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The eagle-eyed amongst you will have noted that every day on this blog has had a “Right Song at the Right Moment” tagged onto the end of it followed by a track and an artist you probably hate or have never heard of.

There are strict rules governing the choice of these songs which I should probably explain.
Music is of vital importance, it provides a soundtrack to your life. If your life has got a crap soundtrack then your existence is diminished.

Wifey accuses me of being a musical fascist which is probably true but I can’t stand laziness in people’s musical taste. People who say “oh allsorts” when you ask them what sort of music they like when what they mean is their entire music collection consists of a Beatles album, Abba “Gold”, a Take That compilation and the soundtrack to f***ing “Flashdance” or “Glee” – depending how old they are. People who can listen to commercial radio stations or Chris Moyles without thinking “in the last hour you have played three songs and they are the same songs you played this time yesterday – shut the f*** up and play something good you c***!”
Obviously everybody has different tastes and I will respect yours if you can back up your argument as to why you think something is good. What kind of music do I like?
Oh allsorts.
For a start I have got no particular problem with The Beatles, Abba or Take That – what I object to is music for people who don’t like music. The aural equivalent of weak coffee or mild Cheddar.
The most time consuming job I did before coming away was honing my I-pod into a 365 day world-fighting machine. Putting on every song I have ever liked, cutting away all the filler, deleting anything guilty of being merely alright. There are only 8,347 tracks on it and a few hundred of them are samples from Family Guy, Generation Kill, Deadwood and The Wire. There are stand-up clips from Chris Rock, Bill Hicks, Doug Stanhope and others and a few hundred phrases in French and Italian that I hoped I would be learning but have consummately failed to do so.

Wifey has got 900+ songs on her MP3 player and we made a dozen mix-CDs in case both devices went flat or we ended up somewhere we couldn’t plug them in.
The diversity stretches from Beethoven to Scissor Sisters, from Robert Johnson to Amy MacDonald, lots of hip-hop, classic metal but very heavy on the alternative/punk rock.
Both devices are set on “shuffle” which means they will spit up entirely random songs. One of my ambitions on this adventure is to hear every song I ever liked. To get through the I-pod’s tracks I have to get through 25 songs a day – I am already over a hundred behind. Also every song I ever liked isn’t actually on the device anyway because A) I now can’t abide a lot of songs I used to like (e.g. The Wombles “Wombling Merry Christmas” and “Teenage” by UK Subs); B) they are socially unacceptable (Gary Glitter’s brilliant live album “Remember Me This Way” – no Gary I’m afraid nobody will); C) they carry too much emotional baggage or; D) I’m an idiot (yesterday I realised I hadn’t put Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Kaleidoscope” or “JuJu” on – why the f*** not, I love those albums?)
Anyway, to win Right Song at the Right Moment a track must be heard that day and at random. Either off the shuffle, on the radio or in a bar or at a Powwow. It hasn’t got to be the best song because that is always hard to quantify, it has to be “right” – for example “Knifeman” by The Bronx or anything by Motorhead or Ministry might sound perfect late at night with a beer in your hand but first track after breakfast they are too much. I need to hear a song, look around and think “yes, this is the soundtrack to right now”.
One of the reasons I’m a hundred songs behind is because the Ford Taurus we hired has got Sirius – which is a multi-channel digital radio service with hundreds of stations including BBC Radio 1 and BBC World Service (so spoiled have we become that I moan about not being able to get Radio 4 or 6). We loved Alt Nation until it became apparent that they only play about 20 different songs all day every day.
The long winded point being the song has to be “right” rather than “best” and that I have a limited choice. For example:
Wednesday 6th July: Right Song at the Right Moment was “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC because after living in Moab for a week we were back on the road and that song is such a pure driving song that it has got chrome f***ing wheels on it.
Thursday 7th – “Whiskey in the Jar” by Thin Lizzy; after a night in the tent under a fearsome thunder and lightning storm the morning was clear and the air was fresh as we left Utah and hit the Navajo reservation in Arizona. Wide plains and dark distant peaks.
Friday 8th – “Sorry” by Madonna had no business beating “Aeroplane Blues” by The Black Keys but we had spent the day hiking in the heat in The Mesa Verde National Park and we were drowsy and knackered with miles still to do. Getting our gay on was a massive mental lift.
Saturday 9th – “Just The Right Bullet” – Tom Waits. Crossed the border into New Mexico and on to a bridge over The Rio Grande, just outside Taos

