Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing

This club has provided me with some of my bestest nights out this year so I'm more than honoured to have been asked to lend my DJ 'skills', such as they are, to their final party of 2008. Not only is it their last blowout of the year, it's the last ever of Helen of Troy in its current incarnation. Sob! So if you've been promising yourself a trip down there, NOW is the time to do it.

BUT, all is not lost, Marie-Claire and Lyndsey will be putting on more Helens with additional style and flair in mysterious new incarnations in the New Year. Eyes and ears peeled! Not to mention the fantastic Helen blog, fast becoming THE touchpoint for all things witty and wonderful in new women's music.



So, for the last time this year head down to Charlie's and feast your ears on decade-spanning music from the great and good of women in rock, dance, pop, indie, electro, r 'n' b and everything in between. You're spoiled this time too, not only will the resident girls be womanning the decks but Thom 'The Bomb' Docking and Caroline Topham are also taking a turn, plus my own 90 minute set of danceable divas, slick noise terror, platinum cheese, forgotten classics and one-hit misses. See you there.

Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing
Charlie's nightclub, Harter St, off Princess St
Manchester M1
10 pm till 4 am
£4 in, £3 with flyer or NUS

The Novel and The Birthday Party

I'm occasionally ‘stumped’ by writing. Getting stumped is worse than writer's block because you can make the words go where you want them to and do what you need them to do, but you can't quite imagine that they will make a scrap of sense to another soul. I sit and eat French fig jam from the jar (Confiture Bonne Maman Figues - c'est magnifque) and wonder how to make these unreal people, who appear just by typing, do and say things plausible enough that someone might want to read about them. All this in full knowledge of the contradiction that, if anyone's life is set down on paper in similar terms, it might defy logic too. Frustration sets in. More jam. Someone once said, ‘Write the kind of book you want to read.’ It’s sounds obvious and simple enough, but it’s a tricky idea once you start writing. Nevertheless it will be my maxim from now on. Let's hope I can recall what kind of book I like to read having deprived myself of fiction for so long ...

Neil turns 31 meaning we have a precious few months where he is 31 but I am still 30 and can behave outrageously to emphasise my relative youth. I might start smoking again. Not. Optimistically anticipating sunshine, it being the middle of July and all, we begin mid-afternoon at the Horse and Jockey on Chorlton Green. I think I miss Chorlton a little bit. I lived there for over four years and commuted back and forth from there a long while after when Neil lived there. I spent a good deal of my early Chorlton days in the Horse and Jockey. We would go there to avoid the rent man and spend almost as much on beer once we were ensconsed in there. We'd go there when the house was too cold, when we were bored, tired of work, when it was sunny, when we wanted chips from next door...you get the idea. It's nice to be back.

In glorious attendance are Paddy, Sarah & Jono with wee beautiful baby George, Ben, Katy, Matthew, Marie, Anna, Kirsty, Keith, Amy, Thom, Evelyn, Ed, Kate, Pete, Martin, G3 and perhaps even some people I've forgotten. The weather is mostly shit but we have a brilliant laugh. The plan is that if we're still upright at 10 we'll head to Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing at Charlie's. We're mostly plastered by about 7 so things don't look promising but alcohol eats up the intervening hours in that way that it has and before I know it we're on the dancefloor in Charlie's, Vogueing (cringe), wigging out to 'Push It' and generally being sweaty and fabulous. Stuart and Jack join us, as do Caroline and her friend, fresh from an apparently amazing Kylie gig. Do we get some Kylie played in honour? I can't remember. I meet lovely Lyndsey the joint head honcho of Helen of Troy. We have a brilliant time but afterwards are sad to learn that Helen and Charlie are to part and a new venue is to be found. Watch this space.

Soundtrack:
Appalling amounts of Shed Seven. I can't help myself. God I had some brilliant nights going to see that band. I wish I could say I was tempering this with something really cool and obscure but no, I'm watching Wet Wet Wet, Huey Lewis and the News and Go West on yutube every chance I get. I don't know what's the matter with me. I'll call it research as I'm trying to compile a list of my favourite ever music videos. Don't look at me like that, I could lie on these things you know. I'll be back in the bosom of Ed Harcourt and Elliott Smith soon, where I belong.

