On not leaving London 2: Africa on the Square, photography at Somerset House and some rich coincidences

Bukky Leo and Black Egypt transport a rapt Trafalgar Square crowd - out of cold, rainy London and straight into the heat of
Fela Kuti's Shrine, in the Kalakuta Republic, Lagos, Nigeria. For half and hour. And then the rain came down.

So by the following week, still not having left London, despite the increasingly grim view of the vile Nine Elms - Battersea development from the back of the flat, it would have been plain churlish not to go to Trafalgar Square for the Africa festival.

There are many such events on this square, always free, of course, and always endorsed by the Mayor of London. They include Chinese New Year, the Russian spring lenten festival, Maslenitsa, Diwali and so on. They are generally heavily sponsored by big corporate interests and the Tourism ministries of relevant countries, and often as a result a bit bland and worthy. Plus the square itself always struck me as one of the bleakest and least encouraging of communal meeting places of any major city I've ever visited.

But remember we now have a new Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. This event is part of the annual educational exercise, Black History Month. It does have a big sponsor - Air France, but the media sponsor is The Voice newspaper. And if anyone can transform an awkward,  grey, ex-triumphalist colonial space into something good, it must surely be Africans.

And by god they did, from the bright colours of the different stalls and pop-up stands selling food, fashion, artefacts, books etc - to the non-stop upbeat patter from the two main presenters on stage. And one super-brilliant DJ. Read on...

So, having arranged to go to the Picasso exhibition at the NPG, we encounter the Square already bustling with people, and with some high-energy South African music echoing off the facades of the old colonial offices all around.

We stay in the square, and watch

We tear ourselves away from this, head to the NPG, even though the sun is shining. Inside there's a big queue for Picasso, so we head for another exhibition, across Covent Garden to Somerset House to see photos by the late Malick Sidibé of nightlife and beach-life in his native Mali. All the photos are black and white and taken on a Kodak Brownie 127 camera with flash gun, and they are superb, evening blown up to a metre square or more. It's a small show and unmissable for the absolute elegance and beauty of the people he cpaptures, their innocence and eloquence of movement, in the matter of body language and facial expression.

This small, unforgettable exhibition has an audio dimension as well, thanks to a background soundtrack of African music contemporary to the photos - that is to say, mainly 1960s, 70s and a bit of 80s.

It's gorgeous music, mixed up with ambient sounds from parties and streetlife of Bamako. This mixtape was produced by the DJ Rita Ray.

By 4pm I am back in the square and there is amazing music coming over the PA. The DJ is Rita Ray. The crowd is dancing, and it keeps on dancing through the three final bands of the day. And dancing even more when Rita Ray ends the whole thing with some astonishing mix-ups or mash-ups of god knows what dub and Afrobeat and tribal chanting and desert blues and who knows what else, but so expertly blended that the sound seems to make the ground slide beneath your feet.

Then the Algerian musician Seddick Zebiri comes on with his band Seeds of

Creation, mixing what sounds like classical Berber oud playing with some serious jazz-funk and a bit of far-out acid-rock riffing and drumming. He's another crowd pleaser! This guy is a crazy singer and mover and his band flies,  always shifting its musical ground, and after a short but fiery set they get a huge round of applause.

The amazing Algerian master musician Seddick Zebiri with his band, Seeds
of Creation, bring a unique brand of North African funk to the Square.

Then comes the final act - a band known as Black Egypt, led by the Nigerian afrobeat Saxophonist Bukky Leo. Yes, the same  Bukky who used to play Sunday evening sets at the Beufoy Arms inLAvender Hill, back in the early 90s I think, a true disciple of the Black Presidnet. ANd sure enough Bukky dedicates this set to Fela, who, he says, "was borh in this month and died in this month". SO Black History month is also Fela Kuti month. Sounds good to me. WOn't argue with that.

Certainly won't argue with this band's top-class renditions of a string of Fela classics, Zombie, Water Get No Enemy, Coffin for Head of State....the voice and the sax are so good, the band is great, even though much smaller than the full Egypt 80 or whatever band Fela had at the time. You could almost imagne the iron hand of Fela himself leading the tight, deadly accurate and beautifully-rehearsed ensemble playing. Trafalgar Square has surely never before resounded to such a fabulous onslaught of music straight out of the Kalakuta  Republic. Love!

