Asia Minor - Guided By Voices - Half Smiles of the Decomposed - 2005

So we continue our glut of GBV songs with a slower, though not slow, little pop number. Like many of the songs on Half Smiles...it is more a case of "hey that's not so bad!" rather than a "This is F-ing awesome!" But after the catastrophe of blandness that was Earthquake Glue, it was better to see GBV go out with half way decent album than an almost totally forgettable one.

After we finished the tour of the Necropolis we made our way back down the hill and into town. We were walking down (and South) towards the Trongate area to see what was going on down there. Along the way we happened to find the oldest bar in Glasgow.

Unlike a city like Dublin, which prides itself on having several still functioning Medieval bars, Glasgow's bars were all more modern. The oldest they could come up with was The Olde Carriage House which dated from the mid-19th century and had many pictures of the original patrons to prove it. While it lacked the "bar from a Dungeons and Dragons Game" charm of say The Brazen Head in Dublin, it was quite interesting to see the pictures of the bar and to get a sense of what life may have been like in 19th century Glasgow.

As for the bar in modern day Glasgow, at 3 in the afternoon on a Monday...well, it was slow, as expected, and more than a bit surly. Four or five old men milled around the bar, and one middle aged dude with a pony tail and a distinctly Alan Moore vibe. We grabbed a pint each and sat quietly in the corner. The TV was playing a creaky World War II film from the fifties called The Frog Men...Richard Widmark was the only remotely familiar actor in the whole thing...but we got a considerable amount of pleasure quietly heckling the film with the Alan Moore dude. We finished up our pints and headed out looking for lunch.