SUGGESTED LISTENING: Nirvana, Incesúcide (DCG, 1992)
Everything that’s happened
to me from that moment
onwards has been
vaguely disappointing
I press save, and shut the creaking lid of the almighty laptop. The dark grey laptop I bought in 1997, when I inherited a grand from that great-aunt who met her end in a nursing home in Leighton Buzzard; the laptop that had seemed so slick and ultramodern back then with its groovy navigation keys and Windows 95, but now looks as ancient as my mum’s typewriter when side by side with Polly’s spanking Mac on the kitchen table. I’ve ridden it hard, like a faithful old workhorse (does one ride a workhorse?)—I’ve had parts replaced, upgraded the memory and processor two or three times, dropped it down umpteen flights of steps, allowed friends to skin up on it, almost set fire to it (it has no power switch thanks to this particular incident), spilled tea on it, nearly lost it completely when Heathrow decided to send it to Frankfurt while I was on the way to Copenhagen—but it still works. Granted, it takes two or three minutes to open up a Word document, and navigating to certain Web pages is often an excuse to pop out for another can of beer, but it’s been a reliable old thing and I’ll be quite sad to see it go. I say that as if I’ve got a spare eight hundred quid for a new one, which as you’ve probably figured is something of an untruth, but I imagine it’ll happen one day when I get a windfall or it finally kicks the bucket and goes to the big IT department in the sky.
Like a shirking schoolboy, I’ve been studiously avoiding what I’m meant to be doing. It’s now eleven o’clock at night, but the frantic scribbling of likely-looking plot outlines, sample chapters and character explorations for the alleged novel I’m supposed to show Mr. Webster tomorrow afternoon has not yet commenced. You may wonder what the arse I’ve been doing for the last twenty-four hours. Funny, I’ve been thinking the same.
You see, being unemployed is not simply a situation one puts up with for a while. It’s actually a full-time job in itself; a wholly absorbing occupation that commences the second you leave the building of your outgoing employer and doesn’t stop until you arrive at the door of your next, however many days, weeks, months or years that takes. There is never, in my fairly comprehensive experience, a period of grace when one cheerfully thinks, “Ooh, I’ll catch up on my reading/tidy my papers/go to a museum/learn to make curry/take advantage of the cheap afternoon cinema tickets,” etc. From minute number one there is a massive, ugly, concrete prehistoric mammoth of guilt and worry standing in the useful bit of whatever room you’re in, trumpeting loudly whenever you try to concentrate, butting you with its tusks if you attempt to do something normal like have sex or eat in a restaurant. A small number of unemployed people—chiefly dependent on their bank balance and/or mental state—manage to give the mammoth its marching orders at five thirty every day and at weekends, enabling them to coexist with partners and friends in a relatively civil and functional manner until nine o’clock the following morning; but alas, the majority continue to mope around like grumpy, directionless dickheads until they’re either too drunk to care or asleep. You can guess which group I belong to.
That said, a few hours spent on the life of Gloria Feathers is hardly time wasted, and will be handy for my eventual masterpiece. Even Alan might give it a quick read. He went through a period of unnatural obsession with Gloria; oddly, it was long after what might be described as her “heyday,” by which point she looked extra emaciated and white as a Tudor. Alan, nearing the end of a degree at Manchester University, had heard the song “4st 7lb” from the Manics’ Holy Bible, decided Gloria was anorexic (he wasn’t entirely alone in this opinion) and made it his mission to “save” her, as recounted in this charming scrapbook entry:
WEDNESDAY 5 OCTOBER [1994]
S*M*A*S*H, Manc Union
Went with Gavin Walker and Dave Smith cos everyone else was revising, turned out to be a f*cking nightmare, never going near either of them again. They had loads of speed before then drank about five pints and just got really obnoxious, support band unknown think they were local, then GLORIA appeared. Can’t believe it, what’s she doing up here. Haven’t seen her in time and she’s even worse than before but she’s so delicate, beautiful, why didn’t I notice this years ago, she’s ill though, sure of it now, waited til band came on (don’t know what all the fuss is about really) then went up to try and say hello … she ignored me at first then I said “would you like a drink” and she said “yes, but don’t expect me to talk to you.” I got her a vodka and she smiled when I passed it to her, my God her eyes are so gorgeous, they look into your soul, I was just going to ask her something about her health when those PRICKS came up and asked if she wanted a cheeseburger. I kept telling them to piss off then Gloria moved away. Was so gutted bought myself three bottles of Mad Dog and had them all while walking back down Wilmslow Road then puked, phoned Clive
It cuts off just like that. I remember my university years being peppered with these late-night phone calls from Alan, which became more drunken at both ends of the line as the years went by and our student debts soared. The discussions usually involved either a band he’d just seen and felt the need to gush or rant about (Miranda Sex Garden and Suede, respectively, seem to stand out in my memory), or a girl he’d just been wounded by. “Why won’t she go out with me, man?” he’d whimper, while I’d try to work out which one of the many he’d recently mentioned had spurned him and why I was suddenly considered an expert. I’m straining to remember the contents of that specific night’s discussion, shivering as I probably was in one of the long corridors of my hall of residence near Marylebone, hanging on the incoming-calls-only intercollegiate phone, wearing my boxer shorts and Power of Dreams “100 Ways to Kill a Love” T-shirt (I kept my rarest shirts for pretend-nonchalant use around the hall in the hope that some girl would notice). It was around this time I turned down the job at the NME (oh yes) so maybe we were talking about that, in between bouts of Alan’s ongoing Gloria-related misery and Mad Dog-fuelled blethering.
