Was Britpop Shit?

Today there is so much stuff in the news about the 20th anniversary of Oasis's gigs at Knebworth, that twenty years from now people will be asking not 'Were you at Knebworth?' but 'Where were you when you found out it was the twentieth anniversary of Knebworth?'. I was there. On the second night, so 20 years tomorrow, which means my 'Christ, I'm old' hasn't kicked in yet. Being there on the second night meant that I missed out on seeing The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers but did get to see the 7,378th most memorable band of the 90s Dreadzone.

Here's what I remember about Knebworth. Me and my friend took a coach there which took a couple of hours, arrived at about midday and immediately found a spot where we stood for the next eleven hours. I am almost certain that I did not have a piss for the entire day. As someone who now urinates twice in an episode of Gogglebox, I can confirm that if I miss one thing about the 90s it is my bladder. I wish I'd got more done really. If I'd had known just how much of future decades were to be taken up by bodily functions, I might have written a couple of symphonies.

Was Britpop shit? Does anyone listen to Britpop anymore? I mean, does anyone ever stick on a Longpigs album? I fully signed up to Britpop. I bought the NME every week, I listened to Steve Lamaq, I bought that 7inch single which was just a recording of an argument between the Gallagher brothers, in the Blur vs Oasis singles battle I sat on the fence and bought one of each. Britpop just happened to coincide roughly with my pubescent need for a culture to join in with.

It feels to me like the last mono-culture of its sort. By 1996, being a British teenager and not liking either Blur or Oasis was unusual. It started as something vaguely alternative but ended up, until the Spice Girls, being almost entirely dominant. Britpop events like album releases or big gigs were regularly on the news. As a teenager, I felt like I was part of a movement comparable with the 60s. I wasn't was I? It was just some, mainly average guitar bands singing the sort of songs that Robbie Williams would go on to sing. If your mum will let you put a tape on in the car then it's not really an significant musical movement is it? It was safe and I don't mean 'safe' by its 90s meaning - I mean no one's mum was worried about them going to Knebworth because they'd already worked out that we were a generation of pussies.

I'm only really talking about my experience of Britpop really aren't I? I'm sure you were all doing crack with Dreadzone. But I really don't think there's been a British musical movement of its size since, nor one that was more disposable or entirely un-revolutionary ever.

My friend Kris

My friend Kris asked me to write a blog post about him. Usually I don't take (or get) requests. 'Mate! Mate! Do you think you could do us a quick 700 words on the Chelsea Flower Show?'. The thing is though, I've got to somehow drag myself off the topic of politics and this request to write about Kristopher Robert Beattie has offered me an opportunity to do so.

You will have already noticed two things about Kris. One: he is the type of person (perhaps the first in history) to ask for someone to write a blog post about him for no discernible reason. Two: he spells his name with a K. That wasn't his choice but his parents'. I like it. It sort of says, "I'm normal but not that normal". It says - "Yes, I work in office supplies but on the weekend I smoke rollies and rock out with my buddies".

I haven't seen Kris in person for about five years. That's because he moved to Wellington, New Zealand with his Kiwi girlfriend and their half-Kiwi son. Since arriving there they have added to the collection, making a half Kiwi daughter meaning that they have, in total, one full Kiwi.

Kris and I became friends in roughly 1995 and, as I remember it, spent pretty much the entirety of the summers of 1996 and 1997 together. He was the first person (other than my brothers) with whom I remember laughing to the point at which I was in danger of vomiting. What we laughed at I do not really remember. There was one incident when Kris had a small squeezy toy frog. It was designed so that when you squeezed it, its tongue would curl out and flick. One night we squeezed it again and again. Sometimes the flick would be hysterically funny and sometimes it wouldn't. I have thought about that frog a lot. There is no way to describe what it was that made some flicks so funny and others not at all. There are hundreds of books written about how to be funny. There are hundreds of people who's job it is to critique comedy. I bet none of these dicksplats could explain what it was that made one of those frog's flicks funnier than another. 'For something to be funny it has to be true' - you obviously didn't spend four hours in Kris Beattie's living room on a Saturday night some time in 1997. Yeah, Saturday night. How old were we? About 16.  For some, their teenage years are about snorting ketamine - not us.

I guess I should try and describe Kris but he doesn't seem to have any photos of himself on Facebook for me to work off so I'm going to have to do it from memory. Kris's skin colour is ever so slightly yellow. He is racially white and, as far as I know, entirely English in heritage and yet he somehow looks foreign. But then, if you were to ask me to name which country he could be from I'd be totally at a loss. I suppose he looks half Greek, half orphan. He has a slim, somewhat elastic physique and is naturally comic in the way moves. He was a strong exponent of the curtains haircut so popular in mid nineties Essex. Despite his slim build, Kris eats a lot and I would take a guess that he is the only one of my friends to have salad cream in his house. Kris knows more than anyone I know about boxing, Olympic sprinters and lower league football. Kris taught me Blackbird on the guitar. Kris once half heartedly mentioned to one of his parents that he thought Bugs Bunny was kind of funny and for the next five Christmases he received Bugs Bunny presents and therefore had a teenage bedroom fully stocked with Bugs Bunny merchandise. Kris is the sort of person who probably knows what the capital of Ecuador is. Kris is probably the only person from Braintree funnier than his dad with honourable mentions going to our school friend Matt LeCount and former Prodigy haircut man Keith Flint. Kris is enormously likeable and yet he is also the sort of person who I could imagine asking me to write a blog about him and then telling me he thought it wasn't actually as good as he'd hoped. Unprompted, Kris once told another friend of mine that that friend was jut jawed. Kris once sang Happy Days to me in German, which I then stole and used in my stand up routine for five years. Kris has a very solid cue action but he sometimes lets himself down on position and is a little over reliant on stun shots. Kris is very good at accents. Most people would describe Kris as happy go lucky in nature but I believe that as he gets older, like me, he is finding himself prone to moments of angst. If I remember correctly, Kris was once the only non Asian person working in an Asian restaurant. Kris is more curious about other people than anyone I have ever met and I reckon is the only person from our year at school who could still name everyone from our year at school. Kris and I's friendship is probably the closest platonic one I've ever had. Kris was once a postman for a while. In 1998, Kris and I murdered a stranger together, buried the body and have never spoken about it since.

Some observations about being an insomniac.

Television in the middle of the night features a frightening amount of adverts for online casinos. I presume they've identified their target market as people watching the Eden channel at 3.30am. Here's how an online casino advert goes... a man (usually a man) alone in a mundane flat opens up his laptop and inexplicably doesn't go to Pornhub. Instead he goes through to Sky Vegas or whatever and suddenly everything is amazing - he's wearing sunglassses, he's dressed like James Bond, he's travelling down the Las Vegas strip in a convertible, he steps into a casino, lights, lights, glamorous flashing lights, an attractive available looking woman in a red low cut dress is standing behind a roulette wheel, a deep voice over says something like 'Do something with your life! Be a man!'. Is there anywhere in advertising in which the lifestyle displayed is so different to the reality? Anyone signing up for a casino website at 3.30am is either pissed or so depressed that their only other option to brighten up their evening is to call into Talksport. How the fuck is this allowed? The only explanation is that those in charge of regulating gambling advertising are all asleep at 3.30am. Sky Vegas have handed the authorities the tape of a responsible commercial but play something monumentally immoral when nobody but the vulnerable is looking.

I know you're not supposed to watch television when you're trying to get to sleep, by the way. The advice seems to be not to do anything that might stimulate you. Well what the tit are you supposed to do then? Stare into the darkness and contemplate your own inadequacies? My entire life is spent avoiding that exact thing. My current method is to watch nature documentaries. I find them relaxing. David Attenborough's voice is the closest I've ever come to finding whatever drug it was that Michael Jackson's doctor was giving him. The problem is it doesn't send me into a deep sleep, just enough that I can't quite keep my eyes open. So I drift in and out of a light slumber and every so often awake to the sound of bison head butting or the sight of an intensely ugly fish.

Here's the main thing about being an insomniac - it's boring. Every week or so I'll go through a night in which I don't even achieve an Attenborough induced flitting in and out of consciousness. Just hours and hours of nothing, of analysing the morality of casino adverts, of returning to and from the bathroom just for something to do. On these nights there's always the belief that sleep may just be round the corner, so best not to ward it off by doing anything interesting. And so you bury yourself alive in tedium, trying not to rerun arguments you had in 2002.

Then you do the following day on no sleep whatsoever. People ask how you are and you reply 'tired'. But it doesn't feel like an earnest kind of tired. You're not tired because you've been taking care of a new born baby or up late working on a vaccine or recently back from LA after some interesting meetings with NBC. You're tired because just before bed it occurred to you that you're not sure if you ever went to a Shed Seven gig or not and now you can't stop thinking about it.

You won't BELIEVE this blog post about Oslo!

A couple of months ago, I told you about a trip I made to Cape Town to film a Swiss insurance commercial. A week or two ago, I had the pleasure of going to Oslo, tasked with selling insurance (for a different company) to Norwegians. About ten years ago I went to Rotterdam to make a Dutch insurance commercial. So these days, when I lie awake in bed at night one question rattles around my skull, tormenting me into the early hours - 'What is it about my face that makes mainland Western Europeans want to buy insurance?'.

Is it my bloated cheeks that makes them think of their own inevitable deaths and the need to ensure their families are protected? Is it my greasy nose that puts them in mind of the small time criminal who will burgle their house? Is it my enormous forehead that reminds them of the twin towers and that an unthinkable tragedy can strike at any time? Whatever it is, I am happy to exploit my features in exchange for disappointingly low fees and short trips to cities I am yet to visit.  

Oslo! What is the one thing people say to you before travelling to Norway? Do they mention the beauty of the landscape? The Fjords? The utopian Scandi-socialist society? No. They tell you that it costs £8 for a pint. This is the one piece of information all Brits have to hand about virtually every country in the world. Open your window now and shout at the first passerby you see - 'How much does a pint cost in Prague?' and watch them confidently shout back 'somewhere between 90p and £1.20'. Now ask them to name one Czech President, past or present. They've gone haven't they?

£8 though. £8! My technique was to imagine that each time I bought a drink, I was buying a round for me and a tight mate who never returned the favour. Still. £8! For £8.99 you can buy the complete works of Norway's greatest writer Henrik Ibsen. For £8 you can buy a pint  (actually, thanks to the metric system just under a pint) of pilsner and then half an hour later watch that £8 leave your body in the form of piss. I appreciate that if you're not blessed with the right kind of genitals (penis, balls) this is more difficult but it is my understanding that it is possible.

I expect you're hoping for an insight into Oslo that goes beyond alcohol pricing. Filming the commercial took three full days (Norwegians are nothing if not thorough in their insurance advertising) so I didn't have as much time as I would have liked to explore. I can tell you that Oslo is a pretty city that hints at a far greater beauty once you leave it and head into the rest of Norway. It was like winning a competition to meet a One Direction member and getting Niall. Sure, he's attractive, but he's no Zayn.

Oslo has an impressive opera house, a viking museum, some nice parks and for a city of it's size what seems like a surplus of TGI Fridays. Overlooking the city is a giant ski jump. This is what I chose to visit on my day off. It seemed like something one should do in Scandinavia. Holmenkollbakken (and yes, I did open another tab to check the smelling) can be seen from virtually anywhere in the city and has a capacity of 70,000 spectators. This suggests that sometimes over 10% of the population of Oslo are inclined to go and watch people put themselves at the mercy of gravity in the name of sport. And why not?

It being summer, there was no snow and henceforth no ski jumping. There were plenty of visitors though. Many, like me, chose to have a look around the ski museum there. I wonder if, when looking at glass cabinets stacked with skis from 1871, 1895, 1910, 1922, 1927 and 'oh, look! 1931!', any of them had my overwhelming thought - 'I do not give a fuck about any of this'. What I wanted to do was get in the lift and head straight to the top of the ski jump and after an hour of queueing, that's exactly what I did. I'm pleased to report the view did not disappoint. I did the only thing I could think of to do when looking down over a city I would most likely never visit again - stand there for roughly 2 and a half minutes, take a picture and then get back in the lift downwards. 

