Things Fall Apart

Newcastle United? It's not looking good...

A few years ago, a senior manager at a Further Education College in the North East described redundancies as “an opportunity to develop new coping strategies.” Such specious logic could well be embraced by Eddie Howe, whose Newcastle United side are currently “ticking along” in a manner reminiscent of the ramshackle outfits turned out by his immediate predecessor, Steve Bruce. After the Boxing Day debacle against Forest, where an encouraging opening 30 minutes gave way to an hour of shambolic non-football, with only Isak and Miley emerging with any credit whatsoever, it is difficult to keep anything in perspective, but the very least you can say about Howe is that he’s as dignified in defeat as he is gracious in victory. While the support is split almost directly down the middle between those slavishly loyal, sportswashed happy clappers who endlessly parrot the “look where we were two years ago” line, without seeming to recognise where we were this time last year, and the furious online zealots demanding Howe’s head on a stick, without offering a cogent strategy for moving the club forward, the only truly nuanced response I’ve come across was this comment on Facebook, of all places, by my pal Little Richard on Boxing Day evening -:

Napoleon said that adversity and misfortune bring out the true nature of a general, so Eddie now has an opportunity to demonstrate his qualities. He will have to do this soon, as we go to the dark place and a bad result there will make today feel positively halcyon. I think he’ll do the best job possible under the circumstances and as those circumstances are none of his making, I don’t hold him to blame. He also shows a willingness to accept failings and learn from his past mistakes. I think gives him the sort of resilience necessary for the thankless task of football manager.

For these reasons I’d hang on to Howe for a good while yet, even if results are poor. The current set up is about building success through evidence based practice and not the old, discredited approach of hire and fire, then hire another sucker. Lose Howe and you’ll need to retrain and overhaul the entire squad and coaching personnel, to fit with the new incumbent’s footballing philosophy. As there’s absolutely no need to find a quick fix, I think we should stick with what we have and make it work. Radical thinking for a football fan, I know.

I agree with every word of that, as well as applauding Howe for his honesty and clarity of expression, in accepting that things are just not good enough at the minute. Of course, the elephant in the room is not Amanda Staveley’s smiling countenance through the current adversity or the Ruben Brothers making donations to the West End Foodbank, it is the fact that the Saudi PIF didn’t buy the club with the express intention of qualifying for the Europa Conference League play-offs, at best. As 2023 closes, we are faced with the prospect of Liverpool (A), sunderland (A), Man City (H) and Villa (A) for our January fixtures. Being honest, I can see nothing other than 4 straight defeats from those games. Were that to happen, I still wouldn’t imagine Howe will be bulleted before the season’s end, especially if, as seems to be the case, he is backed in the January window. However, come the end of the campaign, a more ruthless incumbent may well be installed, unless we magic up a Champions League place.

So, how did we get here? My last NUFC blog, https://payaso-de-mierda.blogspot.com/2023/11/manpower-shortage.html was filed in the immediate aftermath of the Bournemouth debacle, when we assumed things couldn’t get any worse away from home. How wrong we were, eh? Anyway, the triumphant obliteration of Chelsea that saw us back in competitive action after the last international break was almost overshadowed by hysterical complaints about the soon-to-be formed Fans Committee by the usual suspects. It amuses me that those who’d never done an away game in almost a decade before the takeover, are now endlessly bellyaching about points allocations and reserved tickets for YouTube orators. I wonder if those who’ve never been seen in an away end in the past few decades were some of the ones attacked in some Parisian bar the night before the CL game. Such violence was utterly appalling, but probably not as bad as the refereeing at the arse end of injury time in the game itself. Let’s be clear though; there was no agenda, no corruption and no ulterior motive at play. It was an error, pure and simple; a hideous one that highlights the nonsense of the laws of the game being interpreted differently by the FA and UEFA, but an error, nevertheless. It is a crying shame that after such a heroic performance, we didn’t get the win that Paris St Germain deserved, settling for a point that neither side were entitled to.

