How To Drink Booze In Cardiff

Once upon a time I was a newspaper journalist, living and working in Cardiff. Sometimes, after finishing work for the day, I would call in at one of the city centre pubs for a quick drink. Rather a lot of my colleagues were of the same disposition, so we went out together fairly frequently. And every now and then, generally just before a weekend, we would get a gang together, hit the town, and drink a LOT.

We had an established late-night routine which suited such long, boozy sessions well.  It would always begin with an animated trawl around the city centre pubs. More than just a few ports of call, naturally. Pints would be sunk, shop would be talked, jokes would be cracked and, like bitches, we would sometimes tear apart the characters of absent colleagues.

Come the dreaded bell (always at 11pm sharp in those days) a call would come from within the party to adjourn to a bar we knew called Kiwi’s. This would be roundly hailed as a BRILLIANT IDEA, if not an especially progressive one. Kiwi’s was our de facto post-pub destination. A no-brainer. And so our small pack of pisshead hacks would rise as one and stagger across St Mary’s Street to extend the night’s revelry.

Kiwi’s harboured many attractive features. Crucially it remained open until very, very late. It was also very handy for hooking us journos up with more of our kith and kin. As various late editions of our daily newspaper were painstakingly put to bed back at our offices, Thompson House, so the tired and thirsty subs and print-room boys would knock off, grab their coats and make for Kiwi’s. A chilled first pint of the night would reward their short, sober walk. And we hacks, already on our tenth or eleventh jars, would be waiting for them with beery grins and a cluster of tables and barstools which we had commandeered for the benefit of all.

Our relationship with Kiwi’s was strong. They wanted our money: we wanted their booze. So we flashed our press cards a bit, jumped the odd queue, swerved the weekend door tax and generally lorded it about a bit in there. This narrow bar, wedged inauspiciously between rinky dinky jewellery stores and fashion boutiques in what was by day a well-to-do shopping arcade, was our press bar of choice - and we made full use of it. We Western Mail-ers were on permanent nodding terms with the doormen, bar staff and guv’nor. 

Meanwhile an actual press bar, called ‘Press Bar’ and sited directly opposite the front doors of our place of work, remained entirely unpatronised.

Nobody ever left Kiwi’s early. Or so it seemed. Perhaps we collectively considered it ungracious, in some way, to consider jogging on before the staff decided among themselves that it was high time we were booted out. So we stayed on course, drinking and chattering through most of the wee hours. Every now and then, one or two of us might have ventured up the narrow wooden staircase to the small dancefloor upstairs. But this was rare. The music was generally awful. And there was no bar up there.

Closing time was always late – but it still came, every night, nonetheless. When it did, we would allow ourselves to be ushered out quietly and quickly. We knew and accepted Kiwi’s rules. Then, still sheltered under the arcade’s glass and iron canopy, honourable drunken goodbyes would be said to those parties heeding distant calls from warm beds. Off they would trot, gradually, to their suburban Cardiff digs… more than likely picking up a bag of greasy chips or a kebab on their way to the cab rank.

But, let’s back up. Consider our friends from the nightshift. They started late: they have drunk less booze. They are more than likely gagging for yet more pints. But can this desire of theirs be accommodated? Thankfully, yes. It can.

Only a few minutes’ walk from Kiwi’s, in Charles Street, the super-late drinker’s salvation lurks underground. Very few passers-by suspect any late-night/early morning activity beyond the dozen or so wrought iron gates which punctuate this road.  But the experienced eye of the Western Mail  nightshifter knows which one to swing quietly open, which concrete basement steps to quickly trot down, and which of Charles Street’s anonymous front doors to gently rap on.  Behind that door is a secret all-night bistro. 

There’s food, gentle Spanish music and, most importantly of all, a fully-stocked bar.

Just like Kiwi’s, this joint knows its newspaper clientele very well. A barmaid serves drinks, with no sign of ever planning to stop, while the sun outside slowly gains height. And it’s here that the nightshifter will stay, until he himself decides it’s about time to re-emerge, blinking through the cruel daylight and barging past confused city centre shoppers, to head for his home and a few hours sleep behind thick curtains.

And it surely doesn’t need saying? Any dayshift journos who find themselves still up and at it, happy to keep their nocturnal colleagues company through this final stage… well?

They will of course, by this time, be very, very pissed indeed.

Bard

Not sleeping yet.

THE DEAD do pretty nicely out of us, the living. We forgive them all mortal transgressions (no matter how irritating they might have been while alive). We would rather focus on treasured memories of earthly goodness. We do what we can to keep their spirits and names alive through misty-eyed remembrance. And we frequently concede that our fondly-related anecdotes, fine and remarkable stories that they are, benefit from the subtle little tweaks in dialogue and circumstance that we bestow upon them. We are proud to be fine ambassadors for our absent friends. Our dearly departed.

