Freak Out the Squares: Life in a band called Pulp by Russell Senior

Author:Russell Senior
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781314715
Publisher: Aurum

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Werewolf Hotel

During the planning, we’d attempted to leave as much open to chance as possible and had no accommodation booked for the long drive back to England. The route doesn’t take us through any population centres and lacks hotels beyond the alienating travel-tavern type. The camper van affords us the luxury of being able to do this as, at a pinch, we can sleep in it, though it would feel pretty rum to do so after headlining a festival.

We bid a fond adieu to Barcelona and – on the advice of a truck driver, who tells us that this is a scenic route, with a bridge worth seeing – head north towards Millau. Out of Spain and into the Midi, on an empty road that sweeps past limestone gorges riddled with caves. The drama of the landscape increases as the road winds through the Massif Central, under crag and over ravine, until the Millau bridge takes our breath away: arching gracefully beyond the precipices it spans, immense tapering pillars throwing down spidery stays that hold the whole improbable edifice as it curves lightly in the air.

There is one hotel vaguely en route, with a strangely antiquated-looking website. Ralph seems to think he might have accidentally booked it. There is no confirmation email, as is usual, but a grandiloquent and courtly request for us to await a telegram pops up on the screen before fading out. So it’s all a bit up in the air.

A stop at a complex that specialises in candied angelica, where Gareth wanders off to collect brightly coloured flints only to receive a vigorous chapeauing. Another shop that makes a big to-do about cassoulet, displaying it in jars – assuring content and quality by revealing the oddments of dismembered fauna, snouts, wings and webs pressed distorted against the sides of the glass. At twilight the proprietor of a small petrol station fails to answer the bell, leaving me to peruse a wall dedicated to postcards featuring only bilberries and wolves.

Small deer skip off into the undergrowth, birds of prey circle in the spiralling updrafts over volcanic peaks. Gareth says that you never catch up on lost sleep, you never get it back, but Gareth says axolotls turn into newts.

We enter the decaying spa-town – whose ornate cornices, oval windows and porticoed doorways are decorated with recumbent putti, bundles of lictors, swags of husks and bursting baroque pomegranates – and drive between stone pillars, down a gravel driveway to the front of the hotel. It’s late and we don’t want to make a commotion in this silent town, so tiptoe whispering along the crunching gravel and tip our hats to a grande dame who greets us outside: it seems we are expected.

Now this is the truly strange bit. Everyone is in clothes at least a century old. A monocled man who looks like the Kaiser wears a cummerbund and monstrance-like medals on a silk sash. Women in ballgowns and tiaras float through the foyer. There is no wedding,

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