Considering how much I gripe about the line from Bristol to Southampton, I've found myself using it a fair amount again lately. It's mostly the huge potential for overcrowding on the service which means using it for my leisurely meanderings isn't always much fun - but also that interminably long, dull section between Warminster and Salisbury which is always a drag. I recall one of my earliest trips after returning to the rails went this way using a Replacement Bus service - and even that godforsaken mode of travel seemed preferable to this bit of the run. Considering how I love rail travel and promote it, I amuse myself by how outspoken I am about some dull lines - not least this and the truly dull Settle and Carlisle run which despite its scenery, is a long, slow drag. So it was strange to find myself willingly subjecting to this run a second time in a week!
But there was a purpose. In the absence of other goals, and with a freebie First Great Western ticket in hand, I decided to do a multi-modal skip across the South Coast, ending up in Brighton and getting the once much favoured 1V96 back. This meant an early start and a run up to Bristol for breakfast. Once again, despite having a while to wait around the station's Starbucks failed to open even at its much later advertised time. Settled for an alternative and boarded the 07:22 - about the only train on the Portsmouth Harbour route which doesn't get rammed here or at Bath. I managed to snooze for much of the less interesting bit of the run, waking in time to alight at Fareham. The weather had turned out to be really fantastic, and as I made the slow transit to the station bus stop under the subway, I enjoyed the sunshine. The aim here was the Eclipse service which uses a dedicated busway towards Gosport. This is significant because it occupies the former railway alignment into the town, and thus as soon as it opened my curiosity got the better of me. Tracing the route by map, there was a fair amount of evidence of its former status too. The bus when it arrived, was very impressive. Leather seats and a bright, clean interior. Destination displays and free onboard wi-fi completed the sense of a modern services. I found a seat and settled in for the run to journey's end at Gosport Ferry. Once off the main road we turned onto the busway. A two-lane carriageway which cut directly through the tangle of streets. No guideway like in Cambridge, and the route is shared with cyclists - and at least one errant or perhaps just truculent motorist too. However, speeds are reasonable and the stops were showing signs of reasonable use - even on a sleepy, warm Saturday morning. Suddenly just under the Tichborne Way bridge we slowed and took a sharp curve via the 'Tichborne Link' back to the conventional streets at Fareham Road. The way onward hinted at Phase 2 to be completed soon. Having tried this out, I think I'll come back too - because once back on the road network the advantages became starkly clear. The long-wheelbase buses struggling around parked cars, over traffic calming bumps and through endless traffic lights showing the huge advantages of the busway for this journey. However, the trip into town meant passing the strange naval forts and signs for the curiously named 'Explosion Museum'. Occasionally the route came tantalisingly close to the former rail route too as we wound through the suburbs. While a busway is definitely not my preferred option for these things, I have to say this works pretty well.
The centre of Gosport looked busy and prosperous despite some evidence of run down looking areas on the way into town, however today I stayed on to the rather 1970s vintage bus station and made the short walk to the Ferry terminal, buying a ticket from the man in a tiny booth with his old-fashioned dispenser. The ferry service is frequent and fairly keenly priced - and for these reasons appears well used. Queueing on the covered gangway, the ferry was expertly guided alongside and the gates opened allowing swift disembarking and boarding at opposite ends of the vessel. Given the sunshine, everyone dashed upstairs onto the open deck, but I found a window below in the curved bow and settled in for the short ten minute trip across to Portsmouth Harbour. It was quite an experience - as water travel always is these days - and one I'm glad I'd opted for. Arrival at the Harbour means only a short walk up to the station platforms too. I had some time here though, so I had a little lunch, watched the world go by and enjoyed the sunshine.
