A Sproston Green Design For Life

The last week was a big one in terms of entertainment, especially for 30-something expat Brits in Australia.

Last Thursday it was The Charlatans, and on Monday just there it was The Manic Street Preachers, both playing the same venue, The Metro.

There's a lad who must have similar taste in music and be a youtube buff as, like with Ashcroft in August, he's bunged up videos of various songs from the gigs, which is nice of him. He must have been standing near me at The Charlies as the view on this video is pretty much the same one I had:



It wasn't sold out and like Ashcroft, there were tickets going for less than half price outside, but the upside was that you could easily get a decent standing position down the front. By the time they played Sproston Green I was seven beers in and not in a mood to mess about - the intro built everyone into a frenzy and when it kicked in me and the lad I was with leaped forward and joined the melee of about fifty mid-30s lads going properly potty, jumping about and shouting our heads off like it was the mid-90s. Much like Dan and Danny at Rage Against The Machine, it's been a few years since I emerged from a gig soaked in sweat and buzzing, so it was only natural that we went straight from venue to pub for another four beers. I eventually got in about half one, properly gattered. Work the next day was bliss.


The Manics was sold out, all the tickets went in double quick time. I didn't exactly know why until about two songs in when James Dean bradfield told the crowd it'd been over ten years since they were last here, meaning the last time they played Sydney, Mick was there! Madness.



It was on a Monday, which is the seventh best day of the week for going to see a gig, but it was a cracker nonetheless and I was once again able to stand down the front and off to the side without too much hassle. I like the new album (thank you DD) and they played the greatest hits to a crowd who were well up for it. They're also one of the tightest live bands I've seen.

The setlist for the Charlatans is here, and for The Manics here. If you put "Charlatans/Manic Street Preachers Sydney Metro" into Youtube you'll get a few more videos an'all.

Going to gigs is brilliant innit? I had a proper good time as these two and none of you lot were even there!

Dave 'Bruce Wayne' Dumville

The double life of the man from the Mail. There's a brief glimpse one minute forty five seconds in, and then from two minutes fifteen seconds the secret identity is fully revealed as the man we previously knew as an England supporter goes proper loopy. And to think I sat in your house watching England vs Scotland at Euro '96, copping it large from you and your old man as Gazza scored that goal and (prompting an even bigger celebration from you...) Seaman saved that penalty.

As this was BBC Scotland, there's also some of the best commentary you'll ever hear in your life, the Jock version of "Your boys took one hell of a beating", except this time it was a team saving their reputations from taking a hell of a beating, saving themselves from being forever remembered as being unable to beat a team from a country whose population is smaller than the capacity of the ground the game took place in.

MD32

Happy birthday Max! Apologies for the lateness - camera issues and then waiting for a suitable event. As it turned out, a 'suitable event' turned into what's being described as one of the greatest ever finals play-offs, and like Gillingham in 1999 against Many City (as opposed to the year later against Wigan) it didn't turn out well.

There are match reports here and here, but as is the case with these things, reading it doesn't do the game nearly enough justice. The Tigers finished the regular season 3rd and the top eight teams go into a properly convoluted finals system called the McIntyre Final Eight System, that meant they played the team who finished sixth, which was the Sydney Roosters, who are the team of the Eastern Suburbs (where I live), who loads of people hate as they're seen as a bit of a Chelsea, coming from a posher area with a higher percentage of 'what what what' casual fans, as opposed to the West Sydney teams who are 'working class man-of-the-people clubs'.

Tigers should have won the game by about twenty points but they're famous for self-destructing and they pissed it away in legendary style last night, letting the Roosters equalise with zero time remaining on the clock after only needing to run down the clock with six tackles and thirty seconds left, and then after twenty minutes of golden point extra time made a horrible pass mistake which was intercepted and run home for the win, after about three solid chances where they should have won it themselves. Properly end-to-end, tearing your hair out, "it's the hope that kills you" stuff that left Tigers fans stunned and Roosters fans going mental.

There's no segregation at games here and there were a few Roosters fans near me that were giving it the big one and were on the verge of getting killed by loads of pissed up Tigers fans, coppers were lurking about near them. We were in the area that was designated as the Tigers home end, but it's a voluntary scheme and you can sit where you like. I was cracking up, 'cause if it had been in the UK there would have been about four folk beaten to death by angry mobs just in the area where I was sitting.

This round is the 'qualifying finals' - two teams go out, two get a bye, and the other four go into the semis, two go through from this round to play the two who got byes, and the winners of that round play in the Grand Final. If the Tigers had won they'd have got a bye to the semis as the Panthers, who finished above them in second, lost to the Canberra Raiders. As it is The Dragons, who finished top, need to beat the Manly Sea Eagles (who finished eighth) otherwise it's the Tigers who go out this round along with the Warriors, who finished in the bottom half of the draw and then lost to Gold Coast Titans, so they don't get another life. If Dragons beat Manly then the Tigers will play Canberra in the next round. Whilst there's no chance the Dragons can go out even if they lose, a win will see them get a bye so obviously the incentive to win is there, though arguably not as much as Manly as it's straight knock out for them.


Update: The Dragons wiped the floor with the Eagles, so the Tigers play the Raiders in Canberra next week.

School days

I'd like to think this blog was read by millions and that whilst I don't have to go to work because I make so much from advertising on the site, I go because it gets me out the house.

Unfortunately it's not, which is why I probably met more than half of you reading this twenty years ago this week.

