As established in yesterday’s blog: I think Valentine’s Day is stupid and I don’t believe in it. So this evening my partner had to be content with a walk around an art gallery, a meal and a few drinks followed tickets to the hottest show in town. And she could bloody lump it. And I had she had woken up to personalised card (from me).

And if society isn’t happy with me just behaving like I normally would on any day then it can go fuck itself. To be fair the Jake Bugg tickets dictated what we were going to do and the gig being on February 14th was a coincidence. Walking around an art gallery was motivated by me not thinking two people are capable of sitting and talking about stuff for more than a couple of hours if one of them doesn’t know anything about sport.

One thing I am not used to seeing at an art show* is a sign like this:

I had a peak through the door the sign was on and there were some people trying to nail paint to a canvas that just kept sliding off. Fortunately the wardrobe in another installation was in perfect working order.

Jake Bugg was pretty good; quite odd seeing people that excited about someone whose main songs are folky. Those few up-tempo ones tend to have been the singles so it was good to see that everyone seemed equally as enthralled by the more fragile and quiet tunes like Broken (see below). Bugg provokes some debate about authenticity. Because he has co-songwriters people seem to be able to justify being sure he is manufactured – because David Bowie never co-songwrote. More mainstream-orientated people wouldn’t question the authority of someone with long hair playing a guitar who hasn’t been on a televised popularity contest.

In other words the people who watch XFactor think he’s a hippy and the hippies think he may as well been on X-Factor. Fortunately I’m part of the morally and spiritually bankrupt grey area in between. And I just like songs that my ears like – Jake Bugg already has several of these so I like him. My ears also liked them being played live. As did the man from Burnley who stood next to me for a bit. He was initially a bit disappointed that he wasn’t having his “fucking head blown off” but a few songs later confessed that he was a dick and now he’d just listened to the music and words he was “properly impressed” without having his head blown off. (Not everyone’s metaphors, it seems, were toned down after the tragic events in South Africa.)

And if he can change the mind of a man from Burnley perhaps he can change the world.

*Statements based on data sourced from going to see art about five times a year, so these might be commonplace for all I know.