We do this because we love them and we miss them. And because we respect and pity them. But there's a little something else in there, too. We're a little worried. We don't understand death, you see. And we cannot be 100 per cent sure that the dead aren't still, you know, here.

That fanciful feeling, probably propagated a little too successfully by religion, that death is followed by something approaching omnipotent immortality, is both appealing and slightly worrying to us mortals. Do we want to be watched over by our dead friends and relatives for the rest of our lives? Is that a beautiful and angelic thing to happen? Possibly not.

A better notion is that of the temporary guest pass. Something that allows the dead to swoop back into the mortal world to maybe say some goodbyes or exert some kind of supernatural influence to universal benefit. That would be a cool thing. And I think it might happen.

My flight of fancy is this: when people die, they re-integrate with the universe. For a short while they are able to exert some kind of influence on the world they have left behind. The dead have superpowers. For a little while, at least.

Here are some anecdotes that will mean nothing to you:

1) My father sent his old car to his funeral.
2) Liz sent a butterfly to her funeral.
3) Ali sent a rainbow to her funeral.

Maybe the transition from life to death is a lot more like going to sleep than we realise. Maybe, when we die, we get a little bonus time to swoop around and do something a little crazy with the world before we are led away from it forever.

We all have to sleep sometime, but before the lights go out. You know. Maybe leave your mark somehow.

I like the idea of a last hurrah. So does E out of Eels. Here's a verse from one of his songs.

 "You're dead but the world keeps spinning

Take a spin through the world you left

It's getting dark a little too early

Are you missing the dearly bereft?"

Eels 'Last Stop: This Town'.

The Jubilee Flotilla

It’s like. Wait. Um.

All I know is I feel like I need to write all this down. And I know I’m not actually writing it down. But when I think about writing it down, it feels like I’m writing it down. Even though I’m not. Not writing it down.

I think I am tilted towards the ground, at an angle, like a syringe or a skydiver. It’s all grey, or all white. Hardly a second has passed. Or maybe a year has passed? A year seems more likely. It’s hard to tell.

My hands are stretched in front but I don’t see them. I don’t see any of me. I remember them, so I see their memory – through the grey/white... what is this? Air?

I feel the memory of my hands and feet and my eyes looking around me. I remember the hot air smashing them, smashing my eyeballs, and the reddish-grey juice splashing all about, pouring and pouring towards me, like a Mexican wave of silent wetness carried on a current of... is that flame? Yeah, flames all over the river.

It was hot. It’s not hot any more, but I feel the memory of it getting hot. In 1989 I was within ducking distance of an IRA bomb. I have always remembered how the air was bent out of shape, the noise was interwoven with the silence, the blast.

I feel the memory of something like that again. I feel like my legs and stomach were punched clear of the South Bank, high into the London sky. I smell my hair burning, I feel the memory of a pair of teenagers bursting against the river wall like cheap market fruit. I lost my shoes and... what else?

I flew, a little, then I was quiet and in this grey/white. For a second? A year? I don’t know. I just know that I feel like I should write this down.

As I feel like this, I see more of the scene. Or I see the memory of the scene, as it must have played out. Although it feels like perhaps I wasn’t there.

I feel like I remember a lot of noise, a lot of fear. There was a large boat, some flags, the water boiled and four, no, five men smothered the woman dressed in blue. I was flying through the air, smelling my hair, seeing those teenagers and remembering my hands while one of the men roughly slapped a face mask onto the woman, like a gas mask. The others pulled her to the deck. One of them took flight, like me, but quickly stalled at about 30 feet and span in two pieces to the water.

In the woman’s old face I could see her thoughts, or the memory of her thoughts. I can see them now. Something was getting to her, something from this scene. She was being rushed away from it all – and she knew that was the right thing to do - but she also didn’t know if that was the right thing at all. There was guilt and shame and pity in there, and I could see it all. And I could see that she knew she would be pulled clear of all this and most people would not. And I could feel the memory of it all.

And I felt like I should write it down. Because it might just be useful, and the more I feel like I should write it down the more I think I can remember things to write down. And I will remember it all, I will. But first, I think, I should have a little sleep... just a little sleep.

Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?

Channel 4's excellent Dispatches programme promised to lift the lid on the shady world of ticket reselling. And, boy oh boy, it certainly did.

But while it should come as no surprise to anybody that companies such as Seatwave and Viagogo make a killing from huge mark-ups over face value prices, what DID come as a shock was the 'industrial level' of the corruption. Specifically, this country's biggest concert promoters are alleged to be complicit in large-scale ticket touting.

