******************************************************* WARNING This mail is incredibly long! Well 4 me @ least ******************************************************* Contents... 1) The Picnic 2) The gig 3) other stuff 1) England 5 - 6 Scotland The Sinister International Football Match The winning goal scored by the silky footwork (Oh, OK he toe poked it!) of one Alisdair Cook! anyway... Never one to be nervous around new people (aye right!) I set out apprehensively to my second Sinister Picnic. (the last one being so long ago that no-one would even hope to remember who I was, having made absolutely no impression on anyone the last time). On the train from Airdrie to Glasgow, my trip descended into cliche from the outset. Sitting on the train, drinking a Capri-sun (a more twee drink you will not find - well except for ribena I guess - that means U JenOwl) listening to a B+S compilation tape and reading Stuart david's new novel. Any person clued in to there music trivia on that train would have laughed. "Look, he's going to a B+S picnic" they would say! I met Amy and Paul (and subsequently Dave and... OH FUCK!!!!!! I hate when that happens! He was so cool but I've forgotten his name. Sorry :-( ) at the underground on buchanan street and we caught the train to Kelvinbridge. We get off the train and we walk out into the sunshine! WTF??? It was freezing in the city centre! Warm in the west end! Well, OK it was overcast and the grass was damp but at least it wasn't freezing! OK, so by this time, I'm bricking it! No-one knows me AARRGGHH!!! I'm introduced to one of the sweetest guys I've EVER met going by the name of John, and he is eagerly showing off his new feather boa (called penelope) and dufflecoat. Then there is Ally Cook! He strides out, Cool as Fuck! And you think... excellent! We waited around for a while, and i realised the one thing lacking in my picnic gear! A PICNIC! I hadn't brought any food! What a plank! So we followed everyone deep into the regions of Kelvingrove park and we found a rather nice (if a little damp) spot to sit down! We hung around and chatted (mostly about bicarbonate of soda and pigeons exploding) and we saw a dog metamorphisise into a man. People began to join us. Sweetie, and JenOwl, and Ia(i)n Radcliffe and other people of whom their names escape me but could not have been nicer to me if they had tried. Paul and I went on our way to buy food on GWR and when we came back even more people had joined us. The food trip itself was notable for the number of times we managed to cross the same road in the shortest possible time. We bought sweeties and juice and al-key-hol, and we bought jaffa cakes too (well they've got sodium bicarbonate in them - we fancied seeing a pigeon explode - although we thought better of it!). I don't know exactly at what point I decided to get up and join the little kick about that was going on with a ball that Ally had just bought but I thought it'd be sociable. We carried on passing the ball around for a little while and then someone decided on a match. England - Scotland. The glasgow Picnic and it seemed there were more english people there than scots. At one point we had an englishman (a really nice bloke - I hate not being able to remember names) on our team. I think the excuse was that his grannies dog's previous owner was born in Scotland. This same englishman however, who subsequently missed a penalty for us.. ahem. :-D The game was a lot of fun. With lots of running about and jumping and cursing my fat arse! And obviously the English scored first. But us scots are resilient (or just stubborn) and we regrouped and destroyed the english (I'm beginning to sound like one of those videos you watch at 'historic Scotland' or the National trust monuments). The score at the start of the email is slightly apocryphal in the fact that, no-one can actually remember what the score was. It turned into those games that end with the cry of "Next Goal's the winner!!!" Eventually we scored and the game was ours! After the game we headed off to the pub and we all sat down and had a drink together. I felt tired and the one moment I decided to shut my eyes, who should turn up with a camera but JenOwl!!! Great! Can't wait to see that one... ;-) I nicked a B+S poster from the wall to go with my idlewild and mogwai advert-posters (y'know the ones I mean, those posters with the credit card booking no. etc) and Paul showed me that Trevor and Simon (remember going live! - swing yer pants etc etc) now have there very own adult stage show on the fringe. Swing yer edible crotchless panties, oo er missus.. whatever would Andi Peter's say? ooo000ooo 2) So Amy and Paul and John and I headed off down to the gig... and we arrived to see there was already a queue. G'damn it!!! But hark! Who's voice do I hear as we pass the queue? No, It can't Be! Jason Andreas! And thus we exploited our good friend's position in the queue and we 'jumped in' with various louder-than-normal-speech asides to each other of 'Oh wasn't that kind of jason to keep us a space all this time' I'm sure we still pissed a few folk off, but hey... All is fair in love and crowd position! We got in and amy and Paul headed off to keep us a space at the barrier. I bought a t-shirt (and then later that night badges and another t-shirt). When I got back there was a space at the barrier waiting for me and the bad news that my girlfriend wasn't gonna arrive until about 9pm. The uptown Shufflers. OMG!!! How cool were those guys! five wee old men (one couldn't have been younger than 70) playing the ballroom tunes of the 20's and 30's. It kinda tugged at my heartstrings a wee bit as I imagine thats what my uncle arnold (kinda like a third grampa to me - and still as spritely as I am and he's in his 70's) would have been like when he was playing the clarinet all those years ago. My girlfriend arrived just 2 or 3 minutes after the shufflers came off and I got so excited as she was there and also my best friend, Andy had just arrived too..:) It was really cool spending the gig with my girlfriend, andy and his gf and my surrogate wee sis(long story of which I'll let amy tell ya's), amy and her boyfriend, my new bezzie mate Paul. Belle and Sebastian came on stage to a lone bagpiper piping away and OMG! Isobel was utterly utterly beautiful! Mick & Stuart looked cool with the tartan trousers and tartan ties, and I thought sarah was really cute, especially when she sang. The first song, sleep the clock around, started with the vocals really low in the mix and I think a good portion of the auidence had a fleeting moment of disappointment, thinking that the sound might be left like that all night but it was fixed by about the third vocal line and the audince cheered when they heard stuart and bel's voices. I was so excited and happy, that I have absolutely no idea what order the set was in except to say that the next song was le pastie de la borgoise which rocked like a bastard. The request slot was so funny. Stevie doing a rather fine rendition of Rod Stewart's d'ya think I'm Sexy made me laugh so much. It was so good! The next suggestion was 'Letter from america' Naebody could play it except mick so he grabs the guitar and show stevie how its done. Stuart beckoned Mick to sing it but he was not for that at all! :-D So stuart took over and what a laugh, Beans came down to the front and gave stuart his glasses and during the verse when no-one knew the words stevie just adlibed a surprisingly accurate holler that sounded almost exactly like the boy from the proclaimers. Anyway, I'm sure I've rattled on about stuff enough and it'll have taken you a good period of time to read up to hear... 3) one last thing before I go... could anyone i met yesterday please be a kind old soul and click on the following link to my petition. You'll see what its all about when you get there... I have a meeting with the director of programming next week and I need to get as many signatures as is possible..:) the address is... http://www.petitiononline.com/troika/petition.html ok.. thanks for reading.. Neil.x. ===== "I took a wrong direction, from a shooting star" Sparky's Dream - Teenage Fanclub ------------------------------------------------------ Neil Milton; neil_milton@yahoo.com; ICQ:77866398 Troika - http://www.troikaonline.co.uk 2mf - http://www.geocities.com/tmfpromo __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Spot the hottest trends in music, movies, and more. http://buzz.yahoo.com/ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. 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