The Wake

I finally attended my first premiership game, Fulham v Aston Villa at Fulham. Given the number of Americans on the Fulham team, we opted to support them. They hadn’t won in several months, and Aston Villa was towards the top of the league. We went down to a local pub before the match and took down a few with the faithful. We went to the Fulham store and bought scarves, and then headed down to the field. Down 1 goal early, the energy was momentarily stolen. American Clint Dempsey continued to play well, and Brian McBride made a dramatic return from injury late in the game, his first bit of action in months. He was the former captain of the club for several seasons. The Cottagers stormed back to a 2-1 victory, the winning goal coming on a Jimmy Bullard free kick late in the match. As time expired, the entire stadium sang and danced merrily to the sounds of Franki Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You.” A strange choice I thought, but I wasn’t complaining as it allowed me to sing along. I still support the Tottenham Hotspurs as my main team, but their tickets are hard to come by, as they’ve got a following comparable to the other London juggernauts, Chelsea and Arsenal. I’ve also seen the Queens Park Rangers play, but they’re in the league below the premiership, the championship league, which is not to be confused the Champions League, which is an entirely different thing all together.

As far as playing soccer goes, on weekends I head down to Regents Park quite frequently. There are many pick up games to be found, and I met a Japanese fellow named Yoshi whom I now correspond with to organize games. I also joined a 5 v. 5 league with some other American students from my school. They play D3 soccer in Pennsylvania, and we’ve stacked up quite competitively with some of the other teams in the league so far. Occasionally, I’ll go and practice with the Imperial College team, but I arrived to late in the year to actually join.
A few nights after that Fulham victory, I was over in East London at the Life club in Old Street. They were having a dance night called Funk Tarantino. The concept was from house DJ, DJ Inspector Imposter. The night was based around his love of Tarantino soundtracks. He played several songs from the movies, and just a lot of Afro, Northern Soul, hip hop, electro, soul, reggae, garage rock, surf, and rock’n'roll in general. Great fun. Old Street/ Liverpool Street/ Brick Lane area is rapidly becoming one of my favorites. I’ve seen several shows in a record store just of Brick Lane named Rough Trade Records. A French artist named Sebastian Tellier, and tomorrow I’m going down to see Vampire Weekend do an in-store performance. A London group named Pete and Pirates played there recently too. All of them are worth checking out. Here’s the link to the website. It’s a great resource for keeping informed on what’s catching fire here in London. And if you happen to be intown, all you have to do is shoot them an email to get on the guest list for the instore shows.

To read the review of the Sebastian Tellier show, click here