I place Alan’s fragile scrapbook carefully on my desk and make the usual trip past Polly’s bedroom (she’s in there with someone, judging by the wrestling noises) towards the kitchen in general and the fridge in particular, where I find my habitual can of liquid refreshment. I hold the funny, cold metal tube in front of my eyes for a moment, pondering its ingredients and precisely how I’ll benefit from them. Looking at it logically, I’m not drunk, nor do I need to be, but there’s the general buzz of half a dozen units of alcohol inside me; if I increase that buzz, is it really likely do anything for the creativity which must occur at some point between now and 3 p.m. tomorrow? It’s doubtful. I’m thirsty but there’s water in the tap, tea or coffee in the cupboard, milk in the fridge, even some orange juice. I could have any or all of these things. Polly, in a fit of health consciousness, has even bought some echinacea tea, which I also could sample.
I stop being so silly and crack open the beer.
Returning to my room, I decide—inspiration now being somewhat thin on the ground—to take a look in my Important Box. This is a wooden chest I inherited from a university friend who’d been at boarding school, in which I have stored my most valuable and noteworthy items: my passport and birth certificate, my twenty-first-birthday cuff links, my signed copy of Casual Sex in the Cineplex by The Sultans of Ping FC, my university dissertation (some rambling bollocks about Arthur Miller), my letter from Stephen Fry (“I am delighted you so hugely enjoyed The Hippopotamus”), my Letter of the Week in Melody Maker (“You are an important and usually excellent newspaper; STOP abusing your position!”), other assorted paraphernalia and some of the more superior copies of Vorsprung Durch Peanut and its Britpop-era successor, Definitely Not. Although I’m supposed to be writing about anything but music, I can’t resist a quick leaf through these. The first issue that reaches my hand is from autumn 1991, by which time the Peanut had evolved from a bedroom concern to a bedroom concern with slightly faultier equipment (I’d managed to buy one of my ex-school’s old photocopiers at a knockdown price). It primarily consists of a report on the “Great Summer Indiethon”—an insane, forty-two-band slog designed to take in various Reading Festival warm-up gigs, in-store performances, the festival itself and, coincidentally, the secret Thieving Magpies appearance before which Alan and I thrashed those two roadies of theirs at pool in the pub next door to the venue. Throughout, we’re referred to by our fanzine nicknames, Clive Pop and Anal Alan; there’s a cast of other occasionals (including Alan’s university chums Steve the Swede and Emily from East Anglia), loads of banter, in-joking and far less cider than one might imagine. Reading Thursday of that year was my eighteenth birthday, in fact.
A happy memory.
Now, I’m not normally the kind of bloke who mopes around wondering where it all went turnip-shaped, but there’s an irony to all of this that’s making me wince. Unless the rose-tinted specs are messing with me, it goes something like this—eighteen: contented, not a lot to worry about except how much indie the human body can physically absorb, indulging in cheeky snogs and fumbles with whichever female permits it, my weakness for alcohol still in its infancy, trouncing two hardy, dreadlocked Thieving Magpie roadies at pool. Fast-forward to thirty-three: frustrated, no job, next-to-zero money, recovering from a six-year relationship which probably lasted five years too long, my weakness for alcohol well into its senility, being scolded by two hardy, shorn-headed, former Thieving Magpie roadies for writing foolish, bunny-boiling letters to an ex-alternative superstar. I wouldn’t say things were improving with age, would you?