The next game saw us bounce back and batter Man Utd, thrashing them 1-0. It was a strange day as the heavy snow put paid to every local game in the afternoon, bar Hexham 2 Newcastle Blue Star Reserves 4, but cleared in time for an 8pm evening kick off. We tore them apart and it could have been far more than the sole Gordon strike that won us the points. In the midweek, the club’s latest leaden-footed attempt at surveying fan opinion saw the limited distribution of a questionnaire discussing the potential of a ground move. Recent performances have put that question back on ice for the foreseeable. More amusing was the furore surrounding the cancellation of rabid transphobe TERF and rampant Hun Linzi’s season ticket at SJP. Her hysteria on Twitter was far more entertaining than the disaster at Goodison Park, where what seemed likely to be a reasonable point from a drab game ended up as being a thoroughly awful 3-0 loss, as we literally fell to bits in the last 12 minutes. The first two goals were Trippier mistakes, which were unheard of before this deplorable capitulation, but have become a regular feature of subsequent performances.

If Everton was bad, Spurs was far worse, as we started off as badly as we’d finished the previous Thursday. Even a decent patch at the start of the second period was of no consolation, as Spurs upped the ante and cruised past us and off into the distance, with the only positive being how good Wilson looked on his return. This good news carried on into Wednesday following’s Milan game in the Champions League. Make no mistake about it; we were heroic from front to back for an hour, with Joelinton’s goal an absolute jewel. A fully fit NUFC first choice XI wins that 2-0, no mistake, but the lead in our legs came back to haunt us as Howe had no choice but to make substitutions that significantly weakened us. They equalised and, I’m certain, we decided to die bravely by going for it in search of a winner. The logic must have been that if we don’t get the Champions’ League, then we don’t want the Europa Cup route. Hence Schar’s charge up field leading to Milan’s incisive break for their winner, which dumped us out of Europe and made Howe’s job a little less secure than it had been before.

Thankfully Trippier was suspended for the visit of Fulham, which was probably one of the reasons why we never looked in danger of conceding against a fairly powder puff opposition, with only Alex Iwobi offering any kind of threat. For us, Bruno, Miley and Wilson were outstanding. Of course, no sooner do we get Botman and Burn back than Isak, Gordon, Joelinton and Krafth pick up niggles. However, after a madly frustrating first half, Bruno really turned on the style, taking the game to the visitors, who had no answer to our pace and power, allowing us to dish out a front foot thumping. Miley got his first goal, and I had a superb view from the Platinum Club in the middle of the Milburn Stand, so all seemed right with the world again. Sadly, after a thoroughly superb performance against Chelsea in the League Cup, another horrific Trippier error, gifting a stoppage time equaliser to the woeful Mudryk, saw us bow out on penalties. Just a shame that VAR wasn’t in operation for this game, as Chelsea would have been down to 9 by half time, no questions asked. Trippier’s ridiculous penalty then caused a load of amateur headshrinkers on Twitter to debate whether his recent shit performances are because he is mentally ill. Bloody good job they weren’t watching us when Malcolm Brown was filling the right back role, eh?

From there, we went to Luton, which I managed to completely avoid, taking in the utterly dreadful Northallerton 0 Benfield 0, then there was the Forest fiasco. Even if Pat Howard had been sent off after Wood completed his treble, I doubt anyone who have bothered to go on the pitch. Consequently, things look pretty bad at the minute, as we end the year outside of any European places with half the season gone and realistically looking at another cup exit to a lower division side early in the New Year. As Little Richard alluded to earlier, we really do need to stick with Eddie for the foreseeable, but he needs to up his game as much as the team do, if he’s going to be the one to finally end our trophy drought.

 

 

Out-Bloody-Rageous

I've got this piece about Soft Machine in the latest issue of TQ, which you really ought to buy...

