unpopular

Hooptedoodle

I can’t say I’m a great Elmore Leonard fan, but his ten rules of writing (as linked to by ET this morning) are quite compelling and entertaining. I’ll be flicking back to those when I embark on my NaNoWriMo effort in a couple of months. It also occurred to me whilst in the bookstore this morning that James Sallis has surely written some kind of similar ‘rules’ for writing. There is nothing more than an obscure memory that suggests this, which inevitably means he has probably written no such thing, but what the hell. I just felt it suddenly necessary to remember James Sallis. His sole tome on the ‘crime’ shelves (the extraordinarily fine ‘Ghost Of A Flea’) looked quite forlorn this morning and I was sorely tempted to buy it regardless of the fact that I have it already. I often get that impulse in bookstores; the urge to ‘rescue’ favourites from the shelves. Used to get it occasionally in record stores too, but I can’t even remember the last time I was in a real record store, which probably says a lot about how times change and all that. In fact I’m sorely tempted to dig out all of Sallis’ Lew Griffin novels and give them another spin. They were superb pieces of writing, weren’t they?

Pink Flag

Whilst writing yesterday I took a moment to glance back at a few older pieces. It can be strange looking back on your old work, regardless of media. You recognize the impulses and meanings behind their creation, but you don’t necessarily recognize them as still being yours.

One of the pieces I looked at was this one. It was from a series of fragments that cropped up on the very first incarnation of the Tangents website, and were themselves variations on the theme started several years previously when I was making a desperate attempt at a novel. The asterisks are a stylistic fragmentation hangover from that.

I still like this piece, although I am unsure if that’s just because it captures a long lost moment from my past. Perhaps I kid myself that I actually like it because of the clipped structure. There is a nod to The Great Gatsby in there too, though I am not sure anyone would spot it, just as I am not sure anyone would notice the old switcheroo at the end of the story I posted yesterday.

I also used this story as the basis of my first ‘published’ recording. A very rudimentary hash of sampling recorded on an old HP PC and a four track tape machine that I borrowed from school. All the samples were taken from the Wire album. My track appeared on the infamous ‘The Family Twee’ double CD in 1998 and I think I can safely say it was the least musical effort on there. I think I may have also performed it ‘live’ at my one and only performance, upstairs at the Betsey Trotwood prior to the first Bowlie. I was very nervous then after spotting Nick Currie and Amelia Fletcher in the audience…

Anyway, here for your aural torture is the track. And the story.

The Duke Of Harringay: ‘Pink Flag’

PINK FLAG

[militia]

Lucy and Sarah came around at two. This was usual.

*

Sundays are so boring, said Sarah, and Lucy and I said Uh-huh together as a reply. I said How's school? and Sarah goes, Usual.

*

You Bored? I ask Lucy, and she says No in a strange drawl, pushing the fingers of her right hand up through her hair.

*

Lucy did that a lot.

*

Around half two Sarah goes, Let's go out for a walk, and we say Okay, and Why not.

[shells]

There was still a building site in those days, and we walked around through shells of houses. We climbed up large mounds of earth, and clambered down the other side.

*

I've got a flag, said Sarah, and she did. It was an old broom handle with a piece of pink plastic that she stuck on top. A Pink Flag, I said. Very Wire. Lucy said Huh? and I said nothing.

*

I'm going to claim that hill, said Sarah, pointing to an earth mound near the burn that ran the length of the golf course. There was a yellow bulldozer parked near it and I said It won't be there tomorrow but Sarah just goes I don't care.

*

Lucy grabbed my hand and smiled. Come on, she said, and that was all.

[pink flag]

We stood, the three of us together, on top of the earth mound. Sarah stuck the broom handle into it. It leaned slightly towards the west and the sea, and the pink plastic flapped almost imperceptibly in the slight breeze. Lucy's white skirt wafted too, and I noticed that it had small smudges of brown around the hem.

*

This is my hill, said Sarah. This is my flag.

*

It was a pink flag.

Alistair Fitchett, 1995

Catch Me Now I'm Falling

[The World Keeps Going Round]

Martin always met Julie on a Friday night. Maybe not every Friday, certainly, but regularly enough for Julie to joke last week that he should change his name to Terry. She even suggested that one of these days they should meet at Waterloo station, and even though it was corny as hell, Martin had laughed because coming from Julie it was a great line.

He was not sure why they were friends; couldn’t really pinpoint the time when he took it for granted that they were. In fact if he were being honest he would say that he tried not to think of it, mostly because if he did he always ended up wondering if they were really anything more than mere acquaintances. Or worse, perhaps only work colleagues. After all, they never did anything together outside of the work routine apart from the Friday night pub visits. And even then, wasn’t that just an extension of the work routine too? Progressing from a joke about Johnny Halliday by the vending machine in the office canteen to laughing about how horribly clichéd it was to be discussing Sartre in the Cafe Boheme at lunchtime, then finally reaching the conclusion of full blown boozing sessions on a Friday where they spent all their time talking about their worlds of books and films.

