One of my few goals while in the UK was to buy a copy of the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series on CD. It’s extremely hard to find in America, but a brand new edition was sitting on a rack in the first petrol station we stopped at on the way from Edinburgh to Mynyddbach, Wales. This was lucky, because due to the fact that the British government decided that it would be a good idea to repave the entirety of the motorway network all at once, the drive ended up talking nine hours instead of the expected six and a half. Listening to the discs was the one thing that stopped me from pulling out of the endless queues to overturn the car and ignite the countryside with diesel fumes.
We eventually managed to find Mynyddbach, the tiny, invisible village in southwestern Wales that’s home to Sophie’s old friend Katrina Spielmann, her husband Simon, and their kids Julian and Ava, all of whom were kind enough to put us up for two nights. Ava, who’s six, even gave up her room for us, along with detailed instructions including which side of the bed Sophie should sleep on. Despite our lateness, Katrina had homemade enchiladas and tacos waiting, and Julian entertained us with his year-four Powerpoint presentation about his trip to Hampton Court palace, which included an exceptional MS Paint animation of Anne Boleyn losing her head.
On Saturday we took a drive into Cardiff for what I hope will be the geekiest portion of this trip: visiting the Doctor Who exhibition and finding the spot at the harbor front containing the portal to the Torchwood headquarters, both of which we enjoyed more than we should of. As we poked around Cardiff’s harbor and stopped to listen to a recital by a junior jazz ensemble in the lobby of the impressive new Millennium Centre concert hall, it struck me that Cardiff is a lot like Pittsburgh in that it’s a medium-sized, post-industrial sports town (rugby instead of football) with some high-quality assets of which the comfortably ordinary people seem to be exceptionally proud. All of which suits me fine.
We were up at 7am on Sunday to set out for London, much to the dismay of Ava, who’d taken quite a shine to Sophie and even did her the honor of enshrining her spyrograph drawings in her scrapbook. But we needed an early start to make it to London by noon for Kirstyfest, the event that kind of ways spawned our entire trip.
Kirsty MacColl was a British singer and songwriter whose music Sophie and I unexpectedly fell in love with a few years ago. She died in 2000 in one of the most tragic stories in all of pop music (which you can read about in this blog post I wrote a few years back (scroll down to the comments area)), and every year since on the Sunday closest to her birthday, her fans gather in Soho Square in London to celebrate her life. Since this year would’ve been both her fiftieth birthday and Sophie’s and my tenth anniversary, we started planning a trip around Kirstyfest that somehow ballooned into a nine-month circumnavigation.
We raced from the train station, through the tube, to our hotel to drop our bags, and made it to the square at 11:55 to find several dozen people in the square, along with Kirsty’s mother Jean and her sons Jamie and Louis. Jean took a seat on the bench dedicated to Kirsty, and demanded, “Let’s have some good singing this time.” So we all broke into her songs “Soho Square” and “Don’t Come the Cowboy With Me, Sonny Jim.” When we’d finished, she seemed pleased and said “That was quite nice. By the time we get to 100 it should be perfect.”
The crowd adjourned down the block to the Phoenix Artists Club, a private pub for the London theater actor’s scene, and became quickly lubricated. Over the course of the evening, various Kirsty fans and bands composed of Kirsty fans took the stage to sing her songs, including one unforgettable performance by Francisco, an exceptionally drunk Spaniard who, despite not being able to either speak English or sing, led a confused local bar band in a chaotic, ten-minute rendition of the four-minute song “Innocence” that eventually devolved into him endlessly scatting unintelligibly and unaccompanied, until Louis mercifully walked on to stage and rescued us him.
Mark Nevin, Kirsty’s collaborator on her masterpiece Titanic Days, performed a few songs with Sarah Blackwood from Dub Star. While his young son and I fooled around on the airplane chairs lining the wall of the bar, Sophie noticed Mark being greeted by Steve Lillywhite, the legendary producer whose divorce from Kirsty provided all the material for Titanic Days. During the Kirsty quiz, which Sophie and I sat out, a charming fellow named Vincent introduced himself. An ex-Belfast cop, the partner of the quizmaster, and self-professed “Kirsty husband,” Vincent told us about coming to eight years worth of Kirstyfests and about visiting the friends they’d made there in San Francisco and elsewhere, and invited us to drop in on them in Belfast. (That’s him there with Sophie. He’s already checked this blog a few times and sent us some nice messages. Hi Vincent!)
It seemed odd and familiar celebrating with these people. As Jean stood up to tell us about the latest news from her Justice for Kirsty campaign and talked about the memorial that they’ll be erecting at the site of her death in Cozumel, and later on when Louis, obviously thrilled by the turnout, told us that “his mother would be really angry if anyone left here sober,” I realized why. Despite Kirsty being dead for nine years, I felt closer to her at that moment than I’d ever felt to a celebrity I admire. Being with her family and the friends of her family, it was as if we were the distant cousins at a wedding reception after the bride and groom have left for the hotel.
I staggered home with a massive headache and immediately fell asleep. We took the next day off, and then on Tuesday morning boarded the Eurostar bound for Paris and my first trip to continental Europe.
