CURSED (sort of culture)

At the 2015 Brits, after the same old same old run out of pop acts and British indie noisemakers, the lights went up (not very far up ,but up) on a stage filled with what looked like a hundred men in black tracksuits. Two flame throwers blasted up front, and Kanye West started on ‘All Day’. The eagle-eyed might have noticed the cream of British Grime in the front of the pack - Skepta, Stormzy, Novelist, and Krept and Konan among others. To paraphrase Wiley, this was a party that UK Grime had never been invited to, and Kanye kicked the door down.

One of the reasons, okay the only reason, for keeping distant elderly relatives on Facebook is that they occasionally link you to some dusty old internet relics which are good value. Once such ancient tome arrived on my timeline today, get a load of this gem - 50 Ways To Be A Romantic Man.

Like a blind date where a handsome man shows up and asks where you stand on spousal battery, this starts off looking like a good idea but then goes rapidly downhill. The whole list is gold, but I have picked my favourites.

What do you do when you’re getting UK beer fatigue? You know, when your mate tells you about this ‘amazing new bar’ and it’s the new Brewdog and you’ve tried everything on the menu, or when you go to a beer festival and you get IPA blindness and would give your drinking arm for anything darker than pineapple juice. Well you just leave the country, obviously.

Flights and hotels are still nice and cheap going to Warsaw and it’s perfectly compact as a capital city – you can walk from the centre to the historic Old Town in about twenty minutes and you’ll have seen a good chunk of what the city has to offer. In terms of beer they have some cracking pubs and bars where you can get a well priced drink and avoid the temptation to just neck a Carling because you’re away from home and you miss Eastenders and rain.

I was recently in Warsaw for four days and managed to squeeze in a lot of sightseeing and a great many nice beers – here’s some to get you started on your own trip.

PiwPaw (pronounced Piv Pav) – Zurawia 32-34

About 15 taps of absolute class. PiwPaw is probably smaller than your living room so get there before six pm even on a week night if you want to guarantee yourself a seat. It’s just behind the Novotel so it’s easy to navigate to even if you’ve just that moment arrived in the centre of Warsaw. This is the perfect place if you’re with someone who’s a bit picky about what they drink because they literally will have everything – I had a pint of Robinson’s Trooper which was on draught so no-one will get homesick drinking in here. Aside from the taps there are three massive fridges filled with all types of bottled beer.

There’s a queuing system so make sure you’re not jumping in front of someone by standing at the bar. Also they only have one toilet so there’s a long queue for that. And the pricing is about what you would pay over here, obviously a bit less for the domestic beers. But none of this should stop you as PiwPaw really is the premier beer drinkers’ venue in Warsaw.

 Café Blah Blah - Nowogrodzka 22

Just a block away from Piw Paw is Café Blah Blah where they have eight taps on as well as fully stocked fridges. The menu was quite IPA heavy when I went but there were still some nice surprises such as Goldi Basset Extra Special Bitter which I had about eight of. The interior is what I imagine Polish hipsters are into – there’s a table and chairs in an alcove half way up the wall, which is quite cruelly frustrating when there’s standing room only. Again, only one toilet, I don’t what it is about toilet rationing in Poland but if you’ve got IBS you might want to stay at home.

Café Blah Blah also sells food and has space to sit at the bar as well as a mezzanine so it always looks too full but usually isn’t.

 Bar Warsaw (Dive version) – opposite Miodowa 3

In the historic Old Town of Warsaw is a large place called Bar Warsaw de Luxe which serves slightly odd but very satisfying Polish tapas such as giant potato dumplings filled with mince. It’s very attractive and has outdoor seating where you can look out on the square in the midday sun. Now when you see this place, walk on by. Keep going. Around the corner  and opposite the Irish pub you will see another smaller Bar Warsaw which is infinitely more cute and memorable and you should go there instead. It looks tiny but it has an upstairs area, which is also tiny, but it’s got a massive mural which is halfway between 1950s Paris and Soviet Realism. There are vinyl records stuck to the walls and a lot of dusty couches and there is table service. A half litre bottle of Ciechan was the equivalent of £1.50 and they had a small selection on draught as well as quite a few bottles.