So what had it been? Two months? Three? Time was a bit fuzzy these days. It seemed to slip past too quickly and everything blurred together. Was all this just habit now? Were these Friday moments really just a part of the working week? Were he and Julie just parts of the employment jigsaw puzzle, fitting together in the picture of the nine to five, oblivious to the worlds beyond? When he thought about it, he wasn’t even sure where she lived, other than the fact that it was somewhere north of the river. The other end of the Bakerloo line at least, which was effectively nowhere, wasn't it? Anyway, they always found it funny that they both came from opposite ends of the line and met somewhere in the middle. So from Lambeth North and from Kilburn Park they would travel each day, colliding at Piccadilly Circus.

Of course Martin had pointed out, when it became clear that they both travelled on the same line, they weren’t coming from opposite ends at all, and weren’t even meeting in the middle. The middle would be more like Baker Street. Or even Paddington, if you counted the number of stations, and if they had started from Harrow & Wealdstone and Elephant & Castle respectively. Which they didn’t, but still, if you were going to be accurate... To which she had cried ‘Merde!’ and asked why all men were obsessed with such pointless facts and details.

Martin had felt a bit bewildered at that. He thought details were important; had always felt that if you paid attention to the details then the big pictures would look after themselves. Whereas Julie seemed to think that the main idea shouldn’t be spoilt by facts and details that didn’t fit. Like the fact that they didn’t technically come from opposite ends of the line and technically didn’t meet in the middle. The facts simply got in the way of the idea, and so could be discounted. It was simple, really.

Technically too, of course, they never did collide at Piccadilly Circus either. That would be a ridiculous notion, although it didn’t stop Martin from vaguely searching the crowds on the escalators every morning, wondering if he would see her face. The possibility of the impossible, he thought, is always a hope that must be clung to. Because if you let that go, what are you left with? The daily pursuit of the boringly attainable. The thirst for the ordinary.  He often wondered if there was any more depressing adjective; thought it the most horrible thing in the world to read stories in the papers celebrating the very ordinariness of people. Or at least that there was a need to describe people as such. Surely people could be extraordinary? Should be extraordinary.

Martin glanced down at his creased suit and grimaced. No. Perhaps not. But then again, yes, why not. Not the egocentric attitude of thinking oneself to be extraordinary perhaps, but certainly to think it of others. Some others, at the very least. Not that Julie would agree. She’d no doubt wrinkle her nose at the very suggestion. ‘People,’ she would say, in those glorious Gallic tones ‘are disgusting. I hate them all.’ And then she’d raise her glass and say ‘Salut!’

And he’d drink to that. To Julie, at least. His favourite warmest hearted misanthrope.

He glanced at his watch.

[A Long Way From Home]

He glanced at his watch but didn’t really see the time. He looked at the empty glasses on the table. Counted four. But the barman had already been round and cleared three. So this was his fifth. Julie on four. They really should get a grip. Wasn’t he getting a bit old for this? Was thirty-two too old for this? Martin closed his eyes. Remembered when one of Julie’s French friends had asked how old he was. He’d said something like ‘old enough to know better, but too young to care.’ He thought it was clever at the time but now realised that he must have just seemed like a bit of a dick. Was this how it went? Getting older and with every year getting ever more paranoid that you just looked a bit of a dick? Did you perhaps reach a point when it didn’t matter anymore? A moment when you realised all of a sudden that you didn’t care? If he could be sure that there was then he’d happily embrace the idea of getting old. But meanwhile…

He felt a hand on his shoulder. A soft shake. ‘Hey old man. Wake up.’ Martin opened his eyes and looked into Julie’s. He could remember when that would have been so difficult. Not just with Julie, but with anyone. Avoid eye contact. Scurry past and hide away from everything. Hide from the possibilities.

He looked at her as she sat down beside him, smoothing her skirt down on her thighs, the top of her stay-ups just glimpsed as a darker tone of black in the shadow. A tiny tear over her left knee drew his eye to the fleck of whiteness beneath before returning to her face framed with straight golden bangs. He remembered reading something once about how you could figure out if someone liked you. Most of it he had forgotten immediately or dismissed as nonsense. But there was something about eyes. Something about maintaining contact and about your pupils being dilated when you liked someone. Apparently it was natural. Instinct. Something like that. Of course, he thought to himself, drugs do that as well, don’t they? Make your pupils dilate. And alcohol also. So maybe it’s not that simple.

But still.

