
A rainy evening, staring through misted windows on a train crossing the Tay Bridge. A bridge from the mundane to fantasy, memory, illusion, dreams? Some combination of all of these? Or just from Dundee to Wormit?
Actually, it was a train from Dundee to London to pick up an award for Outstanding Beatles Tribute Band. We were somewhat surprised to receive this honour as we don’t do Beatles songs. We do however have a song called Something’s Eating Geoffrey, which is about a beetle and I can only assume that that was good enough to convince the judges, who are far too busy with other stuff to actually listen to people pretending to be the Beatles. Besides. our awards cabinet in the front room of guitarist Dee Sharpe’s granny’s house in Broughty Ferry is a bit bare and photographs of the award suggested it would look nice there next to her 1998 runners up trophy from the Barnhill Bowling Club.
And so we found ourselves on that train going over that bridge, Dee and myself staring out the window deep in thought while bassist Juan Tusrifor hummed an old Andean melody too quietly to make out the tune and our notoriously agoraphobic drummer Kit Bashir softly beat out a rhythm from inside a large suitcase we had somehow jammed into the overhead luggage rack.
From one of the pillars of the ill fated previous bridge a seal slid gracefully into the water, making barely a ripple.