 Cool Cellar Bar which I wish I knew the name of – Old Town Marketplace

In the Old Town Marketplace is a cellar bar which advertises itself with just an A-board outside. The door remains closed, but if the board is there, go in and sample what it was like in the Cavern or any number of underground smoky sixties venues. In Poland you can smoke in bars if they feel like letting you, so if you really want to subject yourself to such a thing even for nostalgia’s sake this bar has got you covered. There are weird witch puppets hanging from the rafters and they serve from a tiny corner bar which has one pump – Warka – and a fridge about the size of yours at home. Still it’s a quirky little place, the barman is very friendly, and for some reason they put on Polish national costumes at some point to drum up business.

 The British Bulldog Pub - Aleje Jerozolimskie 42

Now hear me out on this one, I can imagine you sitting there rolling your eyes and picturing me with my union jack shorts on, loudly asking for ‘ein beerski’ and calling all the barmen Jerzy because that’s the only Polish name they know,, but the British Bulldog has an excellent beer selection and is very big so if you have a large party, some of whom may be having culture shock because there’s no kebab house around, then this is a nice halfway house.

On the pumps, aside from Bishops Finger and Guinness, are Grimbergen Blond, Dubbel and Tripel, or the Holy Trinity as I like to call them. The food is also very good here and there’s an old red phone box to play in if you get really homesick.

It's the anniversary of my mum's death so I thought I would compile all the quotes I tweeted from her without her knowing. 

If there’s one thing I can’t be arsed with now I’m in my thirties it’s gig reviewing. When I was 16 I used to pester the Runcorn Weekly News on an almost daily basis to publish my reviews of shit Britpop outliers like Ocean Colour Scene or the Sneaker Pimps but now I really can’t be bothered to remember playlists and scribble down lyrics on the back of a ticket to never before heard songs which the band fails to namecheck. My phone used to be full of notes saying things like “fast, guitar-y, something about snow?” which I would never be able to identify at a later date.

So I had a great idea - read some other people’s reviews, and then agree or disagree, like a review of reviews. That way I make minimum effort and still get to have attention from people. It’s what I’ve been searching for all my life.

In the pub beforehand I was discussing with my Cribs forum pal Lizzy the number of Cribs shows we had each seen. She was up to 34, I had lost count because I’m functionally innumerate but I thought it was about 25. We met in the Font, a studenty place with real ales and a menu which tries to be jocular. We were surrounded by students and were kicked off our table because the Debating Society had booked it. I contemplated delaying our expulsion by positing that a paper sign held little power in a world where indigenous populations were being supplanted on an almost daily basis, but it was half eight and we wanted to beat the rush.

When we arrived The Ordinary Boys were playing the support slot. Now I find this hilarious because once upon a time the ‘proper music papers’ were lining up to call them the next Oasis and their faux-ska shitehawking was inexplicably popular. Then Preston went on Celebrity Big Brother and the rest is pisstory. Anyway, like that Uncle who visits from Australia, you’re sort of pleased to see them because it’s been a long time then you remember they’re annoying and slightly thick.

The Manchester Evening News comments on how many young people were in attendance and I have to agree the crowd’s median age is about the same as it was ten years ago. These 18 year olds are finding the Cribs from somewhere and I’m not sure where. There was a big surge in numbers after the release of The New Fellas, possibly related to the slightly laddy lyrics and the hooks. That lot are still there - you can see them slyly punching each other during Mirror Kissers or Hey Scenesters, the two songs that send me scurrying to safety if I’m on the floor. Those two tracks inspire a pavlovian response in me, GET OUT! GET TO HIGH GROUND! A LARGE MAN IS ABOUT TO JUMP ON YOUR HEAD!

