Category: Other

Today is three years since I decided to use WordPress instead of Blogger or any other blogging site. While the first year was committed to what I was doing it has fallen away ever so slightly as we enter the third year. I promise you I have a lot going on and I’m going to do my best to play catchup with myself in the near future. 

Thank you for sticking this out with me. It’s been a trip. 

It appears to be a month of me losing women. Yesterday’s was probably the worst yet. My sweet little 1.25 Ford Fiesta has been put out for pasture. She took the knocks well and saw me across thousands of miles. She will always have a special place in my heart but Pancetta is dead.

About five years ago my brother bought a car. He thought it was really cool. It had blacked out rear windows, a little tea tray of a spoiler, nice rims, a CD player, all the mod cons. To belittle his efforts in being “gangster” I decided to give said car a stupid and slightly effeminate name to bring down his name. This car was Pancetta.
What I hadn’t accounted for was that eventually my brother would sell me the car and it would have to keep the same name and so that sassy little lady came under my charge.
I’ve eaten in her, I’ve slept in her. I’ve picked up friends, I’ve picked up girls, I’ve picked up my dad, when drunk and on his way home. She has certainly served her purpose but now, as President Truman says, “we must cut down on the cost of living”. Having recently bought my first property and with the idea that I just want to stay in and write all the time, and the train line is just a ten minute walk away I’ve decided to scrap Pancetta and see how long I can go without a car. I know there are going to be issues with it in the coming months. I’m not entirely sure how food shopping will go, or how I will take stuff to the tip six miles away but if you can change and I can change then maybe the whole damn world can change. I might get a bike. Good for the environment and I’ll feel like Morrissey.

But for now, I just wanted to wish Pancetta well as she evolves into a Tetris square and is dropped into the hole. I hope your line gets cleared soon sweetheart.

For the past few months my life has been consumed by thoughts of Hank Moody, the foul-mouthed, womanising, near-alcoholic anti-hero at the centre of Showtime’s Californication. From the start I was hooked and have told almost everyone I have since been in touch with that it is indeed the series of the gods.
What Californication does so well is to take the story of a writer, or as far as I am concerned, a writer who doesn’t seem to be able to get a lot of writing done, and ramp it, to make it cooler, sexier, more worthy of screen time. It has genuine heart and wonderful character and you will the action along because you are just waiting for Moody to get his shit together and realise what has been waiting for him the whole time.
if you are yet to witness the power of Californication then I can assure you, you are missing out.

I often write about the smorgasbord of talent that Southend and the surrounding areas has to offer. It seems that all of my friends do a thing whether it be music, art, poetry, stand up, juggling, improv, DJing, yoga, script-writing or anything else. What an incredible thing Village Green is therefore for being able to represent these things and even better was my invitation to perform as an alumni of my college along with Adam and Lance aka Charlie’s Hand Movements who I wax lyrical about at every given possibility and will no doubt continue to do so later on in this post.

I turned up early to collect my trader’s wristband, have a cup of tea and wander around the site as the last items were set up and the hordes descended. How different the place is, how serene and noble before there is anyone in it but the vendors, traders and artists trying to batten down the hatches. I watched the sound check on the main stage, ran into an old friend and waited for the clock to tick over to 12 before enjoying my first Red Stripe of the day.
Beside our performance area (because I’m that self involved) was a face painting table set up by SEEVIC. I considered a Stipean (or indeed now Stampian) band of colour across the top half of my face but instead just shuffled around pretending I had important things to do and hiding behind a tree to practice. The invite had been a little ad-hoc and last minute. As such I didn’t have any idea when I was on, how many songs I would be doing or what songs they would be and it was only when sat with Sam, Cat and Freya later I jotted ten songs down on a post it note. After watching Mikey, Adrien and Jack it was my turn. The face painting table was packed out. It was going to be good.
I played:
Good To Dream
An Oblivion I Own
Listen Up
Charlie
Broken Record Love Song
What Katie Did
Scratchings
Coming Down
Don’t Expect To Hear From Me

Wandering back offstage in a hot flush I sat and watched Charlie’s Hand Movements pull it all together. They played a blinding set including Missyerface which they assured me would be ropey at best. It remains one of my favourite songs of theirs because they pulled it off with such aplomb. There were also a couple of new tracks much the anticipated second album.

I loves Village Green. The complaints about the ten pound ticket fee should be laughed out of the park. Just think what you are getting for that ten pounds. Think where that is going and don’t forget the sunscreen.

My thanks to people who came to watch and to Cat and Sam for filming. Thank you to SEEVIC and especially to Charlie’s Hand Movements.