And yet, they tell me to grow up.
All right, so I’ve had a few drinks and Thursday is rapidly turning into Friday, but I’m deathly serious: how many problems, arguments, insecurities, guilt complexes and overdrafts are a direct result of this “growing up”? The demon adulthood, and what’s expected of you, or what you expect of it?
“Grow up,” they say. My ex-girlfriend said it. Alan says it. My mum says it. My sister once said it (then my five-year-old nephew repeated it all afternoon). My bank manager says it, albeit in a style owing slightly more to interest rates and loan top-up policies than models of emotional development. Geoffrey “Lance” Webster says it; for what was the sending round of his pair of amplifier-lugging stooges, if not a big, unwashed crustie fist with the words “GROW UP” tattooed in that hideous, faded greeny-blue colour? And now even f*cking Polly—Polly the neurotic, nymphomaniac disaster, who somehow manages to hold down a legal job in between crazed nights of mainlining red wine, tying pizza-delivery men to her bed and getting taxis from London to Bristol, Polly who can’t even sit still through a film at the cinema without nipping out for a fag and a gin and tonic—she has decided to start saying it. Why? Why are all these people trying to convince me that life would somehow improve if I started behaving like a textbook version of a thirty-three-year-old?
For my small amount of money anyway, most people on this paltry little island are actually trying to be younger, at least cosmetically speaking. Or feel younger. They want the body, face, libido and spontaneous spirit of a twenty-year-old, welded seamlessly onto the carcass of an individual with a forty-year-old’s level of experience, discipline and knowledge of the property market. I spend a substantial amount of my time trying to squeeze forth the tiniest drop of enthusiasm for any of that stuff. But in truth, I’d rather drink dishwater than glance in an estate agent’s window; would sooner chat to a dead pigeon than with someone who’s about to renovate their loft.
I find it fascinating, this differing view of “growing up.” For me, it was nothing more than the process of becoming physically larger, less interested in getting extra track for my Scalextric and more interested in what lay behind women’s clothing. Maybe I’m deeply lacking something, but that was pretty much it; apart from being able to buy certain items and go to certain places without pretending to be Billy Flushing’s elder brother. From then on, the improvements of aging ceased. My first eighteen years were spent looking forward to the age of eighteen, while—if I call upon the sort of brutal honesty only five cans of lager can summon—the last fifteen have basically consisted of looking back.
Blimey.
I sit unhappily in my chair, staring through my bedroom window at the funny little yardy bit we never use (“Why don’t you try growing veg out there, man?” Alan once asked), nagging on my beverage, wondering if there was ever a period around the turn of my twenties (the “happy gap”?) when I was satisfied with the status quo, and if so, how long did it last? Or was it more like some deranged Venn diagram of life, the middle loop representing a period when I was looking both back and forth with equal levels of dissatisfaction?
Being in the fortunate possession of what amounts to a diary covering the days following my arrival in adultland, I leaf through the Peanut—looking so impossibly dated now with its thin, typed white pages, slightly thicker blue paper serving as a cover, and near pitch-black photographs (Jane Stokes from Beef, “surely the most underrated and undervalued indie group to currently grace the circuit,” is virtually unrecognisable as that season’s cover star)—to see if there are any clues. There’s indeed much evidence of a fun and carefree time: “The Peanut team do their best to ruck among the retail racks like it’s a real gig, but Clive Pop knocks over a huge stack of Blue Aeroplanes CDs;” “Clive Pop is back at his Peanut ‘stall’ trying to flog last season’s fanzine as people leave the club—the only one he sells is to a passing elderly Indian chap who walks off studying the Scorpio Rising feature intently;” “The official Vorsprung Durch Peanut Clive Pop eighteenth-birthday celebration takes place on the way back from Camden Palace at four in the morning outside 7-Eleven in Hendon, with packets of Jelly Babies and (Clive Pop’s favourite) pork scratchings, plus various cans of soft drink which the assembled ‘crack’ open, champagne-style. Anal Alan has his second minisnog of the day (different girl, obviously … shhh!)”—and so on. My eyes skim past antics we’d never get away with, nor even attempt, these days: a penniless Steve the Swede had bought a dodgy Reading wristband which came off in the Five Thirty ruck on the second night, so he snuck into the arena at daybreak, while the toilets were open for the campers, hid under a catering lorry for the next four hours with only a bottle of Mendip Magic and a bacon sarnie for company, finally emerging when the gates opened properly at noon. What strikes me most, though, is how little we actually drank. Sure, we had a few, but it was more a case of “let’s pass this bottle of apple schnapps round, get a bit tiddly, dance our arses off to De La Soul and then sober up,” rather than the emphasis on pint after pint of lager that took over by about 1994, when we had access to comparatively large reserves of borrowed cash. This change in approach also had a big effect on the end of our festival day—again, from twenty-one onwards I would ingest as much beer as anatomically possible and pass out by one o’clock at the latest (even if drugs were involved), whereas in the old days we sat around the campfire, ours or anyone else’s, singing, talking bollocks, perhaps going for strolls around the moonlit arena, not considering hitting the sack until either the smoke became too much for our eyes or we’d finally tired of endlessly debating which of the two Ned’s Atomic Dustbin bassists was better.