On not leaving London 1: National Poetry Day at the Festival Hall

Some days you feel, how much longer can we stick around here? This swamp of  bad money and poison air, especially in this area, stricken as it is by deadly Nine Elms Disease.

Falling out of love with London happens increasingly often in this household, and yet it never lasts more than a day or two because the city has a winning habit of serving up something wonderful, just in time.

Last week it did this again. It was National Poetry Day and a series of readings and discussion was advertised at the Festival Hall. This happened in the Clore Ballroom area, a big space underneath the main auditorium, but a useful performance space in its own right, where most of the Southbank's biggest free events are held.

Poet Ian McMillan and his team prepare for the live recording of Radio 3's
The Verb on National Poetry Day, at the Southbank Centre, London.

There was a full programme, all free. A lot of the earlier sessions were aimed at schoolkids, and the place was packed at 3pm. Poet after poet went up and did their stuff: I was looking at the art show in the basement (the excellent annual event featuring art by people in prisons and young offenders institutions) but every so often came the cheering and chanting and stamping of feet on the floor above.

As the afternoon went on, the school groups left and more and more men and women of a certain age and look arrived and found seats. These people looked to be in their 40s, dressed in tight black clothes, austere of look, thin people. They were quite likely fans of one of the poets due to appear - the singer P J Harvey was in fact top of the bill. And to be perfectly honest, I too was there, above all, to see the scarily wonderful singer of so many powerful songs, in person.

But first, the poets. At 4 o'clock, the poet and radio broadcaster Ian McMillan took to the stage with  four poets to record a live session for his Radio 3 programme, The Verb. He's a brilliant master of these strange ceremonies, and calmly proceeds to get the by now rather staid looking audience whooping and cheering and even chanting responses to certain words, as he take the mickey out of pre-conceived notions of what a poet looks like.

One by one he talks to the line-up of four poets, and each reads some of their work. Meanwhile, the resident cartoonist Chris Riddell is busy sketching his own interpretations of the event. So while Luke Kennard reads one of his pieces featuring a very knowing wolf, Riddell has quickly drawn the most insouciant, upper-crust fanged leader of the pack you could want.

All this is thrown up onto two big screens.....but of ocurse it has to be described for the radio listeners...It's a hilarious event, with McMillan making the most of his power in this situation to get his audience to particpiate in repeating all manner of curious and surreal  lines.

You can listen to the finished programme here.

After that - more poetry, and the highlight of this session was Salena Godden. 

She's a powerful performer, highly political, hilarious as well. She'd written "Citizen of Nowhere" specially for the day, a poem full of anger which grew stronger as the way we treat refugees from wars we have helped to start became clearer.


Her finale was "Die Wasp!" - a long angry hilarious piece inspired by a recent stay in Berlin. She's in a cafe, watching a very young and beautiful woman being very young and beautiful and cool as she works on her laptop, and comparing this vision of calm and collected smartness and brilliance with her own unconfident, messed-up accident-prone self. A wasp bothers her. It does not touch the girl. Hence the title, the chorus. It is so funny, and so harsh, and so beautifully true.

Several of the pother poets were just as good, just as moving - it was an eye-opener, a tear-duct opener. 
Sabrina Mahfouz for example, read "The most honest job I've ever had" - a poem in the voice of woman working in the sex industry. Many of these young poets were first or second generation immigrnats to the UK< and several of them are contributors to the new anthology The Good Immigrant which is currently being serialised on BBC Radio4. 

So that by the time we got to the climax, many were already emotionally exhausted. Not what you'd want to be if you were waiting for a performance from  the high priestess of extreme emotional expressiveness, PJ Harvey.

As it happened, Polly-Jean was as cool and collected as a recently harvested cucumber in a chilled room. She strode up to the mic, opened her book, and read away, announcing each poem with a few very straight to the point words. Maybe she was more nervous than you'd expect of a seasoned performer: her voice sounded a bit strained, it was the voice of a newly-qualified English teacher in her first week at a school in Surrey.
She never really let go. She was almost the opposite of the PJ Harvey we knew from tracks like Rid Of Me.  Beautiful, cool, calm, reading splendidly crafted poems about people and places she had experienced, in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and in the USA. Some of the well-turned images and metaphors were read with almost audible quote marks around them. We clapped each poem, politely.