So, unfortunately the length of my stay means I'm only able to offer you a snapshot of Oslo. Although if you're depending on this blog for all your information on the world's capitols I'd think about looking into some other sources. I've always been curious about what it is about Scandinavian countries that makes them top all the happiness, health and education rankings but I didn't have the time nor intelligence to work it out. The simple answer we're told is democratic socialism but there has to be more to it than that. Surely? Because if that's true then the rest of the world is missing a trick. I have to say the houses looked lovely and the people looked healthy. There has to be something darker beneath the surface. There just has to be. Look at Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's face of late. There's a man who's seen some horror in his life. And I mean, seriously, £8 a pint!

Wanky Ode To Reading

When people wax about how much they love reading, I sometime find it a little smug. That being said, this is a blog post about how much I love reading. To proclaim how much you just looooove to read is a none too subtle way of saying 'actually, I'm quite intelligent, actually'. Worst of all are people who say they don't watch television. YES YOU DO. YOU ARE LYING. Just because you don't have a television doesn't mean you are not sat up every night, like the rest of us, watching TELEVISION on your laptop. Have you always not had a television? No. When did you decide that 'actually, you know, I think I can do without a television'? WHEN BROADBAND GOT GOOD.

As a child I used to read a lot. Every day of the summer holidays included a visit to my local library and the bottom of my bed always featured a pile of at least ten books. In my teens this stopped. Instead, my summers were spent driving through the neighbourhood wacking letterboxes with a baseball bat and intimidating four younger boys who were about to go on a life changing adventure - hang on, no, that was Kiefer Sutherland in the movie Stand By Me.

When I was at university and went through the only period of my life without a TV (or computer) I returned to reading. For the first time ever I read grown up books about grown up things. I found that there was something about the medium - the fact that the words are not said aloud but in minds of the writer and then the reader, the one and one relationship that results between the two - that led to honesty. Far more honesty, it seemed to me, than I saw in films or on TV.

Then, after Uni, my reading slowed down. I'm not sure what I did instead. Listen to podcasts? Bang broads? Either way, I wasn't reading much and when I was, my choices were seldom ambitious - Keith Gillespie's autobiography was a low point.

For my New Year's Resolution in 2015, I decided to read more. Good decision. I've been struck again by the honesty that comes out of good books. People get away with saying things in books that they would never dare say on television/radio/Twitter/Facebook/in my house. Say something challenging on Twitter and you can expect an immediate backlash. Hide your darker thoughts 200 pages into a book, that's my advice. Any backlash is likely to reach you a lot slower, if at all.

Here, for my own satisfaction more than anything else, is a list of the books I can remember reading since my 2015 resolution. It's not a mega long list cos I'm not a mega fast reader. I liked them all. Bold means I liked them a lot. Bold and underlined means I liked them a lot a lot.

Saturday - Ian McKewan
The Children Act - Ian McKewan
The Secret History - Donna Tartt - Blew me away. Probably my favourite of the lot.
The Bees - Laline Paull - Very odd - it's a novel about bees for fuck's sake.
Flash Boys - Michael Lewis - I like Michael Lewis a lot. 
Open - Andre Agassi - First half brilliant, second half boring.
The Plot Against America - Phillip Roth
Perfida - James Ellroy - 800 pages long. Do I get a prize?
The Black Dahlia - James Ellroy
My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante - First in a series of four novels. End of this one ensured I will read the next.
This Boy - Alan Johnson
So You've Been Publicly Shamed - Jon Ronson - Everyone else read it, so I did too.
Kill Your Friends - John Niven
One Summer: America, 1927 - Bill Bryson - Ludicrously entertaining. Read about 700 pages in a week.
Australia - Bill Bryson
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson - By now, I was getting a bit bored of Bryson.
Run, Rabbit Run - John Updike
Freedom - Jonathan Franzen - Damned honest writing, I thought.

My friend got punched.