You would think SJM, Metropolis, MCD and Live Nation would be keen to stamp out such scalping activities. But undercover reporters discovered that an incredible 29,000 Take That tickets were allocated to Viagogo by tour promoters SJM in 2011.

The same company, together with Metropolis and MCD, allocated 4,500 V Festival tickets to Viagogo last year. And 9,000 tickets for the upcoming Coldplay tour were allocated by SJM and Metropolis to Viagogo for sale at premium rate.

This stinks, of course - for a number of reasons. The tickets sent to Viagogo could and should have gone on general sale to genuine fans. Instead, they were offered for vastly inflated prices (£539 was quoted for a Coldplay ticket, for instance) through the secondary agent. According to the programme, 90 per cent of this marked-up ticket price is handed back to the promoters, with Viagogo taking ten per cent and their booking fee.

Promoters negotiate with agents to book artists for a certain price - and a ticket price is generally established within such an agreement. If 9,000 Coldplay tickets are sold out of the back door for a hugely inflated price, then who is being ripped off? Are the agents kept in the dark over this? Are the band and their management? Or are they taking a slice from it too?

Channel 4 should be commended for an excellent piece of whistle-blowing. And Live Nation, Metropolis, MCD, SJM and other promoters should be held to account for their actions. They didn't use their right to reply on the programme itself: Channel 4 was only able to obtain a quote from umbrella organisation, the Concert Promoters Association, which missed - or avoided - the point in hand by commenting instead on the security of booking tickets through an established secondary agency.

The fans are being ripped off - of this there is no doubt. But if the allegations in the C4 programme are found to be true, and the people who promote our concerts and tours are deliberately touting their own tickets at a higher price to illicitly obtain a greater revenue for themselves, then they need to explain how - on God's green earth - they can possibly consider this as acceptable.

Andy Barding

Barrow Full of Rocks: Remembering Russell Hoban

I am finding it hard to be too downcast about the death of my favourite writer, Russell Hoban. Why? Because the days surrounding his passing have been so full of Hobanesque drama and apophenic events. It's hard to be sad when available evidence suggests the spirit of this great man is alive and well and thriving among us - somehow.

I first came across his work when I was preparing to fail my English A-Level (if you're one of my 1980s or 1990s employers, of course I actually passed it... honestly... that's why it's on my CV).

'Kleinzeit' was recommended to me by my tutor at Exeter College, along with Tolstoy's 'The Death Of Ivan Ilyich', as material guaranteed to get my whistle whetted while writing an extended essay on 'Death In The Novel'. I don't recall anything about the latter, but the former had me enthralled from the off. The lead character's warped distillation of life experience into one long battle of wits with symbolism and weirdness spoke to me. His personal exchanges with the 'A-to-B' of his illness, with 'Sister' with the London Underground and with yellow paper - that's yellow A4 paper - was fun and thought-provoking.

Further Hoban reading rewarded me with an incrementally deeper understanding of a surreal world that I believed I could sometimes glimpse - a world where words and sentences are infused in objects like blue veins, where the shimmering sheen of 'reality' only loosely covers the nebulous 'moment under the moment'. Entire cities, in Hoban's world, are given voice and soul - and there's a recurring melancholy for the purity of childish thought, too. His books for children, at least the ones which aren't mere animal stories, are sometimes enlightening and visionary. Secrets are in there; secrets that are too good to be kept among kids alone.

I continued to read Hoban through my teenage years, my twenties, my thirties and into my forties. Each new novel (and he was remarkably prolific of late for a poorly octogenarian) added something new to the great Hoban mix: I sometimes think his work is like one of those magic pictures made out of dots. Look at it long enough through defocussed eyes and a truer, surprise image will rise up before you.

I give this man much credit for helping me, and many others, to study this world in a different way. And on one level, what I suppose would be the metaphysical, it seems the universe has been determined to click 'like' on the great big Russell Hoban Facebook page in the sky ever since the man himself logged off for good, suddenly, last week.

First came an email from my mother, about a Russell Hoban Christmas book she was unable to find. On the day he died. Then followed a higher than usual count of 'FJ' numberplates on cars: which is my own potentially cuckoo barometer for symbolism in my waking life (hey, I *am* diagnosed mentally ill, so cut me some slack - OK?).

And then came the finest and funniest and most reassuring of all. Walking around the new secret weekend food market near my home, I came across a lovely antique wheelbarrow parked mysteriously against a railway arch - chock full of rocks. A barrow full of rocks. Morrows cruel mock. Arrow in a box. Harrows full of crock. A repetitive motif in 'Kleinzeit' is this little phrase, presumably misheard and replayed through the drugged and dying mind of the unfortunate Kleinzeit. A barrow full of rocks. Bzzzz.

It raised a smile on an otherwise wet day, the first weekend without a Russell Hoban on this earth.

I'm very sad that he has died, but I am also thankful to have known a piece of his mind through his work. And I will forever be grateful for the peculiar tint he has given my worldview spectacles.

So goodbye, Mr Hoban. And thank you.

Reaching out.

Erk. My growing obsession with establishing some kind of connection between centuries old and young gathers pace.

I still dream of bringing Mr Vincent Van Gogh to the present day, of course, and in-so-doing rescuing his paintings from the prisons which cage them. Not for me, the cosy 21st Century Dr Who worldview of the tortured artist locked in history, waiting patiently for a Timelord to unveil the merit and acclaim that time has heaped on his Dutch shoulders. Oh no. My visionary version of events is a rescue mission, pure and simple: these priceless paintings need to be sprung from their temperature-controlled cells and pasted up on walls. Perhaps squat walls. Perhaps not. But given back to Vincent, whatever.

Similarly, I'm not entirely sure how much of our modern world Mr Charles Dickens would approve of. I find it increasingly easy to walk around London with an inherited sense of wonder at the miracles of the age: the under-construction Shard, the buzz of helicopters, the silver tubes of airliners tracing through the sky. How great, how amazing, it would be to show all these things to Mr D. But then I check myself with the thought that Mr Dickens might prefer to stay in the car. I'd be tempted to run him out of town for some fresh air. If he's not into the fellows walking into public houses without hats on, I fantasise, he's hardly going to appreciate the scallies drinking Special Vat outside William Hill.

The more I read of Dickens, the more I want to reach out and forge that spiritual connection between our respective centuries. But, however hard I look, I don't see that desire reciprocated. Where the mighty, ingenious and entertainingly original American-born writer Russell Hoban is clearly laying out his retirement-age London for future generations to savour - tube journey after walk after cafe after park - there is no indication, anywhere, that Mr Dickens was ever scribing for an age more advanced than his own. Maybe the need to have seen it all and to report to some future audience, like a time-sensitive recce mission, is a truly modern phenomenon?

Whatever, I feel sure Mr Dickens would be glad to see his works still in print in 2011. He might be more than a bit surprised - but pleased all the same. And for the time being, I'm happy to try to see modern London through the same kind of Victoria-tinted spectacles as he would have worn. It's a push, a big push, but sometimes I feel rewarded with just the merest hint that I might be on vaguely the same page. That's something to aspire to, isn't it?

And then punk happened...

Pop music. What a journey! It started life as the fad of the new-born teenagers - a frivolous craze that parents knew little Johnny and Jenny would one day grow up and out of. It exploded through rock'n'roll and went on growing. As time passed and it developed through a myriad of styles and attitudes, so did public taste. Opinions were formed and quickly divided. Some pop became worthy of serious attention - the rest became wholly disposable.

Lines were drawn; battle lines, sometimes. Mods v Rockers. Hippies v Squares. Punks v Straights. To the unconverted, pop remained disposable nonsense. Then, for a brief moment in time, that very disposability was what held our collective public interest. The cheap, three-minute throwaway product wormed its way into our hearts and minds.

Nowadays, pop is transcient - but no longer disposable. It has become the must-keep manna of the masses, the stuff that unites us all. It has value - commercial, artistic, cultural, spiritual and (even) historical value.

Experts are on hand to guide us back through the decades and remind us what happened and when. There are many, many books, films, radio shows and TV documentaries out there, poised to loftily explain the lineage between, say, The Beatles and Blur - almost always relying on the "and then punk happened" bit to explain away the convoluted 70s.

But as anybody who got involved at any stage of the game, to any degree, will confirm: it's just not that simple. Right now, there will be a Danse Society fan somewhere who had a road to Damascus moment sometime in 1981 and who has lived his life accordingly ever since. There will be a volunteer hospital driver in Birmingham who extraordinarily played bass for the MC5 at Wembley Stadium in 1972 (it's true - he's called Derek Hughes). And by that same token, there will be a kid in Lancashire somewhere who will go to see Effluence play and have his life changed during the course of a three minute song.

Regrettably, nobody lives forever and some of the older guard are slipping through our fingers. Time marches on, and with the passing of people also goes the memories, the stories, the impressions of the innovators as well as those who were just lucky enough to be there. All their stories are important, and all of value to the collective consciousness that surrounds music. Rather than the rigid story that is played out on doco after doco, music has a living, organic history. The resurgence of garage rock or the whole Robert Johnson story - if you think about it - is testament to that.

We music fans, writers, performers, record buyers and specialist enthusiasts all have tales to tell - and with the internet age, a great opportunity to tell them. Please do so, and do it now. Contribute to the big picture and make it bigger: let's leave the people of tomorrow with a better legacy than "and then punk happened..."