She's such a brilliant singer and exponent of that spare, blood-curling brand of electric punk blues-rock music, that you wondered, why is this beautiful, slighly diffident lady behaving in this prim manner? Personally, I think her poetry is already there in her music, and it is not  fully expressed in these quite careful, restrained poems about very bloody, horror-filled situations. Maybe we've already seen too much.

The only one that really seems to smoulder a bit was a poem about the countryside, from a new book she's working on. That seemed more like it: raw, bloody nature.

Rock stars who become poets ften have htis problem, and it was fascinating that PJ's set came just a week or so before the Dylan-Nobel prize news broke. Why people get so hung up about definitions of poetry I don't know. If someone uses words and music to have an effect that could not be imagined or achieved any other way....it is poetry, just as an unaccompanied song is just as much music as is a full orchestral performance.

Another poet who had a big role that afternoon was Inua Ellams, who was one of the MCs along with Indigo Williams for part of the event. He's one of that generation of young black poets, inspried as much by hip-hop and rap as by European writers; inpsired by jazz and politics,  and as you can see on his excellent website, he's inspried even by a visit to the office of a quantity surveyor. But today he performs a piece which gets straight to my heart. It's called the ‘Saxophone Player’s Mouth’, and its a sort of warts and all tribute to the great dead Nigerian musician, the inventor of Afrobeat,  Fela Kuti.

Which leads naturally on the next episode of this occasional series....

Why Camberwell is the fairest of them all: sweet music and scorched grass in SE5

My cool ruler: Dawn Penn instructs the crowd on the finer points of  deep roots reggae at the 2015 Camberwell Fair - a revival of an ancient festival that, oh now it is so obvious,  has been badly missed for 160 years

Gutted to have missed the Lambeth Country Show two weeks back, I set off on Saturday for the first Camberwell Fair for 160 years, hoping it might restore a little bit of south London summer joy to a severely depleted soul (mine).

Not many of us can remember the last fair on Camberwell Green, as it was in 1855. If it was anything like as good as today's, you wonder why the hell it didn't keep going. In fact maybe that's the reason - if it was anywhere near as much fun as this eight hour feast of music, food, arts and crafts, dance and (ok) a little bit of drinking and what not - then you can imagine only too well why the authorities of the day might have wanted to put a cap on it.

Today's event on that well-trodden wedge of grass in SE5 had a bit of a magical feel. Much as everyone loves the annual feast of reggae music, cider and farmyard attractions that the London Borough of Lambeth puts on in Brockwell Park, it has almost become a victim of its own success, with pressure each year to cut it back or charge for entry.

The moment Camberwell Green became
skank central…our lovely crowd goes
ska-crazy for the double-up-tempo beat of
ChainSka Brassica

This event in the neighbouring borough eventually had the support of Southwark council (well, it had to really, didn't it?) - but the movers behind it were not council people but local community groups, arts people, musicians.

 As a new venture it had that lovely risky feeling - and everyone there, I'm sure, felt that way, that we were all incredibly lucky to be there, and to witness for example, the reggae legend Dawn Penn singing her heart out for a crowd of a few hundred extremely happy people in the late afternoon sun.

Yes, Dawn Penn - and yes, she sang You Don't Love Me, and yes she was in great form, and backed by a great band (Black Slate International) who'd been levitating the crowd for the previous hour.

And this was just one of the stages - somehow they'd fitted two sound stages as well as dozens of craft and food and community stalls into the space as well as a big beer bar, a farmers' market and a distinctly tropical feeling rainbow forest cocktail bar, built of corrugated metal around a big old chestnut tree.

Arriving at 4pm I joined a long queue to get in. The half-hour shuffle towards the gates was fine as we could hear a high energy Balkan dance band, The Turbans, whipping up the crowd within. Sadly we'd already missed two of the early acts - the Afro-Colombian folk band, Papyera, and a Congolese band, Kasai Masai.

Walking across the Green to the toward the main Wormfood Stage, you pass a stall covered in art and fabrics, and there's a large sketch of the London skyline as seen from Peckham covering several panels of board. This is the preliminary drawing for a proposed massive mural that two artists, Georgia Bosson and Cecily Vessey, are hoping to paint in central Peckham to draw attention to the way blocks of luxury flats are ruining south London's views. This is part of the Peckham Vision campaign - something we sorely needed but did not have the community spirit to get in the Nine Elms-Vauxhall area.

