Features

This selection from my portfolio includes two band interviews, a piece written on the road with Newcastle’s ice hockey team, and a feature on the Tall Ships Race which appeared on the cover of Livewire magazine in 2005.

I’ve written a wide range of interview features with actors, authors, musicians, sports stars, comedians, one gangster and one magician. My other feature work includes inter-county club crawls, blind dates, alternative medicine and interior design, amongst other things…

“We were in the middle of a fully-fledged riot, and we’d started it…”

Neil Burch of Texas’ …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead conclusively proves to David John Watton that he’s the most rock ‘n’ roll man on the planet.

FORTY-SEVEN WORDS into the interview, and things are starting to get really interesting. I’m talking to Neil Burch, deadpan bassist and sample wizard of Texas’ ultimate rock ‘n’ roll outlaws, … And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, a band who from their name onwards deal only in extremes.
It’s 10.45 in the morning, highlights from my scrawled question sheet include: “Would you like to die onstage?”, “What’s better – comedy or tragedy?” and “What’s your favourite mortal sin?”. Even at this mild hour of the day, I don’t know which one of us is slurring more. And all I wanted to know was if the Columbia Hotel (and Trail Of Dead themselves) were living up the their reputations as twin bastions of rock ‘n’ roll babylon.
“Actually, it’s lived up to its name,” says Neil with the remarkable talent of a man who speaks only in pullout quotes. “I think someone OD’d last night on one of the floors.”
And was that in any way attributable to yourselves?
“No, I was definitely not involved,” he says. I’m not at all convinced. “We were downstairs drinking because the bar opens late and I see these two girls and a couple of guys come in, get a bottle of champagne and several glasses and then disappear upstairs.
And an hour or so later, I see the same two girls tiptoeing down the stairs with their shows in their hand, just quickly getting out, and there’s all these flashing lights, police, ambulance outside, and I’m like, ‘Man, I think someone’s turning blue upstairs’. So we go back to the bar, have a few more drinks and eventually the story filters through that, sure enough, someone had shot a little too much of something in his arm and apparently had stopped breathing for a full three minutes. But he’s alright now.”

AND WE’RE OFF. When Bill Hicks said that he wanted his rock ‘n’ roll heroes to stand onstage with a blood bubble coming out of their nose, he could easily have been talking directly about Trail Of Dead. Since smashing out of the Austin indie-punk underground in 1998 with their furious, sophisticated and intense self-titled debut album, their unwavering commitment to (a) alcohol, and (b) musical abandon has seen them gain a level of notoriety afforded to very few bands in this distinctly limp rock ‘n’ roll age.
Musically, if you draw a line from Jerry Lee Lewis through the MC5, The Ramones, Sonic Youth, Mogwai and the dearly lamented At The Drive-In, their name stands proud at the end as torch-bearers of truly dangerous music.
For the media, they’re a dream come true or walking disaster machine, depending on your belief. Just last month they were thrown out of an XFM session for disrupting a board meeting in the building with their sonic attack, and they’re generally regarded as the best value interviewees in music. For example, who else would answer a question like ‘Other than music, what are your interests?’ with ‘fishing, hunting, kite-collecting, knitting, gardening, the study of mediaeval weaponry, heraldry, calligraphy, masturbation, destruction of socio-economic boundaries, croquet, elocution, long division…’ Or, ‘What are your philosophies?’ with ‘Nuke ‘em all. Let God sort ‘em out’?
Their peers treat them with respect, if not downright fear: Stuart Braithwaite from Mogwai’s advice for surviving the Leeds 2001 festival was “Avoid Trail Of Dead at all costs, otherwise they’ll pin us down and pour vodka down our throats.” And their live shows…

