Manchester Scenewipe

Sounds From The Other City 2011 In Words

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011, 12:35 pm

“CANNONBALL SOIL-PAUPER INTO THE

SAVAGE, TEENAGE VAGINA OF SOLEMNITUDE”

This is the last entry I find in my notebook for ‘Sounds From The Other City’ last night.
After getting home I remember nothing of the two Burger-Journeys I evidently embarked upon. I awake to a tumultuous stomach, a thundercloud brow and the news of Osama Bin Laden’s perforated face.

Let’s back up…

14:37 Sunday, May 1st 2011: It’s sunny but you’re intermittently bitch-slapped with a chill-wind every so often, much to the chagrin of peanut-smugglers everywhere. As we ride the Bus through Moss Side, a ruddy, alcohol-swollen bloke sat opposite me flicks his albino eyes suspiciously over everyone who gets aboard from beneath the peak of his black ‘Chartwell Golf’ cap – looking the Muslims up & down in particular. His left hand is rammed in his coat pocket like he’s desperately wrestling a rogue boner into check, or concealing a Baby Browning. He unclasps his right hand from the red rail and unpeels the rectangular plaster, allowing it to flap-off his trachea where it hangs by one stubbornly gummy corner. He begins to dab-away at the hole in the centre of his neck with a dirty-white handkerchief that duly clouds a yellowy-red in its centre. He eventually alights opposite The Whitworth on Moss Lane East, before floating over the road and disappearing into the darkness of its doorway, where on the other side I envisage him ordering a bottle of wine, insisting the bartender leave the cork, plugging the hole in his throat with it, and draining the bottle hungrily.

15:06 Stop P, Piccadilly Gardens: An ungracefully weighed-down fly descends, touching-down arse-first, and falling forward, proceeds to go about his icky business by the shores of a dried-up black Coke splash, obliviously embroiled in numerous Monty Python-titles foot-squish near-misses.

15:19 Chapel Street, Salford: Obscuring Islington Mill from view along Chapel Street are the gutted husks of long-gone businesses and empty lots, in the process of being co-opted by local chancers or slowly reclaimed by nature. We get our wristbands in time to find out United got beat, so woe betide the first band I see. Needing a game plan, we settle by the side of the River at…

15:45 The Old Pint Pot. The Sun is smashed to glittering smithereens on the Irwell’s surface, which Papa Whelks tells me was wigged with thick foam scum a few decades ago. I sneeze, scattering Silverfish into my peripheral vision, and taking a hint from this and the river, decide to go with the flow and follow my nose.

Being nearest, The Crescent is next. It’s a whimsical place. The only thing lacking is a Dreamcatcher if you know what I mean, but I like it. Marx and Engels allegedly drank in here but unfortunately there’s no Hammer to the Crescent’s Sickle and Revolution is far from anyone’s agenda this sedate May Day, as at 16:49 The buttoned-down ‘Urchins’ uprise and take over the stage from the recently departed ‘Sandbox’ and their indignant & pretty, but ultimately limping ditties of emotional defiance. While they set-up ‘No Cars Go’ sounds-out its momentary juxtaposed notes of warning before soaring out the PA, blowing the soul from my bones.

Unfortunately ‘Urchins’ (not to be confused with ‘Urchins Baby World’ in Bolton who’ve bagsied the UK domain name) usurp it, sounding like a gang of Rwandan ‘Rock Band’ Champions given real instruments for the first time & forced to learn them at Gunpoint on their lunch break, playing Daddy’s Classic Rock abomination-favourites via the worst Cockney pretenders to the 2-tone throne, so we spill out into the street.

17:43 Bexley square I’m served a burger from a Pennsylvanian
 Medical Ethics MA student and his buddy, Salfordian George, who wastes no time in engaging me in tales of Red Deer Roadkill on The Crescent, before regaling us with his account of the time he chased a Buck bounding over a wall into A Northern Scottish beer garden while terriers hung by their teeth from it’s haunches, before tearing strips-off in front of appalled tourists, until George eventually shot it…before slitting it’s throat to make sure, of course.

George (middle)

18:17 The New Oxford there’s a distinctively cock-tinged stink in the air as ‘Ste McCabe’ carouses out the side entrance with ‘Zsa Zsa Noir‘ for a fag break before launching into his laptop-accompanied, distortion pedal-driven, socio-scoffing, proto Homo-Pop-Punk.

Salford Arms 19:00 The set-bridging DJ plays Four-Tet-esque ethno-techno, which provides an apt soundtrack to the Tibetan food they’re serving. The idling touch-screen digimatronic quiz machine asks me what Will Smith’s daughter is called. I assume its Willow Smith because it’s got a ring to it, and smacks of his vanity. In the beer garden where we go to wait for ‘Neko Neko‘ based on nothing other than the name, there’s a clingfilm-skinned cap-wearing pensioner pot-boy on a loop, methodically collecting bottles from inside and depositing them in the recycling bin.