The next leg took me on one of Southern's very well used West Coastway services to Brighton. These get far too busy for my liking, and soon the train was fairly full. I also suffered the indignity of being asked to turn my music down on this leg of the trip - something I don't think has ever happened to me before. I felt rather sullen and pathetically wronged after this. Looking back I can chuckle - but at the time I felt surprisingly silly and down about it. I surprise myself with my oddness at times. Arriving at Brighton meant decanting a lot of people via the narrow Platform 1 and 2 island, then squashing around to the ticket gates. The Great Escape festival was on in town this weekend, using a range of local venues - and thus the station was incredibly busy. To speed things up, staff opened the gates and let us tumble through. I aimed straight for the exit, and some recommendations for shops I'd been offered - including the excellent Resident Music tucked away in The Laines. It was years since I'd wandered in Brighton, and it still had the slightly strange but very pleasant edge which I'd immediately liked on my early trips here. After browsing the friendly, and somewhat enlightened environs of Resident for a while, I decided on coffee and a chance to reflect. With Brighton delighting in lots of artisan type places, the large Starbucks I found was reasonably quiet and importantly nice and cool in the growing heat of the day.
Having some time now, I decided to head for the Volks Electric Railway. I'd never made it to this tourist favourite before, and it was a fair walk - but not an unpleasant one milling among the festival crowds. On getting there, the queue for the tiny single-car trains was huge and I calculated I couldn't easily wait in the queue and safely make it back to my mainline train so after watching a departure, I resolved to revisit at a less touristy, sunny time and do the line. The walk back to the station was a hot, long and irritating slog through huge crowds. Once at the station I improvised a meal while listening to a band playing in a venue next door. No idea who it was, but they were pretty good. Finally over to Platform 2 to beat the crowds and wait for the First Great Western unit to be opened up. Some amusing scenes as a Southern unit occupied the end of the platform ahead of my train, and people debated the idea of front train, first train and 'First' train as written on the side of the unit. Did some impromptu directing, before getting a seat on the unit.
It was strange to be back on 1V96. I'd used this train once or twice to visit friends here many years back, and also when I returned to the rails and it was Class 31 hauled on Fridays. I recalled particularly the last ever 31 hauled diagram in December 2004, and realised with some horror just how long ago that was, and that it was probably the last time I'd spent more than a few minutes in Brighton! The run back was pleasant and lazy - with me feeling ultra paranoid about music volume. The train didn't get hugely busy, even at Southampton - a fact I filed away for future use. The guard was fine with my odd combination of tickets too, and I settled in for the long winding route back to Bath Spa. Changing here meant a short wait for 1C27 from Paddington, a frequently used train home which I could have picked up at Bristol as I often do. It was nice though to relax for the last leg. Amazingly my multi-modal run had gone very smoothly, and the bus and boat rides had impressed me hugely. It's days like these which restore faith in public transport along with being entertaining trips in their own right.
Antibang, We Were Evergreen, Slow Club - The Fleece, Bristol
Posted in SHOFT on Tuesday 8th May 2012 at 11:05pm
It was strange wandering around Bristol this evening on my way to The Fleece. The first day back after a Bank Holiday weekend is always a resentment-filled, depressing occasion and watching the harassed commuters stumbling along, eyes fixed down on the slick pavements didn't fill me with confidence for how this evening might pan out. Wet Tuesday evenings in Bristol aren't known for producing big audiences, and with the local crowd still coming down from the Simple Things festival at the weekend, I was worried it would be a small bunch of us turning out tonight. In the event, I needn't have worried - and this is perhaps testament to just how far tonight's headliners Slow Club have progressed in reaching new ears over the past year or so. However, once again The Fleece's odd talent for picking some incongruous support acts made for a curiously uneven evening of entertainment. Arriving late from what seems to have been a taxing journey from Leeds, Antibang appear to be taking the frustration out on the odd mixture of instruments up on the stage. They trade in a curious - and not always wholly successful - mixture of genuinely enthusiastic, raucously silly pop and deliberately off-the-wall moments of challenge. The band centres on their shouting, ranting vocalist/drummer hybrid, who gestures, moans and howls his way through the cacophony. He is supported by a second drummer, a guitarist in a cape and silver lycra leggings, and perhaps the lynch-pin of the band in the operator of their burbling, warped synthesiser sounds who also adds a female vocal counterpoint to this bewildering brew. This works best at the end of a long composition where both voices work around a theme of 'you're such a loner' and the sound coalesces into dreamy pop. Despite the meandering songs occasional crashing into outbursts of clapping, whistling, and singing in-the-round, the Bristol audience stays characteristically restrained throughout, though the band get a decent end-of-set send off. The dense, busy songs here tonight might fare a little better with considered listening on record. Antibang worked best this evening when their songs wound up into thudding, brassy confused endings. Otherwise I found Antibang a deliberately odd and occasionally uncomfortably contrived proposition. Perhaps I'm just a little bit too jaded tonight for this ranty, agit-jazz thing? Silver lycra and messianic drummer-vocalists aside, I sense there might be complicated and interesting music buried under the gimmicks and the overplayed wackiness.
