IT WAS a rum sort of night I spent supping with Alberre in Hell’s Waiting Room recently.
There was live music a-plenty but also a fair bit of friction too.
As someone who has done performance poetry in London, I can see now that musicians can be just as bitchy about each other’s abilities as are poets.
Regular Waiting Room minstrel Rocky Geetar was joined by a group of musicians of a more, shall we say, restrained style of playing.
They all rubbed along all right at first, but tetchiness soon crept in as the folky-type musicians (the new arrivals that night) felt Rocky Geetar was taking up too much of the available performance time.

What’s supposed to happen is that the musicians take it in turns to perform, or they jam together.
The trouble is Rocky can be a bit of a maverick with whom it is not always easy to jam. He can change his dynamic (i.e. singing and playing guitar very loud then very soft) in great sudden surges, which can be disconcerting.
Apparently his choice of chords and timing can also be eccentric on occasions.
All of that was clearly displeasing to the folky musicians who had come into the Waiting Room on this particular night. They wanted to play everything nice and gentle.
Some of the folky lot, including Gezza, were relatively tolerant about Rocky’s mischief-making and guitar duelling, but others were decidedly sniffy about his antics.
There wasn’t a kick-off as such, but as the pints and tantrums melodrama unfolded, Alberre and I watched with wry amusement.
It reminded me of the era when I was a performance poet in the pubs of East London and trendy Hoxton and Shoreditch.
All the poets on that circuit absolutely hated each other’s work – and they never bothered to hide their feelings. It is clearly much the same, sometimes, with Wallasey’s musicians.
One local musician, however, who always manages to fit in with everybody else, however crazily / drunkenly their playing might be, is the harmonica man, Lofty.
His counter-melodies waft in and out of all the songs quite magically, no-matter who is supposed to be leading the performance.
Now, I do like more or less all the live music in the Waiting Room, though some of it is not of the highest quality.
For instance, I am thoroughly sick of hearing “In My Liverpool Home� sung by people who are not Scousers at all but Wirral Woollybacks.
Come to think, I’m sick of hearing “In My Liverpool Home� no matter who sings it. Ditto that miserable dirge “Hey Jude�. Double ditto John Lennon’s execrable “Imagine�.
As I say though, the Waiting Room’s live music scene is interesting to listen to, and it is even more entertaining to watch the faces of the musicians as they display, by turn, contempt, pity and amusement for those they consider to be their lesser talented comrades.

SO anyway, I hope that Mandy Mobiles’ mood has improved. It probably has because since last I saw her, her beloved Blues have battered Liverpool in the local derby.
However, when I did bump into her a week ago she was still simmering over an incident during which her temper got the better of her in an argument with her boyfriend Viktor.
It was a row that had been going on all day...
It happened on the weekend that Viktor’s mam and dad were due to visit Mandy’s house in Liscard.
Early in the day, Mandy had some extra work to do and she tried to explain that to her boyfriend. He didn’t want to listen as he was watching telly. So he told her to “shut up�. Big mistake.
Mandy didn’t react straight away. She even went out for a meal with Viktor that night and was her normal, cheerful, sunny self. Almost.
Within her, however, an explosion of rage was developing over the insult that had been directed at her earlier in the day by Viktor.
How dare he tell her to shut up just because his attention had been given to something as superficial as television.
In a spectacular way, she restarted the day’s argument when she and Viktor retired upstairs for the night.
The verbals hadn’t been going for very long when Mandy made her point most dramatically about the unimportance of telly compared to real human relationships.
She walked over to the bedroom window, opened it, then quick as a flash she grabbed the telly and DVD rig and threw both of them out of the first floor window. They landed with a satisfying crash on the cold, hard pavement.
So there you are. Doubtless we have all been tempted to chuck the telly out of the window from time to time.
The difference with Mandy is … she went ahead and did it.

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