Open Mic Shite: Point Blank Fuck Off – a guest story by Kriddy T.
It was me.
I went to a grotty little boozer in South Croydon, and teed off my set with a track from Half Man Half Biscuit’s début, the song was ‘Fuckin’ Hell It’s Fred Titmuss’. The locals were lapping it up, much to the dismay of my fellow musicians who were waiting their turn, a couple from Prague who were on a weekend break to South Croydon even bought me a cup of beer as well as complimenting me on my choice of song, however they said they would have preferred ‘99% of Gargoyle’s look like Bob Todd’ but that was nit-picking and anything from the HMHB back catalogue would have been, and I quote, “shit hot”.
“Cheers, Croydon. Lovely to be back…” I said as I chimed the last chord (D7).
I then burst into ‘One Step Beyond’, complete with me peacocking and jumping around, getting right up into peoples’ faces and knocking pints of lager everywhere. The song finished with me ducking as a foaming glass of Fosters (read piss) came whooshing over my barnet and exploding all over the pool table, fists started flying and a small burly but amiable bloke with severe eczema around the mouth came running from behind the bar.
“Oi oi! We’ll have none of that in our pub, now mind ya fucking language and keep playing sunshine” said the working class chap who owned the pub.
By no means was I going to calm the baying angry mob who I’d just antagonized into a frenzy.
“Any requests?” I smirked, as I tuned my shitty little Argos guitar up. I purposely dragged it out, this took well over five minutes to do, as I wound my rusty old guitar up, I read a passage from the Qu’ran, don’t ask me what part cos I’ve not got a fucking clue to be honest wiv ya.
“Get on with it you ‘orrible little mug!” said a small Jewish child who was out with her family for a few pints of Strongbow.
“Right then…” I mumbled as I downed the last drop from the pint of milk I had on-stage.
I was thoroughly tuned and ready to play. I laid out a frantic and crazed rendition of ‘Le Freak’, with most of the song featuring me in my pants kicking the fake wooden partition walls in till my monkey boots snapped like a Kit Kat. It went down a storm, a bloody great tropical storm that is, a bloody great storm that involves lots of civilian deaths and mass property damage, culminating with a bloody awful pop single to raise money for the poor bastards, yeah, one of those storms. The angry flatcap-sporting proletariat filth were now in pure infatuation and sheer awe of my performing skills. A few chaps at the front became so delirious with excitement that they were carted away to the hospital, and I do mean carted away, a wheelbarrow was fetched from the cellar by a blind racist geordie fellow by the name of Iain who insisted, often with force (largely verbal), that his name was to be pronounced “E-AAIIIIN!”, if you were to call him “E-UN”, he’d (try to) thump you.
I tried to lull the heated, hostile crowd, even pretending to be one of those violent black rappers you see on the telly.
“S’bout time we wind this shit down. Y’all need to chill the fuck out, ya feel me?”
By now the crowd were spilling out onto the streets, forming streams into the back roads, every vantage point had been seized in the whole of South Croydon, twitter was ablaze as people sent frenetic messages to one another from their tiny illiterate brains “OI @BAZSEXY1978 DIS MAN IN DA PUB IZ WELL GUD, CUM INNIT”, stuff like that I imagine.
“I, just took a ride! IN A SILVER MACHINE…!”, I screamed, the audience singing to every word, a large mosh pit spawned from the front making its way all the way to back of the pub and people became enraptured with sheer delight, my delight, angel delight.
As crowd-surfers knocked down the light fittings and the blazer wearing old men shouted the words to the Hawkwind classic, ‘Silver Machine’, I threw my guitar down in fit of pure spiritual incandescent rage.
“Goodbye Croydon. Goodbye.”
Dan Taylor 