‘Neko Neko’ turns out to be a white-guy with dreadlocks playing Electronica/Hip Hop, so obviously its over to…The Kings’ Arms 19:30 After talking to Giles from ‘The Earlies‘ who’s tending bar, we pass through a particularly potent Poo-Ghost, (or ‘fart’ to the layman) on the staircase before emerging into the upstairs space that is aptly acting as the departure lounge for Salford’s sundown while Sonny & the Sunsets 20:06 corral their  acoustic good-time vibes before a throbbing audience plugging-up the doorway to the other room.

United Reform is like a soup kitchen. The bedraggled masses are served beer through a sliding door in the wall. ‘Denis Jones’ is railroad plodding his shit in front of a lightshow-dappled backdrop that looks like a frogspawn abortion caused by pouring over snow. Stripey Frenchman-shirted multi-Instumentaliser manipulates the power-outlets, chain-gang flagellating the fuck out the youth club vibe of it all.

I find a potato on the outside wall, and throw it at United Reform.

Sodium-vapour lamps amber the streets while The Asian guys in their exhaust-pipe expanded Mercedes listen to Will Smith’s ‘Men In Black’ while stuck at lights, so we all jam and laugh on it for a while.

“The good guys dress in Black, remember that,

just in case we ever face to face & make contact”.

Back up Chapel St, Bexley Square‘s elongated Light Saber pavements illuminate the way to…

New Oxford 21:10 for ‘Brown Brogues‘ so get me a pint of your shittiest bitter. I seemed to be in possession of a Charlie Sheen-equalling, tornado-ing-of-ego, and stood upon a chair at the side of the room while bash fuck n’ drums & Indie hair boy, guitar hiked-up over his heart – kick the living shit out the sea of people crammed into the criminally inadequate matchbox back room of the New Oxford.

It’s at around this time that I have to rely solely on my notes, which read as follows:

“Pint Pot at 21:29 Winner of the night’s Gaudiest Jumper & Pants competition announced.”

”22:15 the Salford Arms There’s some bitch in an Abbey Rd tshirt who doesn’t know what it means”

“The Angel 22:50 Which is the witchcraft doo-wop hopscotch team DJing Talking Heads-athon.
”

“Islington Mill Wilson offers us drugs with C3PO’s gay-face on.”

“On a dick-binge scoffing cock”

“Foreskins and miniskirts pulled back in duressturbation”

“I’m breathing dry ice, tonight matthew i’m going to be…”

“We’re in the Death Star”.

“Allege whiye people startling listening to a”

“Cannonball soil pauper into the savage, teenage vagina of solemnitude”

After arriving home I remember nothing of the two seperate Burger-Journey’s I’m alleged to have embarked-upon. I awake to a tumultuous stomach, a thundercloud brow and the news of Osama Bin Laden’s perforated face.

Lets back up.

“…a ruddy, alcohol-swollen bloke sat opposite me flicks his albino eyes suspiciously over everyone who gets aboard from beneath the peak of his black ‘Chartwell Golf’ cap – looking the Muslims up & down in particular.”

I google “Chartwell Golf” and discover its a Country club 11 miles west of Fort George G. Meade, Headquarters of…

“The good guys dress in Black, remember that,

just in case we ever face to face & make contact”.

I can’t say with any feasible degree of certainty that I wasn’t the trigger-man at that Pakistani mansion.

‘Chartwell’ Black Cap-man was in the bedeviled possession of an unscrupulous moral code. The chain-smoking he employed to assuage the cumulative guilt of decades of slayings on the Government’s say-so had failed to conquer his lungs, but finally taken its toll on his throat. In a final act of fealty, he decided to lay down his now discernibly finite life for one last job.

The Medical Ethics Student from Maryland’s Neighbouring state of Pennsylvania must have slipped me a ‘Mickey Finn’ in the Cheeseburger he served me. Having ingested the suggestibility serum contained within, his buddy George (G. Meade anyone?!) instilled in me the subliminal kill-switch with his description of his brutal but necessary murder of the Wild Deer out of control, flailing around dangerously in a tourist enclave (a thinly-veiled metaphor for some abstract terrorist attack on tourist soil, obviously).

Savage is the town 6.3 miles West of Fort George G. Meade.

The “teenage vagina” was invoked by the references to Will Smith’s daughter and is obviously meant to be representative of the small aperture in Chartwell’s neck…

Leaving only the soil-pauper (grass-roots civilian), that needed cannon-balling through it.

Me.

The man in drag, and geriatric pot collector were in all likelihood undercover agents deposited to monitor my progress, and the potato-throw a test of my mettle.

‘Solemnitude’ isn’t a word, but a portmanteau of solemnity & solitude. I can only guess this refers to Chartwell’s death.

Presumably once activated I used ‘Chartwell’ as some sort of sacrificial Human Shield, piggy-back riding him into the compound with the Baby Browning he had been concealing on the bus, rammed through the back of his screaming neck and out his tracheostomy hole, steadied perfectly on the V where his clavicles met for me to take the decisive shot…

It’s the only logical explanation.

Words by Chester Whelks

Photos by Kitty Saros

Sounds From The Other City Website