So it was that Charlie, Doug and I met up at the Grand Ole Opry for King Creosote’s first post-Mercury Award gig. That’s the Grand Ole Opry, Glasgow. And what a godawful venue it is.

On the way in, the stewards directed everyone past a queue snaking all the way from the entrance into the auditorium. What’s this, I wondered? The cloakroom? But no, this was the queue for the bar, ringed as it was by bewhiskered old gents wearing badges emblazoned “Committee” who sent everyone to join the queue all the way back at the front door. Why it was the usual gentle scrum was not permitted to develop I have no idea.

The stage is flanked by two giant embossed cowboy heads like faces on a pair of silver dollars. That would be weird enough, but their ten-gallon hats are so disproportionately small that it appear that the upper portions of their skulls have been removed and their hats balanced delicately on the resultant flat surface. I spent the gig trying (and failing) not to look at them, sort of like a car crash on the opposite carriageway of a motorway.

Then, to round things off, the “Committee” saw fit to allow in (without tickets, I’m pretty sure) a load of knuckle-dragging regulars who stood at the back and talked loudly about how the music was pish, and why didn’t they fuckin play something that aw cunt kent. They spoke like James Kelman writes, only informed by aimless vitriol instead of wry social commentary.

The evening’s saving grace was that the music was, in general, pretty good. King Creosote was a chatty and witty host, deploying some in-song mockery to quieten a couple of overly vocal hecklers at the front, and keeping the real fans rapt throughout. Have a listen!

Chris, Leyla & Scarlet are visiting at the moment. Coba Fynn coalesces across time and space. Tremendous!

For four and a half hours.

We knocked back a few beers, flicked through the pile of somewhat current music magazines abandoned by the control booth’s previous occupants, and blethered idly. Finally Nick held aloft an unlabelled CD.

“Here it is.”

He wrote “Coba Fynn” on the disk with a black marker pen and handed it to Davis. There was general enthusiasm.

“Let’s get a drink! Nick, have you got time for a drink with us?”

And so began a night out to which I really struggle to do justice. The four of us grabbed a pint in the chilly courtyard of a bar just off Buchanan Street (the fact that I don’t remember its name may give you some clue as to where the evening was headed), then we said goodbye to Nick and the three of us took the tube to the west end to meet up with Doug’s sister Jackie and the Captain.

The thing is, that despite living in Glasgow for more than a year, I didn’t really get to grips with the city until the very last minute. I can try to pin the blame on any number of factors — the drudgery of commuting to Edinburgh, living down in the south side when really we should have held out for a flat in the west end, or even the trauma of redecorating a bathroom (it really was that bad) — but it occurs to me now that I might just have been suffering from undiagnosed nostalgia.

Back before the advent of the Roquefort Files, before Chris & Leyla left for the land of Oz, I found myself over in the west end of Glasgow for a few nights out with the extended ‘Fynn family. In the same way that Josh, Jeff and I parlayed our dank, lightless East Preston Street flat of the time into a stone-cold party machine, everything ‘Fynnish seemed to revolve around the idiosyncratic flat just off Great Western Road shared by Charlie, Doug and the Captain. There was boozing just round the corner in the coincidentally-named Captain’s Rest; there were parties, where guests would peer down at the words adorning the fish tank in the living room:

Neon tetra
Neon tetra
Tu es mon raison d’être

there was watching of 2001: A Space Odyssey in the small hours, and of course there was waking up the morning after and peeling one’s drooling face off the sofa. My expectations of Glasgow were subtly fixed by a few such episodes all those years ago.

Finding myself out again in the west end with Jackie, the Captain and the ‘Fynn acted as some sort of catalyst to bring not the memories themselves to the fore, but instead the state of mind. We ate; we drank; we drank some more; we tried to play the mastered album on Jackie’s CD player only to find that it would not work; we threw our hands up in consternation and then kept on drinking until we could drink no more. It was a great night — brightened just the slightest bit by the rosy glow of nostalgia, maybe, but a great night nonetheless.

P.S. Nick emailed us the CD image later in the week. It is good.

