The night I saw Green Minge

I remember being 15 when fun required effort. Real effort. You had to earn your teenage angst. It wasn’t available in neat retail units with soft lighting and loyalty cards. You had to go out and find it. You moshed to thrash bands in sticky-floored pubs, drank White Lightning in fields, and occasionally crashed parties in suspiciously wealthy cul-de-sacs. There was grit. There was danger. There was the constant possibility of being chased by someone’s furious dad in slippers.

Then somewhere along the way, angst became commercial.

By 2007, you could buy it in bulk. Emo was available nationwide. You could pick up a starter pack in almost any town: haircut, eyeliner, luminous drink, geometrically improbable ear piercings. Teenage misery had gone mainstream and picked up a bar tab.

Which brings us to the night I saw Green Minge at Bar Blu in Rhyl. A set that lasted twenty minutes and somehow managed to feel like a small geological era.

Walking in, the room glowed with the soft blue luminescence of drinks that looked less like beverages and more like reactor coolant. Teenagers shimmered under UV light like exotic sea creatures. You could only wonder what strange worlds they’d seen. What knowledge they possessed. What Pandora’s Box Green Minge were about to open.

The answer, as it turned out, was utter chaos.

The band kept the masses bemused, amused, unamused, ashamed and aghast — often simultaneously. Any longer and I’m fairly certain someone would’ve introduced a bottle to the stage at high velocity, but for those twenty minutes it was a mindless, yobbish spectacle that lodged itself in the brain like an unpaid parking ticket.

There was once a hippy band in the 70s who let people wander on and off stage and improvise mid-set. This felt similar, except without the improvisation. Or the structure. Or the sense that anyone knew why they were there.

The opening “song” — and I use that term with the generosity of a saint — featured a drummer who spent most of his time texting on his phone. Not playing. Not even pretending to play. Just casually wandering around the stage, drinking, occasionally joining in on the microphones like a man who’d accidentally wandered into the wrong room at a house party. Eventually a “guest drummer” appeared, which is never a sentence you want to hear during the first number.

What followed resembled a triple bad-acid interpretation of psychedelic noise rock. Aggressive vocals, thundering bass, laptop-generated drums and effects. It was loud, chaotic and utterly baffling. The kind of performance that leaves you unsure whether you witnessed a gig or a minor public disturbance.

Trying to describe how it felt is difficult, but I’ve settled on the most accurate metaphor available: treading in fox shit.

Not when the dog rolls in it — that’s obvious. That’s visible. That’s manageable. No, the real horror is when you unknowingly bring it home on your shoe. That sweet, meaty, utterly vile smell creeping into your house while you wonder why your eyes are watering. The slow realisation that this is entirely your fault. You could have taken your shoes off. You could have avoided the park. But no. You brought this upon yourself.

And in this case, you paid for the privilege.

The fox turd does not care. It cannot be reasoned with. It listens to terrible music and drinks fizzy raspberry for fun. The only solution is to go outside, find the roughest patch of pavement, and scrape furiously until the nightmare is gone.

And yet — here’s the infuriating bit — it was memorable. Ridiculous. Absurd. A story that refuses to die. Because sometimes the worst gigs are the ones that linger the longest, like a smell you can’t quite eliminate.

Twenty minutes. That’s all it took.

Proof that you don’t need a full set to leave a lasting impression. Sometimes all you need is a phone-obsessed drummer, a room full of glowing drinks, and the overwhelming sensation that you’ve just stepped in something you’ll never fully scrape off.

Micro-beery

There is a particular joy in the microbrewery and/or pop-up pub. A fleeting miracle of hops and optimism that appears in a small town industrial unit, or old shop promises artisanal enlightenment, and dares you to pronounce half the taps without embarrassing yourself.

And half the adventure is getting there.

I’ve been rediscovering the joys of alternative transport. First it was the bike — heroic little expeditions out to Llanfairfechan or Felinheli — but lately the trains have become the chariot of choice. Trains, it turns out, are the perfect vehicle for microbrewery exploration because they remove the tedious burden of responsibility. If you’re not driving, you can drink with the carefree abandon of a Victorian aristocrat. Even better if you don’t have to pay; but I always pay (in case the fascist railway police are reading this).

Recent excursions have included the noble towns of Rhyl, Llandudno and Colwyn Bay, all of which now play host to the modern phenomenon of the microbrewery taproom: part pub, part laboratory, part optimistic social experiment.

I used to work in the Bay, and my memories mostly involved daytime scenes that resembled a nature documentary narrated by someone deeply concerned about society. Watching junkies and chavs arguing in broad daylight does tend to colour your expectations of what an evening out might entail. But microbrewery pubs have a strange superpower: they can make an industrial estate or an old shop feel like a cultural destination simply by installing fairy lights and charging £5.80 a pint.

Inside, the atmosphere is always the same in the best possible way: small, busy, slightly chaotic, and spilling out onto the pavement because the concept of “capacity” is more of a philosophical suggestion. You’ll find people earnestly discussing yeast strains while standing next to someone who just wants “a normal lager please” and has accidentally wandered into a dissertation.

Then comes the tasting.

Rows of taps with names that sound like rejected indie bands: Hazy Comet, Angry Otter, Post-Industrial Sunrise. Every beer has a paragraph attached. Every paragraph contains the words citrus, notes, and finish. Suddenly you’re expected to have opinions about mouthfeel.

We tried the Czech lagers first, hoping for something familiar. A comforting baseline. A linguistic safe space.

Instead, we discovered that our senses are either broken or have quietly resigned from service. Pint after pint arrived with indecipherable names and subtle differences we were assured absolutely existed. If we were proper connoisseurs, we’d be detecting delicate fragrances and poetic undertones. We’d swirl the glass thoughtfully and murmur about balance and body.

In reality, the tasting notes sounded more like this:

Hints of cheap prostitute.

A bold tractor factory finish.

A lingering afterglow of communist oppression.

Instead, we nodded gravely and said, “Yeah, that’s nice,” before ordering another one we couldn’t pronounce.

And that’s the joy of the microbrewery pub. It’s not really about refinement. It’s about the journey. About trains rattling through the dark to towns you wouldn’t normally visit. About discovering a tiny room full of people who have collectively decided that this industrial unit is, for tonight, the centre of civilisation.

Because the best nights out don’t always happen in famous places. Sometimes they happen in converted warehouses, down side streets, under fairy lights, surrounded by tanks full of experimental liquid and people pretending they understand it.

And by the end of the evening, whether you’ve tasted citrus, pine, grapefruit, or absolutely nothing at all, you’ll agree on one thing: you definitely need another one. 🍺

Crud fanzine - the sequel

Crud #2 slithered into existence in April 1987, propelled by enthusiasm, naivety, and a heroic shortage of imagination. True to form, it contained the standard fanzine ritual: interviews with the usual suspects—the bands who were permanently mid-sentence in everyone else’s photocopied pages too. Still, there was method in the monotony. After catching Chumbawamba at the Boardwalk in Manchester alongside Anhrefn, I fired off a postal interview to the former and cornered the latter for a chat as well. Anhrefn were riding a small wave of excitement at the time, thanks to their anthem Action Man landing on the 7” compilation The First Cuts Are The Deepest on Words Of Warning Records.

The issue’s cultural gravitas was further elevated by Young Bowler’s Garfield cartoon, which depicted the lasagne-loving feline in a state of profound psychedelic exploration. Meanwhile, Jill The Ripper packed the margins with her razor-sharp doodles. One of these—featuring a punk sheep riding a skateboard—caught Anhrefn’s eye. They promptly commissioned her to design their album cover for Defaid, Skateboards A Wellies (Defaid meaning “sheep,” in case you're Welsh-not). Released in October on Workers Playtime Records, the album softened their live bite into something closer to punk flirting with new wave, but still a great debut all the same. Jill’s reward for her artistic breakthrough was being credited on the sleeve as “Jill The Kipper,” which she did not, for one second, believe was a charming linguistic misunderstanding ha-ha!

Promotion for the zine became a full-contact sport. I hitchhiked in all weather along the A55 and onward to Manchester and Liverpool, dropping copies on record shop counters like a low-budget Johnny Appleseed of stapled paper. Piccadilly Records, Probe, Kavern Records in Rhyl, and Cob in Bangor all received their unsolicited deliveries. Not content with legitimate distribution, I branched into covert operations—slipping copies onto magazine shelves in WH Smiths and assorted newsagents. This was the golden pre-barcode era, when a shopkeeper could simply ring up 25p and politely pretend the zine had always belonged there. Guerrilla marketing, 1987 style: equal parts optimism, mild trespass, and blind faith that someone, somewhere, might actually buy the thing... and they did! By the sackful!

First time I saw Subhumans

Dick Lucas - vocalist of Subhumans, Culture Shock and Citizen Fish

As a kid, my relationship with music involved envelopes, stamps, and blind faith in the British postal service. While other children were sensibly spending their paper-round money on sweets and football stickers, I was carefully sealing £1.50 in an envelope and sending it off to a mysterious address in Melksham. A week later, like anarcho-punk Father Christmas, Bluurg Records & Tapes would send back the latest release by Subhumans, AOS3 or Shrapnel.

I’d slap the record onto a second-hand player my mum had heroically sourced for £25, sit cross-legged on the floor, and study the lyric sheet like it was sacred scripture. Other kids were revising maths tables; I was learning how to dismantle society with a three-chord progression. I praised the lord for giving us the Subhumans — though I suspect they would’ve strongly objected to being included in any religious gratitude list.

Fast-forward six or seven years and the teenage dream began bleeding into real life. My band (4Q) at the time supported Culture Shock in Bradford, and some 30 years on their vocalist Dick Lucas actually remembered the gig. This felt like being knighted, if knighthoods involved vans that smelt faintly of damp denim and patchouli oil. A few years later in the early 90s, I caught Citizen Fish at The Ship & Castle in Caernarfon, which felt like a sequel nobody had planned but everyone enjoyed.

And then came 2008. The year the childhood circle completed itself at The Dirty Weekend Festival in Hendre Hall. The Subhumans’ first proper foray into North Wales. The band that had soundtracked my teenage bedroom finally stood in front of me, real and loud and unapologetically alive.

They’d grown out of the same early-80s anarchist soil as a whole generation of DIY punk, orbiting similar ideas but always stubbornly themselves. And there they were: older, wiser, still furious, still funny, still sounding like the world needed urgently fixing.

Ask anyone in that packed, sweaty, mohican-speckled crowd and you’d have received the same answer: what a performance. Old songs, new songs — everything landed like a stamp on the forehead. Crisp. Clear. Furious. Joyful. The kind of gig that makes you remember why you fell in love with music in the first place.

Of course, the honest truth is that my memory of the set gradually dissolves into a warm, blurry haze as the evening progressed and my liver entered negotiations with reality. By the end, my brain had quietly slipped out the back door without telling me.

But maybe that’s fitting. Because the important part wasn’t remembering every song. It was the moment itself — the long, ridiculous journey from posting coins in an envelope to standing in a room watching the band that shaped your teenage worldview.

A big, fat, juicy tick on the life list, and I've ticked it several times since seeing Subhumans again and again. And I will again.

Welcome to your dystopian future

They didn’t announce the takeover. There was no dramatic midnight broadcast, no marching boots, no flag unfurling against a storm. That would have been crude, theatrical. Instead, the shift arrived softly—wrapped in convenience, padded with cheerful marketing, delivered by subscription.

The first sign was the letter that never came. The job that vanished without ceremony. No redundancy meeting, no awkward handshake, just a quiet disappearance into a statistical column labelled “efficiency gains.” You weren’t fired; you were optimized. The language was kinder than reality. Reality was a shrug.

It turns out mass unemployment is easier to swallow when it feels like a software update.

Invisible government doesn’t rise through coups or revolutions. It emerges through procurement contracts, consulting firms, and pilot programs. The public face still waves from podiums, still debates passionately on television, still promises change every election cycle. But somewhere behind the curtain, a quieter administration takes root—one that doesn’t need votes, only metrics.

Their ideology is simple: the nation is a spreadsheet.

Every citizen is a cost centre, a productivity curve, a risk profile. Some cells glow green. Others flash amber. A few blink red until someone presses delete.

Of course, they would never call it deletion. They call it sustainability. Resilience. Long-term planning. Words that taste like vitamins and smell like bleach.

The public still argues about policy. They rage online about taxes, borders, culture wars, statues. The spectacle is necessary. A population must feel politically engaged the way toddlers feel involved in cooking when handed a wooden spoon. Meanwhile the real decisions are made by people whose names never appear on ballot papers and whose job titles sound like PowerPoint slide headings.

Strategic Foresight. Population Outcomes. Future Viability.

They don’t rule you directly. They shape the systems that rule you, which is far more elegant.

You notice it first in the language of burden. Burden of pensions. Burden of healthcare. Burden of welfare. A curious term, burden. It implies weight without specifying who is tired of carrying it. Soon enough the burden begins to look suspiciously like people who are old, poor, sick, inconvenient, or statistically expensive.

Then comes the miracle of crisis. A new emergency arrives just when budgets grow tight. War or a health scare, perhaps. A whisper of contagion. The public learns new vocabulary overnight and begins to monitor its own behaviour with religious fervour. Compliance becomes patriotism. Suspicion becomes civic duty.

And suddenly the idea of reducing the “burden” doesn’t sound monstrous. It sounds pragmatic. Necessary, even. A reluctant kindness.

No one needs to say the quiet part aloud. The algorithm understands subtext.

Meanwhile the high street fades like an old photograph. Independent shops close one by one, their windows papered over with pastel rectangles. The supermarkets bloom in their place—cathedrals of logistics and predictive analytics. Every purchase becomes a confession. Every receipt, a diary entry. Your cravings, your routines, your weaknesses: catalogued with loving precision.

You tell yourself it’s just convenience. It is convenient. That’s the brilliance of it. Oppression is exhausting; convenience is irresistible.

Your living room becomes the new public square. Entertainment streams endlessly. News arrives pre-digested, pre-sorted, pre-approved. Everything is on demand except meaning. The screen asks nothing of you except attention, which you surrender gladly because the alternative is silence—and silence leaves room for thinking.

Thinking is inefficient.

5G and cheap broadband spreads like tap water. A noble achievement, officially. Universal connection. Equal access. But the same pipe that delivers amusement delivers narrative. The same cable that streams sitcoms streams certainty. You never feel propagandised because propaganda now feels like ambience.

It hums in the background, like a fridge.

Polls appear constantly, glowing with reassuring results. The public is satisfied. The public approves. The public trusts. You are the public, of course, though you have no memory of being asked. The numbers look so clean, so comforting. They must be true. Numbers are honest in a way people aren’t.

And so the invisible government never needs to lie outright. It simply curates reality until the truth becomes statistically improbable.

Care homes become quiet places. Efficient places. Places where the costs taper off in neat, downward lines. Hospitals run on austerity and applause. Applause is cheaper. Applause is renewable. Applause doesn’t require funding allocations.

Remember clapping from your doorway, feeling heroic and strangely hollow?

The remarkable thing is how normal it all feels. That’s the real triumph. Dystopia, it turns out, is not a thunderclap but a background process. It installs itself while you scroll. It updates while you sleep. It reboots while you argue about something else entirely.

“It couldn’t happen here,” people say, comforted by the geography of denial.

But the invisible government doesn’t live in a place. It lives in systems, in incentives, in dashboards and quarterly targets. It lives wherever efficiency becomes morality and human beings become line items.

It doesn’t need to conquer you.

It just needs you to log in.

#217 - Neil Crud on Louder Than War Radio

Fresh releases, old favourites, bargain-bin rescues and gig-ready bangers — Show #217.

We kicked things off in suitably lysergic fashion with Standard Issue Pleasure Model and Acid Punk, a track that’s been floating around long enough to feel familiar but has finally landed where it belongs on the Tripsitter album. The band hail from British Columbia and the record only dropped on Friday, so this felt like the perfect moment to give it its proper on-air christening. Plus I usurped Noises From The Bottom Left Corner who is playing it on his Saturday show this week.

Staying on the acid-tinged theme, Cold Feet delivered Acid Death from their 2020 Punk Entity EP — their last release to date and still sounding raw and sharp years later.

From there it was time for Bangor’s own Skinflick and D Is For Death from Fourth Wall Of A Deathcult. Birthday shout-out to Justin, who celebrated by playing a rare Blackpool gig — and if you listen closely you can practically hear new material bubbling away in some alleyway rehearsal room already.