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Taos was brilliant by the way; galleries and shops selling local art that was genuinely amazing (I’ve never been into pottery but… like…wow), coffee shops, cool bars and this all-pervading laid back attitude. I felt an overwhelming urge to buy a black cowboy hat and spend the next week getting tattoos and drinking tequila on the roof bar at El Camino. Fortunately the budget and Wifey felt otherwise.
Sunday 10th “?” by “Hell knows” – it was the weekend of the Taos Powwow where native American people from all over the continent gather to sing, drum, dance and celebrate their culture. The drumming and singing sounds simplistic when you first hear it but when one of the gatherings near you starts (there were dozens spread around a sacred circle) – you feel the power, the complexity of the beat and the clarity in the vocal melody. I missed the name of the group and the song, because the PA was awful, who struck up next to where we were standing but they finished and I realised I was crying. I’d have felt a right soft sod except so was Wifey and she is way less soppy than I am.
But that is with my point with music – it should be good enough to shake your whole life up and not be formulaic slop to further the career of some grasping little shit house.
Monday 11th “Panic Switch” – Silversun Pickups – criminally ignored in the UK to the point that they were 3rd on the bill to Placebo when they last played the UK. Alt Nation plays them twice an hour over here.
Tuesday 12th “Jesus of Suburbia” – Green Day; pulling up to another cheap motel in Pueblo but well armed with chilled booze.
Wednesday 13th “Gravel Pit” – Wu Tang Clan – entering The Cheyenne Mountain State Park. (where we saw a 4 foot long snake and didn’t shit ourselves like we thought we would)

Sunday 26th June

If I thought shipping out of Newcastle was going to mean my avoiding the summer silly-season, where you think intensely about football even when there is no football to think about, I was wrong. I guessed as much from early on when Barry in New York was all over every transfer rumour and had the links to prove it. I tried then not to be distracted by speculation and confounded by thoughts of squad strength and I failed. I have been doing the same, on and off, ever since. It seems my brain has become conditioned over the decades to default to Newcastle United whenever it gets done with meandering around the edges of reality.
The Ford Taurus twisted out of Deadwood’s mountain roads and onto the interstate at Spearfish with the cruise control and the I-pod doing half my work for me. Wifey, with a map on her lap, was doing the other half – so the mind was free to wander…………..

Is filling the squad up with young Frenchmen going to make us Arsenal in disguise or are we merely walking an already well trodden path? After all we have had a number of young Frenchmen in our colours in recent years; Ginola, Goma, Domi, N’Zogbia and so on and so on and so off. They start well, we take them to our hearts, we try to ignore the “misquotes” in L’Equipe and they end up being as hard to control as a gang of hungry kittens in a trout farm. They slump into a pouting great strop and we part company, with Newcastle United considerably out of pocket and us fans that shade more jaded.

In deliberately moving out so many of the players who got Newcastle promoted and then kept us up, are we also dispensing with that underrated role in any dressing room; that of the arse-kicker? It is all too easy to imagine that, with our hierarchy dismantled, Cabaye, Ba and Marveaux will be “misquoted” when talking of dressing room cliques and be climbing up the curtains by Christmas.

Wifey and I got to The Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, a remarkable natural feature that seems to have burst unnaturally out of the ground. A crazed hippy in South Dakota had promised us a strange spiritual experience on approaching it. We did a full circle of the thing, which is mile and a half and I tried waving my arms at it to see if that would help us win The League Cup.