She smiled, and then started to cry.

I score 50%.

After breakfast — a long time after breakfast, so thorough is the mental preparation and discussion which accompanies any activity involving two or more members of Coba Fynn — David & Jenna gave Doug and I a lift into the centre of town before heading back to Edinburgh. Doug and I had other plans, and we sauntered into The Arches to try out Alien Wars. We were lucky enough to have a couple of complementary tickets waiting, courtesy of Doug’s disgustingly successful sister Jackie, and unlucky enough to arrive at precisely the same time as every ned of school age in Glasgow. We grabbed a pint in the bar and waited an hour, as suggested by the receptionist (who, ironically enough, was too cool for school; in the movie of this particular day, she’d be filing her nails and flirting with the guitarist of an up-and-coming electro-pop band), and when we returned the queue was exactly as long as when we had first arrived.

We bit the bullet and took our place in line.

Alien Wars is, if you haven’t come across it before, a sort of live rendition of Aliens with a Glaswegian twist. That’s not to say that the creatures can be found drinking alone at busy city-centre bars, projecting a faintly aggressive mien and determinedly trying to engage in sectarian football chat anyone foolish to move within striking distance, but instead that our host, the imposing Corporal Mackenzie, had a deep but comprehensible Glasgow bark.

“It is not true that there are live alien creatures down here,” he admonished us sternly. “Now turn off your mobile phones; they interfere with the security systems.”

Nice, I thought. Don’t want a ringing phone to break the suspension of disbelief.

“Follow me!”

We were hustled through the double doors into a facsimile of the darkened corridors of Hadley’s Hope and told to line up against the wall. Flickering lights and dry ice abounded. Corporal Mackenzie started our ‘briefing’.

“As you’ve been told, an alien spaceship was found during recent renovations at The Arches. We’re going to view it now, and although it’s completely safe, you must stick with me and do exactly as I say. Now— whose mobile phone is that?”

We all reflexively checked our phones.

“Security systems deactivated,” a recorded PA voice announced. Ah, very clever, I thought.

“Shit! Fuck!” bellowed Corporal Mackenzie. “It’s all a lie — there are aliens down here and we’ve been experimenting on them. Run! Run!”

I won’t spoil any more of it, but I will say that I stumbled through the last door shaky with adrenaline and grinning with appreciation. It’s great fun, and it’s only on until the end of March. Do it!

The gig was originally supposed to have taken place in Glasgow’s Barfly, but its new owners HMV had taken one look at its finances and immediately closed it down, leaving the gig without a venue and the four bands adrift. Sim-o the promoter had pulled out all the stops to find us a new home at Ivory Black’s around the corner, and we turned up at 6 pm sharp (well, sharp for Coba Fynn) to watch apprehensively as the other bands were dropped off by their parents.

“What’s the running order? When are we soundchecking?” we asked the gig skivvy.

“I remember you guys from Barfly. You’re aren’t just another one of these kiddie Blink 182 cover bands, so we’ll put you second to last. Oh, and we only soundcheck the first and last bands because of noise regulations.”

Political correctness gone mad, readers. Call the Daily Mail.

“See you back here in five hours’ time!”

And so, after a few quiet pints and a burger in front of the fire at Rab Ha’s had us yawning and fighting off a Pavlovian urge to call it a night, we hauled ourselves back to Ivory Blacks to grab another pint and watch the last couple of bands before our slot.

We tuned up and plugged in, and at the direction of the sound guy we more or less soundchecked right there and then. In normal circumstances I’d have been spluttering with indignation — how unprofessional! — but on this particular night it seemed to fit right into the haphazard, last minute feel of things, and we were off into Glasgow Girl without any more fuss.

And oddly enough, we played a really good gig.

The crowd was a mix of giggling schoolchildren, a few neds hovering at the happy/belligerent boundary and some ‘Fynn regulars. The kids were too busy exchanging Bebo addresses to pay much attention, but our faithful fans were enjoying themselves and the neds in particular seemed to have been gripped with a strange fascination for the mighty ‘Fynn. A slack-jawed couple lounged over the security rail right under Charlie’s nose and stared fixedly up at him for the whole duration, while a cheerily demented guy near the bar danced away and locked eyes with at yours truly, punching the air as we na-na-na-na’d our way through Fox in the Phoenix. We finished to whoops and applause.