A welcome trip to the late 90s followed with Four Letter Word and Unconditional from the Zero Visibility (Experiments With Truth) sessions. Originally released in 1999 and later reissued by Boss Tuneage, it feels newly rediscovered thanks to a perfectly timed label sale that resulted in an armful of bargain vinyl. Punk rock economics at its finest.

The agitation level rose with Grant Sharkey and 4th4, taken from Actual Intelligence. Sharkey continues to do what he does best — poking the establishment while preparing to take Webber The Musical to the Edinburgh Fringe. Subtlety has never been the point.

Upcoming gig energy kicked in with Clobber’s Council Estate Of Mind, ahead of their Outpost and London dates, before Grade 2 reminded everyone why they’ve become one of the UK’s biggest modern street-punk exports. Better Today previews their fourth album Talk About It, released via Hellcat Records — a coming-of-age record shaped by growing up together in public.

International punk kept flowing: Italy’s Couchgagzzz previewed their forthcoming Primitive Men album and sounding not too dissimilar to show favourites Why Bother?, while fellow Italians Thunder Bomber delivered A Little Sadness ahead of their April release Boys Alive, promising genre-blurring punk with synths, sax and harmonica.

The acid thread returned courtesy of Warlockhunt with the Amon Acid Remix of We Are, tying into their appearance at next week’s NorthWest Doomfest in Chester — already sold out, naturally.

Also an exclusive! The Mistakes - Life’s Too Short - brand new track - single from their forthcoming album out soonish on Engineer Records.

From the same stable, Uncivilised crashed in with Click Bait from their brand-new Let Rip release, while Pray U Prey and Pandemix proved that Boss Tuneage bargains keep giving.

A run of big names followed: Evil Blizzard with the hypnotic Down Down Down, and street-punk legends The Casualties previewing their new album with Detonate ahead of Scarborough Punk Festival.

DIY and local scenes were heavily represented: Warrington’s TicNoToc, Bangor’s Charlie Garlic (live at The Skerries), Slovenia’s great export Slund, and almost a whole Outpost gig preview run from Chain Of Survival and Code Break.

The night finished by digging deep into UK post-punk history with Vital Disorders and their 1982 single Zombie.

---

Full Playlist

Standard Issue Pleasure Model – Acid Punk
Cold Feet – Acid Death
Skinflick – D Is For Death
Four Letter Word – Unconditional
Grant Sharkey – 4th4
Clobber – Council Estate Of Mind
Grade 2 – Better Today
Warlockhunt – We Are (Amon Acid Remix)
Couchgagzzz – Mighty Dog
The Mistake - Life’s Too Short
Uncivilised – Click Bait
Pray U Prey – Suffering Rules This World
Thunder Bomber – A Little Sadness
Evil Blizzard – Down Down Down
The Casualties – Detonate
TicNoToc – Piece Of Me
Charlie Garlic – Axe & Hammer (Live at The Skerries, Bangor 03.05.24)
Slund – Power Hungry
Pandemix – World War None
Chain Of Survival – Handbreak
Code Break – The Lost
Vital Disorders – Zombie

Drink Yourself Fitter - Run To The Pub

Duncan Black performing at Y Fricsan in 2009

I drove past what was Y Fricsan in Cwm-Y-Glo yesterday. It used to be a pub and it got me thinking: There was a time when Britain knew what mattered. We saved the whale. We saved the children. We even saved with the Woolwich (and look how that turned out). Now, dear reader, we must turn our attention to a far more pressing humanitarian crisis: the slow, dignified extinction of the North Wales pub.

In Wales, around 60 pubs a year are closing. Sixty. That’s one every six days. By the time you finish reading this, statistically speaking, a landlord somewhere will have turned off the lights, pulled down the blinds, and whispered “last orders” to the empty ghosts of quiz nights past. Rising costs, energy bills that resemble phone numbers, and the government taxing drinkers like they’re funding a small moon landing haven’t helped. But we must also address the twin villains of modern virtue: Dry January and Sober October — two months a year when the nation collectively decides water is “actually quite refreshing”. Disgraceful.

