Wreckless Eric News Page September 2002

Normal For Norfolk
Here I am again after yet another hiatus. I've finally got a permanent address again – not that I'm going to reveal it on the internet, but it's a bungalow (not a boat – that's another long and complicated story that I can't be bothered with right now, suffice to say that boats are a sore subject at the moment), and it's in a leafy Norfolk suburb where it's mates with a lot of other bungalows. It's a fantastic place to go for a walk just as it gets dark – you know - that time between switching on the lights and getting round to drawing the curtains. People round here have goopy paintings of tearful dogs adorning the mantelpiece, they have wallpaper that's difficult to look at, and big MFI cabinets full of bowling trophies and photos of gormless relatives. I was in the local petrol station the other day when a monstrous human shape lumbered in demanding 'got any whoite braird?' Apparently doctors round here have a code for people that are loony, but not loony enough to be put away - they write NFN on their notes – it means Normal For Norfolk. I like it here.

I've started writing songs again which is a bit of a surprise to me because I was almost convinced that I never would. I'm sorting them out with Andre of Beat Group Electrique and Donovan of Trash fame (also Bootleg Beatles). We've got three finished so far and I've got a load of others knocking about too. As soon as I've moved all my recording equipment into one of my three bedrooms I'll be ready to record them.

I've also got to finish my book – there's a deadline of September 30^th and I've got about thirty thousand words to write. So I'm going to have to keep this brief…

Since I last wrote anything for the site we've had the Jubilee celebrations. What a fucking shame and disgrace that was. I played in Canterbury and I was the voice of dissent. Having refused to be televised (which is where we left off last time) I put the shits up the BBC by threatening to kick in a TV monitor on the stage if they didn't either cover it up or switch it off. It was showing the jolly capers at the palace. I explained to the audience that I didn't want to see any of that shit while I was playing, and that the whole thing was a farce – they were only there because everyone else was there and everyone else was there because they hadn't got minds of their own. I don't think the audience liked me much. But then I wasn't that impressed with them - the Croydon audience of last March was positively vibrant in comparison. This lot were all peeling oranges and trying to figure out complicated knitting patterns. Karen filmed them from the back of the stage. Here are some stills:

I said 'I won't do any of my more esoteric material because I can see you're a family audience and I wouldn't like to offend anybody.' A fat American woman sitting in a plastic armchair in the middle of the crowd said 'I don't mind offensive, I just don't like boring – and you, you're a bore.'
It's bad enough having to play to cunts like that without being insulted by them. I was quietly furious. I looked at her and said, 'Yes, but you're fat, old, and ugly, and I don't like your slacks… and you're American.' Then I started in on the more esoteric material. By the time I was halfway through You Can't See The Woods I think we all knew where we were coming from. The six people that were into it were really into it and the rest were completely fucked off. They sat on the damp grass and carried on peeling oranges. Unfortunately the rain held off. God save the queen, or as I said at the end: 'It's a shame about the fat American cow but she's old, and unless I die in a road accident on my way out of here I'll still be around when she's dead…' Royalists are bad enough, but American royalists are just fucking ridiculous. All that patriotic fervour and flag waving, it's just a trick to make us feel proud of our shitty country.

Well, I'm sitting here in my great big bungalow lounge and listening to the Cornershop album Handcream For A Generation. I still think it sounds a bit woolly to me, and also I get the impression that they're big fans of Odelay by Beck – but then who isn't. It's growing on me. I really don't know if anyone else is listening to it but I wish they'd let me know… It's just finished and now I've put on the first side of Check Your Head by the Beastie Boys. Before that I was doing what I thought was a cool mix involving Lay Lady Lay by Bob Dylan, Cowboys by Portishead and Donovan's Sunny Goodge Street.
At some point between the Cantaborian fiasco and right now I saw Air playing at UEA (University Of East Anglia). It's a dreadful venue and it always seems to half fill up with beefy agricultural students – it hasn't changed since I first played there in seventy-seven or whenever it was. But Air were utterly fantastic. Buy all their records and go and see them, that's my advice. Also Pulp in Thetford Forest – that was a great night too. And Thetford Forest is a lovely venue – but it's probably a different story when it rains.

The Beastie Boys have just spiralled off and now I'm listening to Jose Felliciano. I'm tempted to stick on Bert Kempfeart's Swingin' Safari after this. It all seems to suit the bungalow. Half my record collection (the easy listening part – which I've been collecting since long before it became trendy) has come to it's spiritual home. Bossa Nova anybody…?

Last week I had a gig in Stirling. It was my first time in Scotland for sixteen years so I was quite excited about it. It's a hell of a long way to drive for one gig so I decided to fly, and having received countless emails from Ryanair advertising weekend breaks in Helsinki for four quid and return flights to Dublin for a couple of bottle tops when I hadn't any need, intention, desire, or even the money to go anywhere, I thought I ought to take advantage. It was a very stupid thing to do. Ryanair should carry a government health warning at the least – especially when they've got anything to do with Stansted Airport. The kindest thing I can think of to do to Stansted Airport would be to evacuate everybody (except of course most of the senior staff of Ryanair and also the baggage handling company, not forgetting all the managers of all the airlines, fast food outlets, Sock Shops, Tie Racks, WH Smiths, and also the fuck-witted architect that built this piece of stupidity in the first place) and drop bombs on it until it doesn't exist anymore. Maybe this would strike a blow for humanity.
After Jose Felliciano I actually got A Swingin' Safari out and held it in my hand, but my eye was taken by Los Tres Paraguayos Vol. 2 and now I'm typing along to Guantanamera – which Lee Brilleau and Sparko of the Feelgoods immortalised all those years ago as Cunt In The Mirror (I saw a cunt in the mirror…)

Worth particular note amongst this selection is the performance of Daniel Cordoza, lead singer of the group, composer, arranger, singer and instrumentalist of great talent. With a voice of great warmth and expression he gives a little extra something to the Latin American favourites on this record. Most of the songs will need no introduction, songs like "Guantanamera", "Amapola" and "Cielito" Lindo", but amongst those which are, perhaps, not quite so familiar to you we are sure you will find some which will quickly become new favourites.

Quite. That 'perhaps' says it all – they're scraping the bottom of the barrel and hoping that us botty wiggling bungalow dwellers are going to be too busy handing round the cheesy snacks to notice. I wish I had Volume 1. If anybody sees it hanging around in a charity shop please get it for me. It's on the Marble Arch label.

Anyway, I digress… We're at Stansted Airport – or rather we're not at Stansted Airport at all – we're on the M11 doing eighty miles an hour and being late because someone on the team has been too busy moving house to remember that you need a passport to get on an internal flight these days. They caught sight of a mention of it at the last moment in the six pages of fine print that Ryanair email to you when you book one of their flights, and then they remembered that they'd forgotten where they'd put it because they used the bag they'd had it in for a purpose that was unrelated to the business of having to prove one's identity, so they'd taken the passport out of the bag and put it down somewhere. And they couldn't remember where. Also the flight was scheduled to leave a full quarter of an hour earlier than this person had hitherto assumed it would. As you can imagine, I was furious. The simplest thing would have been to leave this person behind but unfortunately this person was an essential and integral part of the evenings projected solo performance.

We missed the plane. Or, that is, the plane was delayed (which is a feature of all Ryanair flights by the way) but they wouldn't let us on it because the flight was closed and they were only accepting standby passengers. The next flight was three and a quarter hours later at half past three in the afternoon, and we had to rebook to get on that. But only if they had any seats left and they couldn't tell us that because the computers were down which was part of why they couldn't let us on the flight we were supposed to be on in the first place, even though it was sitting on the tarmac with lots of empty seats.

We had to join a queue. An interesting feature of Stansted Airport is that if you stand still for more than a minute people will start queuing behind you – because that's what Stansted Airport is all about – queuing, drinking over-priced cups of tea, and killing time in the Sock Shop. This isn't just sour grapes because of one incident – I've suffered Stansted Airport on numerous occasions when I've been kind hearted enough meet people off flights there. If anyone else wants to be met in the future – they're on the bus. The last time was a six hour wait for my mum on a flight from Lourdes that was seven hours late. I was privy to this information because someone rang me from France to tell me. Stansted Airport were unwilling to admit that the flight was at all delayed even when it hadn't arrived five and a half hours after it was supposed to have done.
Anyway, having queued for an hour and twenty minutes and coughed up another eighty quid we were rewarded with standby tickets that may or may not get us on the next flight. We'd have to queue again, but in the interim there was just time to queue for the toilets and slosh down another over-priced cup of tea.

They let us on the flight this time but they wouldn't let me take my guitar on with me, it'd have to go as a 'fragile item'. They stickered it all up and directed me towards one of those temporary looking structure which such a large part of the Stansted Airport interior, and a large, hairy fat man in a sweaty T-shirt took it off me and shoved it on a conveyor belt. I had misgivings about this and as it went through the X ray machine, looking beautiful in full colour, I was rather pleased that Karen tried to take a photo because the thought had crossed my mind that this might be the last I saw of it. Unfortunately a large, bossy woman in some kind of uniform stepped in between the monitor screen and Karen's camera and told us that photography was not permitted. So we got a photo of a pair of wide, uniformed hips instead which is just a black square so I won't bother putting it in. Instead you can have some of me changing a string in Stirling (yes, we did get their eventually).

