I'm Walking Here

I’m walking. My journey takes me through the streets of Leeds, through the university, on to studentland and the gig that’s been in my diary for a couple of months.  It’s also inevitably a walk through memory lane. The concrete stark lines of red route are now immersed in a tangle of new buildings. Academia is a growing business it seems. Somewhere between evening and night the campus is quiet. Only the obsessed and dedicated remain in the large sports centre. Considering the size of the campus there are only a few lost souls scuttering across it. Me hopefully giving off my best “I am not a rapist” vibes as we cross the sparsely lit pathways.  

Crossing Clarendon Road is to time warp both to the back to back slum housing of the city’s dark industrial past and my own youth, now some decades ago. The houses are still present, a mix of poorly maintained student flat conversions and in a change since my days an influx of Asian immigrants. There's a quite large new mosque rising above the terraces, kebab houses and  gelato cafes.  As the road drops down hill I note the off-licence that I once had a thunderbird wine fueled adventure is now an estate agents and I lament the switch from drunken idiocy to modern short term economics. The very next house doesn't have its curtains fully drawn and I glimpse inside. Despite being on the ground floor it's a bedroom and the wall visible to me is a sea of pictures. Some personal photographs, some art and many from the news. It could have been my student flat. I felt an immediate connection to the area, the ethos. A lightning strike to the gut.

My day has started in London. Adrift in The City, glass temples and a hurried, disengaged populus. The office I was in for the day was achingly Google, all cafes, open plan microdesks and personal cloisters, alcoves with a pew and a humble bench that through the clear collapsible door you could observe the worship of macbooks and mammon. After a day in this chrome bubble, role playing being at work I raced north by train. From a day pretending to be the vice president of operations I found myself sat in a bar that was culturally dissonant. During the last general election this was one of Jeremy Corbyn's stop offs where he gave a speech to a huge crowd and the connection between him and the youth vote became very clear.  This evening's bar population is more distributed, at least in age but there's a strong counter culture feel. No one is wearing branded clothes. Conversations aren't straying into comparing the latest Audi to its BMW competitor. My friend is already in the bar and better still he's got me a pint in. He's on fine form, playfully banging the table with the palm of his hand whilst articulating frustrations of work, all ideas carpets and digital catapults. We tangentially do politics. Nowadays it's too much for casual conversation, even if you're both on the same side. My friend spots some of the band stood at the bar which gives us a strong hint that we can get another pint in. The conversation flows. I'm blissfully happy.

A relaxed drink or so later and it's time to scuttle into the new room that's been built to host bands. This is mostly the reason why Mogwai are playing such a small venue, to celebrate its opening. The room isn't large but is packed. The few hundred present are crammed in, edging for position to catch a view of the stage. We stand at the side, conveniently close to the bar. Mogwai take to the stage and with somewhat less fanfare than one might expect from say a Taylor Swift gig, pick up their instruments and start playing. More lightning bolts to the gut. I've followed the band for the last 18 years with admiration and fondness. They've never been subject to a level of obsession that I've attached to say Godspeed you! Black Emperor, Nine Inch Nails or Radiohead but they've always been “there”, intrinsically recognisable from album to album but at the same time exploring reinvention along the way. Tonight they are amazing. Tracks are taken from across their back catalogue and whether brand new or a decade old are received with near rapture by the crowd. Singing, posturing, an act - there is none. Bar the odd muted thank you there is next to no interaction with the crowd. There's just the music. An intense hour later and with an apology over there not being an encore due to the drummer being injured the band quietly exit the  stage. We’re left in a state of euphoria. Not only at the performance we've just shared but also in witnessing one of the best beards seen outside of the merchant navy. The old stagers remove hearing protectors and although the band were loud, unlike their earlier days not punishingly so. We all file begin to file outside, back into the outside world, of delayed trains, missed deadlines, urgent meetings, the social media is all disaster porn as Hurricane Irma tracks through the Carribean, England splutter through their world cup qualifying campaign, Jacob Rees-Mogg draws attention to himself, using religion to articulate hate….  We head into the night. Into darkness.