Benefits - Middlesbrough

Middlesbrough is our home. It's where many in the band have lived and worked for years. You know the Boro, a Teesside town that emerged during the Industrial Revolution to become a global powerhouse in the iron and steel industries. With rapid growth comes consequences. Boom and bust. And more bust. And a League Cup win. And bust again. It's still home though and yeah, it's fine to look back on former glories with misty eyes, but it's also important to look to the future...and hope that the towns transport infrastructure will one day improve.

2023 has been an amazing year for the band - signing to Invada Records, releasing our album NAILS, playing Glastonbury, performing in Europe for the first time etc - and we're finishing it all off with a hometown show at Middlesbrough Town Hall on Saturday December 16th. You're invited.
TICKETS https://www.seetickets.com/event/bene...

It’d be quicker to walk, I mutter under my breath.
My car trundles along Marton Road valiantly trying to get me to the cinema on time.
Should have been there ten minutes ago. Probably missed the trailers.
Fingers tapping the steering wheel, maybe there’s been an accident.
Or the backend of school run? SUVs, plastic, white leathered. Parked in the bus stop.
Perhaps it’s just the continual crawl of workers,
vape smoke billows out of every car. Each one single, occupied, bleary eyed, company tied, as we wait for a song we know, to counter the standstill.
Maybe Queen? Nothing modern. Not at this time. It’s too early for that.
New builds, old builds, abandoned builds,
A space where something used to be.
A space where something MIGHT be.
A new sports centre, cut price supermarket.
A package drop-off point underneath some knackered 70s flats.
Red light after red light after red light…then roadworks…
..brow beaten concrete, orange brick and ornings.

This place may sometimes look like it’s had its day, but it’s still young.
Two hundred years ago all of this was fields.
No modern art gallery, no transporter bridge, no calls for an IKEA to be housed near the football stadium where there’s rumoured to be ample parking. Nothing.
But this town grew. Oh, how it grew.
Back then it was a hotspot for iron.
A harsh smog breathing monster, a Victorian powerhouse cliché.
People came from all over the UK, Europe, and the world to live and work in this unruly metal boom town. We are true children of the Industrial Revolution.
A town built on migration, remember that.

Yet, I’ve never been one to overly romanticise the past.
I struggle to blather on about crumbling glories from lifetimes ago.
I don’t clink and clank pints wearing rose tinted glasses, beered up to the hilt,
Tugging at an invented memory, lusting for a past that I’m not sure ever existed.
Even the Carling Cup victory seems distant now.
What can we say WE achieved. What milestones can you or I, create.
Where is the new?
Be as proud as you want to be…if it fills your heart…but keep looking forward.
That blue bridge, that little fella, that road to hell, that béchamel, that chicken, or pork, that scale model ship in the shopping centre, the Spirit of 86, populist local politics…they don’t define us.

The new version of Popmaster comes on the radio, it’s alright, it’s complicated but I like it.
It’s an attempt at progress.
I think I get more answers right than they do.
One day I might even try and be a contestant.
This magnificent town quite literally forged its own history.
So, let’s crack on and continue. Just like my car crawls, move along. Move along. Move along.