The various members of Coba Fynn have been the pivots around which some of my more memorable nights out have eccentrically revolved. Chris presided over a number of noteworthy evenings back in our salad days, culminating one night in a Dantean descent to the lowest level of Espionage with a man named John who foamed slightly at the mouth whenever he talked. We drank, we regaled and we held forth at length. We toasted each other with tequila and sambuca, and delicately cleansed our palates between spirits with the finest of beers.

Then, suddenly, the pleasurable blur the evening had attained resolved itself into pin-sharp focus, the kind which hides neither unpleasant detail nor flatters in the slightest. I accidentally sloshed a sambuca all over some innocent passer-by’s fur coat (good luck getting that out), and shortly afterwards delivered the coup de grace in the form of a momentary, public bout of retroperistalsis. All over Chris’ jacket. (Good luck getting that out.) I was brought back to sobriety so fast it made a whipcrack noise.

Quelle nuit! For all of its monstrous, self-inflicted assault on my dignity, I still smile when I think of it.

More recently Doug, Chris and I took the Trøll up to a farm just outside Aberdeen where we sat in a trailer, played guitar and generally acted the goat in the countryside, courtesy of Chris’ giant farmer friend Bryan. The next day I brought a limping Saab back to Glasgow without the use of 1st or 2nd gears. But I’ve talked about that before, so I’ll spare you the gory detail.

So, on to this weekend. Ruth & Andy had invited me over to their flat in the west end for a meal on Saturday, so I trundled over there for haggis, neeps and tatties, a couple of glasses of wine and some pleasant conversation. I left them to it—apparently still suffering the after effects of some partying the previous evening—and headed round to The (bar) Belle on Great Western Road where Charlie and Davis/d(e) were already under steam. Davis’ friend Angus was there too, and the four of us found a table by the fire where we spent the rest of the evening mutually congratulating ourselves on how awesome our respective bands were.

I say “the rest of the evening”, but it became clear, even as we were gently evicted from the closing-up Belle, that none of us wanted to call it a night. We wandered easterly along Great Western Road but each potential venue was either closed or closing. At the Kelvin bridge, someone—I don’t remember who—mentioned the Woodside Social Club. I’d never heard of it, but the rest of the guys enthused about having been there back in their student days. We turned north onto North Woodside Road, the noise of a west end Saturday night fading behind us.

The Woody appeared just as the silence and darkness were starting to play on my nerves. Inside, a no-nonsense ticket lady asked me to open my bag (“Got any booze in there?”—why did she think we were there in the first place?) and charged us £5 for the privilege of entering this last Saturday night resort. “I’m positive she used to be a neighbour of mine,” Angus confided. “She was a prostitute,” he whispered gleefully.

“Awesome. Say, why does everyone have dreadlocks?” I asked as we pushed through the doors into the club proper.

“Hear me now! Jah will be done wit de bashment gyal,” toasted an MC over some really quite forceful, squelchy bass. “Kill whitey,” he added. Two banners declared the name of the club over a green, gold and red field: Bass Warrior.

“Jesus,” I said in wonder, “my trousers are vibrating it’s so loud.”

“This is genius,” said Charlie.

We strolled up to the bar and when my eyeballs were not deforming in sympathy with the bass notes, I checked out our surroundings. The room looked like like a ’60s miners’ social club, and despite the fact that the far end of the room was dominated by speakers the size of Smart cars, it looked like some of the miners had never left. Rasta dudes and girls were dancing to the beat (or maybe they were just vibrating along the floor at its resonant frequency) and round the fringes of the room sat erect a few white-haired couples, watching the night unfold with half pints and whisky chasers.

“Let’s go upstairs and play pool.”

We forked over another couple of quid for access to the stairs to the upper level. The first floor was almost completely deserted: two connected halls lined with green vinyl benches housed four pools tables each and were served by a common bar. There was a jukebox. “Let’s put on some Zeppelin,” I said, not yet acclimatised to the silence. And so the night resumed its gregarious course as we sank pints and pool balls for a couple more hours.

Towards 3, there came some commotion at the door. Our friend, the ticket lady of the night, came barrelling in with one of the bouncers in tow. “Have youse been doing coke in the bogs?” she demanded. “‘Cause we’ve been raided! Those two guys downstairs wearing hats were CID! The toilets are covered in white powder.”

“Wearing hats? What, no we haven’t been doing coke in the toilets.”

“Aye, but if you are going to use anything, be discreet, okay?”

“It still wasn’t us. But thanks for the tip.”

“Aye well. Mind next time, right?”

With her message delivered, and at least partially convinced that we hadn’t been heedlessly flinging Columbian marching powder around the toilets, she left.

“That was odd.”

We finished our game and our pints and took our leave from the Woody. Back at Charlie’s we collapsed in the living room, each with a bottle of beer in one hand and a whisky in the other, and argued about the Beatles until about 5.30 am.

Like I say, band nights are memorable nights.