Last night I was fortunate enough to see one of my favourite and one of the most interesting, exciting and innovative live bands of modern times play the last gig of their world tour. I wasn’t lucky enough to pay just £2.50 for the privilege but that is another story for another time.
The first time I saw Arcade Fire play, at my first Reading festival in 2007 I felt as if I had experienced some kind of wake up in and of itself. There were more people on the stage than I could count as they jumped between instruments and beat their fists in triumph at their celebration of life, disorder and death. The show was sublime. I was a convert. When The Suburbs was released I couldn’t get tickets for their London show so joined my friend James in Birmingham to watch them and we saw them together again at Reading in 2010 where they headlined after The Libertines.
In December 2013 they put on a number of smaller scale gigs as The Reflektors and I saw them at The Roundhouse as they blasted through the lion’s share of the new album to an adoring and fancy dressed crowd.

The gig last night was the best I have seen them. It was the production they should have been afforded form the beginning. The songs were all there. The audience stuck with them. It was a spectacle as any large scale show should be. Thousands of sets of eyes scanned the mirrored wall to take in what was going on.
The set began with their now infamous bobble heads wandering out onto the stage and taking up instruments to begin what sounded like a bad version of Wake Up. They were quickly shooed away as the band appeared from stage left in their finery to rapturous applause and ripping through Normal Person, Rebellion (Lies) and Joan Of Arc.

Win took bottles of water, sipped from them and sent them hurling out into the crowd between tracks and berated the local ‘rich people’ who had complained about the BST gigs when they were announced earlier in the year. He seemed to have finally found a level of comfort as the frontman for one of the biggest bands in the world. Joan Of Arc was followed by three songs from The Suburbs; Rococo, the title track and Ready To Start, before the band dipped back to Funeral for Neighbourhood #1 and Crown Of Love.
After the call to arms that is We Exist they treated me personally to Intervention, an a’capella Antichrist Television Blues and No Cars Go from my favourite album, Neon Bible, before taking to Reflektor tracks. They finished the main set with a powerful version of Sprawl II, Regine performing her art school dance moves and spinning coloured streamers to cheers from the crowd.

With the lights out and the crowd screaming for more a bobble head of the Pope took to the stage to dance to Sympathy For The Devil before the band returned for an encore where Win told the audience to be quiet because the rich people were trying to sleep. The set ended with Wake Up, as they are almost obliged to do. Will Butler smashing his way around the stage before hurling tambourines and microphones into the audience. The crowd were still singing the refrain when the lights came up on our gawking faces and we were shunned towards an exit.

Setlist:
‘Normal Person’
‘Rebellion (Lies)’
‘Joan Of Arc’
‘Rococo’
‘The Suburbs’
‘Ready To Start’
‘Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)’
‘Crown Of Love’
‘We Exist’
‘Intervention’
‘(Antichrist Television Blues)’
‘No Cars Go’
‘Reflektor’
‘Afterlife’
‘It’s Never Over (Oh Orpheus)’
‘Sprawl II’
‘Here Comes The Night Time’
‘Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)’
‘Wake Up’

