Last updated: June 15, 2026
This is Part 4 of my UK trip series. New here? You can catch up on the earlier entries:
Part 1 — arriving in the UK and my first live event with The Big Push ·
Part 2 — Live Music, Long Trains, and a Guitar Pick I’ll Never Forget
Part 3 — Visiting Ren’s Brighton: A Renegade’s Walking Tour Through the City Behind the Music.
Otherwise, read on.
After the London weekend, I came back to Brighton on a Tuesday afternoon, and what followed turned out to be the quietest stretch of the whole UK trip. The Big Push played Chalk that Friday, and then I stayed on in Brighton for another full week before heading up to Manchester. So it was the better part of two weeks, with one big night near the front of it and a lot of slow days on either side.
I want to talk about that stretch, because the slow days ended up mattering as much as the big night. But I’ll be honest about where this is going. The center of this post is the Chalk show, and what happened after it, when I ended up near the front of a meet and greet line and got to meet Ren.
I’ll get there. Let me set the days around it up first.
A Slow Week, and Why I Needed One
There is a particular kind of tired that builds up on a trip like this. Not just physical, though there was plenty of that after Bristol and the head cold I dragged around London. It’s more that you spend so much energy being somewhere new, meeting people, navigating trains and queues and unfamiliar streets, that eventually you need a few days where nothing is required of you.
This was that week.
I wandered the Lanes again, this time without trying to find anything. I sat in cafes. I ran into Renegades I already knew and a few I didn’t. I let Brighton be a place I lived in for a little while rather than a place I was visiting. Some days I had no plan at all, and I’ve started to think those are the days that actually teach you something on a trip this long. You can’t be a tourist for thirteen months. At some point you have to just exist in a place, and a slow week in Brighton turned out to be good practice for that. I did laundry.
It was also the stretch that gave me two of my favorite small stories from the entire UK leg, both of them on the same slow afternoon. One involves a friend named Randy and an Uber driver. The other involves a band busking on a street corner. I’ll tell both.
Randy and the Uber Driver
I’m going to keep this one short, partly because it’s the kind of story that’s better in person, and partly because some of it is Randy’s to tell.
This one happened in the quiet week after Chalk, before I left for Manchester, but it belongs with the slow days so I’ll tell it here. It was one of the nicer afternoons of that stretch. Two friends and I decided to chase down a few more Ren locations. I’d had it in my head to find the steps Ren stands on during part of the “Money Ties” video. I failed that mission completely. But the day wasn’t a loss. We toured the church I wrote about in the last post, the Church of St. Bartholomew, where the Big Push filmed “Swan Song.” Standing inside it again was worth the trip on its own.
After we’d wandered that part of the city for a while, we decided to Uber over to the North Laine area to walk around. My friend Randy wanted to head back to her hostel instead, so the plan was simple: the driver would drop Roxy and me off first, at the spot where we wanted to start walking, and then carry on and take Randy to her hostel. We added the extra stop in the app before we even pulled away. Clear instructions. GPS set.
Something got lost in translation.
I think what happened is that the driver, somewhere in the back-and-forth of three people talking, kept hearing hospital when every one of us was saying hostel. And once that word lodged in his head, it stayed there. He ignored the app. He ignored the GPS. He had decided, with total conviction, that this woman needed a hospital, and he was going to deliver her to one.
Here’s the part that makes it. Before any of that resolved, he dropped Roxy and me off first, near the North Laines, exactly where we’d asked to go. Then he drove off with Randy still in the car, headed for the local hospital instead of her hostel.
So picture it from the driver’s side. Two people climb out, cheerful, off to go shopping and wander the Lanes. The third one stays in the car, apparently bound for the emergency room. From where he sat, we must have looked like the worst friends in Brighton. Take her to the hospital, we’ve got shopping to do. We’ll find out later whether she survived. No time to deal with this, just get her to the hospital.
Randy did, for the record, make it out of her supposed medical emergency. She tells the whole thing better than I do, and the version she tells after the fact is genuinely one of the funniest stories from the entire UK leg.
The Ren Mural
One of the main stops was to see the Ren Mural, painted by Mick Mowgli last year I believe, with Ren’s face and SickBoi logos. Mick’s artwork can be seen all over Brighton.
