THE DEEP POOL TRAIN TRAIN A month of going here and there to record for new projects. First back to the one and only Bryn Derwen Studio, close to the town of Bethesda in North Wales, on the western side of Snowdonia. This is always a kind of homecoming for me, the landscape reminding me of both Argyll and Fife, and the people who work and live there being true and good friends. Sadly i cannot increase my carbon brogueprint and fly there - well, you could fly to John Lennon airport in Liverpool and take the small train to Chester and change, but by the time you've got to an airport that goes to Liverpool you may as well have just sat on the five hour Virgin train journey in the 'Quiet Class' coach, in which you are most likely to get a seat. Jubilation amongst all long distance train passengers like myself to hear that, as one of his first smiting acts of government Gordon Brown has taken away the Cross-Country Operating Franchise from Virgin Trains, to, i hope, their great shock and horror. Sadly he's given it to Arriva, known in the rail trade as Non Arriva, who are even worse than Virgin, but that's hardly the point. Anyone who suffered through the first years of Virgin Trains' existence will, like me, never forgive them for the endless trauma of hanging around in the rain in a siding outside Stoke On Trent on one of their stinking broken-down trains, over and over and over and over, listening to their stupid dishonest excuses: 'we're held up by a slow-moving goods train in front of us - a local train has broken down - there's a psychotic cabbage on the line holding a mouldy leaf to a Polish plumber's throat - a member of the crew, due to join the train at Ashby De La Zouche has unexpectedly won the National Lottery and told us to fuck right off and shove our job up our collective arse'. The list was endless - passengers would take bets on which excuse they were going to use, but we all knew the truth which was they were running the 'service' (ha!) as cheaply as possible so they could lie around in the Maldives having a wank. I was once (stop me if you've heard this) on a Virgin train going to Bristol on Christmas Eve. Naturally it was mobbed with people, tired, fractious and anxious to get home. At Birmingham New Street station, the train stopped and we were told that the journey was cancelled and that we'd have to complete our journey(s) on 'local trains.' Many passengers were beyond furious and luckily some of them were Sloane Rangers who were not prepared to take this shit - usually it's me who loses it and comes close to a custodial sentence, whereas Sloanes can largely lose it with impunity. We all got off the train as commanded and a couple of middle-aged Sloane geezers in canary-coloured cords and blue blazers grabbed hold of a genuinely startled Virgin slave on the platform, one of the Sloanes saying 'What the fucking hell is wrong with the train?' The guy was so shocked that he accidentally told the truth. 'We need the engine for a more important service' he spluttered as he was walked backwards up to a pillar. 'A MORE IMPORTANT SERVICE ?- WHAT THE FUCKING HELL DOES THAT MEAN?' yelled the enraged lead Sloane. I noticed other Virgin slaves who were initially coming to the guy's rescue stop further down the platform and decide they had something better to do - maybe wrap up Christmas presents for relatives in Australia. 'We need the engine for the London Euston service'. Difficult to imagine a more infuriating statement for Cotswold-bound Sloanes to have to hear on Christmas Eve on a platform of the worst major train station in the entire world after having been told they could fuck off by a train service fronted by a geezer who they consided to be nothing less than a bearded grinning lying conman. 'If YOU, yes YOU PERSONALLY don't ensure that this train gets moving NOW i'm going to rip your fucking cock off'. Yes, Sloanes can really get to the nub of the matter when the red Virgin mist comes down.By this time the other Sloanes in the gang had radicalised the whole platform of fellow sufferers - 'did you hear what this bastard just said about why the train's stopped?' 'I was fascinated, especially as i knew i'd been close to violence myself and was sorely afraid of spending Christmas Day in Steelhouse Lane Jail - a terrifying place i know only too well from nearly half a century ago. Suddenly senior Virgin management figures appeared - i'm absolutely intrigued by how such things happen - presumably one of the turncoat Virgin underlings had had the nous to go and inform the executive canteen that a 'major incident, the type of which we have feared for some time, is now taking place on Platform 7B' Sir, SIR!' one of the senior exec types was shouting at the lead frothing Sloane - PLEASE put our employee down or we will be forced to call the Railway police'. 'You're going to fucking well need a lot of them if we don't get home tonight you shit' seethed lead Sloane. Shit, by the way, in the world of Sloane is a really serious thing to call someone. 'He's a shit' - if you say this to fellow trusting Sloanes of someone, there's just no coming back as far as those folk will be concerned. 'I think there's been a big misunderstanding' exclaimed lead exec, other nodding their heads furiously, everyone having to shout as a tannoy voice intoned - 'WILL THE PERSON SMOKING ON PLATFORM 4C PLEASE EXTINGUISH THEIR SMOKING MATERIALS IMMEDIATELY - BIRMINGHAM NEW STREET STATION IS CLASSIFIED AS AN UNDERGROUND STATION AND SMOKING IS PROHIBITED IN ANY PART OF THE STATION INCLUDING THE PLATFORMS' over another voice saying 'WE ARE SORRY TO ANNOUNCE THAT THE 18 44 VIRGIN TRAINS SERVICE TO BRISTOL TEMPLE MEADS HAS BEEN CANCELLED - WE ARE VERY SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE THIS MAY CAUSE TO YOUR JOURNEY - PLEASE LISTEN FOR FURTHER ANNOUNCEMENTS.' That was our train, so mayhem broke out all over again with increasing severity. 'THE TRAIN WILL BE LEAVING BIRMINGHAM IN TEN MINUTES - WE ARE JUST BRINGING OVER A REPLACEMENT ENGINE AS FAST AS WE POSSIBLY CAN!' shouted chief exec. 