It’s also August Bank Holiday Monday, but this is the Tavern, High Spen, second home of China Drum, if you don’t count The Shed. The customers are in fancy dress and on the small stage in front of the large China Drum poster the Christmas karaoke is playing, and to be honest this Christmas singalong is not really the sort of music my editor and I were expecting. After a Christmas medley a quartet of Geordie lads request Daydream Believer by the Monkeys and chant into the two shared mikes the alternative words, which would be "Cheer up Peter Reid" except that the first two words are changed, one of them to "off". They go on to suggest that not only is he a sad man but but he is also the manager of a rather poor football team. We all join in of course. Well, it’s Christmas.
This is our second night visiting the Tavern. Yesterday we had been made welcome with tales of the lads and their music and invited back today for the Christmas party, which is always held in August. Vanessa, who Adam calls his little sister, told us that The band were in Aberdeen preparing for their tour, but her mum, Corinne, the landlady of the Tavern, said that Adam would be back. He never misses the Christmas party. She was right, even though it took him a seven hour drive, which Adam described to us over the noise of the karaoke. He’s a great mime artist, using his hands and body language like a drummer who has thrown the sticks to someone else - Jan Alkema - and is full of a newfound freedom.
So: Baseball In The Dark. When you’re on the road or in the Tavern or playing in The Shed, how do you get a song started? Adam, Corinne and Vanessa told us.
Late one night all is quiet around High Spen, except behind the closed doors of the Tavern, where the regulars have spent another evening checking the quality of the local ale and discussing Drum music and the day Newcastle put five goals past M*******r U****d, whether there is life south of Gateshead and the usual bits of philosophy that seem important when you’re amongst friends and one day is ending and another beginning. It gets to 3 a.m. and even Cliffie is running out of things to say and Corinne takes a look around and tells them they’re all slumped around like a bunch of couch potatoes. Do you get potatoes in bunches? Anyway, she looks for a solution, something to liven them up; a point, a purpose. This, remember, is the person who organises the pub Christmas party for Bank Holiday Monday.
Then she gets it: everybody outside for a game of baseball. Brilliant idea. Okay, it’s pitch dark, but they’ve got a baseball and bat and a field. So Corinne sends them out to play baseball and she goes up to bed. And they pick sides and play commences, and of course Corinne was right, it is exactly the right thing to do, and everyone is pitching and hitting and fielding and throwing and trying to catch this baseball as it flies at them in the dark.
And Adam is still full of the sort of philosophy that arises every time you tilt the neck of that Newcastle Brown bottle, and he watches his friends searching the sky and the outfield for that baseball, and he thinks about someone who is not there, and he starts thinking metaphorically, as songwriters do: "The ball does a thousand miles an hour and it could land anywhere/ I don’t really know you from me, you could be doing anything/ It’s just like playing baseball in the dark".
Then the bat breaks, as things will at that time in the morning when many are gathered together. So, this being Geordieland and there being two teams and a ball, the game transmutes to football, and it’s even harder to see the ball now: "The ball is getting nearer but all I see is space/ I couldn’t even see the call, never mind the face/ It’s just like playing baseball in the dark".
And as Adam mimes it for us, over the noise of the Christmas karaoke, we watch him throw the ball and swing the bat and we look up through the dark ready to catch it, and we look across at Corinne and check our watches and wonder whether in a couple of hours she’ll order everyone out to the field.
"As long as I’m on Adam’s side," my editor tells me.