Dawn was the one I came to see, along with Afrobeat master and former Egypt 80 member (and thus Fela Kuti sideman), Dele Sosimi, whose tight, fiery and yet academically precise Afrobeat show ended the day triumphantly.

In between there was a revelation for anyone who had not so far encountered a band of local boys calling themselves ChainSka Brassica.  Members of this very young-looking nine-piece band took control, ordering people to the stage from all over the Green, getting them up off their arses. Dominated by super-tight rhythm and horn sections and with a suitably belligerent lead singer (who, it turned out, was really a sensitive soul), this band clearly meant business and quickly impressed anyone doubting their credentials.

Their songs were sharp, funny and with some good hard-biting New Cross style lyrics, and whenever they shifted into ska gear, the whole crowd's knees were pumping the air - honestly! 

What a great band. Even the inter-song banter was good. "Camberwell! Am I going to get you skanking tonight!"

And oh yes they did. Just as Dele Sosimi's band got plenty of people trying to copy the great man's oh-so-fluid rump movements, so ChainSka boys got several hundred pairs of trainer-clad feet pumping into the parched turf of Camberwell Green.

For part of the show I was standing behind a group of Capoeira experts who were brilliant movers to all the different musical styles - but even they seemed to be exhausted by 60 minutes of moon stomping knees-up.

What a great event, though. It had that magical ingredient - it was an experiment, and had been put together by the sheer love, guts, energy and enthusiasm a of local artists and promoters, notably Wormfood London. It felt like a  privilege to be there. It was a privilege. By the end of the evening I was regretting that day back in 1985 when I turned down a lovely flat in Dagmar Road for the stupid place I bought in Clapham. Mind you I often regret turning down an even lovelier flat in New Cross just as badly.

ANyway, a great day, and  you can be sure there's several thousand people now hoping they can turn this into a regular annual event.

With apologies to an almost forgotten art-rock band from just up the road, where do we want to be?

"Camberwell!"

 When do we want to be there?

 "Now!"

Local band ChainSka Brassica brew up storm of ska for the nutty boys and girls and London SE5

And at this beautifully-decorated tent at the north end of the Green there was a whole alternative programme of djs, rappers, spoken-word artists, and singers and poets on the Community Stage: if only we'd had time to see them all!

Between acts, plenty of time to get refreshing cocktails at this lovely rainbow forest bar

Dele Sosimi and band get a very willing crowd into a deep Nigerian afrobeat groove

Sheer joy: Osibisa in Brockwell Park

eye-iko-bee-eye-ay-oh-my-lord-eye-eeko-bee-eye-ayyyy!!!!!!! 

Ay-ee-ko-b-i-a, oh my Lord!

Ay-ee-ko-B-I-A!

O-b-i-a!

O-B-I-A!

oooh-bee-aye-yeh....

O-B-I-A!

O-S-I-B-I-S-A!!

Oh my God, another crazy nostalgia trip for old sod in Brockwell Park, as Osibisa play all their old favourites with such energy and joy that even the crowd of demob-happy GCSE-age school kids just can't help themsleves and start dancing to this music that - 40 years ago - introduced London to contemporary African pop and rock and jazz - a sort of North London version of Santana mixed with a bit of Sly, and this well before most of us had even heard of Fela Kuti.

Ok, I admit it. This blog - is it a blog really? - has been getting too damn moany of late, too grumpy old fool, all the usual targets of the post-midlife male sourpuss. But today I can only gush ridiculously, in a way that I haven't been able to do since at least last year's carnival.

I have a new reason, and it's just like all the old reasons to be cheerful, it really is like a throwback.

(And yes, I loved Ian Dury so much, and yet I only saw him once - at a free concert at Crystal Palace back in 1981, the royal wedding day. A free concert, you get me).

I have been so stingy all my life - but then I have managed to see and enjoy many, many great things, many great musicians and bands - without paying. Quite often thanks to Ken Livingstone or other elected London local government people.

So, today I had another reason to be cheerful for  the minimal outlay of a bottle of fizzy water. The Lambeth Country Show in Brockwell Park is one of the last big London events that still reminds me of those massive free GLC festivals of the 1980s. It's one of the last of those big public-sector events, and it has all the benefits and the drawbacks that such an event would have, in this age of cuts and health & safety and all the rest of things that make 2013 very unlike 1986.