Last on were Ready 2 Fall, a fresh-faced foursome of Blink 182 wannabes who took my preconceptions and rocked them to pieces. We whooped and applauded in our turn, and I was impressed enough to later visit their Bebo page (okay, not all of my preconceptions) and have a listen to their recordings. You should do the same!

Rather than move in one go, we’ve sort of dribbled in fits and starts over the past fortnight, bringing a carload of stuff to Edinburgh and storing it in Austen & Maria’s flat whenever we had the chance. Driving back to Glasgow on one of those nights, I was sitting at a red light on a typical Glasgow street, tenement blocks on either side and a smir of rain making the pavements reflect the streetlights, and I realised that I’d left my sense of “home” in Edinburgh. Before some eastbound journey along the M8 I’d loaded it into the car along with a box of clothes or CDs and unloaded it along with them at the other end.

This was a shock: not only could I pinpoint the exact time when I no longer considered Glasgow to be my home, I hadn’t ever been sure I’d thought of it as my home in the first place! Edinburgh’s been the setting for so much of my life over the past decade that I’ve “mythologised” it to a degree (five years of navel-gazing will do that to one’s perception of a time and place) and at some point over the last year or so I’ve started to do the same to Glasgow. (Bear with me on this next bit, because I am about to go quite misty-eyed and pretentious. Also, apologies are due to my man Plato.)

In some ideal way, Sauchiehall Street is a cosmopolitan boulevard; the GFT with its art deco lines and cramped seats is the archetypal cinema; the Art School is the nexus where Mackintosh’s Glasgow meets Grey’s Unthank; the Langside Café by the Victoria Infirmary, where builders and surgeons and families alike squeeze into the tiny seats, is the place to eat Sunday breakfast on the south side. This is not to say that I haven’t squirmed uncomfortably through interminable films at the GFT, or gagged on the limpest rasher of greasy bacon in the Langside Café, but my imperfect experiences of these places are just the shadows cast by their true selves, by the kind of idea behind each one; and that I remember them as their ideals and not as their shadows is how I know that Glasgow sneaked up on me and became my home for a year.

You can wipe away that tear now.

Jeff, Devon, Neil & Vanessa gave Ash & I a hand to move our stuff from its temporary resting place into the new flat last weekend, and so I hired a van in which to do it. I can report that the driving experience of the 6-speed diesel Vauxhall Vivaro is very much like a crack high*: incredibly addictive and frustratingly short-lived. The turbo spools up with an audible whooshing noise and the revs leap skyward; the tyres break loose in a slur of wheelspin and the van catapults itself forward. The white van mania evaporates just 500 rpm later, but hey, this thing has six gears so you just grab another one and start all over.

* Possibly the best line ever uttered on TV: “This crack is really moreish,” — Super Hans, Peep Show.

* * *

After a year of Monday nights spent chez Jeff & Devon, I finally had the chance to return the favour last week: with an appointment out on Bute on Tuesday morning, Jeff asked if he could kip at our place the night before, and I was happy to oblige. We pottered along to Shawlands after dinner to take in a bit of the local colour and wound up in Stube—my default Shawlands boozing destination—after I rejected the various other offerings along the way with a cursory shake of the head. “That one? Too crap/grim/dangerous.”

Stube was almost deserted, and when, after about half a pint, the lights dimmed briefly, I wondered aloud what had happened. “Was that a power cut? Did a fuse blow?”

“No,” Jeff replied quizzically, “it’s last orders.”

It’s been so long since I’ve been in a pub at closing time that I no longer recognise the signs. This is a troubling development.

Disappointed by the early kicking out, we drank up (the fizzy lager tickling my gag reflex the whole way down) and headed back towards the flat, stopping at the Ivory for a couple more along the way. I moaned about writer’s block and Jeff offered me beer and encouragement. It was a great night, and it was followed by a horrific morning after. The mere whiff of alcohol is enough to engage my body’s hangover response these days.

