Far Out Experiences: An Irish disaster and the sad realities of press trip journalism
Last January, amid the interminable slew of junk in my email inbox, an all-inclusive trip to Dublin suddenly appeared. The offer was to go and watch one of the finest bands around as part of a St. Patrick’s Day celebration. The enticing email sat between a press release from a band claiming to be the next ‘Dodgy’ and the results of a study into the most popular houseplants that someone thought I, as a music journalist, should know about. I raced through the copy, looking for the catch. All I had to do was show up and write something nondescript about the gig. What could possibly be easier? No towering opus or tedious interview transcription, just one measly piece, a fraction of the daily word count I churn through in the office. I signed up.
The only slight hitch was that the one flight per day from my local airport in Newcastle meant that I missed the planned whisky tasting. Not to worry, I would travel down to Leeds to catch an earlier flight because I hate being late, especially for whisky—horrid, bitter, throat-burning bloody whisky. I peeled myself off the mattress at 4:30am and began on my merry way. As I stood by the revolving door of Leeds airport, looking skyward at the plane that I was meant to be on disappearing behind ominous clouds, I took stock of my tragic position and began the long, arduous task of questioning the whisky-tasting virtues that had led me to this hill.
Watching the plane that you were meant to be on unapologetically rise into the distance is an experience that only those who have suffered through it can empathise with. The climb into altitude is achingly slow. It reminded me of accidentally releasing a complimentary TGI Friday helium balloon as a child—watching it slip into the stratosphere while contemplating my doomed mortality. There is a permanence to that loss that can’t be comprehended unless it plays out like a tragedy before you. The plane, like the balloon, was never coming back. I had missed it. I had let a great gift slip through my sorry – and now very cold – fingers.
The events had played out rather mundanely up until about 15 minutes before this horrible existential awakening. I had made it to Leeds half an hour before intended. I mulled about the airport, repeatedly listening to the band’s new single, unsure of what I was trying to glean from this but feeling a slight obligation to do so as I wondered how on earth this trip could prove to be a cost-effective promotion for the conglomerate behind it. Irked and stressed by this, I decided to get a coffee and embrace the first major windfall of my fledgling career. I joined the check-in queue nice and early. Dublin, Belfast and Alicante were mixed in. It didn’t move much. Then, it started to stretch out behind me. It quickly became the longest line of people enquiring with their other halves whether they’d remembered to set Hollyoaks to record that had ever assembled.
The stress was mounting even more now. Other passengers were bickering, saying things like, “Well, I gave it to you last”. I was on my own. If I had forgotten something, I only had myself to blame. The clock was now ticking at increasing speed, gobbling up vital seconds like a particularly hungry Pac-Man. I made it to the front. Thanks to the pandemic laying waste to the workings of transport, I was not ecstatic to be heading off to Dublin to soak in the culture on someone else’s cash, but simply relieved that the PR paying for it would, indeed, have their piece.
There was a problem scanning my boarding pass. Suddenly that relief felt like how I imagined it would be for the nurse at the VD clinic to approach you with a beaming smile only to deliver bad news. “This man will take you to the desk to print off a physical boarding card,” I was told. Happily, I followed him. I told the helpful folks there the situation, and they printed me a pass. Once more, I was marched to the front, where the kind gentleman scanned my boarding card, let me through, and then over his shoulder said, “Enjoy your trip to Belfast”. I wasn’t going to Belfast.
Commotion unfurled. It was pure pandemonium, at least in my troubled mind anyway. Most of the staff were actually pretty unmoved and apathetic about this potential press trip cataclysm. I raced back to the desk. Questions were asked. Faces looked unforgiving. The vibes were all wrong. It seemed like a situation that was not getting sorted as thunderous clicks masked a lack of action on the computers that the clerks were gormlessly gawking at. I’ve seen enough football to know that their faces were that of a manager watching their side 4-0 down after a bad run of form, knowing that they can’t turn this calamity around. “I’m afraid it’s too late to get back into the Dublin system, sir,” came the sorry words. “But you’ll have to. This is for business,” I said, feeling as though that was a lie even though drinking whisky and having a post-punk knees-up was technically business on this occasion.
Needless to say, it couldn’t be resolved. To this day, I don’t know how they managed to print off a Belfast boarding pass for a man who wasn’t even on a Belfast flight. To me, that even sounds illegal—at the very least, it is surely a safety risk. All of these, however, were questions for another time. I needed air. I needed to be away from the fellow in the hi-vis jacket, slowly plotting his forthcoming insinuation that this was somehow my fault. At any moment, I would stop silently waggling my Belfast boarding pass confusingly and pointing at my ‘What happens in Dublin stays in Dublin’ T-shirt as though I was about to cry—tears of imagined Guinness set to roll down my flushed cheek and streek my four-leaf clover facepaint.