But I clutch on to my can of beer and refuse to entertain the thought that this malaise is entirely down to booze. No—it must be something else.
It doesn’t take me long to find it. Cast your eye over the snippet below—and bear in mind that this is August 1991 we’re talking about.
4:15 p.m. [Friday] Another minidebate over the Peanut team’s next move. Clive Pop is off to meet and greet The Family Cat, but Anal Alan and Steve the Swede decide to see Nirvana on the main stage (“They’re meant to be pretty good, man”). Clive Pop sticks around for a few minutes, the first song is energetic but pretty metallist (plus they’ve got some really irritating bloke with a Mohican doing a Bez) so he sticks to plan A and heads for the signing tent.
4:25 p.m. It’s a big queue for the Cat! They’re not playing until Sunday, but the fans are already out in force. Good for them.
4:30 p.m. Still queuing for the Cat. A song Clive Pop faintly recognises drifts over from the main stage—must have heard it in a club. Not bad. Never mind, we’ll soon hear all about it from Anal Alan.
4:40 p.m. Swizz! Who should walk past Clive Pop but all five members of The Family Cat! The cheeky so-and-sos have only just arrived!
4:50 p.m. Clive Pop reaches the front of the queue, his copy of the Peanut is cheerily autographed by the band. “Nice of you to turn up,” Clive laughs. “Sorry,” they all chorus. “Watching Nirvana,” admits the singer, shaking his head. “Jaw-dropping.”
4:55 p.m. The Peanut team reconvene by the Pennine Pizza bus. For a minute or two it looks like Anal Alan and Steve the Swede have just been told a relative has died, they look so shocked. After a while Steve manages to blurt “that was the greatest of my life”—but this is his standard post-gig proclamation (he even said it recently about a Cud show), so there’s no need for Clive Pop to worry.
Except, of course, there was.
For the rest of the bloody day, as I now recall, I heard nothing other than how unbelievably brilliant Nirvana had been, sprinkled with general mirth that I had missed them in favour of “The Family Shat,” as Alan and Steve immediately christened them. My usual comeback to such garbage (which I very successfully employed when Alan made similar noises about Underneath What and The Atom Seed) was to calmly state that we’d see how big they were in six months’ time. But on this occasion, fate was stacked so heavily against me that I get a toothache just thinking about it. I don’t need to tell you (but I’m going to anyway) that by the time those six months were up, not only were Nirvana the biggest alternative-rock band in the world, but they’d also unwittingly set the plan for nineties popular culture firmly in stone. I had missed what is widely regarded, at least in Britain, as the pivotal moment—by about two hundred metres. Of course, I saw Nirvana headlining the following year, as everyone and his dog did, but by then it was far too late.
Call me melodramatic but this recollection hits me square in the emotional goolies. I grab Alan’s scrapbook again to cross-reference. There it is, plain as day, in Alan’s usual blend of hyperbole and questionable grammar:
Thank f*ck I ignored Clive going to get signatures from the f*cking family shat cos instead I saw NIRVANA, okay they started a bit metallist but by song 4 they were bloody revalation. Amazing then I remembered it was them that do the q. good “gramma take me home” one we dance to at that shitty club on Oxford Street but man, they made everyone else look shit. Singer dived into kit. Could be big. Poor old Clive we took the piss a bit he spent the rest of his birthday money getting drunk, had to wake him up for the poppies.
