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I managed to get quite close to the stage for this gig - down among the groundlings, about 20 feet back, I'd guess. This placed me on Keith Richards' side of the stage, and I remember thinking how remarkably healthy he looked. "This is a man 15 years my senior," I mused. "If half of what I read is true, he has ingested enough hard drugs to fell an army and yet he looks fitter - and just plain better - than I have ever looked in my life. Bastard!"
Aside from that, and the fact that the set opened with Under My Thumb, I have no recollection of the show whatsoever. The YouTube footage confirms it wasn't much to get excited about, though: somewhere in the six years since I'd seen them at Knebworth, the Stones had discarded whatever embers remained of their evil fire and settled for backing Mick Jagger's live aerobics routine instead.
Far more satisfactory was the Ian Stewart Band concert I saw at London's tiny 100 Club on September 16, 1983. Stewart was the Stones' original pianist, of course, and a founder member of the band, but had been sacked by manager Andrew Loog Oldham because he didn't look the part. "Stew, with his short hair, beefy arms and pugnaciously sensible face looked 'too normal' for what Oldham's mental movie camera was already starting to run," Philip Norman explains in his Stones biography. "Oldham's request was that he stay on as their roadie, driver and occasional session pianist. Stew agreed, though his pride was badly hurt." ⁽¹⁾

Stewart had continued working with the band ever since, both live and in the studio. By all accounts, he was the one man in the room the other Stones really worried about impressing, and the only one capable of cowing them into professionalism when they misbehaved. A guilty conscience is a powerful thing.
The 100 Club gig convened a version of Rocket 88, the piano-led blues and boogie-woogie band Stewart formed with Charlie Watts in the early 1970s to keep the two men amused when the Stones weren't on the road. People like Alexis Korner and Jack Bruce would often play with Rocket 88 as well. Rather than the Wolf/Reed/Waters records which inspired the Stones, they took their inspiration from Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson and Big Joe Turner. The result was what Stewart himself called "a band with the best horn players in Europe, a very powerful rhythym section, and the only boogie-woogie piano team in the world". ⁽²⁾
Rocket 88 always had a rotating cast, and I can't remember who else was in the line-up on this particular night besides Stewart and Watts themselves. They were bloody good, though. You can guage the mood of the evening from the fact that, come interval time, Watts simply bundled up to the bar with all we punters and ordered his drink for himself. Brushed against my right arm while doing so, as a matter of fact - oh, yes.
A relaxed and intimate gig like this, with no celebrity bullshit and none of the faffing about involved in a stadium show is where the real fun's to be had in my book. You can keep your sense of occasion and your big events - just give me a sweaty little cellar and a handful of bluesmen who really know their trade.

1) "It wasn't done very nicely," Stewart tells Norman of his 1963 sacking. "I just turned up one day to find the others had stage suits and there was no stage suit for me. [.] I thought, 'I can't go back to ICI after this. I might as well stay with them and see the world." Norman's book is called The Stones, and was published by Elm Tree Books in 1984.

2) I've taken that quote from the sleeve notes of Rocket 88's eponymous live album, recorded at Hanover's Rotation Club in 1979. Do yourself a favour and check it out.

In the Spring of 1984, I saw a newspaper report that some of the world's best poker players would soon be coming to the Isle of Man for a Texas Hold 'Em tournament organised by Dublin's Eccentrics' Club. I don't play poker, but it all sounded very intriguing, so I booked a week off work and jumped on the Douglas ferry from Liverpool to see what went on at these things.

* The Palace Casino's tournament room is furnished with eight poker tables, plus a sign-in desk and a safe at one end. Each table is presided over by an impeccably-clad dealer. The players are far more casually dressed, however - baseball caps, T-shirts and shorts. The only sign of gambler chic is the odd Binion's tour jacket or a piece of blingy male jewellery.

* The event's first five days, are filled with preliminary games requiring a buy-in stake of anywhere from £200 to £1,000. These are reasonably well-attended, but the real action is in the informal side games, where far more money changes hands.

* Ready money is the only currency poker players appreciate, and such is the demand for it here that the bank next to the Palace runs out of cash on day two. Rather than waiting for cash to be brought in from elsewhere on the island, some players simply fly to the mainland to replenish their bankrolls there.

* Day Six - the big one - is devoted to the Hold 'Em tournament I've come to see. Thirty-four players buy in to the final day's play, each paying a stake of £2,000 to do so, plus a further £200 to pay for dealers and table space. That creates a total pot of £68,000 to be shared among the last five players to survive. The winner will get half, the runner-up 20% and so on. Fifth pace nets you 5%, or £3,400. ⁽¹⁾

* One of the big name players here is Amarillo Slim, who makes a point of riding to the casino from Douglas Airport on a horse so that all the attending press can photograph him and his surgically-attached Stetson.

* Slim has a colourful turn of phrase. "Good player?" he scoffs at the bar when asked about one of his rivals. "That boy a good player? He couldn't track an elephant through four feet of snow!" When someone else asks him if he's rich, he replies that he's "got enough money to burn up 40 wet mules".

* Other players on the final day include Terry Rogers (the tournament's organiser), Liam Flood (an Irish bookmaker), Cyndy Violette (the only woman taking part), Jack Keller (then the World Series of Poker's champion), Donnacha O'Dea (once an Olympic swimmer), Artie Cobb (who'd won his first WSOP bracelet the previous year), Bill Fain (a physics professor), Gabe Kaplan (who appeared in Welcome Back Kotter), Jack "Treetop" Straus (WSOP's 1982 winner) and Suitcase Johnny (whose real name I never did discover). Rogers, Flood, O'Dea and Johnny are all Irish, the rest American.

* Wandering between tables, I overhear Bill Fain chatting to one of the other players. "I don't believe in all this probability shit," he confides. "I studied physics, so I know that's crap!"

* After 90 minutes play on the final day, just 21 of the original 34 players are left in it. An hour later, Amarillo Slim runs smack into four tens and becomes the first name player to go out. "Ah well," someone nearby tells him. "At least you were beaten in style. Slim grins, agreeing: that's something.

* The remaining 18 players are now grouped around just two tables. Suitcase Johnny is next to fall, followed by Cyndy Violette. A little later, Terry Rogers jumps to his feet after cleaning out Bill Fain to win a place in the last ten. "Ah Terry, Terry, Terry," he declares. "You did it, m'boy, you did it!"

* A buzz goes round the room that Jack Keller is all-in against Liam Flood, so we all gather round the world champion's table to see if he'll survive. He doesn't. Flood takes the hand and Keller is out of the tournament. Just eight players left now.

* As the survivors arrange themselves round the final table, Kaplan welcomes his fellow Americans to what he calls "the legion of doom". The bookies make him a 2-1 favourite to win this thing, with Flood at 7-2 and Rogers at 4-1. O'Dea's the longshot at 18-1.

* The afternoon break is called and Rogers produces a calculator to tot up everyone's current stash of chips and chalk them up on the tournament board. Flood leads with £17,700, followed by Kaplan with £17,150. Rogers himself has £14,850 and Treetop £6,700. Four other players survive, each holding some share of the £11,600 remaining. It's Tom McEvoy's £1,625 which brings up the rear.

* Satisfied he's got his figures right, Rogers ducks over to the edge of the room and - not for the first time, digs a mysterious jar out from under the table. "It's honey," he tells me when I ask. "I don't get much sleep and I need the hit."

* McEvoy's the last player to come down after the break and play resumes about 5:00pm.

* There's a cheer as Flood wins a hand against Treetop. "All this partisanship is terrible," Kaplan jokingly complains. "The Irish cheering every time their man takes a hand. It's like the LA Olympics or something!" He gets his revenge later, as Rogers and Flood face off against each other. "Ah, but I love to see the Irish boys fight among themselves," Kaplan purrs, settling back in his chair to watch.

* Dreams die think and fast over the next hour, and by 6:30pm there's just Rogers, Flood and Kaplan left. Flood now holds £32,400, Kaplan £20,800 and Rogers £14,800. Time for another break.

