Notting Hill Diary

Ed holds an imaginary falcon (Tom Armitage)

My poor throbbing fingers
The problem with playing guitar now for Rotten Hill Gang is that I don’t get to play very much of my first instrument, which is bass. Wild Boar’s music is fast and furious, so whenever we play (if we do two gigs in a year that’s tour in our books), the callouses on my right hand are starting from scratch and my first and second fingers develop serious sub dermal bruises at best and on a really good night, out and out bleeding.

This isn’t usually a seriously problem because my throbbing digits usually have a few months to return to normal size, but, for the first time ever, our storming gig last Tuesday at the Scala (kindly reviewed by Yasmin Selena Butt here), we’re playing again within a week and in another first, we have an hour long set to play.

This is a recipe for the tips of my fingers to become completely shredded, but historically, a basis for judgement as to the success of a WB gig has been how many members of the band have ended up with blood on their instruments. On one notorious night at Nektar all four of us donated to the cause.

The Blag - althogether too chi-chi for my taste

Look I’ll be nice about the Blag and admit that it just isn’t my kind of a place. If I want to buy a beer, I want it in a pint glass, I want a decent selection of beers and I don’t want to pay more than the average price of a pint to get just over half a pint.

But then I suppose beer isn’t what this bar is about and they do seem to employ proper bar staff who know how to make proper drinks. I suppose what I’m getting at is that it’s possible to combine the two. Ruby’s on All Saints Road make great cocktails and still manages to server beer in pints at normal prices. Could that be why Ruby’s is nearly always buzzing, while on both Friday and Saturday nights, the Blag entertained a maximum of approximately 25 patrons?

That aside, the management, bar staff and security are all very friendly and helpful and the music, a selection of “the sort of thing you’d expect to hear in a bar like that” good, if far from ground breaking (the Rotten Hill Gang set aside of course ). So despite my reservations, I’d perversely recommend the place to anyone who “likes that sort of thing”. Which is lucky really, because I see from our myspace page that we’re playing there again on November 21!

Cor it’s busy for us at the moment isn’t it? Nice that all these people keep asking us to play.

I’ll try to remember to announce them all one by one here, but you can see the full schedule on our seriously in need of updating myspace page.

I’ve never been to the Blag before (it’s the Kensal Road one, not the Notting Hill one) so I’ll take this opportunity to review the club while I’m there, albeit from a slightly strange angle. It’ll be about as objective as my writings about Carnival

Join in if you know the chorus!

Axx

The Blag Club
222 Kensal Road
London W10 5BN

Yes, yes I know the Scala is in Kings Cross, but the point is that Wild Boar are a local band. It’s Ed Harcourt’s bizarre side project that’s … oh hear for yourself. I’m playing bass.

We’re supporting “Hush the Many” Nima’s new band, “Arrows of Love”.

There’s an unlimited, though paying, guest list. Anyone who wants to go just drop me a note and I’ll sort it out.

Axx

Sobriety can be its own high

No more bouncer related stories for a while please
OK enough moaning about door staff. Here’s new of an event taking place at Inn on the Green on Valentine’s day next year, a place a place where door staff is never an issue and a friendly welcome always guaranteed.

A short while ago a chap (or possibly chapess I guess, I never did ask*) named Cal posted a comment to my item on The Duke of Wellington, pointing out that locals still call it Finches.

Clean parties?
What interested me was the link back to his site (and remember all links from here are nofollow free) about his clean parties. I don’t know much about them apart from the fact that they run occasional parties at which the pumps are covered. That’s right, they charge you to get in and then don’t let you drink any alcohol (or of course anything naughtier).

But surely that’s nuts!
On the face of it I can see that that sounds like a crazy business plan. Valentine’s day next year falls on a Saturday and you wouldn’t think that any bar would have to try very hard to fill up that night, but I urge you to visit their site. I think it’s a brilliant idea! After all the competition is tough and every other bar in town will be - well - serving alcohol. I’m sure there are enough people around who just don’t want to drink, for whatever reason, and don’t want to be around people who do want to drink.

