Sideways at SXSE: Part II
Once again... all the characters and events are fictionalised and any resemblance to persons real or historical is entirely coincidental.
Sunday 13th April, 2025.
When my eyes fearfully opened to confront the world, I saw Tabby getting ready to leave. My head was reeling from all the sunlight pounding upon the windows.
“I feel bad about leaving but I have so much packing to do,” she said while hastily stuffing her belongings into her tote bag. The luggage for her week-long holiday to Italy – which she was leaving tomorrow for – still sat empty. “I underestimated how much time I have to get it all done! You guys have fun though!”
Then there were only two…
I looked my watch to check the time and found a small black ghost stamped on my hand; then a flood of insane and warbling memories from last night came flooding. Oh god!
There was a torridness in Eliza’s manner which went beyond the simple effects of a hangover. Though the events at The Windmill last night had debilitated her, she was no less determined to see the rest of this weekend through.
Over a vodka cranberry and a joint for breakfast, we gathered up our scattered wits to prepare us for the day ahead.
“What are the chances we run into him again today?” I asked her diplomatically.
“I d’nt know. House Arrest are playing so he might be there. He might also go see Adamczewski. But then he wasn’t at the festival yesterday… who knows?”
An avalanche had soundlessly settled on Eliza’s soul through the night and the events of the day promised few implements to dig her out from under this snow.
Too tarnished by my hangover to care, I wore yesterday’s clothes. Eliza on the other hand went for a purple mesh top over blue jeans.
“Does this jacket make me look like Alan Ginsberg?” she said with nasally irony after putting on a brown corduroy blazer and striking a distinctly academic pose.
“Yeah, get on stage today and start reciting Howl at the top of your lungs.”
Inadvertently we’d achieved wearing the same outfit but in different fonts. Both wore leather shoes; hers DMs, mine Cuban heels. Both wore jeans; hers blue, mine yellow. Both wore some sort of slim-fitting jacket. Both had nails painted; hers blue, mine purple.
Even the day was of a very different tenor compared to yesterday’s. Gone was the blazing sun, replaced by portentous clouds which threatened to dump the Pacific Ocean over our heads. Something fetid was in the air today, as if no amount of distance or speed could take you away from the foulness that arose from your soul.
As we approached The Old Dip (I’ll revert back to its proper name now that Tabby isn’t here), our hangovers really set in. Our limbs were difficult to move, as if the Earth’s core had grown denser just that very moment. My stomach felt like a washing machine on a spin cycle with a brick thrown in.
Doctor Doctor were up on stage playing the kind of music that would send any sickness over the edge. There was something brilliantly haunting in their appearance; from their sunglasses to both guitarists playing Vox Phantoms and the bassist floating around the stage like a listless wraith. They looked like understudies to the grim reaper roaming the desert; an impression carried further by the deep-fried-fuzz of their music. On their 2023 self-titeld EP there are unmistakable hoofprints of spaghetti western and desert blues across their arid musical landscape. Portentous basslines and shuffling drumming speak of impending dehydration while the guitars are overdriven to the point of sounding like whip cracks across stone. Other tacks are an exercise in destructive amplification where the tempo and rhythm become as deranged as the flagellation of their instruments; all in an attempt to see how far the equipment can be pushed while it still sounds musical.
There was hardly any room in the crowd for us to move. Every thwack on the drum kit and each violent strum of the guitar violently rattled the screws that tenuously held us together. We couldn’t hack it. With a drink in hand, we sat on the bench out front and appreciated the music from afar.
Aaron, who’d been speaking to someone, finally noticed our despondent picnic. Cosplaying as the can of Guinness he poured into a plastic glass, Aaron with an E was wearing an all-black combination of jeans, trainers, t-shirt, and a hoodie. We were making small talk when he spotted someone approach us and said, “Here he is! All good Fents?”
Was that…? He had Fenton’s rough-worn face and thick brows, but his most distinguishing feature was replaced by a flat mop of hair that rested over his forehead like a small, sleeping animal. Suggesting that his mohawk has a will of its own, not only did he look but he also felt like a different person. More soft-spoken than usual. His hands buried timidly deep within the pockets of his green hoodie.
“Oi Fenton you got a haircut,” said multiple people from nearby conversations. In fact, people from numerous clusters of conversations were recognising each other, butting in for a quick hello. Same thing was happening outside Dash the Henge across the street. They all made the chit-chat of those who were bumping into each other out and about in the neighbourhood. Even though most of these people live nowhere near here, these are still their ends.