Saturday night and Sunday morning, 14th – 15th June

My sister’s ace mate Michelle up from London for the weekend so Saturday evening sees us bar-hopping up Oxford Road. Gorgeous sunny evening so it’s outside Kro 2 to begin where I natter about the wedding and Michelle tells us about her sister who used to be a kitten-heeled dolly-bird and is now marrying an Australian farmer for a life of outback dust and toilet spiders. Love eh? In attendance besides us are James (Emma’s boyf), Joffrey, Stuart, Dean and Christine, who I haven’t seen for ages since they moved north to the ‘burbs (Swinton), and Kate and Pete, fresh from seeing Rufus Wainwright, Devo and others in Barcelona. Extremely jealous.

Kate has been simply bursting to tell me an amazing anecdote and when she does my jaw hits the floor. She’s an extra in the new Ken Loach movie, Looking For Eric, which is being filmed around Manchester. It’s apparently the brainchild of Eric Cantona himself who is both starring in the film and co-producing it. Obviously Kate’s a dear dear friend of ‘Kenny’ by now but has yet to see the bearded French beauty himself, but she will. The whole thing is so surreal and brilliant. Filming in Chorlton and Old Trafford, a cast of local stand-up comedians, Eric holed up in The Lowry learning to jive, apparently, and all this directed by the man responsible for Cathy Come Home, Poor Cow, Up the Junction, Kes for Christ’s sake! He’s 71, can you believe it? The film is apparently about football fandom, rather than a biopic of Eric himself as was originally reported. It will probably be the first and last football movie I ever sit through. Coming Summer 2009.

A stiff(er) drink is in order so it’s down to The Deaf Institute to hog a large table and proceed in earnest to get langered. Great music from the Chips night upstairs (oh the memories, and lack of, from Chips With Everything at Night and Day, wherein I had officially my greatest ever Manchester night out, maybe I’ll blog it one day …) and generally a great bar I’ve decided with beautiful people, us included natch. At some point we decide we want somewhere with even nicer wallpaper so we pinball up the road to Odder and manage against all odds (ha!) to get seats there too. This suits us, especially as we’ve realised that amongst us there is only one person still in their twenties. I won’t tell you who, it would just mean far too much to her. How decrepit we must seem!

Still, we’re not dead yet so I persuade the hordes they MUST dance and we head to Charlie’s for Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing (named after a Margaret Atwood poem), my second girl-music night in as many weeks. I love any excuse to go to Charlie’s, it’s kitsch, pokey, brilliant and allegedly owned by Triads. The remit of the night is dead simple: good music from any genre or decade, so long as it’s by women and it’s bloody good, so we have The Breeders, Madonna, Ting Tings, Elastica, Gossip, and possibly CSS and L7 too (or did I dream it? My brain was fairly starched by this point …) The place isn’t heaving but the crowd are lovely (my new friend Sian is here, hello!) and the dancefloor rarely empties. No bar queues either! Lots of lovely girls, gay and straight, plus boys of course. Us lot were the best dancers though. Fact. Back to mine afterwards for the usual late night dredging of youtube for craptacular pop nonsense and eventually zzzzzzz …

(Almost forgot! I did not smoke a single cigarette the entire evening. Am quietly very proud of myself. I long for a life without cigarettes after being an on-off smoker for longer than I care to admit).

Sunday is SUNNY so it’s shades and shorts and up the road to Sackville Park for chilled picnic loveliness with Kirsty, Keith, Amy, Thom, Sian and the monkey. Yummy hangover grub plus fruity cider to take the edge off last night’s boozy ghosts. The park itself is pretty quiet (intermittent clouds keep the hardcore sunbathers at home) but any chance of peace is utterly destroyed by the four hour line-dancing fiesta outside The Rembrandt, courtesy of Manchester Prairie Dogs. God love ‘em, me and Joff were moved to tears watching them one year at Pride (loooong weekend) but trilogies of shrill Irish folk music, pounding handbag travesties and sequence dancing to ‘Vogue’ on a Sunday afternoon? Police!

A few rounds of Truth or Dare on the picnic blanket reveal us to be a bunch of thieves, drunks, vandals and sexual deviants, which pleases me no end. I top up my holiday tan and end up slightly tipsy in the sunshine which is very nearly my favourite thing in the world. Kirsty introduces us to the delights of peanut butter pancakes from Wong Wong’s bakery. SO good. We have those for tea and the weekend draws to a close. I go to sleep feeling pretty lucky to have all these great people in my life, and the monkey most of all. (And Manchester too).

Soundtrack:
OutKast – Aquemini (need to get entire back catalogue pronto)
Pop Levi – The Return to Form Black Magick Party (totally T-Rex, am especially hooked on ‘Skip Ghetto’ still, Pop keeps a little Marc in his heart …)