I have tried invoking primeval powers in the past with such a lowly goal in mind; when buying an Inca cross in Peru, a beaded wristband in Namibia and a black stone from the witchcraft museum in Cornwall. All in the pathetic hope that a peculiar god would reward a respectful traveller with a modest gift. I expect the same result, after all Wyoming has rocked the sporting world in the same way Peru, Namibia and Boscastle has done, namely not at all. Their Gods seemingly have little interest in their local teams so I can’t blame them when Newcastle United are knocked out by someone bollocks in the 4th Round of a cup no one cares about.

A massive thunderstorm burst over The Little Big Horn battle site as we arrived. Lightning cracked, thunder rumbled and rain came down as hard as arrows on a surrounded Cavalry General. 135 years to the day later. A Crow guide showed us round the cemetery (that’s from the tribe as opposed to the murder) pointing out graves with an interesting story behind them. Like the soldier who killed himself when it turned out his recently deceased wife was a man.

Right Song at the Right Moment: was easily “Going Out West” by Tom Waits (used in “Fight Club”- all bristling with attitude AND we were going West at the time) until just as we pulled into The Little Big Horn, when the I-pod spat up “Keep On Keeping On” by The Redskins

Monday 27th June
A motel in Billings then on towards the North East gate at Yellowstone. Not the most accessible entrance, with a steep winding occasionally precarious road over the mountains but the views were breathtaking. Frozen lakes, waterfalls, dozens of retired CEOs riding Harley Davidsons away from their well-spent youths – with the promise of a night in a campsite in earshot of wild wolves.
Our favouring the North East of anything ended in disaster (as usual) – 13 miles in the road had been washed away and we were directed back out and towards the East Entrance. 136 miles of beautiful winding road on which it was impossible to sustain anything above 45 mph.

Again I zoned out;………  our midfield has lacked pace since Kieron Dyer left. We have had a team of grizzled warriors who have done us proud but that will only take you so far and Pardew has said from the start he wants quick attacking football. I know every manager says that, but my dumb optimism is kicking in, and there is surely money still to be spent. And we have hopefully got Ben Arfa, Gosling and Vuckic coming in like new players.

Right Song at the Right Moment: “Exit” – Killing Joke angry tribal drums and aggressive chopping guitar as we finally enter Cody – the birth place of Buffalo Bill where every single bloody thing is named after the man.

Tuesday 28th
I wake in the tent wondering why there is never any speculation regarding the departure of Shola Ameobi? We are back in Yellowstone, snowy peaks, vast lakes, tremendous hazelnut coffee and a fearful herd of tourists, thankfully mostly travelling the opposite direction to us.

Old Faithful goes off the second we arrive – which is awful considerate of it. Pushing on, a bison has wandered into the road and the queue entering the East Gate all want a picture of it. You, I and the Indians call them buffalo – they are bison (old joke alert! – the difference being you can’t wash your hands in a buffalo – I thank you) – we got bored of counting the cars when the number surpassed 700……and why wouldn’t Stoke or Blackburn want a player who has scored so many Premiership goals? And how uninspiring is our strike-force exactly? If Lovenkrands and Shola were our 3rd and 4th choice strikers few of us would complain, if they are 1st and 2nd dumping Ranger and Best seems daft – so does that mean we are getting two new strikers?

Right Song at the Right Moment: “Stay in the Car” – Girls Against Boys. 6 am and several tons of bison is standing by the road looking at us.

Wednesday 29th
Clear of the awesome Yellowstone National Park we were uninspired by Idaho Falls and Blackfoot. Despite their cool names they were little more than retail parks with the hotels and conference centres attached. This is what out of town retail does to places, the towns themselves wither. We stayed in Pocatello and the downtown area looked like Gateshead High Street. But it did have a cool liquor store and an Italian restaurant.