I sat outside the now-empty terminal. A lonely passenger left behind like a single glove that slipped out of a pocket in the depths of the bleakest mid-winter. My maniacally twisted face was like a Picasso in turmoil. And I wondered, “Did the radical pioneers of Gonzo journalism ever feel like this?” Did Tom Wolfe ever endure a crippling LSD slump as he sat in the departure lounge of some crumby regional airport looking up at the sad-faced goon from an unnamed airline company who had utterly Chernobyled his morning itinerary with all the grace and decorum of Gemma Collins on ice? When Wolfe approached this hi-vis-ed halfwit, did he too marvel with fascination about whether he was, in fact, Dr Frankenstein’s first draft, steadfast to scupper the best-laid plans of humanity as vengeance for the inflictions of his daft-minded creator? Did he wonder whether this fiasco would only worsen as folks from PR companies scurried to “sort things out”?
Did Wolfe ever utter to a passing face, “I only wanted to ask who the band wrote ‘I Love You’ for as some romantic quest for my old gal,” and feel the cathartic mix of his mission returning and a second later see the slight glimmer of hope diminish under an odd premonition of doom that the question would remain unanswered? Aside from all of the specifics, I’d say yes. He probably did. For now, for me, Manchester beckons. If I can get there, the kind PR folks reckon they can get me on another flight. I can. Manchester’s winking eye could represent an amusing anecdote at a pre-gig Dublin dinner with all the other invited journos, or its extended hand could be the shake of another atrocity and send more woe my way. Such is the life of a Gonzo journalist on the road to nowhere, wondering what the fuck he could possibly write to be worth this.
The night before the trip, a blazing row with a loved one had flung my relationship into a perilous balance. I had intended to spend my time waiting in Dublin airport for the planned lift making reparations. As it happened, I barely had time to check my phone. Now, I receive a message saying that Kylie, her dad’s lizard, had died, and he slung it in the bin before collection. In my haste, I only have time to reply: “Kylie is in heaven now, and by heaven, I mean Hepburn recycling plant.” I didn’t need this stress on top of everything else. Thus, I make my way across Leeds with the disposition of a blizzard over desert sands. A bus to the centre of town, then a solid jog to the train station, and I should be on my way with maybe two seconds to spare.
As my hairline visibly recedes like a landslide you see on the news played in rewind, I come to the sudden and none-too-comforting realisation that all of this is worsened immensely by the fucking Yorkshire accent. Friendly enough, when things are rosy, I basked in it all morning as old folks in Sketchers talked of sunbathing with a cardigan on in the blistering 16-degree early-spring sun of Benidorm. It was lilting and lyrical back then. Now, however, in times of high crisis, they sound like damp-brained dullards whose batteries are slowly running out. I become aware that I have turned horrible. Nevertheless, I trundle towards Leeds train station on a bus that seems to stop more often than a bin waggon. The rain splatters my window as though God is pissing himself laughing at the plight of a wandering sinner, and all seems daft in this too-big world with too many marching ticks of a clock that murders seconds with merciless speed and efficiency.
Feeling like a man running down an upwards escalator, I look up at the grey sky once more to see if that damn plane is still lurching unapologetically off the ground. I’ve seen day-old balloons get off the floor faster than that passport-teasing, phallic, budget bastard. Chasing my tail towards a Dublin oblivion, I disembark the bus and quickly get into the prancing stride of the world’s campest sprinting hipster. My days as a lung-busting box-to-box midfielder now seem as distant as Laika, the dog the Russians blasted into space, never to return. I arrive at the station, and my ticket won’t load. A foreign man stands before me in front of the nearest high-vis authority. He explains he must get to an airport so he can return to Bucharest. The high-visibility man is barely listening, and his face gives the impression that he thinks the accented fellow wants to drink port and book a rest.
He scans him through, and I dart through the opening along with him. I make it to the train. I listen to the calming sounds of the Silver Jews’ classic masterpiece Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea as I venture towards Manchester. The stress subsides. The PR people seem determined to get me there. They empathise with my morning plight and say things like “So sorry”, “ah mate”, and “we’ll do everything we can”. I feel a sense of pride at this. I arrive at the airport once more with plenty of time to spare. I go straight to the desk for a physical boarding card. I won’t be undone by technical problems this time. The good old trusty paper is thrust into my clammy hand. I read Dublin over and over, checking that the lettering doesn’t bare any resemblance to Dubrovnik or some other funny business.