As it turned out I was right – I didn't see my guitar for another twenty-four hours – and that's why, as you've probably noticed, the guitar in these pictures is one that I wouldn't normally be seen dead with but we'll get to that later. We arrived at Glasgow Prestwick with the imprint of the seats in front on our faces and waited in vain for my guitar to hurtle through the rubber flaps with all the golf clubs and mis-matched Antler luggage. A middle-aged security woman who told me that if it was a fragile item it would be delivered to her, but she had no notification of any fragile item and pointed me in the direction of the carousel. She said 'I don't know what you're asking me for – I'm only the security officer.' She was also the only official person in evidence and by her own admission was in charge of fragile items. Her whole demeanour was aggressive and unhelpful.
The last of the baggage left on trolleys, pushed away by the last of the passengers, the carousel was switched off, and we were left alone in the empty baggage hall with the security gorgon, whose name, incidentally, is Teresa Hawkens. Teresa Hawkens was extremely rude. She told me to go round the corner to the Ryanair desk because my missing luggage was really not her problem. I got the impression that there was a certain amount of racism involved in this, me being so obviously English and her being so very Scottish, but of course I could be wrong. She was probably just having a bad time with the menopause – and before I'm accused of sexism I would add that not long afterwards I met one of her colleagues who was probably having trouble with the male menopause – that'd be a kind way of explaining his behaviour.

As I walked away Teresa Hawkens stood glaring at me like a Bull Mastiff, muttering stuff under her breath. I finally lost my temper. I turned and bore down on her – and when I do that, even though I'm only five foot six, I'm terrifying. 'What did you say to me, bitch? I'm going to make an official complaint about you - you're supposed to be here to help people but all you are is fucking rude. What's your name?' She backed off and tried to cover up her identity tag with her hands. But I'd already seen it – TERESA HAWKENS.

The way she covered up her identity tag really gave the game away – she knew she'd over stepped the mark. I left her yakking into a walkie talkie and went round to the Ryanair desk. There were three Ryanair representatives manning the desk and none of them was particularly interested in my loss of luggage – it wasn't their problem and there was nothing they could do about it. In fact they seemed quite surprised and put out that I even broached the subject with them. I was persistent so they called in a representative from the baggage handling company because apparently it was all their fault.

The baggage handling company was represented by a young man in a large fluorescent yellow anorak. He told me that there was nothing whatsoever that he could do about it and anyway he hadn't got time because he was having to deal with all these calls concerning other lost baggage which were coming through to his mobile (and which he was ignoring). His mobile rang constantly and it was all the fault of the baggage handlers at Stansted Airport who'd racked up an all time record of two hundred lost items that week. I expressed my dissatisfaction and he asked me what I would like him to do about it. It was like talking to a moronic eight year old. I said 'I would like you to find my guitar and give it to me, and I would like you to do this immediately.' He said that this was absolutely not possible. I found this puzzling because nobody had so far done anything to try and trace the whereabouts of my luggage. All they wanted to do was, firstly, impress upon me that it wasn't there fault - that it was somebody else's fault, and secondly, that they were powerless to do anything at all to find it.

The baggage handling company representative was just explaining that the Ryanair staff – the ones in the Ryanair uniforms sitting behind the Ryanair desk, the ones who suddenly seemed to have dematerialised – didn't actually work for Ryanair. I was about to with this fascinating new twist when I felt a presence. I turned round and there was a thug in a uniform, a sort of male version of Teresa, glaring at me. 'What do you want?' I demanded. The thug looked absolutely outraged: 'Phwort do I want? phwort do I want? – I was called here, sonny, because there was a report of a disturbance.'

I'm forty-eight years old and I've been round the block a few times, and nobody calls me 'sonny', it doesn't matter how many broken beer glasses have been imprinted into their face. I said 'well you can go away because I'm not talking to you'. He told me that I could discuss the matter with him in a private room if I carried on like that and then he started pulling at my sleeve. Then he said that if I didn't keep my voice down he'd call some of his mates and I would find myself being forcibly ejected from the airport. I found this confusing because he was the one doing all the shouting - I was talking to him very quietly. I said 'I'm not talking to you, I'm talking to this man,' indicating the baggage handling company representative, 'and when I've finished doing that I'll leave the airport without any assistance from you'. He backed off. I think he realised that he'd gone to far - threats are bad enough, and there was definitely a threat, but tugging at my sleeve, and in front of witnesses too, that just wasn't on. They're not supposed to touch you – he had no right to do that.

But what can you do – complain? Not really. I rang the Air Transport Users Council when I got back. Apparently there isn't an independent body that investigates claims against airlines or airports – it'd be too complicated because it comes under International. This lead me to wonder what exactly the Air Transport Users Council exists for, but the lady couldn't tell me so I hung up.