All the more remarkable, then, that Lambeth has managed to keep this show on the road, and to keep it so good, so damn good, that they can bring on acts of such stature to play full-length sets. And if you don't get the value of an event paid for out of your Council Tax, just look around - everyone who wants to be here is here. No-one is here on a corporate freebie. There's no sponsorship, no VIPS, no 3m high steel fence. It's not SW4 or any other of those ghastly yuppie-fests on Clapham Common - thank Christ the Lord. 

This afternoon kicked off  with the Manasseh sound system, perfect warm-up for the Madness spin-off Ska orchestra of Lee Thompson, they wroked so hard and it eventually paid off, they had everyone moving by the end. And they were a fine support band for the big, big, legendary main act of the day.

Legendary? Osibisa? It's quite hard to remeber how big they veryu nearly were, back at the endof the 1960s, it could have been them - instead it was Bob marley and Fela Kuti who really broke through.

But even so Osibisa were big and they were a vital component at hat time, in that emergence of Afrobeat and funk and sould and reggae.Well, they are to me, because I remember my best friend at school urging me to listen to this LP, back in 1970 or so - African music, even before we had heard of Fela Kuti, despite the efforts of Ginger Baker.

And this afternoon, Osibisa were brilliant. The crowd was very mixed - the family show is a wonderfully diverse event, bringing dog-grooming, dressage and organic farming into close and intimate contact with a bit of dub step here, some grime over there, loads of wannabe gangster rappers  and maybe some traditional African dance there plus all the hippy-trippy stuff that Herne Hill can muster on a hot summer afternoon. Plenty, in other words.

Plenty of variety, most it boozed up and most already happy after the ska knees-up set from the Madness gang, all sweaty in their tight suits and pork-pies. All boozed and gassed up, all aftere their different things, all happily soaking up the sounds and the sun, which, with a sort of miracle-like retunr from retirement, shone for at least three-quarters of the afternoon.

Yes, today was bliss. I am still living it, and thank Osibisa, Lambeth, and everyone there for an unforgettable afternoon of music and dance.

SUV menace: Is Ginger Baker to blame?

No secret,  I hate SUVs. As a cyclist in London,  I'm more and more often experiencing that near-death feeling at the business end of some chunk of over-heated metal driven by some over-cool yummy daddy or mummy  - is it a BMW, an Audi, a Merc or one of the originals, the Range Rover series? - as  they push their chrome-plated noses across the mini-roundabouts of South Kensington.

And then I think back to one of the dodgy heroes of my youth, the jazz and rock drummer Ginger Baker.  And I think, fuck you Ginger - you helped kick off this whole SUV thing in 1971 by driving one of the first Range Rovers across the Sahara, on your way to the shrine of shrines for all jazz and rock drummers of the time - Fela Kuti's Shrine in Lagos, Nigeria.

So, swerving out of the way of one of these monsters, I had this thought. If you'd stayed back home, or gone by plane,  Ginger, would London today be quite so clogged up with these inflated and unnecessary automobiles?

The new film,  "Beware Mr Baker", is a wonderfully entertaining documentary about that strange period in London's musical history - late 50s through to 1970. Thanks to the producer/director/writer/narrator Jay Bulger's bravery, it was an unusually good film, revising and reviving ideas about these old rock idols, and yet never detracting from the skill and showmanship that made Baker such a natural star in the first place.

But he deals with other stars in that strange 1960s/70s constellation, as well.  Oddly, Eric Clapton came out of the whole thing smelling only of the finest roses.

But Ginger! Oh dear! Now, everyone seems to agree he was a monster, a violent, selfish bully who also happened to be a drum genius. And a bit of a sad case, in his old age.

Well he surely was a great drummer,  even though some of us found those solos a little overpowering. And at least 20 minutes too long. Unless it was live and we were there, moving.

I love drumming, and I love the way Mr Baker, etc, made us all think back to the origins of the rhythms of jazz, just as Miles Davis and a number of others did, in those days, the very early 1970s, that time of Tony Williams, Miles, Sly, James Brown, and the amazing wake-up call we were just beginning to get from Jamaica.

