Category: sheffield

The dream is dying

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Things are looking bad. Very bad.

The beauty and rediscovered novelty of the snow has given way to the practicalities of travel and the implications of not being able to get to where I need to be.
As I write, there are blizzard conditions outside, adding to the (at least) 16″ of snow on the ground already. Locally, the roads are all closed, deep in snow and transport is at an absolute standstill. These are exceptional conditions, even for Sheffield.  And in the midst of all this, I have to get to the station and try and find my way to Gloucester for the next leg of my journey. But that’s not going to be possible – I’m just not able to get anywhere at the moment: it really is that bad. And so, I’m going to make a big push to walk the 5 miles to Sheffield station towing a 23kg suitcase on a sledge: and get to London.

And even when I do that, Gatwick airport is closed.

But I need to do my bit: there’s no point my being anywhere but Gatwick if they should reopen before my flight is due to leave.

I’m depressed, a litte worried about heading out in these conditions and resigned to the fact that this isn’t going to happen. So, if it does, then I’m all smiles.

Photos from yesterday are going up on flickr as I write.

And now, I am just going outside and may be some time.

Baby, it’s cold outside

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Blimey. Chilliness abounds.
Yesterday, I nearly died at Portishead by the side of the Bristol Channel. And bloody hell, there are nicer places to pop your clogs, I can tell you.
I would have taken more photos on such an elemental day, but I was shaking too much: when my brother feels the cold, you know it’s bad.
It was bitter and I needed a pint of the same to recover.

Then onto the football – least said, soonest mended, although I will quietly seethe forever at the inexplicable and biased actions of Mr A Wanker – or whatever that ref’s name was. Still, always a pleasure(?) to watch my beloved red and white wizzzaaaaaards.

Today – sunnier, more beautiful, less windy, slightly less chance of getting hypothermia. Slightly.

Up onto the moors above Sheffield for a walk in the snow. And very pretty it was too.
Photos from the first two days (which have passed far too quickly) are here.

Tomorrow, Newcastle, where I can apparently expect to see A LOT of the white stuff – and get some more of that infamous Portishead-style wind.

Back into the pub, then.

Better by tomorrow

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After a weekend wracked by Mrs 6000’s tonsillitis and the consequent increased demands on my fathering abilities, I find myself concerningly nursing a sore throat of my own this morning. Both the kids have also been coughing and thus we’re off on another family outing to the doctor this morning. Oh joy.

Sore throats are never good, but this one is especially bad because tomorrow evening, we have plans (and tickets) to go and see (and hear) Crowded House at the Grand West Arena. Of course, laryngitis (I haven’t had any tonsils since a well-planned surgical intervention in 1979) will have no bearing on my eyesight or ear…sight(?), but it will make me feel generally crap and prevent me from singing along with the band in question.

Hits such as Four Seasons In One Day (written by Neil Finn after a particularly heavy 24 hours playing Championship Manager on the Playstation) and the much misheard Don’t Dream You’re Sober – an alcoholic’s worst nightmare – will have to be performed solely by the guys on stage and that would be a bad thing for the audience generally. Believe it, because it’s true.

Anyway, it would be foolish of me to strain my currently delicate vocal cords any further chatting to you good people. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with arepeejee’s stunning Warp Speed Winter Gardens:

Straight out of Sheffield, via Betelgeuse.

Make it so.

The 6000 miles… Desert Island Discs post

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Music. I love it. Can’t get enough of it. Literally.

And that’s one of the reasons that I could never – would never – want of be able to come up with a Top 10 of my favourite songs. Although I’ve often wanted to, I’ve always been hugely concerned that I’d leave something important out. And I probably have, because following on from The Blog Up North‘s lead, and despite the fact I don’t do memes, I’m finally going to a Desert Island Discs (DID) post.

Wikipedia tells me that Desert Island Discs is:

…the longest-running factual programme in the history of radio. Guests are invited to imagine themselves cast away on a desert island, and to choose eight pieces of music, originally gramophone records, to take with them; discussion of their choices permits a review of their life.
Excerpts from their choices are played or, in the case of short pieces, the whole work.
At the end of the programme they choose the one piece they regard most highly. They are then asked which book they would take with them; they are automatically given the Complete Works of Shakespeare and either the Bible or another appropriate religious or philosophical work.
Guests also choose one luxury, which must be inanimate and of no use in escaping the island or allowing communication from outside.

I’ve been thinking about doing this for so long and the BUN post was the nudge I needed to get me over the speedbump of indecision and onward towards actually getting a list down on paper… er… pixels. Regular readers will note that several (if not more) of the tracks listed have been featured in one form or another on the blog before.
And with good reason.