Given my policy of generally not writing about things I don't completely enjoy, I've struggled with describing my experience of the previous act, and also more surprisingly with watching We Were Evergreen play tonight. On paper at least, they ought to appeal to me but I'll start with the obvious - this band is perfect. Uncomfortably, irritatingly and mind-numbingly so. The three faultlessly pretty people which form We Were Evergreen take to the stage and with an air of studied geek chic, to produce shiny, clean folk-pop which I have to confess the audience in The Fleece appears to adore. The sounds hinges on the electronic backdrops provided by Fabienne who hunches over her kit for long enough to get things going before joining in the twee dancing on stage. Singer and ukelele player Michael croons and strums between his own outbursts of joyful jigging, and it all fits seamlessly together. When they aim for Beatles-like harmonies, they land perfectly. When they add a little hint of europop fizz, it bubbles through the audience just how they wanted it to. The songs begin to blur into one for me mid-set, and I realise that this music has no edges - no peaks and dips to give me a journey to travel with the band, no surprises or twists to make me sit up and listen. Its a long, slick stream of beautifully designed but ultimately anodyne pop. There are elements here which, taken alone are fun and interesting - some of the cheesy beats which underlie the songs are infectious and I spy a little dancing at the front, and occasionally when they harmonise it makes for a pleasantly folky sound. I pick up hints of Even As We Speak but not their knack for writing engaging lyrics sadly. Ultimately I feel like I'm being conned here, and I can't quite put my finger on why. I also feel like I'm being hugely unfair, like I'm kicking a puppy which was only trying to make me happy. But this just wasn't for me. Live music is about the clicks and buzzes, spilled drinks, broken strings and false starts. It loses it's soul when it's this unblemished. We Were Evergreen are talented souls I'm certain, but I feel like they need to have their hearts broken before they'll ever truly reach mine.
I've written a great deal about Slow Club before, and I wondered how I'd add anything to my previous feverish declarations of love for the band's music. But one of the most engaging and endearing things about Charles and Rebecca's take on things is that sometimes it appears to all stumble together quite accidentally, and anything could happen on the way. Augmented tonight by their now practically full-time band comprised of Avvon and Stephen of Sweet Baboo, they take the stage with Rebecca arriving last to a huge reception. It's around now that I realise that Slow Club are reaching a much wider audience, and a glance around the now much increased all-ages audience shows a truly bewildering range of punters. It's here that as someone writing about music I should probably get sniffily elitist and suggest that these people weren't there at all the best gigs. But it genuinely never feels like that with this band - it's just really inspiring to see people listening and loving the music, and I want everyone to see why I bang relentlessly on about them. The band are also in that strange position where they are touring between releases. With last year's "Paradise" figuring heavily in the set, there are also several new songs which will form an as yet unrecorded EP. These songs are a little darker, a little slower perhaps, and interestingly Rebecca's voice is remoulded again when she sings them - switching character to become a wounded, country heroine this time around. Despite her professed "funny tummy" she is completely on form tonight - her voice reaching wonderful high notes and gravelly lows, and her between song jibes at ever-suffering Charles as barbed and witty as ever. It's really encouraging to hear these new songs get a boisterous reception from the audience alongside older material.