Mate. Remember I was doing all those reviews of London's shittest pubs? Well, that came to what was in hindsight a foreseeable conclusion a couple of weeks ago when my friend got punched in the mouth. There are a number of ways in which one can introduce their own face to someone else's fist... having a saucy affair, wearing the wrong football shirt, standing up for civil rights in 1960's Mississippi. My friend chose none of those. I don't think either of us foresaw what would bring about his downfall. What my friend did was make the mistake of calling someone Suggs.

We'd been to a non league football match earlier in the day. One of my gripes with modern football is that you are not allowed to drink alcohol in view of the pitch. You have to wait till half time for a pint, just like children. When will the nanny state learn that we can damn well look after ourselves? At non league football it's different. You can stand and watch the game, pint in hand, like some kind of German. What I hadn't accounted for was that that means by the time the match is over, you will be approaching your government advised weekly unit intake.

Then the pair of us went to a pub to carry on our drinking like we were on an underpopulated stag do. After a few games of pool I think I was under the misapprehension that I was 'drinking myself sober'. When we lost possession of the pool table it occurred to me that I knew another pub nearby with pool facilities. I'd only been there once before, on a Tuesday afternoon, but I saw no reason why it couldn't serve our purposes - drinking, cue sports and a rapidly deteriorating standard of conversation.

The pub in question was The Nag's Head on Camberwell Road. Regular readers may remember my first trip there which is documented here. On that occasion I was a sober man with my wits about me popping in for a quick drink on a Tuesday afternoon with the sole purpose of writing about the place. Now it was a boozy Saturday night and both I and the pub were entirely different beasts.

At first we seemed to assimilate pretty well. Our cue skills were still operational and we quickly got possession of the pool table. A succession of minor characters from The Bill stuck a pound on the table, challenged one of us to a game and came undone. These are nice people, we thought. They may not dress, talk or read Owen Jones like us but when you play them and beat them at their own game then they respect you. I felt like the Raj. But what I hadn't spotted was that at least one of them was planning a rebellion.

On the lead up to the moment that defined the evening I'm unsurprisingly a little hazy. I was sat down while my mate played pool with two girls who looked like they'd been in a scrap or two and a guy who looked like he's been in a scrap or two that very day. I wasn't concerned though, we'd shared in some bantz, we'd earned their respect. Then my senses, however numbed, picked up on a change in atmosphere. I don't think we'd done anything specifically wrong. There was just something about our demeanour which suggested we felt like we belonged and the guy in the group wanted to correct us.

I could see my friend bantering away and although I was sure he was being entirely harmless I felt it was time for us to leave. I hadn't anticipated what the trigger would be for what I feared might happen - in reply to something the guy said, my friend came out without an innocuous ''alright Suggs'.

The red mist hit and bop went his fist onto my friend's mouth. I quickly noticed a couple of things. Firstly, my immediate instinct was to do everything I could to avoid getting hit myself. I didn't do what many men would do, possibly the majority, and pile in in anger at what had befallen my friend. No, my survival instincts told me to stand up and DEESCALATE. The other thing I noticed was that the villain did indeed look like a 25 year old Suggs.

As it happened, by the time I got to my friend who was just a few steps away, the situation was completely under control. Suggs had already been escorted from the building. This was a pub which had seen some fights in it's time and knew exactly how to handle it. We were held in the pub for 15 minutes to avoid any kind of clash with Suggs out on the streets - undoubtedly his domain. My friend was understandably shaken and rather galled. The landlady got him a glass of water and said a sorrowful "well, you won't two won't come back now". "No, of course we will!" we lied.

Positive thinking.

Christ, my farts stink today. Which is a good thing. Each sniff reminds me that I am a living organism who eats, digests and excretes food - it makes me feel alive! That's me trying out positive thinking, one of my New Year's resolutions, and this is me trying out another - writing more.

But when you're trying to think positively what do you write about? How many novels go 'there was a man with a great life who met a woman with a great life and thanks to a lack of obstacles, together, they went on to have exponentially better lives'? My creativity engine has for much of my working life been powered by hatred and misery. Soz.