'Well you better fucking stay RIGHT HERE till that happens - in fact you better get on the fucking train with US!' I wanted to get this Sloane's name and address and start a fan club - it was the voice that won and lost an entire empire, and it was going to get me home tonight after all... Back in the future, i left my Virgin train at Crewe (byee!!) and walked over to get the train to Chester. Because the Virgin train was of course late, i only just made it onto the Chester train. There were only two seats left, next to each other. I threw myself on one of them in a puffing sweating heap and noticed that on the seat next to me there was a paisley pattern umbrella which i was sure had been left behind by a pretty teenage girl who was bustling to leave the carriage. In gallant style i thought 'i've just got time to run and give this brolly to her before the doors close and we take off'. I picked up the brolly with great affirmation - as i did so my hand was covered in something wet and warm. I looked down - the chick had been sick into the brolly, possibly a kebab followed by scotch broth, eaten quite recently, and that's why she was in a hurry to distance herself from the rain defeating object. I sat for the rest of the journey with fellow passenger looking round, saying 'phoo! - what's that stink?', but in Northern accents. At Chester i rinsed my arm in the station toilet, watched by an old fella holding a bottle of Magner's, the shit new Irish cider beloved of people who don't really drink - this guy was a clear exeption to the rule. I then went out and sat on one end of a bench on the platform, waiting for the Bangor train - there was a young iPodded geezer sitting on the other end sort of singing along with his machine - 'Nnngggaaacozyorrabiiiitch' seemd to be the mainstay of the work. Suddenly he got up and the whole bench tilted my way and threw me off the end. I lay there in a heap while heartless Welsh people laughed - one of them said - 'Hey! that's the guy that smelled of sick on the other train!' Later that night me and David Wrench, my co-producer, engineer and soul-mate, sat in the Douglas Hotel in Bethesda, enjoying a desultory talk with landlady Christine while drinking a fantastic local beer called Old Slate Miner's Final Agony. Then we got on to talking about one of my favourite poets, Osip Mandelstam - generally thought to be Russian, but in fact Polish. I'm about to send David a little known book by Mandelstam called 'Journey To Armenia' in which every sentence is a stand alone work of art. My most treasured personal review is by someone who said of the Sir Vincent Lone song 'The Lights Below' - 'every single line tells an entire story'. Some lines from the 'Armenia 'book: 'I don't know how it is with others, but for me the charm of a woman increases if she is a young traveller, has spent five days lying on a hard bench of the Tashkent train, knows her way around Linnaean Latin, knows which side she is on in the dispute between the Lamarckians and the epigeneticists, and is not indifferent to the soybean, cotton, or chicory'. Or: - 'When i was a child a stupid sort of touchiness, a false pride, kept me from ever going out to look for berries or stooping down over mushrooms. Gothic pinecones and hypocritical acorns in their monastic caps pleased me more than mushrooms. I would stroke the pinecones. They would bristle. They were trying to convince me of something. In their shelled tenderness, in their geometrical gaping i sensed the rudiments of architecture, the demon of which has accompanied me throughout my life'. In blazingly beautiful weather i returned home by train the other day from Dartmoor in the west of England, where i had been recording with another soul-mate - long time collaborator Michael Cosgrave. We'd had a gin and tonic in his garden whilst laughing about David Cameron and his ludicrous soundbite speech, in which certain phrases which he uses repeatedly have exactly the same cadence every time - to reinforce the message you see? - just in case you didn't get it first time round cos you were thinking about something else, like - 'why is he speaking in that funny voice?' I changed trains at Axminster, a sleepy town in east Devon. I was the only person on the platform for twenty minutes. Suddenly with five minutes to go until the next train arrived, about forty Sloanes of all ages and sizes arrived. When the train did arrive i got in the very back carriage, well away from them. I don't mind them in the slightest, but they always show off like mad in the company of non-U people like myself, or look at you as if you're nothing more than a brolly full of hot sick. Typically they all waded into my carriage and started shouting about absent friends - 'Where's Molly at the moment?' 'She's in Thailand for a bit'. Sloanes don't go on holiday - they go to places 'for a bit'. A twinkly old lad with a drinks trolley started to move through the train speaking in that funny sibilant way these folk always do - 'Crisssspsss, sssandwichesssss, ssssofttt ddrinkssss, beersssss'. A middle-aged lead Sloane bloke bought some lagers from him and said 'look, can you just stay here and sort of be our bar? - we're going all the way to London, so i'm sure we'll be buying lots from you'. Save you some trouble and save us having to come and find you!' Put like that it seemd like an eminently sensible idea from a Sloane perspective, but the old trolley boy had an agenda of his own. 'We-ell, oi cants really bi doin' tha' - therr moight be other folks what need to eat an' drink as well y'see, so oi got a move orf down the train'. 'Oh, i see, erm, well - will you be coming back?' Oi turns round at Crewkerne, then oi'll be back 'ere boi Salisbury'. 'Oh, well, i suppose that'll have to do' said folorn Sloane, all his mates twisting their faces with the sheer injustice of not having their very own drinks servant. I was leaving the train myself at Salisbury. I noticed on the platform when i alighted, that my fellow alighters were a rugged lot, anxious young sailors going to Portsmouth, Southampton football fans returning from intense counselling sessions for depression, tattooed women with toddlers, on the phone saying 'you WILL be fucking sorry when Lennie catches up with ya'. The Sloanes looked at us from the train with a mixture of fake pity and morbid fascination. All except lead Sloane, who was losing his temper with trolleyman because he'd run out of lager. -----------------------------------------------------------------------Reading: ----------------------------------------------------------------------- |
|