So – here goes, in no particular order:

1. Jamie Cullum – High And Dry
Including this Radiohead cover partially excuses me from not actually having a Radiohead song in this list (see below).
In my mind anyway.
This is off his breakthrough 2002 album Pointless Nostalgic. I saw him perform an intimate gig at Warwick University in summer 2003, where his support was a beautiful and talented (but at that point unknown) teenage singer called Amy Winehouse.
Cullum sat and chatted with the audience about his life and his (newfound) career and amazed us by using his piano as a impromptu set of bongos – something which he claimed to have been thrown out of a posh New York hotel for doing while on tour.
Talking of which, here’s a video for the song – shot in the Big Apple. I mentioned the carefree and relaxed feel of this cover: I’m not a fan of jazz per se, but this example of Cullum’s jazz/pop/indie fusion just does it for me.

2. James Blunt – No Bravery (live)
One of those artists (and one of those tracks) that unexpectedly knocks you completely off your feet when you see them live. Having been coerced into accompanying Mrs 6000 to see Mr Blunt at Grand West in 2008, I was impressed with his live performance, but this was the track that will stay with me from that concert. His energy, the passion in his voice and the lyrics, together with the backdrop of images from Kosovo – many of them shot by Blunt himself – were so powerful that the audience was simply stunned into silence.
Here’s a video of the track (live) with some of those elements on show. And the bonus of French subtitles. Find yourself a quiet spot and spend 3½ minutes watching it. You’ll probably want to give yourself another 3½ to watch it again.

3. Depeche Mode – Enjoy The Silence
Electropop at its very, very, very best. For a band whose career has spanned so many years, it was surprisingly easy to choose one track for this list. There are a billion different versions out there – most of which are very good, but this original version will do nicely for the purposes of this list. Although there’s no one thing that jumps out at you about this 1990 song, the 2004 re-release, imaginatively titled Enjoy The Silence 04 – for some reason never really lives up to it’s predecessor. Enjoy The Silence came off the Violator album, which also gave us Personal Jesus, Policy of Truth and World in my Eyes – any of which could have made a top 50 DID list. But this is the top 8 –  and this one is the best of Depeche Mode’s offerings.

4. Arctic Monkeys – Mardy Bum
Hometown band alert. This a great song from Whatever People Say I Am…
Have some Glastonbury 2007 YouTube goodness.
Why do I like it? Because the title needs explaining to anyone outside South Yorkshire and because it describes the simplistic male approach to arguments within relationships so very perfectly – pseudo-feigning innocence while deflecting the blame elsewhere. Come now, we’ve all done it.
The lyrics are clever too: “I see your frown and it’s like looking down the barrel of a gun, and it goes off…” and “you’ve got the face on”. Elsewhere on the album, we see the same sort of argument from a third person point of view in Settle For A Draw – which was a another close contender for this list.

5. Tony Christie – Louise
DOUBLE hometown band alert. With some hometown piano on a sideplate.
This one featured fairly recently on 6000 miles… and is off Christie’s 2008 album Made In Sheffield. It’s a stripped down piano and trumpet reworking of The Human League’s 1984 synthpop hit and it ticks a lot of boxes for me. Piano is one of them. It’s not something I go out looking for in a song, but if there’s one in there, I seem to like it. The change in key and pace in the chorus of this cover is beautiful – Richard Hawley is at the keyboard here.
Also a big plus is the openness and simplicity of the performance. As with James Blunt above, there’s nothing to hide behind here – you have to get it exactly right, every time.

6. Morten Harket – Spanish Steps
While a-ha were on sabbatical, Morten released his second solo album Wild Seed (1995). For me, it features some of Morten’s best vocal work. There were a number of stand-out tracks: A Kind of Christmas Card , Half in Love, Half in Hate, Los Angeles and Spanish Steps amongst them. This one makes it in because it bears special significance for me: The theme is one of lovers separated by (in this case) 5,000 miles. That’s about 83.3% of how it was for Mrs 6ooo and I before I moved to SA and she became Mrs 6000 – and so yes: it’s personal and it’s soppy. But it’s still a great song.
The sound isn’t great (and neither is the video – WTF?!?) on this link, but it does give you an idea.

7. Muse – Map Of The Problematique (live)
Muse remain one of the best live performances I’ve ever seen. And this was the best track of the day that day. The album version is good, but this is one of those songs that gains so much from being played live. Not much more to be said about this – it’s just a great rock track played with huge energy. Really good.

