Oxygen (Catfish And The Bottlemen/1975)

Van

The UK festival season always peaked with Glastonbury, that was what i thought anyway, and it was what everyone always said.

I'd had Honeymoons set turned up loud before our last gig, jumping up and down on the settee with Bondy as we geared ourselves up for the night ahead, but then when we'd come off stage that night, and Fliss had sobbed down the phone to me about Radiohead, all coked up and a mess, the summer seemed to reach its peak.

Suddenly after that night I found myself longing for Autumn, longing for skinny jeans and jumpers and huge winter coats, a good excuse to stay indoors with a cuppa and write a new tune.

Then the night she'd called me on the way back from a party at Reading, I'd felt myself feel that desire even more, a curdled sickness in the pit of my stomach when she'd told me they'd seen Rhys and Danny. she'd sounded nauseous herself, this strange dissonance in her laugh and her forced happy tones. I could tell there was something she wasn't letting onto me and now all I wanted to do was ask her about it, but I couldnt.

So instead I listened to their interviews, I over analyzed her lyrics, trying desperately to work out what they were about, making guesses at who had been on her mind as she had penned another melody.

She'd been doing the rounds again on social media, making the scene by all accounts. A party last night after Leeds, and not just any party.

I wasn't sure whether she knew where she'd ended up, whether when she'd been twirling round the living room to Arctic Monkeys with Lennon Gallagher, that she'd clocked that she was in his fathers hotel room, that I was Liam Gallaghers party they had crashed, but the word going round now was that she'd made it.

Not so much her friends, but her and Kitty, photographed reeling drunk with two Gallaghers, well they'd made it now, and who knew what kind of phonecalls their manager would receive in the morning.

In many ways i felt happy for her, this was the kind of attention she needed, all be in phony and pointless, a distraction from their real talents. But seeing a video on Gene's Instagram of Fliss and Lennon with their arms around one another, swaying along to Let It Be, twinned with the selfies they had taken in someone's bedroom, left me feeling a little disheartened, a little worried that perhaps I had just been a stop gap until shed found someone more famous than me to rest on.

Now as I lay back on the settee in a hotel lobby waiting for Benji and Bondy to come back downstairs and join me on a night about town. There was a band on at a bar round the corner who we were all dying to see. I looked up at the ceiling, gagging for a cigarette but too lazy to go outside, I studied the patterns and gazed up at the chandelier above my head. It was one hell of a fancy hotel, it still blew my mind that a lad like me had ever even been allowed in it.

And then my phone rang again and though I'd been expecting Fliss, I got my mam instead.

"Hiya love," she beamed down the phone, "eh you'll never guess who I've just seen down the seafront," she said practically bubbling over.

"Who?" I grinned her enthusiasm ever so contagious.

"Fliss's Dad!" She smiled, and my stomach dropped, I didnt want to talk about her now, not until I got to talk to her. "I couldn't believe it when I saw him you know, he's not been round our way for years!"

"Really?" I chuckled, "how mads that eh, Fliss will love that,"

"We had a proper catch up you know, talked about all those times when yous two were younger and all the trouble his kids used to cause, we were talking all about her band too, he was saying he'd seen her once before at a gig in Liverpool, that he was dead proud of her, it was lovely you know...  you can tell her tonight, wait, you are seeing her tonight?"