As a kid, I grew up in a house that adored music, though not perhaps the most obvious kinds. The old fella only possessed Irish folk records, such as seemingly the entire recorded output of both The Dubliners and the Clancy Brothers. He took his sartorial notes from them as well; while most of his contemporaries in Felling had affected a quasi-Rat Pack look in bumfreezer jackets and ankle strangler strides, he’d most often be seen propping up various counters on licensed premises, bedight in an Arran gansey and wellies. Fair play to him as well. My mam, who actually saw Bob Dylan at the City Hall in ‘65, as captured by D. A. Pennebaker in Don’t Look Back, was something of a folkie too, though she tended towards the gentler sounds of singer songwriters like James Taylor and his sort. Soppy I know, but far better than the preferences of her sister Maureen who only collected James Last albums. When she died in 2008, we cleared out hundreds of them from her attic; all skipped without further ado…

Anyway, being beguiled and fascinated by music when I was still in nappies, one of the factors involved in teaching myself to read, was by rapaciously devouring the advertising essays on CBS inner sleeves, which led me to forming the opinion cover art could be as fascinating as the sounds the records themselves made. This was a thought I held on to for years, meaning that after the legendary Pop Inn record shop opened in Felling Square in summer 1975, I would spend most of my school holidays in its clutches, endlessly surfing the racks, not for the purpose of potential purchases (I think albums were £2 a shot and I was on 75p a week pocket money back then), but just to study covers that fascinated me: Ghosts by The Strawbs, Cunning Stunts by Caravan, Unorthodox Behaviour by Brand X, All Funked Up by Snafu and even more obscure cuts by the likes of The Amazing Blondel and JJ Cale. These arcane images set my imagination alight.

One band who intrigued me above all were (The?) Soft Machine. Now, this was long before I was given my diagnosis of autism, before the concept of obsessive compulsive disorder was in the public domain, and indeed before the soubriquet “nerd” had entered common parlance. I was just very interested in lists and details, specifically why Soft Machine couldn’t decide on a consistent method of naming their albums; why Volume Two, then Third and eventually Six and Seven? It drove me up the wall, although I was prepared to forgive, and desperate to hear, any group who had songs such as: Out-Bloody-Rageous, Hibou Anemone & Bear, Plus Belle qu’un Poubelle, Eamonn Andrews, Hullo Der, Esther’s Nose Job and The Man Who Waved at Trains.  Despite having discovered the esoteric delights of the perfumed, pre punk John Peel Show around this time, with the first track I ever heard him play being a Dick Gaughan number that the old fella sang along with, note and word perfect (though this was to prove the exception to the rule in subsequent shows, certainly from early ‘77 onwards), it appeared that the great man had moved on from what I hadn’t yet learned to call the Canterbury Scene and prog in general. Even the faint signals from pirate stations off the coast of Norfolk, offered little solace in terms of introducing me to thoroughly obscure experimental wig outs. If only Saturdays hadn’t been dedicated to football in the winter and cricket in the summer, as they are now, I might have stumbled upon Fluff Freeman’s show. As it was, I found myself writing the names of bands on my school jotter that even the most pretentious sixth form longhairs hadn’t heard of.

And then, in the summer of 1977, the year that punk broke (though Neil Young’s American Stars and Bars meant more to me than the Sex Pistols et al, with only Wire’s magisterial Pink Flag staying the test of time from that crowd), my obsession with Soft Machine firstly grew stronger and then was, somehow, sated slightly. Reading a discarded NME in the school canteen on the last day of term, I found news of the imminent release of a 3-album retrospective Soft Machine compilation, entitled The Triple Echo, telling the history of the band from their first single to the latest album. I remember saccharine soul classic Float On by The Floaters played on Radio 1 as I digested this news item with my school dinner. I knew, I simply knew I had to get hold of this fascinating release (Soft Machine I mean). I did as well, but not until 1985 at the end of my second year at university, when a bloke from the year above sold all of his worldly goods ahead of graduation, intending to travel the world on the proceeds. I’ve no idea if he did or not, but I’d like to think the £3 I gave him for The Triple Echo helped him on his way. This piece is dedicated to you Pete Burns, but I know you won’t be listening.