Pretty soon the Hyperdense duo were gone, whisked away by strangers who we simultaneously longed to meet and wanted no part of.
Eliza nudged me on the arm and gestured towards the man in a herringbone blazer to the right of us. It was impossible not to recognise him; the hollow eyes, his gaunt face, a head of hair like an eraser-tipped pencil, and the missing tooth made sure of that. People were stealing furtive glances his way, just like us; and what’s more, he was basking in our searchlights. The air of inflamed celebrity that rose vaporous off his shoulders was attracting casual nods of recognition from everyone. The man in question was Saul Adamczewski; one half of Insecure Men, with his own solo career, and perhaps most infamously, former guitarist of the Fat White Family. This unhinged band of provocateurs are driven by an immortal perversity that slaps the stale methods of the music industry like an ice cream out of a child’s hand. Their fourth and most recent album Forgiveness Is Yours (2024) is the first one recorded without Saul, but his time with the band has cemented his notorious reputation. The band’s crazed history is recounted by frontman Lias Saoudi and writer Adele Stripe in Ten Thousand Apologies (2022), which also happens to be the same book I misplaced after a particularly undisciplined drinking bout at a private view. Funnily enough, Eliza is the friend whom that book belonged to, given to her by señor unmentionable. Apologies for the unwelcome recurrence of this unnameable character.
Adding to the implicit deference everyone was paying Saul is the fact that the Fat White Family are a scene band that “came up”. They started out playing in places like Queen’s Head and The Windmill in Brixton – regular haunts of the SE London music scene. Seeing them graduate from the pub circuit to doing headline gigs at Troxy and other music halls around the country is a proud sight for anyone in the scene. So Saul’s presence at SXSE, among his would-be contemporaries, was very much that of a prodigal son returning home for a family dinner.
Any band that manages to break through the endless middle of their local music scene and propel themselves onto the touring circuit are held in high esteem by their listeners. Their upward struggle accords them the kind of legitimacy an industry plant doesn’t have. To an extent, these musicians are even deified by their former scenes, representing the fabulous fruition of their aspirations. Well if Fat White Family, Fat Dog, black midi, Squid, or Goat Girl can do it, then so can we!
Eliza reckons that given a year or two, bands currently in the scene like House Arrest, or Man/Woman/Chainsaw will be on the bill for Wide Awake Festival. When considering that Jeanie and the White Boys and Us are playing Glastonbury in a matter of months, everything is possible! The well-paved path leading them there is to support more established musical acts. Enough people turn up to catch the support that some kind of an audience is guaranteed. It seems that everyone is simply supporting someone bigger than them…
“BRUNOOOOO!” yelled Eliza to a spindly man in a flat cap with silvering facial scruff crossing the street. He smiled and waved at her, getting out of the way of a passing Fiat. “Everybody knows Brunoooooo,” Eliza yelled back, to which he laughed easily.
Something in his manner suggested the security of someone who owns multiple properties. I asked who this Bruno person was, to which I got a dastardly answer.
“I went to a party once,” she said while taking slow gulps of her Guinness, “and Bruno was there and I was wondering who’s this random man at a party full of university students – like potentially some of them are freshers. Turns out he’s this bloke who just spends all the money he’s raking in going out every single night of the week to gigs and parties and he would just buy drugs. I remember this girl who came up and said ‘Bruno where’s the ket?’. He pointed and said ‘it’s over there’ and she just casually took it outside. And I was drinking water at this party and he was like ‘what you doing’ and I was like ‘drinking water’ and he said ‘don’t you want a beer? I can get you a beer’ and I was like ‘I just want water’.”
It's an intriguing U-turn when broke uni students who emphatically preach about eating the rich will happily spend time with a landlord, provided he offers them drugs. The delicious social currency of drugs and alcohol never depreciates in value, and in such an economy Bruno is simply a benevolent investor. I will follow any polite person in possession of a bag, and so will you – don’t lie. I imagine Bruno being one of those socialites who act as beneficiaries for the vibes; in that he’s there to stimulate the momentum of a party and provide people narcotics the way a maître d’ provides refreshments.
A coveted role indeed considering that parties in the scene accomplish more than just a derangement of the senses. Even when completely sideways, these parties serve as a fertile hotbed of artistic ideas. They double down as informal rehearsal spaces where the bands can throw notions around without the formal scrutiny of a crowd or promoter.
