When I received the course timetable, I'd smiled when I saw that Wednesday afternoon was free, and quickly booked a ticket for the Skid Row gig at The Electric Ballroom. Oxford probably has some of the best city connections to London, so after the morning classes, I walked up the road to the bus-stop, and waited for one of the cheap 24-hour coaches to take me "home".
It was seven years to the month that I moved out of London, and there are parts of the city that I truly do miss. There are, however, also neighbourhoods that I could happily go the rest of my life without returning to. On my way to Camden, I realised I hadn’t been there for almost ten years... and I’d forgotten quite how much I dislike the place.
Keen to avoid the rush hour, I got there unnecessarily early. There was no queue to speak of outside the venue, and nothing much to do but wander around. I felt nothing but disdain I felt as I walked through its over-rated markets and crappy streets, which were customarily filled with dealers, hopeful-but-misguided wannabes, and foreign language students whose guidebooks had cruelly misinformed them that Camden was cool.
I was hit on by a couple of desperate-looking smack addicts as I perused the overly familiar pseudo-goth-rock crap on offer, and marveled at how familiar it all looked. The vast majority appeared unchanged from the days when I used to shop there as an impressionable teenager.
Wow... I really do sound jaded, don’t I?
Unable to take any more, I gave up and sat outside the venue, trying to block out the local sights, sounds and smells with Donna Summer on my iPod (not very metal, I know!). Sick of people tripping over my legs, I later decided to be a little more sociable and chat to the other people in the queue.
They told me the name of the sexy-as-fuck Snake substitute was Keri Kelli. I laughed even before I later saw the spelling on a guitar pick. It gave some hint as to his rather dodgy, very glammed up past... the evidence is on his website... under Big Bang Babies ;-)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment