Aidan wants to play pool, but I refuse. I hate pool. Besides, he always beats me. We grab a table. On the dance floor, two heavy set ladies are busy shaking what their Mammas’ gave them. (“Those words on the sign aren’t just the name of the bar,” Aidan warned me earlier. “They’re also what you shout at the taxi driver first thing next morning…”)

He taps me on the arm. “I know, I see them.” But that’s not what he’s pointing at. Christ. It couldn’t be. “Bill Byrne?” I whisper. “Groundskeeper Billy,” he chuckles. “Is it him?” “Well, it sure as shit looks like him.”

Bill Byrne is the groundsman at our football club. He is also one of the most intense human beings we’ve ever met. This might be the first time anyone has seen him not wearing wellies.

“You reckon that’s his wife?” Aidan wonders. “Oh, it’s gotta be,” I reply. “They both look bored stiff.”

The most enduring legend about Groundskeeper Billy is that he has metal plate in his head. Now I don’t know if that’s true or not. But once, when we got caught out in a thunderstorm, I noticed him sprinting for the clubhouse in a manic, zigzag pattern – like a soldier dodging sniper fire.

We wave politely. He returns the salute. Then he says something to his companion. She reaches for her handbag and they stand up. They’re hardly coming over, are they? They’re hardly joining us. Christ, they are.

“Wouldn’t have thought this was your scene exactly, Bill?” says Aidan, after the introductions are made. “Oh, I’m a fan of the rock,” he says. “The pop. The hip hop.”

“The hip-hop?”

He doesn’t elaborate. There is stony silence. Neither of our new companions is exactly a scintillating conversationalist. I try another tack.

“How long have you and Bill been together?” I ask Delilah. “This is our first night out together,” she replies. “We met on the internet.” There is an even longer, more awkward silence.

“Grounds are looking great this weather,” I offer. Bill takes his job extremely seriously. “It’s dry,” he shrugs. “That’s all-important. Because the powers that be wouldn’t think twice about playing a match after 50 or 60 mm of rain. Then they wonder why the surfaces get cut to shit…” He shakes his head bitterly.

More silence. “The new nets are looking great,” Aidan ventures. “The markings all seem to be in straight lines,” I chip in. Bill just nods. Yet another awkward silence. Then Aidan leans over.

“Here Bill,” he says. “Would you say you have ninety nine problems but the pitch ain’t one?”
He thinks about it for a second.

“Yes,” replies Groundskeeper Billy, deadpan. “Yes, I would…”

I stand up rather abruptly at this point.

“Okay,” I announce. “Who’s for a game of pool?”

* lighthouse attendant
* homeless professor
* marijuana Santa Claus
* Vice President of Ultimate Frisbee
* person who looks like they write on alpaca message boards
* Wolf Blitzer at Burning Man

He also claimed that he Febrezes his beard. As always with SNL, it was a pretty uneven show. But Galifianakis’s contributions were hilarious.

Uptight (1965)

The first stone cold classic. Later pilfered shamelessly by a band whose name doesn’t even deserve to be mentioned on the same page.

I Was Made to Love Her (1967)

Perhaps my favourite of them all. The best bit is where he refers to himself in the third person. “You know Stevie ain’t gonna leave you, baby…” So cool. He’s only seventeen years old.

I Don’t Know Why (1968)

Later covered by the Stones the night Brian Jones was found dead.

Living For The City (1973)

If he was a genius at 12, its hard to think of a word to describe what he had blossomed into by 23. Even the endlessly arrogant Kanye West admits it would be sacrilege for any artist to even attempt to emulate Wonder’s classic albums of the early Seventies – Talking Book and Innervisions.

Sir Duke / I Wish (1981)

“Music is a world within itself, with a language we all understand…” By the time he recorded Songs in the Key of Life in 1976, Stevie Wonder was at the height of his powers. Of course, it was all downhill from there. But he had nothing left to prove. This version of of his Duke Ellington tribute was recorded live in Tokyo in 1981.

Show business is a fickle industry. And certainly these damning excoriations of his music, the first written by myself, the second, and more hilarious, by my friend Mark, can’t have helped either. (To this day, people leave comments accusing Mark and myself of being jealous of Appleton’s talent. Why? Just because our own attempt to fuse funk, chillout and drum n’ base – Funkstain – also ended in failure? Phh… That has nothing to do with it!)

Subsequent to all that, his drummer got in touch to take issue with some of the things we’d written.

The good news today is that green shoots of recovery are finally appearing. Two new songs recently appeared on the singer’s MySpace page. The first, entitled My Little Girlfriend, suggests Appleton may finally have found love, possibly with a small child or a dwarf. The other is a number he likes to call Music Made a Man of Me. (Come off it, son. Sealing the deal with that hot girl in the Dirty Funk video made a man of you. Music played, at best, a supporting role.)

The 20-year-old has also recently started Twitting. Sample tweet:

Who says you can’t mix a little acoustic with a little disco in the same record? To play safe is not play.

This is the Steve we know and love. So chin up, bruv. Get back on the horse. As wise man one said: The funk don’t stop, it just moves away.

P.S. HOLY SHIT! Colin just informs me that Steve has his own television pilot! On the internet! And he performs Dirty Funk at the beginning of each episode! (Oh, and it appears to have been edited by a drunk five-year-old…)

#2
So the vendor makes the hot dog and the monk pays him with a twenty, which the vendor pockets. After waiting for a moment, the monk asks for his change.

The vendor looks at him and says, “Change must come from within.”