Take Y Fricsan, tucked away in Cwm-y-Glo between Llanrug and Llanberis, crouched heroically at the foot of Snowdonia like a pint glass shielding itself from the wind. To most people, it’s as unknown as the correct pronunciation of its postcode. But to those who’ve been, it was a cathedral of character: low ceilings, high spirits, and a guestbook that migrated onto the plaster above your head. If the signatures on the ceiling could talk, they’d mostly ask for another round.

I went there many years ago to watch some bands, the place was rammed for a fundraiser to save the pub!. Five pounds a head, shoulder-to-shoulder, sweat-on-sweat solidarity. A joyous, hopeful injection of cash. Which, in pub economics, is roughly equivalent to putting a sticking plaster on the Titanic. Because pubs don’t survive on charity weekends. They survive on Tuesdays. On accidental Thursdays. On the sacred ritual of “just popping in”. They survive on habit.

And this is where the Great National Abstinence Conspiracy comes in. Every January, millions of people discover sparkling water and begin using the word “mindful” unironically. Every October, the same people post pictures of herbal tea like they’ve discovered fire. For two entire months, the country collectively decides pubs are optional. Imagine running a café where everyone boycotted coffee in March and September. Imagine a barber where nobody cut their hair in June and December. Actually, bad example — some of us tried that during lockdown and still haven’t recovered.

The truth is simple: pubs run on winter. They run on dark nights and sideways rain. They run on the phrase, “It’s miserable outside so we might as well.” And right when they need you most, you’re at home sniffing kombucha and congratulating yourself for drinking sparkling sadness.

The future of places like Y Fricsan doesn’t lie in nostalgic Facebook posts that begin with “Remember when…”. It lies with the regulars: the drunks, hikers, holidaymakers, and, yes, the occasional dick head who trudge out of the rain and order another round. The midweek pint brigade. The Sunday lingerers. The “go on then, just the one” crowd who never mean it. Without them, the pub becomes a memory and Britain becomes a country where the most exciting night out is a supermarket meal deal and a documentary about Pub Closures.

So here’s a modest, sensible, entirely reasonable proposal. If you must take two months off drinking every year — and apparently you must — then let’s apply some basic logistics. Move them. Shift your noble abstinence to February and November: the cold, miserable post-Christmas financial wasteland and the pre-Christmas financial panic. Months when nobody needs help staying sober because they’re already broke and emotionally exhausted. Leave January and October alone. Let pubs have the months they actually need.

Tell your friends. Tell your family. Tell that bloke who keeps posting about his step count. This year we drink for Britain. We drink for Wales. We drink for the survival of sticky carpets and questionable jukeboxes. We drink for the little pubs clinging to the mountains, that is sadly now a Bakehouse (whatever that is).

Cancel Dry January. Sack off Sober October. If you must be virtuous, be virtuous in February and November when everyone else is hammering the pubs anyway. Because if we don’t, the next thing we’ll be saving won’t be whales or children — it’ll be the last pub standing. 🍻

This Week: Family hiking record buying gig missing

Two years to the day since Mum passed, the family decided to mark the anniversary with a pilgrimage up Moel Famau. Why Moel Famau? No one really knows. We're not entirely sure if she ever went up there. But she did have a serious case of hiraeth for the Clwydian Range, and in Welsh emotional logic that’s more than enough justification to drag nine adults up a hill.

The day began, as all meaningful spiritual journeys do, with an all-you-can-eat breakfast at Table Table in Rhuddlan (so good, apparently, they named it twice). If you’re going to climb a mountain, you need to carbo-load like you’re preparing for the apocalypse. Jane, Steve, Emma, Mark, Rhys, Charlotte, Erin, Tom and myself assembled for what was essentially four couples and one spare part (me), bravely consuming our bodyweight in hash browns before squeezing into two cars and heading off.

We rolled through the quiet of Cilcain and reached the trail car park under suspiciously good weather. Had it been yesterday we would have been doing this in horizontal glass rain. But today we were blessed or someone had successfully subscribed to the Premium Weather App. We thanked the heavens and set off.

The hike itself was a leisurely 3.5 hours — the perfect amount of time for what I can only describe as conversational speed-dating. Pair off, chat about life, rotate partners, repeat. By the summit we’d all been fully updated on careers, kids, aches, pains and existential dread. We’re basically conversational swingers.

