This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

The gig in Sowerby Bridge was in an old pub – 1751 – in a low ceilinged room with dark furniture and Yorkshiremen.  Hoggart wrote that there is an overemphasis on the working classes.  We at once have a strong admiration for their potential and therefore feel pity when they don’t manifest it.  But we, the working classes, are just like every other class: mediocre.  Exceptional people, as Baldwin liked to tell us, are, well, exceptional – ‘white people often seem to expect Negroes to produce nothing but exceptions, the fact is that Negroes are really just like everybody else.  Some of them are exceptional and most of them are not.’  Replace white people with the middle classes and Negroes with Yorkshireman and you have England. So pity can transmogrify – easily, in my experience – into heartbreak.  I am never more at home than I am in Yorkshire.

To acknowledge your suffering is to invite mockery.  There’s vast quantities of both in the heartland.  The electric wit – ‘he’s got his fuckin’ Songs of Praise jumper on’ – is a side-effect of this.  We give up who we are in exchange for membership to the group.  At the same time, the people in the room that night for Signe and Peter have, at least momentarily, rejected the mainstream and demanded something more diverse than Corrie vs. EastEnders.  They want a rich life.  The Full Catastrophe.

The gig moved forward.  It was, uncharacteristically, riddled with errors.  This served only to endear the artists to the crowd.  (To show vulnerability is to create a contract of coercion, to give these bastards bullets to fire; or, put differently, is the beginning of trust – Yorkshire people like this for it is us (human) and them (perfect)).  The crowd demanded an encore.  We got picked up by an old Indian man in a minivan.  He played – I don’t really know for sure – a sort of Bollywood CD.  It wailed.  I howled with it doing my best imitation of Shiva.  The Dobson Shiva.  We couldn’t stop laughing.  We drank all the Whiskey.  I tried to sleep.  Steph was like a crazed Orangutan.  The night fizzled out with an drunken argument about Labyrinth and its soundtrack, which the girls have played everyday in the car – ‘dance magic dance, jump magic jump’.  Bell’s whiskey had obliterated all superegos.  Control was gone.  The three amigos ruled.

The next morning I awoke.  To my right was the empty bottle.  It’s back was facing me.  It said, ‘Enjoy Bell’s Responsibly’.  I remember thinking, ‘it depends on your definition of responsible’.

The morning reestablished some sort of normality.  We all looked rough.  I got the guys to pose for one last photograph.  It ended where it began.  With Yorkshire in shot, with all her potential, and pity, and all her heartbreak.  They are Steph Guy, Mark Coleman, Signe Tollefsen and Peter Schuyff.  I am Jamie Dobson.  Good luck, and goodbye.

ON THE ROAD

AN ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

BY

JAMIE DOBSON

CHARACTERS:

MARK COLEMAN
COLD, MOODY, WITH A GINGER BEARD AND BUSINESS-LIKE.  MARK IS IN HIS LATE 20S, WAS BORN IN PRESTON, NORTH ENGLAND, GRADUATED IN MATHEMATICS BEFORE GETTING CAUGHT IN A JOB SO BAD THEY HAD TO PAY HIM VAST AMOUNTS OF MONEY TO DO IT.  IN A QUARTER-LIFE CRISIS HE QUITS JOBS AND DECIDES TO SEEK HIS FORTUNE OUT AS A MANAGER AND RECORD PRODUCER. OVERCOMPENSATES HOMOSEXUAL FEARS BY WOMANISING.

STEPH GUY
DARK HAIRED.  LATE 20S.  PRECOCIOUS CHILD.  MAJORED IN DRAMA AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER.  MUM WON THE POOLS.  DAD LIVES IN CARAVAN.  TASTED FAME EARLY IN BRITISH SOPA OPERAS AS A STREET CROOK AND HIPPY.  WEARS ONLY ANIMAL PRINTS AND PITCH BLACK.  IS IN LOVE WITH DAVID BOWIE, CIRCA LABYRINTH.

SIGNE TOLLEFSEN
BORN IN HOLLAND BEFORE MOVING TO ENGLAND IN HER TEENAGE YEARS.  LATE 20S.  CLASSICALLY TRAINED SINGER.  MAJORED IN PHILOSOPHY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF HULL.  LOVER OF SCHUYFF.  SMOKES A VAPORISER.  IS RESPONSIBLE AND SERIOUS HAVING BEEN RAISED IN THE TRADITIONS OF BATAVIA.   DRIVES THE TOUR BUS.

PETER SCHUYFF
EARLY 50S.  ARTIST.  THICK MUSTACHE AND STUBBLE.  TALL AND SLENDER LIKE A MERCENARY IN A WESTERN MOVIE WHO KILLS SOMEONE’S BROTHER IN A COLD HEARTED MANNER.  LIVED IN THE CHELSEA HOTEL FOR SEVENTEEN YEARS.  SWAPPED ALL HIS ANDY WARHOL PAINTINGS TO FUEL HIS HEROIN ADDICTION.  RAISED IN VANCOUVER.  DUTCH MOTHER.  LOVER OF TOLLEFSEN.  MARRIED TWO OR THREE TIMES.  HE THINKS.

JAMIE DOBSON
EARLY 30S.  LUDICROUSLY HANDSOME.  CHARMING.  HINTS OF SOCIOPATHY HIDDEN BY OVERDEVELOPED SENSE OF HUMOUR AND ESTEEM.  EMBEDDED WRITER ON THE TOUR.  BORN AND RAISED IN HULL, EAST YORKSHIRE.  LIVES LIFE ACCORDING TO THE LITERARY MANTRA: ALL WRITERS ARE CUNTS.

PLOT:
THREE MUSICIANS AND THEIR MANAGER, WITH A WRITER TAGGING ALONG, TRAVEL THE LENGTH AND BREADTH OF THE UNITED KINGDOM PROMOTING THEIR NEWEST ALBUMS.

EACH PROTAGONIST IS A HAS-BEEN.  HAS BEEN A CHILD.  HAS BEEN A LOVER.  HAS BEEN FAMOUS.  HAS BEEN INTOXICATED.  THE FILM, THEN, STARTS THE MIDDLE.  IN THE MIDDLE OF CAREERS.  THE MIDDLE OF LIVES.  THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD.  AS SOME CHAPTERS END OTHERS BEGIN.  THIS IS A STORY OF BEGINNINGS.

THE STORY, THEN, FLASHES BACK AND FLASHES FORWARD.  THE LANDSCAPE IS A REFLECTION OF THE DARK LYRICS OF THE ARTISTS, AND SO THE UNITED KINGDOM AND THE JOURNEY ACROSS IT IS AN ALLEGORY FOR THE WHAT THEY ARE DOING AND WHAT THEY ARE TRYING TO ACHIEVE.

EXAMPLE FADE IN:
OUTSIDE A BAR IN EDINBURGH.  IT’S FREEZING COLD.  ALL FIVE ARE SMOKING CIGARETTES.  THEY STOMP THEIR FEET TO KEEP WARM.  A HIPPY LOOKING BAG-LADY IS TALKING TO ANOTHER WOMAN.

DOBSON
Peter, don’t move.

SCHUYFF
(Looking up from his cigarette and speaking in his American drawl)
What?

DOBSON
Don’t make any eye contact.  Look straight ahead.

SCHUYFF
Are you fucking serious, man?

DOBSON
I am.  The gingers are everywhere.  They are in it the with the Catholics.  The last thing some people see in these parts are Mel Gibson leading a pack of gingers to the Klingon war cry, ‘Uraaagh!  Qapla’.

(Everyone laughs.  A man walks by with his dog.)

GUY
(In a North Western accent.)
Eh, look at him, he’s fit him.

TOLLEFSEN
(American English accent)
He is cute.

DOBSON
Do you know what’s under that flat cap?