* Out in the bar, word from the side games is that some guy from Baton Rouge is currently losing between £50,000 and £60,000. Someone else is £30,000 down. My informant's a Scottish lad who'd managed to scare up enough cash to come over to Douglas and play in a couple of the earlier games. His stake soon disappeared, but he seems happy enough with the experience gained. "I know I've got a lot to learn," he tells me. "But now that I've found out where they have tournaments in this country, I'm hoping to play a lot more."

* Play starts up again at 8:00pm. A few minutes later, Rogers goes all-in against Kaplan with a bet of £10,400. Kaplan calmly counts out double the chips and calls. Rogers has two kings and Kaplan two eights, but it all depends on the last communal card - known as "the river". That card is turned, and it gives Kaplan a straight to go with his pair. Rogers is out. "You played great, Terry," one of the spectators consoles him. "You'll never be 4-1 again."

* Half an hour later, it's all over. Flood's modest pair of Jacks is enough to see off Kaplan in what turns out to be final hand and suddenly the Eccentric's have a new champion. "What about a drink then, lads?" Flood declares as he gets to his feet. "I could sure do with one."

* Disappearing to the bar, Flood returns with a drink in his hand. I catch him for a moment to ask how long he's been playing serious poker. "I don't play serious poker," he corrects me. "Tournament play isn't really serious - the outlay's too small." And what are you going to spend the £34,000 on, Liam? "Ah, who knows? I'll probably pay off some of my debts first." ⁽²⁾

Many thanks to all at The Hendon Mob's poker website for helping me confirm the names of the players in my photos above.

1) In Texas Hold 'Em, each player antes up and is dealt two cards face-down. They examine these cards, and there follows a round of betting. Three communal cards (the flop) are then dealt face-up in the centre of the table, and there's a second round of betting from the remaining players. A fourth communal card (the turn) is then revealed, followed by another round of betting, and finally a fifth communal card called the river. The winner is whichever surviving player can make the best five-card poker hand from his or her own two cards plus the five communal ones. In tournament play, once you've lost your original buy-in stake, that's it. You're out of the contest, and all you can do is slink off to join a side-game - where the real money changes hands.

2) Des Wilson's 2006 book Swimming With the Devilfish reveals that Flood had been able to muster only 10% of the buy-in money when this tournament began, the remaining 90% being supplied by Rogers and some other friends. That meant they were entitled to 90% of Flood's prize money when he won, of course, so presumably those were the debts he had in mind when we spoke. No wonder Rogers is keeping such a close eye on Flood's chips in that last photo!

I was still a faithful NME reader at this point and trusted the paper's critics enough to often buy LPs on their recommendations alone. A case in point is Sean O'Hagan's glowing verdict on Red Roses for Me, The Pogues' debut album.
I don't think I'd ever heard the band when I first read this review, but O'Hagan's enthusiasm was enough to convince me it was a must-have. "Shane MacGowan's faith in the power of positive drinking music has paid premiums," he wrote. "The raucous surge and evocative noise that has filled the capital's pubs and clubs has come through the stark sobriety of the studio set-up to arrive intact in all its sweat-soaked, beer-stained glory." That was good enough for me, so I went out and bought the album next day.
It was love at first listen and I immediately started telling all my friends what a great album this was. I took to reminding people that I was half Irish - something I'd never given much thought to before - and adopting a cod Irish accent when singing along to MacGowan's gutter anthems. I went on about the band so much that their name started to register even with people who had no interest in their music. When I changed jobs for a move to London in August 1985, one of the art department guys I'd worked with made me a leaving card drawn up to look like a comic book cover. The lettering he included announced that the story inside was called "The Curse of The Pogues". ⁽¹⁾
One of the reasons I loved this band so much was MacGowan's remarkable songwriting. His best songs dragged the folk tradition's tales of underclass life out of the history books and into the Camden and Soho streets which he and the band's fans walked every day. He filled his songs with everyday details of London low life - rent boys, tramps, pubs and dog tracks - but was never patronising. Like Tom Waits in his early career, MacGowan often chronicled the drinking life and did so with an authenticity and affection which made it clear he was no mere tourist. ⁽²⁾

Many of his songs were already feeding back into the Irish pub song repertoire which helped inspire them, promising a kind of immortality mere pop stars could only dream of. His epic boozing was already making it look like MacGowan himself wouldn't be with us for long, but you could be damn sure his songs would survive.
When I moved to London in 1985, I rented a room in Stoke Newington and worked in Soho. This put me smack in the middle of Pogues territory and I started to identify with the band's records even more closely as a result. Every night after work, a crowd of us would pile into the Star & Garter in Poland Street for a nice boozy evening. Posters carrying MacGowan's face were plastered all over Soho by this point - part of a Stiff campaign promoting one of the band's early singles - and I'd always point these out as we headed home at the end of the night, imploring my companions to "give this man a hit before he kills himself". It seemed a ridiculous thing to hope for at the time.

1) The card was based on one of Howard Chaykin's American Flagg covers. Flagg was one of my favourite comics at the time, and I tended to drone on about it almost as much as I did The Pogues.

2) Although his songs always have a sentimental side, MacGowan tempers his romanticism with a stubborn realism Waits lacks. The vagrants who Waits sings about in On The Nickel are portrayed as overgrown children, with all the innocence that implies. Although they are forced to sleep rough, no real harm ever seems to come to them. MacGowan's equivalents in The Old Main Drag are close to death and no longer able to control their bodily functions. They are prone to sudden incoherent yells and always at risk of a random beating. I love Waits' boozy songs too, but this distinction between his approach to the subject and MacGowan's is one worth making, I think.

I next saw Moore at the Birmingham Comic Art Show - that's Birmingham in the British Midlands, not the one in Alabama. This time, he showed up in a silver suit.
I'd read an interview in some fanzine or other where Moore had noted ruefully that comics were always likely to draw attention more for their art than for the quality of their writing. Fans always wanted artists to draw them a sketch, he jokingly complained, but no-one ever asked their favourite writer to pen them a paragraph. I filed this remark away with my growing stock of Moore trivia and remembered it again at the Birmingham show. Seeing him momentarily alone in the dealers' room, I went over, handed him my pocket diary open at a conveniently empty page and asked him to write me a sentence.
He looked at me askance and replied, "I'll draw you a picture of Maxwell the Magic Cat instead". As he did so, I babbled an explanation of how my mind had been working and he grinned vaguely at what a twerp I was. He handed my diary back with the completed drawing above then made his excuses and left. It had not been the ground-breaking encounter I'd hoped for, but at least I hadn't completely embarrassed myself. If only I'd had the sense to leave it there.

I found a sports bar called Players a couple of blocks west of the Chelsea Hotel (where I was staying) and planted myself there to enjoy a Michelob and read my Village Voice. The Voice had one of New York's best listings sections in those days and I was delighted to find that Pinetop Perkins had a gig lined up at the Lone Star Café in a few days' time.
I knew Perkins' work from his time with Muddy Waters' band, where he played piano from 1970 until Waters' death 13 years later. When Johnny Winter put Waters together with some other expert bluesmen for the magnificent 1977 album Hard Again, Pinetop was right there with him alongside James Cotton, Bob Margolin, Charles Calmese, Willie "Big Eyes" Snith and Winter himself. Muddy and Pinetop were both over 60 when they recorded that album, but they led the band in a performance which many 20-year-olds would envy for its sheer potency. Amazingly, 1978's I'm Ready - a follow-up album which Pinetop also plays on - is just as good.
I loved both those records to bits, and I was still kicking myself for missing the chance to see Waters live when he'd visited London during this late flowering of his career. Still, Pinetop Perkins would be a substantial consolation prize, particularly when he was playing a venue as good as the Lone Star Café. This Fifth Avenue bar, which I'd first visited to see Albert King in 1979, was one of the best places in New York to see rootsy live music. Pinetop was 75 years old by the time I read his name in the Voice that day, but I had no doubt he'd still be capable of tearing the roof off at that particular joint. I took a pen from my pocket and made a big red circle round his name.

The following Monday, I got to the Lone Star about 9:00pm, found a seat near the stage and ordered my first beer of the evening. Most of my fellow drinkers that night were in their 30s or 40s and - as far as I could tell from the conversations I overheard - seemed pretty knowledgeable about the blues heritage Pinetop represented. Here was a man who'd been playing the blues since the era of Robert Johnson and Son House. He'd recorded at Sun Records' Memphis studios a year before Elvis Presley made his first commercial recordings there. The blues legends he'd worked with included not only Muddy Waters, but also Earl Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson and Junior Wells. ⁽¹⁾
Blues and boogie-woogie make perfect drinking music and always sound better in a bar than they do in any other setting. Seeing Pinetop do his stuff at close quarters in a venue so ideally suited to the purpose was sure to be a treat and everyone gathered at the Lone Star that night knew it. That's just how it turned out too. Pinetop, immaculately attired in his trademark brown suit and fedora, sang and played his way through a loose, rolling set of blues standards like High-Heeled Sneakers, Hoochie-Coochie Man, Chicken Shack, Got My Mojo Working and Kidney Stew. He also gave us several of his own compositions, including Down in Mississippi and the irresistible Big Fat Mama. Bonnie Rait showed up to help with a couple of numbers and everyone had a great time. For pure intimacy and atmosphere, it remains one of the best gigs I've ever seen.

1) Pinetop died in 2011, aged 97. Here's an extract from his New York Times obituary: "His longevity as a performer was remarkable - all the more so considering his fondness for cigarettes and alcohol; by his own account he began smoking at age 9 and didn't quit drinking till he was 82. Few people working in any popular art form have been as prolific in the ninth and tenth decades of their lives."

Shortly after the Birmingham show, Moore stopped attending conventions altogether. You couldn't blame him, because his celebrity took a quantum leap with the success of Watchmen and the fan-worship he received at conventions would have become quite unmanageable as a result. Here he is explaining the decision in a 1990 interview with The Comics Journal:

"I used to go to comics marts, small mini-conventions in England, and in the bar comics enthusiasts - who I didn't see as fans at the time - would come up and just talk to me. And I'd enjoy talking to them. I'd have a beer with them and we'd talk on a one-to-one level. It wouldn't have been in terms of me and my adoring audience.
"You can do that when it's only 10 or 15 enthusiasts, but you come to a point where there's 60 or 100 fans [and] you can't have a one-to-one relationship with that many people. Inevitably, you end up addressing them en masse from your podium or whatever. I'm not interested in those types of relationships with people. They don't feel balanced, they don't feel fair, they don't feel positive. They feel like one or more parties is inevitably going to get degraded in a situation like that, so I try to avoid them."

Moore was an occasional contributor to Heartbreak Hotel, the small press mag I mentioned in the previous item, giving it a couple of short comics stories he'd both written and drawn himself. One was about his 1987 trip to New York and the other inspired by the Move's psychedelic 1967 hit I Can Hear The Grass Grow. He'd also given Lionel and Don - the mag's publishers - some stuff for their previous venture, a cartoon anthology called Strip Aids which raised money for London Lighthouse.
All in all, then, it was only natural that, when Heartbreak Hotel threw a party at a London bar called the Conservatory, they invited Moore along. Lionel knew how much I liked Swamp Thing and Watchmen, so he promised to introduce me on the night.

Moore's fame had gone through the roof since Watchmen came out. I still loved the comics he produced, but I could also see that some of the praise given him in the fan press was ridiculously overblown. In the small, self-regarding world of comics, a talent like his shone all the brighter, and this led some reviewers to suggest he was Shakespeare, Milton and Melville rolled into one. My own view was that he was a very good genre writer - even a great one on his day - but that it was people like Clive Barker and William Gibson rather than the giants of world literature who were his true peers. I suspect he'd feel much the same way himself.⁽²⁾
This was the cocktail of thoughts swirling through my nervous brain as Lionel steered Moore towards me at the party. Lionel introduced us, Moore said hello and I opened my mouth to see what came out. I should have said I liked his work. I should have said it was nice to meet him. I should have said it was remarkably pleasant weather we were having. Instead, what I said was this:
"Hello. Boy, you really ripped off a lot from Clive Barker, didn't you?"
Moore took this boorish remark as well as anyone could. He blinked a bit, said he didn't think Barker was that much of an influence and asked which particular bits of his work I had in mind. I babbled something about the Winchester House issue of Swamp Thing reminding me strongly of a story in Clive Barker's Books of Blood, and Moore listened politely for a few minutes before Lionel led him off to find someone less oafish he could talk to. My remark was particularly unjust, because Moore had actually given Barker a substantial nod in Swamp Thing by showing one of the book's characters reading precisely the Barker collection I'd mentioned.
Perhaps Moore is right in saying that the worshipper/worshipee relationship implied by fandom dooms all such encounters before they even begin. Two years after the Heartbreak Hotel party, I read the Comics Journal interview quoted above and saw Moore refer to fans who said "ridiculously flattering things about the work which made you feel bad because they weren't deserved, or ridiculously critical things about the work which would make be feel annoyed because they weren't deserved". I cringed all over again after reading that, because I knew I'd avoided the first trap only by stepping squarely into the second. Sorry, Alan.

1) The other contributors to the jam drawing above were: Dan Clowes (Lloyd Llewellyn); Skip Williamson (Snappy Sammy Smoot); Jay Lynch (Pat), Kim Deitch (Waldo) and Larry Marder (beans).

2) This whole period of Moore's career now looks like his juvenalia to me. The real highlights would come much later, including From Hell (comics, 1999), The Highbury Working (audio CD, 2000), Promethea (comics, 2006), Neonomicon (comics, 2011) and Jerusalem (prose novel, 2016). His upcoming movie The Show looks like being something pretty special too.

I was living in Finsbury Park by this time, and most weekends I'd trot along to The Osbourne Tavern in Stroud Green Road to have a couple of pints and enjoy the band there. They were an engaging bunch of nutters called Psycho Ceilidh, who played the Osbourne pretty regularly and were always a hell of a lot of fun.
We'll get to them in a minute, but first let me tell you my little story about the Osbourne Tavern itself. I was in there on my own one evening, probably about 8:00pm or so, sat at the bar and minding my own business. There was a small group of guys drinking over to my left, all taking the piss out of one another in what seemed to be a perfectly friendly way. Suddenly, there was a flurry of curses and waving arms from that corner, at which point one of them stormed off shouting in fury. I had no idea what it was all about, but he was clearly very upset - not just angry, but hurt too.
He stopped in the doorway leading out into the street, then turned back to yell at his former companions again. "I've got a fucking GUN in my car!" he shouted. "I'm going to come back in here and shoot every one of you cunts!" He seemed to mean not just the little group of people he'd been talking to, but all the rest of us too.
His companions laughed their heads off at this, telling him to fuck off and stop being such a twat. No-one else in the pub seemed to take him remotely seriously either, least of all the barman, who'd barely glanced up from his copy of The Sun as all this was going on. I turned away from the door again - a little nervously, I admit - finished up my pint as quickly as I could without looking a fool, and then strolled across the road to the White Lion to resume my evening there. There was nothing in that week's Hornsey Gazette about a bloodbath at the Osbourne, so I assume our would-be killer simply went home to sleep it off.

Anyway: back to Psycho Ceilidh. The band's three core members were singer Fiach McHugh (who also played bodhran), guitarist Willie Barr and bassist Steve Daley, who doubled on mandolin. Generally, they'd have a fourth musician with them too, such the fiddler Chris Short or a banjo player called Dick Smith, who went on to join The Coal Porters. They played a set of noisy Irished-up covers with the same attitude of frantic, ramshackle abandon The Pogues had brought to their Kings Cross pub gigs a decade earlier.
Short, now with Churchfitters, played a couple of dozen Psycho Ceilidh gigs at around the time I saw them. "It was very much a live band, very much a pub band," he told me over the phone from France. "I loved playing with them. I had lots of good times. Lots of drinking, lots of having a laugh, but behind it music that had some originality and a lot of kick to it.
"The gigs were all mad, but incredible fun. I remember nearly getting lynched one time in the Osbourne Tavern for our version of Danny Boy. It was a hell-for-leather punk version, with Fiach screaming the lyrics at the top of his voice and the rest of us doing a sort of punk accompaniment behind him. Some of the more traditional drinkers there thought we were taking the piss. It very nearly turned nasty."
One of the things that made Psycho Ceilidh unique was their habit of dragging New York art rock songs like Talking Heads' Psycho Killer into their set and roughing them up a bit. Best of all was the distinctly idiosyncratic rewrite they gave to Lou Reed's Vicious, which usually begins like this:

You're vicious,
You hit me with a flower,
You do it every hour,
Oh baby, you're so vicious!

In Psycho Ceilidh's hands, this became:

You're savage,
You hit me with a cabbage,
Three times a week on average,
Oh baby, you're so savage!

Genius! "As with the Churchfitters, we always wanted to do things in a version you'd never heard before," Short told me. "In the case of Psycho Ceilidh, it was a version you'd never even imagined before!"
There was a stripped-down busking version of the band too, known as Reels on Wheels, which comprised just Daley, Barr and Short. "We would jump into a carriage on the London Underground and Steve would shout, 'Nobody move! This is a polka!'," Short recalls on Churchfitters' website. "Surprisingly, I was arrested only once."

On another occasion, Reels on Wheels had just entered the carriage when the train driver announced he would refuse to move off the platform till these "pickpockets disguised as buskers" got out. "The whole carriage said 'That's not true - you stay right there'," Short told me. "So we just waited till the driver got fed up and moved the train. It was nice to have the support of the people rather than thinking we'd annoyed them, you know?"

If anyone else has memories of Psycho Ceilidh - or, better yet, a photo of them in action - please get in touch. I'd love to pass on any further information here.

I was half-drunk in a tatty rock club near Washington's red light district. It was approaching midnight, I was miles from my hotel and I had no very firm plan how I was going to get back there after the show. Just yards from where I stood, a man was dangling a concrete block from two chains attached to his pierced nipples, a procedure which threatened - in the words of his friend Jim - to "make Dolly Parton look flat".
Not everyone's idea of a good time, I know. But I was happy enough. I had come to the 9:30 Club on Washington's F Street to see The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow perform as part of the troupe's 1992 Eyeball Terrorist tour. This was the classic Jim Rose line-up: Rose himself, his wife Bebe, Mr Lifto, The Torture King, The Enigma and Matt "The Tube" Crowley. They'd just got off the 1992 Lollapalooza festival tour, where they'd played to crowds of 7,000 or more all over the US.
I'd set off for F Street far sooner than necessary that night, thinking I'd better leave myself a bit of extra time to find the club. In the event, I needn't have worried because its entrance stood out a mile. The Atlantic Building's once-elegant doorway was plastered with stickers, fliers and spray-paint slogans promoting bands who'd played there or hoped to do so soon. Whichever member of Colon was responsible for placing the band's own stickers had done a particularly thorough job.

Most of the stores and restaurants on this stretch of F Street were semi-derelict and covered in posters of their own. Many bore graffitied tags from the Crips street gang or from someone calling himself "Cool Disco Dan". I retraced my steps to a nearby bar and killed the next hour with a couple of beers there.
Back on F Street, I found the 9:30 packed with typical grunge rockers and college kids. I could see the place was perfect for the sleaziest kind of rock 'n' roll. The barmaids were dressed in cheap knock-offs of Madonna's conical bra, and there were TVs tuned to white noise and static in every corner. The whole place was dark, poorly-decorated and filthy - just what I'd hoped for, in fact.
Nothing was happening on stage yet, so bought a tour T-shirt at the merchandise table and then staked out a spot at the bar which gave me both a clear view of the stage and easy access to more beer. Two Rolling Rocks later, some calliope music kicked in on the PA and we were ready to begin.
Rose's main role was to MC the show, but he also warmed the audience up with a few tricks of his own. He tapped a nail into his nasal cavity with a hammer, allowed Bebe to throw darts into his naked back, rested his face in a bed of broken glass and popped his shoulder to escape from a straightjacket. He also attempted to tumble dry ice on his tongue long enough to produce twin "smoke rings" from his nose and mouth. When this trick failed to come off, everyone applauded anyway. "No, don't," Rose said, spitting out the ice. "I fucked up! I was scared!"
And perhaps he was. Rose's feats were certainly not risk-free. But his own act owed as much to old-fashioned hokum and a knowledge of human anatomy as it did to any fakir-like abilities on his part. The real meat of the show - in more senses than one - came with Mr Lifto and The Torture King.
Lifto's speciality was an unusual weightlifting act, which involved him hefting a suitcase, two domestic steam irons and the aforementioned concrete block from chains attached to his pierced earlobes, tongue, nipples and penis. The most striking part of the act came when he attached the irons to his dick and swung them too and fro between his legs. The supporting organ protested this cavalier treatment by stretching to four times its normal length and threatening to snap in half like an old rubber band.

This is the kind of spectacle that tends to make local councillors a little nervous, and many municipal authorities had ruled that Lifto could perform this part of his act in their town only if his (increasingly) dangly bits were somehow concealed from full view. Sometimes, Lifto dealt with these objections by placing a waist-high gauze screen in front of his soon-to-be-stretched member, producing a bizarre shadowplay. For the Washington show, he relied on a liberal coating of shaving foam. I have since seen him performing the same feat au naturel, however, so I can vouch for the fact that no prosthetics were involved. Judging by the expression on his contorted face as the irons swung back and forth in Washington, it hurt too.

Next up was The Torture King, who proceeded to push a selection of hatpins and meat skewers through his arms, neck and face. It's the small details of his act which I remember most clearly. I recall, for example, that the flesh on his left forearm extended into a cone shape and resisted for a moment just before the skewer punched through to open air. I also noticed that the long hatpin which he poked through both cheeks picked up a tiny bead of saliva on its tip as it journeyed through his gaping mouth. You could see it there, glinting in the stage lights. ⁽¹⁾
After Mr Lifto and The Torture King, the temperature inevitably dropped a little, and we were left with Enigma's bug-eating routine and The Tube regurgitating beer from his stomach, which members of the audience were later invited to drink. Many did so. Curiously, it was The Tube's relatively mild stunts which prompted the greatest gasps of disgust from the audience. Oh sure - now you're appalled!
Watching all this from my spot at the bar, I felt a surge of intense, fiery joy. I was enjoying this show in the same ferocious way I'd enjoyed The Clash's white-hot Plymouth gig in 1977 or The Pogues at the Town & Country. That was a sensation I'd felt at only two or three concerts since, and one which I had started to believe I'd never experience again. And yet, here it was: that thrilling sense that tonight I'd found my way to the very belly of beast. The wild, hi-octane spirit of true rock 'n' roll was abroad that night and if it happened to be embodied by sideshow performers rather than musicians, then so what? This was indeed entertainment, as Jim Rose boasted, which was "live, real, raw and dangerous". And it was big fun. Very big fun indeed.
I know that describing an evening like this in such glowing terms risks making me look like a slavering sadist, but that really isn't the point. Like any good showmen, Rose and his chums pulled in a crowd by promising to give them something they had never seen before. And how often do any of us get a chance to witness that?

It's also worth pointing out that Rose's dark and funny PT Barnum spiel was a big part of the show's success. He would introduce parts of The Torture King's act by warning the audience that they might pass out ("I've seen junkies faint!") or find themselves soaked in blood ("Sometimes he goes off like a geyser!"). When Mr Lifto hoisted the concrete block with his nipples, Rose would hint that terrible damage might result ("Don't rip 'em out, Lifto.") but then make it clear where his true concerns lay (.we need ya tomorrow night!"). Every now and again, he would stress the show's educational aspects by thrusting his forefinger in the air and uttering a sudden cry of "Science!"
In these anaemic times, when ever eating a little animal fat is thought tantamount to suicide, shows like these provide a valuable reminder that we're all a lot tougher than we think we are. And I certainly don't see Lifto and the rest as objects of pity. They seemed sane enough to me, were plainly doing this by choice and gave every sign of thoroughly enjoying their 15 minutes of fame. Where would you rather be: playing to sell-out crowds all over the world, or working some miserable day job?

1) The truth is that human skin really is much more malleable than we imagine. According to Rose in his 1995 book Freak Like Me, The Torture King's Secret was avoiding veins and blood vessels and pulling out the pins slowly enough to let any blood be may had loosed congeal. Mr Lifto, he adds, trained for his own act by expanding his original piercings with heavy-gauge jewellery and practicing till he formed pain-resistant calluses on the areas that bore most weight.

OK, this is a weird one. I can't put an exact date on it, but I was sitting alone at home one night in Finsbury Park when I decided to pass some time by trying to copy a few of the character drawings in Steve Schneider's That's All Folks: The Art of Warner Bros Animation.
The circumstances could not have been less promising. I was slumped in my armchair, awkwardly propping Schneider's open A4 book on one knee and my own A3 sketchpad on the other. All I had to draw with was a bog-standard felt tip, and I knew full well that I couldn't draw anywhere near well enough to get the Warner Brothers characters right anyway. ⁽¹⁾
And yet, just for the next couple of hours, I couldn't put a foot wrong. I made no attempt to pencil any of the figures first, but simply started copying them from the book in ink. Every mark I made on the paper fell perfectly in place, and every line followed precisely the path required. I felt more like a spectator than anything as I watched all this unfold - it was an almost mystical experience.
One by one, Spike, Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester, Pepe and Daffy all appeared beneath my pen, each one realised with a perfection I've never come close to before or since. I couldn't draw as well as this - I knew that for a fact - and yet, just for that couple of hours, I could. Then the spell snapped off again and I was back to my old cack-handed self.
All writers know the feeling of being "in the zone", a rare trance-like state when the words flow painlessly through you on to the page with easy grace. It seems to be a question of finally managing to get out of your own way, and I can only assume something similar happened here. If it weren't for the concrete evidence the evening left behind, I'd honestly think I must have dreamt the whole thing.

1) Believe me, this is NOT false modesty. Something like the face at the top of this page is normally the very best I can do as far as drawing's concerned - and that's a world away from the clean, elegant lines of the Warner Brothers characters.

Like everyone else, I greeted the announcement of this gig with considerable scepticism. Here was the band which had inflamed us all into a crusade against fat, bloated, irrelevant rock stars coming together again 20 years after their prime to headline an open-air event in front of 30,000 worshipping fans, each of whom was asked to pay £22.50 for admission. Surely the only proper response was a contemptuous sneer?
On the other hand, this was the Sex Pistols, undeniably the most important band of their generation, and one of the very few significant punk acts I'd never seen live. The Pistols' 1976 Anarchy tour had played a Plymouth club called Woods just nine months before I moved to the city and that near-miss still rankled with me. Finsbury Park was just a short walk from my front door and Iggy Pop had been booked as the day's main support act. I'd never seen him live either and quite fancied the chance to do so. Somewhat shame-facedly, I shelled out my £22.50 and bought a ticket.
When the day dawned, I filed in through the park's main entrance with all the other punters, found a spot near the back of the crowd and spent most of my afternoon wandering back and forth between there and the beer tent. When Iggy came on, I shouldered my way through to somewhere near the front of the stage and threw myself into the moshpit. I'd been pogoing around there for only a few minutes when I started to feel like I was going to have a heart attack and had to reverse my way back to a calmer section of the crowd. Twenty years earlier, I'd have spent most of Iggy's set in that moshpit and the songs would have just flown by. Now I could barely stand the pace for two numbers. When had I become so old?

No such concerns bothered Iggy himself. He was 49 at the time - ten years older than me - but he threw himself around that stage for a solid hour with all the energy of a hyperactive toddler. As I watched his slim, muscular, shirtless form cavorting about, I remembered the sight of Keith Richards at Wembley back in 1982, and felt exactly the same surge of jealousy all over again. Double bastard!
The Pistols took the stage in front of a backdrop of giant newspaper headlines drawn from the hysterical tabloid coverage of their 1976 TV appearance with Bill Grundy. Prominent among these was the Daily Express front page which gave this tour its name: "Punk? Call it Filthy Lucre". Thankfully, their singer made no attempt to impersonate his Faganesque younger self, choosing instead to stroll sedately around the stage in a tablecloth-check shirt with his hair teased into a sarcastic crown of bleached blonde spikes. "It's Johnny and the boys," he announced. "Fat, 40 and back".
That set the tone for the whole set. No-one was taking this occasion terribly seriously - least of all the band themselves - so there were no great expectations to fulfil and no risk of disappointment if those expectations weren't matched. In the event, Pistols '96 weren't too bad at all. Steve Jones' guitar sound was as admirably crunchy as ever, Rotten/Lydon managed to remember all the words and there was nothing wrong with Glen Matlock and Paul Cook's rhythm section either. If you closed your eyes for a second, you could almost believe you were hearing the band at its 1970s peak, rather than enduring the third-rate tribute act we'd all feared would turn up instead.

They opened with Bodies, going on to play their four classic singles and most of Never Mind The Bollocks. I rejoined the moshpit for Anarchy In The UK, but retreated again immediately afterwards. The band stayed on stage for about an hour (encores included) and bade us farewell with a ramshackle version of Iggy & The Stooges' No Fun. I'd hoped they might invite Iggy out to join them on this particular number, but no such luck.
Next day, I ran into my lodger Duncan, who told me he'd refused to buy a ticket for the gig but managed to get in anyway. He'd been milling around with a crowd of other excluded fans outside the security fence till the end of Iggy's set, when someone managed to break a section of that fence down. Duncan rushed in along with everyone else and had therefore seen the Pistols perform for nothing while I'd paid through the nose. His punk credentials were left gleaming by this episode, while mine looked very sorry indeed. I felt even older after that.

The Harringay Arms in Crouch End was one of my favourite pubs when I lived up that way. It was a thin, rectangular room, with its short edge opening on to Crouch Hill and a bar lining most of the long right-hand wall. Opposite the entrance, at the far end of the room, there was a dartboard, a TV bolted to the wall (always tuned to either racing or football) and a table in the corner full of old boys who seemed to have been drinking there since early adolescence. The smoke of a thousand roll-ups had stained the ceiling immediately above them a grubby shade of nicotine brown.
Dave Stewart's recording studio - a converted church - was just three doors away from the Harringay, so now and again you'd also find some up-and-coming band dropping from in there in to kill a bit of time while they complained about whichever member wasn't present. All this made for an interesting mix of people, and one which is far harder to find in London pubs today. I always made a point of taking friends from outside London to the Harringay when they visited, and often dropped in there on my own for an hour or two to have a few beers while I read a book.
On this particular night, I was reading Victor Bockris's 1998 memoir Muhammad Ali in Fighter's Heaven, an account of the writer's stay with Ali at his Pennsylvania training camp in 1973/74. I'd only intended to stop in for a hour on my way home from a meeting up at Alexander Palace, but I was enjoying the book so much that I just stayed put. Chapter followed chapter and pint followed pint. Small wonder, then, that by 9:00pm or so I was starring to feel distinctly pissed.