The final push took us to the remains of Jubilee Tower, which sits proudly on the summit. The tower was originally built in 1810–1811 to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Mad King George III. Designed by architect Thomas Harrison, it was meant to be a grand obelisk-style monument visible for miles. Unfortunately, the Welsh weather had other plans, and a storm in the mid-1800s badly damaged the structure, leaving it a romantic ruin for more than a century. It wasn’t until the late 20th century that restoration work made it safe and accessible again — so we could all wheeze our way up it and admire the view.

And what a view. On a clear day you can see as far as Cadair Idris to the south-west, along with sprawling Welsh / English countryside and distant cities in the opposite direction. It was peaceful, tranquil, and almost perfectly serene… apart from a Scouse drone buzzing around our heads like an electronic wasp.

Still, it was a genuinely lovely day and a rare chance to properly catch up as a family without screens, deadlines or the usual hullaballoo of real life.

In a plot twist nobody saw coming (except anyone who knows me), the very next evening I sat down on the couch “just for five minutes” and woke up over an hour later. This accidental coma meant I completely missed The Orb and System 7 playing up the road in Bethesda — a gig I was supposed to review for Louder Than War.

Only the day before I’d been telling people how much more energy I have these days. The universe clearly felt I needed humbling.

To soothe my wounded reviewer’s ego, I did what any responsible adult would do: bought records in a sale.

Boss Tuneage Records were offering free postage over £20, which is basically a legally binding invitation to spend £20. So I picked up four albums for about a fiver each:

• Four Letter Word – Zero Visibility
  Already a known quantity from radio play on my show and reliably excellent.
• Prey U Pray – Figure The 8
  Proper punk/metal and refreshingly long. Hardcore albums these days often clock in at the length of a kettle boil, so this felt positively prog.
• Pandemix – Love Is Obliteration
  You simply cannot go wrong with Pandemix.
• DL Burdon – Accidental Aesop
  Bought entirely because I liked the sleeve. A nostalgic throwback to teenage me getting the bus from Denbigh to Rhyl and gambling paper-round money on records judged purely by cover art. The jury is still out on this one. It’s… not really my bag. But the sleeve is cool, so at least my shelves look cultured.

Saturday was supposed to be a heroic double-header of live music.

Plan A: an early show at Rockpoint Records in New Brighton, featuring Italian entertainment maestros CUT whose tour poster accurately cites them as 'John Lee Hooker in a postpunk straitjacket,' alongside semi-Aussie dirtbags The Dry Retch.

Plan B: a heroic dash across the Mersey to the Baltic Triangle to see Fucked Up tearing it up at District at the start of their UK tour.

To all intents and purposes, none of this happened. Because I made the fatal mistake of thinking I could do it on public transport. My reasoning was that fuel is still rocketing skyward and I spend way too much time driving the car along the A55, so why not take a break and (possibly) save a little money too?

I made it as far as Chester station. Progress! From there I shimmied across the road to The Town Crier for a pint of Neck Oil to “work out the logistics.” This is the first sign things are about to go wrong in any story.

It turns out getting to New Brighton would take an hour and fifteen minutes by train. Longer by bus (it's only about 22 miles! - or 17mph!!). My Uber app kindly offered a faster option for the bargain price of £30. I like the bands, but I don’t like them that much! And anyway, who the fuck puts a gig on in New Brighton!? Ha ha!

So, in the company of friends and associates, I had another pint. Then another. Then another. You know the montage.

At some point, reality tapped me on the shoulder and reminded me that Arriva Cymru (or whoever runs the railways this week) has the last train back to North Wales leaving at 10:45pm on a Saturday. Every other night it’s 1:40am — making Liverpool gigs perfectly viable. But not tonight.

In fairness, if you’ve ever been part of the drunken debauchery on the last train home from Chester to North Wales after a Friday night, you can probably understand why the operator decided once per weekend was enough.

So instead of trashing my ears with live music on Merseyside, I trashed my insides with a Naga curry. The following morning I woke feeling like I’d gone ten rounds with a chilli and lost every single one. A curryover of the most vindictive and unforgiving kind.

Rock and roll is fucked up (see below)