected since the time John Adams was there. I swear I saw a little clay pipe at the bottom of one pile.

We stopped for a coffee and a sit down having walked through most of upper Boston on our way here.

In the park under a tree was a guy who couldn't have been more than twenty, on his own, singing and playing guitar. Normally buskers will play something instantly recognisable and catchy to get peoples attention. I think that's why they're so reviled, they only play what they think you'd like to hear so they play the most inoffensive dreck and by not offending anyone they usually alienate everyone.

I didn't identify this tune at first but it wasn't unpleasant, so I sat, sipping my coffee, listening to his strumming. It was only after I got past his strong Bostonian accent that I realised what he was singing this beautiful song that he had written about how painful his breakup with a particular girl was. He was singing a personal song about how he himself felt. I could see him pause occasionally and take a small stub of pencil and mark up a legal pad he had next to him.

I don't think it would have mattered if there had been ten people in that park or a thousand. He wasn't there to entertain others. He would still have been singing that song on his own in an attic if he had to. Because he HAD to sing it. Because it was the only way he could process the emotions he was dealing with. And that what I love about good art. Good artists will do what they do not for the pleasure of others or for praise, adoration and cash but because if they had no fans, no crowds, no public, they'd still be doing it anyway.

Somehow I don't think Damien Hirst or Tracy Emin would still be artists if they'd had no success. They'd be turning out copies of quaint Landscapes so fast it would make your head spin.

Real art is passion. Real art is a gnawing desperate need to vent these feelings by singing, writing, painting, or whatever before those very emotions burn you out from the inside.

andy is happy

my wife is very talented