He looked into Julie’s eyes and saw large pupils gazing back at him. If he was being particularly daft he’d also say they were sparkling, but that would be going too far, surely? And if Julie’s pupils were dilated, what about his own? Had she read that same fact on the Internet? Did she believe it? Did she care?

All these questions flickered in the back of his mind as he settled into the sofa, the fifth pint of London Pride clutched like a talisman. He pondered all of them in almost an instant, but most of all Martin wondered why, after all these years, it never got much easier.

Well that wasn’t really true though was it? He could look Julie in the eye, couldn’t he? And the talking was easier. After the stuttered Halliday joke and the too quick Sartre dismissal they had settled to a seemingly endless stream of words about music, books, films. All of that. Corny but true.

He remembered when she’d said she got the tube from Kilburn Park and he asked if she knew that Bee Gees song. Julie said yes right away, but then added that she actually knew it only as someone else’s cover version. She asked him back if he knew the Monochrome Set song about Lambeth. Martin had laughed. Yes. Corny but true. The ordinary becoming extraordinary.

He liked how they could share reference points even though their experiences were different. Different times, different cultures. Or maybe not. Maybe none of that mattered. It certainly felt that way; like the contexts all boiled down to ideas and feelings in the end. Which was what made the links. Perhaps the world then, he suddenly thought, is not about the details, the facts and the things at all. It’s just about the big ideas; the feelings and the snatched moments. And whilst the people might fade to dust long before the objects, those objects, those details too will fade with time. But the feelings go on forever.

All of which sounded like a load of bollocks now of course, when the pupils were dilating and the warmth of Julie’s body against his arm made him question just exactly what those feelings were right now.

Martin put his head back and thought of songs about kissing.

[Nothing Lasts Forever]

As always they hugged at the split in the tube station corridor. He would go left and straight ahead, she would go right and down the stairs. Diverging again. This time Martin thought that Julie held him tighter and a little longer than usual, but that was probably just the sixth pint talking and if he was honest he could remember thinking the same thing every time they said goodbye.

He kissed her cheek.

They parted and went North and South.

Same as always.

And same as always the ache of separation immediately began to grow somewhere inside. The pain of impulses ignored pierced the heart like an icicle: a creeping paralysis that would ebb and flow, waiting for the end of another working week.

Swoon

Funny the thing’s you remember. Funny the things you forget. I have been remembering to forget to remember and forgetting to remember to forget a lot recently. You can blame it all on general exhaustion, or on the fact that I attended a wedding at the weekend where some faces from the past swam in front of me for a few hours and then, as these things do, passed back into the mists. Either reason works okay.

I don’t think I get as misty eyed and romantically reminiscent as I used to do. There is nothing inherently attractive in imagining pasts that only vaguely existed, after all. We all of us make up our own stories and retell them to death. There is no truth and there are no lies. Just different stories. They all change always. They all take on new accents with each retelling; cast new lines and reel in new angles. And there is nothing to be gained in throwing rocks in the pool just for the sake of seeing ripples break on the shores of ancient regret.

Instead just smile beatifically, shrug a shoulder and let it roll away. The fact that you all shot off on different tangents does not diminish the value of the initial explosion, after all.

But songs. Records. The moments they store: the cores of those explosions. For me, at least. The ciphers that give body to the energies of youth. Or of age. The familiarity of sounds and words that kiss you on the nape of the neck. Those things always curl up around my heart; cuddle up and nudge me with knowing nods and gentle rejoinders. Remember this? The cast of a shadow over the harbour wall. The scent of leather upholstery and perfume mixed in late night driven home and a whisper of will I see you again? Bitter wine and chocolate kisses. Midnight in candlelight a mile above the city and thunderstorms rolling in from the ocean. A chasm of indifference and a pocket full of promises.

Sextet

“It was a grey day. A pale mist hung over everything and all but obscured the bridge that spans the sound. Do you remember?”
I thought I saw Chris' eyes moisten. Or maybe she just inclined her head a touch more towards the window to watch the squirrels on the lawn.
“Earlier I had walked on the beach, kicking through the sand. I had my stereo on, playing Sextet. When I walked on the pier and stood by the steps that disappeared into the shallow sea, ‘Crystal’ came on and the sound of the waves matched perfectly. I couldn’t tell what was real and what was A Certain Ratio. I smiled because it was so corny and beautiful.”
Chris stretched her foot into a sunbeam and turned imperceptibly further away from me. “Later, I watched you gaze around for me on the same pier, and you looked like a sunrise. You hugged me tight in the midsummer mist and I thought I would break.”
I don’t know what Chris did then, but I had to blink back a tear. Because the craziest thing was, that memory had not even happened yet. And when it did it wasn’t even this Chris. It wasn’t even this me. Not that I know who either of us is anymore, and not that it makes the slightest difference anyway.

The funniest thing though is that in reality I still don’t remember any of that at all. I do remember reading about Martin Beck taking ferries to Copenhagen from Limhamn and of a policeman riding his bicycle on the Ribersborg and eating cinnamon pastries. I do remember reading about being on top of the world, looking across the city, as if seen from an airplane: to the north, Landskrona, Ven and even Helsingborg visible in the startlingly clear air.

But that was all fiction, borrowed from a world of books and films.

“Do you remember, I took hold of your hand?” I can see that in my mind; my thumb turning once on hers again just like someone wrote in a novel. I remember how in that moment it felt like the world had simultaneously reached a peak of magical purity and plummeted to a depth of hopeless impossibility. There was a vague feeling of panic and defeat hanging in the mist, like this was never meant to happen. That this moment had been beamed in from a parallel universe; was some interference pattern whose only purpose was to throw everything off track, plummeting from then on into a train wreck of lost feelings and missed promises. As punctuation points go, that moment was, if not a definitive period, at least a series of trailing dots …

Fade out.

And cut.

“Much later I sat on the pier, drinking champagne and watching the sun go down. It didn’t make me cry because I wanted to see the stars, but it was a damned close call.”

Joined Up Isolation

A month or so ago I was asked a few questions for a university/college essay about the 1980’s fanzine and independent music scene in the UK. In some ways it’s quite scary that people are asking me questions about such things. I mean, it makes me feel old as hell, but on the other it is also rather gratifying. It’s good too that some sort of historical contextualising is going on. Like the interviews that Kevin was doing for the Hungry Beat film (what news on that I wonder?). I would love to see more of those.

Anyway, my responses to the questions are below.

Have you got your own definition for ‘New Pop’?

My own definition of ‘New Pop’ is based on what people like Paul Morley were talking about in the early 1980’s; that kind of music which grew out of Punk but which embraced melody, art and rebellion in more or less equal measure. In many respects it was a redefinition of what had become the New Wave, or at least the extension of that. Andy Partridge of XTC talked about how he thought all the New Wave and Punk thing was rubbish, and how he always thought of XTC as New Pop. Which they were. The New Pop groups plundered from black and white music, made sometimes strange connections whilst all the time wanting to remain commercial and fun. New Pop did not want to sit around sulking in the Underground, it wanted to be in the charts and on the radio.

Can you tell me more about the fanzines you made? Do you remember how and why you started your first fanzine? Where and how was it made, printed, distributed?

The first fanzine I made was in my bedroom, cutting pictures out of magazines, pasting them onto sheets of A4 and hand writing a load of nonsense words alongside them. It was called ‘Been Teen’ after the Dolly Mixture song, and there were, I think, three issues. The ‘print run’ would have been ten copies or so of each, distributed amongst my friends at the parties we used to hold regularly. I would have been fifteen, sixteen at the time I guess. I don’t have any of the evidence for those ‘zines – they were thrown in the trash many years ago, along with the ‘books’ I also wrote to entertain people at those parties. After that I did a series of other ‘zines, in print runs of between 50 and 500. All of them were written out of some desperate need to communicate and make connections. Before the Internet, this was the way that networks were built up. People would write letters and send fanzines, mix tapes, bootlegs, etc. For people like me, living outside of the big cities, it was the only way to make those kinds of links. It was a way of feeling less alone.

Most of my fanzines were photocopied on the local library copier or, when I was in Art School, on the department copiers. Only when I started teaching did I start getting them printed up properly. I remember pretty much everyone used the JUMA printing company – they must have printed up so many music fanzines and other small press publications. I think they were originally in London, then moved to Sheffield. I could be wrong on that though.

Distribution was through the network of friends I mentioned earlier. If you knew someone in a certain town or a city you would ask them to take some copies into their local record store. It was all done on a ‘cash or return’ basis. We trusted each other to collect the cash and send it back. It was small sums, but that trust was important. Some very small labels used the same approach, as an alternative to the Rough Trade organized Cartel or other Independent distributors.

D-I-Y: what does the expression mean to you? Do you do it yourself because no one will do it for you? And do you feel that you actually create(d) yourself through the artefacts you create(d)?

I don’t really like the D-I-Y tag, because it has, in my opinion, come to have a quite specific aesthetic attached to it. A bit like how ‘indie’ came to mean a style, or ‘C86’ became a catchall phrase for a specific kind of guitar indiepop. The big problem with the fallout of Punk and the DIY ethic was that whole ‘anyone can do it’ idea. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. So much of what has been made in the ‘spirit of DIY’ has been appalling.

I prefer the idea of things being hand crafted. There is something more artful about that. DIY suggests hitting nails with big hammers, whereas hand crafted suggests care and attention to detail.

