._Blog

Something borrowed, something blue.

First of all, we overshot our opening date. That calamity was down to an insurance issue, which... seems to have been sorted. Thus, we had to pass on the bank holiday weekend. A couple of socially distanced gigs needed to be rearranged...

And just like that, the blog has returned. It’s been long enough since the last real post, eg. December (that January thing: ‘nice stuff people said about The Peer Hat’, definitely does not count---if you were indeed wondering, that was for the Arts Council’s perusal…not merely some form of grotesque flex), that it feels like a grandiose hello and thank you is in order.

We'd intended to release this blog entry yesterday, but the relentless stream of snowballs and black Russians took their toll and all of a sudden, here we are on Boxing Day. The main purpose of this blog entry is, of course, to wish you all a happy Christmas from the Peer Hat... to alert you that, despite appearances, we're stil very much alive and kicking. However, we want to talk to you a little bit about the future, both near and somewhat more distant.

I intend for this to be shorter than usual, if only because my time is precious and I don't have much of it (well, I didn't when I started writing this - things can change a lot in a few days) . Needless to say, the current climate is one which cannot succour a music venue for very long.

The time between entries has increased. I've made sure to be out everyday, to feel the wind on my face and to explore this weird region of ours in as much detail as I can, peeling back something satisfying and forbidden, committing it to my memory for reasons as yet uncertain

Warning, this episode of the blog is both long and weird. If it's at times indulgent, please grant us a reprieve, this once. In the future, we can chuckle about it over billiards and port. At any rate, buckle in...it's going to be hairy.

Enough time has passed since our last blog, to bury an entire cemetery of unrecorded events. I can wander around, lost in the mists of this graveyard, stumbling at each mound in turn, furrowing my brow in an effort to decipher the scratchings upon the headstones. Sometimes there are words and names that I can almost elucidate

A couple of weeks back now, Julie Campbell AKA Lonelady, sent me a request to delve once again beneath the trembling surface skin of Mancunian unconscious memory. Scrub Transmissions, essentially amounts to a treasure hunt: in this case, the treasure to be found, is a Lonelady poem & song, playing on a permanent loop

This blog entry was set to go out last Thursday, but with the emergence of our Crowd-Funder, it seemed like a good idea to avoid clogging the airwaves with yet more Peer Hat related stuff (especially when so many places are in dire need of immediate aid)

Let's get the mediocre/not so good news out of the way: we failed in our bid for Arts Council monies. Initially, I was hit pretty hard by this. Against my better judgement, I'd put a degree of store into a successful application. Evidently, it was not to be....but I refuse to let this drag us further down than it already has

Time falls away from us, even though we are it. That we cannot hold onto or reconcile the tragedy of ourselves, seems a a huge conundrum in a materialist reality. We can watch and some say watching is the most refined way of participation, though I am not amongst them.

Another week rears it's head, as if we were drawing from a deck comprised of the Nine Of Swords and nothing but. I found myself curiously depressed without really knowing why

This past 10 days or so, have been ruthlessly dominated, by the need to submit our emergency grant application to the Arts Council. It's been a difficult process, with a limiting approach (300 words per section, 1,800 characters...including spaces and line breaks), that has had the sad effect of almost completely draining my desire to sit and write

From the bottom looking up, can be an intimidating experience. Right now there's a tremendous amount being asked of us, a tremendous amount that we're being forced to swallow in the name of 'defeating' this virus (can a virus be defeated? Or is it the same as terror?).

A brick, does not have to be a brick when it's home to a ghost. An alleyway, doesn't have to be an alley way, if it's home to a spirit that will eat your children (although if you're polite, you can reckon on things going your way when you're in this part of town...only please be kind).

Chances are good, that if you've spent any amount of time around Manchester's alternative spaces (code for 'not shit'), you'll have noticed a watchful presence, the shadow of a man, hunched over a table, eyes fixed on yours (shining from the darkness), frantically drawing, scraping his pen or brush across paper in a fashion that might initially alarm

Two Thirty AM on a Tuesday, the Tuesday following the house arrest of most of the British population. We'd been meaning to get this blog out there by Saturday night, but events being as they were, we found ourselves distinctly lacking in the right stuff so to speak.