The highlight of the set is a truly beguiling "Hackney Marsh" where Rebecca and Charles come forward from their microphones and let their unamplified voices fill the room. The Fleece can be a pretty noisy space at the best of times, but there is pin-drop silence as they strip the song back to its roots. Even a false start and a fit of giggles can't break the spell, and neither the band nor the rapt audience are quite ready for what happens next. As the song moves into the section which is normally adorned on record by a saxophone solo, a bit of a clatter behind us signals Stephen Black clambering onto the bar and blasting out that solo as he crabwalks his way unsteadily towards the stage with a strange echo of Lisa in the opening credits of The Simpsons. Watching the surprise and delight in the room - in the audience, in the normally stoic Fleece bar staff, and up on stage - I realise it's one of those moments that you know you're going to talk about for years, and that you'll never quite do justice to in your description. With audience now hanging on every note, the set closes with "Giving Up On Love" delivered in riotous, triumphant style by the whole band again. Sometimes Bristol gigs feel a bit like a battle of wits, with the band determined to win over an audience who are doing their utmost to repel all boarders. Tonight, Slow Club had won from the moment they struck the first note, and what started as a fairly inauspicious night turned into perhaps my favourite show of the year so far.
I'm playing catch-up with these entries after a very strange and directionless few weeks where I've managed to think about doing lots and actually achieve very little. In the middle of this period came the welcome opportunity to get away and travel - always something I value, as much for the chance to observe the world at large as anything else. But this trip had a purpose too, which was this curious tour to points south. Completely illogically of course, I started out yesterday by heading in the opposite direction - north to Crewe. Class 20s aren't my favourite traction by any means, but they're unusual enough to warrant a bit of a trip to get some mileage with them - especially as you have to wonder just how long they can carry on hauling trains like this on the mainline. A fitful night and an early start made for a rather bleary-eyed walk to the station where I met familiar faces including my travelling companion for the day. In fact, the tables we occupied became a pretty sociable little knot in the middle of a rather quiet carriage, which is always a good thing in my book.
Despite predictions of failure or non-availability the pair of 20s, one required and one not, turned up on time and shot away from Crewe in surprisingly rocket-like fashion. We sped south taking a route skirting the Midlands to join the route to Banbury and Oxford. I've used this route surprisingly often this year, having not needed to in recent times - and I'm always impressed by how quietly but surely, Chiltern Trains have delivered on their Project Evergreen promises - faster alignments, restrictions eliminated - little improvements that sum up to a better experience all round. At Aynho Junction we headed for Didcot, and the Foxhall curve onto the mainline. There had been two separate foul-ups on the Great Western this morning - one around Paddington and the other in South Wales - which meant some of the participants who were due on the train were behind schedule. Given some space due to gaps in service, we were unusually allowed to wait a while, and a rammed Gloucester-Swindon unit and a busy HST soon turned up with the missing folks. We headed off again, via Thingley Junction to the rarely used Melksham route and onto the Portsmouth line. Here, my usual ennui descended and I dozed and chatted as far as Southampton Maritime. I also realised I'd rather strangely chosen to replicate this route next week too!
Arrival in Hampshire meant we'd reached the focus of the tour - a little but significant crop of very unusual lines around the county, starting with a call at Eastleigh to let off passengers who wanted a short break. Out of the station northwards and onto the Romsey branch where we reversed at a signal, and headed back through the station non-stop with the trailing 37 in the lead now, and into Eastleigh Works. I'd been here before, but we used a different line - one that disappointingly had a fair amount of former Metropolitan Line stock stored on it - although to be honest they all did at present! This meant many people didn't get far past the gates, but the First Class end was well positioned and the usual tide of 'vestibule creamers' made their showing as we came to a halt. The original plan had been a traversal of the depot loop which hadn't been possible in the end. I was lucky enough to have done this too, so it wasn't a great loss - but it did mean we ended up with a fair number of very odd reversals here - which began to take their toll on people's sanity! So our next reversal took us back through the station with the aim of halting at Allbrook Junction. In the event, we ended up back on the Romsey branch. This is where things got a little hazy and the driver seemed to lose track. Returning to the station we were signalled onto the Down Through line, leaving a large group of bewildered patrons stranded on the platform. Coming to a shuddering halt short of Southampton Airport Parkway, we eventually headed back into the platform, collected our punters and continued towards Southampton. A very odd and slightly amusing interlude!