* * *

What else has happened? In the dying days of my commute I’ve decided to spread the love around a little, so last Tuesday I imposed upon Neil & Vanessa for a change. Neil and I took in Rivals/Les Liens du Sang at the Filmhouse that night, and I came away impressed: it’s a well-made homage to gritty ’70s cop dramas like The French Connection (see what I did there?), filled with smoking, shagging and fuzzy guitar riffs. It tends more towards “drama” than “cop”, and struggles to maintain momentum towards a slightly abrupt ending, but it’s still worth watching.

In a fit of gig-going, Ash & I saw Death Cab for Cutie at the Corn Exchange, and then Nick Cave at the same venue ten days later. We’d gone to the Death Cab gig almost by accident, pulled in by that indie gravity which emanates from bands once or twice removed from your normal listening fare; for me, The Postal Service was the hook, with vocals provided by Death Cab’s Ben Gibbard. The audience lapped it up but I listened from the point of view of a semi-interested observer and it didn’t quite gel for me.

Nick Cave, on the other hand, was mental. He is, I think, half consumed by the characters of his songs: he’s a gunslinger, a two-bit whore or a tragic lover as the moment requires. The sound was dreadful—all riot-control bass and buzzsaw treble—and the special effects distinctly not, but the force of his personality was more than enough to carry the night. Excellent stuff.

Squeezed in amongst all that, then, were a few more morsels: I met up with Josh while he was on a flying visit one weekend, ending up in the stylish pomposity of Monteith’s on the Royal Mile under Jez’s guidance; and lastly, Ash & I went along to a quiet, pleasant and very grown up work Christmas bash.

So, the great Glasgow experiment is coming to an end almost exactly a year after it started: we’re looking for a place to rent in Edinburgh and have already found tenants—friends of Ash from her Masters course—to move into our flat in the new year. Last weekend, then, we happened to be in Edinburgh for the Death Cab for Cutie gig on Friday night, and took the opportunity to book a couple of flat viewings for the morning after. I’ve already skived off work to view a few places over the last week or so, and although no one of them was completely right for us, it’s still encouraging that there are so many decent places up for rent.

After viewing the flats on Saturday morning (no dice again, but also nothing startlingly wrong with them), and on our way back to the centre of town, we went in past Jez & Serena’s to drag them out for breakfast. Finding them still in bed (not literally; I mean, we didn’t burst into their flat and storm disapprovingly into their bedroom or anything. It was enough for Serena to tell us as much over the door intercom), Ash and I pottered along to Baroque for some breakfast while they got up.

It was a pleasant little interlude: the day was sunny, the bar was quiet and the food was decent. I leafed through the paper over French toast and coffee, pointing out the stories cataloguing the worst points of capitalism’s ongoing meltdown.

Jez and Serena arrived, and I moaned extensively at them about the dire state of the mortgage market. At this point we hadn’t yet found out if our new tenants were going to bite, and I was somewhat concerned that we could be forced to sell up in order to move to a new place in Edinburgh. “No-one is buying just now, and we could end up paying two mortgages, or just lose a boatload of money on the whole thing. I have no idea what to do. Have you guys been affected by the credit crunch at all?”

Jez reflected on this.

“In my company, they don’t let us take the private jet anymore.”

There was silence, and then laughter.

Callander isn’t exactly at a rarefied Highland latitude, but the towns thin out and the midge clouds thicken up remarkably quickly as Glasgow recedes in the mirrors, and the hotel had the feeling of a country retreat rather than one on the main street of an otherwise busy little town. Waxy & Phil were talking with a knot of beaming guests, so we waved hello and wandered inside for a drink. The hotel manager gathered us up to watch the first dance as we chatted with the Captain in the library and we filed through to the function room.

The next couple of hours shot by until with alarming rapidity we found ourselves in front of the assembled guests. “Waxy, I hope we don’t ruin your wedding,” Charlie said, or words to that effect. “We’re Coba Fynn. Waxy asked us to play—” (Charlie had explained some time previously to Waxy & Phil that Coba Fynn would of course be playing at their wedding) “—so we hope you enjoy yourselves.” He turned to us. “Let’s go.”

And so we did.

It was tremendii. CF original Glasgow Girl got the guests onto the dance floor and some choice covers kept them there, Waxy’s dad joining us on harmonica and wailing vocals for Hoochie-Coochie Man. We played two wedding requests: The Lighthouse Song for Waxy, the song practically playing itself through our intruments; and Phil’s favourite Smoke on the Water. The demanded encore of Crossroads was played at a blistering pace with blistering hands, and when we finished the set after forty-five short minutes I felt a twinge of guilty triumph at having stolen the ceilidh band’s thunder.

We took paper plates of buffet pies and spring rolls outside to cool down for a bit. Doug and I analysed the night’s performance in a chin-stroking fashion.

“Nice work there on the drums, Doug. Although I couldn’t hear myself very well—I thought maybe the bass was a bit low.”

“Really? I could hear you fine. I could feel you in my bones.”

“So long as it was your bones, and not your boner.”

“Obviously not, man. But I will say that if there was to be a sexual connection between any two members of the band…”

“…then it’s going to be the rhythm section, right? That’s what I like to hear.”

Ash laughed at us.

“Oh, it’s cool; we’re just being homoironic.”†

A fantastic night, and a fantastic wedding. Congratulations, Waxy & Phil!

* A month or so back we were pressed into service for Charlie’s boss’ retiral do at Oran Mor in the west end of Glasgow. We set up in the Auditorium under Alasdair Grey’s spectacular mural, soundchecked in the abbreviated time available and then got out of the way as the first guests filed in. Quite firmly uninvited to the meal itself, Doug, Davis and I ate mixed pakora at Charlie’s kitchen table while the dinner guests gorged themselves on wild salmon, truffled asparagus and caviar washed down by 18-year-old single malts and the finest cognac. (Probably, anyway. My speculation may be informed by a touch of jealousy.) We arrived bang on time for our set, waited through an hour of overrunning, back-slapping speeches and were hustled off the stage after only twenty minutes as the function staff started cleaning up at the stroke of 11.30pm.

** At Bannerman’s; intimate is the term, I think, meaning “comprised only of the band’s friends and immediate family.”

† Gauche, non-PC or just lame? I can’t decide.

On Saturday then, my parents came across to help us get started. The tiles were built out from the wall a little, with a dado rail-sort of cap to them, and ran all the way around the bathroom. Ash and I had always wondered why the previous owner had gone so tile-crazy, so it was with a fair bit of trepidation that I watched my Dad chip away at the first few tiles. I don’t really know what I had expected us to find hidden underneath—some scraper-resistant psychedelic wallpaper perhaps, or maybe a bit of water damage.

I could have dealt with either of those. Frankly, I could have dealt with a walled-up corpse if it came to it.

Unfortunately, what we actually found was a portal to a dimension of ultimate horror:

Cthuluhu fhtagn

The first few tiles beside the bath fell away from a plywood sheet damp with rot and black with mould. More prying revealed that the plywood had been screwed directly onto some tongue-and-groove panelling from around about the turn of the last century, with the dado rail nailed on top to conceal what lay beneath. We collectively reeled at the fungous horror spread across the wall.

We attacked the wall across from the bath next. It turns out that the fin de siècle panelling went all the way around the room, and that the matching tiles on every wall were not just the result of a questionable aesthetic decision on the part of the previous owner. Her methodology: hide that nasty, quaint old wood behind a hectare of indestructible ceramic blueness and hope that the suckers viewing the flat* don’t ask too many questions. The joiner who perpetrated this evil—and you have to give him credit for thoroughness—had obtained the largest single piece of plywood he could find, almost the full length of the room, and screwed it into the panelling behind at roughly 8″ intervals in a grid pattern. I’ve seen less robust anvils.