The next day we landed up in Salt Lake City and as Wifey negotiated the rate for a motel I flicked the car radio onto BBC Radio 1 for Newsbeat (yes it can do that , how mental? With a time delay so you get English daytime radio despite the seven hour time difference. You travel halfway round the world and here are Scott Mills and Fearne bloody Cotton in my car) sunderland have signed Connor Wickham for £8.1 million and I can’t work out why I am so annoyed. I didn’t really expect many answers from this trip but I hoped a lot of the questions would stop.

Right Song at the Right Moment: “Leeches” – Gallows as we rumbled through Salt Lake City: “burning all your churches down”: in this place that would be some job, the phone book has eight and a half pages of em.

Before this journey began, back in Newcastle, when we could stand no more packing, organising or communal screams of frustration we would settle down in front of the TV. Time was short so our choice of viewing was strictly monitored. The really rather good “Treme” was abandoned because it was too slow and long, “The Sopranos” would have meant the expense of buying the last two series and what chance of watching all seven in two months. “The Wire” at five series was pushing it too much, so down time was celebrated with an episode or three of “Deadwood”.
As time ran out we were spending up to four or five hours a night engrossed in this astonishing three series HBO tale of a Western Frontier town from around 1876. So immersed did we become that even though we had seen it before (twice) it haunted our waking and sometimes sleeping hours.
Deadwood is a truly staggering piece of television and not just because of the extreme profanity within the dialogue. The characters are superb and deeply complex, even the seemingly minor players. The ongoing struggle between morality and practicality, that allows murderers to go unpunished yet minor insults to brook serious retribution, makes the brain swirl. The way scenes are acted without dialogue or with characters saying something, when clearly talking about something else entirely, is breathtaking. Ian McShane as proprietor of the Gem saloon Al Swearengen, acts his f***ing face off. You spend the first three episodes hoping he is brought to justice for his seemingly evil machinations but you soon come to understand he is the best thing in the show. Hilarious, perceptive and deviously pragmatic to Machiavellian proportions he has many of the show’s greatest lines (“Sometimes that’s what life is. One vile f***ing task after another.”).

Yet repeated views lead you to adore nearly all the other characters however flawed. Charlie Utter, Wu, Trixie, Jane – sorry if these names mean nothing to you but the box-set is available and you will thank me if you watch it (unless your kids pick up on the language).
So we have had Deadwood in our minds for months. We arrived on Thursday and stayed in the area for three days. We went to the cemetery where Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane and Seth Bullock are buried. In the Adams museum we learnt that many of the characters from TV were based on real people: Bullock’s Jewish friend Sol Star, newspaper man A.W. Merrick and theatre impresario (played by the superb Brian Cox) Jack Langrishe.
In neighbouring Lead (pronounced Leed) we went to the mine that George Hearst bought from the brothers Fred and Moses – a mine that turned out to be the richest in the world.

We learned that there were 200 men to every woman in the hills in 1880, that only 1% of residents died from natural causes, that fire virtually destroyed Deadwood twice, (the original Gem theatre burned to the ground), saw a photo of your actual Al Swearengen and we ate a lot of Mexican food.
In fact we ate so much Mexican food at That Big Burrito Place in Lead that the couple who run it invited us for dinner and drinks on Saturday night. Their four amazing kids seemed to be under the impression that in England we live next door to Harry Potter and all tried to copy our accents. In The Blue Cactus we avoided the obnoxious drunks, Karaoke machine and Nintendo Wii to have a brilliant night.
I don’t know if we expected to feel as though we had been in an episode of Deadwood and the town itself bears no resemblance to its 1876 version but the well documented local history sparks your imagination.
Next Yellowstone

Right Song at the Right Moment::
Thursday: “Quincetera” – Mariachi El Bronx
Friday: The theme music from “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” (Ennio Morricone) which was on TV at the motel. Although with adverts and storm warnings every ten minutes it must have gone on for five hours.
Saturday: “Wild Orchid” – The White Stripes

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We had a memorable weekend near Denver staying with friends of my sister. Neil, Tessa and their son Jason didn’t know us from Bonnie and Clyde but they could not have been kinder. It was only after we sat down for dinner that we discovered that they hadn’t spoken face to face to my sister in 20 years.