Back in 1977, my mother began to act as an agent for Kays’ Catalogue, for “pin money” as it was called at the time. Of even more interest to 13 year old me than the ladies’ lingerie models in the underwear section, was the fact the catalogue carried a random, eclectic and slightly bizarre selection of records in the “leisure” section, with each sleeve blown up to cover a quarter of a page. Eschewing the wider range of products carried by Callers, Windows or even HMV in town, my mother decided to purchase, for about 22p a week I think, a series of musical Christmas presents for the family and, with me being an August birthday, I became the guinea pig to see if Kays could be trusted to deliver the goods, so I got to make two choices, for summer and for winter. Alongside Simon & Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits (her choice), James Last Live in Moscow (including strange cover versions of Looking After Number 1 and Go Buddy Go) for Maureen and Blonde on Blonde (my Christmas double album), there was an album that lacked any advertising spiel about its genre, content or context. Instead, all it showed was a cartoon cover of an old man in overalls and flat cap, setting a pigeon free in his back garden. This was Bundles, by Soft Machine. My heart almost stopped and then it almost burst. It wasn’t The Triple Echo, but it was the first realistic opportunity I’d ever had to hear and to own anything by them. Bundles was the first album of theirs not to have a numerical title and, so I was to discover, the last to include any of the founding members.

Whenever I picture Soft Machine or call upon a musical memory of their work, I see them as comprising of louche, bibulous bassist Kevin Ayers, cheroot and claret in hand, scruffy, bearded falsetto percussionist Robert Wyatt, antipodean, ganga fuelled pixie guitarist Daevid Allen and inscrutable, academic organist Mike Ratledge, apparently still married to Marsha Hunt after all these years. Hugh Hopper, tall and balding, is there in the background, but I don’t see Roy Babbington, Allan Holdsworth, Karl Jenkins or John Marshall at all. In fact, I don’t hear them either and that is strange because, with modest input from Ratledge, they were the musicians who recorded Bundles.

My 13^th birthday was a Thursday. There was a film of Fleetwood Mac performing Dreams on Top of the Tops, while Eddie & The Hot Rods’ anthemic Do Anything You Wanna Do caught my attention, but nothing on that show, introduced by “Kid” Jensen, had made me think quite as hard as the album I’d been presented with by my mother that morning; Bundles was utterly unlike anything I’d ever heard before. For a start, it didn’t have any lyrics. For another, most of the already lengthy pieces seemed to merge imperceptibly into each other, apart from a couple of truly odd guitar and percussion pieces that didn’t seem to fit at all. Listening to the album again for this article, I feel Holdsworth’s Gone Sailing is a beautiful virtuoso performance, unlike his decidedly dull Land of the Bag Snake on side 2, that is perfect for the end of side 1, but that Marshall’s formless Four Gongs, Two Drums offers nothing to the record at all.

Did I like the album? I wouldn’t have been able to answer you back then, as the concept of challenging music was not one with which I was familiar on the day I became a teenager. Ask me now and I’ll tell you most affirmatively that I do. The five-part opening suite Hazard Profile is a strong and compelling piece, which is only bettered by the closing The Floating World that still is a highlight of live shows played by whatever iteration or brand Soft Machine are operating as these days. The title track is a banger as well. Sadly, poor Mike Ratledge was sidelined to the extent of having his two brief, but promising sections shoved in the middle of side two. Both Peff and The Man Who Waved at Trains should have been explored in more depth. To these ears, Bundles is a very good album and one I grew to appreciate more as time passed, but it is a rather staid and humourless piece; a generic, jazz rock set of sterling, disciplined musicianship that offers little in the way of surrealistic flourishes. It is the logical destination of the journey the group had been on since Robert Wyatt joined Kevin Ayers and Daevid Allen in bailing out before the release of Fifth a couple of years before. Compared to the surreal, playful joy of the first three albums, it sounds like the work of a completely different band, mainly because it is the work of an almost completely different band.