The Gulls on Ship Street
The same afternoon as the Randy story, Roxy and I were walking through the Lanes with no real destination when we heard music coming from a side street. We followed it, the way you do, and turned onto Ship Street to find The Gulls busking.
If you’ve watched any amount of Big Push footage, Ship Street will look familiar. It’s a favorite spot for buskers in Brighton, and it shows up again and again in videos, the Big Push and plenty of other artists, all drawn to the same stretch of pavement. There’s something about the acoustics, the foot traffic, the way the buildings hold the sound. It’s become a kind of unofficial stage in the city, and recognizing it in person, after seeing it so many times on a screen, was its own small thrill.
The Gulls were the opening band for the Big Push, so seeing them out there in the open was already a treat. But the timing was what made it. Roxy and I happened on them right as they were getting started. There wasn’t even a crowd yet, just the band and the two of us and an otherwise ordinary Brighton street.
That gap, before the crowd forms, is rare. We got to actually talk to them. We told them we’d been following them on the tour, and they were gracious about it. They signed CDs for us and took a group photo. Then the crowd started to build, and we stayed, and they played a long set of their own songs and a handful of covers. I took some video, and I’ll put a couple of clips below.
Toward the end of the set, Gorran and Romain showed up. They played several songs alongside the Gulls, right there on the street, and for a few minutes Ship Street had an impromptu lineup that no one had announced and no one had paid for. You had to be standing there. We were.
More Signatures for the Collection
That same Ship Street session is where Simon introduced me to Vitkus, who was just there as a spectator, watching the Gulls like the rest of us. He also reintroduced me to Gorran and Romain, and at some point the conversation turned, as it does in this community, to tattoos.
I asked them to sign my arm.
I should explain. I’ve been thinking for a while about what my next couple of tattoos are going to be, and I know at least some of them are going to be Ren related. The music has carried me through enough that it feels right to mark it permanently. So when the chance came up to get signatures from members of the Big Push, signatures I could potentially turn into ink later, I took it. Gorran and Romain signed my arm. I’m still working out exactly what I want and where, and whether the Big Push signatures make the cut alongside the Ren pieces, but the idea is sitting with me. I like that it’s not decided yet. Some of these will be permanent, and I’d rather get them right than get them fast.
More on the tattoo plans in a future post, once I actually figure them out.
The Big Push at Chalk
Chalk holds under a thousand people. Of all the Big Push shows I caught on this run, it was by far the most intimate, and intimacy changes everything about a show like this. You’re not watching from a distance. You’re in it. The band can see faces. You can feel the room move as one thing instead of a thousand separate people.
I’d been to the bigger shows by then, and they have their own kind of magic: the scale, the wall of sound, the sense of being part of something huge. But Chalk was a different animal. It felt like the band was playing in a room rather than to an arena, and when the music dropped into the quiet moments, the ones that built into so many of these songs, you could hear the whole room holding still.
The band delivered everything I’d hoped for. The night itself, though, wasn’t my favorite of the run, and I’ll be honest about why. There was a fan near me who spent the entire set talking to her friends at full volume, and once I noticed it I couldn’t un-notice it. I’m sure she was just excited but i thought it was a bit rude to be talking so much and so loudly in the middle of songs. My touch of the ’tisms kicked in, the autistic wiring that turns one repeating distraction into the only thing my brain will hold onto, and I spent more of the show than I wanted to working to tune her out.
The Meet and Greet: Meeting Ren
When the show ended, a meet and greet line formed, and I got into it quickly. The way the venue handled this was very well done compared to the other locations — orderly and calm. I was lucky enough that I ended up near the front of the queue, which is not something that usually happens to me. I am not a person who lands at the front of lines. But there I was.
And then I met Ren. Again.
I say again because I’d technically met him once before, a year ago, in New York City. I have no illusion that he remembers me. The man meets hundreds and hundreds of people at these events, and I was one face in one line in one city on a long tour. But meeting him a second time, after seeing him live at least three times at this point and after everything his music has meant to me, hit differently than the first time did.
I got to tell him what his music has done for me. Not a speech — there isn’t time for a speech in a meet and greet line — but enough. And here is the thing I keep coming back to: I could genuinely tell he was listening. Not performing politeness, not nodding while looking past me to the next person. He was there for it. I had 100% of his attention. When I shared a bit of my story, what the songs carried me through, he took it in. You can feel the difference between someone who is being kind out of obligation and someone who is actually present.