 

Neil and Tessa not only provided us our first bed since Tuesday (oh the sheer bliss of it), brilliant company, lifts, food and use of their washing machine but they were a fountain of brilliant advice for our road trip. On the Sunday night, after a day in the Rocky Mountains, we found ourselves in Boulder (where Mork & Mindy was set and it’s reportedly the happiest place in America).

 

We sipped scrumptious margaritas and they helped plot our route. The next day it was raining. Monday morning on a bus with rain lashing against the windows, isn’t this what we were trying to get away from?

“I hope it’s not that one,” says Wifey pointing at a garish yellow car at the front of the car hire place. The man behind the counter had a little name badge that said he was the manager. On discovering we were English he announced that Top Gear was his favourite programme, “Have you seen it?” Yeah and the last one we saw was the repeat of the drive across the US that finished with Clarkson saying “Don’t go to America.” “You have booked an economy car, which is that yellow compact on the lot there, considering your route, may I suggest an upgrade?” – “Are you saying that car won’t make it?” I doubt that little yellow bastard had been moved in five years it was just there to frighten idiots into upgrades. We couldn’t afford an upgrade. He offered us a much better deal on an upgrade. Unaware that we had been haggling we agreed and suddenly felt like children in a sweet shop.

 

What to choose? A Ford Mustang convertible for only $10 a day more. Motherf****r! I was born to drive that car. 9.6 miles to the gallon and it was raining like hell outside. We took a Ford Taurus that promised 27 miles to the gallon and had a proper roof. I sat in the driver seat or more accurately I climbed into the cockpit of this bloody monster unable to adjust the seat never mind work out what all the flashing lights did. I got out and wandered round it getting soaking wet as Wifey peered out at me, the tip of her nose barely visible above the dash board. It was going to be like trying to drive the Starship Enterprise down the f***ing street, blindfold. An attendant showed us how to move the seats up and forward which only slightly lessoned the feeling of bewilderment and terror. What the bloody hell have we done, I can’t drive this? If I was only going to be able to drive half a mile before being involved in a fatal accident I could have at least gone out in a f***ing Mustang.

Somehow we made it to the nearest Wal-Mart. We bought the cheapest tent ($24), the cheapest sleeping bags ($10 each), beef jerky, processed meat and some carrots to frighten off crack-heads. We had been on the freeway for about half an hour when I said, “This car is f***ing brilliant!” It purred like a big cat, was more comfortable than Elton John’s sofa, the cruise control was a dream and it had a digital radio. In two hours we were in Cheyenne. We had stopped at a Days Inn in Nashville but this one wanted $139 for one night. The scuzzy place down the road, that looked like the sort of place you hide up if a Terminator or the FBI are chasing you, only wanted $46.

The girl at the liquor store over the road had said my accent made me sound “so elegant” – I looked at the spoils of the day. A motel, with rubber sheets (the reasons for which were all too horrible to consider), processed food, bread buns, cheap wine and a 40 oz bottle of beer. “We are now officially white trash.” Right Song at the Right Moment “Ruby Soho” by Rancid on Lithium Radio (Rancid on the radio in the afternoon – what a f***in’ country.) Tuesday 21st A cop breakfast of coffee and old donuts – high on the hog I tells you, real high, that’s where we’re living at. That cliché about the horizon going on forever here? It just does. Wyoming. 100 miles later, Wyoming. We can’t still be in Wyoming. Wyoming. Wyoming. Nebraska at last. Nebraska looks like Wyoming. Two gas stops later we were in Whiteclay, a Sioux town within a reservation with 89% unemployment. A dismal place and a shame on the USA. As is the massacre sight at Wounded Knee where the US cavalry murdered starving women and children in the snow, only about 120 years ago.

