My Exciting Life In ROCK (part 1): 31/8/02 - Bearwood College, Wokingham

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Wokingham! Scene of so many GRATE ROCK EVENTS like... er... Actually, this may well have been the Premiere Wokingham Rock Event EVER, for LO! It isn't exactly a Rocking Hood.

I got asked to do this gig by someone who'd seen me accidentally at the Bull & Gate - she was one of the MANY people over the years who'd gone there to see a friend's band and hadn't realised that you don't HAVE to stick around and see the other acts, and so had ended up seeing ME. Draw your own morals from that particular story, but for me it meant a LOVELY day trip out to a part of the countryside that The Likes Of Me very rarely get to see.

I say "Likes Of Me" because Bearwood College is a Private School, and by golly HECK didn't it look like it - when I finally got to the entrance I had to walk past the Porter's Lodge and down a lengthy wooded driveway towards the main house, with sounds of MOLESWORTH echoing round my head. By the time I got to the front door my FORELOCK was profoundly tugged and my workmen's hat was clutched apologetically in both hands. It was all I could do to FORCE myself through the front door, rather than going round the back to the Tradesman's Entrance.

The gig was part of someone's birthday party, which was all taking place in a couple of rooms downstairs which looked out onto the LAKE! The school had its own lake, also, I think, a GOLF COURSE! By golly, at my school we thought it was swish having permanent buildings, but this was something ELSE. I spent the first hour or so there being IMPRESSED - this nearly always happens to me when I come into contact with The Super Posh, my first reaction is AWE which gradually but inevitably mutates into CLASS WAR.

THIS time, however, it changed into sadness, as myself and the PALS who'd come with me went for a bit of a wander round the rest of the building. Once past the YACHTING TROPHIES (yachting trophies!) you got to the dormitories... and the air of abandonment and despair was PALPABLE. Just standing outside the door you could feel the years of tearful children left there for months on end by parents too concerned with making money to waste time seeing their own offspring. The worst of it was that you knew the poor little kids dumped in this place would spend the next several years being trained to BE the kind of "success" and money-fixated people who would go on to do exactly the same thing to their OWN children, and then lecture the rest of us about how to live OUR lives.

All right, maybe this WASN'T an exception to the inevitable descent to CLASS WAR, but at least this time I wanted to give our moneyed oppressors a bit of a cuddle BEFORE putting them up against the wall. That's not a bad manifesto really, is it?

ANYWAY, after all THAT I returned to the party, where the assembled THRONG of Teachers (for that is what they were, and why they'd got the use of the school) were getting progressively DRUNK, as Teachers in a throng will always DO. Soon it was time for me to do MY set, and I had a FINE old time - in fact I got the best EVER reception for the song "If You're Too Turned On". It's about a) using the images of politicians to forego orgasm and so b) how some of the most hateful politicians can inadvertently do SOME good, and THUS has a middle bit which goes:

Oh Enoch Powell, Enoch Powell
Did you think you'd be remembered
As the face that helped a thousand nights
Go on five minutes more?

Oh Enoch Powell, Enoch Powell
You are the loch-keeper of love
There is a river that you're holding back
But it's not made of blood

USUALLY this bit would get, at best, a SNIGGER as someone worked out what I was on about, but THIS time I could SEE the moment when one of the teachers suddenly TWIGGED (NB that it's a river of MAN MILK), as he GUFFAWED so heartily that he fell off his chair! It was FANTASTIC!

After that there was nowhere else to go but down, so we didn't hang around very much longer - the nibbles had been nibbled, our beer was drunk and so were we, and we headed off to get the train home, away from the dappled sunshine flicking through the trees in the drive, and the tear-washed pillows of children learning about the meaning of money.

We had pasties at Reading Station on the way home too. It was GRATE!

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