That's when I noticed a new arrival was causing some sort of commotion at the other end of the bar. I squinted over and saw it was Suggs, the lead singer of Madness, who (as I later discovered) had been working on his first solo album at Stewart's studio and decided he fancied a pint before going home. I'd seen Madness play live way back in 1979 and loved their cheeky, music hall approach to English pop in the chart-topping years that followed. Under different circumstances, I'd have loved to have a chat with Suggsy, but I had no wish to repeat the Alan Moore debacle of ten years earlier, so I decided to play the jaded Londoner and keep my mouth shut instead. Pop stars? Get 'em in here all the time, mate.
Half an hour later, I glanced up to find Suggs wedged at the bar next to me - the only vacant spot - and asking if the book was any good. I said, yes, it was excellent and we got talking about what a brilliant bloke Ali was. I'd just seen Leon Gast's 1996 Ali documentary When We Were Kings so, what with that and the book as well, I had plenty to say on the subject. How much sense I was making by this point in the evening, I don't know, but there was loads of information in there somewhere.
All this time, I'd dealt with the Alan Moore problem simply by refusing to acknowledge that I knew who I was talking to. Eventually, Suggs took the initiative and started to introduce himself. I told him that I knew perfectly well who he was, but that I'd thought it best to avoid all the usual fannish palaver. "You don't want all that old bollocks," I said. He seemed to accept this explanation and we went back to talking about Ali.
We chatted for another 20 minutes or so, then Suggs went off to talk to somebody else and I decided I'd better go home. Noticing my somewhat unsteady progress towards the door, he took a moment to come over and make sure I was OK before saying goodnight. The man's a gent.

I was sitting on the monorail platform at Seattle Centre, flipping through the local listings rag, when I discovered Tom Waits was booked to play a couple of gigs at the city's 5th Avenue Theatre on the coming Monday and Tuesday. Clearly, there was no time to waste: I abandoned my plans for the morning, dashed straight back to my hotel and called the theatre's box office straight away. Ten minutes later, I'd got a ticket for each of the two shows and established that the venue was just a short walk from where I staying. The gods were with me.

On the first night, Waits' band arrived on stage without him and launched straight into The Black Rider. After a few seconds, a roar from the back rows announced that Waits had made his entrance through the audience doors and was now strolling stageward down the central aisle. He was wearing his usual Oxfam suit and battered trilby, bellowing the song's lyrics into a bullhorn and scattering glitter dust from his jacket pockets as he went. We were off to a flying start.

The evening divided neatly into four sets. First, we had Waits with his four-piece band led by Beck guitarist Smokey Hormel. They gave us Jockey Full of Bourbon, Jesus Gonna Be Here, In the Coliseum, Pony, Get Behind the Mule, Chocolate Jesus ("It's an immaculate confection," Waits growled by way of introduction), Fish in the Jailhouse, Hold On and Step Right Up/Eyeball Kid. Waits sang, played guitar and whipped dust across the stage from a filthy old hankie in his pocket. The stark stage lighting cast a giant shadow of his form on the grey backdrop as he twisted and squirmed his way through the songs.
The big production number so far was Eyeball Kid, for which Waits produced a sheet of mirror shards, which he wrapped round his hat and held in place as he revolved on the spot like the figure at the centre of a music box. A tight spotlight played on the shards as he spun slowly round and round, sending a shower of stars swirling round the walls and ceiling of the theatre. It was a magical moment.
Later in the song, each member of the band was given a brief solo and each was rewarded in turn with a scattering of glitter dust, which Waits hurled like confetti over their heads and shoulders. They deserved the praise, proving themselves at various points in the evening capable of both astonishing power and fragile beauty.
This concluded the first part of the evening. The stage darkened, the band disappeared into the wings, and the lighting changed again to reveal a piano and a stand-up bass at the right-hand side of the stage. Time for Waits' solo set, which comprised Tango Till They're Sore, (Back In) The Good Old World, Cemetery Polka, Invitation to the Blues, Fall of Troy, Picture in a Frame and Innocent When You Dream. The highlight here was undoubtedly Innocent When You Dream. "Sing with me," Waits commanded and just about everyone in the 2,000-seat theatre did. All together now: "It's such a sad old feeling.".
As we all wondered if our throats would ever heal, the band returned and kicked into 16 Shells from a Thirty Ought Six. "My wife says I write two kinds of songs," Waits announced as he cued up the next number. "Grand Weepers and Grim Reapers. This kind of combines both." The song in question turned out to be Gun Street Girl, after which we got Who Are You, Strange Weather, Cold Cold Ground and I'll Shoot the Moon. This last number was romantic as hell, Waits playing the faded crooner to perfection. "This one's for the ladies in the audience," he'd said as he introduced it. "You know who you are."
Everyone filed off stage after that, bidding us a phony farewell before the encore we all hoped would follow. A few minutes later, they were back with Filippino Box Spring Hog, Shore Leave and House Where Nobody Lives. Waits closed the evening with a solo version of Lucky Day Overture and that was that. Altogether, he'd been on stage for two and a half hours.
Returning to the theatre the next night, I got chatting to an American girl in the next seat as we waited for the show to begin. When I mentioned that I'd been there for Monday night's gig too, she and her friends immediately started peppering me with questions. More than anything, they wanted to know why anyone would come to the same show two nights running. First of all, I said, I was pretty sure it wouldn't be the same show - or not the same setlist anyway. More to the point, I lived in Britain, where chances to see Waits' live were few and very far between. He'd last played London in 1987, I pointed out, and it was anybody's guess when he might do so again. How could I throw away this chance of a double-header when it happened to come my way? ⁽¹⁾

I don't think I ever convinced them on this latter point, but I was certainly right about the first. Waits was already on stage when the band started this time, and new additions in the first set included Earth Died Screaming, Cold Water, I Don't Wanna Grow Up, Get Behind the Mule, Murder in the Red Barn and What's He Building in There? The band, once again, was on staggering form, adding a much more melodic edge to the songs' sparse recorded versions. Danny McGough's keyboard swirls on I Don't Wanna Grown Up, for example, made me think of The Band circa 1973.
Waits' solo set opened with Tango Till They're Sore again, but then added A Little Rain, Frank's Wild Years and Johnsburg Illinois. The band's second set included Blue Valentine and Blind Love, before closing once again with I'll Shoot the Moon. Encores on this second evening included a sublime version of Take It With Me, which Waits performed alone at the piano. You scarcely dared breathe as he played this song, for fear of breaking the gossamer tension it created in the room. "That was so beautiful it almost made me cry," a girl in front of me remarked a she gathered her things to leave. Her friend agreed. And so, silently, did I.

1) Waits would not play London again until November 2004. I was in San Francisco at that time, so I had to wait till his 2008 Glitter & Doom UK tour, when I caught him at the Edinburgh Playhouse. Throw in the 1987 London gig mentioned above, and that's just four times I've managed to see him in the past 31 years.

I dragged my bags out on to the concourse at Austin airport and found a cab driver, who introduced himself as Jimmy. He had a long, droopy moustache, a rat-assed old camouflage Stetson and must have been somewhere in his early thirties. He asked me where I'd come in from and I told him Dallas. "That's uptightsville," he said as we pulled away from the kerb. "You'll have much more fun here."
I told Jimmy I was hoping to hear some live music while I was in town, and he suggested a couple of bars on the city's infamous Sixth Street. Talk of bars got us on to the English licencing laws and the fact that the pubs there used to be closed all afternoon. This made Jimmy think of siestas and the "illegal immigrants and liberals" running Austin's city council. He was getting quite animated now. "Here we go," I thought.
For Jimmy, it was a short step from Austin's city council to "corrupt motherfuckers like Clinton". Bill, it seemed, had particularly displeased Jimmy because the Secret Service had insisted that Austin residents' cars be towed off the streets to make way for a recent visit by the Presidential motorcade. "In the days of the warrior kings, people like that would have ended up on the fucking block," Jimmy snarled. All this angry wisdom was delivered over his shoulder as he repeatedly glanced back at me to make sure I was taking it all in. He paid scant - if any - attention to the traffic around us. What cares a warrior king for such trivia?
Thankfully, the drive from the airport to the centre of Austin was not a long one, and my hotel soon hove into sight. Jimmy dropped me off, gave me a firm handshake and sped off in search of a fresh audience. I'd barely got out of the cab when a tattered figure close behind me suddenly erupted. "I need some weed!" he yelled to nobody in particular. "Goddamn it, it's Labour Day! I need some marijuana! Who got it?"

That night, I went out to explore Sixth Street. This was Austin's Music Row, crammed with the clubs and bars which hosted its South by Southwest festival every year. It began at the end nearest my hotel with Buffalo Billiards, the Grove Drug Store and the Marisco Grill. Just a block further on lay Joe's Generic Bar, the Black Cat and Capital City Tattoo. I counted a dozen music venues in the single block between Trinity and San Jacinto alone, including one called The Bates Motel.
Among the bands on offer at these joints were Slum City, Cadillac Voodoo Choir, Broken Teeth, Steamroller, Daheebeegeebees and some bunch of no-hopers called Bowling for Soup. In the doorway of 1^st Street Loan, a homeless young drummer was clattering up a storm on a couple of upturned plastic buckets he'd found in the street. "Sixth Street is a zoo after dark," the hotel barman had told me just before I came out and I was beginning to see what he meant. This place was looking like more fun than Dallas already.

[I spent the next few days exploring Austin attractions like the State Capitol, LBJ's Presidential museum, the University of Texas campus and Bat Bridge. Then it was back to music. ⁽¹⁾]

On my last day in town, I realised I still hadn't been to Antone's and thought I'd better put this right. Just a block off Sixth Street, this place was the one venue absolutely everyone in town recommended. I'd never heard of Eleven Hundred Springs, the band playing there that night, but I knew Antone's had its own record shop up by UoT's campus, so I stopped by there to see if the store clerk could tell me anything about them.
I slid the Austin Chronicle's listings page across the counter to him, pointed out the item on Eleven Hundred Springs and asked if he knew what kind of music they played. He'd never heard of them, he said - but he thought he'd probably be able to figure out their style from the ad alone. My role was clearly to play Doctor Watson to his Sherlock Holmes, so I kept quiet and prepared to express baffled admiration at his deductive powers.

Eleven Hundred Springs, he said, had evidently taken their name from an old commercial for Pearl Beer, a local Texas brew, which used to advertise the stuff as being "the product of eleven hundred springs". The Chronicle's photo of the band showed all but one of them wearing Stetsons and the other with greasy hair and a goatee. Texas beer, Stetsons, facial hair and a media-savvy name: it all added up to one thing. "I'd say they're alternative country," he concluded. I could see the logic of his methods and had to agree. "I'll go along tonight and see if you're right," I promised.
I got to Antone's at about 9:30pm and found the place empty except for a few barstaff and assorted hangers-on. I sat at the bar and ordered a beer. A few more punters drifted in over the course of the next half hour, but the place was still far from full. At about 10:00pm, two guys sitting next to me clambered up on stage, called their two friends over from the other side of the room and the support band's set got under way.
This mob, The Hollisters, played a good old honky tonk set full of references to life on the road, shitty jobs, faithless women, excessive drinking and all the other staples of the country repertoire. The singer wore a Stetson and the guitarist took care to provide plenty of twang. All was as it should be. I particularly liked their version of Little Egypt, a vintage R&B tune about a stripper which I recalled from a much-loved old Downliner's Sect album.
Eleven Hundred Springs turned out to be far less interesting. They were much more polished than The Hollisters and replaced the support band's excellent twang with acres of pretty-pretty steel guitar. The Hollisters had clearly been disciples of Johnny Cash, but this lot reminded me more of The Eagles. I had an early flight to San Antonio next morning, so I gave up after their first three or four songs and went home to get some sleep.

1) My other abiding memory of this trip is the godawful heat in Austin. The city broke its all-time temperature record three days running while I was there, topping out at 112 degrees on September 5. "It really can't get much worse," one despairing headline in the American-Statesman read. No wonder it had struck me that Austin's city centre alleyways smelt even worse than those in London or New York: their own urine that month was not only stale, but baked.

The White Stripes made big news in England in August 2001, when they recorded a session for John Peel's radio show. Peel declared the band "a revelation", adding: "I've not been affected by anything as much as this since punk, perhaps even since I first saw Jimi Hendrix". Ever keen to find a "new Beatlemania" story, Radio 4's Today programme ran a rather clueless item about Peel's remarks, which concluded that there were "scores more bands in Detroit playing a similar style of music". The crucial label at the heart of all this, it seemed, was Washington State's Sympathy for the Record Industry.
I was curious to discover what all the fuss was about, so I started listening to Peel's show again after a break of several years and invested in the White Stripes first two CDs. Pretty soon, I was au fait not just with Jack and Meg, but also with several of the city's other most interesting bands: The Come-Ons, The Detroit Cobras, The Soledad Brothers and the Von Bondies to name but three. "Is Detroit the new Seattle?" the NME breathlessly enquired. "Beats me," I thought. "But it certainly seems worth nipping over to have a look."

Weds, Feb 13: I got off the People Mover at Greektown Station, walked through Trapper's Alley and found myself in Monroe Avenue. This row of about two dozen restaurants and bars - the one bright spot in central Detroit - now mostly relied on the nearby casino's customers for its business. I found a little storefront bar there called The Music Menu, which had a poster in its window announcing the coming week's programme of live gigs. A singer called Thornetta Davis was scheduled to appear that night, followed by The Brothers Groove on Thursday, Lucas on Friday and The Orbitsuns on Saturday. ⁽¹⁾

The poster's background showed a tall, skinny guitarist behind a microphone stand. He was wearing black jeans, a sleeveless black T-shirt, a long black leather waistcoat and a black baseball cap. His long, thin arms were covered in tattoos and his hair was black and greasy. He looked every inch the rock 'n' roll frontman.
All the names on the poster were new to me. Even so, I was glad to find such a promising venue within a short and easy walk of my hotel, so I made a mental note to investigate The Music Menu further. I spent the rest of my evening going through a couple of the local listings rags. Current columnist Josh Steichmann had a piece there calling The Orbitsuns 'eclectic honky-tonkers' and singling out their recent gig at Ann Arbor's Blind Pig as one of the month's best. This mob was starting to sound pretty good.

Thurs, Feb 14: I had no great hopes for The Brothers Groove. Metro Times said they played "acid jazz, funk and power pop", which didn't sound like a very appetising combination to me. Still, I was curious to see what The Music Menu was like as a venue, so I went along and ponied up my $5 at the door anyway. As the big bald fella collecting money there waved me in, I had my first look round the joint's interior.
It was a long, rectangular room, dimly-lit, with a bar taking up most of its right-hand wall and about 20 small tables filling the rest of the floor. Above the tables, all along the left-hand wall, were black & white photographs of various semi-famous musicians who'd played there in the past. To my right, there was a pool table and, to my left, a small stage area which backed on to the building's shopfront windows. These windows had been blocked off with thick black curtains and topped with a net of fairy lights to add some showbiz glitz. At the far-end of the room, which was about a third full, I could see one set of doors leading to the kitchen and another to the toilets.
Behind the bar, there lurked the usual collection of cash registers, bottles and fridge cabinets, plus a large mirror with a "Double Diamond" logo and a pony-tailed barman called Jay. I got a beer in and asked Jay to tell me about the bands lined up for later in the week. He had a ready answer. "Lucas are blues-rock," he said. "The Orbitsuns are bluegrass rock - and they're the best band in Detroit right now."

The Brothers Groove started their set about 10:30pm. They played polished, funky soul, decorated here and there with a spot of wah-wah guitar. All the band's own songs seemed to be about lust, sex or dangerous women. The best of these was You Got That Thing, a slow, steamy love song which gave their keyboard player Chris Codish a chance to show off his skill. They threw in a few covers too, including Dr John's Right Place, Wrong Time and ZZ Top's Cheap Sunglasses. There was nothing I would have called acid jazz or power pop anywhere in this 45-minute opening set, which suited me just fine.
After their set, I paused on my way out to buy a band CD from the bass player. The door guy I mentioned earlier must have seen this transaction, because he came running after me out on to the street brandishing another CD. This one was by Thornetta Davis, the singer who'd appeared at The Music Menu the previous night.
If I liked The Brothers Groove, this guy said, I would love Thornetta Davis, because she was great. He added that Codish sometimes played keyboards with her, said she appeared at The Music Menu fairly regularly, and urged me to come back and see her soon. Like a couple of other people I'd spoken to that night, he seemed driven by a genuine love of Davis's music and hugely proud of her status as a home-grown Detroit talent. Now he wanted to spread the word. Already, I was starting to kick myself for missing the previous night's gig.
I bought the Davis CD he'd come out to show me, explaining I probably wouldn't get a chance to see her this time round as I was only going to be in town for a few days. I'd be back here on Saturday for The Orbitsuns though, I promised, and quite possibly for Lucas tomorrow night too. This seemed to satisfy him and we bid each other a cordial goodnight. The Music Menu, I decided, had passed its audition.

