3 Monts Flanders Golden Ale, etc

This time of year is the booziest, is it not? The snow, the burning cold on reddened faces...coats, hats, gloves...those annoying electric shocks off your car...droves of people mobbing the malls like bloated lemmings on acid...spending long periods of time indoors with in-laws, spouses, kids, screaming gaggles of kids...yes, it's the time of year you really want to kill the pain with some good ol' fashioned booze. Personally I favour 3 Monts golden ale from from French Flanders. Lovely stuff.

Manchester Perry Boys and Nonsense

The towers of Salford and the keys to the sandy kingdom wherein dwell the psychedelic kangaroo and the tamarind seed. Is there anybody going to listen to my story all about the girl who came to stay...? You don't regret a single day, y'know?

I thought not...

Mad Dogfish: The Ones that Got Away

My second book, "Mad Dogfish: The Ones that Got Away" is currently being finished/edited. The book, which I like to describe as "Perry Boys on Steroids" is concerned with the mid-70s to the present day (2008-9) and covers music, fashion, football, crime, drugs, and travel - with emphasis on the travel.
The book is a tribute to those who took the plunge and travelled to alien shores, with or without a Lonely Planet guide, or a companion, or a pot to piss in. Staying on the move, kipping in sleazy motels, swimming in exotic oceans, wrecking French cities with the Red Army, and steaming about the American Interstate system, all these things are covered, as well as grafting in Mexico, painting millionaires' homes on Martha's Vineyard, and doing the blacktop game with the gypsies and mad Scots in Florida and Georgia.
Thailand, snides, Australian grafting, Germany, etc (thanks to my good friend Kenneth Lewis and his mad mates, Dominic Lavin, et al) all these countries and topics are covered...I can't wait to get this thing finished and out there.
And of course, the whole thing wouldn't be right without at least 80 pages dedicated to the evolution of the "casual" movement, and its rudimentary beginnings in Saint Etienne back in 1977.

Crystal Branches Everywhere...

Well, it's winter, innit, again? The snow is falling and the trees are sheathed in knobbly ice as is my car - not good. This is hell. Or is it? The fisher cats (weasels, really, not cats) are patrolling, looking for real cats to eat, and I've seen four foxes in the last several weeks. Foxes are nice little things, and cats can put up a decent fight against them, thank goodness. But it's the shrill sounds, the piercing bizarre utterances from the mouths of the fishers that really gets my goat. If I had a goat it might well get it, get it? The deck outside is covered in snow, and the football has been whited-out where it stands. Must be a god few inches out there. The cats won't go out, will not wear it. So where does this leave me?
It leaves me pondering over the tackle that broke Eduardo's leg yesterday, and the fall that tore my mother's ligaments on Thursday. I sit and add bits to my next book, and hope it gets published, or I'll publish it myself, and then I drink a cup of rosy lee with the missus. Go for an Eartha Kitt, that's right, lay a few Henry the Thirds in the ol' bag 'n' boil it. Up the apples and pears for a Tom Tit. The fact is, we utterly pasted the Geordies last night and the ICJ nicked the Tyne Bridge to weigh it in for beer money, but somehow all I see is Eduardo, and Gallas, kicking the hoardings like a third-rate Cantona, before collapsing in the middle of the park and sobbing like a fucking loon.
Bloody ridiculous, that, wannit? A grown man, crying like a girlie boy, like a big pantie-girdle. Get back to France, pantie man. In England we are men. Those of us that are actually English, and the other 99.9%. An Englishman's home is his Adi Dassle, knowhatImean? The Tyne Bridge was dismantled early this morning in a bus depot outside somewhere horrid, and flogged to a herd of gyppos who came through in a caravan train, like post-industrial pioneers across a pre-Mad Max landscape. They've got it sussed, the ol' Romani. Nick and buy and sell and glean and scrape and keep on moving, do not stop. Buy a Roller with the dosh, a slightly bigger caravan, have bare-knuckle fights and wreck pubs in moody areas after funerals. Show The Man who's boss, and all that. Copper pipes, tarmac, fortune-telling, good ol' fashioned graft, bicycle thieving, Ufology, Crown Green Bowls, Church Institute cloakrooms, old red phoneboxes, aeroplanes to Spain to smuggle ciggies back, the full Montezuma.


SO there you 'ave it.

Is Manchester Britain's Second City, or is it Just A Shithole?