I’ve always imagined parties as a political revolt which flies in the face of state-sanctioned-sanity. Regimes flip-flop between either cultivating a drug/alcohol epidemic in an impoverished neighbourhood or strictly curtailing their use altogether in an effort to keep the people docile. The UK Government’s current strategy seems to be the latter. Parties have always made the ruling gentry quiver in their suede loafers because of all the funny ideas the common folk will conjure together. Scene parties take this insubordination seriously because they do so in the face of an existential threat.
When you think of places in London like Camden, Shoreditch, and parts of Hackney, two images spring to mind; their past as cultural nuclei and the overpriced, gentrified caricatures they presently are. Their present palimpsestically plastered over their fading past. Before they were such glittering centres of social gravity, however, they were shitholes where broke artists could live affordably. Borough councils would promote these areas as cheap, attracting more broke artists. With a burgeoning artistic community, these became the places to be. Everyone would flock there for a piece of the action. Once a generation or two of cool has rubbed itself into the streets, paving stones, and bones of these neighbourhoods – enough that they develop a self-sustaining reputation – that’s when the council steps in. Frothing at the mouth with £££ in their eyes, they start a decade-long cosmetic surgery that grafts off all its acquired beauty for a more slick, upmarket appearance. The four horsemen of gentrification will rear their pale heads; Gails, Wholefoods, Franco Manca, and Leon. While an explosion of pastel and block colours with clean text takes place on the newly-pedestrianised high street, cheap housing is exploded off the map in residential areas to make way for expensive new-builds. Rent prices start their inexorable hike, pricing the locals out of the area, and eradicating all its former multiculturalism. A disaffected horde of broke artists must now find someplace else to live.
The flow of people around a city is as inevitable as a convection current. What’s insidious here is the weaponization of urban design and policy by the council; using creative communities as bait to attract a more affluent and ““““respectable”””” sort.
Many parts of London are undergoing ruthless and enforced gentrification. The Docklands look unrecognisable compared to a decade or two ago. It never seems to stop in places like Spitalfields, Aldgate, or Bethnal Green. Further out, even Streatham and Ealing are feeling its cold scalpel across their face. So now, Camberwell, Peckham, and Deptford are being courted by property developers; and the scene is more than aware of it. The high streets and crumbling blocks on demolition deathrow have provided ample warning signs. While sitting outside The Old Dip, weakly sipping my cider as if it were the tartest vinegar, I imagined what Camberwell Road would look like with a Uniqlo or a Joe and the Juice. Would Camberwell Green have a mobile pet supply shop operating out the back of a van? What would become of The Old Dip or Dash the Henge or The Bear? Best not think about that…
The local bands and bandits have a better solution; unparalleled narcotics intake. Put a couple dozen drug users in a room and the law of averages dictates that once they’re done trying to either fuck or kill each other, they’ll all unite towards a common hallucination.
“They do art or music or some other university course,” Eliza told me later, “living in South London, not going to any of their lectures just spending all their student loans on drugs and parties.” As someone who’s done it twice; university is but a fairy tale. In most cases, it’s a lack of educational stimulation rather than intelligence that drives them out of the classroom and into the bottom of a baggy in some dark corner of a pub surrounded by similarly disillusioned creatives. Sensing – without any confirmation or guidance – their true calling to be elsewhere, they follow their nose towards it; a ramshackle band with beat-up instruments and the homely aroma of sweat and beer. The blood-alcohol-osmosis in these backrooms ends up teaching them more about the world than the underfunded classrooms ever could.
With music as the only outlet for their tectonic rage over the upheavals of the world, they resist the council’s covetous plans the only way they know how. Standing on not-yet-hallowed-ground, they desecrate the air with their electric dirge. And afterwards they lacerate their senses with enough drugs to sedate a sperm whale. Communal drug use is their modus operandi. “They buy their coke off the same person,” quips Eliza. Totally untethered from even the remotest ideas of worldiness, the scene collectively radiates an energy that’s indefinably nuts, their vibrations smearing up and down walls, unsettling street lamps, disrupting traffic, tearing a hole in the fabric of space and time. None of those things are conducive to lucrative property development. It’s a controlled crash that hopes to repel the council from the burning wreckage plummeting their way.
While we were smoking a joint on a bench in Camberwell Green, we realised how unprotected we were from the cold. Yesterday’s wardrobe cowered in the face of today’s weather. So we hobbled our way over to The Bear. Digger was there (remember him?)! A dapper DJ in a grey three-piece suit and fedora tailored to the contours of his small shoulders was an unlikely sight. More DJs should take wardrobe tips from Marco – as Digger kept calling him. His little wooden box of 45s sat by the decks like a crate of incredibly rare jewels heaved out of the bottom of the ocean. Marco’s fingers skipped deftly over the records, spinning one sparkly tune after another; uncut gems excavated from the very depths of dub, reggae, and funk. Each time I pulled out my phone to Shazam the song, Digger saved me the effort by not only telling me the song title but also a brief biography of the musicians.