I join the check-in queue. I have made it. My manic and horrible morning of rows, dead lizards, dropped bollocks, and train station sprints will surely be the talk of the day over in Dublin. Christ, my biggest worry now is that the anecdote is such a rib-tickler that it will unfairly detract from the gig itself. And then it happens, over the tannoy, like the voice of Satan himself, a message from the folks at Manchester airport apologising for the queue delays. For two hours, I achingly trudged forwards like a slug over sandpaper. Everyone slowly becoming a bastard, my girlfriend’s relationship with the dead and discarded lizard steadily becoming more cherished, and the impending article gradually gaining epic Panorama importance.
My bag is flagged by security. Why? Once again, I shall never know. The man swabbing it goes about his business as though he has found a way to exist outside of time. It seems he has a tantric approach to the task at hand. Other passengers are screaming at him. They are making it worse, and I try to telepathically communicate to them that my plight is appalling, having already missed one flight from Leeds this morning and that if only they were as enlightened as me, they would hush and pray. This evil, slothful swabber clearly absorbs hate through osmosis and only grows stronger like the latest goon Good Morning Britain has hired to upset the nation over porridge for a year before they inevitably take the bait, push it too far, and get the axe. With each yell, his movements grow even more painstaking, and he smiles the shit-eating smile of a saboteur’s success as the latest tannoy apology rings out.
I check my watch. The plane is due to leave in three minutes. How could this happen to me, little old me, who only a few weeks ago signed up to give a monthly donation to a sanctuary for donkeys with sciatica? I start to leap into the air. I’m not sure why; it is simple involuntary biology. It seems akin to the fact that people about to die from freezing hypothermia inexplicably strip their clothes off. The gentleman next to me notices my distress. I tell him I am about to miss my second flight that day for very important, almost top secret, classified business. I wonder if I will ever write again. Then this saint informs me that if I have checked in, I’ll be on the flight list, so they shouldn’t leave without me. This knowledgeable frequent flyer is my hero, a plainclothes saviour.
The swabber now approaches with my bag, achingly slowly, as though it is in the hands of an arcade grabber claw, and my prize could succumb to further folly at any minute. He makes it unscathed. I sprint towards the terminus, briefly catching the eye of Ross McWhirter, but I’m travelling too quickly for him even to verify my speed. I can see the plane. This time, it is gloriously, miraculously, still parked on the tarmac. Dublin, here I come. My masterpiece is inbound. I once more involuntarily leap, this time in celebration. A jettison of euphoria induces a spasm in the limbs. This is a feeling that, evidently, only Marco Tardelli can empathise with.
“Are you Mr Taylor,” they ask. “I am indeed,” I say with beaming pride. Has someone informed them about my pressing and important artistic business? I wonder to myself. “I’m afraid you’ve been removed from the flight list. You can’t get on. It’s about to take off”. And Arguments and protests instantly left my body before those futile suitors even emerged. The world has clearly conspired not to allow me on that plane – that plane right there, tangibly within grasp. I could practically piss on the windscreen -literally, I hadn’t used the toilet since 4am.
The staff summon a bus. A bus for one to trundle me away from the gates. I am the lone passenger on the bus, with a single staff member to accompany me. I tell her how I have already missed a flight in another city today, I explain that I think my girlfriend may have left me, and I tell her that my career is pretty much over. I believe she sympathised. I arrive back where I started, the same tannoy apology reverberating on a loop. I grab my phone to relay the bad news to the PR people. It is out of battery. I rummage through my rucksack. My charger has fallen out during my sprint to the gate. I trudge off to buy another. I can assure you that all of this is, tragically, true.
It is now a dark and rainy evening. I am 16 hours of travelling into my day in an airport, a mere two-hour drive from where I rolled out of bed an eternity ago. I am beyond self-pity and in a state of comatose self-loathing. I feel like a man on death row for a crime he didn’t commit but resigned to the knowledge that he somehow deserved it anyway. Even the fact I haven’t eaten is subsumed by this new malaise of torpid inertia. Who do I know in Manchester?
Fellow Far Out writer Joe Taysom is my knight in shining armour. He agrees to meet me in a pub. I get the train into Manchester city centre and pop the pub into uber. A car miraculously arrives. As the city lights fade like stars into the blue sky in the rearview mirror, it dawns on me that there might be more than one Nags Head in Manchester. I am, indeed, heading to the wrong one. It’s just one of those days, I suppose.
When I eventually arrive, I am once again surprised by Joe’s deceptive height. This is a good pub, and I love a good pub, but never before has one seemed so soothing. We unpack the shit pickle I have found myself lodged in, and I discover a truth that would’ve been hard to acknowledge without a pint: the great concession of the universe is that at least our tragedies make up our repertoire of anecdotes.
The next day, I am on a train back to Newcastle, and a call comes through on my phone; it’s more bad news from nowhere. Oh well, I suppose there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
