The Trib (38 page)

The day after that, Carlisle:

The Apes are faffing around their dressing room, about to go on stage to a rather intimidating crowd of Kasabian fans. It's a downsized tour for Kasabian, one of the most popular bands in Britain today, but the venue still holds about 2,000 people. ‘Are Kasabian a big band?' asks Tom innocently, when they wander into the colossal hall for the first time earlier that day.

It's this lack of stopping to think, coupled with a constant motion in touring – just yesterday, they began a sold-out UK tour with The Ting Tings – that has been a blessing to the Apes. MayKay says other Irish bands sit down and examine everything, dissect it, over-think it, whereas she and her bandmates just do it. ‘What has happened with us since the band started, is when big things come up, a million little things come up as well, so we don't have time to get worried or panic about anything bigger. For example, Glastonbury – we gigged all the way up to Glastonbury, so we never really thought about Glastonbury until the day. It's the same thing with the album. It's done now,' she says, frankly.

They are scarred by the road. Knackered, but having a blast. When they get home for a couple of days' break, after a few hours, they end up in Pockets' house. They can't stay away from each other. They admit to having become institutionalised by touring, leading to endless conversations like this:

Tom: ‘You'd miss an aul' truck stop, wouldn't you, when you're at home? Not specific or anything, just the idea of them.'

Pockets: ‘I'd like to leave my house and be able to go across and have a good selection. Maybe win some cash prizes.'

Tom: ‘No. You've got too much choice at home.'

MayKay: ‘I'm sorry, I definitely don't miss truck stops. Do you ever just find yourself sitting at a truck stop and eating or something and being like, “I was here before. Don't know when, don't care when, never gonna find out.” Oh my God.'

Tom: ‘You should buy a paper.'

MayKay: ‘Buy a paper?'

Tom: ‘Yeah, then don't be in a truck stop, because you just zone out.'

MayKay: ‘I've never seen you read a paper.'

Tom: ‘You've never seen me read a paper?'

MayKay: ‘I've never seen you read a paper in a truck stop.'

Tom: ‘I read papers in truck stops, yeah.'

MayKay: ‘Anyway! I don't know if reading in a truck stop makes me like them any more.'

Tom: ‘It makes me like them.'

MayKay: ‘Well, that's good. You've found a method. I have not yet. I'm sure I will.'

As for the music? It's odd genius (Pockets describes it self-deprecatingly thus: ‘Hook, verse, hook, verse, end of song. The end. That's it. Run it through a distortion pedal.') Obsessions with 1990s popular culture, an incredible talent for catching a melody, then another one, then another one, and ending up with a pop song that has fifty times as much catchiness as anything near it. Feminist, occasionally violent lyrics; almost cartoon-like, and full of strange fantasy. The result is near-perfect pop befitting of a culture where pop doesn't exist anymore; music that's simultaneously assaulting and comforting, stupid and remarkably intelligent.

There's a seven-second song called
Megameanie
on their forthcoming album, as well as what's probably one of the most beautiful post-breakup songs ever written,
Snore Bore Whore
, which runs over five minutes and contains among other things a sample from the narration of newscaster George Putnam on the 1965 anti-pornography propaganda film
Perversion For Profit
, primal screeches from MayKay and beautiful keyboard parts. It's the song that reinforces the fact that, despite their appearance, anti-coolness, and tendency to bang pots together on stage, they are truly remarkable songwriters.

After playing a few practical jokes that involve soaking each other in the dressing room showers and chucking chairs about, they bounce on stage. Confronted by skinheads hugging their girlfriends, waiting for the blokey Oasis-aphiles Kasabian to come on stage and not these weirdos from Ireland, it could all go horribly wrong. Does it? Of course not. They're that good, you see. Do you not know that yet?

Modern Nursery Rhymes: a lyrical journey into the heart of Fight Like Apes

Knucklehead

Hold up stay fresh / Don't let that
beast consume you yet / You're
looking like a rack of lamb / And
you're talking like a caravan / So, no pressure, no
pressure / You're spending tea time with / Fran
Drescher, Fran Drescher / From that awful TV
show ...

Do You Karate?

And he hides behind the guise / Of making life a big surprise / Until you realise / He doesn't even know you like stars

Snore Bore Whore

It's getting better / I sleep well again and now / And I saw my successor yesterday/ And I smiled 'cause she looks like a cow / But none of that matters / ‘Cause she's been your cow for a while / So none of that matters / 'Cause there's something she does that makes you smile

Jake Summers

Hey! You! What's your face? / I've got a pocket full of fist / You got a stupid face / Hey! You! Know your place / You're like Kentucky Fried Chicken / But without the taste / Hey! You! Get some grace / You know you're Driving Miss Daisy all over the place / Hey! You! You're taking up space / And you're a f**king disappointment to the human race

Recyclable Ass

I'd love if my ex-boyfriends / Would stop getting with new girlfriends / And stay single forever / Just in case I change my mind / Woo-ta-ya, that one's a home-wrecker / Woo-ta-ta, looks like Woody Woodpecker / Woo-ta, just let me know and when / So I can take you off my list, you recyclable men

3 October 2010

W
eek number two of my new fitness regime and it's already gone pear-shaped. Week one – buying runners – went well, but week two – wearing them – went horribly wrong. I made the mistake of bringing them to a gym. I'd forgotten what a testosterone-fuelled pit the whole shower area can be. And I'd also packed my sports bag in the dark, selecting from the underwear drawer an item that would have further effeminised a lady boy.