“No more Guinness today!” Eliza announced repulsively before she ordered a cider.
Digger got on the decks. Makes sense. He opened his set with something that sounded somewhere between marching band music and Flight of the Valkyries. What on Earth have we gotten ourselves into? And why isn’t anyone else reacting to this? Right after this strange overture, Digger launched into a brilliant obstacle course of dub, roots, and reggae that got a couple of middle-aged ladies off their stools and out on the floor. Wine glasses carefully clutched they rocked like a boat on rolling waters, anchored by the songs of their youth.
After his set, the lights went down and Digger went about screwing with a projector that refused to connect to a display. A blue error message was thrown on the projection screen which, in the gloaming, illuminated half the bar in a freezing glow. These technical difficulties were a prelude to Digger’s film club screening, which he was convincing us to stay for. Sadly our work here wasn’t done.
We ambled our way through the biting cold to Dash the Henge where Saul Adamczewski was slated for 8:30. A crowd of people stood outside, looking like factory workers before their shift, puffing cigarette smoke out of their own chimneys. Like penguins, we insulated ourselves in the middle of this crowd. It was 8:45 and still no sign of Saul. Restless vibrations were rippling through the assembly, intensifying with every passing minute.
Eyes bright as a candle, he arrived just before 9 like a minister late to his own congregation. We all filtered into the house of god and watched in confusion as Saul tuned his electro-acoustic guitar on stage.
“Can somebody get me a beer please?” he said into the mic.
An elderly lady behind the counter, armed with two colourful cans, parted the crowd like the Red Sea and hand-delivered the beers. I described yesterday how Dash the Henge is longer than it is wide – so we were stuffed in this place like powder down a cannon barrel. We could already tell the whole thing was about to misfire.
Saul’s arrival almost halfway through the hour allotted him meant that no soundcheck was done, so he had no choice but to do that while also playing his set. Singing wistfully into the mic, he’d strike a few chords on the guitar only to interrupt himself saying, “This sounds like shite, can you turn the gain up please?”
He made a couple more similar false starts, each self-interruption laced with more anger; whether at himself or the innocent sound man, I couldn’t tell. The crowd, divided into two camps, couldn’t believe what they were witnessing. Those closer to the stage maintained a solemn silence, as if beholding something religious and mystical. Those closer to the door were wondering whether this was satire or a cheap joke. Eliza and I belonged to the latter. Emptied of their patience, those at the back began chatting among themselves, their collective murmurs threatening to drown out Saul’s performance. The acolytes up front kept turning around, eyes ablaze with the annoyance of disturbed transcendence.
Once the sound was nailed, he began his set in earnest with what little time was left, but the damage was already done. People began leaving. Good riddance, thought the people up front.
“House Arrest are about to come on,” said Eliza, already making a move towards the door.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I affirmed.
Which was a shame because time was Saul’s only enemy here. This whole mess could’ve been avoided if he had arrived and sound-checked on time. With two albums under his own name as well as with Insecure Men, Saul is delving into a musical palate he was unable to taste amidst the pandemonium of the Fat White Family. His solo albums The Coward and Adventures in Limbo – presumably from which he played tonight – take you by the hand, leading you down sombre soundscapes where choral vocals and nocturnal acoustic guitars line the horizon with their dark silhouettes. His vivid lyricism interspersed with whimsical spoken word passages make for a sublime dissociative soundtrack.
House Arrest were already on stage but hadn’t started playing yet when we crossed the street to get to The Old Dip. Wearing the same wraparound sunglasses, Jasper had a very different aura to him now compared to when he was DJing for Pink Eye Club last night. There was something monumental about his presence, something unspoken had transformed and flowered in him. He clutched his black guitar as if any moment he was about to smash a hole in the floor with it. Next to him was Ben, the synth player with a head so perfectly round and a face so cuttingly angular that his ears were the only thing that interrupted their curvilinear flow. Then there’s Eli, the second guitarist, and the only thing that stopped him from looking like a courthouse clerk with his striped shirt and thick moustache was a pair of plastic leopard print sunglasses. I’m not acquainted with the rest of the band… sorry.