When I was seventeen I went through the entirely unique experience of suffering teenage heartache. I've always thought it was that heartache that gave me the drive and 'I'll show you' mentality to get myself into a half decent drama school. Then in my early twenties I found myself in a God awful call centre job and living above a kebab shop which made me a) miserable and b) fat. It was a desire to get out of that situation that led me to pour a great deal of effort into a comedy double act and ultimately made me the mid ranking performer I am today. When that double act came to a depressing end the creativity train trundled out of my station again and I achieved some success as a stand up until I ultimately came undone when faced with the 'white middle class guy in comedy glass ceiling' and an inability to write new material. Trapped in my own negative thinking about stand up and my acting career I found the new creative energy to write a book that has an affectionate pop at the acting business. You'll notice that it has stormed its way into the top 500,000 in the Amazon sales ranks.

In each instance it was a sort of anger that drove me. But now, as you can see, that has all gone. Now I'm the sort of man who sees joy in every moment and smells roses in every fart. What will become of this new positive prick? Will I turn into a gormless ball of happiness with nothing to write about? Will I no longer need to define myself by my career, move to Costa Rica and become a contented surfing instructor? Or will this new positive outlook and smiling face open up all the doors that until now have been closed to me, doors which haven't responded to my cynical demeanour and arid sense of humour? Are you in fact reading the words of the next Phillip Schofield? Possibly.

I don't think there's anything wrong with, where possible, trying to see the positive side. It's something as I've got older I've found more and more difficult though. In relative terms I'm someone for whom life has been one long blowjob. That has never stopped me from indulging in a good shoe gazing session. Now my challenge is to continue to write but to do it with a little more joie de fuckin' vivre. Wish me luck.

An afterthought - I've now realised that this puts a lot of pressure on my next post being an account of a my favourite ever trip to a craft fare or day at the seaside.

There's a London pub actually called London Pub.

It's near Russell Square in a small area which seems to have been left as a historical relic of grey 1960's architecture. There's plenty of hotels here which must specialise in disappointed tourists with poor research skills, easily swayed by the phrase 'central London'.  And what's one of the things everyone tells you to do when visiting London? Go to a 'London pub' of course.

Well here it is. London Pub. Having received a tip off about this place, my assumption was that it's clientele must be foreigners who've misunderstood that piece of advice and thought that it referred to a specific place. The sign above the door encouraged that line of thinking. There's a badly drawn picture featuring Big Ben, a beefeater, a London bus and somewhat unimaginatively the word 'Waterloo'. Walking in, I was surprised to find actual real life Londoners. There they were dropping h's, wearing council work clothes, drinking at 3pm... the real deal!

Here's my overall impression of this pub - it looks as if it is ran by the state. Everything about it creates the impression that it is a functional drinking house funded by a Communist regime's 'Ministry of Pubs'. I felt as if I had walked into HMRC or Birmingham Central Library. Here, for example is the wifi password...

That is the sort of bureaucratic kerfuffle you'd usual only expect to come across when trying to pay a council tax bill.

The beer selection wasn't bad but I suppose, when you've got an entire government department of civil servants working on it that's to be expected. The layout of the place was in keeping with the 1960s buildings in the area. Green banquets, cheap wood paneling, a red carpet of the kind Jennifer Lawrence is never likely to set foot on. 

On the TVs was darts and below one of those was what I decided was a Dutch couple. Going to a 'London pub' had clearly been on their itinerary and this was it. They shared a plate of fish and chips and didn't say a word to each other in the entire half an hour I was there. I assumed they were contemplating their bad choices in where to have their pub trip, where to eat Britain's most famous delicacy and, judging by the silence, who to go on holiday with.

You'll notice from the wifi picture that 'London Pub' is connected to the Royal National Hotel - another suspiciously functional looking name. I wonder how long this place will last. I'm sure the hotel provides a fair amount of ill informed custom but it's a pretty big building in an expensively central location. Surely the fact it hasn't yet been turned into a Wetherspoons is an oversight soon to be corrected.

Would I prefer that? No. Wetherspoons are everywhere. This is something so odd, so unique, that it deserves to stay as an example of what a pub ran by Ken Livingstone would look like.