(Everyone mumbles)
What?  No?

DOBSON
A big fucking ginger affro.

COLEMAN
What’s she doing?  (The lady has come over and grabbed Steph)

BAG-LADY
Am no a lesbian, but if a was, I-ad foak you!

(Everyone smiles or laughs.)

TOLLEFSEN
You are not a lesbian?

BAG-LADY
Na, a love coak, hard and fast, right in ma erse!  (She spins around and points to her backside while looking over her shoulder at Tollefsen.)

DOBSON
(To Tollefsen)
That Dark Side of the Moon is rubbish.  Like Faulkner.  (Peter’s ears prick up).

TOLLEFSEN
The Wall is for uneducated arseholes.

SCHUYFF
Oh, man, you’re not still going on about Faulkner.

DOBSON
I am just saying, you fucking lot like stuff because culture tells you too.  As I Lay Dying was rubbish.

COLEMAN
The problem, Dobson, is that you’re a cock.

GUY
You are a cock.
(The bag lady is back.)

BAG-LADY
(To Coleman)
I’ve felt her tits but av no seen you coak.

COLEMAN
Indeed.

FADE OUT
CAMERA SWEEPS UPWARDS LEAVING TRAILS OF SMOKE AND CIGARETTE DOTS IN THE EVENING EYE.

8th of November, 2010, 14:02, Glasgow.
They say that during the siege of Stalingrad, the heavy ones died first. Or, as Peter put it, ‘the smack-heads were the last to drop’. In the armies, only the horses were fed by weight. Last night, at the gig, I fell asleep on a chair. My body temperature plummeted. Peter and Steph reveled in my weakness. They took photographs of me.

My thirst for sleep was met with a two-seater couch and a Scottish draft from the window. A sheet was better than nothing. But, only just. Mark was in a worse position: on the floor. Steph said last night, ‘this tour is less rock and roll then my fucking granny; it’s all laptops and bad food’. I suspect many tours are not rock and roll, or, most people’s understanding of rock and roll is wrong.

Last night the TomTom took us down a street that dead-ended – no lights, trees blocking the view to the main road, a walk-way coming out next to a stone wall – but, hark the herald angles sing, between the stone wall and end terrace was an alley, which snaked. Didn’t snake. Zig-zagged. Mildly zig-zagged as if it were designed for a marble to travel along. We rounded the last corner and came out into the back of a shopping street adorned with warmth, fairy lights, and Tudoresque black-and-white bricks and beams.

The move from dark to lightness, from what was not seen to what wanted to be seen, needed to be seen, to what only manifested when seen, served to speed time up. Transitions do this. We were like waiters leaving the kitchen for the floor. Like a lecturer entering the auditorium. Like a child stepping into the light. The street was in every sense a toy. An abstraction. A face put on. An officer. A racing car. The shops were ‘Ketchup’, an exclusive burger bar; a cinema, whose lettering was old fashioned; the ‘Wee Curry House’; ‘Wodka Vodka’. The street was narrow, the alley the syringe to this needle. The ceiling was fairy lights, structured like the alleys of Seville, whose ceilings are canvasses to keep the sun off the shoppers’ heads. There was no danger in the street, only couples in scarfs, cobbles on the streets, and lights arranged to entice, to seduce, and create a sense of warmth. It was medieval.

Our bar was the first one on the right. It was medieval and small and thin and therefore reminded us of Holland. The guys flew into autonomous activities: sound check, merch stand, posters, flyers on seats, little black dresses, cigarettes, food. You kill time until you can’t kill it anymore. Time you can’t kill is game time. If playing rugby, or writing, or building software, or following musicians has taught me anything, it’s that wait time is preparation time for game time. How you spend the former is obvious in the latter.

*

Earlier in the week, day 1, I spoke about art being society’s superego. Art is a way to bring attention to the things the self needs to know. I also spoke of tics and neuroses and said they modulate the ego, too. This theme came up at breakfast, again, this morning.