Underway again, rather than taking the severe curve towards Southampton Central we continued straight past Northam Traincare and onto the docks branch. This more direct route served an impressive terminus at one point, the rather grand buildings of which remained evident. Passing multi-storey storage areas for the motor industry, row after row of Minis and Landrovers were evident. Also in dock was the vast Queen Victoria, a huge and impressive sight beside the line. Pressing on and winding through the Eastern Docks, we finally came to the QEII landing stage. I'd been here before - on foot from Southampton after an edgy night in a B&B miles from town - or so it seemed. That time, I was meeting people arriving by boat to live here. Today, I was just passing through as we pressed on to the very end of the line. An excellent result, though we were urged not to get out because the fee for 'use of the station' was huge!
Reversing again after a very efficient change of ends, we headed back to Northam Traincare, using the Reception Line there to reverse once again and head through Southampton Central to reach the gates of Western Docks. This shorter branch led through a more industrial scene, curving away from the mainline and through piles of sand and building materials to double back towards the point we'd reached on the Eastern Dock branch. There had been a through connection at some point, but this had long since gone and we soon found our way to the end of the short branch, again reaching the furthest possible point. It had been a very successful day from a track bashing point of view - and being at the right end of the train for the branches was a very welcome change!
The return trip wasn't without incident either. Firstly we headed towards Guildford using the rather dull line via Petersfield. This was a sleepy bit of the journey with little happening, although it was interesting to watch how we made up and then lost time. We weren't seriously late though, and I was content to laze my way along the line. Getting lost in the tangle of lines around Ascot, we were due to pause at Ash Vale - ostensibly for a photo stop on an otherwise long day on the train. This stop was curtailed to keep us on time, and de-training via the front four coaches would have meant it was unlikely we'd manage even to get off in the time allowed! From here we took the route to Reading, using the connection which climbs from the Southern tracks to the Great Western mainline - something I don't recall doing before. Work on reviving the underpass which will allow trains to reach the other side of the revitalised station seemed to be progressing very well too - and I wondered if we'd have used that route if it had been available? Our first set-down was at Didcot, in lieu of Swindon on the outward run. Except we didn't stop. Taking the curve through the station at speed, once again a number of passengers looking rather stunned as the platforms zoomed by. Those poor Swindon punters who'd been inconvenienced by the early issues were once again the victims as we made a call at Oxford for them to alight and head back to Didcot.
The run back to Crewe was quiet and pleasant in the summery evening, and was only marred by the activities of a couple of BLS people who I probably shouldn't name, working the train and stirring up feelings against a former colleague. If nothing else, this solidified my resolve that resigning from the News Team had been the right thing to do. Otherwise it had been a successful, sociable and interesting day. There are so few good tours operating this summer that these days are increasingly precious and important.
Winding the clock back a couple of years, I found myself waking up to the musical possibilities of the internet. Having spent a few years feeling pretty pessimistic about music I was getting excited again about new things and realising how foolishly pompous it was to assume that because I'd stopped listening, new things had stopped happening. Around this time I began to reinvestigate what was on the horizon in Glasgow, somewhere my own formative music steps had taken place and where I've always found something interesting going on. Largely immune to being swept along by 'scenes', there has always been a eclectic mix of new music in the city, spurred on by the almost over-abundance of venues. On the very first edition of the Glasgow PodcArt which I tentatively downloaded was a song by Julia and The Doogans - and from that moment on I was hooked by that remarkable voice and those simple, direct songs. But in those early, naieve days I had no context and what I hadn't appreciated is just how close to the grass roots I was flying here. With one, completely sold out EP under her belt, Julia was doing everything herself and working damn hard at it. And for the last two years, those of us who want to hear more have had to seek out Julia's performances or await the next in a steady flow of demos for new songs. A new release has always seemed impossibly far away in fact.
That is until now. This five-track EP is again completely self-released but as ever in the Doogan camp, it has been done professionally and with attention to detail. While there is charm and honesty in those home made sleeves which I treasure so much and endlessly bang on about, there is something pretty inspiring about seeing an artist striving for professionalism like this too. The EP begins with a with a slightly menacing melody picked on the guitar which becomes "Diamonds" - a surprisingly dark song which has featured in Julia's live set for a while now, dealing with fear - and more specifically the fear of loss. In her wonderfully dexterous voice Julia spins a tale of submission and redemption. The addition of a delightfully mournful cello and piano gives the track a curiously cinematic quality. "Those Things" is somewhat more upbeat, Renata Pilikinait?'s cello here altering its personality entirely to provide drive and momentum alongside the shuffle of drums. I've heard Julia referred to before as a 'folk singer' but she has always been insistent that she sings pop songs. This piece supports her assertion completely, with Julia's ear for a well-constructed pop tune deployed faultlessly to provide memorably sweeping choruses and an impeccable, addictive vocal melody. I've tried to describe Julia's voice previously to no avail, and I'll probably fail again here. The key is its range and agility, and the ability to switch between a folky rustic delivery and these swooning pop chorus. Never far from her Glasgow roots, the intonation doesn't adopt that weird transatlantic drawl so beloved of singer-songwriter types - but manages to stay rooted in the Central Belt.
The last couple of years have seen numerous demos and covers sneak out of the Doogan camp, and "Answer" first surfaced as one of these, with Doogan's legendary downplaying of her abilities suggesting she'd remove the download soon because it wasn't good enough. Luckily I managed to grab it before it disappeared, and the surprise is how little needed to be done to what was already a gorgeously constructed track to turn it into the version here. Jennifer Hamilton provides a little piano embellishment and this along with a skiffly tap of drums are all there is aside from Julia's voice and guitar. The lyrics describe a promise of unending support and fidelity - surely a positive declaration, but even here there is just the hint it may not be returned in kind and that it's all in vain. There is something about this quiet, resolute delivery which invites a deliciously maudlin interpretation. With its more formal song structure and picked guitars "Bound" is likely the closest Julia's brand of songwriting comes to the contested area of folk music. Appropriately the lyrics explore commitment and entanglement, and not for the first time the song's narrator is sleeplessly pondering relationships, a theme which seems to thread through this EP. Finally, employing just the piano and cello, the closing "Down The Line" provides a space where Doogan's vocals can echo and soar unrestrained. It's delicate and almost fragile, but the strength and clarity of the voice is very apparent here. And with that echo of relationships transcending distance and a lonely glockenspiel melody picked out against the moans of the cello, Julia urges us not to worry. It's easy to be lulled into a sense of security by her voice, but the dark corners of these songs remain part of their allure.
This EP is the culmination of a tremendous amount of hard work for Julia Doogan, writing, playing live and bringing together The Doogans in their current, incredibly talented form over the past two years. At the same time it represents maturing songcraft and a developing ear for melody which has resulted in this absurdly catchy and addictive release which still manages to explore complex emotional landscapes and some pretty dark spaces within the confines of short, direct pop songs. Recurring throughout this record are themes of commitment, submission and loss which sometimes set the lyrics darkly at odds with the pretty, beautifully played tunes. It's true that there are a lot of people out there with their guitars, doing the heart-on-sleeve singer-songwriter thing in a fairly adequate way. But this is something rather special, and the approach here hinges on the quality of the musicianship and songwriting and the ability to hook you in with a deft chorus or heart-achingly neat turn of phrase. I've no doubt that this EP will sell out just like it's predecessor, and I can only urge you to get in quickly and not miss out like I did last time around. Let's not leave it two years before the next one folks!
Julia and The Doogans - Those Things
You can buy the "Diamonds EP" from Bandcamp or from Julia and The Doogans own online store where it comes bundled with all manner of other items.
Lost::MikeGTN
I've had a home on the web for more years than I care to remember, and a few kind souls persuade me it's worth persisting with keeping it updated. This current incarnation of the site is centred around the blog posts which began back in 1999 as 'the daylog' and continued through my travels and tribulations during the following years.
I don't get out and about nearly as much these days, but I do try to record significant events and trips for posterity. You may also have arrived here by following the trail to my former music blog Songs Heard On Fast Trains. That content is preserved here too.
