“There was
madness in any direction, at any hour” – Hunter S Thompson.
TEASER TRAILER: THAT’S SIMPLY NOT
CRICKET!!
Past two ayem, heavy pouring Scottish rain, as usual. There were four of us
standing outside my front door, three Australians and myself, three of us sober, including me, one
hopelessly drunk. The locked inside door laughed at us mockingly. I shrugged,
and went and grabbed a brick from the top of the driveway wall a few feet away.
Walking back over to Andrew (sober), I handed him the wet slimy future
projectile. “Well, you can do the honours, seeing as how you locked us out.” He
took it from me, weighed it up for a second, stepping up to the doorstep, like
a bowler at Melbourne Cricket Ground preparing to chuck a googly at the batter
for an opposing team. Then the director raised the building block over his head
and…
…wait.
Press rewind.
We’ve jumped ahead too far.
Hopefully at least I have your attention, as that was the object of the
time-jumping exercise. I suppose I will have to explain a few things first,
about how we got to the wet point above…
LET’S START AT THE VERY BEGINNING, A
VERY GOOD PLACE TO START…
In the late 80s (aye, showing my age), I used to have a small, select shelf of
VHS tapes that were my fave films. They were all offbeat, off the wall, and off
their heads: Mad Foxes, GBH, Suffer Little Children, Invitation to Hell (same
tape as The Last Night), The Human Tornado, Repo Man – anything totally unique and
one-off was what I was after. Amongst them was For Your Height Only, a James
Bond impersonator film where a poorly-dubbed shortarse cocknocker midget
punched, kicked, quipped, danced, fucked, and farted his way through endless
waves of ludicrous-voiced goons and willing voluptuous vixens. I knew nothing
whatsoever about this film, except it was hilarious and bizarre and I loved it.
Many years later, I discovered that some Australian guy called Andrew Leavold had made a film about Weng Weng, the diminutive star of the film, called The Search For Weng Weng. My long-dormant youthful interest piqued, I went along to a screening of the film on its 2014 American tour. It was showing in Andersonville, not far from the Chicago suburb I was living in at the time, East Rogers Park. I met the Australian director and we instantly hit it off, drinking some random mishmash Weng Weng cocktail in a local bar and shouting lines from Dolemite (“DOLEMITE IS MY NAME, AND FUCKING UP MOTHERFUCKERS IS MY GAME!”) out loud, to the annoyance of the other, more sensible drinkers.
In 2017, Andrew brought the film on a UK tour. I was back in Scotland, and he stayed with me in Bainsford in Falkirk for a couple of days. I set up a Glasgow screening of the film. We also had a day-long pub crawl, taking in every pub from Bainsford right to the centre of Falkirk – and there are a lot of them. We ended up past-midnight in the Tolbooth Tavern in Tolbooth Street (controversially claimed to be Britain’s shortest street; Weng Weng would have felt right at home there!) with some weird American bird (never hung out with an American in my life before that in Falkirk) we met in The Graeme Hotel who grew up in a cult, with her singing Adele songs on karaoke. Yes, it was one of those nights. I drove Andrew to his next screening in Manchester the next day, a mere 500-mile round trip. Great fun, though, listening to Brutalism by Idles (my big album that year) on repeat.
https://whorattledyourcage.blogspot.com/2022/08/opening-time-at-pub-movie.html
So when Andrew said that he was coming to Scotland (after trekking through Paris,
Berlin, London, Manchester, Blackpool and Copenhagen beforehand) with the film with Fred himself, accompanied by a
punk pal of theirs, Dick Dale, with his splatterpunk anti-epic Ribspreader…it
was a no-brainer that I would invite them up to Scotland to stay with me for a
few days at my flat in Crosshouse, Kilmarnock. Which is where all the chaos
started...
(That’s
my quote on the Pub poster)
“INFAMY, INFAMY THEY’VE ALL GOT IT INFAMY!”