That idea that we create ourselves through the objects we make is very interesting though. And yes, I think that the process of creating those artifacts played a large part in my own personal development. It still does. I tend to define myself by what I create – it’s the mark one leaves behind that matters, I think. It’s that desperate need to prove that you really existed (to paraphrase Ray Davies). To know that someone felt the same and that you connected. Lou Reed said that one of the reasons why he made music was to make people feel less alone, and I think that’s true in what a lot of artists do. Those connections that make someone else feel less alone in turn help the artist. And recognition from those whose opinions you value is a very special feeling.

Can pop ever be anything else than a ‘personal odyssey’? (Why?) Is indie pop bound to be something solitary and intimate, like a secret you can never fully share?

The great thing about Pop, for me, is that tension between wanting to belong and wanting to remain outside of everything. It seems to me that a lot of those songs which people call ‘indiepop’ deal with those kinds of tensions, or at least that the tension is inherent in the way it gets mediated. It’s that collision point between being mass produced and remaining exclusive. Pop is all about mass production, but when you take that aesthetic and you place it within a hipster culture which is all about exclusivity and outsider idealism, then you start to get interesting things happening.

And yes, for me Pop is always going to be about the personal. I struggle to see how it can be otherwise. Even in mass-mediated moments like stadium rock shows which are predicated on the audience sharing a basic common idea or emotion, there must be a multitude of subtly different personal interpretations. Context IS everything, and we all of us bring our own context to our experience of any art form. That’s the point at which all art becomes under the ownership of the consumer. It’s a deliciously unavoidable and inevitable moment. And recorded music, because of the important part the tangible, mass-produced artifact has to play in the process of consumption, is perhaps the best example of that.

How is it that songs can create a new space and a new time? (shaping your (the) world?)

I think this also is all about context and ownership. Again, recorded music does this so well because it is mass produced and easily replicated. Taking recordings into a new context gives them a new narrative, and those narratives are the ones which are made up of a range of elements: the ‘original’ theme of the song is one of these, but just as important are those threads that the consumer brings to the party. This is what gives the song (or more accurately the recording) the ability to inhabit an infinite number of spaces and times. It’s all in the relationship between the recording and the consumer.

What do you write about when you write about music?

I have always written about myself and my life, because that’s what the music has always been about for me. It’s a soundtrack that both reflects and informs my life. I have never pretended to understand music. When musicians talk about notes and chords, I glaze over and start watching the clouds in the sky. I once said that I wrote about music in order to make sense of how I fitted into the world in which I found myself. That’s still the case.   

In the late eighties, what were exactly the feelings of indie fans towards ‘older’ indie labels such as Rough Trade or Factory? Was there any sense of indebtedness at all?

I remember in the Sarapoly game (Sarah 50) you could play as a number of ‘indie label moguls’ including Anthony Wilson, Ivo and Alan McGee. It was all rather playfully antagonistic. I don’t think any sense of indebtedness crept into it at all. I don’t think anyone felt any individual was owed a debt because they ‘broke down the barriers’ or whatever. Labels were appreciated for the products they had put out, for their attitude etc, but there was not a cult of personality around any individuals. More than anything there was a sense of having a dynamic forward motion; labels like Factory and Rough Trade were a part of the story but people were interested in making their own stories, or in contributing their part of the picture. It was all very recent history then of course too, so no, I don’t think anyone really thought about it. It’s only in recent years with people casting their historical eyes back and re-evaluating things that the ‘importance’ of certain labels or individuals has become a topic for debate. But that’s inevitable. It’s what the passage of time does.

How do you explain the disintegration of the indie scene as it were? (I’m thinking of Creation Records’ slow decay). Do you feel it died the very moment it went public (britpop boom…)?

That’s a difficult one. It is predicated on the notion that there ever was a unified ‘indie’ scene in the first place. Which, as far as I’m concerned, there wasn’t. People hated each other. There were rifts and factions and schisms from the word go. Whenever that word was… Again, it comes back to that collision between mass production / mass mediation and outsider exclusivity. The fracturing of Popular culture has been going on for decades. It reached a point of fluidity many years ago, and the ‘disintegration of the indie scene’ could be seen as being part of that degeneration. The sad thing is that as things became more fractured, people became (have become) more insular and blinkered in their choices. The definition of genre has now become so defined that many people seem to make a conscious decision to limit themselves to one style.

So no, I don’t think Britpop was any more (or less) important a moment in that degeneration than the Stone Roses at Spike Island or The Jesus And Mary Chain signing to a major label or whatever.