I’ve mentioned my Auntie Maureen and her James Last obsession already. Well, my mother had a pal with far better musical taste, in the shape of Cynthia, who was a fine art lecturer who’d been to art school in London. Apparently, she was the first woman in Felling to live across the blanket with her fella instead of getting married; no doubt a Bohemian habit she’d picked up down the smoke. Not only that, but her walls and ceilings were painted black, she didn’t watch telly and made her coffee in a percolator, into which she poured demerara sugar. We’re talking the nearest thing to the Beat Generation on Windy Nook Bank in the mid-60s. I became mates with her son Jeremy (tough name to have in NE10 back then to be honest) when we were in High School, as we were both intellectuals in the O Level Stream. Several times I went round theirs to listen to records, mainly on account of finding Cynth, as she encouraged us to call her, owned the first four Soft Machine albums.

I was far from a Benjamin Braddock wannabe (the term MILF didn’t exist back then either), but I happily hoovered up the fact that Soft Machine, in the early days at least, were as daft and delightful as I’d always hoped. Surreal, crazy and simply exploding with ideas, I loved those albums. Sadly, at the end of school, Jeremy moved away to a Quaker boarding school to do his A Levels, while his mam and her latest beau, some character in long hair, beads and an Afghan, shifted their operation out into the wilds of the North Pennines, running an artist studio in Nenthead, Allendale or some such isolated head space. I kept the Soft Machine flame alive by discovering and falling deeply in love with the subsequent work of Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers and Daevid Allen, including Matching Mole, The Whole World and Gong. One time, I might even tell you about seeing Here & Now at the Black Bull in Wardley in 1979…

A Day of (Scottish) wine & (Bonnyrigg) Roses

 A rainy day in Bonnyrigg

The last time I was up in Scotland was at the very end of July. As part of my glacially progressing quest to do all 42 SPFL grounds, I’d seized the opportunity to tick Dens Park off the list, when the Dee hosted Inverness CT in the League Cup on a random Sunday. That was ground #27 of the current membership (Albion, Berwick and Cowdenbeath are visits I can no longer count) and for a variety of reasons, another opportunity to venture north of the border didn’t present itself until December 9^th.

I don’t need to tell you how wet this autumn has been, but I’ll just point out that Percy Main have been washed out on 7 occasions (September 16^th, October 7^th, 21^st and 28^th, November 18^th, December 2^nd, and 9^th) so far. Really, I should have made more trips up here, but engineering works, industrial action and a lack of cash conspired against me. My travelling companion for this jaunt was my mate Gary, who is the Benfield secretary; their story is an equally wet tale of woe. While PMA were again prevented from playing our Alliance Challenge Cup tie away to Burradon and New Fordley, Benfield’s trip to West Auckland, pulled back to the Friday night by mutual consent, also fell foul of the weather. Hence, we found ourselves on the 10.41 GNER flyer to Waverley, comparing the qualities of Greggs and McDonalds’ regular lattes and instant porridge, with the US franchise winning hands down on both counts.

As is generally the case, the train was rammed, mainly with day trippers looking forward to a session at the Christmas Market then as many bars as they could fall into and then out of again. Gary and I were also interested in a few bevvies, but football rather than the swally was the prime motivation for this visit. The game of choice for me was the bottom division clash between Bonnyrigg Rose and Peterhead. Of course, with them having a grass pitch, which is becoming more of a rarity in Scotland of late, the incessant downpours could have put the game in jeopardy, which meant the second choice would have been a revisit to the mundane 4G at Ainslie Park, where I saw Edinburgh City play Elgin a few years back, but now hosts League 2 newcomers The Spartans, where Stirling Albion were the visitors.