He gave me a hug. We took a few photos. I asked him to doodle a Freckled Angels logo on my arm and told him it was going to be a tattoo. He took his time drawing it, and I greatly appreciated him doing that for me. The whole thing was brief, the way these things have to be, but it was real, and I walked away carrying a memory that will stay with me.
I don’t know how to write about this without it sounding like fan worship, and maybe some of it is. But the honest version is simpler than that. A stranger made music that got me through some hard things in my life. It was a companion of sorts while I was dealing with my father’s illness and eventual death. Some songs validated things I’d carried for years. Others challenged me to start thinking about things differently. Like I mentioned in my first Sabbatical Files article, my decision to travel and try to find myself again, to figure out what my next chapter will be is something I partly credit Ren’s music for getting me to a mental place where it seemed like the best idea.
Getting to look that person in the eye and say thank you, and have him actually hear it, is one of the moments from this whole trip I’ll keep. He was so sweet and kind to me.
Ok enough about Ren….for now…
I met Glenn, the drummer from the Big Push. We talked about the run of shows I’ve been at. He was easy to talk to, generous with his time, the way the whole band has been every time our paths have crossed. I got a photo with him.
I also got to see Gorran again, and Romain, who at that point signed the guitar pick he had given me back at the Bristol show. So now I have a signed pick from him, which closes a loop I started a week earlier when he climbed down into the pit to hand it to me in the first place. It’s one of the few physical things from this trip I know I’ll hold onto.
The Morning After: A Grown Man and His Fear of Needles
I woke up early the next day. Earlier than I needed to, the way you do when your brain has already decided something before you have.
I walked into our breakfast spot and announced, to anyone who would listen, that I was going through with it. The Freckle Angel that Ren had drawn on my arm the night before was going to become a real tattoo, and it was going to happen today, before I could talk myself out of it.
I need to be honest about something I’d been saying all week. I have always been afraid of getting a tattoo. Not afraid of the commitment, not afraid of what people would think. Afraid of the pain. Plain and simple. I had mentioned this to the group more than once, probably more than they wanted to hear, the way you keep poking at the thing that scares you to see if it still bites.
So when I made my announcement over breakfast, I followed it with a request. I asked if anyone wanted to come along. For moral support, I said. Or, more accurately, to watch a grown man potentially cry in a tattoo chair over a design smaller than a coaster. I figured if I was going to do the bravest small thing I’d done in a while, I might as well have witnesses.
The Freckled Angels symbol — a simple drawing of two wings meant to represent an angel — is what Ren drew on my arm. I decided to add the line “So it goes.” One thing I share with Ren is that I also love the writing of Kurt Vonnegut. One of Ren’s favorite books is Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut is known for satirical, darkly humorous novels that blend science fiction with sharp social critique. The line “So it goes” is repeated throughout Slaughterhouse-Five, appearing each time death is mentioned, and Ren has used it in a handful of his songs as well.
I resonate with it as a symbol — a reminder that life, this thing we’re all experiencing, is short, and that we should make the best of it no matter what our internal storylines might have taught us.
So, as I mentioned, my three new friends — Randy, Roxy, and Sarah — came with me for support, but what happened after my tattoo was finished was pretty special. All three decided to get tattoos too, each one Ren-related and meaningful. We’ll forever be tattoo buddies.
What the Week Added Up To
It was a slow week. I keep using that word because it’s the right one. Between the Chalk show and Manchester, I had this stretch of Brighton time that on paper doesn’t sound like much. A few cafes. Some wandering. A busking session I stumbled into. A meet and greet I got lucky in. A tattoo I finally stopped being afraid of.
But that’s sort of the point of a trip like this, or at least it’s becoming the point. The big moments, the Chalk show, meeting Ren, are the ones I’ll tell people about. The slow days are the ones that made the big moments land. You can’t be pointed at the peak the whole time. You need the quiet days in between to actually feel the loud ones.
I’m still figuring out how to do this, this whole slowing down thing. A slow week in Brighton was good training for the thirteen months ahead, where most of the days, if I’m honest, are going to be slow ones. Learning to be okay with that, to find the moments and the unplanned afternoons.
In my final blog post in this series i head up to Manchester to see The Big Push one last time.