“WE’VE ALL BEEN injured pretty badly,” says Neil when I ask him of Trail Of Dead have ever come close to fulfilling the prophecy of their name at a gig. “I think the most recent incident when we actually feared for our lives was when we did a tour of Brazil, and it was the last gig of the tour in a place called Sau Carlos.
And we finished playing and kind of threw some stuff at each other – not extreme by any standard that we’ve set in the past, y’know, we didn’t go farther than we’ve ever gone before, it pretty much a normal end of tour thing. And it inspired something in the crowd and… they went nuts. They started fighting with the security, picking up the monitor ledges in the front and throwing them at the security guards, and of course we envisaged this sort of Altamont scenario with the security and the crowd fighting and eventually someone gets seriously hurt.
So they’re fighting, and you could hear this sort of ‘chunk, chunk, chunk’, and we were like, ‘What is that?’ and they were kicking at the supports of the stage, sort of a makeshift stage on wooden supports that was five or six feet tall, and the whole thing was just rocking, I thought the whole thing would come down. For a few minutes there, I mean, we all felt for the first time I think that we were in the middle of a fully-fledged riot, and we’d started it, and y’know, we might not make it out it good health.”
By this point my rock geiger counter has gone off the scale. Would there be a certain Trail Of Dead poetry in being killed by your own audience?
“Yeah!” Jesus, these guys just became my favourite band. “If you go out and try to incite people to some sort of emotion, some sort of action and they end up just usurping you and killing you… I think that would be a fitting end, actually.”

TRAIL OF DEAD’S third album Source, Tags and Codes is released this month, and is everything you and I want it to be: angry, polarised, widescreen, measured; a snarling summation of the punk rock spirit 25 years on. If Fidel Castro mocked the Manic Street Preachers for not being ‘louder than war’, he should try these boys.
And if El Presidente really wants to see the music-as-war equation in its purest form, there’s few better situations than Trail Of Dead in the flesh. Seeing as their live shows regularly see full-on fights with the audience, instruments sacrificed or given away to delirious fans and wholesale destruction of venues, I’d really like to know what the dream Trail Of Dead gig would be. (I’m guessing the words ‘MTV’ and ‘Unplugged’ won’t feature too strongly in the following answer.)
Oh, let’s see,” says Neil, warming to the theme. “Maybe we’d be at Buckingham Palace, and there’d be a huge bonfire in the centre of the courtyard, and it’d be filled with 12 and 13 year-olds that were sort of roasting the Queen over a spit in the middle of the bonfire, and at the end of the gig when she was well done, they’d eat her flesh.”
Incredibly, the very next question on my sheet is ‘Who is your favourite English monarch?’
“Which one tastes the best?”

(Published: The North Guide, March 2002)

Face Off!

After years of false starts, the Newcastle Vipers look like rekindling the North East’s love affair with ice hockey. David John Watton went head-to-head with the meanest dudes on two skates…

IT’S MY FIRST ever ice hockey game, and I’m absolutely terrified. My sole previous experiences of the sport being the legendary Nintendo title Blades of Steel and the 1977 Paul Newman movie Slapshot, I and my fellow hockey virgin are unsettled enough by the signs warning “KEEP ALERT! The puck may leave the ice during play!” to choose a vantage point well away from the action for Newcastle Vipers versus Edinburgh Capitals, in the unrecognisable Telewest Arena.
This proves wise, as within a minute of the game beginning, one 200lb Canadian slams another into the ring fencing with such force, a discussion is prompted on whether the marks staining the surrounding boards are actually somebody else’s blood.
By the third and final period however, our confidence rises enough to take up a ringside seat for the end of the thrilling match, two rows and no more than ten years from the heat of the action. From here, you get the full impact of what we’re fast discovering to be an incredible game: the pace, sounds, innate visual beauty and undercurrent of sheer aggression in live ice hockey is, quite honestly, breathtaking.
And then something magical happens. With the score poised at 3-1 to stylish Newcastle, a long-running niggle between the Capitals’ lanky Czech defenceman Jan Krajicek and the Vipers’ own bad boy Rob Trumbley spills over into a full-blown, toe-to-toe, gloves-off brawl. The game officials stand back and let them get on with it. The Telewest Arena, transformed perfectly into an all-American hockey rink for the night, goes wild. And we stand aghast, then exhilarated: this is exactly what we’ve been waiting for the whole game, only we didn’t know it yet. This, as the PA announcer stated at the game’s start, is no-hold’s Viper hockey.