I myself have been experimenting with sobriety recently
It’s quite a feeling to leave a bar or club late at night absolutely sober. I don’t mean any feeling of superiority over or condecension towards your peers, just that it’s amazing to see the streets not through an alcoholic fuzz, but through clear eyes. It probably only applies if you’ve regularly experienced the dizzy opposite, but sobriety is in a way its own high. Plus if everybody else isn’t drinking, you don’t feel like you have to as well.

I’m not advocating it as a lifestyle necessarily. I realise that at the moment I’m dangerously below the recommended glass or so of red wine a day and have much catching up to do. I’m just saying that a few non drinking weeks or even days can be a revelation and I recommend that you incorporate one of Cal’s clean parties into your drink free diet at some point.

*Cal is of the bloke persuasion.

Of course the irony is that the ads served up on this page are bound to be to do with pubs!

Correction! Google’s cleverer thanI thought and is serving up alcohol addiction ads.

Writing about security at the Paradise bar on Friday reminded me of a night at Sin of Charring Cross Road a few months back. I can only assume that the bouncers there are friends of those at Paradise.

Sin isn’t somewhere I’d go to through choice, but some friends and I were invited to an aftershow for a band whose name I’ve forgotten (might have been CSS, but don’t quote me!). I was there with some friends from Sweden whom I hardly see and who were flying off in the morning, so this was my last chance.

I was tired and desperate to leave for about 30 minutes before I fell asleep on the bench seat I was sitting on. I woke up to a tap on the shoulder from a bouncer who said “Time to leave mate!”, which I thought was fair enough in all honesty, it’s not a good look for a bar to have people sleeping in it. I said “Sure, I’ll just say bye to my wife”, which he was fine with, then I gave one of my Swedish friends a hug and on the way out, stopped to kiss another one good bye.

What I couldn’t see was that in addition to the bouncer leading me out, quite peacefully, 5 others had amassed behind me. They pulled my friend away very roughly and frog marched me down the stairs. At one point one of the shouted at me “Stop struggling!”. I wasn’t, it’s just that with 6 gorillas carrying and pushing me down the stairs I was having trouble finding my footing. When we got to the bottom they literally threw me out into Charring Cross Road to stumble in front of a queue of people waiting to get in. Kind of humiliating! Well it would have been if I didn’t have a better sense of humour.

As they were dragging me downstairs, my friend, a rather slight girl, asked why they were being so rough with both of us and, as one, they told her to “Fuck off!”. She left it at that, but shortly afterwards they threw her out and a little later on they pushed the guy that had invited us in the first place down the stairs so hard that he had to go to hospital the next days because he had a suspected fracture of the arm. It turned out to be a badly pulled tendon.

Yes I know this has nothing to do with Notting Hill, but sometimes I just write about what’s on my mind.

Paradise by Way of Kensal Green

Somehow I never did get round to reviewing this place properly. I’ve thought about why that might be. After all it’s a perfectly nice place to go, the drinks prices are good, the restaurant gets great reviews and upstairs is one of the few bar like venues for bands to play in the area.

We (Rotten Hill Gang) played there on Friday at Gus’s “Great Brain Robbery”, which I’ve been to a few times as documented elsewhere. I highly recommend any night that Gus puts on by the way.

Our set was great, if a little chaotic (and let’s hope that never changes), enhanced by the fact that just as we went on somebody noticed that Ronnie Wood had turned up, although not, it has to be said, to see us, but Saint Jude, who were on after us.

The main problem with the Paradise bar is the door and security staff, who seem to believe that they’re in some movie about clubs in the mid 80s, when door staff were at their worst. Nothing puts a downer on an evening more than getting unnecessary attitude on the door from humourless animals who give the impression that they’re doing YOU a favour by allowing you to spend money at the establishment.

Once inside, the feeling is very much one of being followed everywhere by burly men with walkie talkies as if the Berlin Wall had never fallen and you’re a visitor to some Eastern European military installation. In the past I’ve known of people getting beaten up outside, allegedly by the door staff. TONE IT DOWN LADS! I’ve already decided to visit the place as little as I can and I know of at least two promoters who’ve vowed to move their nights elsewhere as soon as possible.

Footnote: I’ve since found out that a friend of mine got punched twice in the face HARD (I saw the evidence last night) by once of the bouncers as he was leaving because he had the audacity to ask if his girlfriend could pop back inside to fetch his jacket.