Museum Monday: Newcastle Brown Ale, Punk, Drums, Mellotrons and Amphetamine Sulphate

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Newcastle United just won their first soccer trophy in over 50 years.  I’d forgotten they’d won anything, but the excitement over the game yesterday against Liverpool made me remember my time growing up there (around the time of the last trophy), and its influence on me now.

In many ways, Newcastle is kind of the Chicago of the UK: working class, hard people used to struggle and cold and a kind of roll-up-your-sleeves, let’s get it done unpretentiousness. I started playing drums in Durham, just 18 miles from Newcastle. My dad helped me buy my first new drum kit from the Drum Center on Percy Street, and I started my love affair with Newcastle Brown Ale there too (age 11), and then backing strippers at Newcastle Labor Club (Age 12 or 13), and trying to do my homework in the dressing room.

Newcastle Brown Ale appears all over Pigface and all over the Museum: from the 1994 album Notes From Thee Underground and backdrops to the small sculptures I started to make when I stopped drinking (the first time). I made a kind of shrine to Newcastle Brown Ale. I had 16 years sober until my dad died and I just said, “fuck it!” (Now, I’m back not drinking, and just celebrated 4 years!) People would collect bottle caps and send me bags of them, which I would cup in my hands and inhale in the way I imagine Jesse and the staff of Dark Matter Coffee do when out in the coffee fields. Easy Listening (for difficult fuckheads) has the bottle caps, guns and nuns too!

Its ok, I know it’s a Monday and we don’t have time for strippers, Newcastle Brown Ale, the beginning of Punk, drums, mellotrons and amphetamine sulphate tangent, but I did want to say – congratulations to the team and especially the multi-generational fans of a great football club and a wonderful historic city!

A reminder that our NiN Day is quickly approaching (this weekend, 3/22!) & many events are up on the calendar for the museum! Register Here!

I will be at speaking about a Blueprint For Chaos at 5pm on Tuesday 25th of March at Illinois State University’s University Galleries. It is free and open to the public! I’ll also have some free passes to the museum for anyone that wants one (that is, as they say, a $45 value!), and I’m happy to stick around, chat and sign anything you might want to bring that I’ve played on! 

More big announcements soon! 

Be nice and then, when you just can’t anymore………be even nicer you glorious motherfucker