Over at the Partridge-esque ‘Mancunian Matters’ their piece asserts “it’s noticeable that the venue is packed out with old-school Cribs fans, dressed in band T-shirts, who are there to relive their student days and Red Stripe fuelled nights at 42’s.” For those outside Manchester, 42s is 42nd Street, a totally shit student venue where they do indeed sell cans of Red Stripe for about £3, which is the opposite of a bargain. Now back in my day, the late 1840s, you didn’t wear your band tshirt to see the actual band who were playing, you wore a different band tshirt, to show that you knew more than one band. I actually almost (accidentally) wore a One Direction shirt to this gig but I realised just in time. However the upside is that every now and then you will be rocking your black and white Zayn portrait shirt and someone at the same unlikely place (punk gig, beer festival, anywhere you have to be over 16 to enter) will see it and jump up and down with glee, and then you can be friends and have a conversation about which has better album tracks, Up All Night or Take Me Home. (Up All Night, obvs, I mean ‘I Want’? Forget about it). Anyway I suppose it’s the equivalent of wearing your away shirt to a home game, you’re trying to show off.

Let’s go to The Guardian where they say “The Jarman brothers messily assault their punkish indie oeuvre with a rush that feels positively Proustian in its recall of the mid-noughties when guitars still owned British pop.” Positively Proustian! Next album title, lads? What he means is, it reminds you of something. Just say that - it reminds you of when guitars still owned British pop, which I don’t like, it’s a sniffy attitude by the sort of person who might say “I like all music except dance and rap”. Guitars haven’t ‘owned’ British pop since about 1965 in my opinion, and certainly the mid-noughties were no musical Shangri-La. This was the year that Joss Stone won the BRIT award for Best Urban Act. Just read that sentence to yourself one more time and despair. In 2004 you have to get to the 19th best selling pop single of the year before you find a guitar band and that was Busted.

Anyway, they don’t sound the mid-noughties, they sound like The Cribs, and there wasn’t anything quite like them in 2003 when I first heard album track ‘Things You Should Be Knowing’ on a promo CD and zinged them straight onto the A list of the radio station I was running. (Ask me in the pub). They were clearly playing for themselves, not trying to fit in to what was already out there, which was good because all that was out there was the Twitching Corpse of Radiohead, The Coral and ...Lostprophets.

Bold Street has gone to shit hasn’t it? It used to be the drinker’s first choice for independent bars with unpronounceable foreign beers and narky staff with interesting facial hair who will tell you that Gluggensteiner is the shit in Berlin this winter so that will be five pounds please. Now though, Bold Street is finished and Off Bold Street is the place to be. You idiot. Nobody goes to Bold Street anymore. You can’t sit with us, get lost.

Colquitt St and environs is probably best known for wandering vagrants and Alma de Cuba, but its newest resident is Brewdog, the latest in a chain of pubs opened by the independent Scottish brewery who prides itself on brewing quality ales with funny names and eye-watering prices.

The place was packed last night for it’s opening, but luckily Liverpool is one of the bigger Brewdogs. Alongside the standard brand fixtures - for example the big old blackboard showing you how beer is brewed that you will definitely read properly one day - Liverpool has been given something of a seafaring theme, with a giant neon anchor on the wall and on the uniforms, and a load of grizzled old sea captains propping up the bar. If you’ve wandered down Colquitt Street and felt a little intimidated by the big glass fronted behemoth, (beer-moth?) I have compiled a list of facts which will ease you into the Brewdog brand.

  Beards must be worn by all male customers, and this may put the less hirsute gentleman off. However the bar issues a limited number of ‘Beard Passes’ per evening for the clean shaven, and there is a bin full of false beards which you can borrow for the duration of your visit.

  The bar staff are all former models and  this can be distracting when you’re trying to pick one of the forty plus beers on offer. There you’ll be, weighing up the relative merits of a black lager over a standard porter, when the barman will flutter his sizeable eyelashes and suddenly you’re thinking of rainbows and sunsets and you’ve missed your turn at the bar.

  You need to have a working knowledge of craft beers to order properly, because even though they will give you a free sample of any beer you like, you still have to react to it, and you don’t want to look like a tit. Here is a quick guide to blagging to Jimmy Handsome, the dreamy barman.

  Beer is yellowy colour  - “Quite hoppy isn’t it?”

