Ooooooooooooor willie

We flew to Scotland last month for a weekend of rural treat and retreats. As you might imagine, it was a very salubrious couple of days involving country walks, kippage, scran and many bevs. However, we did find time to squeeze in a bacon and black pudding butty so that knocked a few points off the smug, worthy weekend-ometer'...

The beaches

Balearic tartan vibes

Isn't it delightful? 

Coast to coast

Mushies

Do not touch them. DO NOT TOUCH THEM. 

Kinky boots

In da creepy woods

Watch out for the Baba Gook... 

A big feathery cock

One in the gob

We're gluttons in our gaff and and had the pleasure of noshing on this the other night. What is it I hear you cry? Pork, roast potatoes, macaroni cheese and a cheese toastie on the side. Delicious...

72 hours in South Yorks

Returning to South Yorks is always jokes but our recent jaunt up the backbone of the country to Sheffield was a total stonker. Our journey was made to take part in the 49th and penultimate ever night of Kabal but while the night itself was total class, the rest of our frolics were equally as vibes-filled. 

We landed on the Friday lunchtime after a very beige, scran-filled train ride. We mooched around the city centre before meeting our Air BnB host, the laconic and possibly stoned Nathan. He was a very unenthusiastic individual who turned up on Sunday morning to kick us out on a hoverboard. None of us had had much sleep so we took it in turns to try and mount/fall off his board while baiting him for not raving as hard as we had at Kabal the previous night (we found him lurking in the shadows of the club). 

Our first evening in South Yorks involved drinking pints at normal prices (fuck you London) and eating some poncy sushi before heading home for a bluetooth speaker boogie in the kitchen. 

Saturday was more jokes, consisting of a trip to the countryside to search for magic mushrooms. Turns out the hills above Sheffield are stuffed with millions of different strains of the wee blighters but only a handful have the hallucinogenic properties we were after. As a result, our afternoon was spent staring at the ground looking for the type of 'fun guys' which possess a 'nipple'and 'bruise blue'. After finding about 12 we retired to a local boozer where a medieval re-enactment event was taking place. Serious. Weird vibes a plenty. 

Kabal itself was a winner - the Night Kitchen is a sprawling network of studios and rooms with vibes going on across every area. Downstairs was amazing, featuring throbbing electronics from the likes of Dino Thompson and Scott Monkz while up stairs was full of aural darkness, bass and jungle. Serocee brought the dancehall noise before Toddla delivered a load of hype among the jingles. It was Pipes and Winston Hazel who saw us through to the close with maximum beggaring on our part. We went home for a few more morning cans, then hit the hay briefly before getting up and spitting ourselves out into the nearest boozer. Here were the scenes of some great unraveling until it was home time. Well done Sheffield - that was a winner...   

Woody's classic

The king of gelato house

Yummo

Foraging

The hills, the hills, the hills... 

Fields and that

Ken Kesey has found one! 

The best thing to ever happen ever in the history of the world ever

Chaos crew in full effect

Drinking with the beavers

As we all know, beer is a deeply delicious drop and arrives in our gobs in a multitude of forms and flavours. While we could always enjoy any fizzy tipple which loosely arrives under the banner of 'beer', the Beavertown brewery in Tottenham Hale has come up with a particularly magical and strong drinkable voodoo.

We went up there the other week to sample its wares and lo it's a pretty peculiar vibe. You get to a deserted industrial estate in the fag end of Tottenham to be confronted by a load of beer snobs in a yard outside a brewery. The place was fucking ram-jammed, mainly with trendy beardy blokes sipping, quaffing and making notes on their brews. Disappointingly there was a very low quota of the weird, older ale drinkers, the ones who enjoy Discworld, wearing socks and sandals and tucking their fleeces into their shorts. But this new breed of craft ale supper are no less rude, snooty or sneery as their older counterparts.

While the sausage fest of bad vibes went on around us, we chose to try and drink as many of the Gamma Ray and Neck Oil bevs as possible in the five hour opening window that the tap room allowed. The cans are only 330ml but it's probably a good job as these bevs pack a pretty potent punch which sends you fucking mental. It shut at 8pm and we went over to the Hen and Chickens in Highbury to try and watch the rugby but by that time it was too late. Total memory loss, vom and no recollection of getting home. Classic and proof that you can sometimes have too much of a very, very, very good thing... we'll be returning...

The beer of kings...

The damage

Champagne or gelato?

The last few months have been such a vibe that we've barely had time to stop and take a moment for it to sink in. Here are some of the big and bouncy bits...

Greenpeace bear

Essential reading

Sarma Beyti - note inclusion of sarma

#butt

#cunt

Ru Paul is a wise, wise, wise queen

Our ends

Our disgusting dirty bath

Mouth vibes

Hairy

Standard Thursday night in the Marquis - eight pints of this

skat scene

Those you encounter when drinking in Hackney

Nob eyes

6 things we learned in Marseille

Bonjour tout le monde is about as far as my French vocabulary goes so when we journeyed to Marseille at the end of September there were plenty of conversational hiccups to chomp on. But despite my inability to do even basic tasks, we still managed to have a whale of a time drinking rose by the gallon and stuffing our gobs with mussels and chips at every opportunity. We even got a bit of culture, got lost in the mountains and swam in the sea. 

Here's what we learned from our stay in Marseille... 

You can get extremely sunburnt in September. I failed to apply any lotions to the top half of my adonis-like body. Hence a deep, deep, deep frying and waking up the following day in agony feeling like a battered mars bar. The belly became very swollen and there was fear that I'd cooked my large intestine... 

French crabs are well tasty. We went to this joint called Toinou where you have to eat crab using a pair of pliers and all your strength. We even had a whelk.

The French have their own Super Kebab. Unbelievably we stumbled across the Super Kebab, which even more unbelievably has a fried egg in it. Yes mate.

The French love cheese toasties. Even better than the kebabs is just how much the French are into beige croque monsieurs. We ate one every time we saw them. Which was twice. 

They have cannons which resemble massive bifters. We found this cannon in the Musee bit of Marseille on the coastline. It looked like a massive, metal zoot. 

The French love cats. We found this book in one of the Air Bnbs. Essential holiday reading if you're a feline fan.

The Andrew Weatherall Weekender... Carcassone wins...

Counts, wine, bats, knights, crusades; these are the stuff of which dreams of castles in the south of France are made. 

Carcassone is one such city, a fortress so striking the French poet Gustave Nadaud wrote a verse describing the place as one a man dreamed of seeing but couldn't physically see before he died. If the Andrew Weatherall Weekender continues to call Carcassone home, the Wikipedia entry might need some tweaking to include 'amazing, chugging rave space where you can royally lose your shit in a medieval manner'.

While the annals of history may show it it to have been attacked by warriors armed with steel, the only metal laid down over the last weekend was in the dance, a double header featuring four sets from Weathers, two as the eclectric Music Is Not For Everyone, a further pair as A Love From Outer Space and The Asphodells.

While the musical offering was always going to be second to none, the pre-match bants promised a somelier and a Michelin-starred chef, meaning one could be forgiven for thinking this rave would be well gourmet mate. But the reality was far more gnarly. Plus, no amount of words prepare you for the castle. You walk up the hill through a night of bats, wander over the bridge, through a tunnel and are suddenly surrounded by shops flogging tat and crafts, plus shitloadssssss of foodie places pushing foie gras and snails. But all set in stone to give it an authentic, historical vibe. You can even buy a plastic suit of armour and stage your own battle. But the only fight going on during our jaunt was in the guts of the fortress, between the beats and our lost minds on the dancefloor.

Some marbles were well and truly gone. Sterling Roswell, formerly of Spaceman 3 and the owner of a fine pair of silver boots, played an ace distorted set of psyche country while one old gent gurned at his feet. We thought this grey haired champ was French but he turned out, like many of the clientele, to be from the North West of England. Big up. Another girl was so spannered she tried to get one of the old fella's mates to wheel her around the dusty dancefloor like a wheel barrow. But it all added up to immense shits and giggles. We got down to Crimes of the Future playing a live John Carpenter tribute, then messrs Johnston and Weatherall took the whole place to the outer reaches of the cosmos with three blissful hours of electronic thump.

The second evening started out a slightly more muted affair with hangovers certainly on sight but the ace Parisian's Vox Pop stuck a synthesised blue touch paper under the dancefloor, inspiring the crowd to get their motorik grooves out. Then it was the turn of the Asphodells to wreck the joint, with Timothy J Fairplay and Weatherall knocking it out of the park with a set sodden with sleaze and low slung electronic swagger. We got shit faced and I ate 'magic mushrooms' (which resembled a twig) from a French man who may or may not have been Eric Cantona. Somehow we woke up in our Air Bnb without any memory of walking back. Maybe these two incidents were related? The day after we dejectedly sloped off to the airport to get Ryanair's Andrew Weatherall Express flight back with half the festival and all the DJs... Carcassone - you smashed it m8. Tres bon. See you in 2016...

We're taking this castle hostage with our cans

Carcassone at dusk

The tree

Down the front

In the heart of the rave

The castle