I finally succumbed to Bert Keampfert's Swingin' Safari (This is a week and a bit later by the way because I've been busy with my book). Fuck me – what a record! It's way better than I ever imagined or remembered. Jeff Higgott popped round the other afternoon and I played it to him. We came to the conclusion that Bert Kaempfert & His Orchestra would be the ideal backing band for me, so if anybody knows what Bert and the boys are up to these days, let me know. Together we could be a winning team though there's not much likelihood of us being able to do the Minx Club. Think of it – Bert Kaempfert & His Orchestra could be Paul McCartney to my John Lennon…

…by the way, the Cornershop album, Handcream For A Generation, of which I was so scathing in my last irregular attempt to keep everybody up to date has become a firm favourite and gets a play just about every day which just goes to show that I can be wrong from time to time – but not when it comes to RYANAIR (you've got another name check there boys).

Anyway, back in Stirling I had a gig to do. We had to hire a guitar. It was waiting for me when I got to the gig and it must have been the worst electrified acoustic guitar in the shop. It had no tone whatsoever though it improved slightly when I put a new set of strings on it. It was a cheapo effort from Taiwan with one of those ridiculous Anglo/American names like Shaftsbury or Tanglewood, and it had a really yuk looking cutaway. Why they just can't call these ghastly instruments Yuk guitars I don't know. It'd look good picked out in mother of toilet seat on the headstock.

The auditorium had been set up in a raked fashion which meant that I got neck ache trying to make eye contact with anything more difficult than the knees of the people in the front row, and the people further back felt excluded by distance. Never mind – apparently that's how they had it for Hugh Cornwall, and he loved it. I think Hugh Cornwall's a wanker, but I've already said that elsewhere.
To save time in me having to explain the gig when I've got so many other things to do here's a review which you may already have seen on the front page:

I should mention that by this time I was wearing a black seventies evening suit, in a silk and linen mix which came from the vestiaire of the Societe de Noblesse Francaise. A friend of mine works there and at the weekend she has the key to the vestiaire which is a little depot where rich aristocrats bring their cast-offs so that poor aristocrats can have the benefit of them and not let the side down. I've had it for years but I never had the chance to wear it until my daughter, Luci, invited me to her eighteenth birthday party. Everyone had to wear evening dress. I enjoyed wearing my suit so much I've decided to wear it at the occasional gig. If I'd been wearing it at the airport that security man would be dead meat by now. I spent the whole of Luci's party appearing out of the shrubbery, looking devastating, having just dispatched another enemy agent.

The next day at the airport it was as though there had been some sort of coup in the night. The check in was taken care of by a very nice helpful Scottish lady who suggested I went to the Ryanair desk which, when I got to it, was staffed by a charming young woman who slipped out of a door and came back clutching my guitar. It was all intact so I took it over to the check in where the nice helpful lady was nearly as pleased as I was and said I could carry it to the aeroplane myself where it'd be taken on as Delicate Baggage. It was like a fucking fairytale.

Incidentally, while I'm writing this twaddle I'm listening to the Sandpipers version of Cunt In The Mirror which I found today in a charity shop. It's a sickly piece of work, but a welcome addition to my growing collection of 'bungalow music'. I also found another Bert Kaempfert record – That Latin Feeling. To start with I was a little disappointed by this one after A Swingin' Safari, but by track number four, Mambo Mania, I was hooked – it's classic Bert. I just talked to my friend, Andre Barreau, who's another Kaempfert devotee and he gave me the sad news that Bert's been dead for some considerable time now. But on the bright side, the orchestra still exist, and one of the horn players in the Bootleg Beatles orchestra is actually a member of it.

In the charity shop I also found a copy of Bert Kaempfert Special on the Contour label presented by Musical Rendezvous. I'm going to give that a whirl right now while I round off this dreadful Ryanair oddessey…

I got on the plane and handed my guitar to a nice young member of the cabin staff called Scot who told me that I'd be reunited with it at the Stansted baggage claim. He was adamant that under no circumstances could I carry it off the plane myself as this would present a security risk – carrying on, carrying off? What's the fucking difference? When we got to Stansted I rang the baggage handlers on the special phone provided in the baggage claim. This Bert Kaempfert record's a bit slushy – there's no twangy bass on it and the penny whistles have been substituted for strings. Very disappointing – I think Bert fell on his arse with this one. Probably record company pressure. They had had no notification of any delicate or fragile items of luggage arriving on our flight. My guitar suddenly went flying on to the conveyer belt like a leaping salmon followed by a large suitcase that landed on top of it. It could've been worse – just a couple of cracks in the side, hardly worth complaining about really - I wouldn't get anywhere if I did because Ryanair make you sign a disclaimer – they don't care where your luggage lands up, or what condition it's in when it gets there. I'm just going to send them a copy of this instead. I'm also going to send a copy to the managements of Stansted and Prestwick airports.