retiredmartin

May 2024. Kelham. Sheffield.

I’ve got my Tidal playing via my Sonos into my SBLs again, none of which makes sense to me but it does mean I get to hear angsty twenty-three year old American women berating boyfriends, so life is good.

But nothing beats live music, and a £40 Get Together ticket bought me a day’s worth of (female-led) new music in Kelham Island’s bars on Saturday.

CMAT headlines, again. You know CMAT by now, surely ?

The best thing to come from Dublin since Taytos, CMAT’s brilliant last record singularly set out the case for Vincent Kompany to leave Burnley for Bayern Munich (worse pubs but better schnitzel, I guess).

I never actually got to see CMAT, but she’ll be at End of the Road in the summer, and at every other UK festival apart from Glyndebourne.

Get Together may be her smallest gig this year, and there was no chance of getting in to the Peddler Market and I was knackered by 7 anyway. Standing up for 6 hours, with a few steps every hour between acts, takes it out of you as you approach middle age.

So, just a reminder that Kelham Island has great character, from the antiques rooms and tea shop chic of Yellow Arch,

to the East London styled chic of Neepsend Social Club, where the women seemed to home in on Easy Rider on cask,

(we’ll excuse the vertical queue for the bar, just this once),

to the brewery converted to bar and music room of Alder, home to a Left Handed Giant takeover,

where Mickey Nomimono’s punk poetry included a “unique” version of the Dead Kennedy’s “Too Drunk To ****“.

Beer from Purity and Stone and Cloudawater amongst the local staff. I had three NBSS +/- pints of cask between £4 and £5, all decent but suffering from what we experts call “plastic cup syndrome“. Has anyone ever done any scientific research on how glass improves the taste of beer.

Discovery of the Day – Liz Lawrence, the best thing to come out of Stratford-on-Avon since (checks notes) the Flowers IPA delivery van in the 1990s, I guess.

Yes, nothing beats live music. Unless you’re and Old Codger trying to listen while Millennials stand around, back to the music, chatting loudly about nothing. I see this a lot; folk who go to gigs for the Facebook post and the beer, oblivious to anyone else’s wish to listen. It’s why I go to End of the Road.

Anyway, STFU (Sheffield Thirty-something Festival Unabletokeepquiets).