 

 

The Ranger at the information centre was Sioux, he was a US Marine for four years, and he felt the destruction of his people was inevitable. Was there a point where something could have been done differently? “Yes,” he said with a smile, “you could have stayed over there”. I presume he didn’t mean me personally. Hell of a thing if he did. Right Song at the Right Moment. “The Adventure” – Angels and Airwaves. Alt Nation on Sirius Digital Radio in the car. Possibly the greatest radio station in the world. At least this week it is.

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Country & Western music moved into an alternative dimension nearly 20 years ago. Tired of being considered the soundtrack to white domestic abuse and the music to molest pigs to, it moved into an alternative reality. Somewhere around the time of Billy Ray Cyrus’ “Achy Breaky Heart” by my reckoning. All you had to do to have no contact whatsoever with Country & Western music in the UK from this point was to not listen to Terry Wogan and not live in Norfolk. It was like it had ceased to exist. A good thing too, what with the steel guitar being the single most appalling sounding musical instrument this side of the noise you would get if you tried playing a mad bull elephant’s scrotum with a meat tenderiser and a faulty hoover.
At least that was the impression I had. Enamoured by Alabama 3’s take on Hank Williams and by the sublime bluegrass music played in documentaries about the American Civil War I would try to approach Country & Western music from time to time and find it almost gone from popular culture. In a brief flash of controversy The Dixie Chicks wrote the brilliantly defiant “Long Way Round” album as a reaction to the death threats they got for slagging off George Bush in Texas. Otherwise nothing.
You can only find the portal to C&W land if you a seasoned fan. Anyone else looking at a “Stars of Country Music” bill will now think “who the f*** are these people?” Nonsense you may say because it remains trendy in some quarters to name drop Patsy Cline but name five of her songs without the internet, go on, you can’t. See.
All an ill thought out theory I suspected, until we arrived in Nashville, the famous epicentre of the genre. Where were the rhinestone shirts? The cowboy hats, the nervous looking canoeists, the traumatised pigs? Flicking round the radio stations in our hire car I got some Pixies, some Pearl Jam, some hip-hop and some Back Street Boys (who were due in town after we left – a pity, I know).

The first venue we passed was the Exit In where Kings of Leon played their early home town gigs, a place that has recorded on the wall outside a formidable array of acts who have played there: Faith No More, The Ramones, BB King, The Clash, Talking Heads and Johnny Cash for example.
We found an out of town hotel with a pool and a nearby shop that sold vegetables and an even better shop that sold bottles of wine for $6.
Right Song at the Right Moment – “4 Kicks” – Kings of Leon (Wifey’s MP3 player plugged into rental car’s sound system on the road from Memphis).
The next day we went to Lynchburg, Tennessee. Of course to the Jack Daniel’s distillery, where they pretended not to recognise me, despite the likelihood that I have paid for all their holidays over recent years. You may know that you can’t actually drink the stuff there because it is a “dry county” but the sheer amount of JD paraphernalia in Lynchburg seems to allow for no other goods or comestibles to be sold. Every shop is a JD merch shop, no bog-roll, pans or bread.
Back in Nashville the search for C&W World continued. If this were a wildlife programme we would be saying in hushed tones “just as we were about to give up all hope…” at this point. But we had the location of the famous Grand Ole Opry, where the biggest stars of Country music have played for decades. The place where Johnny Cash, in the grips of an amphetamine rage, put out all the footlights with a mic stand in protest to the way the owners had treated his friend Elvis. People claiming Cash as a Country star need to be reminded he was banned from the place for decades.
So we found it, the way into C&W world; on a frightful Country and Western retail park 10 miles east of downtown Nashville. Willie Nelson has got a bar and grill out there too with a big old cartoon likeness of the notorious failed tax dodger on the wall outside. Next door is Cooter’s, named after the dim-witted mechanic in The Dukes of Hazard. There are bits of what is supposed to be The General Lee car stuck to it. It is a vast area, with hotels, restaurants, grotesqueries and assorted Good Ole bullhicky. We didn’t even let the wheels on the car stop turning never mind try and interact with the place. After a short panic where we thought we might get stuck going round in circles forever, like what most Country music does, we blasted away to safety.
Right Song at the Right Moment – “Back Down South”- Kings of Leon, on the road to Lynchburg (Wifey’s suspiciously unvaried MP3 “shuffle”).
Wednesday
Right Song – “Six Barrel Shotgun” – Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Four hours to do 217 miles so as not to get charged extra on the rental car back in Memphis. Out of Nashville rush hour traffic onto the free way having just sussed out the cruise control on our blood red KIA.

