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The first thing I noticed about Leeds was the size of the buildings. Actually that’s the second thing I noticed. The first was that it was really fucking cold, and as usual, dressed in a thin suit jacket, I was woefully unprepared for these types of temperatures. (Oh the sacrifices we must make for fashion.)

t'blues

James Taylor
2006-08-23 16:02:08

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his next wok” the Hollywood tagline would read. Sadly this wasn’t the case. The food wasn’t bad, it was just severely average (and left we with digestive problems but that’s another story). When indulging in such buffets though, the quality of the food is relatively unimportant; one must simply cram as much as physically possible down one’s esophagus. However the sweet and sour soup killed off that ambition; tasting, as it did, like the combined perspiration of every customer (and there was a lot of perspiration) had been collected, processed and infused with an oxo cube or two. Never has a slight spelling mistake been so unintentionally misleading.

I’ve never been a massive fan of the blues, however I can see that it does have its time and place. This is preferably a 1930’s Louisianan cornfield but there’s no accounting for tastes, right. I just find it difficult to understand how so many hours of recording history have been devoted to such a simple and uninspired chord sequence.

That I spent several hours that evening rehearsing and recording a mock blues song for Steve’s friend’s school project was surprising then. In the end it was actually quite fun, certainly more so than listening to the stuff. The track actually sounded quite authentic due to the poor quality of the inbuilt i-book microphone we recorded onto. It is a testament to blues straightforwardness though that we were able to achieve such a feat in an hour or two though.

Saturday night was much the same as the previous, similar pubs, less drink, more dancing. Steve is know for is semi-legendry powers over the fairer sex, so it was with slight amusement that I watched him work his magic on a couple of girls he knew. Ultimately, however, he was unsuccessful.

After the last two nights, plus a shoulder injury, achieved by sleeping on the floor for too long, an early start to Sunday was never on the cards, so you will be unsurprised to read that it was well before midday before we arose. In fact not much in general was achieved on Sunday. The most generous thing I can say is that it was a day of repose.

The evening Steve's feelings are plain.was different however. Steve was in the process of setting up a covers band with some friends from his course. It was in its infancy, so he invited me along for a jam. I was kind of nervous about this, I didn’t want to interfere and I assumed the others in his band didn’t want me interfering. Nothing could have been further from the truth. I was, and this might sound a bit melodramatic, rather touched by the by the genuine warmth and generosity of these people. Maybe all northern people are like this, I don’t really know, but the unabashed camaraderie displayed by these people is something rarely seen in the south, outside of a music festival (or depending on the level of inebriation, possibly a very friendly pub.

it was a great evening. There weren’t enough instruments to go round, but people swapped round. I spent most of the evening playing a battered acoustic that no one could hear, but this hardly mattered. The atmosphere put me in mind of an old fashioned camp-fire-sing- a- long (just without a campfire and with lots instruments and inside, ok not a world class analogy). Although Steve characteristically managed to turn it into a Beatles-a-thon, I felt slightly melancholic that I’m no longer in the kind of environment where you can just get together with some friends on a Sunday evening to play some old songs, just because you’ve got nothing better to do. It was the only time that weekend that I felt kind of jealous that Steve’s got another two years of that too look forward to.