Eight years later, and I still remember that walk

It was dark, damp November night in 2004. I was 20 years-old and flat broke.

Having just recently been fired from a sales job for spending all my time writing poems and screenplays instead of, y'know, selling stuff, I'd been channelling most of my creative efforts into contributing a couple of articles to a little rag called The LINC.

 Based on the strength of these contributions, I'd been asked to cover what our editor, and many others, saw as one of the hottest gigs to have hit the town in ages.

The Lux, a haunt still somewhat legendary in local music circles, was due at any time to be torn down, along with most of Wigan's cultural history (with the defunct Ritz, host to early gigs by The Bealtes and Rolling Stones, and the site of the former 'Best Disco in the World', Wigan Casino) to make way for some ghastly enterprise known as The Grand Arcade Shopping Centre.

In its final days, it was playing host to an eclectic ensemble of acts including the controversial and antagonistic Selfish C***, The Martini Henry Rifles, local heros Moco and some mental woman in a plaid skirt I'm pretty sure only got the gig because she was sleeping with someone from the headline act.

Would I like to review it? Hell yeah I would!

And so off I went, armed with my last fiver -enough back then to afford ten cigarettes and a pint of larger- and a bunch of enthusiasm, to cover what ultimately turned into a maddening, mental and highly memorable night of live music.

From the moment Steve Jones and lept from The Lux’s tiny stage to lead Moco through their usual spell-binding performance, a heady broth of heat, sweat and beer began to swell in the electric atmosphere; it was clear we were in for something very special that night.

Huddled up in vicinity of the bar, more for personal safety than a desire to quench a thirst without much waiting around, I watched as a small army of rabid-gig goers threw themselves into a debauched night of rock ‘n’ roll with as much gusto as the bands themselves.

We had Dirty Snow, an art-rock group of sorts who did nothing much of anything other than act slightly insane, we had Welsh ear-molesters The Martini Henry Riffles, who’s sound was pretty much the sort of thing you’d imagine WW2 would sound like if both sides shot each other with bad-ass guitars rather than guns, and of course, we had the headliners.

By the time the controversial duo were even half way through their first song, it was obvious this wasn’t something many of us were expecting.

Still huddled towards the bar, still for personal safety more than ever, my mind raced to jot down a series of mental notes as frontman Martin Tomlinson drew the hostility from the otherwise enlivened crowd with a nihilistic, antagonistic performance.

The tempers flared, performance art came very close to it all kicking off , so much so that the venue owner decided to pull the plug on the set and, if memory serves, the bouncers threw the headline act out of the club!

That was the end of that then. Well, for most people anyway.

For me, there was still the small issue of getting home. Carried away in the excitement of the evening, I’d missed the last bus home, and even back then there wasn’t much change left from a fiver once you’d bought cigarettes and alcohol; certainly not enough for a taxi home. There was only one thing for it; I’d have to walk.

And so I did, for just over six miles, mostly uphill, from The Lux back to my house.

It was dark, damp, cold and generally horrible. I was tired, achy and yet, still kind of excited; no matter how much the walk sucked, I stayed strong, telling myself over and over that one day, this will pay off, consider it a sacrifice towards something better.

It may sound somewhat clichéd now, but back then I held firm in the belief that having to endure a bit of a walk home after covering one of the most important local gigs in ages, would pay off, that the universe would somehow reward me for gutting it out and not punish me for being too broke to afford a taxi.

Turns out it did.

After submitting my review of the evening the magazine, a repost of which can now be found on the Wigan Music Reviews Archive blog, I received a call from our then editor to say the team had been impressed with me, needed an extra hand in the office, and would I like a job?

That was 2004, and I’ve been working for that same magazine in some capacity or another ever since. A lot has changed, including myself, and though I’ll be eventually leaving the company come the spring, I’ll always be grateful to that one gig on a cold, damp night one winter, and all the opportunities it’s afforded me since.