After hacking away at the tiles for hours, bloodying our knuckles trying to divine the location of the next screw, we eventually bought a nail detector from Homebase and marked the n remaining targets with big black crosses. Charlie picked me up at 6pm to head through to Edinburgh for a gig, and I left a disconsolate Ash staring at the destruction.

She called me that night just before the gig: “I’ve got that big bit of wood off,” she said. “I just battered away with the claw hammer to get to each screw.”

I almost wept with joy. My girlfriend is awesome.

* Guess who?

FUCKIN TRAMS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And then another:

Edinburgh does. Not. Need. Fuckin. TRAMS!!!!!!!!!!!!

We arrived after a stormy journey-into-terror drive to Glasgow (wherein we forded the M8) to find Davis alone on stage, idly picking out chords, and the sound guy looking at his watch, unimpressed.

We went on at 8.30 or so to an audience consisting mostly of the other bands, and the Captain. I had memories of the last time we played such a quiet gig, and they were not happy ones. Something this time just clicked, though: the audience, or lack of it, was incidental, and though I was happy that they seemed to enjoy the set it was more about hitting the right note within the band. We played consistently and convincingly, I think, and afterwards a Blim was sufficiently impressed to compare Fox in the Phoenix to the Clash.

The ‘Fynn and the Clash mentioned in the same breath. This is a welcome development.

I stayed to watch El Condor Pasa. Their songs and playing were good, but my God! they were bored. They’d been touring for two whole days and already they looked like they’d rather be looking for tall buildings off which they might reliably end it all. We clapped, they looked stricken. It was an odd show.

* * *

We had another gig on Saturday—a going away party for Emily, one of Charlie’s colleagues and the temporarily resuscitated Average Folk Band‘s squeezebox maestro—but before then we’d booked practice at the benighted Verden Studios. Verden is on the outskirts of Portobello, and squats within a ’70s office block on an otherwise derelict industrial estate. It has a few redeeming features—expansive windows in some of the upper rooms; mismatched but solid gear; mini-bars filled with cans of Irn Bru and bottles of beer—but mostly, it’s a hole. We were assigned a windowless box on the ground floor with litter stuffed behind the soundproofing panels and no ventilation.

And yet we had the best practice ever. We sweated freely and played our hearts out. My perception is too subjective to tell if we were actually good or not, but it felt like we were guitar heroes that day*.

The gig then came around that weekend. We had the stage to ourselves and oodles of time to play with before anyone arrived so we took our time getting our minimal set-up (amps for the guitars, a simple PA for the vocals) just right, then went our separate ways to park cars, get changed, grab some food and the like. Doug and I sat outside with squeaking styrofoam cartons of deep-fried whatever from the local takeaway, blethering aimlessly but engrossingly until everyone was back and the audience began slowly filtering in. Over the next couple of hours our better halves arrived, the Average Folk Band played a few songs, Ruth & Andy turned up with a load of visiting friends, and we finally were on around 10pm.

Christ, it was brilliant.

The Barfly set was still fresh in our minds and I’m pretty sure we played even better than the rehearsal. The crowning achievement was our run through Take Me Over (“that sounded like Nine Inch Nails” said Waxy, on hearing our first performance of it earlier this year), where we turned things up to 11, smashed it out of the stadium and [insert hyperbolic metaphor of choice here] so hard that a little girl ran away across the dance floor, hands clamped over her ears. Rock & roll!

We trotted out a load of radio friendly covers during the second half to get the audience up and dancing. Charlie coaxed a gaggle of giggling nurses to sing backing vocals on Twist and Shout; Andy arrived on the dance floor with a cartwheel inches from Davis’ face, and we finished with a messy, sprawling cover of Crossroads where we tried (and failed, but gloriously so) to channel Clapton, Baker and Bruce through our sweat-dripping instruments.

The silence rang in my ears after the clapping and cheers subsided. Sweat was rolling down my sides under my shirt, and my bass was slick with condensation. What a gig.

* Q10 in Glasgow is similar to Verden in this respect: its rooms are damp-walled caves formed by the arches of a disused railway bridge, with temperamental amplifiers, fungous couches and peeling paint, and still it seems to lift rehearsals a bit above the average.