By 1971, when that veneer of fame was begining to wear a little thin, perhaps, Ginger decided to check out these roots in person. He would go to Nigeria. He would go in a large British vehicle built by that  British establishment bastion, Rover. And the whole thing would be filmed by the BBC TV arts director of the moment, Tony Palmer.

The resulting film - Ginger in Africa - now seems like half a brilliant advertisement for Rover's brand new offering, the  Range Rover, a gentrified version of their military/agricultural workhorse, the Land Rover – and half a fascinating pilgrimage of one our best jazz/rock musician's search for his rhythmic roots in West Africa.

I love this film.  Watch it if you can. Or, if you can't find it, watch the new documentary - parts of  Tony Palmer's original documentary seem to be in there. But pleae, if you live anywhere in the UK, apart from on a large farm, please don't buy a Range Rover or any other SUV. Unless, like Ginger, you are planning to drive it across the Channel, across Europe, across Algeria, across the  Sahara Desert.

And then on to Lagos.

Fela Kuti musical at NT in November

Ages ago I wrote this stuff about Fela the musical:

"In two minds about the news that the Broadway musical hit, Fela!, is coming to London this autumn.

I've loved Fela Kuti's music through four decades (first heard him in the early 70s, when UK rock gods started falling over each other to get a bit of authenticity by visiting Lagos).

Now he's going to be up there on the same billboards with the likes of Freddy Mercury, Abba, and Andrew Lloyd Weber - a curious fate for this tempestous musician and political activist.

Am I just being a snob? I mean, the fear that it won't live up to the reality of his music and stage presence is ridiculous isn't it? I don't like music biopics much (apart from those old Ken Russell BBC films on the likes of Delius) - but I do like the idea of Fela being brought to new audiences."

Since then I've seen the show. It was at Sadlers Wells, and it was astonishing. I never did see the real Fela, I never went to Lagos to visit the Shrine, the Kalakuta republic, I just have been deeply attracted to his music since - when?

I first heard Fela when a friend made me listen to the Ginger Baker/Fela Ransome Kuti recordings back in the early 70s. It was exciting stuff, but then so was Osibisa, and then along came Bob Marley and I was totally absorbed in Jamaican music for the next 10 years or so. Apart from a wee bit of Ian Dury, and a lot of jazz, and the Clash, PiL, Robert Wyatt  and Jah Wobble.

Partly thanks to John Peel, but even more thanks to another radio man, Charlie Gillett, I  started again listening to wider ranges of stuff. Gillett's show on BBC Radio London was a beautiful thing. He was so mild, modest, and engagingly knowledgable, he out-Peeled Peel for me.

 Thanks to him, African, specifically South African,  music, re-entered my airspace in the early 80s, and then thanks also to repeated visits to a Kentish Town pub where the great (and now late) Dudu Pukwana's band – Zila – had a regular slot. This music was just so crazily, beautifully, infectiously hot and full of human charm, and this coming form a band of exiles who'd been forced out of their own country by hatred and death-threats.

The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, District Six, Hugh Masekela, Paul simon's stuff - and the way  UK musicians like the Specials, Robert Wyatt etc, signed up to anti-Apartheid with the whole of their musical as well as political souls  - that music was powerful, joyful and even quite dangerous, in the best sense.

And then we had the Bundhu Boys,  etc etc....I needed to get back to the Nigerian sounds but there was just too much else of beauty around. Rare groove revivals, James Brown. Funk, punk, Rip Rig and Panic. All that Cuban and Brazilian stuff too, and the rise of Soca. Those were good times to love music in London, or anywhere else I am sure.

Fela was there all along BUT stupidly  I only really got back into him in 1983 or so, when, on the last evening of that year's Notting Hill Carnival, as the southern quarter of the crowd of revellers surged back up Portobello towards the tube and the buses, as we surged past pyramids of empty Red Stripe tins and coconut shells, there was one last sound system - not really a sound system, just an indoors hi-fi set up on a trestle table outdoors,  two small but good speakers and a deck and a big amp, and a girl dj/citizen swaying around, selling her last few tins of lager, with Shuffering and Smiling playing off vinyl at maximum volume, and that stream of going-home pople were stopping their going and starting again to dance, and Fela sort of led it all, a big last street dance at the 1983 Notting Hill carnival.

Anyone else who witnessed this please remind me. Maybe I was just too tired and stoned and runk and dreaming to have any accurate memories.