The Creation Records story is interesting too. When I read the doorstop book about the label I stopped as soon as it got to Oasis because I was not in the slightest bit interested, but I’m sure there are others who would have thought the opposite, and that is to be expected. Oddly enough I was just perusing the whole Creation singles catalogue at the weekend, and it struck me that you could argue that whichever phase of the Creation history you choose, there were good and bad records in almost equal measure. Deciding which is which is up to each individual, of course. Personally, I loved the early phase with the Jasmine Minks, Loft etc and the later one where they were putting out those great records by Sheer Taft, Love Corporation etc. Interestingly the Creation discography on Tweenet, for example, chooses to erase those records from the list. It’s not entirely clear why, but I’m sure there was a reason.

Was there ever such a thing as an indie pop community /  network in the eighties? In other words, is it possible to talk about one united ‘indie scene’ or was it rather a matter of isolated acts and specific town / people / places? WHO did it?

See my point above. But yes, the network was real. Or rather there were numerous networks built upon various strands of taste and culture. Each group of people would have their own network and those networks crossed and merged at various points. It was all built on the mail service of course. And yes, the sense of isolation was perhaps greater, but then again, people were hitching around the country and groups knew whose floor to sleep on if they were doing a gig in a particular town. In that respect I don’t think it’s changed significantly, it’s just that new modes of communication have made it easier. I think that sense of joined up isolation is still there though. I think it always will be.

What role do you think the British music magazines played if any?

There was a feeling of the music press catching up all the time, of them missing the point or what have you. That’s the exclusivity thing kicking in again. There was often a feeling that as soon as a group made their way out of the fanzines and into the music press, then it was time to move onto something else. I am sure this frustrated a large number of groups. The music press certainly helped popularize certain groups and labels, and probably helped them sell more records, which on the whole can’t be a bad thing. Of course this is me talking from the perspective of someone who was to some extent involved in the fanzine culture. The vast majority of people buying the music press and the records didn’t know or care about any of that ‘underground’, which was fair enough.

What were your favourite places to go to gigs and buy records back then?

I was then, and still am, more a fan of listening to records in my own space than of going to gigs. I did like Glasgow Rooftops though, and the club space underneath. Fury Murray’s was okay. Closer to home, the Darlington Hotel in Ayr used to put on the occasional show, and there was a dodgy pub on the road between Ayr and Prestwick where the Jasmine Minks and The Claim played. There was a small record store in Ayr, whose name I now forget. I would buy things from there sometimes, though most of the time I would buy records in Glasgow. There was a small store called A1 I think, which much later became the first FOPP store. It was a really tiny shop just down the hill from the Art school and I spent so much time (and money there). Also some second hand stores near Glasgow Central whose names now elude me.

As elusive as kisses from snow angels

The sound of a single strummed guitar weaves through the mist and anoints my ears. I walk the paths of the park looking for the source. I walk for hours.

The sound escapes me, is always out of reach. The paths wind around hills, sometimes climbing, sometimes dropping towards pools surrounded by rusted fencing and withered undergrowth. I walk past trees I do not know the name of. I walk across their lost leaves and slip inside the darkness of the approaching night. 

Sound still floats on the first drops of cold hard rain descending from the skies turning orange in the electric glow of the city.

I’m thinking of a long time ago. There was the same city and the same sky, with the same leaves and the same rain. There was always rain. I’m thinking about the guitar. I’m seeing eyes and hearing names and smelling the scent of stolen illuminations.

Scrawled cards. A hundred greetings on an envelope and watching the moon open up its halo over the arms of the trees.

Listening to ‘Bachelor Kisses’.

The sound of the guitar reminds me of too much. Sounds are such purveyors of disintegration, like hairspray on pillows and perfume on books.

As elusive as kisses from snow angels.

Jean’s Not Happening

““The repetition was almost frightening…” You know I was thinking about that again the other day, and then John wrote me this note. He was talking about all those old movies we used to love. It was all there. The evenings when we would sit up and watch those Noir films, and the old kitchen sink stuff.” I glanced over at Chris, looking for some acknowledgment that she was listening. Sometimes it was impossible to tell what world she was really inhabiting. Her eyes would glisten suddenly and fade away, so it seemed like she was caught in some trap, but she would always smile and nod and eventually come back with an answer.
This time she was right on the same wavelength though because she rejoined immediately with ““and you said jokingly, my new name was repetition.”” Her smile lit up the room.

It is surprising the things that you can forget and then suddenly remember in a flash. Like that line. Like ‘Jean’s Not Happening’.