Tweet Our hope that people would stop being so damn graspy once we got away from New York was starting to look like wishful bloody thinking. Befuddled from the Amtrak experience we only gave our breakfast waitress a 12% tip instead of 15% so she came back and complained. I mumbled an apology and gave her an extra buck – we were then expected to tip the band who struck up halfway through our eggs, bacon, grits and biscuits. We didn’t ask them to start bothering us with elevator jazz while we were eating, damn it.

We later bought a small bottle of water from a shop and the girl at the check-out muttered something which turned out to be $2.50 when we inspected our change. We vowed to demand how much everything costs before we buy it in future until we leave the country, including asking “is that everything” what with taxes, gratuities, hobbit fees and whatever else they tag on. “

Americans are stoopid, lazy and,” holding up the ten bucks I’d just given him, “greedy”, said Taighe in the Voodoo Bar on Rampart St. Possibly a sweeping and unfair opinion given the size and diversity of the population, we thought, but as guests in this country it would be rude to argue. Taighe had lost his two front/lower teeth to a recent mugging but was chatty, charming, possibly erring on the side of “fabulous”, with sideburns like Junior Wolverine and a Southern accent so strong that “stoopid” actually needs about 8 Os in it to be spelt right. We were also off the tourist beat which is ill-advised but most of the famous Bourbon Street is best avoided. We ate and drank away from it; The Corner Bar provided enough gumbo and jambalaya to wedge that bloody song by The Carpenters in my head for the rest of our stay despite every bar blasting jazz at us. After a bottle in Molly’s at the Market (picture below) we went to Johnny White’s on Bourbon where the music was brilliant.

We wandered, beer in hand, through masses of whoopin’ and hollerin’ folks with beads round their necks, back down Bourbon to our hotel. Flashing lights, banging music and carnival smells, every bar has a “barker” outside urging you to join the ghastly party inside. Special mention for the guy who said nothing but just held up a sign with “Tits & Whisky” on it.

I don’t want to give the impression that all of New Orleans is like Blackpool on crack because it isn’t, it was great and well worth the trip. It is mysterious and charismatic, so many of the buildings loom with shadowed verandas like you imagine they should (especially if you have read the early Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice before she got super precious and they became unreadable).

Everybody was friendly and we would go back in a heartbeat, especially now we know which bits to avoid. But as we left the next day the guy in front of us paid a $5 tip to the man who hails the cabs for the hotel guests. $5 for blowing a bloody whistle? I don’t bloody think so. Wrong Song – can’t be doing with that rag-time jazz but no one made me go to New Orleans

Right Song at the Right Moment – walking into Johnny White’s they were playing “Lazy Eye” by the Silversun Pickups, so blessed relief from the above. Saturday 11th of June. Train to Memphis. Right Song: – Seasick Steve, “St Louis Slim” – “last I heard he was going down to Memphis” (I-pod shuffle)

Wrong Song: “An Evening in Roma” – Dean Martin. Perfect for an evening in Roma, a bit off for an afternoon train through a swamp. (I-pod shuffle)