A thaw has descended on Big Freeze Britain ™ and amid the dwindling patches of compacted slush and ice we shuffle gingerly, easing ourselves into the grey new year. However, if there’s one man guaranteed grab us and our tentative January blues and batter them into shape then it’s Henry Rollins, that tireless devourer of life experience.
Back in town on his Frequent Flyer tour, Rollin’s latest barrage of spoken word fires off a crash-course update on his itinerary in the two years since he was last on tour. At a time when most of us are already faltering in our dedication to newly acquired gym membership Rollins’ relentless oomph is chastening.
Since 2008, then, he has among other things: acted in a regular role in the prestigious TV series Sons of Anarchy; gotten lost in the sprawling slums of Bangladesh; wandered obliviously amid a Nepalese general strike (thinking it was just a lazy Sunday with added police); spread a little surreptitious pro-Tibet propaganda in Tiananmen Square; sampled the jaw-dropping luxury of a Saudi Arabian palace complex in the company of a playboy prince; witnessed the dwindling annual protests against the Bhopal chemical plant disaster, a sobering reminder that multinational companies can and do get away with murder; and indeed arrived here in Salford a week after attending a festival in the Sahara desert.
As a lifestyle it’s faintly exhausting to even to listen to – his motto of ‘knowledge without mileage equals bullshit’ clearly isn’t empty sloganeering - and in his delivery it seems that he never pauses for breath. In the course of the entire evening he allows himself two - literally two - hasty gulps of his water bottle, both grabbed at points while the audience are laughing. It all adds up to a sense that life is ticking away and has to be grabbed to wring out every useful second. Five minutes into the show his microphone fails, and, barely pausing to acknowledge this, he simply raises his voice and carries on yelling his anecdote across the auditorium until the sound is reconnected.
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After two and half hours he concludes – a little reluctantly, one suspects – and sends out the audience, shell-shocked with knowledge and second-hand experience, into the night. Presumably the majority of us will return to comfortable nights in front of the tv, but out there we know that a relentless, tattooed source of dynamism and inspiration will continue to pound the beaten tracks and beyond of the entire world.
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