I was at the school a couple of days, knocking about with the other new lads in Alpha 2 (Anthony O'Neill and Martin Watts spring to mind) until we had our first German class of the year with Van Der Fleet, which is when I knocked you all bandy with my fantastisch Deutsch.

Straight after the class I remember being swamped by a load of you asking me all sorts of questions, the most important of which was obviously "Which team do you support?" As I'd just seen them draw with Hearts in a friendly at Tynecastle a couple of weeks before, and they had the likes of Gascoigne and Lineker fresh off the back of a fine Italia 1990 campaign, I said Spurs, and as Danny had yet to fully discover the golden path that led to Priestfield, he was the one that celebrated the small victory of having the new lad support the same team as you. Unfortunately he tried to double up on the second most important question: "Where do you live" and when I said Hempstead, asked if that was the top end, via Maidstone Road. I'd discovered it wasn't, it was mid-'Stead, via the woods and the 'love tunnel' under the link road. This meant I soon walked to school with Mick of a morning, who was more concerned with the fact that I'd been living in his road for the past three months without appearing on the French family radar in any significant fashion.

I was appearing all too often soon enough though, as my time-keeping was shit-house even then and meeting at the top of the road at ten past eight normally meant Mick knocking on the door at quarter past to see if I was coming or not, whilst my mum wrestled with my nine-month-old baby brother.

I solidified my reputation about two weeks later when I got a "DT" from Wooton and had to pick up litter with Grievsy and Godfrey for an hour after school - after a whole lesson of being called Wiggy (Handa being weirdly lairy in Wooton's class) he lost it and belted me with a DT for an innocuous "Ah nae danger pal!" to which the whole class pissed themselves laughing and he thought it was some cruel in-joke that deserved a harsh punishment. Did I ever mention I had to steal the note he wrote about that incident from Harvey's office in the sixth form? Four years later I'm idlly flicking through my confidential file (He was tops Harvey weren't he?) when that 'report' from my first few weeks at school is still there. I was getting ready to do UCAS forms and all that caper! The Wiggy prick wasn't going to sabotage a glorious higher education so I nicked it, ripped it up and chucked it away later on.


Happy days!

(I'm glad we never had mobile phones in our day.)

Uni days

I trust we've all read this?

Three years dossing at university? It's the only way to train for life

I never think back to uni and get misty eyed about the lectures I attended.

Alright, actually I do sometimes, especially these days 'cause back then having a row with some Toby or Clarissa in a seminar about politics and popular culture was considered the 'work' part of going to uni, as opposed to the 'work' part of life these days, which is a lot less interesting and takes up a much bigger part of your day.

I'll always remember having a mature student from Coventry in my politics classes. He was a big burly working class lad, probably about thirty, and the happiest bloke on campus, everyone used to know him because he was so chipper and an all-round lovely bloke. I got to a class five minutes early one day (that's not the interesting part...) and he was sat outside in the sun with his walkman on. He took it off and said "Hello mate - ain't this grand? I'm sat here listening to some world music on my walkman and waiting to go into a politics class I really enjoy when, like the rest of my family, I should be down the car plant working my nuts off for a pittance."

He properly loved it and would put the rest of us to shame in the way that we would show up the kids if we went back to uni now - after getting a sniff of the real world, and coming to realise that the subjects you're learning about are in fact interesting, you'd enjoy getting stuck into the books and doing a 'massive' sixteen hours a week work, which is what they recommended you do at my gaff - eight on lectures and seminars and eight personal study.

Sixteen hours a week! You'd happily let them cut an arm off for that kinda of schedule these days and yet at the time there was more chance of a nose-fulled threesome with Emma Noble and Kimberley Davies than there was of going to all your classes and then doing the same hours again down the library.

On Fire

I watched Arcade Fire live from Madison Square Garden during lunch today, it was brilliant. The gig was streamed live on Youtube and directed by Terry Gilliam. Apart from the odd drop out and buffering issues, the quality was very high (1500kb) and the new stuff sounded very good (even Sprawl, a new one that they restarted after the drum machine started playing up during the first minute).

It won't be long before slight improvements in technology make quality issues and drops out a thing of the past, and I reckon that's when you'll see Sky Sports style pay-per-view tickets being sold. Watching it live on a screen wasn't half as good as being down the front, but it was almost as good as being up the back, albeit in a different way. When you're up the back of the big venues you get the vibe but not much sense of what's actually going on, other than what song they're playing. With this there were cameras all over the shop and when he went walkabout in the crowd during We Used To Wait there were cameras on him the whole time.

It don't seem too much of a stretch to think of a time when, like the premier League, going to 'premier' gigs is for rich folk (if it ain't already…) and normal folk and kids in the suburbs (see what I did there…) will spend their money on a TV ticket.

Might only work with huge bands, as the cost is obviously prohibitive and you'd need five figure ticket sales, but if Arcade Fire (or whoever) were playing in Manchester on a Thursday night and you weren't going out, you'd go what, a fiver, to watch it streamed live? How much is it for a pelt rom-com on Sky Box Office? If it had been Oasis in the mid-90s we'd have gone in a quid each, gathered round Dave's with cans of Strongbow and watched it before tearing off down the Ave at the mercy of our hormones.

The gig itself was a cracker, highlight being Power Out straight into Rebellion followed by Month Of May, Keep The Car Running then Tunnels. It was weird sitting at my desk getting goose bumps and wanting to down a pint and go mental. The goose bumps bit I mean. I quite often sit at my desk wanting to down a pint and go mental.

DB33