All my life I, Ian Hough have championed the virtues of Manchester, my home town. People have been telling me that I should work in public relations for the place, such has been my enthusiasm for transmitting its might and elegance to "foreigners" who haven't yet worked out how cool it/we is/are. Out here we is stoned, man-dudes, k? The previous sentence was a cruel sarcasm, based on recent experiences I have had with some of the Mancunians (that's what they call people from Manchester). They have accused me of being "middle class"! Devastating! They have called me a "Bury lad"! Arrgghh!! And most of all they have drawn very definite lines in the sand as to what is "proper" or "real" Manchester, and what is Salford (a neighbouring city which was there for a very very long time before the Romans came and built Manchester), and what is "my" Bury, and other things besides.
In my first book, "Perry Boys", I push Manchester as the second city of Britain, and I took the mickey out of the cockneys in a playful chapter entitled "Cockney Kryptonite". But when I did the same to United fans from Manchester in a recent edition of United We Stand fanzine, it seems the Albert Tatlock spirit is alive and well in the city, and a sense of humour has somehow dissolved like the statues in the acid rain I know and love.
Britain's Second City? All my life I have pushed this idea of Manchester and wanted to make it true, but now I am rethinking everything; third city? Fourth City? You tell me, my penguins of the crystal desert. You tell me...

Perry Boys Make Some Noise

The teenage wasteland resonates like a demented tin-hatted sentinel at guard by a blazing ancient sofa, where eagle-eyed tramps contemplate vile deeds and the good people troop home from work while the morning's tinfoil starshine coming up over the horizon like a flaming lamp in the hand of Leviathon glitters with massive might fresh from the bowels of the periodic table. Aye, me hearties, when the Perry Boys start to emerge from the fire-escapes, humming their ska tunes and dancing to Bowie, the sun curdles rusty in the sad socket of the dusky sky, and the tiddlywinks are flipping across the clouds like stone discuses in unison with the flocking geese that point in formation to the south, and warmth, nourishment, blue seas, and security.
When did the illegitimate clown paint his face to resemble his father's keeper and stomp on the dogshit in the thoroughfare like he just didn't care anymore? Why do the women insist on gender-based biochemical symmetry when no such thing exists? People are obsessed with elegance where none lies, and when our gorgeous damsels finally accept that their lot is not to match us at our preposterous game but to complement it, they will discover happiness. There are many cracks between worlds, and few are so deep and mysterious as that between gender. One must trace the lineage all the way back to the volvox and beyond in order to discern when the fissure first exhibited its qualities. The drums, stars and guitars are thumping, twanging, lurching like dalek-dogs on heat at my garden gate, as I pull the blinds tight and scratch my head in solid gold wonderment. Clever are the modern day football hooligans, the casual gangs of Mancheser and Salford, the Scallies of Scotland Road, and the thick-hided denizens of the Millwall mythos. When did the pathologic slide begin? Was it when Adidas took their proboscis and stuck it deep into southeast Asia, or was it earlier in the chronology, was it when the Perry Boys scowled and stared at the scallywagglers of Liverpool? Did the Cardiff Soul Crew not make sense of the Butlins Barry Island massacres, and did the Leeds Service Crew ever run from the Perry Boys, or am I sorely, surely mistaken?
Why did they even call us Perry Boys? Why didn't they call us something more original, like the Gaggleflockers, or the Jibtastic Wretches?

Hard to say, my sons, but I am listening to some excellent music by a band called Dile right now, and they are doing the business, with their songs like "Perry Boys", "Garstang", and "take the Skinheads Bowling"....fucking awesome.

Mad Dogfish; the ones that got away

The travelling gene will not move from the helix, won't be expunged from the code. We will always want to live in Deadwood and be drunk on the frontier of civilisation, in places where thugs, football casual hooligans, and deadbeats roam free, while the measly few chatterbox whippets of future planning knock together their banks, post-offices, and hardware stores. The ruts are sloppy and deep, the whisky is third rate, but it doesn't matter, because we're free. Free from the nine-to-five slough toward Gomorrah executed by the filth-laded mules of straightheadedness and sloth. The babies are gurgling in the treetops, like little beans, and the turrets hold princesses waiting to be freed like butterflies and beetles entrapped in the buckets and glass globes of teenage boys.
Buses trundle the boulevards and the trees are unidentifiable, the denizens of the sidewalks skid on innumerable oil-slicks and rotten fruits, and the traffic sounds like a roaring behemoth. When we hit the stadia we halt and sniff the air, as it curdles our brains with its gorgeous cold hydrocarbon merging with crisps, beer, and freshly cut grass, right there in the bowl of theatrical magnificence called Camp Nou or even Foxboro.
Be of stout mind my sons, and don't drop the soap, as it might slip away and you'll be filthy thereafter. When you lie to yourselves about where you've been and why, the answer will rain down in indecipherable slang from a great height in your unconscious; you are running away from being a human being, you are chafing at the doorway to mortality, and they'll never take you alive...