In this morning’s newspaper, in an article entitled ‘Children need parenting classes to break cycle of poverty – Field’, it was reported that ‘The theme of [Frank] Field’s review is “how to prevent poor children becoming poorer”’. His final recommendation is that poverty should not be fought on financial grounds – duh! – but on teaching children how to parent in order for the cycle of poverty of thought to be broken. Hold that thought.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759), starts:

I Wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what they were then doing;-that not only the production of a rational Being was concern’d in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;-and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:- Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,-I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.

Hold that thought.

In 1914 Freud, in ‘On Narcissism’, wrote that an individual’s impulses – for sex, for food, to mother their children – could be be repressed if they came into conflict with the individual’s cultural and ethical ideas. He said,

The  same impressions, experiences, impulses and desires that one man  indulges or at least works over consciously will be rejected with the utmost indignation by another, or even stifled before they enter  consciousness.

I think that most parents – mothers and fathers – have a natural urge to look after their child. I think, if they could, they would not go back to work. Yet, this is repressed because of its conflict with society’s wider demands. Anyone, however, who lets someone else raise their children and claims to be against poverty is 1) a liar; 2) thick as pig shit; 3) deluded to the point of pure repression. Without a shadow of a doubt, society is effected by the last point. Field went onto say,

I think it is more difficult to parent now than it was. The pressures on you are greater. It is expected that people, mothers, should work, and rather quickly after birth, even if they are on their own. Postwar housing developments have split up communities. You are bombarded with demands from television about the things that children should have. It puts a much greater pressure on parents. To add to that you may not have had a good role model yourself.

*

We started this story in the middle – in media res.  We are now at a point where the only way to move forward is to move backwards.  Wait time is preparation time for game time. How you spend the former is obvious in the latter.

We programmed the TomTom to take us north to a castle. It wasn’t a castle. A tree line dominated our peripheral vision on one side, the deep autumn leaves dyed the water’s reflection the colour of tannin. The castle was a house with plastered walls. A number of fenced areas surrounded the apartment as if they were meant for different vegetables. They were ruined, now. A weather-dyed Jamaican flag hung off a tree, to the right, a trellis was adorned with the skeleton of letters that were used in a funeral cortège; ‘Dad’ hung above ‘Stig’. Wind came through the trees, gravel crunched underneath, the light was – has been all week – low, and so, with the deep tannin leaves around us, had a feel of sepia. The feel of a Serge Leone movie, especially since the house and its outbuildings could be connected with beams suitable for a lynching. Suitable for a dead animal’s entrails to be shown off. Nooks and crannies defined the place and so when Steph said it felt like a gun was trained on us, we all knew what she meant. It was silent, a sound people from the city are not used to. Silence hisses. Since we’d broken in, that’s to say climbed over the fence, we had a feeling we weren’t welcome. This bizarre collaboration of fence, brick and plaster offered us no reasons to change our mind. We left, and, once we rounded the track, which had led us the 300 metres up to the house, we made jokes. ‘The house owner had got himself on TomTom as a castle so he could murder tourists’. ‘The owner is coming! With a shot gun. And he’s wearing a goat!’ [Queue Mel Gibson on South Park impression, ‘uraaaagh! uraaagh! raaaaaagh!’]

The rest of the journey took us through rolling autumnal hills and trickling streams. It was dead. Cars passed. We phased in an out of concentration. The adrenaline had, I think, started to pump. Then, we entered a haze of darkness and concrete and the signs told us that was Glasgow. Out the window, a red-haired lady with a mini-skirt and thick tights on, passed us by. She was well built, thunder (and lighting in her) thighs. ‘She’d snap your fucking neck, Peter,’ I said, ‘like a chicken bone… Crack! The last thing you’d see is a ginger pube’.

And so that brings us up to date. Peter went first to the toilet to change into his outfit, all black and big cowboy boots. Steph second, but not fully changing, only sorting her hair and make-up out and getting into her cowboy boots. She’ll slip into the little black dress later. Signe is still in her boots, a tutu looking hippy skirt, her layers and a fur coat. She’ll be the last to change. They are not nervous. It’s not worth it. They’ll get their game heads on at the last minute. Steph is sat next to me. Everyone else is emailing, which is what they do when they have been disconnected for a few hours. To me, this feels like a compulsion. Looks like what smokers do when they get off a long haul flight. And as quickly as this administrative zeal has started, it is rejected and finished and no longer attractive. The itch will rise and be scratched later. This is how I know it’s 2010.

Cool, she says, when she’s finished. I am looking the most tired of us all. Peter is not far behind. The girls and Mark are fine. ‘You’re not helping’, Signe says, when Mark interferes with her and Vanessa harmonising. Peter is rocking and smiling now. Steph is going for something higher than level 27. Everyone is laughing, or smiling, Vanessa says to Mark, ‘take it away’! Peter says, ‘not too far there, Chico’! Mark is an amateur, doing his best, but is now being called a pedestrian bastard. Everytime he fucks up they all laugh. Peter says, ‘that’s cool, that’s hot, man’.

Peter is back with his harmonica and guitar and a tumbler of whisky. This shit just got real.

We have an extra day in Edinburgh today and will be moving onto Glasgow today or tomorrow, depending on the sleeping arrangements.  The gig will be tomorrow night.  I am really looking forward to it, looking forward to a mad crowd, which I am sure Glasgow can provide.

Yesterday I awoke at 13:00, which for me is very late, after having about 13 hours sleep.  I felt bad for the rest of them because they were on the floor of another apartment and it was freezing, and the cushions were not right.  We met up for a drink down in the Grassmarket, an oblong street with pubs, hotels, and beggars on each side.  At the end was a vintage clothes store the girls wanted to visit.  Peter and I followed.  Steph tried on a half black, half red, beret.  Her hair is black, too.  (She likes black and white and animal prints and that’s all she wears.  Her and Signe both wear fur coats.  Steph’s is black.).  I said, ‘you just need a white fleck in your hair and you’ll look like Cruella de Vil, you’ll be rocking’.
    ‘All I need is a traumatic experience.’
    ‘Just wait until Peter sees another empty room.’

Peter and I walked back to their apartment via an off-license.  One litre of whiskey and one can of coke.  The very posh sounding Scottish man said, ‘that’s not foa mixing?’  The cheek.  We bought a thirteen pound bottle of whiskey and this silly four-eyes fucking cardigan wearing babushka wants to take the moral high-ground over a mixer.  Not that I’ve got a problem with people who wear glasses, by the way, I’ve just got a problem with people who wear them at the end of their nose and look over them at me.  I lived in Edinburgh for a year and have come back on numerous occasions. I have never really figured out where these people come from.  The best I can come up with is this: the New Zealand Maori and their white pig countrymen are both tribal, both conformist to their own rules.  This was brought to my attention in King’s History of New Zealand.  Now, this doesn’t make me anything other than a bloke whose read a book, but he made an interesting point: the nature of two, at some point rival groups, is alignment.  You may not start off being a proud Pakeha, maybe you are just a bloke from Hull on a ship to make your fortune, but, in the face of these strange people with tattoos on their faces you feel you have to align with anyone who looks like you.  So, under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t speak to any cunt from east Hull, yet, only last week I found myself with a load of KR fans in a pub in Amsterdam watching the derby.  In the face of foreigners it’s natural to ‘band together’.  (This is why Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese students all hang together at our western universities.  Similarity lies in the shadow of difference.)  Any-hooooooo, I reckon that all Scots were once upon a time the same.  Then the English came with their wide-screen TVs and red-wine.  The gentry, or the wannabe gentry, aligned with English while the rest, the Sick Boys and the Rentons and my uncle Charlie, utterly rejected this.  The fallout was what we see now: two distinct groups of people in Edinburgh: the wankers and the rest.  To me, that is, was, and always will be the problem with Edinburgh.  ‘Is that for mixing?’  Yeah, I should of said, but not with the likes of you.