“We had that record on all the time that summer. It was a bloody awful summer. Rain every day.”
She was right. 1985 was a terrible year to be 16.
“We pretty much hid out in your father’s barn, listening to the rain on the roof.”
“There were some great records to discover though. The Go-Betweens. Felt. Hurrah! and Pale Fountains.”
She was right about that too. We were obsessed with those groups, and played them all the time on an ancient portable mono tape recorder. The Lovin’ Spoonful, early Dylan and The Mamas and The Papas from her dad’s collection, too. All the records sounded as tinny as that barn roof.
“All those kids in school who thought they were so cool were droning on about Morrissey and Marr though. Remember how they all ganged up on us because we had matching haircuts and refused to sign their ‘meat is murder’ petition to make the school canteen meat free?”
“And they all rode their ponies at the weekend and came to school in their parent’s Landrovers that were covered in cow shit.”

We really did hate everyone in those days.

I have a photo of the two of us in our school uniforms that year. We are on the wall beside the bus stop in the village. The old rectory is behind us, barely visible through the overgrown hedge. On my lapel is a tiny circle of colour; a Pale Fountains badge, though you could never tell from the picture. Chris has a different one on her own blazer. Our ties are done up neatly, shirts buttoned to the top. All the other kids thought it was rebellious to have their shirts undone and their ties all ragged and pulled aside. They would turn their collars up and roll their sleeves to their elbows, imagining themselves perhaps in some John Hughes movie. They all looked a state.

We, on the other hand would be meticulously neat and smart. Just because we lived in the country didn’t mean we had to dress like the fucking Wurzels. And anyway, we would look in the music press and see pictures of groups from the cities who looked like the hippies the farmers kept kicking off their fields, so where was the logic in anything?

And we really did get our hair cut the same. It started off as a Jean Seberg thing, and then Chris read ‘The Garden of Eden’, and that was that. In our dreams we drove around in an open top sports car and the landscape in our heads was the Cote D’Azur. Even so, the reality of boneshaker bikes and a myriad of Devon lanes to get lost in was not so bad.

“And there was one tape, it had ‘Jean’s Not Happening’, ‘Hip Hip’ and ‘Do You Believe In Magic’ on it, in one sweet sequence. We took it everywhere we went. Those songs became our summer.” I glanced over at Chris. She was flicking through some papers on my desk. Notes for a book that would never be written. Another novel attempt that I abandoned in a slow ebb of energy. Because nothing was ever the same after 1985. So many things happened that summer. Ghosts from the past cast themselves in shining new guises and re-established old ways of being, whilst the pure brightness of hope disappeared in ashes scattered from Lawrence Tower. The old ways out were suddenly the new ways in.

We never did get to meet in September, and I do not remember much at all about that final year in school. I do, however, know there are no more photos and that for years I could not listen to that Pale Fountains record. For sometimes the words that once propped up your world can just as surely puncture it.

With Love and Squalor

I first met Chris when we were fourteen. Even when I look back on it now, it seems so strange that we ever became friends. Maybe that strangeness was the reason itself.

She had come cycling down our lane on an old boneshaker one early August afternoon. School had finished a week before and I had nothing to do and nowhere to go so as usual was just sitting in the front garden watching the world slip away from me. The sun was at its peak, and although the shadows from the trees in the orchard were short, I knew that they were already lengthening. I hated that midsummer was in the middle of the school term, that by the time we had our freedom everything was already creeping steadily towards the fall. Apples ripened on the branches, slowly blushing whilst the plums dropped and decayed into the grass. Endings always seemed much closer than beginnings then.

No one ever came past our house. There was nowhere to go, after all. The lane just petered out a hundred yards past the red tin barn and although you could jump over the fence and walk across two fields to the river, no one ever did.

That afternoon she was wearing a pair of faded cut off jeans and a loose red t-shirt, stained with what looked like white paint around the bottom. Her shoes were beaten up blue Converse.

“What’s at the end of the lane?” she demanded, nodding past the trees and the hedgerows. No introductions, just a demand. I eventually got used to that from Chris, but that first time I just thought she was a rude tourist, lost in the lanes. I just looked dumb and shrugged my bony shoulders. “Nothing much” I finally replied. “Just a couple of fields and then the river.”
“Can you swim in it?”
“I guess so. Maybe. I never tried. All the kids go up to the next village. There’s a weir downstream there and they jump off the bridge into where it’s deepest. If you want to swim you should go there.” I’d seen them there every year I could remember, so I knew it was true. I had never done it myself though because I always hated taking off my shirt and I looked so stupid in swimming trunks.
“I saw that earlier. I rode over the bridge.” She yawned and looked at the sky stretching cloudless and pristine above us. “They were all shrieking and ducking each other.”
I wondered what she was going to say next and already wanted her to say what I’d always thought.
“I hate all that stuff. It’s so immature.”
I smiled inside and laughed aloud. “Yeah. Stupid kids stuff.”
Her smile was broad and shone through her eyes which I later knew to be a deep brown like the Devon soil when the fields are freshly ploughed and mark the end of winter. “But we should go swimming in the river at the end of your lane. It will be ours and ours alone.”
We didn’t even know each other’s names then and already she was claiming rivers for us. But that was Chris. Always wanting to try something new and understand everything about where she was and what she found around herself. Full of mysteries too, but I didn’t discover that until much later.

