Way back in the dim dark distant past. In an age when Mobil phones were for making phone calls but only a few of us had them. When the internet did not seem like something that would catch on as a single picture took twenty seconds to download down a 56k line. When there were only four TV channels and they mostly closed at midnight. When you could smoke in a pub and MEGA drives were the cutting edge of the console-verse. There used to be a pub called the travellers rest, sat at the top of a hill in a less than fashionable part of Leeds, on the borderland between Armley and Bramley which few chose to cross and next door to the mental hospital.
In that pub, there used to gather a crowd of young 20 somethings which were sometimes closer to their mid-teens than they admitted. Among them were three or more wise men, whom we shall call, the hippy ex-singer, the really tall hippy, and the one who professed not to be a hippy because he loved violence (who was also a hippy).
In between getting drunk, hogging the jukebox, and putting the world to rights this crowd of strangely epileptic individuals played host to the artistic dreams of three young men among them. The writer, the singer and the actor. Of them , I should add, the writer was most certainly the most pretentious, unwittingly arrogant and occasionally irritating.
Such are the dreams of young men in the dark days of the late eighties and early nineties in the Britain Thatcher built on the bones of broken dreams.
They dream dreams of artistic endeavour, the writer wrote, the singer sang and learned guitar, and the actor acted up…. And the world went by and paid them no heed.
Fast forward a small collection of years in the grander scheme of things. To the year 2015 , where the internet holds the world in its grasp and a Mobile phone is a computer which could land the space shuttle and has accesses to the total sum of human knowledge ( okay we use it to play candy crush, and look at pictures of cats but the potential is there all the same.)
And in these strange days of the future that the three young men could barely of dreams back then suddenly something rather wonderful happens. The wrong side of forty they manage their dreams.
The Singer ,(Dave is the one with the beard ) and his new band , get a record deal and their new single from the forthcoming album is out this week
The Actor (Rik is the tall one in the foreground) , is staring in the forthcoming Short film The Goodbye Girl
And as for the write, well his is still a tad pretentious if truth be told, but you may have heard of his first novel
And the three wise hippy’s, there still wiser than we or so they tell us, and gentlemen to boot.
Anyway, 2015 , year of the Horse, year of Goodbye Girl , Year of Cider lane . and year of the renaissance for the dreams of young men , who may be the other side of 40, but are still young enough to dream.
edit .
More of the actor ‘acting up ‘
The Passing Place 