I'd have been safer wearing my wife's underwear, particularly as the other men present seemed to be a group of body-building bouncers from various eastern European countries, many of whom could well have been war criminals. ‘Don't hurt me, I work in the media' cut no ice here. Nor indeed did the words ‘mercy', ‘help' or ‘hello, sailor'.

The real mistake I made was thinking I could buy my own underwear. This is a fallacy of mine linked to a belief I still vaguely have that I am an independent person who can survive in the world without adult supervision. Wiser heads than mine believe shopping for underwear is beyond most men, and they are right. ‘Leave it to your wife,' they say, but I am nothing if not old-fashioned.

I thought I knew what I was doing. ‘How hard can it be to find white kecks with a red waistband?' I asked myself? But it's not that easy in real life. The underwear boxes are vaguely homoerotic and I'm not sure it would reflect well on you to linger over them. I spotted the ones I thought I needed and was just about to pounce when I saw similar ones with a more fetching gold-coloured band. ‘Ah,' I thought, ‘live a little. What harm can it do?'

The answer was quite a lot. They weren't the same. The back, an area for which I think the word ‘generous' should be used at all times, was more akin to a G-string than a comfortable seating area. The front had been designed during a cotton shortage but made up in dynamic uplift, support and pinpoint definition what it lacked in common decency. ‘Don't ever wear them out,' my wife told me solemnly, ‘unless you intend to leave me.'

I couldn't bring them back. That would have involved me holding them up in front of a beautiful young sales assistant and telling her, ‘I'm not this type of man.' And that would have exposed me to the possibility of her looking at the box and saying, ‘No, you aren't.' I thought of trying to offload them onto a friend but my wife argued it would be too public a questioning of his sexuality. ‘He'll come out when he's ready,' she told me. So they languished in a drawer until they ended up in my sports bag. I realised the mistake as I sat naked and wet after the shower. Naked and wet and among a group of men who lift weights four hours a day, drink weird protein things and have ‘packages' that would disappoint a hamster.

So I took the only option: Commando. Yeah, I know. What must they think of me? Still, they didn't get my name and will remember me only as the ‘Commando' guy who can dry himself really, really fast! No, honestly, really, really, really fast.

10 October 2010

D
id you know that the follow-up question to ‘Is there anybody there?', much loved amid mystic circles, is actually ‘wearing anything nice?' I didn't either, but it is. Dead people wear clothes and only right too. It was one thing for the young boy in
The Sixth Sense
to see dead people, but if he'd also been exposed to his aunt Gertrude – naked as the day they found her body in the coal shed – well, even Bruce Willis would have blushed.

It was a psychic that told me. Now psychics, cleverly, maintain that in reading terms I am dead to them. ‘You are dead to me,' they say, eyeing me suspiciously. ‘I feel no energy from you, nothing,' they add. My wife says the same, but they also hint that my deceased kin on the other side are in no rush to contact me anyway. Even she doesn't do that.

This psychic, like the
Sixth Sense
boy, also saw dead people when he was a child. ‘Were you not terrified?' I asked him. ‘No,' he told me, ‘you see, for a long time I didn't realise they were dead. They were so normal to me.'

I wondered aloud, ‘Had they clothes on?' He seemed surprised, ‘Of course, of course they had clothes on.'

He thought I was wondering if the ladies might be in the naughty naked nude. But I wasn't, really. It's just, you would have thought, when the mystery of death is at last revealed and the veil between this world and the next is lifted, you wouldn't have to worry anymore about being caught wearing the jumper your mother gave you.

Be just our luck, wouldn't it? To be badly dressed for eternity.

He was losing me now. I was thinking random thoughts? If we have clothes do we have to have presses? Who irons? Do colours still fade? – when I suddenly heard him telling me that he is often asked to help in missing-person cases.

Then the words ‘car key' appeared mysteriously in my mind. I hadn't seen my car key in two days. Operative word here is ‘key', not ‘keys'. I lost the spare ages ago. The garage had told me I could only order a new one if I had the log book. The log book was locked in the car. I started screaming the words ‘where are my keys?' in my mind and asked him if there was anything he wanted to tell me.

His answer was so vague that even now I struggle to remember a single word of it. It was like a James Blunt B-side. Initially it seemed to be going nowhere but then suddenly it petered out. It was like a ghost itself. He may have answered my question but I just can't be sure. I might have imagined he answered it, or dreamt it.

In the absence of the car key I asked him if my producer should get engaged. He became very serious: There was a very dramatic pause for effect. ‘No,' he said, ‘no, I'm sorry, tell her “no”.'

She isn't dating or even planning to.

We found my keys under a curtain, bedroom variety as opposed to netherworld.

They'd just been on the dark side for a bit.

17 October 2010

T
he vegetable man – as in he who sells vegetables – has gone all Lewis Carroll on me. I had thought the day's headline – ‘Taxes to rise' – deserved a mention, but when I did, he eyed it derisively and raising his eyes to the beautiful sunny day said cryptically: ‘Why assume that's any more real than any of this?' This, from a man who knows his onions, seemed like a fair point.