I was to pick up the terrible trio in Glasgow, a half hour away from here, on the night of Wednesday, 3rd April, at 8.30 p.m., fresh off an eight-and-a-half-hour bus trip from London. I used to do that trip myself in the late 80s/very early 90s to horror film festivals in London at King’s Cross, at the notorious Scala Cinema, so I knew how brutal it could be. They would arrive Wednesday night, then relax and detox on Thursday.
On Friday at 3.45 p.m. I would go pick up the rental van they had me hire to take us though to their Glasgow at some small venue called the Glasgow GMAC I had never heard of before. Then there was to be an Edinburgh screening on Saturday night at 6 p.m., and after that I would take them to Edinburgh the next morning to get their train back to London. Simple. As a bonus, I even set up a screening of the double bill in McChristies, the local pub. A barmaid in there, Kirsty, agreed to it and I put up a small poster in the pub. I thought it would be a natural kind of a screening for films like these, because there are a lot of old punks who drink in there. Plus it would be some exact cash for the streeeeeeetched trip kitty, which would be a bonus. Super, smashing, great, as Jim Bowen used to put it.
But, to quote Robert Burns, from To a Mouse: “The best-laid schemes o’ Mice and Men gang aft agley.” Which basically translates as: shove your plans up your Satanic Verse (my own contribution to Scottish rhyming slang, meaning ‘erse/arse’, which admittedly lost a wee bit of comedic power after Salman Rushdie got attacked)(but I minted the phrase before that happened, so fuck him), nothing is ever bloody simple. And indeed this proved to be the truth. When I didn’t hear back for a few days from McChristies about the screening, I chased them up, only to be told by an apologetic Kirsty that the manager had seen the poster, watched the trailers, and decided that the event “wasn’t right” for the pub. Laughing here.
What else would people be doing on a Thursday evening in a small Ayrshire village than going to see a mad double bill with the filmmakers and star in attendance? Seemed obvious to me, a completely unique, one-off event. But no, that was that, and it wasn’t Kirsty’s fault. I told Andrew about it on Messenger, which was how I was staying in contact with him, joking that they had been banned from a pub they had never even set foot in! It was a bit of a pisser, to be honest, but there was nothing we could do about it, so ho-hum. Not even in town and causing controversial chaos already. Crosshouse would never be the same…
WEDNESDAY 3/4/2024: OUT ON A BUS ON A PSYCHEDELIC TRIP
(Yes, I just named this section after a line from a Billy Idol song, let’s move along, nothing to see here, nothing to see…)
I got myself through to Buchanan Street Bus Station in Glasgow on the bus on Wednesday night, my car unfortunately having failed its MOT and been scrapped a few months before. I didn’t know what their bus number was, so I went round to look at the arrivals board. Just as I was walking over to it I noticed something…oddly familiar, a LOUD sartorial smash amidst the usual dark-coloured Scottish dour clothing ranks. The pattern on the slightly ratty coat in question looked like a mix between a dalmatian’s spots and the markings of a giraffe. It looked like something the Manic Street Preachers would have worn circa 1992, during their gobby glam era.
Yes, it was definitely Fred! I recognised the jacket from his previous posted photos from the rest of the trip on Facebook, and he himself from the documentary. Unmisfuckingstakeable. I hadn’t been expecting the guys already, because they were due in at half eight, and it was only eight. Fred was in the station’s Greggs grabbing something to eat, reaching into a fridge. I walked up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned round to squint at me in confusion: he had no idea who I was or what I looked like, after all.
“You’re new to the Yabba?” I said to him in a bad Australian accent, opening my jacket and showing him my Wake in Fright teeshirt. This is a classic Australian film from 1971 about a young, stuck-up English teacher, John Grant, who gets trapped in a flyblown bucolic outback town and grog-glug-slugs himself into oblivion. It was a kind of drink-drowned shorthand between Andrew and myself, and I had told him he was coming to the Scottish Yabba, the area of the film Grant ends up in. This is a pretty rural area of Scotland, y’see.
