Just the Facts

incl. a few brass tacks

Today’s ‘Stack Attack got away from us — it’s 3am in Wakefield, we’re out the door at 10 to motor on down to Bristol, and there’s no plan for this post. But a vow is a vow, and though we’ll certainly fall short of our promise to post each day of this tour, the moment of failure has not yet arrived.💪

But this is going to be very loose. Here are some notes on the day:

• Relatively short drive from Newcastle this morning (90 mins), and we have a great spot in Leeds, so we forwent any wake-up comforts (food, coffee) until arriving in West Yorkshire’s capital, and into the waiting arms of Union Coffee, over at 51 Great George St. (strong recommend). As mentioned in a recent post, finding filter coffee in the U.K. is often difficult, and when it happens and it’s a good cup, we do this:

  

  I just discovered that Substack has a bank of stock photos you can drop into posts — get ready for lots of that ((Photo by Ivana Cajina on Unsplash)

  Not only does Union have great coffee, they have matching food, and the staff, instead of being arrogant assholes who know they’ve got the goods, are convivial and welcoming. Keith and I discovered this joint when we were in Leeds for the Huffy acoustic record store promo-week, and went twice in twenty-four hours, again when we played the Brudenell last year, and frankly would go weekly if we lived in Leeds. Indeed, if we lived in Newcastle or Manchester we’d go biweekly. Okay. I guess you know how we feel about Union Coffee.

• The Wardrobe, which hosted today’s show, is a good spot. Great crew, really fun, clear-sounding stage, and what appear to be nice sight-lines for a high percentage of the audience. The green room sucks — we were jokingly calling it “our hole” when we were out and about later, as in “I guess we should go back to our hole” —but very few venues tick every single box. So we did our soundcheck, made some further tweaks to the setlist, and got out of the building for an hour or so. A (Zoom) student of Carne’s has a brother who chefs at a local wine/food place called Eat Your Greens, so we followed that thread of random human connection and ended up in a swell place where K.C. got wine and Keith M. and I had vegan whisky amaretto sours (Keith makes most cocktails disappear like quality filmmaking in the Netflix era, but doesn’t love a sour due to the egg protein goo that gives it that lovely viscosity — Eat Your Greens had a non-amniotic workaround, but I didn't pay attention to what it was). Then, back to our hole.

• What a show. Felt like we got the setlist to a great place by [SPOILER ALERT] leaving out What You Do Best and Lethal Enforcer, which we experimented with this week; sticking with Courage, first tried in Newcastle; and bringing recent standby No Wait at Five Leaves back. We put Ghouls in tonight at the top of the encore, and that felt like the only misstep — something’s still missing when we play it live; not sure what, but we’re not living up to the recording. Talked afterward about [STILL SPOILING] rotating Dinosaurs into that location tomorrow night.

  

• Here’s Carne in the darkened lobby of our Wakefield hotel, where he and I ate dinner and finished a good bottle of Italian wine from Newcastle’s rider (what is this, a Hemingway story?!). The details are uninteresting, but our original dinner plan got fucked up, either because we don’t know how to use Deliveroo — admittedly, it was our first time trying — or because Deliveroo sucks, so instead of eating fantastic Malaysian food (also discovered during the Huffy in-store tour), we picked up some pretty darn good late-night Lebanese on the way out of town. Murray snake-attacked his food in the van…

  

  I searched for a photo of “snake eating” and “snake bulge,” hoping for one of those pics of a snake who has swallowed a chipmunk; Substack doesn’t have one, thank goodness, because here’s this instead. ( Photo by Bethany Beck on Unsplash)

  …then beelined to his room after check-in. Carne and I had a more leisurely meal, talked about the great show and the evils of capitalism, then retired upstairs to slide into our form-fitting knitwear and catch some Z’s. I made a pit-stop here 👋.

That’s all I’ve got. Oh, Carne just texted me this video, “How Singapore Airlines Makes 50,000 In-Flight Meals A Day,” with the note “Also this is nuts,” after I asked if he remembered the name of our Lebanese late-nite. I haven’t watched it yet, but KC doesn’t use the word “nuts” lightly (“also,” “this,” and “is” he’s pretty relaxed with), so maybe give it a look.

Last thing: yesterday’s post on “music we like” elicited a bunch of great responses in the comments (recommended browse), one of which reminded me of a band I loved when I was a little older than 16 (18, I think) called Dog’s Eye View (kinda terrible name, but good band). And then this afternoon I was sifting my travel hard drive for a Lobes demo to send you when I came upon a truly mid song I wrote during a Song Challenge last year, and realized it totally burgles Dog’s Eye View. I had no idea after recording it, I just knew it wasn’t about to be a W.A.S. song, but with D.E.V. back in my brain the similarity is obvious. It just goes to show you that your art is probably recycled other-people’s-art even if you don't realize it. Even if you think you’re standing on a high mountain ridge, your angle of view able to perceive all truths and unencumbered by any obstacle, you’re actually standing on the shoulder of a giant, or Dog’s Eye View’s heads or something. Anyway, here’s that song, which I mis-titled “Built to Swill” at the time because I incorrectly thought Built to Spill was the victim of my burgling:

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