Beasley Street

Blues play West Ham tomorrow. Their owners used to be our owners. It would have been nice to welcome them back with all the hospitality for whichthye  St Andrews crowd is justly famed for, but it won't happen, not to David Gold. He has been banned. This is hilarious. He and Sully disrespected  Yeung et al, all through the changeover process, and probably also stitched them up like kippers. Having trousered the money, Gold wanted to stay on, but he was told to go forth and multiply. He made some rather rude comments in one of the papers this week and has now been banned from the ground. We are a class act and no mistake.

As for the game, everyone is confidently expecting us to win comfortably, on the grounds that West Ham are even worse than the Villa. They are ignoring the immutable law……." The Bastards Will Always Let You Down". Get your money on a West Ham victory.

There was a decent article in the Guardian this morning on the best football documentaries. The Graham Taylor one gets a mention, as it should because it is brilliant. I was pleased to see  a mention for 'Six Days to Saturday" a 1963 documentary all about Swindon Town. It is really good in itself, but is an absolutely fascinating piece of history. Players walk to the ground, they live in terraced houses,  and Ernie Hunt supplements his income cutting his team mates hair. Yes. That Ernie Hunt.  If you get a chance to see it, you should.

There was also an article by John Harris, bemoaning the lack of a counter to the coalition in the arts. Hang on John, son, it's only been 6 fucking months. Give the artists time to sharpen their pencils. I'm sure there is plenty of stuff out there, in the pubs and the little places, he should probably get out a bit more. A more pertinent point is that protest music is usually shit. Billy Bragg is shit. I prefer Charles Bragg. Crass were shit. John Cooper Clarke was brilliant, but he looked at  desolation rather than politics. The best political band we have had is Gang of Four, and they were hardly a laugh a minute.

In literature, the best protest writer this nation has seen in many a year is James Kelman, and look what happened when he won the Booker. The poor fucker was lucky he didn't get strung from a lamp post for his working class temerity. Crime is the best source of radical literature, and crime emanating from Glasgow, and Edinburg, and, to a lesser extent Dublin, is the best of a very good bunch. It does not call for revolution, but it examines the minutiae of wrecked communities and people and psyches in way that you won't see in the mainstream. It's there though, if you care to look for it.

Never mind all that. I am listening to Elliot Brood, again. What a band. Even listening in a warm kitchen on a miserable, black winters night, as soon as I hear the first chord, I am back in a tent, in a field, in Dorset, going apeshit, with a few hundred other old bastards, all grinning from ear to ear.