This week I made a couple of tentative steps into my attempts at becoming a real journo. These involved being invited to the screening of a TV show, drinking too many of the complimentary beers, standing quite close to two men I admire but couldn’t pluck up the balls to talk to and then sitting on my own, at the back of an auditorium, pretending to take notes. You know what I worked out? I fucking love being a journalist.
The series in question was The Mimic, the beer in question was Becks, and the two men were Terry Mynott (who stars as Martin Huddle) and Matt Morgan (who wrote it (and also saw Russell Brand right through his darkest ages)). I admire them because they are both brilliant at what they do, funny and seem approachable, yet, I could not approach them.
I have discovered that the best thing you can do when at a press launch event type thing is pretend you know what everyone is talking about and say the name of your publication as often and as quickly as you can.
“Paul Schiernecker” I muttered to the girls in reception handing out the laminates. “I’m here for WUWO”. I took stock of what I was saying, issuing words like I was Doctor Gonzo with a cigarillo clamped between his grinding jaws, A man walked in front of me in a bike jacket.
“Hi, I’m really sorry but I need to toilet, can I just grab my pass?” he asked. I went to be annoyed, to issue some kind of disdain at being shoved down the line before I realised I was before the very man I was there for. It was Terry Mynott, the mimic, the talent, the man my friend Aislinn had described as being like a good looking version of Dan Skinner. He was there, right in front of me, and he needed a wee. I couldn’t believe it.
The reception girls threw their arms out over their deck, trying to find his pass and then handed it across to him, all crouched and lowly like Gollum. He walked off to the toilets. I stood, amazed.
I’m easily starstruck. I once told Simon Pegg that I wanted to keep my brother in a shed. I once freaked out when Simon Amstell appeared to acknowledge I was a person in a hallway of The Roundhouse. I was once onstage with Joe Pasquale in a pantomime production of Peter Pan. I am not yet cut out for the dizzying heights of being Mikey P (that’s what us journos call Michael Parkinson). I stood like a man possessed and watched someone I had seen on the telly a few times disappear off to the lav. I couldn’t believe I had come so close to an interaction. Maybe it could replace the time I saw Paul Gascoigne in an airport as my celebrity story. No, don’t be too brash Paul, think about what you’re saying!
I then had to repeat my name, annunciating effectively this time so they could dig it out for me. At the top it had a big double line through the words “Victoria Wood – writer”.
Fuck you Dinnerladies, I thought to myself and was ushered down the stairs in to the basement like an errant Fritzl mongrel child.
When I got down there I found a crowd of other unwashed, Converse bedecked and bespectacled writer types awaiting some kind of action. They each sat in a corner of the room which was seemingly impossible to the world of physics because it was a perfect circle. Outside the area was a bar. I got a Becks and sat down, pretending to be engaged in a series of emails I had received offering me Wowcher deals and the opportunity to review my own novel on Amazon.
Then in came the wonderful girls of the PR agency with whom I had received countless emails as they tried to keep the whole show on the road. They were only ever too keen to set things up, point things out and seemed to build a genuine rapport so quickly that it seemed inappropriate. They walked in amongst us like the girls of the Beauxbatons Academy of Magic, Disney critters fluttering between them, a choir of rose-like smells given off by their very presence. Fifteen guts were sucked in, smiles were forced, we aimed to please.
They began working their way around the circle, chatting to the writers on either side of me. I went up to get another beer. There was a strange knot of people stood to one side. Amongst them, now in a t-shirt was Terry, and with him, in a beanie hat and hefty beard was Matt Morgan. This is when I really started to freak out. There was a time, not long enough ago that I am ready to laugh about it, that my good friend Jocasta and I would sit in front of the wireless (a laptop at the end of his bed with some bodacious speakers) and listen to Matt and Russell in their 6 Music days. This was before they got over to Radio 2. It was before Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Sachs-gate and Katy Perry. It felt like they were chatting to us and we were there for them every week. Over the course of the following few days we would also download the podcasts and laugh again at their stupid comments and conversations, their between-track banter (god I hate that word) and their friendship and rapport. It was a very precious time. That’s why seeing one of them in the flesh freaked me out a bit. I had a similar incident when I saw Brand perform at the Cliffs last year and he came near me whilst on the prowl for his after-show feast.
I stood at the bar and pretended to be an actual normal human being and then scurried back to my seat with another bottle in my hand. That’s when the lovely Emma who I have been emailing decided to instigate a conversation. When I told her who I was working for she pointed along the bench at a couple of young rapscallions who were interns for my magazine. I joined them to pretend to know what I was talking about and to explain the strengths of The Mimic over conventional impressions shows. Then we got another beer.
We were ushered into the screening room where I once more shuffled past Terry and Matt, worried I was about to foul the whole thing up by letting my mask slip. I sat in the back with the most revered looking of the journalists and took out my notepad. I wrote THE MIMIC in my blotchy hand at the top of the page and then considered writing something else for over an hour.
The commissioning editor gave a short speech and then we watched the first two episodes. The strange thing about attending an event like that on your own is it feels a bit odd to laugh. Fortunately everyone else was laughing because the second series of The Mimic is even better than the first. The visual and written jokes are back, the voices have grown in quality and volume, the setup for them doesn’t feel as clunky. It’s a great show.
Afterwards everyone applauded, as you naturally have to, and there was a question and answer session. I, naturally didn’t ask anything but tried to capture a couple of the provided anecdotes in note form. As class was dismissed I ducked out again, bowing to anyone who smiled at me and leaving Victoria Wood’s pass with security, I walked back out the door and under the roaming chunks of metal that make up the structural 4 at the front of the building. I was out. I was done.

Two days later I did get to speak to Terry at length as an interview had been setup for us. This time I was prepared. I had good questions about voices and acting and things. To be fair to the man, he knows how to spin a good yarn. His anecdotes were bittersweet and brilliant, he laughed at my attempts at jokes and he even treated me to impressions of Charlie Brooker, Alan Carr and Walter White. I tweeted him which he duly favourited, the social media equivalent of a thumbs up. I will say this much, I’ve been given a glimpse of things to come and I loved it. This is just the tip of the iceberg but I’m ready to veer right for it and kill everyone on board.

Last night I celebrated the launch of my first novel at The Alex in Southend. Here’s my speech:

I was told last night it was a requirement at a book launch to give a speech. Twenty minutes ago I started writing one.
I stand before you tonight as a man who has written a book. Before that, I was a man writing a book and before that still I was a man.
If you haven’t written a book then you are in that position, unless you are a woman, in which case you are still a woman. Regardless of any way you have been chosen to be represented you are full of potential. I would like to dedicate tonight to anyone who is sat on a good idea. I would like to tell you to go for it. It’s only because I am surrounded by such incredible people that I was able to start realising my own potential. I look around this room and see all of you who do.
I would like to thank you for being a part of this, especially Ben for introducing me, to Kate for believing in and for dealing with me in the capacity of both a girlfriend and a carer. To my friends and to my family, especially Robert and Edward who are never entirely aware of how much I am watching them and noting down every stupid word they say in the hopes I can turn it into literature.
I would like you to raise a toast to The Stamp Collective.