From what I hear, the band have an entire album produced and ready for distribution but are forced to keep it in the freezer while they look for a distribution channel that isn’t simply self-releasing it on Spotify. The meagre returns justify their aversion to the streaming platform. Eliza tells me of Jasper’s frequent rants on his Instagram stories over the struggles of being an up-and-coming musician, lamenting of venues like Paper Dress Vintage or the Sebright Arms that’d pay something like £50 for a gig; peanut that barely covers transport for a six-piece band.
Hence why singles are all you’ll find in their discography.
Without any warning, the band fired away into a particularly fried rendition of one of their 2023 singles, “M. Monroe”. The lurching guitar riff is reminiscent of a car engine spluttering, shooting jets of hot petrol everywhere; the vehicle is still driving at top speed, propelled by the sweating drums and a rhythm section so overdriven that the amps let out a primal scream. Ben, meanwhile, commandeers the synth like a blind drunk driver behind the wheel, making gloriously reckless noise while pulling a face as if possessed. The music video has Jasper in a dress and tinsel wig being frantically chased by the camera through the streets of Camberwell at night.
While the guitars were screeching like an angel with her wings clipped, Ben said, “Can somebody buy me a drink please, I’m PARCHED…” Within no time a pint was handed to him.
“LAVLEY!” he said, immediately crashing into another song.
This one was “CASH DOLLY MUNNA”, their first single. The steady drums skip around like skyscrapers during some biblical earthquake while a ridiculously fuzzed riff swings up and down like the needle of a Richter scale. The crowd by this point had outgrown the relatively small floor of The Old Dip. I was practically standing behind the bar, that’s how far I’d been pushed to the fringes. Eliza kept dipping in and out of the crowd, returning each time pouring sweat and blissfully rattled. The second verse devolved into a twisted solo that turned the crowd into a swirling mass that was expanding and contracting like muscles during a seizure. Entire bodies were being thrown around. Someone managed to crowd-surf. Then the song brings you back down with a mid-tempo closer that hits like a shot of morphine, the guitars belching cacophonous bile while the bass bounces around like your faltering consciousness.
Next came “Truckin’ On”, a slower song with the tempo of viscous sludge dripping off the stage and covering everything with its gross perspiration. Even with such a subdued tempo, the band go really hard, throwing riffs in the air like delicate crockery and hearing them shatter on a floor wired with mics. Knowing that it’d be caught, Jasper hurled his guitar into the crowd during the last few bars of the song. Of course it was Aaron who caught it, managing to swipe a few lazy chords before handing it back. Sopping wet with sweat, Jasper and Eli had lost their shirts.
All hell broke loose when they lashed out their most recent single, “Dead Baby Delivery Service”. The only thing that matched the frenzy of the instrumentation was the viciousness with which the crowd were throwing themselves around. The moshpit looked like a nuclear chain reaction unfolding before my eyes; human bodies splitting into twos, fours, eights, sixteens… like particles colliding into each other and other and other… Got my foot crushed by a well-built man who brought his platform boots down with full and innocent force. The people got what they wanted; fucked up lyricism, schizophrenic guitarwork, synth-playing that’d get Ben locked up in some countries, and drumming that felt like a prolonged heart-attack brought to sudden cardiac arrest at the end of the song.
The song’s music video is a static shot. Jasper in a tuxedo sits stock-still in one of the window booths of the Old Dip, mouthing the words to the song while Aaron – yes the one with an E, from Hyperdense – dances topless on the pavement outside. There’s a wholesome sense of camaraderie in the fact that the staff at The Old Dip allowed the band to shoot their music video here. Indeed, venues which support local bands, host them regularly, pay them fairly for their gigs, and douse them with free beer are the foundation of any music scene. Without them, the bands are no more than buskers being ignored on the street.
And before we knew what even hit us, it was all over. House Arrest cleared off the stage to thunderous howls by a crowd that zapped their way to the beer garden in the back. Eliza and I were lucky to find a place to sit, surrounded by people piled high over each other. Under a pitch-black and smoggy sky, this place marked its existence with a bright red light the colour of blood. It splattered all up the walls, over the floor, and smeared across all our faces. Swiftly approaching burnout, we smoked our cigarettes under this sinister and cruel light while passing a bottle of Magners between us.
The next band to take the stage was a five-piece in camo green flight jackets going by the simple name of Us. Two guitarists, a bassist, a drummer, and a harmonica player with about a dozen harps strewn at his feet. Their thick heads of hair, suit pants, and boots made them look like The Yardbirds during their prime.
