Past Amusements

Finding myself in a nostalgic mood, I thought back to days spent in amusement arcades. My hometown only had one, and it was full of fruit machines, one-armed bandits and the like. I had no interest in them. I had to wait for our holidays to Butlins in Ayr for those kind of kicks.

Back in the 1980s, home computers were still rather basic. My faithful old Sinclair +2, with it's massive 128k of memory, brought me many hours of gaming joy, but an arcade offered kicks on a whole new level. In the days of HD gaming with a Playstation and a decent sized TV, it seems like a different world that we had to leave the home to get gaming with full colour and amazing sounds.

As an aside, one time we swapped the joys of Ayr for the Pontins, in Southport. While in the arcade, playing what I remember as a kind of Spy Hunter clone, I was pushed aside by a bigger boy (I was seven) who took my turn. I was found in tears by my cousin, who was nine years older than me and a bit more "handy". Within minutes, I had my turn back and a few extra 20p pieces for my trouble. So, for you, big man, my hero ever since, here are my choice arcade classics on which many a coin was spent.

Out Run

Bloody Sunday drivers!

You see, living in a small town in the back end of nowhere, we didn't have much in the way of glamour. Out Run offered a whole warehouse of it. Drive a Ferrari, with a girl beside you, racing across exotic locations at high speed. What more could I want?

The selling point, I think I can state with authority, was the soundtrack. Talk to someone (OK, a man) of my age and play Magical Sound Shower and you'll see them glaze over.

I remember the first time I played Out Run. It was in Blackpool, on a day trip, and you had to sit in a car shaped cabinet in which my feet just touched the pedals - lucky I was tall for my age. As it happened, I wiped out on the first corner and stormed off in a sulk before my dad told me that didn't mean it was game over. Alas, the wasted seconds did mean it soon was.

Rampage

High rise living ain't too bad. Unless this happens.

So, some bizarre accident turns you into a huge monster. The obvious response is to destroy just about every city in the USA. I'm sure we can all relate to the premise that Rampage brought us.

Playing either a giant ape, lizard or wolf, the mission was to just destroy as much as possible, while avoiding the unwanted attentions of the military, who don't take kindly to your attempts at town planning. 

I'm not sure how "new" it was that you could have three players going at the same time was, but it felt amazing at the time. It meant my moaning brother could join in, though my dad remained constantly useless and would generally skulk off back to the bar area after being defeated early doors. On the plus side, it meant random strangers could join in - nice way to make friends amongst the usual "entertainment" that a holiday at Butlins involved.

Operation Wolf

What this had, which I'd never seen before, was a copy of a Uzi submachine gun attached to the cabinet. You had to aim with this to kill all the mooks that were unfortunate enough to cross your sights, which seemed revolutionary at the time.

Another quiet trip to the shops ruined, then

Needless to say, there was a lot of killing to be done if you were to rescue the hostages that had been taken for a reason I can't remember, if there even was one. All that mattered was that they were there, and about 5000 soldiers needed to be slaughtered to get to them. Not that I ever got to the end. No, I saw this instead:

Shouldn't have had that kebab last night, eh?

At least they were polite about your death. 

City and Country

I recently watched, for what I think was the fourth time, BBC's excellent documentary Synth Britannia, part of which explored the feelings of alienation post-war British town planning could bring -underpasses, tower blocks and endless grey concrete - and how it influenced the music of people like Gary Numan, John Foxx and Cabaret Voltaire.

This brought to mind my recent trip to Preston - I met my bessie mate at their (in)famous bus station, to reach which requires you to walk through this underground walkway that was like stepping back into another world. I have expected we would get assaulted by a gang of droogs. 

Being brought up in a small town in the back end of nowhere, I wasn't aware of these strange pieces of architecture. It wasn't so much grey in Whitehaven - the colour that springs to mind when I think of my hometown in the 1980s would be brown. The largest building in town was the multi-story car park, and the brown bricks used in that were also used for all sorts of things in town.

The car park was a strange building. In my dad's car, we would go from broad daylight to almost total darkness in seconds as you climbed the ramp. To get out, you crossed the bridge and went down this odd narrow circular passageway which always stunk of piss. Thinking now, I've no idea if this part of the structure is still there.

In 2013, the place has changed, for the better. There has been huge amounts of money put into making the harbour look pleasant. 25 years ago, it was a dump, with derelict cranes and two huge silos dominating the area. Tram lines that ran from North to South sides were a sad reminder of the then-recent demise of the last coal mine in town. When the tide was out, you would see shabby little boats sat on the mud and it looked tragic, so to go back today and see a shiny marina that holds a festival every summer... well, it makes going home that little bit nicer.

I live in a city now, but Manchester has also changed a lot in the last 30 years. The horrid Hulme Crescents are long gone and the city centre always seems to have some glass tower being thrown up to replace some old piece of crap from the 1960s - the city that inspired Ian Curtis to write lyrics such as Shadowplay is pretty much gone, bar the odd signifier like the the Mancunian Way.

Despite my love of electro music dealing with the horror of living in the concrete jungle (my current favourite is Underpass by John Foxx), I'm fairly sure having a childhood where 40 odd miles of mountains and lakes just at the end of the road means I couldn't hack the real thing. In the last couple of years, I came to realise that despite nine years living here, I'll never be a city lad: my heart belongs to Cumbria, though I do hope they knock down that bloody car park sometime soon.

Power Games

If, like me, you live in the United Kingdom, you'll be aware that we currently have a bunch of tossers in charge. A load of inept arseholes who couldn't tell you time of day without a full committee investigation first.

Yes, the opposition are doubtless no better. But they're irrelevant for the moment. David Cameron, George Osborne, Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Gove and the rest of the mob are essentially about as welcome as a nasty rash on your penis that develops just before you're set to go on a date you're certain you're going to get a result on (female readers may wish to alter this analogy to fit).

Despite that, it is good to have a bit of a laugh at them now and again. With that, I had a fair old of a chuckle at this short game.

Tally-ho, chaps! Smash the oiks!

Made in the best traditions of Super Mario Bros and Wonderboy, Super Tory Boy allows you to play as either our glorious leader, his financial whiz-kid chum Gideon or the blonde bombshell that the people of London somehow saw fit to elect Mayor, Boris Johnson.

Give it a go - you only use one button, so anyone can have a decent shot. Shut down public services and be sure to crush those unemployed layabouts, all in the name of Britannia! I managed a score of £10,416,087 - anyone do better?

On The North Lancs Streets

Preston is a strange place. I couldn't think of any reason why you'd want to visit unless you were a student there (as I nearly was) or your football team were playing North End. Nothing wrong with the place, I guess, just nothing of interest to be found.

Except, perhaps, a gig by Go-Kart Mozart, one of the very few to support their recent album On The Hot Dog Streets. A chance to see their leader Lawrence in action on stage was not to be sniffed at. 

In somewhat typical fashion, the gig had a last-day venue change. Which I didn't know about until arrival and required a somewhat desperate series of asking total strangers where we had to be. Initially it looked like we'd be late, but in a further misadventure, it was all running late anyways.

Support bands, then. Hot Vestry are a bunch of late teens types from Macclesfield who dress like they want to be in the Paisley Underground and have hair that makes mine look good. They also sounded fairly anonymous to these ears, despite some decent work from the drummer. Not that it matters, as they've already got foots on the ladder of the Manchester music scene via endorsement from Tim Burgess and a support slot with New Order. How did they get the latter? Well, it's always nice to have the right connections.

Next up were the Oreoh!s, which is a name that really needs to go. There's a difficulty in trying to be objective here, as the three of them look like they have a combined age of 40 and you don't want to be too mean to a band who are all young enough to be my children, which is in itself a depressing thought. Their set trundled along harmlessly enough, with nothing of any note to stick in the mind bar the fact the guitarist held his instrument like Bernard Sumner, and even looked like a younger version of the man. Like Hot Vestry, I'd imagine a lot of work has to be done down the line before they'll be headlining any decent sized venues on their own steam. Time is on their side, at least. My own suggestion would be that the singer ditches the bass playing and focuses more on fronting the band.

There are enough words written about Lawrence out there already - some of it due to me. On the night, he isn't happy about the venue change, states the stage lights are too bright and he has a bad cold. Despite the sparse audience, the band put on a great show. It helps to have a guy with a huge assortment of keyboards to produce all manner of sounds, and major kudos has to go out to the man behind them to some top-notch playing. The rhythm section (this version of Go-Kart Mozart is minus guitar) also do their job in solid fashion.

What Lawrence has that very few others have too is that all the songs he has written since 1980 are clearly identifiable as his, whether it be in the style of jangly indie (Felt), stomping glam rock (Denim) or novelty electro-pop (now). It's easy to say the guy deserves a hit, but he's always made even his most "mainstream" music just slightly off-kilter enough so that you won't hear it on radio. West Brom Blues from his most recent album On The Hot Dog Streets is a perfect example.

It can't be said enough that the guy is a total one-off, and worth even a night in Preston and a train journey home surrounded by Man City fans. The "tour" as it is (four gigs in four months) continues in a hometown gig in Birmingham next month, then Oxford in December and Hebden Bridge (work that one out) in January.