IT’S A FEW hours before my second ever ice hockey game, and I’m still absolutely terrified.
Rob Trumbley, the dark star of the previous match is sitting a few seats down the plush team coach with the brilliant Finnish forward Mikko Koivonuro; them, me and the 14 other Newcastle ice warriors are travelling up to Edinburgh for the return leg of Sunday’s game. The eventual 5-1 win over the Capitals, ensuring the Vipers’ qualification for the Findus Cup finals has rendered tonight’s result obsolete, but this doesn’t mean Newcastle will be going down without a fight.
The players – half fully professional Canadian and Finnish imports, half enthusiastic local talents – are a friendly and fun bunch, but what’s making my feeble nine-and-a-half stone frame shift uneasily in its seat is the choice of pre-match entertainment: a compilation video of Newcastle fights from years gone, set to a thumping trance soundtrack with animated cheers from players and coaches alike as we go.
I enquire as to the identity of one wild-eyed bruiser who features on the video even more than Trumbley, the enfant terrible of the current squad. Karl Culley, one of the young geordies in the Vipers team who swapped football for hockey aged 14 after playing one game and falling completely for the sport, shakes his head. “That’s Louis Bedard,” he informs me. “Psycho.”

THE RECENT HISTORY of ice hockey in this region is much more turbulent than any Louis Bedard brawl. Ten years ago, Durham Wasps completed an unprecedented feat in British hockey with a grand slam of all three major trophies – together, the Wasps, the Whitley Warriors, Sunderland Chiefs and Cleveland Bombers drew up to 12,000 fans every weekend, a hockey hotbed that was the envy of the nation.
Then financial idealism in the shape of NUFC bankroller Sir John Hall gatecrashed the party. By 1995, Hall had bought up the Wasps and moved them to Crowtree Leisure Centre whilst a rival franchise, Durham City Wasps sprung up in the Land of the Prince Bishops. By 1996, the original Wasps had been renamed the Newcastle Cobras and relocated to the Telewest Arena to play in the inaugural British Superleague – of which Hall was chairman. This moved ousted the Whitley Warriors from their home, and what many believed was their rightful place in the top flight.
This was only the start of the drama. Hall abandoned his idea of a united Newcastle sporting family in time for the 1998-1999 season leaving the league itself to rescue the franchise, which then became the Newcastle Riverkings. This tenuous arrangement lasted two seasons. A Finnish club named Jokerit Helsinki took over ownership and management of the club – now the Newcastle Jesters – in 2000 but pulled out a year later, leaving not only Newcastle without a team until the start of this season but the Whitley Warriors reeling and Durham, such a superpower for over half a century, without any hockey at all.
So this season is truly a fresh dawn. The new franchise, owned by speedway magnate Darryl Illingworth play in the Findus British National League (one rung below the Superleague) and is managed by a icon of the British game, Alex Dampier. A Canadian who crossed the water in 1978, Dampier became the most successful coach of our national team in its history and first experienced Newcastle with the ill-fated Riverkings. Now, along with his coach Clyde Tuyl, he has been set the task of building a team from scratch that can ignite the passion for hockey in Newcastle after the difficulties of the last few years.
And early indications are very good. Players like Koivunoro, veteran defender Andre Malo and netminder Pasi Raitonen bring sheer quality to the team, local lads like Culley and the highly-rated Stephen Wallace offer a vision of an exciting North East spine of the future, and in Rob Trumbley, they have a one-man entertainment machine.

WHEN ASKED ABOUT the team’s ambitions for the season, Dampier’s assertion that they’ll “probably win the league” is clearly tongue-in-cheek, but this season could certainly be a memorable one for Newcastle hockey fans.
Although the Edinburgh trip wasn’t a great success (cons: the Capitals won 3-0; pros: your writer didn’t get killed by Rob Trumbley), the Vipers still have home advantage for the Findus Cup Finals – their first time in that stage of the competition – and it’s true to say that everything that’s good about the franchise starts with the Telewest. It’s the best-appointed venue in the league; production values (Canadian announcer, Aerosmith and Springsteen blaring out during breaks in play, Mark Knopfler’s Why Aye Man every time a goal is scored) are superb, and the sport is welcoming for all. Kids no bigger than hockey sticks and old ladies all regularly attend matches, adding to the genuine, unforced family atmosphere.
As a die-hard devotee of the pigskin game I never thought I’d find myself falling for another sport, but ice hockey – with its relentless speed, thrilling grace and yeah, great violence – is a game that’s easy to fall in love with. No-hold’s barred Viper hockey? As long as they stay well behind those barriers, it gets my vote every time.

(Published: The North Guide, November 2002)