Luckily, Edinburgh revealed itself further to us as the day went on.  We went to a pub called the Ye Old Golf Tavern where we ate terrible food but it was served with chips, pale ale, and there was some Rugby Union on in the background.  Adrian and Vicki – my friend whose house I am staying at and his girlfriend – came out, too.  They became our guides.  They took us first to a pub around the corner with an open fire and drunk people.  Peter ordered a Bud for Signe.  When the landlord said that he didn’t sell Bud, Peter said, ‘my girlfriend just had one’, the landlord said, ‘not from here she didnae’ and that was our first bit of trouble of the night.  Peter lamented his stupidity but, frankly, that’s an easy mistake to make.  Luckily the landlord never saw the bottle of Whiskey Peter had in Steph’s hand bag – ‘four fucking pounds a shot’, he said with that nasally, drawling, American voice he has.

Steph and I went out for a cigarette.  A lady was there.  Ex-heroin addict, two children, their dad’s a gypsy, they are not together any more, she speaks gypsy and Dutch.  Dutch, sure, I thought, ‘hoe gaat het met je dan?’  ‘Jaaaaaa!  Goed hoor,’ she replied.  Unbelievable.  Her hair was lank, as if it thought she was still a smack head and it was redirecting nutrition to her vital organs.  Her eyes were too close together and she was massively short sighted, a fact betrayed by the beady pinpricks her glasses created.  She had baggy clothes on and looked like an old hippy.  She was speaking to a rather stunned – but not retracting – young lady saying things like, ‘if I were a lesbiaaan, a’d foak yooo in an instance’.  We walked right out into this.  Steph, not wanting to feel left out, said, ‘what about me?’  The lady then nuzzled Steph’s breasts, put her hand in her bra, and when she came up for air her glasses were steamed up like the boiler room of a steam ship.  She declared, ‘Ahm no a fuckin lesbian!  I love coak’ – she jumped a full 180 degrees, pointed at her bottom, at her anus actually, and looked over her shoulder to Steph and I – ‘I love coak, hard and fast… right up ma erse!’  She then tried to persuade me to get my ‘coak’ out.

We moved onto a pub called the Royal Oak.  This is a yellow, police cell, type of place.  It looks like pubs did when we were kids.  Adrian and I have been there a few times.  Old ugly men, one of them chronically overweight and diabetic and addicted to nicotine and with a big bushy beard, sit around singing songs.  He was a fat fat man and not a big fat man; he could not be strong man; he was an overweight skinny man and so he laboured under his own weight.  Some young men, caught up, I think, in music that will age them prematurely, hung out drinking and waiting their turn. They sing haunting shanties.  Then they switch to songs in the mode of, ‘when ma lassie was young, and she was ugly, and I thought, “for me, that’s no bad”’.  I recognised, ‘That Lucky Old Sun’: ‘Fuss with my woman, toil for my kids/Sweat till I’m wrinkled and gray/While that lucky old sun got nothin’ to do/But roll around heaven all day’.  We were all right at home drinking shit beer: Adrian, Signe; a shit rum and flat coke: me; whiskey from his own bottle: Peter.  It was only a matter of time before Peter had the guitar and did ‘Fatherland’ with the girls chiming in on the chorus.  Signe then did a song about smoke rings; she blew them away.  Just as she started, Peter said to Steph, he eats his words at times like this because the giggle is on the way out, ‘I get to go to bed with that every night’.  They burst out laughing and I thought it was a serious moment and shushed them.  A man with a fiddle, lank, dyed blond hair, and a mouth full of teeth shaped like a chimpanzee, joined in with Signe’s number.  He later did a couple of songs with a hard faced, wide-boy sort of chap with a pirate’s earring and flat-cap on.  He had the air of a sociopath about him, an air of self-pity, and maybe his song choice gave him away: it wasn’t me.  The Scottish, folky, no doubt the original version of Shaggy’s song.  (‘When I pished on the counter; it wasnae me.’)

