Tired Old Towns

‘Will you tell that bitch to serve me?’

I was standing at the bar of an Oasis-themed night spot in Bolton, watching an Italian Oasis tribute band.

As a jobbing musician in Greater Manchester, it’s tough to escape Oasis.

My guitarist and I were due on after them to play indie covers deep into the night.

I could only half-hear the man—he was shorter than me but stockier, balder, and obviously at that early stage of drunkenness that makes people slightly manic and edgy.

‘That bitch’ was a young barmaid who looked about 18.

I told him he was welcome to tell her himself.

In my job, drunken men are pretty par for the course, and I ran out of patience with them around 2018.

‘That bitch’ behind the bar, I found out later, was actually his teenage daughter.

After a few minutes, he returned.

‘So what do you do then, mate?’ he asked.

It was a painful conversation.

The band was loud, meaning he had to lean in to shout into my ear.

Eventually, irritated by my lack of engagement, he said:

‘So what—do you think you’re hard or something?’

‘No—I just can’t hear you—I’m trying to watch the band.’

‘I’m making an effort here, pal, and you’re being a prick.’

Finally, I lost patience.

‘Look, mate: I just don’t want to talk to you. I don’t know who you are, I can’t hear you, and I’m trying to watch the band. There’s no reason for us to have a conversation.’

‘Alright, no worries,’ he said, and shook my hand.

CCTV footage shows him disappear outside for a while.

When the camera catches him coming back in—a good five minutes later—he chats to his wife and his daughter's boyfriend for a moment.

You can almost see the decisive moment in the camera footage—it’s like someone flicks a switch in his brain.

He puts down his pint of lager, walks over to where I’m standing, and hits me twice from behind in the back of the head.

As I turn in bewilderment, he hits me twice more, this time in the face.

I go down, and he jumps on top of me and wraps his arm around my neck.

I’m relying on what I saw on the CCTV feed because I have no memory of it whatsoever.

One moment I’m watching an Italian man sing ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’ and the next I’m being helped back to my feet and my shirt is covered in blood.

My face was iced up in the kitchen at the back of the bar and, after half an hour or so, I drove myself to the hospital, getting lost twice along the five-mile journey and struggling to navigate the car park.

Thankfully, I escaped relatively unscathed.

One deep cut above my top lip that has since become a very minor scar, a comically swollen face, some whiplash, and a week of canceled gigs.

Not to mention the bruised ego.

Though, of course, it could have been far worse.

I’m telling you all this because I’m about to release this new song, ‘Tired Old Town,’ and I’m having conflicting feelings about it.

I grew up in Bolton and have always been close by.

I left for university, but terms were short and I was always back for the summer.

I spent a couple of years after that teaching English in China, and then moved out to South Manchester, but family, friends, and a lot of gigs take me back there almost every week.

In case you’ve never been: if Manchester is the middle of a clock, Bolton is a sizeable town that sits at about 11 p.m.

Just like the city it orbits, it was at the heart of the Industrial Revolution and, some 150 years ago, was a terraced latticework of coal-fired chimneys, factories, and enormous textile mills.

Now, like all such places, it struggles to know itself.

Manufacturing having left Britain around 1970, those textile mills have become apartment blocks, storage spaces, or have simply been left to rot.

The town center is an eerie place during the day, haunted by waifs and strays.

The precincts are closing down, and every street seems to be the same sequence of takeaways and vape shops.

It only comes alive on Saturday nights—even Fridays are quiet now—for a weekly pageant of binge-drinking, coke-snorting, and, as I recently found out, petty violence.

I guess I was feeling these things fairly acutely when I wrote the song.

There’s also a long tradition of ‘get me out of this small town’ songs that I’m pretty well-steeped in.

Some of my all-time favorites have written them: Jason Isbell, Paul Simon, and—the king of that sub-genre—Bruce Springsteen.

Recently, though, I’ve started to have second thoughts about my depiction of Bolton in the song.

I suppose, much like people, places are multi-faceted.

And, living with someone—or somewhere—for 30 years is going to result in some complex, conflicted feelings.

My song is five fairly bleak verses about smoking, drinking, shop closures, falling leaves, and dying grandparents.

But, of course, there’s more to the place than that.

I still turn its corners and see things I’ve never noticed before.

And my relationship with it changes almost constantly.

Sometimes I’m wearied by the knee-jerk cynicism, the piss-taking and put-downs, the same people in the same bars every weekend, saying the same things.

Other times, this strikes me as exactly what we all need a bit more of.

An antidote to pretension, a dose of reality, people who actually care about each other and where they’re from.

A meme recently did the rounds on the internet that went:

‘I just arrived at Bolton train station and ordered an oat milk latte. The lady behind the counter said “we don’t do that sort of thing here.”’

On any given day, this could embody either everything I love or can’t stand about the place.

I took a videographer into town last weekend to film some ‘content’ (my least favorite word) and was reminded of exactly that.

We set out to shoot some glimpses of the ‘tired old town,’ but Bolton was typically unhelpful.

Hoping for some grey footage of crumbling buildings and graffiti, instead, it served up golden sunshine.

Two old ladies stopped us outside a tree-lined vicarage and asked me to sing them a Neil Diamond song.

Morning drinkers outside a pub in town chatted and laughed with us while we filmed, offering to head inside and grab us water.

Kids played cricket in Queen’s Park, and a man named Ansaar invited us into his kebab house to film and tried to feed us for free.

As the day wore on, I began to feel increasingly guilty.

I suppose songs are like snapshots—polaroid pictures of the state of mind you were in when you wrote them.

Maybe if I were to write it again now, it’d come out of the darkroom a little less tired and old.

A little warmer, a little greener, with a little more honest charm.

Then again, I’m sure a lot of those bitter feelings of mine are still only a punch in the face away.

The song goes live across streaming platforms on Tuesday (May 28th).

Until then…

Keep dreaming,

Rob