Beer is browny colour - “Not that hoppy is it?”

Beer is black - “Would you call that a porter?”

  The beers are between 2.3% and whiskey. Some of them are so strong that they will only serve them to you in a ⅔ pint glass, so don’t go looking a biff by saying “Eh pal, I don’t want a bird’s glass, what are you tryina say eh? Sayin’ I’m gay? Well I’ve never had feelings about a man that way before but you really are quite attractive so maybe we could have a drink and see where it goes?”

  The ‘ironic’ stuff is there so we don’t all feel like alcoholics, so just go with it. Don’t tut at the Connect 4 on the tables or the bearded teenagers playing cards, just be glad that the beer is so expensive that no beauts can come in and skit you for playing a child’s game with other grown men.

  Brewdog is a bit like the Queen Vic in that brands don’t exist there. It’s a sort of tied house so you can’t have a coke, because that’s too corporate and obvious. You can have a Professor Wiffle’s Olde Tyme Cola in a glass bottle and like it. Don’t be confused by some of the names of the beers, that’s not the line-up for All Tomorrow’s Parties you’re seeing on the wall, that’s the beer list. If in doubt just string three random words together and ask for that. I once asked for a pint of Tortoise Rake Syndicate and ended up with a refreshing saison.

I've now been playing this game for a few months, I'm an A Lister in the top 150 and Willow Pape is still a giant pain in my arse. Here's what I have learned so far from one of the most successful mobile games of the year.

You can’t have an off day when your job is to be famous

Every game has consequences for inaction. In Animal Crossing you get weeds growing in your village and a duck might shout at you, which is not very realistic. However, in KK : Hollywood, if you slack off and don’t tap the screen enough during a photo shoot or an appearance, you don’t get your coveted blue stars, and you get a low rating for that event. Who cares right? Well actually, you do, because if you don’t get more than two stars then the gossip magazines tweet that you were a waste of space. They might even use the word ‘meh’ to describe your work, and no-one wants that. Translated to real life, you can see how not being at your best might cause some gossip mongers, fans, and even fellow celebrities to point out on twitter what an absolute disgrace you are.

Being Kim Kardashian is exhausting

The last time I complained out loud to this game was last week when I had a swimsuit photo shoot in Punta Mita, Mexico and then had to fly back to Hollywood for a meeting with my manager, only to be told that I need to go back to Punta Mita for a guest appearance. And this wasn’t even reality. Kim Kardashian actually has to do stuff like this. She has to fly from LA to Paris, then London the same night, then to Mexico the following morning, then LA again. And if she ever looks like shit at the airport, or like me at the airport, she gets slagged off in the papers. Luckily, on the game a flight from LA to London is only $60, so it takes a bit of the sting out.

Having a boyfriend is a pain in the arse

You can have a boyfriend or a girlfriend in the game, and you can flip between boys and girls without even having to change any settings, it’s all good to Kim. The problem is, once you’ve got a boyfriend, he nags you every single day to go out, even though you’ve got about five jobs to do and you have that psycho Willow Pape following you about claiming you poison pigeons or some shit. Then you finally cave in and go on a date and he insults your outfit unless you go and spend thousands of dollars on something ‘romantic’ (i.e. it has a little heart next to it in the shop). If you do that you have to buy another expensive outfit when you do a real job, because you don’t need romantic outfits for that, you need ‘star’ outfits, and round and round we go. Did I mention that if you refuse to go on one single date with him, he dumps you unless you pay him your coveted K stars. And all the male characters look like either Justin Bieber during his Amsterdam phase or an e-fit of a date rapist. Anyway, I ditched my boyfriend and now I’m rich, so there’s a lesson for you.

Everyone in the entertainment and fashion industry is a psychopath

The Brindley in Runcorn is one of those odd little local arts centres which can’t really help but have an eclectic mix of events. I’ve done a photography class there, been to a beer festival there, seen The Handsome Family and a local singing group’s annual concert - at one time I was one of their only trained film projectionists, but ask me about that in the pub.

