"...Bet
Your Bollocks On It!"
Characters
and more characters...
When
I worked at Reckless Records in Soho's Berwick Street – I'd be standing there,
all magnificent and humble - vacuuming dry yet another Atlantic Plum label LP
on our whizz-bang ding-dang-dolally Loricraft PRC 6. Judging it an act of
extraordinary generosity (and nay even compassion) – I'd often regale to the
young lads and lassies that worked with me (lucky sods), that as an Irishman my
absolute favourite thing about England and English people is their lunacy.
They're all mad. Even the ones who tell you they're quite sane and have a
fabulously convincing front of normalcy (and possibly even possess impressively
typed bits of paper to prove it) – they're almost always the worst. Nuts the
whole dang lot of them. Mad Dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. And I
love it...
I
mean the Irish are bonkers for sure too – and famously so – what with the
marauding Viking blood coursing through our hirsute Celtic groins and
Shamrock-Shaped Y-Fronts (you want a pair of those don't you) – a land where
fine looking women turn into swans for no good reason and then go and live on a
lake for a thousand years (weeping and wailing the entire time), a country
traumatised by the sheer volume of all those Lord Of The Dance costumes and
Michael Flatley comebacks, where Guinness is prescribed for acne and toothaches
(tastes good but doesn't fix either) and people consume pancake-sized mushrooms
just to make it through the 80ts mix tape
on the last bus home. Mad, mad, mad - mad as a ring-dum-a-doo-dum-a-da
(whack for your Daddy-O) - in a land where men are men, sheep worry and
seagulls fly in pairs.
But
we pale into mere insignificance against the towering achievement of the British
- the biz-snitz when it comes to bonkers. And at long last along comes an
entire book of such people and their lifestyles to bolster up my long held
views – views it has to be said that have often been questioned and even
ridiculed by longhaired types of lesser bearing (probably bloody foreigners -
see Daily Mail for incontrovertible proof).
Ever
since his first widely acclaimed tome on Music and its effect on his life
"Bringing It All Back Home" – I've had genuine warmth for Ian
Clayton's writing and superb knack of recollection, his way of bringing those
tiny moments of life and connection into your living room – in short the kind
of writer that makes you smile and think. Well once again Clayton has gathered
together the stories of characters he's met along life's pathways and collated
together their often whacky motivation. These are the kind of nutjobs that can
only be found in pubs – especially ones where the beer is good and the landlord
even more nutty than the dog asleep under the darts board with half a tail and
an eye once reputedly owned by Napoleon.
Inside
"It's The Beer Talking – Adventures In Public Houses" (published by
Route, February 2019) you'll meet rugby fans in Pontefract pubs with a roaring
thirst after a good game, men stripping down Triumph motorbikes that refuse to
work (but they do it anyway), Delaney the Irish road digger who downs a gallon
of pints and then sweats that off on miles of tarmac, Ianto the Cornish
scaffolder who'll polish off a half dozen Tetley Bitters in 35 minutes and work
the planks and girders until dark without incident, Josie the tough but
warmhearted Irish landlady who'd feed the shivering workers still waiting for
payday to make sure they didn't do themselves and their already old bodies a
mischief and the shifty womaniser 'Suitcase John' - out the window and gone in
the morning. In its pages you'll encounter railway pubs that smell of sweat and
wintergreen and have portly bartenders who wipe glasses with towels close to
being condemned as bio-hazardous material. You get knackered decades-old but
inviting snugs in watering holes with names like The Jubilee, The Greyhound,
The Junction, The Green Dragon and The Travellers Rest – boozers that have
poured thousands of glasses of Bass, Tadcaster, Old Peculiar, Adnams, Pedigree
and Sam Smith by Tuesday night let alone the busy weekend. Bars where broody
out-of-work miners itching for some fisticuffs would be told by tough landlords
to 'cut it out lads'.
And
on the opposite end of the social scales, there's the dapper Mr. and Mrs.
Whitney-Mayo who ate Kippers and Dundee Marmalade for breakfast and had been
tea planters in India back in the days of the Raj. There's the curmudgeonly old
landlord Ron Crabtree who served a beer of legendary flooring power called
Enoch's Hammer - named after a bit of machinery some welders broke (it had the
same effect on your brain). Pubs where Northern Men would discuss ferrets,
roll-ups, the game on Wednesday, the state of some of the pillocks on
Mastermind, the beautiful cisterns of original Thomas Crapper loos, the
life-affirming joy of Motown, Stax and Atlantic 45s, the curves of Sonja
Kristina in Curved Air and the psychedelic escape pod of Spirit's "Twelve
Dreams Of Dr. Sardonicus" vs. the proletariat's plight highlighted in
Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" - and all whilst rectifying the
problems of Western civilisation by closing time.
Clayton
doesn't just scour England for the perfect pint and chat either – he casts his
public house net far and wide. There's Jurgen and Volker and the young hipster
types in the Katzengold Bar (Fool's Good) in Wuppertal in Northern Germany
where a perfect pint of Pils can often takes up to the seven minutes to pour.
He's sampled bottles of Fruh Kolsch in China, supped real ale at the North Sea
Jazz Festival in The Hague and loved the purity of the beer brewed in Bavaria
to the Reinheitsgebot laws that go back to the Middle Ages – an enlightened
Euro settlement where pipes from the local brewery go underground and literally
into the bars of the town. And on it goes in his search for the perfect pint
accompanied by a congenial natter...
You
meet people in life who seem to think that others are largely there for their
amusement. Ian Clayton isn't one of those life-voyeurs. He's inquisitive,
talkative, interested in your story, your ups and downs and even your heartache
(he, his wife Heather and his family have had a few of their own). But what
occurs time and time again throughout the text is that he's connecting –
luxuriating in expression and banter - seeking out people - especially if it
leads to that precious stuff called friendship. You would imagine Ian has a lot
of friends who value him and isn't that the loveliest thing to say of anyone,
let alone a writer. We should all be so lucky.
I
enjoyed "It's The Beer Talking – Adventures In Public Houses" so much
and I think you will too – take time to make friends with it...