So it was Chris who made me see my world for what it was, or for what it could be. Then again, perhaps she would say the same about me.

The next day she cycled up to the gate like it was her who had always lived there and not me. She propped her bike against the hedgerow and flopped down on the grass. Her hair glistened like a fresh morning and a hairslide with a tiny pink piglet for decoration held it off her face.

“What you reading?” she asked, pointing at the book I had just abandoned on the grass. I picked up a battered copy of ‘Franny and Zoey’ and waved it pointlessly in the air.
“Oh cool” she said and grabbed it from my hand. “I love Salinger. I read this when I was eleven. Of course you know he was stationed near here, don’t you?”
I just looked dumb. I have always been good at that. It’s like how I always look pissed off. Everyone always tells me to cheer up, that it might never happen. Like they’d know. Because it always does, or it already has. Later Chris told me that people said it to her all the time too. She thought it was just a teenage thing, and I used to think the same. Sometimes I look back and wonder if it would still have happened to Chris if she made it past sixteen, but it’s a moot point so I never dwell on it, like she didn’t dwell on my blankness that afternoon. Instead she just went right on with her monologue.
“My god, how can you not know that? That story, ‘Franny and Zoey’, it’s set in a Devon town. Well, that’s Tiverton. Daddy says so, anyway. He says that Salinger was probably stationed in the old manor house out there before D-Day, when he was in the Intelligence Service. Is it true it rains hardest in the centre of town? When it rains again I want to go and find out.” We looked at the sky doubtfully.
“No-one in their right mind wants to go to Tiverton. You’d get kidnapped and sold into the white slave trade if you went there alone.” I was only partly joking. “And anyway, how would your Dad know about that story? I thought you just moved here from Kent?”
Chris just shrugged. “Oh, he teaches American Literature at the University. Well, he will in October when the term starts. He’s writing some book about Hemingway at the moment. We only just moved and he’s already off to Key West for more research. He says it’s quieter there in the middle of summer because it’s too hot for the tourists.”
“Yeah, I imagine” I said, although of course I couldn’t.
“Have you read Hemingway? You really should. You’d love him.”
I didn’t know how she could tell that then, but in the end she was right about that like she was right about everything. “We did ‘The Old Man And The Sea’ in school last year” I offered.
“Hmmm, okay. But ‘The Sun Also Rises’ is best. We went to Pamplona last year for the bulls running. I’m vegetarian so I thought it was all really horrible what they were doing to those poor animals, but the book is just amazing. You can forgive a lot when Art is great, don’t you think?”
I just looked around helplessly and nodded. We didn’t get much talk about Art or Spain in Stoke Canon. Unless it was Mrs Jones’ watercolour classes at the church hall, or the lads in the pub talking about their holidays to the Costa Brava. I’d heard them, Sunday lunchtimes when Dad took us out for roast as a special treat. They stood by the bar for hours, smoking cigarettes and drinking endless pints of beer. They would guffaw and roar like belching lions.

Chris talked so fast and was full of so many things I had never heard of. Neither of us knew it then of course, but in the two years we would have together we would teach each other so much.

It was reading Murakami, and particularly Sputnik Sweetheart and Norwegian Wood at the start of the holidays that got me thinking about writing again. There are lines in both books about reasons for writing, and they connected with me so strongly. For effectively it was all about that idea of writing to make a sense of oneself in the world. It’s an idea that I also talked about so long ago, and I had forgotten about it somehow.

So it was good to be reminded about that. And I did start writing again, and it was fun. Being fascinated by the whole process of creation though, I am always thinking about the publication stage, and I think we all of us who make things need that stage to feel fulfilled. This is where the Internet is so great of course, for everyone can publish and be damned. You can argue that’s a blessing in disguise of course, but hey, the search for the single gem whose unique sparkle you personally love the most in the tumult of Aladdin’s Cave is at least as important as the finding. Right?

Anyway, I started publishing some bits of writing on another blog, but then I figured what the hell… why not just keep everything here. I mean, I have no idea why different people read this. Some maybe want to read about Pop music. Some maybe want to just know what I’m doing from day to day (hi Mom!). Some maybe just like it that some days there’s someone grouchier and grumpier than them. Hell, maybe some people even like the writing. It’s a strange world, after all.

So I’m gonna start posting some of those pieces here. I’m thinking of it like an electronic sketchbook for words. They probably only make sense in my own head, but what the heck…