I saw Andy Fairweather Low at the Brindley last year and went away feeling like more people of my generation should know him. I may well have been the youngest person there at 33, but this year I wasn’t because I spotted a local musician called Matt who has a great mane of blonde curls like a lion, and he’s about 23. So that’s it, just me and Matt, flying the flag for the under fifties.

AFL (he has this on his amps and I spent about an hour trying to work out what it stood for, Audio...Flux...Line?) has a three piece band -  a drummer, a bass player, and a sax player. The sax player had both a tenor and an alto sax but we got there three numbers in and we never saw the tenor. A lesson for you there - get in early, don’t sit in Wetherspoons having just one more pint because ‘no-one actually goes on at 7.30pm’. The band look like a jovial bunch of pals all having a bit of a laugh. Andy will think nothing of stopping them a few bars in, saying “I think we can do a bit better than that” like a kindly primary school music teacher.

As well as the Amen Corner’s number one ‘If Paradise Is Half As Nice’ with which he closes the show, AFL manages to get through five decades of blues and rock songs in the show, which actually had an interval. ‘Natural Sinner’ and ‘Wide Eyed and Legless’ are his other big hits, both went to number 6 in the UK chart, but the crowd seemed just as happy hearing  old album tracks, covers and whatever else the band had to offer. Low peppers his sets with little anecdotes about big names such as Eric Clapton and Pete Townsend. He’s an affable chap still making money from being a musician and he seems delighted about that. Afterwards in the bar he happily signed CDs, chatted and took photos with people, his manager taking the money for the CDs and probably driving the van like in the old days. Andy Fairweather Low has played all over the world, but you get the distinct impression that he’s just as happy in Runcorn as he is at the Royal Albert Hall.

And that’s nice, isn’t it?

L-R My dad, Andy Fairweather Low, his manager

On Saturday I went to the annual Indyman Beer Con, a place for independent breweries to showcase their ales. I went because a friend invited me, and we’d been there before. I bought my ticket a good few months ago for £13 and it was the most I have ever spent on a ticket to a beer festival, but then the venue is the endearing Victoria Baths, a listed Edwardian swimming pool and turkish baths which is is not in use except for weddings and events like this. The festival was fun, if a bit pricey and a bit..well, I’m going to use the word and hang the consequences - hipstery. A few days later I saw a post on the excellent BeerCast asking a very direct question : is Indyman elitist? (There is also an actual review of the beers I drank, it’s the last paragraph, marked with an asterisk, if you want to skip the whinging).

  Let me develop my point on the hipster aspect of the festival - I had no idea that Indyman was actual something that you were meant to be proud to attend, that it held something of a social cachet. It never occurred to me because my friend always buys the tickets so I don’t see the apparent mad scramble to purchase. I don’t read beer blogs so I’ve never seen people complain about not getting in. It doesn’t really matter to me whether I get to go or not, to be quite honest. I like seeing my drinking buddy, and Indyman has become our thing to go to, but we could just as easily go to the Liverpool Winter Beer Festival, which I went to last year. There’s a beer festival in the crypt of the Catholic cathedral in Liverpool too, but I can never be bothered to go because it’s hard to get tickets. The scarcity effect has no pull for me.

  Apparently people are bothered about getting to go to Indyman, and that, in my opinion, is what makes it elitist. Because a lot more people could go if they just moved the venue to some big empty hall. The tickets would be cheaper, for one thing. But the venue is part of the identity of the festival. It’s knowing, it’s ironic, it’s vintage, it’s shabby chic. The music on off on the Saturday night was by PLANK! who describe themselves as “an electronically expressive sound borne out of a respect to the likes of 70s Krautrock pioneers Neu!, Cluster and Harmonia, alongside more wilfully expansive rock and mind bending electronics.” Almost Famous were shilling their burgers alongside Chaart Cart who claim to make ‘peasant food’ although they were charging a bit more than peasant prices for it, and the Great North Pie Co., whose pies are so special they cost £6. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure this is top notch food, I couldn’t afford it so I didn’t have any.

