Jamie Dobson

Tuesday, 2 November 2010, 14:39
The room I am in is lit by eight lights each with two fluorescent strips. My mate Andy told me that the light sabre battles in Star Wars were fought using them and that they’d have to cut, sweep up, and start again for every new strike. A Turkish couple have just been sat opposite me. No tickets (or papers). They are holding me because of an apparent irregularity in my passport and this is not good because Harry ‘the Dog’ Dobson has set off to pick me up and he won’t be happy – I mean, less happy; he’s never happy – if I don’t turn up. He’ll take it personally, which, in Hull, is the only way to take anything.

The Adelphi club is on De Grey street. It connects Newland Avenue to Beverley road. It was a house, Victorian, maybe, once upon a time, but is now a music club. The other houses are split into flats and occupied by students or people who qualify for housing benefit. When I was growing up I had heard about the Apelphi but never got the chance to see it until I was older. It was, along with Spiders, a thing of legend. Tonight the Woodwards (Peter Schuyff) and Signe Tollefsen are playing there. They are currently touring the country and I thought I would drop in on them, starting in my home town, and follow them around. I was asked last night, ‘are you a groupie’? I am not a groupie but something much worse. I am a writer, and in the capacity of this tour I am a writer of the most divisive kind. I am a journalist, an embedded journalist no less, like the ones they send to Afghanistan or Iraq.

Signe is a red-haired and slender yet powerful looking young woman. She wants to ‘make her own fucking music’. This is a reaction to the classical training she received. And so, at once, she appears to be driven by a desire for her music to be known and for a shot at self expression. I made a mistake when I met her and Peter last week of assuming that they were touring this time as the Woodwards with Signe Tollefsen. ‘It’s the Woodwards and Signe Tollefsen’, she corrected me, sucking on a plastic vaporiser which, that night, was her substitute for a cigarette. The self matters.

Signe and I first met during a radio interview where I found out she studied philosophy at Hull University. I felt a an immediate pang of kindredness; I too, so I like to think, studied philosophy not at Hull but in Hull. Tonight, then, is a return for both of us.

I met Peter four or five years ago. I’d seen him perform at one of those pubs along that bit of water opposite Amsterdam’s Centraal Bibliotheek. We walked back towards the station and I asked him about his song, ‘Jihad’. (Well you don’t fucking listen/What’s a man got to do/When’s it gonna be clear/That we’re better than you) I don’t remember the answer but assumed him to be an American patriot. On the patriot thing – dissent and patriotism being the same thing – I was right. But, he’s actually Canadian. New York adopted him for a while in the 80s and so, even by his own admission, Peter now feels American. Peter, has a reputation for 1) knowing famous people and 2) maintaining Orchard Park levels of intoxication.

Tonight signifies a return home for me, but also the beginning of trying to understand why four people choose to live like modern day troubadours, choose to travel the country at personal expense. They say that the superego – and neuroses and tics – modulates the ego, brings awareness to the self in order so that it can be steered… Art is society’s superego. What will this group do to modulate my England? And if art is an excess of ability in our species, what excesses am I about to see?

For now, what came before tonight is not important. For Signe and Peter’s journey to be my journey (and therefore your journey), for us to be in this drama, we have to start at the same time. That time is tonight, at 19:00, at the Adelphi club in Hull. (Provided the police let me out of this cell, of course.)