8. a-ha – Hunting High And Low (live at Vallhall 2001)
Wow. I could have put [several] a-ha tracks into this list, but I thought that would be pretty dull for the DID listeners. So I didn’t. And having made that decision, I thought I’d limit it to just one. Yes, there was the Spanish Steps thing in there as well, but in a pub quiz scenario, there’s Queen and there’s Freddie Mercury, there’s The Smiths and there’s Morrissey. And you don’t get the point if the band did the song, but you thought it was the solo artist. So I can get away with including both these songs here.
Having made the decision to just include one, the choice was easy. Despite being a huge fan of all that a-ha have done, HH&L is my single favourite song and this version is sublime.

I think it goes without saying that it’s even more sublime if you ignore the Portuguese subtitles. Unless you’re Portuguese, in which case they will probably enhance the sublimeness, the sublimitude, the subliminity of the track for you.
And check it out: plenty of piano, plenty of openness and exposure. And it’s carried off brilliantly. Written in 1984, performed here in 2001 , it might not have had the commercial success of Take on Me and The Sun Aways Shines On TV, but it still stands the test of time. The only downside is that it’s traditionally a track that the band leave to the end of their concerts. Great to hear, but then you know that the end is nigh. Really nigh in 7 weeks time. And this one is going to be the killer for me that bittersweet night.

So – tying up a few loose DID ends:
My “most highly regarded choice” : easy – that last one, by a country mile.
My book: I don’t read a lot, so I think a photographic book of Cape Town and surrounds – to remind me of home.
My one luxury: I think I’ll take my biltong-making paraphernalia, please.

Apologies to the bands that nearly made it in here: Manic Street Preachers, The Smiths, Radiohead, The Stranglers, ABC, Oasis, Arno Carstens, Nirvana, The Cranberries, Snow Patrol, The Levellers, The Killers, Zebra & Giraffe, Crowded House (see you next week, guys), Carter USM, New Order, Coldplay, Pet Shop Boys, REM (but how?!?), The Verve, Royksopp, Skunk Anasie and many others.

Maybe next time. Because this cannot be the end of this.

In the meantime,  please feel free to share your thoughts and/or your 8 tracks in the comments below.
If you do this on your blog, let me know and I’ll do some linky stuff.

UPDATE: More DID goodness from Joyanne and The Cave
Also, more apologies are due, this time to Placebo, The Wildhearts, Therapy?, System of a Down, AFI, The Streets, Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip (probably not the one you’re thinking of), Terrance Trent D’Arby and 30 Seconds to Mars.

I knew this was going to happen.

Sheffield (for David Smith)

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M&G thoughtleader columnist David Smith was quick to nip in with a quip when UK comedian Alexander Armstrong tweeted a picture from the top of the “Sheffield Eye”, having told us:

It’s only ANOTHER beautiful day In Sheffield. Going to ride the massive wheel outside our hotel and will twitpic from the top. LOVE it here!

Smith was quick to come back with:

Is that comedy or do you really like Sheffield?

Armstrong assured us that there was no joking here – he loved the place. Whether he was being honest or not, I don’t know. I do know that he was playing a gig there a few hours later and that saying anything else would probably have been suicidal, but he seems a nice bloke, so let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.

Well, now Armstong’s (and my) view of Sheffield has been backed up by Max Davidson in the Telegraph, who – in his Nature’s best places to live – lists Sheffield as one of his “six most desirable locations to live” in the UK. My home city is listed along  alongside quaint villages and small towns, because, as Davidson points out:

People who only know Sheffield through The Full Monty will probably be surprised to learn that it has the highest number of trees per head of population of any city in Europe. With the Peak District on its doorstep, greenery is also spread unevenly across the city, but gives areas such as Broomhill, near the university, a rus in urbe charm that few British cities can match. Air quality is high for a conurbation of this size, with anti-pollution measures in place.

I had to just check my Latin to establish that rus in urbe essentially means “countryside in the city”. Which sounds just about right.
And as we all know – trees are good, right? And there are loads of them in Sheffield.

Because of its industrial heritage and geographic location – amongst the coal mines of north Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire – together with the… erm…  “exposure” given to it by The Full Monty (a film which accurately portrayed the urban decay that hit the city during the 1980s, if not the route that most unemployed male residents took to improve their lives), Sheffield often gets a bad press. But that’s quite unfair, as Armstrong and Davidson have both noticed.

It’s something that I notice too – not having lived there for almost 20 years now, but having remained in constant contact with the place, it’s amazing to see the regeneration and the optimism that always seems to increase each time I go back “home”.
Of course, the industry is still there – it has to be – and there are problem areas like in any city. But there’s so much more to Sheffield than most people – including David Smith – realise.

And there are trees.

This post was in no way sponsored by Sheffield Tourism, although if they want to slip a few quid my way, I probably won’t say no.