  For those who’ve never been to a beer festival before, they usually consist of a big room with casks, kegs, and wooden serving tables all around the perimeter. Sometimes there’s some chips or a sausage roll on offer. Indyman has a large hall, plus two actual swimming pools, thankfully drained, a Turkish baths, and a series of small ante rooms. Then there’s the outside patio where indie beer behemoths Brewdog had parked their huge neon lit truck from which they were pumping drum n bass alongside IPAs. It takes the phrase beer ‘festival’ literally, and looks more like something you might find in a far corner at Glastonbury than your run of the mill beards-and-bitters convention.

  I can see exactly what Indyman are trying to do - there is no other beer festival quite like this one - but I do think the time is right for another group to offer a cheaper alternative. The £13 entrance fee for Saturday is twice that of the other big hitter, the CAMRA organised Manchester Beer and Cider Festival, and that’s before you pay for the drink tokens which enable you to actually try the beer. Seeing as they sell out every year it’s not really Indyman’s responsibility to address any complaints of elitism, they are, after all, running a business. But should someone else decide to come along and make a cut price version of their successful model, we could get another beer festival out of it, and that can never be a bad thing.

  *The Actual Beers (or most of them, I was a bit drunk)

Calico Jack Rum BA - I was forced into drinking this as they couldn’t get the Blackcurrant Sour to pour properly, so its possible merits were tinged with disappointment.

Black Perle - a fairly standard porter. Nothing to see here.

The Earl Phantom - a collaboration between Beavertown and IMBC which was absolutely bloody gorgeous. You know that bit on Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory where he plucks a lemon coloured cup and saucer from a tree in the tasting room and drinks it before eating the cup? I imagine this is what that would taste like - lemon drops and bergamot.

Random Magic Rock stout - a lot of the listed beers were off so we tried this one. Good job it only cost one token because it was awful and went straight into a nettle bush outside.

Siren Rainbow Stout - nice fruity porter that tasted like an old, fermented mince pie.

Madamin - cost us 5 tokens (at one pound per token) for 1/3rd. So this was a £15 a pint beer. Good job it was rich and spicy, though we couldn’t afford one each and had to share it.

My dad forgot that Tony Benn was dead. He texted me a few weeks ago saying ‘get tickets to this’, so I did. Then last week he said “I can’t believe we get to see Tony Benn in person’. “Dad, “ says I, “he died a few months ago. That’s why the film is called Will and Testament.” He was disappointed but hey ho, he was still excited to come and see the film, which is  a fawning biography. A fawnography.

Not that that’s a bad thing, Tony Benn’s had his share of smear campaigns. It’s actually refreshing to watch what is basically a filmed autobiography. We don’t put down the seminal “”May I Have Your Attention Please” by James Cordon and say “Well he never mentioned what a twat he was to Sir Patrick Stewart at the BAFTAs.” Actually, he may have done, I never finished it.

The venue for the screening was the Concert Room in St George’s Hall, which is a half circular exercise in showing off, full of marble statues, gilding, frescas and all sorts of frippery. It looks like Elton John’s bathroom. As lovely as it is to look at, it wasn’t really suitable for the screening of a film. For one the speakers were too small and were angled towards the front row, so we on the balcony could barely hear anything. I think I probably heard about 60% of the dialogue as the sound quality was so poor. There was a Q and A afterwards but the entire balcony left - if we couldn’t hear the film, we weren’t going to be able to hear the director either. Maybe it was a ruse so we’d all buy the DVD.

The film is beautifully shot, with a lot of dreamy studio spaces filmed with giant props and huge hanging photographs. as if you’re actually wandering around Benn’s memory. There’s plenty of archive footage to be going on with but the best bits are just Benn himself sitting in a chair smoking a pipe and being self-deprecating. There’s not a great deal of objectivity but why would you want that? Objectivity in films like this is wasted, and usually extraneous. If you like Tony Benn you’ll enjoy this film, if you hated him, you’ll hate it. There would some interest for politicos and students who were born in the 1990s, it’s a pretty good document about the basics of the miner’s strike and Thatcher’s Britain, and at 90 minutes it’s not too taxing.