This morning the shower gel was cold. The houses here are cold. The average life expectancy of Scottish men is 23. Holland seems tropical. We miss it.

The 9-5 is therefore both comforting and confining. (As is school, and prison, and the relationship a toddler has to its parents.) All temporal structures are a substitute for the teat. To reject this is to reject the boundaries of risks and rewards, to step out from a self-imposed prison. Kant said that, the ‘Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another’.

I am reminded of Baldwin’s letter to his nephew, where he said, ‘The very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon shook and my chains fell off’.

The chains are man’s self-imposed limitations. They are what artists kick off and in doing so take all the risks and therefore receive all the rewards and rejections.  If they are smart, they learn to treat both those imposters with equal levels of contempt.

At the same time, then, the un-mothered child risks narcissism, the strange belief that he or she is not subject to the laws of man; premature success lends itself to this form of insanity. The artist, then, deals with humility, self-obsession, tics, neuroses, and risks losing himself like the babies tested on Mount Olympus.

*

The gig last night was subject to the worse kind of organisational failure. The venue thought the tour manager was promoting the gig. The tour manager thought the venue was promoting it. Both imposters must be treated the same.

I picked up a bottle of whisky for Peter. I picked up some cigarettes for Steph. We mulled about as the small crowd assembled. We pushed the chairs forward and ordered drinks. Later than scheduled, Peter took the stage and announced that things would be different tonight, that they would be doing a more intimate set. Success lies not in understanding, but finding the resolve and the courage to function without the guidance of another.

Peter and Signe broke the show into four parts. Peter – I haven’t asked him yet – seemed to relax, seemed to be released from the constraints of a larger audience – and spoke more. Introduced more. Engaged like I’ve never seen. The very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon shook and my chains fell off.

The guys exploded onto this tour, leaving Preston and Leeds in wanting, slowed down in Hull and completely phase shifted in Edinburgh, which was, I suppose, meant to be a highlight of the tour. I can’t know how this lot are feeling. They look OK. The jokes are still coming, we are all still scrounging sleep and vitamins at every available moment. The paradox of the artist is this: everything is in their hands; nothing is in their hands. The rejection of routine is a reminder of this. The artist, in turn, reminds the rest of us.

This day started last night, at three o’clock in the morning. It seems, even at this early stage in the tour, that touring is about recovering and catching naps and calories at every free moment. I can’t say I like it too much. My muscles ache, I have that tiredness that comes from adrenaline. I’d give anything for a bed now, as would Peter and Signe and Steph. Instead, we’ve got six pillows on the floor (Peter and Signe), an armchair (me) and a couch (Steph). All of this, of course, is offset by the excitement and fun and things people say (‘that’s Newcastle that, Steph. What do you mean, “how do I know?”, because I can smell the soap-dodging Geordie cunts, that’s how I know’.)

We woke at three and left at four to get Mark to the airport. (He has to attend a funeral today.) We got across to Leeds and – I can’t believe she’s going to get more smoke up her arse – Signe managed the car, Dutch-hand drive, really well. We found a petrol station, a local cafe and a MacDonald’s. We went local, agreeing that, despite the Egg McMuffin being the best thing those cunts offer, it was better to support a smaller business. We were served by an overweight man who looked like a sack of potatoes in a scraggy white school shirt and black pants – it was good to see the cafe’s staff dress policy working. His head looked like it was stuck on with blu-tack and he moped about charging us for four famous fives when we actually ordered: ‘two famous fives, a bacon sandwich and a magnificent seven for me, mate, two teas and two coffees’ and make it fucking snappy, Igor, before I jump over that counter and put your fucking head in the deep-fat-fryer. Around the cafe – it was large, as if three high-street cafes had been stuck together – were signs for wi-fi. Steph asked, ‘is your wi-fi on?’
    ‘Don’t you just turn your computer on and it sorts itself out?’
    ‘There’s no signal.’
    ‘Oh, well, I don’t know, I am computer illiterate.’ People like this man speak how I imagine Down’s Syndrome Italians would speak. They reek of self-pity and powerlessness. I think of Scott’s Weapons of the Weak with his foot dragging (and I know he means it as a metaphor but around here it’s real). As I type this I am asking the guys questions, as they nod in and out of sleep, and Peter has to run to the toilet to vomit for the second time in a few minutes. ‘Stop talking about that fucking breakfast.’