Fri, Feb 15: I stopped by at The Music Menu again tonight, this time to see what Lucas were all about. They turned out to be a Cream-style power trio, led by a formidable guitarist called Brett Lucas. Their set started well with an enjoyable version of Howlin' Wolf's Howlin' For My Darlin', but things went rapidly downhill from there. I've always found blues-rock trios a rather leaden affair and I'm afraid this lot did nothing to change my mind. Everyone else seemed to love them, though.

Sat, Feb 16: By Saturday evening, I was feeling really psyched-up about The Orbitsuns. Giving myself a chance to see "the best band in Detroit right now" was precisely what this trip was all about. As I'd left The Music Menu last night, I'd spotted a new Orbitsuns poster in the front window and stopped to admire the pretty young cowgal it showed. If this image was anything to go by, the band would be bright, sharp, sexy and thoroughly steeped in country music. All this and eclectic honky-tonk too. What more could I ask?
This time, The Music Menu was full to bursting and, in deference to it being Saturday night, the usual $5 entrance charge had been hiked to $6. The only seat I was able to find at the bar placed me right up by the kitchens but, as other punters came and went, I was able to work my way down stool-by-stool to the corner nearest the stage.
The first sign of action came a few minutes after I arrived, when the evening's support band climbed on stage and started tuning up. This lot were called The Resonators, and I was heartened to hear the first sounds they produced were those of a pedal-steel guitar. They were a four-piece, comprising guitar/vocals, bass, drums and pedal steel. They played a Steve Earle-ish brand of rocking country, full of self-composed songs like Turn of the Night, Let's Get To It and When Did She Start Day-Dreaming? None of them were wearing Stetsons.
Or, at least, not at first they weren't. Waylon Jennings, one of the pioneers of the outlaw country movement, had died a couple of days earlier and the Resonators' lead singer was obviously a fan. He announced the band were dedicating their set to Waylon that night and then, fearing that such a move might look presumptuous, quickly added "Not that it matters". He then produced a natty black Stetson and said he would be wearing it for the next number, which was called Where Do I Begin?

When this song was complete, he took the Stetson off again, made sure we all got a good look at it and called for a show of hands to decide whether he should keep it on for the rest of the set or not. "Keep the hat" won by a landslide: we were up for all the country fixin's we could get now.
The Resonators finished their set with a promise that the very imminent Orbitsuns would "rock your world", then distributed a few fliers for one of their upcoming gigs before sitting down to have a drink. Everyone else rushed to the bar to get another round in before the headliners got started.
My new neighbour there was a very drunk girl who leaned blearily against the bar as she waited to be served. I watched her warily from the corner of my eye as she deliberately dipped her $20 bill into the flame of a bar-top candle. Every time the corner caught light, she would retract it sharply, blow it out, and then start the routine all over again. The solitary barmaid on duty was swamped, so drunk girl had time to light and extinguish her money three or four times before getting served. She seemed to find the process quite a mesmerising one.
The Orbitsuns hit the stage about midnight, led by singer/guitarist Vinnie Dombroski, who I immediately recognised as the lanky, tattooed rocker on Wednesday's Music Menu poster. I later discovered he'd been in a fairly major Detroit rock band called Sponge, who scored a gold disc with their 1994 debut album Rotting Piñata. Somewhere round 1999, he'd started writing country songs and recruited some Detroit pals to help him form The Orbitsuns. They'd played their first gig a couple of years ago and been steadily building a following in the city ever since.
If The Brothers Groove's theme had been "Lust", then the Orbitsuns' was definitely "Love Gone Wrong". As part of this brief, they tackled remorse, heavy drinking, infidelity, lies, death, self-pity and all the other staples of the country songbook. They relied quite heavily on crunchy rock guitars in this live setting, but there was more than enough lyrical steel guitar work from Tim Duvalier and wry, witty lyrics from Dombroski to justify the "country" tag too. Mostly, they stuck to their own compositions.

Knockin' on the Door was a rockabilly-fuelled chugger about a man who stays out too late, kicks in his own front door and then spends the rest of the night sheepishly repairing it. I'm Leaving You was full of hurt pride and twangy guitars, with a sulky narrator complaining that his girlfriend had dumped him before he could beat her to it. Haul Ass was a noisy rocker which the band used as an audience singalong, Mistreated was a country-fried ballad with lashings of weepy steel guitar, and What Road Are You On? gave us a taste of country/gospel blues.
One of my favourite moments in the set came during the fast instrumental bit of Haul Ass. This required drummer Jimmy Paluzzi to bash out the beat with metronome precision while bassist John Dunn matched him blow for blow. When they reached this passage, Dunn leapt into position immediately in front of Paluzzi's kit. The two men locked eyes together, each daring the other to screw up, and nailed that beat down. Moment by moment, their eyes grew wider and their grins a little more manic, but neither man faltered for a second. They seemed to be beaming a mental message back and forth between each other and that message read "Shit! This is fun, ain't it?!"
The band threw a few covers into the set too, including Bob Dylan's Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine, Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire and Red Arnall's Cocaine Blues. The last song in particular fit them like a glove, but still couldn't top the final cover they had in store.

It was nearly 2:00am when the band kicked into the Elvis Presley song Suspicious Minds. As they played the intro, a beautiful black girl from the audience climbed on stage to join them. This, Vinnie announced to huge applause, was Thornetta Davis, who'd agreed to join them for a song. She sang the hell out of the thing, her throaty soul/gospel voice taking the evening's music to a whole new level. I exchanged a grin with the door guy I'd spoken to on Thursday. "Told you," he mouthed.
And that was more or less that. The Orbitsuns said their goodnights, Duvalier sold me one of their self-produced CDs and I started back towards my (thankfully nearby) hotel. As I weaved along the sidewalk, I thought about the intricate network of connections between all the Detroit bands I'd seen.
I knew by then that Chris Codish of The Brothers Groove sometimes played with Thornetta Davis, and that he'd also appeared with Vinnie Dombroski on the 1996 Sponge album Wax Ecstatic. Brett Lucas had backed Davis too, as well as playing on The Brothers Groove CD. Dombroski, who'd just invited Davis on stage with his own band, was known to share a stage with The Brothers Groove from time to time too. And so it went on.
I found this a cheering thought. I may not have seen anything of The White Stripes or The Soledad Brothers while I'd been in Detroit, but I had been able to get a taste of another, equally genuine scene the city had to offer. All The Music Menu bands needed to win the same UK recognition as the Sympathy for the Record Industry crew, it seemed to me, was a break-out act like The White Stripes to draw some attention their way. In the small hours of that chilly Detroit morning, with my belly full of beer, the only doubt in my mind was whether Thornetta Davis or The Orbitsuns would get there first.

Sixteen years on from my visit to Detroit, I'm pleased to report that The Brothers Groove, Brett Lucas, The Orbitsuns and Thornetta Davis are all still going strong and all still busy helping each other out when the opportunity arises Thornetta Davis's 2016 album Honest Woman (with Brett Lucas on guitar) is particularly good.

1) Years later, I discovered that The Music Menu stood on the edge of Detroit's main blues neighbourhood of the 1930s and 1940s. "Paradise Alley was three-quarters black by day and, at night, became in integrated strip of bars, clubs, private clubs and restaurants that spelt entertainment - that is music, prostitution and gambling," Mike Rowe writes in the sleeve notes of his Down Home Blues: Detroit compilation. John Lee Hooker got his start playing Paradise Valley joints like the Apex and namechecks one of them - Henry's Swing Bar - in his 1948 song Boogie Chillun.