MATT'S JOURNAL: 27/08/22
We returned to what’s left of Leicester to play at The Obnoxious Council Worker, a new venue for us. Throughout the soundcheck, the speakers crackled with every chord, the vocal mic cut in and out and the bass drum skin split straight down the middle. It was easily the best PA we’d ever played through.
Once complete, we had 6-8 hours to kill before we were on stage, so decided to venture outside in search of sustenance. I wandered the crumbling streets of the city, with Tom at my side; trying to persuade me to cover something from a Chinese opera, and Rich somewhere behind, the chains about his person rattling with each step; a habit the undead always seem to have.
“Hi guys, can I just take a second of your time?”
We heard him before we saw him, his words flushing my entire being with a sickly sense of unease. My eyes darted about, but it was not long before I saw him emerge from behind a stack of disused Electrolux vacuum cleaners. His polo shirt, though faded and dirty was still bright red in colour, and his smile that spoke of sickening enthusiasm, one born of mania, but still failing to mask the desperation he exuded.
I had read about these. Salesmen were individuals who hunted down the polite, and made their prey feel so uncomfortable that they had no choice but to purchase what they were pitching to escape the clutches of conversation. The economy may be just a memory these days, but salesmen live on, and know no other life outside of their profession. So they keep on selling, even when they’ve nothing to sell.
Luckily, I had trained for this. I focused all of my Britishness, every shred of awkwardness my ancestors had felt, and spoke.
“Not today, thank you”.
“Sorry guys, I know your busy, but I really won’t take up much of your time”.
It hadn’t stopped him, I was dumbstruck. He was walking alongside us now. I turned to Tom, and then Rich, but they looked back at me with expressions that mirrored the panic I was feeling. I had used the ace up my sleeve and it had failed. Now he was talking about how his carrier pigeons were two hundred grams lighter than those of his competitors, but the words were washing over me. I was out of ideas, but if I didn’t think of something soon, we’d end up somehow trading Rich in for a pigeon coop.
Tom blurted out that we preferred chunkier pigeons as they made for a better meal once their working days were over. It was a good effort, but he had an answer for that too; he’d loan us a mallard for the first three months that we could eat if it didn’t meet expectations. Discombobulated by all this talk of birds, we stumbled into a nearby alleyway, with our new friend still in hot pursuit. In this dead end, filled with piles of rubbish, I began thinking of how we were going to explain to tonight’s soundman that he now had to mic up a pigeon coop, when the piles of rubbish began to rustle. More of them; different coloured polo shirts, but same manic grin, began emerging.
There was talk of a charity dedicated to saving tuberculosis, a sex insurance company and a nuclear-powered VHS amongst a wall of fervent chatter, but our new friend did not share in this enthusiasm; for the first time since we’d met him, his smile had vanished and had been replaced by a grimace of indignation. He stepped in front of us, arms stretched wide, and stood glaring at his approaching kinsmen, who had also begun to show a more serious demeanour (one of them even hissed, I think). It then dawned on us, that these salesmen were going to fight over us.
As the alley echoed with the war cries of these hustlers, we took the initiative and bolted, all but forgotten about in the brawl that had erupted. We ran, the primal cries of pain and fury growing distant, all the way back to the venue. By comparison to these prior events, our adrenaline-fuelled set was a welcome respite; some liked it, most were confused, so a fairly standard Doomsday Sun experience by all accounts. We never did get to dine in Leicester that evening, but ironically enough, we hit a pigeon on the way home, so did get our meal before the day was done.