It was Thursday 12th March 2020, a fortnight before things got serious on the Covid front, when I was invited to the press launch of Q Shoreditch: a new pool club cum cocktail bar in a swish casino-style setting on East London's Tabernacle Street, as far removed as can be from the dingy snooker clubs I'm better used to.

I readily accepted the invite, being a life-long cuesports fan (blogged a few years ago about meeting Ronnie O'Sullivan, and tweeted only last week my Crucible ticket for the cancelled World Championship, and having to settle instead for a BBC rerun of an old Steve Davis match.)

Handily for me I was already in town that afternoon for a Puressential press conference at The Ivy (eat your heart out Alan Partridge) so was able to arrive early doors for the Shoreditch opening, which I also made sure of knowing a certain former six-time World Championship snooker finalist (and my mum's favourite ever player) was in attendance for the evening.

As it's been a while since my last blog post, and because they tend to be mostly music-orientated these days, I thought I'd expound my favourite tracks of the 2010s, before we get too far into the new decade.

The 10s was a cultural timespan so fully immersed in the digital era that half of any new music you listen tends to go under most other people's radars, the last hurrah of the singles chart being so far into the past now you'd need a Hubble-strength telescope to detect its dying rays.
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Nowadays my main sources are BBC 6 Music, as ever; Radio 2 (!) occasionally; otherwise random tweeted recommendations from friends and those I'm following, and around the summer festival period I'll peruse music websites for the lowdown on bands I've just come across or am about to see. Nothing from TV, nor from an equivalent to NME, which is quite sad when I think about it, compared to the pre-internet era of MTV when it actually played videos and the music press when the alt scene was thriving.

New acts aside, heritage artists like Metallica and the late Leonard Cohen have still been producing the goods, to my ears, although I can't see that continuing much longer.

The final cut is an unholy mix of (mainly) alternative, indie, metal, post-punk & electronica, but also some classical, reggae, trip-hop and African jazz-funk. There’s a few not included only because they’re not on Spotify, like a bonus track from Bowie’s 'The Next Day' in 2013, which proves why the app can’t always be relied upon.
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Got my hands on a review copy of LoC - the dramatised examination of seminal Norwegian black metal band Mayhem - released last week on DVD. 

​As a lifelong metal fan I’m well acquainted with the story of these church-burning nutjobs (while never having got round to reading the eponymous book) so to finally see a filmic representation of what went down was certainly an eye opener, and not wholly in a positive way.   
 
I thought I’d fire off some thoughts on the movie and its cast/director, what was good about it but mainly where it all went a bit wrong. The former can be summed up in its being visually decent - slickly produced and edited – which is no surprise considering director Jonas Åkerlund’s history of music videos for the likes of Rammstein, Ozzy and Metallica (not to mention J-Lo, Pink and Lady Gaga!).
 
There were also some genuine lols punctuating the film, derived chiefly from the middle-class suburban situations of these cod-Satanic black metallers, like the little sis peeping and guffawing at the band rehearsing in the family home basement.

​We've all had one of those nights, be it a party or, in this case, a gig, where the whole affair is punctuated by a series of bizarre incidents, when you can't predict what else is going to happen but know that something definitely will, with alcohol usually the culprit. I had such a quintessential one of these last Saturday that I had to relate it in a blog post for posterity.

It all began with the suggestion from my 60s music-loving mate Pete that we go and see 'Cosmic Charlies' at Fiddler's Elbow in Camden, the band being "Europe's premier Grateful Dead tribute" est. 1988 and the venue a dive pub near Chalk Farm Station, in its own words "a classic, no-nonsense, retro live music venue".

What made this an attractive proposition is that Pete is a proper 'Deadhead', having seen the real deal a couple times in the 60s & 70s, and he rated the Charlies - had even bumped into fellow Deadheads at their shows who were at the same concerts fifty years ago. So for me, having listened to a lot of Grateful Dead over the years and knowing that it was more about the  'live experience' with them, this would be the closest I could get to it, surely.