Yeah, poor old Clive. Now I think about it, I do have a faint sense of the rest of the weekend feeling entirely different, like I’d become another person.
My God.
Panicking slightly (God knows why, it’s sixteen years too late to do anything about it), I quickly nip to the kitchen for another beer, pick up my phone and speed-dial number three.
“Yeah?”
“Alan, it’s Clive.”
“I know,” he growls. “I meant ‘yeah’ as in, ‘what can you possibly want at this time of night?’”
I glance at my watch. Bugger. Twenty past midnight.
“Sorry, did I wake you up? Need to ask you something.”
He does that maddening trick of not replying, leaving the phone line a silent void which only I am required to fill.
“Err … you know when we saw Nirvana at Reading in ninety-one?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Were they really that good or were you guys just winding me up?”
His usual scoffing-burp sound comes speeding down the wire from Crouch End. “Doesn’t it say anything about this in my scrapbook?”
“Yeah, it—”
“Because part of the reason I gave you the damn thing was so I didn’t have to answer daft questions at times like this. I’ve got to be in Cardiff by eight thirty.”
“Sorry. It says they were a ‘bloody revalation.’”
“Well, there you go.”
“Yes, but was it, like, life-changing?”
“Oh, probably not.”
“Do you think it changed me?”
“Changed you?”
“Yeah.”
“You missed them, didn’t you?”
“Yeah—I mean, do you think not seeing them changed me?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“Sorry, it’s just that … I’ve suddenly realised, everything that’s happened to me from that moment onwards has been vaguely disappointing …”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
“And that it might have been the start of me … you know … losing it slightly.”
Unexpectedly, this heralds a laugh.
“Losing your edge,” Alan chuckles. “And you were there, off your tits at Spike Island, 1990. ‘It’ll never catch on,’ you said.”
“Did I say that?”
“Something along those lines. Forget it. Listen, put that crap away for the night, finish your can of beer [how’d he know I was drinking one?], get some sleep and stop being so bloody hysterical.”
But Alan is an expert at the slick closure of a phone call, even agreeing to a swift morally supportive coffee tomorrow afternoon before I meet Webster. I can’t say I feel an awful lot better, though. I ignore his advice, return to the fanzine, and yes: the post-Nirvana results are quite remarkable. According to our reporter, Pop Will Eat Itself and Ned’s were both “a disappointment.” The Fat Lady Sings “didn’t deserve an encore.” The Sisters of Mercy were “ridiculous.” Flowered Up and Teenage Fanclub were “boringly similar” (which seems unlikely), while Blur “only have one good song.” The Family Cat’s actual performance on the Sunday doesn’t even garner a review. Only De La Soul sparkle—watched, as we know, with the assistance of Steve the Swede’s apple schnapps—but this judgement is accompanied by a sophisticated observation that “drinking at a festival is actually quite fun, all the bands sound great when you’re a bit pissed, and no one cares about the weather; this could be the way forward.”
F*ck.
I drain the last of my can, pull on my hooded top, grab my keys, stumble through the kitchen and just go, out into the northeast London night. I know from experience that feelings like these are only soothed by walking. It doesn’t really matter where I go, but naturally I always end up heading in a south-westerly direction, as if magnetically drawn towards London’s centre. I don’t really spend much time there these days, but its pull remains compelling. It’s a dry, windless night, and after an initial stiffness (I haven’t left the house since yesterday evening) I’m soon up to speed, hurrying out of my locality, past a few stragglers contemplating a kebab after leaving one of the later-shutting pubs, beyond the church, past the final bus stop and out onto the road bordering the park. There was a time when I would leap over the fence and cut across, but nowadays even I—na?veté and slightly disposable attitude to life aside—take the long route round. Not that I’ve ever had the problems with muggers and nutters some of my friends have had. I put this down to perpetually marching at breakneck speed, pulling my woolly hat down to my eyes and doing my best to look more barmy than anyone else.
There are two things I always see on these small-hour jaunts. Indeed, both appear with such clockwork regularity I think I’d be concerned for the state of the universe if I didn’t see them. One is a collection of elderly African ladies with huge multicoloured shopping bags. Doesn’t matter what time it is. Once I saw them at three in the morning. It’s extraordinary. They always look perfectly happy, gossiping away, never in the same place (tonight they’re ambling along Green Lanes; another time they were coming out of a house in Finsbury Park; once they were even as far away as King’s Cross). When I spy them this evening I almost feel like saying hello. The second thing I habitually encounter is an old chap walking his dog. Again, time seems to make little difference—one o’clock, two o’clock, even around six on one occasion. Both man and dog always look totally miserable. The bloke’s probably got one of those jobs with crazy shifts, like Alan’s tenure a few years back in a certain banking department that required him to be there from 11:30 p.m. until 8 a.m., Friday to Tuesday; the bizarre upshot being that his working week kicked off just as everyone else was getting plastered at the end of theirs, and his “weekend” began first thing on a Wednesday morning. Typically, Alan made damn sure he didn’t miss out on a proper “Friday night,” rooting out some meatpacker’s boozer near Smith-field Market, where he would sup away happily until lunchtime and then drunkenly retire to bed. “Saturday-morning hangovers are so much nicer on Wednesday evenings,” he would tell people, “plus there’s better telly on.”
Tonight’s dog-walking man is looking extra pissed off, tramping past Canonbury station as his dog feigns enthusiasm for a clutch of weeds.
“Ivan!” he shouts. “Git a bladdy move on!”
Loosely following that stupid bus route that doesn’t go anywhere useful, I enter the no-man’s-land between Canonbury and Highbury, my mind frantically sifting through a multitude of topics—my bank balance, Nirvana, Alan’s continued indifference to my plight, Spike Island (why did he have to bring that one up?), the ubiquitous Mr. Webster, my ubiquitous ex-girlfriend—although my anxiety is beginning to recede thanks to my ferociously marching along. It works every time. The gaunt, alert figure of a fox appears from behind the council block a few hundred metres ahead, then vanishes up that posh tree-lined road I always turn down by mistake when waywardly returning from nights at the Garage. I wince as I pass the school where I vomited after one tequila too many on Alan’s thirtieth birthday. I round the corner where I had that huge row with The Ex (I wanted to walk, she wanted to get a cab: a recurring theme) and stride past those silly-looking cafés that precede Highbury Corner, finally shooting straight down the strip of overpriced shops and restaurants that is Upper Street.
Given that I’ve never been overly attached to this particular thoroughfare, it’s remarkable how effectively it hoards memories and unleashes them as I walk, like one of those slow-release vitamin-pill things. That’s the problem with living in one corner of a city for too long, I suppose, and this top mile of the main Islington drag is all about (again) The Ex. No wonder she moved to Camberwell. Example: when I look at the Hope and Anchor, I don’t see a semidecent music pub with a creditable punk heritage, I see the place I first met the friend of a friend who joined us for a pint after we’d seen Arab Strap at the Union Chapel. When I see that petrol station on the left, I see the first packet of sandwiches we shared while waiting for a cab to take the two of us and a paralytically drunk Polly home. The King’s Head pub is the place I spilled my first pint over her. The Turkish restaurant is where I took her for a date on that first Valentine’s Day and my debit card got rejected. The Bull is where I used to listlessly wait for her to finish cackling with her work colleagues on a Thursday evening. Then the cinema, where I realised once and for all that she’d never fancy me as much as she did Ralph Fiennes. The Slug and Lettuce, where I got into that huge argument with a male friend of hers about his method of getting to work (he used to drive from Hackney to Willesden every morning; had he never heard of the Silverlink train line?)—the argument which finally precipitated The Conversation.
Which I’m not going to bore you with.
As I reach the southern end of the street the memories are older, often of an Islington that no longer exists. The Camden Head pub, once the second-best jukebox in London, now replaced by the questionable music taste of the bar staff. The old pizza restaurant, long since replaced by something trendier, where Alan and I used to do the all-you-can-eat buffet thing for about three quid, scoffing vast amounts of stodgy, nutritionless mush before going to gigs at the Powerhaus. The old tube station, prerenovation, without ticket barrier, an essential bolt-hole for every discerning student fare-evader. And then: the Powerhaus itself.
Today, the idea of an impossibly dingy, dirty, sick-smelling indie hole parked squarely on the front line of Islington’s retail paradise is as incongruous as ordering a snakebite in Starbucks, but exist it did, and we f*cking loved the place; the scene of some of our crunchiest, scummiest gigs: Extreme Noise Terror, Die Cheerleader, Tad, Cardiacs (I’ve also heard Alan boast to people that we saw a very early Radiohead show there, which I regret to say is bollocks). It was the perfect alternative venue, a fabulous, feedback-drenched sin bin of head-crushingly loud musical chaos; you could smell the clientele as they rolled across Islington High Street, particularly after the gig, when the cider, beer, sweat and patchouli oil had blended to form a now sadly extinct compound we christened Powergunge, caking the boots, leather jackets and hair of the faithful as they headed home. That the Powerhaus was replaced in the mid-nineties by an All Bar One tells you all you need to know about London’s descent into chain-driven consumer nonsense. That the All Bar One subsequently became a branch of the Halifax is where social commentary and I go separate ways.
By this stage in my thoughts I’m standing right opposite our former glory hole, getting my breath back. It’s just hit me how knackered I am and how many beers I’ve had, and considering it’s now quarter past one in the morning and I’ve still not put finger to laptop for the Webster project, I probably ought to start thinking about home. But an unseen force is drawing me across the wide road. I skip across to the central reservation and wait for a half-empty police riot van to pass, its passengers eyeing me suspiciously as I itch the back of my legs. I hurriedly take off my woolly hat and tidy my hair—my typical, feeble knee-jerk attempt at looking innocent—and the van switches on its siren and speeds off in search of real criminals, leaving me to stroll over to our old haunt with its unchanged mock-Tudor front. I stare through the sterile windows, now advertising tax-free savings and personal loans rather than appearances by The Fall or Huggy Bear, and wonder if customers ever feel the Ghost of Indie Past as they fill in their deposit slips, whether the staff realise their quiet, carpeted office is exactly the room in which three hundred unwashed lunatics rucked to Crazyhead, spat at The Damned, gaped at Polly Harvey or blissed out to Orbital, or if they know they’re interviewing new mortgage customers in the very same space of air from which Wayne Hussey once breathed to serenade his eskimos. It’s doubtful.
I linger awhile, not entirely sure what I’m trying to find. Perhaps nothing. I suppose it would be enough to think that, very occasionally, an office junior shifts some file boxes in a back room and wonders what that foul smell is, or speculates on the origin of the awful substance clinging to the bottom of the filing cabinet, or asks why his suit always reeks of patchouli oil after working late. Satisfied by this notion, I’m taking a deep breath and turning to go when something odd—no, make that bloody extraordinary—catches my eye.
On an otherwise standard-issue black signpost between the Halifax and Snappy Snaps are the remnants of a sticker: a black, triangular sticker that somehow resisted the efforts of the graffiti removal teams. Although it’s faint, I can still make out an unmistakable red-and-yellow comic-book-style emblem, formed from the letters A and H, an emblem I first beheld about sixteen years ago, not ten yards from this very spot, emblazoned on the cover of a fanzine entitled Alternative Heroes. The geeky bloke enthusiastically peddling the fanzine to the gathering pre-gig crowd was none other than Mr. Billy Flushing.
My face is now so close to the signpost I’m practically licking it, but I still can’t believe what I’m seeing. When did the Powerhaus close down? 1995? 1996? I’m pretty sure Billy wasn’t still doing his fanzine right up until that point, but even if he was, a sticker like this couldn’t have remained on a signpost for the eleven years since. Stuff like this gets blasted off almost immediately these days, even in Camden. No, this sticker must have been slapped on recently. What’s more, unless there’s another oddball out there with a job lot of Alternative Heroes promotional stickers, it’s Billy himself who’s been doing the slapping.
This established, I don’t hang about. I turn and run back up the street, frantically hailing a passing bus. I whip out my mobile and call my own number, leaving one of those ridiculous aural notes-to-self as I pelt down the Essex Road, after which I sit down for a moment and ransack my memory.
The Powerhaus gig Billy showed up at with his stack of fanzines was a fan-club-only Thieving Magpies show to launch the single “Roundpeg Squarehole” in June 1991. By this point our once enthusiastic friendship had completely evaporated, but I nodded at him outside the venue and strolled over to look at his creation while Alan scoffed and went inside.
I must confess my heart sank when I examined it. Evidently using Billy’s brother’s stationery resources to the full, Alternative Heroes had a glossy cover and proper, newspaper-style pages. Inside, Billy had combined his knowledge of music with his deeper love of comics, creating double-page strips featuring some of the alternative world’s current stars: a wacky, Beano-style battle between Faith No More and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a ghostly drama concerning The Cure’s Robert Smith, a seaside caper involving The Wonder Stuff, a sitcom with the Pixies as a dysfunctional American family, and on the front page a swashbuckling adventure story starring all four members of the Thieving Magpies. It was imaginative, original, witty, frequently surreal and decidedly well-constructed. In those terms at least, it was streets ahead of Vorsprung Durch Peanut—and Billy, of course, knew it.