Thankfully, possibly because Peterhead had come one hell of a long way for this game, our Midlothian Question was given a positive answer, as the fixture of choice was given the go-ahead early and so Gary and I took the train from Waverley to Eskbank, on the fairly new Tweedmouth line, which is built equidistant between Dalkieth and Bonnyrigg. Needless to say, Bonnyrigg is at the top of a steep hill and the rain showed no sign of letting up. Without knowledge of the local bus network, Gary and I were left with no choice but to slog it to the peak, which meant I did get my steps in for the day.

We’d made a vow to stop in the first pub we passed to get out of the elements. This turned out to be Gigi’s Italian Bar and Restaurant, which was very welcoming and quite full of pre Festive lunchtime diners. It wasn’t the authentic Scottish pub experience though, so after a Cruzcampo for Gary and a Neck Oil for me, we made our way to the Bonnyrigg Rose Social Club, which was over the road and across the outdoor swimming pool of a car park, right opposite the main entrance to New Dundas Park. As a firm believer of the “when in Rome” principle, we both got on the Tennent’s, which worked out a fiver a round less than in the other place. We were made very welcome and chatted with several local fellas about the game ahead and the awful sodding weather. Topping up with a final measure of Black Bottle Scottish wine for a deoch an doras, we left the place at 2.58 and still made kick off.

Bonnyrigg, in their second season in the SPFL, sat in 5^th place, while Peterhead, who have been in the league since the millennium, are second, on their first campaign back at this level after relegation last time out. The entry fee was £14, which initially seemed extortionate to me, but when you consider that’s far cheaper than Blyth Spartans, or that I was charged £22 at York City back in October, you can’t really complain. Well, of course you can, which Gary and I did loudly and monotonously, but that’s mainly because we’re a pair of miserable old sods in our late 50s.

The playing surface wouldn’t have passed an inspection south of the border in these hysterical, prissy times, when a cloudy afternoon is enough to get a game called off. Looking at the state of the centre of the pitch, I remarked to Gary that “and Tudor’s gone down for Newcastle” would be the best way to describe how it looked, which didn’t even factor in the delicious slope of this proper old style ground. However, that was all the better as it allowed for a proper blood and thunder contest. Stood on the halfway line on a covered shallow terrace, I was immediately impressed by the metal crush barriers on a grassy bank opposite and the tiny stand behind the goal on our right, which contained the 30 or so visitors from the far frozen North. Considering the crowd was 468, there was ample space for everyone to see events unfold.

Bonnyrigg took the lead on 22 minutes, when Kerr Young buried a powerful header from a corner. However, the home support’s cheers were short lived as Peterhead were awarded a penalty for handball a few minutes later. Paddy Martin in the home goal was the hero, diving low to his right and blocking a tame attempt by Kieran Shanks. Sadly, as the pitch became even more churned up and passing football was a scarce commodity, chances were almost non-existent. On the hour though, scorer Young turned villain, giving away a free kick in a dangerous position, which Joe McKee expertly guided into the top corner of the net. Despite the further efforts of a rapidly tiring set of players from both sides, the cloying surface took the honours, and the sides were forced to settle for a 1-1 draw. It didn’t put off the Bonnyrigg Young Team who, with microphone and drum, kept up a relentless beat and an incomprehensible torrent of verbiage. This accidental take on No Audience Underground sports chanting reminded me of The Prats, that infamous pre-teen combo of Fast Records fame. Check them out here; https://www.theprats.co.uk/index1.html

So, full time and a quick step back down the hill, followed by a short pit stop to use the facilities in Tesco. We caught the train with the Peterhead squad, which seemed strange to me as Peterhead is the football club furthest from a train station in Britain; 32 miles from Aberdeen no less. Anyway, they seemed happy enough with the Moretti carry out they’d sorted out for the journey. At Edinburgh, Gary and I sorted out ours, as well as a quick pint in The Guild Ford, which was full to bursting, before catching our train and making it home without further upset or mishap. A great day out and still 14 others to come, if I’m to achieve this ambition of mine to visit every Scottish ground.