Diary of an up and coming sociopath

Guess what I did Wednesday night while Nikki was on her way back from Belgium. Still thinking? NEED A CLUE?

How’s this?

That’s right. A free Frank Black “precore” show (it’s like an encore, only before the gig.) I’d been planning to go since I learnt of its existance a couple of days before, and since the previous one in Dublin ended in the police escorting him away from a crowd of a thousand fans, I spent the day glued to the Frank Black forums to see if there was any news on how it was going to go down. By complete chance, I discovered he was appearing on 6Music, so I tuned in to see if I’d missed it. Luckily I hadn’t, and when he appeared he confirmed that the council would not be letting them do the gig as planned, but to stay tuned…

A brief interview and a few songs followed. At the end, it was announced that a new venue had been found - the Social on Little Portland Street, a venue I last visited to see David Ford when he was thrashing out his new album, which occurred not too long after Nikki moved down to London - possibly even just before. With that in mind, I grabbed Nikki’s old, battery-less camera and fled, eager to get in line. I popped into the newsagents on Haven Lane and purchased some, then combined the batteries with the battery-less camera leaving me with one working camera. I love it when life is like an adventure game.

Naturally, because I wanted it to be fast, the Tube was completely fucked so I spent the 50-minute wait on what should’ve been a 25 minute journey praying to Satan that I got there in time. When I emerged from Oxford Circus I had to orient myself, but still managed to make it to the venue in time to join the front of the queue with about 8 or 9 other people. We waited until just gone 5, when who should arrive but Frank Black/Black Francis himself, with tour manager and cameraman in tow. As he waited outside for someone to let him into the venue, he did stand at the front of the queue and speak unto us (literally, he stood mere inches away from me) and it was fucking awesome because he’s FRANK BLACK, y’know? If I had a religion it’d probably involve him.

He explained the situation with the gigs to us, and I made him laugh when he said “they told us we’d be arrested if we tried to gig because, I dunno, they thought we were going to start a riot or something.” and I was like “Wait, we’re not!?” demonstrating the rapist-like with that’s gotten me where I am today. His tour manager also discussed how Westminster council cracked down on busking like the gestapo (I’m paraphrasing) but once they heard he was taking the free gig to Camden’s jurisdiction they naturally stopped caring.

Eventually he was let in and we followed, and I found myself a nice place to watch, sitting on a table in a booth near the front. He played a substantial set of about 8, maybe 9 songs, including Where Is My Mind? and Motorway to Roswell, as well as some stuff off Bluefinger (easily his best album since the Pixies and you should all totally get it) and Svnfngr, and a new song. And it was all fucking great. I hestitate to use the word magical, because my soul is dead, but that’s got to be about as close as it gets. We’re talking Arcade Fire at Porchester Hall, 4Scott, Placebo-instore levels of impressiveness. Plenty of between-song banter, too (as well as during song-banter) and he used that special ability musicians have to make the slightest comments seem hilarious. He also did this amusing thing in Where is my Mind where he mimed the instrumental bits, which doesn’t sound that interesting, but y’know, you probably had to be there. AND I WAS!

To end, here is a youtube embedment of various versions of the only song people seem to have recorded, the aforementioned Where is my Mind. If you want the full James Experience, this specific video was recorded by the person literally sitting in front of me, as you can probably see if you compare the video angle to the angle in my photo.

Otherwise: