21st
Mott the Hoople - Saturday Gigs
Not the easiest day, if I’m honest. Perhaps I need to start treating 4-20 like everyone else seems to. Then again, allergies. Coughy-cough cough. Nah. Not fo’ me.
A strange run. Into the city, my city, for scant seconds. Then (for various reasons) had to immediately turn around and leave the city, my city, and listen to the game on the radio. Then, with nearly four minutes left and the hometown team up five, the signal went out. Too far away from the city. So what’s my best hope, until I can get home and pull up the Tivo?
This thing.
Not to be confused with this thing.
Actually, go ahead and confuse it with that thing. The hometown team was -7 with der Merc in its ranks, and though they did have Stella Artois, this hardly helped the bottom line. To say nothing of the fact that the beer cost four dollars, and one penny. How do you tip 99 cents? Especially when the bartender gives you a five dollar bill, and all that change, back? Are they so used to horrible tips that they don’t know how to break the fiver?
Eventually, I got home. And before shuffling off for a proper nap only to wake up and take in both Tivo’d contests at a little past four on 4-21, I took in a bit of what Fili-B and I have been driving you nuts with, over the last few years. The Caterham race This bit. Right.
And, as the map of South London was tossed up, I saw a familiar face. “Croydon.”
OK, it’s not familiar. I’ve never been anywhere close to it, though some in our midst actually lived close to it. But as a budding (actually, already-budded) Anglophile in junior high, that name meant the world to me.
Because of this song. Even without knowing much of Mott the Hoople’s backstory save for their most popular album (thankfully in our living room on LP in 1992) and the Bowie story, I didn’t know what to expect upon buying this tape, because of so few familiar songs on it. “Saturday Gigs” was the type of self-referential piece that I kind of tend to dig, which makes my uneasy relationship with hip-hop all the more confusing.
It’s a pretty straightforward ballad, all about playing here and struggling there, parts that don’t really give me a rise. But the most confusing part — “but then we went to Croydon!” — gave me the goosebumps back then, as it does now. As it did last night.
I don’t know why it was so special to them, part of me (most of me. All of me. “All of me …”) doesn’t want to know.
I just know that I want to go to Croydon. Like they did. Not before the playoffs end, though.
‘allo’allo’allo — Mercury’s Mustache
