This Sunday morning we (as in The Young’uns) were on Cerys Matthews’ BBC 6 Music show. Having got to bed late due to celebrating a friend’s birthday, and then waking at 5am to take a painfully slow megabus journey from Sheffield to London, I felt, rather aptly, in a state of catatonia. I hope Cerys appreciated the tribute. If we’d been on Hewey Morgan’s show then I’d pay homage to his band the Fun Loving Criminals, perhaps assaulting someone by throwing a banana skin in front of them, resulting in them having a comical skid and trip. I suppose that tactic would also work if we were on the Marc Riley show, given that his former band was The Fall. If we were on Clare Grogans show then I would walk around using a pair of augmented reality glasses. I’ll let you Google that one, if you haven’t worked it out already. Sometimes you appreciate things more if you have to work a bit for it. While your at it, see if you can decipher this blog post’s hidden political subtext. It’s there if you look hard enough. Keep re-reading until you get it.

As we walked through the BBC corridor we passed Andrew Marr, who had just interviewed Theresa May (apparently Brexit still means Brexit), also Michael Ball and some bloke from Strictly Come Dancing who I’ve never heard of and am not going to look up because I take a strange glee in remaining ignorant about such things. I also overheard a conversation between two people, one of whom declared that they were off to the Sexy Fish. Having Googled Sexy Fish, it appears that it’s a high-end London restaurant, although I suppose it might also be their nickname for andrew Marr, given that’s whose studio they were standing outside.

Just a warning: I’d be careful going any further down the list of Google search results for “sexy fish,” as you get some rather niche aquatic porn; let’s just say those carp aren’t so coy, and those Salmon are most certainly wild. Fortunately I’ve done the research for you, and so here are some facts about fish porn.

One of the most famous fish porn films is Grinding Nemo. That features quite a lot of gill on gill action. Another one is all about a fish swingers party which involves a lot of partner swapping. If you want to look it up it’s called Your Plaice Or Mine. Sadly that film made headlines in the fish porn world because the actor playing the part of an insatiable fisherman failed to ware protection and consequently caught crabs. Apparently they couldn’t find a condom adequate enough to fit the fisherman’s rod. That’s according to an unnamed source, although people believe it to be a source close to some of the prawns working on the film, which presumably means that the source in question would be one Marie Rose. Marie Rose worked in the costume department and was responsible for dressing the prawns.

Anyway, what were we chatting about before we got distracted by the subject of fish porn? Oh yes, Cerys Matthews. A special hello by the way to anyone who has stumbled across this because they Googled “Cerys Matthews fish porn.” Sorry for your disappointment.

We arrived in the studio to some panic, as a befuddled engineer was trying to figure out why all of the music played so far on the show was massively distorted. This mishap probably did us quite a big favour, as it got fixed just before we came on, meaning that our songs sounded infinitely more pleasing than the previous 90 minutes’ worth of music. This might have been the reason why we were deluged with orders for our CD from 6 Music listeners. It’s a shame that all of our CDs, due to a technical fault, are riddled with heavy distortion.

This sudden surge in sales resulted in Michael having to get a train back to Teesside so as to be able to post the albums out. His original plan was to stay in London until Tuesday, because we were doing a session on BBC Radio 3 on the Monday evening. You would have thought it would make sense for Michael to have brought a load of CDs with him so that he could post them from where he actually was, rather than having to make a 600 mile round trip, but alas there was no room in Michael’s bag due to the fact that he insists on carrying his own two pillows from home, maintaining that he can’t get a good night’s sleep without them. So on the one hand he had to make a completely pointless and expensive six hour round trip, but on the other hand at least he got a good night’s sleep, even though, ironically, due to taking the train home, he ended up sleeping in his own bed anyway, meaning that he essentially just took his pillows out for a day trip. But at least the pillows got to meet Cerys Matthews. Cerys was particularly inamoured by the pillows, especially when Michael pointed out that they were made from international velvet. That’s a hilarious Catatonia joke there, I thank you.

This whole pillow fiasco has become so ridiculous that Michael has suggested we don’t sing any songs on our radio sessions that require him to play guitar, as he is travelling by train and is too encumbered by carrying around his bloody pillows. We’ve turned into a band that can’t play half their songs and can’t sell their music due to a pair of pillows. Those pillows are The Young’uns’ Yoko Ono.

If you want to buy a copy of our latest album, The Ballad Of Johnny Longstaff, you can get it here. But please hurry, because we fly to Dublin in a couple of days, and I don’t want Michael making a round trip on a plane in order to keep up with the purchases. We’re on tour from late January through February. Tickets are selling very fast, with a few venues already sold out. If you’re attending one of the gigs then feel free to come and say hello and meet us in person, and if you’re really lucky you might even get to meet Michael’s pillows. Maybe we could charge a pound to have a photo with the pillows. It might help recover some of our costs incurred by Michael’s redundant train journeys.

You can listen to our BBC 6 Music chat here.
And our session on BBC Radio 3 here.

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