Eliza and I had somehow made it right at the front of the stage where she could practically feel the creamy vocalist spraying spit over her. Us’ collection of singles has culminated in Underground Renaissance, their debut LP from 2024. Most of the setlist they clawed off this album and shredded it into our faces. Omitting their softer songs like “Hop on a Cloud” – and we’re using the word softvery lightly here – from the gig, they ravaged through their headbangers with an aggressive rhythm that was two steps away from belligerence. They swapped guitar and harmonica solos with the momentum of a derailed train that’s lost none of its speed and continues to crash through the wilderness on its side. I was struck dumb by their precision at such a carnal tempo. And at the end of each song, with glittering charm, they all bowed simultaneously before subjecting us to their next face-melter.
As the band carried the crazed crowd into their final song, “Just My Situation”, loaded with bluesy melancholia turned frenetic by their criminal tempo, I felt like I was at the epicentre of some cataclysm. The vocalist/rhythm guitarist scratched at the strings of his beat-up Telecaster while the lead played a splendid solo alongside the warbling howl of the harmonica. Did the people walking past outside know what a spectacular and unfettered riot was going on in here? They’d see five handsome Finnish men dismantling their instruments, they’d catch disembodied melodies sneaking between the cracks of the door, but would they give a fuck? Every now and again we feel the warm hand of the universe rest on our shoulder, pulling us briefly out of our humdrum existence to let us know we’re precisely where we’re meant to be. Such a feeling washed through me as Us finished their set and gave their final bow while guitar feedback murmured through the air.
At this point I wanted nothing more than to go home. My legs were starting to fail me and my head was spinning like a centrifuge. But Eliza wanted to stay for one more set and I can’t resist a good time. Sleaze, fronted by Dave Ashby, played the final slot. But you’ll be utterly disappointed in knowing that I had zoned out of existence through that final hour. I have dim and drunken flashes of Dave playing acoustic solo for a couple of numbers before the rest of the band joined him on stage. Suddenly I was in the middle of a moshpit rolling a cigarette above my head while being jostled violently by all manner of people around me. I miraculously managed to roll one cigarette which I handed to Eliza. I was unable, however, to roll myself one so I angrily hurled the scrunched-up paper and tobacco into the pit. Have it, I don’t want it anyway! I wish I could write you a review of Sleaze but I simply wasn’t there and I’m not about to fabricate an entire gig. I am, after all, a respectable journalist who has never once bent the truth to his own ends…
*
It was time to flee. We were regurgitated out onto the street, borne upon a landslide of sweaty flesh. I stared up at the moon which looked painted across the canvas of the sky. We saw no familiar faces, or could no longer recognise those who’d accompanied us this whole time.
A man with magnificent dreads sat next to us on the pavement bench and did a bump of coke off his hand in full view of passing motorists and pedestrians. The horde of people drinking pints and smoking cigarettes provided excellent cover.
“Do you guys want some?” he politely asked Eliza and I, brushing white flecks of rocket fuel off his nostril.
“Wellllllll,” said Eliza while side-eyeing me.
“Yeah… if you’re offering,” I said, returning her dutiful sidelong glance of ‘if you will, I will too’.
However, the man’s coke-laced brain acrobatically leapt towards a different conversational trapeze. “I’m LOADED!” he announced. “I make A LOT of money. £30 an hour from cheffing. I’m a private chef! If you ever want to borrow money, I’m the one to ask.”
With his kind face that perfectly concealed his potential for aggression, I thought he’d make a good loan shark. Thankfully, he totally forgot about his coke offer, because we would’ve taken it, distorting the end of the night into an endless downward spiral.
The chef spotted a familiar face in the crowd and traipsed off without another word.
“On that note,” said Eliza mirthfully while springing to her feet, “it’s time to leeeave.”
“YAAAAAHyahyahyahyah.”
“YAAAHyahyahyahyahyah,” we jabbered in unison.
As I lay there that night, ears ringing, static fizzing around my eyes, waiting for my grip around my consciousness to fail, I reel back and forth from a contact high I’ll probably never come down from. The Virgil to my Dante, Eliza led me through the bowels of a community I knew existed but could never comprehend until I had been baptised by its holy, hoppy, sweat.
That loud and ecstatic and foul and tremendous weekend was over a month ago. I’m closing the lid of this coffin and putting this beast to rest the night before Wide Awake Festival, which promises to be an unmitigated descent into madness with a killer soundtrack. Cut that onto your wax and spin it!
