Back in 2003 I had an affair with a
girl from Manchester which went quite predictably and quite
disastrously wrong. I ended up going back to Shrewsbury with a broken
heart and my tail placed pretty firmly between my legs. The scars
from the relationship, as they tend to do, healed up with time. I
found myself getting over the girl, but my love for the city of
Manchester stayed unabashed and undimmed. Usually, during this time
in my life I would get over a break up by getting myself as drunk as
possible but I found this wasn’t quite the ticket.
This was my busy music period. I was
attending as many gigs as humanly possible. If there wasn’t a show
to go to, I would catch the train, as painful as it was, back to
Manchester and spend a day record shopping. I used to enjoy a post
shop drink in Dry bar, but one day descended the stairs to the toilet
to witness two huge men passing over (and I've ransacked my memory of
this but it always gives the same results) a yellow balloon full of
what I can only imagine to be cocaine. After that (a most
embarrassing encounter, they were clearly waiting for me to finish my
business but the shock of seeing my first ever proper drug deal had
left my penis unable to piss) the port of call for a post record
shop drink was next door at the Night and Day café. I fell in love
with the place a couple of years previous, during a hopelessly
romantic and stupidly and pretentiously dim poetic stage. When I
walked in the girl behind the bar wore a stripy top, peddle pushers
and ballet shoes. She looked like something from a Kerouac novel, and
I found myself quite smitten with the place.
I found myself going there more and
more. It's great place to sit and think, the perfect point of
communication (or lack of) for a heat broken berk from Shropshire. It
was at this time that that things got a little weird between the café
and I. I had found a 7” single in the bargain bin in Vinyl Exchange
which I had, in truth, only bought because I liked the sleeve. It was
a black and white shot of girl framed by a circle. She had a perfect
fringe and white tights with arrows drawn on in thick marker pointing
down. It was sexy; a bit sixties, a bit mod. The record was One
Evening by Feist. The A side was really good, an organ led half
pissed on wine ditty to new and unexpected love (which as you can
imagine was quite the tonic) but the B-side was better, a piano led
woozy ballad called Lovers Spit, a song about relationships being a
curse, which as you can imagine suited me even better. It's about now
that strangeness kicks in. I strutted into Night and Day with the 7”
in a cute little plastic bag to find Feist playing over the PA.
Strange, I thought as I ordered my cup of tea. But this would go on
happening. Over the next few trips I found (and I swear I'm not
making this up) which ever record I bought would be playing when I
walked into Night and Day. This happened maybe four or five times
until it got to the point where I was almost expecting it. This is
where things turn really strange.
I had finished my record shop at Vinyl
Revival and walked out to head to Night and Day fully expecting to
here my purchases played when I got there. As exited the door, there
was two teenagers, a girl and a boy, looking at the stock in the shop
window. The girl had caught sight of something exciting, possibly the
mugs and yelled at her friend with great animation 'Hey! Joe!' whilst
pointing at whatever took her fancy. Of course my mental jukebox
started playing Hey Joe by Jimi Hendrix. I took the minute walk to
Night and Day and, mind blowingly, the said tune was belting out of
the speakers. Spooky, no? I tried to rationalise all this. Told
myself that the people behind the bar at N&D probably picked up
the same bargains at nearby Vinyl Exchange, but then I thought about
the amount of people shuffling the thousands upon thousands of cards
in the CD racks and thought no. I read somewhere that it would be,
statistically speaking, odder not to hear the tune you were humming
come on the radio seconds later than to hear it. But five times on
the spin? Was my insomnia making my brain make weird connections?
A few months later, after playing her
debut LP to death, I found out Feist was doing a gig at the Night and
Day. I took this as some sort of sign and booked myself a ticket. I'm
not sure what I was expecting. The heavens to open and some sort of
light to pour down on me through the Manchester sky. To meet the love
of my life maybe? I don't know, but I was expecting something. As it
turned out, the gig was uneventful. So uneventful that I can't find
any record of it even taking place. There's nothing on the internet,
but it happened. I was there. So were maybe thirty other people and
place seemed sadly empty for such a great performance. She was
brilliant (as was her band), a total star. Speaking in French between
songs and belting out her songs like her life depended on it. She
even wore the outfit she donned on the 7” sleeve. The support that
night was a young lad called Sam Hammond and he was brilliant too. He
was a good looking lad with a strong jaw of wispy beard and dressed
(almost certainly by Pop Boutique) like an old blues man. He looked
like he travelled with nothing but a small suitcase and a guitar and
sang like someone who had lived a thousand lives. His songs were
peppered with Dylan, but with an urban coffee shop twist. I thought
his set was brilliant. I went home, though slightly disappointed that
Dionysus didn't appear or anything, happy; trying to put such daft
thoughts about coincidence and fate out of my head.
A couple of months after that, I went
to a gig a lot closer (ten minutes from my house in fact) to home at
the Buttermarket in Shrewsbury. It was by a Manchester band called
Longview who had released a few singles on the 14th Floor
label that had bothered the indie charts a bit. I usually, or at
least did, get to gigs nice and early but being so close to my house
I had left pretty late and when I climbed the steps to the hall the
lights were already out signifying the support had started, I made my
way through the dark the the bar when I heard a familiar voice
singing. “I'm just a pawwwwn in her gaaayme'. It was Sam Hammond.
He played another blinder, though weirdly to few more people than the
Feist gig and had gone down well. I saw him at the bar after his set
and bought him a pint. Told him I thought his said was great and how
weird it was that I saw him randomly a few weeks back and even
weirder here. He gave it the old 'Oh thanks man' with that slow head
nod pop stars do when they are being flattered. 'So what music to you
like?' he asked. I told him I was stuck on a song called Dark of my
Moon. 'They Gene Clark song!' he shouted suddenly animated, spilling
his Guinness over his suit 'I bloody love that song!'. He wrote down
the chords for me, we shook hands. He most likely went his way, and I
went mine.
I hadn't thought about any of this, the
N&D coincidence, the Feist gig or any of it for well over a
decade. There was a post recently, a pretty funny meme, on twitter
about Bob Dylan that had gone 'viral'. The poster was someone called
Sam Hammond. Was it the same guy? It was, of course, and the memories
came flooding back. I tried to find Sam's CD, unplayed for a good
twelve years, but searching the house high and low couldn’t find
it. I tried searching Ebay to buy another copy but found that I
couldn't remember the title. I half remembered it being named after
the date it was recorded. And there it was. Sam Hammond. 171203. It
was cut exactly four years before the death of my father. Spooky, no?
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