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“Hi Fred, I’m Graham, how are you doing?” I was careful to slow down my speaking, because I know the Scottish accent can be difficult for non-Scots, as every horrible rude American loves to tell us on every single Scottish online video they see. I found myself automatically using the slow…clear…enunciation…of…each…verb…and…vowel I had to do when I was living in America to be understood, slowing down my inflections and intonations to funereal pace for even half-comprehension.
Fred smiled dimly, understanding replacing confusion. “Oh, right.”
I saw from the corner of my left eye Dick Dale, the other character I recognised from Facebook-posted trip pics, bounding over, maybe worried in case Fred was being accosted by the world’s oldest, crappest rentboy. “Hi Dick, I’m Graham,” I said. I was not sure if I should hug Fred and him. “I dunno whether to shake your hand or what,” I said, slightly faltering. “Fucking right!” said Dick, amiably jamming his hand into mine, just before I shook Fred’s.
“Nah mate, I gotta go, I gotta go,” he said, in an unplaceable English accent.
“Thanks a lot,” I said sarcastically, stepping off, muttering “ya fucking cunt” under my breath. Didn’t want barred from my regular bus if he heard me. All it would have taken was thirty seconds more! I had to go back and tell the guys the driver was a prick as he drove off without so much as a backwards glance. Welcome to Scotland, boys! They were relatively unfazed, and we got a taxi with a cool, funny driver down the road to the village with enough time to spare to get some beer. Andrew bought some Australian-stereotype-feeding Fosters, noting “it was literally the cheapest beer they had.” We got back into the taxi, reached my place, I gave the driver a three quid tip (I always tip, having been a taxi driver briefly myself) and we all traipsed inside.
Fred had photocopied A4 templates of nude women and men indulging in various sex acts, only without heads, so he can draw faces of paying punters on the space left for a tenner. The features look spot on, too. Apparently the caricatures were selling like hotcakes at previous screenings, with people lining up to get them. At one point Andrew and I were talking and I saw Fred intently pingponging his head and attention back-and-forth between us, sketching both of us in a sketchbook he takes everywhere with him. It felt slightly odd, but not too bad, and I soon got used to and ignored it. I would find out this constant art factory assembly line was Fred’s normal modus operandi.
I was told that the previous two screenings had been chalk and cheese. The Manchester one had had hardly anybody there, because nobody wanted to come out on a rainy Sunday evening, but the Blackpool one had apparently more than made up for it. Old mister Human Centipede himself Laurence Harvey, a friend of Andrew’s whom I had also met the time before in Manchester, also turned up there.
But all that was near-future business. We sat drinking and gabbing and viewing for a while. Andrew produced a can of Bud Spencer beans, which he’d bought at the Bud Spencer Museum in Berlin. It’s weird that the place should be there, as Spencer was Italian. He’d had to empty the beans out at the airport to take the can on the plane. Bizarre. Fred brought out a CD of his funny solo album named '3182 etc', and played it for us, singing along. It was the first time it had been played in Scotland, certainly, though I’m not sure where else it had been unveiled. Still, it was a real thrill and trip to have a real live artist I had admired in my multiple viewings of Pub: The Movie sitting in my living room on my sofabed, singing and drawing. It was surreal, and you couldn’t have wiped the grin off my face with a shovel, had you bizarrely been trying to do so for any reason. I got the guys set up with my internet. I misread a letter in the password and it took way longer than it should, making me feel like a dick.
Though I am a non-smoker, I let Fred and Dick smoke indoors that night. But it had such a rough effect on my lungs and eyes that I politely asked them to smoke outdoors after that, and they were pleased to oblige. I showed them some Doctor Weetabix videos, which they rightly laughed like fuck at, and Chips Rafferty, from Wake in Fright, feeding Marlon Brando some Australian beer. We still got a relatively early night, though, because the guys were tired from the bus trip and wanted to get to their kip. Fred and Andrew slept side-by-side on my sofabed, and Dick crashed out in my second bedroom next to all my junk in his sleeping bag. I hit the hay myself, smiling as I nodded off, a long-discussed good-punk-company artistic dream solidifying under my roof to the sound of snores and bus-saved-up farts from a land down under and over and out.
Link to Part 2:
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