After roping in mutual muso mate Gordon, 10 years older than me and 20 younger than Pete, and equally beguiled by the Dead's legacy, we assembled in nearby retro bar Joe's for pre-beers, ​where Pete primed us by waxing nostalgic on the quasi-religious communal experience of the Dead's often 7-hour sets, plus how he once climbed up the scaffolding tower at one of the big outdoor shows while off his face before remembering that he hated heights and couldn't work out how to get down. Tonight would have a lot to live up to.
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​I've had some pretty crappy days over the past couple of years, but last week had one of the worst of my whole life, and funnily enough after my recent police-themed post breaking a long hiatus it was a police officer who made a fleeting cameo in my afternoon and was instrumental in fucking it up. 

The backstory is that since leaving the force I haven't had much use for my battered old Ford Fiesta that now sits forlornly outside my house, waiting to be called into action again. After being driven only a couple of times in the preceding six months - to pick up my late dad from hospital then later help clear out his pad - it was needed again for a short-notice work assignment, which meant having to jump the flat battery.

​No problem: my one local mate Andy (a driving instructor, who taught me to drive) was able to swing by during his work break with jump leads, and after we hooked up our engines mine instantly spluttered into life along with the radio and alarm with a turn of the ignition. Happy at the painlessness of the procedure, I went back into the house after waving Andy off to gather my stuff and lock up, leaving the engine running because of course if I switched it off it wouldn't start up again due to low battery level.

Incredibly, however, in the space of those few minutes a random passer-by on my quiet residential street actually got into my car and grabbed the keys - but he wasn't a thief. I heard the engine cut off while closing my front door and looked around to see a man opening my front gate with my car keys in one hand and an opened police badge in the other.

​"You know that leaving your engine running is illegal sir," he admonished while handing over the keys. "And anyone could drive off with it?".

This is just a post of recognition of the fact that there's been a gap of more than a year since my last, which is owing to an eventful year-long career change that has come to an end and a lot of other life stuff that's been going on that's kept me away from recreational writing. However I'm now back in the game and will be posting again soon, as well as adding some new pictures and videos and having a general update.

​It turned out that my day with the police as a civilian observer became a full year wearing the uniform - more to come on the highs and lows of that when the time is right. It's safe to say for the time being that I have a major newfound respect for the police after experiencing first-hand what the job entails and the impact it has on your life and those around you.

​So it's back to the writing board for now, and reminiscing through episodes of Police Interceptors.

Until later.
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It was early December, 1995, a Saturday evening, and my parents had gone away on holiday, leaving me the sole occupier of the family home for a week. As a burgeoning rebellious teenager that meant only one thing: inviting the lads from sixth form round for a Saturday-night session of beers, smoke and music, specifically the stuff we’d recently been getting into: The Beatles, The Kinks, anything that had influenced the Britpop movement which had crested that summer with the Blur .v. Oasis chart showdown.

Little did we know there was another British artist who’d had a major influence on both those indie heavyweights: Oasis were to cover Heroes as a B-side two years later while Blur faced legal intervention the same year after their single M.O.R was found to bear more than a striking resemblance to Boys Keep Swinging (Eno & David later received a joint songwriting credit for the track).

Back in my hazy living room that evening we were all well aware of Bowie as a musician, although he hadn’t quite made it onto our session A-list. Only two years previously I’d bought my first single of his – Jump They Say – enamoured by its funked-up Nile Rodgers vibes, chorus guitar wail and jazzy trumpet solo, all contrasting the morbid lyrical content. As my teenage ears were more attuned to modern production values it was tracks like this, rather than Changes, Space Oddity etc, that floated my boat. Appreciation of the older stuff would surely follow, but for now it would all be kept in the back seat even longer by what we experienced that evening.

​To escape one of our worst early summers of recent years I visited Seville and Cadiz in Andalusia for the first time last month, just in time for the weather in southern Spain to hit the other extreme, of often unbearable 40+ degree heat – the Spanish version of a heatwave.