The rest of the journey was mainly uneventful. I told Peter that ginger people have sided with the Jews in a bid to take over the world and that, in Scotland, the gingers are allowed to roam free and may attack at any moment. Up near Coldstream, a temporary traffic light was set up and I said, ‘the check point! Peter, sit up, it’s the border. If they look you in the eye, just look forward’. I could see fear in his eyes, he looked over Steph’s head to the lights. The gingers, I said, would not take mercy and, if they had their William Wallace makeup on, we’d be fucked. Stone cold dead. I also warned him that some Scots would appear to be normal but, like Roald Dahl’s witches, would be wearing wigs and heavy foundation. ‘There’s freckles under there,’ I warned him, ‘if you scrub hard enough’.

Once we got to the house we were staying at, we dropped the bags, popped across the Meadows – Sick Boy and Renton shot the dog there, in the movie – and went into a Mash Cafe (Monster Mash) for my third or fourth kilo of potatoes in as many days. After the drive, and that garbage we got served for breakfast, a pyramid of potatoes, neeps and haggis has never looked so appealing. It lasted five minutes.

On the way home, Signe and Steph ran off into a charity shop and shouted, ‘we’ll catch you up’. Of course, they didn’t, and of course, they have the key. Peter was only mildly annoyed and cursed the air, ‘what an arsehole thing to do’. That got shortened to, ‘what an arsehole’. The poor lad is sick and tired, I can’t say I blame him. And, in fairness, he got under the blanket and never said a word to the girls. I told him to get his feet in. I feel for him, and in the bitter, and utterly sunless, back drop of this stone-cold, dark-stoned, fried Mars bar eating dollop of heather – Peter: ‘why the fuck would anyone build a fucking city here? What the fuck?’ Renton: ‘Scotland’s shite, we’re the fucking lowest of the low, the scum of the fucking Earth. I don’t hate the English, they’re just wankers’ – all one ever really wants to do is get under the blanket.

Our plan now is simple. 1) sleep. They all already are asleep. 2) go to the gig. 3) drink, sleep, stop mindlessly hating on Scotland because our blood sugars are low. (It seems, by the way, that Peter is doing most of the hating, the girls want to shop, and I am happy to keep doing Renton, ‘Moan the fuck, Peter’). 4) go to the art gallery. 5) watch ‘Jackass 3-D’ at the Dominion (the UK’s only privately owned cinema). And 6) eat a fried Mars bar with a can of Irn-Bru.

I pray that the gig has more than ten people, the turnout in Hull was woeful, otherwise this journey up was for nought save my racist and gingerphobic jokes. At 80 pound for petrol, and 50 odd for food, that’s about 40 quid a joke.

We had fish and Chips last night but Peter opened his up and changed his mind. Mark and Steph had curry. She mugged Nick Tilsley in Coronation Street and was a hippy in Heartbeat. Peter was a Hasidic Jew in Once Upon a Time In America. Signe, Mark and I have no such claims to fame. I’d been in Anlaby Police Cells, once.

Steph is drinking coffee with me, she’s having a moan about the cats that live here. Peter is trying to get a gallery in Seattle to return his paintings. Mark and Signe are in the kitchen. It’s 4:03 and they told me we were leaving at 4. I’ve been up an hour. We had better be leaving on time.

I am looking forward to seeing my mate Adrian tonight. I am going to put him on the guest list. I’ve also just finished Glue and Trainspotting and so have got my Edinburgh accent down. Fried Mars bars, here we come.