However my week there was made a whole lot cooler by two random animal-themed incidents on the first and last day which perfectly captured the vibe of the place.
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THE PEACOCK

Without going into too much detail about the city, Seville’s biggest cultural draw is its 14th-century Moorish palace called The Alcázar, where the mrs and I decided to visit on our first morning before the afternoon heat took hold. Unfortunately that’s what hundreds of other tourists had opted to do too, so in we bundled with the queuing hordes to wander the ancient halls and courtyards.

After an hour of having to muscle in on photo vantage points I decided to escape the herds, grab a coffee and stroll solo around the quiet shaded area of the outdoor gardens while Jen continued inside, as she wanted to find the spots where Game of Thrones had been filmed. It turned out to be one of the better holiday decisions I've ever made.

​Charity shops have generally been a happy hunting ground for me over the years. At least half of my book and record collection, and a fair few wardrobe items, can trace their lineage to Marie Curies and Faras across the land.

​In this post-recession retail landscape they've proliferated more than ever, often occupying empty high street spaces no sooner have they been vacated, attracted as ever by heavily discounted business rates. 

​Whenever I’m on a weekend away or assignment in another part of the country I’ll always duck into one if there’s time to kill, in pursuit of another random find, be it a pair of vintage flares or an old Beano annual.

Celebrity fatalities generally leave me cold and unresponsive but, as with the demises of Kurt Cobain and Freddie Mercury  22 and 25 years ago, David Bowie's death last week was one of the few that did impart a slight wrenching effect, in a breakfast radio switch-on moment that'll now be ingrained in my memory until my own end.
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It was the abrupt nature of the news, following the unmentioned cancer, and because he was so enduring - I'd actually predicted he would headline Glastonbury this year following the new album release which turned out to be his final words, and was cursing my luck even more at being abroad and missing the tickets boat again.

However while last Monday began grimmer than most January weeks ever could, it actually became rosier as the day continued, with wall-to-wall Bowie tracks on BBC6, a monsoon of memories and commemoration online, and just going through all my albums, photos and video clips, all work plans shelved.

By the end of the week, however, I'd consumed so many similarly worded tribute pieces as to have reached saturation point, a feeling nailed by David Baddiel who tweeted on Friday:

​After last month's day with the police dealing with some of London's more unsavoury characters, this month I spent six days on a press trip to Israel with someone who was in many ways a lot worse, to the point that the Israeli guards' guns (pictured) looked increasingly attractive as the week drew on. (*To clarify, I don't have the full data on Britain's bullshitters but he's indisputably the biggest I've ever met.)

The background to this is that you often have to spend press trips with other journalists, and as many PR people will tell you: “There’s always one in every group...(making) the trip less enjoyable for everyone else".  Step forward - 'Stan', which is as close to his real name without fully revealing it.

All I know about Stan is he used to work for a red-top tabloid before losing his job, not long after somehow being shortlisted for 'Reporter of the Year' - something he mentioned at least four times during the week. His most immediately prominent physical attribute though was his grating, unintelligible northern accent: a nasal babble somewhere between a sped-up Liam Gallagher and that Lancashire girl off The Apprentice a few years back.   

​Last week I had a much more exciting day than the usual shift at my writing desk, after being permitted to shadow a Metropolitan Police response unit for an afternoon and evening in central London, as part of the police ride-along scheme.
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After meeting my sergeant contact at Paddington Green Station I went through a series of checks and disclaimers – understandably a fair bit of bureaucracy involved due to the potential dangers – then was fitted with a bulletproof vest and invited into the daily group briefing before officers’ shifts begin.

Ride-alongs have generally been more widespread a scheme in the United States, however UK police forces have recently become keener to implement the practice here, perhaps due to lapses of public trust in law enforcement.
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It presents an unobstructed view of a police shift – dealing with offenders and victims, statement taking, arrests, even the form-filling back at the station if you’re that interested. As a fan of police procedural TV shows – BBC’s The Met by chance the most recent – the opportunity of being a solo spectator in a live and unedited episode was never going to be refused.