“Nice ’zine, Billy,” I offered.
“Thanks!” he replied, neglecting to look me in the eye, instead eagerly rooting out potential punters. He was still wearing his school shirt and trousers but had removed his glasses for the occasion, which must have made life a little tricky. “Come on, don’t be shy!” he yelled, eliciting a cringe from me. “Alternative Heroes, only forty pence.”
“Forty pence!” I exclaimed. He was mad. It must have cost at least seventy to produce.
“Opening offer,” he commented.
I flicked through the pages again.
“It’s odd, though, Billy—aren’t these bands a bit too, um … normal for you?”
“Of course,” he shrugged, “but business is business.”
Except it wasn’t. Although a few people stopped to look, no one was buying; Alternative Heroes went straight over everyone’s head. In the time I stood next to him I managed to sell four copies of the Peanut without even trying. The indie-verse simply wasn’t ready for Billy’s comic-book/music-press crossover.
“Well, see you in there,” I said after a few minutes.
“Don’t be silly!” Billy frowned, his eyes meeting mine for the first time. “I’m not going to the gig. I don’t even like the Thieving Magpies.”
I made my excuses and shuffled inside.
The final time I saw him was a year later at a pointless, premature school-reunion lunch my parents forced me to attend. Again, the conversation was stilted and we made no move to remain in contact, but I remember thinking he’d become an altogether more confident presence. Tellingly, he spent much of the afternoon chatting to a girl from our year who wouldn’t have even acknowledged he belonged to the same species a year previously.
I sit back in my bus seat, strangely calmed by my latest plan. It’s always good to occasionally know what you’re doing. Soon I’m marching down my own street, past Lance Webster’s house, which I acknowledge with a two-fingered salute that wouldn’t look out of place in a primary school. I jump down the steps to our flat and burst into the kitchen, where Polly’s latest conquest (a tall, curly-haired posh bloke) leaps up and grabs the nearest dishcloth as Polly calmly butters some toast. They are both unavoidably naked.
“Sorry, Clive,” Polly murmurs, while the chap smiles awkwardly—but I am out the other side of the room before further discussion can ensue. Seen it all before anyway.
I barge into my bedroom, open up the almighty, creaking laptop again, jam my finger firmly into the hole where the on button once was and retire for a tactical loo break while the dear old thing boots up. Ten minutes later, I’m excitedly awaiting the results of a Google search. I’m not entirely sure what I’m expecting: a few cursory references to the man perhaps (I’ve even got a few of my own if you look hard enough), maybe a MySpace page. I’m starting simply with “Billy Flushing.” What I don’t realise is it’s the last search I’ll need to bother with.
Welcome to BillyFlushing.com – home of visual artist, graphic novelist and publisher
Join the mailing list. www.billyflushing.com/welcome.htm – 3k – Cached – Similar pages – Note this [more results from www.billyflushing.com]
Billy Flushing – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Billy Flushing aka “RoyaleB,” “Fsycho Bill” (born Watford, England, on 23 January 1973) is an internationally recognised comic artist, graphic novelist and critic. He founded the XCarto … en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Flushing – 43k – Cached – Similar pages – Note this
Billy Flushing
Billy Flushing in my opinion is the king of modern comics. Having read his stuff as RoyaleB I didn’t think anyone could beat it, then I discovered he was also Fsycho Bill! Amazing, he … www.graphixchat.com/board/forumdisplay.php?f=42 – 94k – Cached – Similar pages – Note this
Xcarto corporation – Billy Flushing CEO founded Xcarto after leaving univ … 21/12/2006. Xcarto Webshop Spring Offers 10/1/2007. Billy Flushing in Comic Zone Magazine (issue 120) – Fsycho Bill – new hardback retrospective with DVD extra OUT NOW … www.xcarto.com/ – 13k – Cached – Similar pages – Note this
Graphic Novel Art @ Forbidden Planet – The Online Entertainment … Forbidden Planet feature. For the first time, we interview graphic god of our time Billy “RoyaleB” Flushing on the eve of his retrospective interactive hardback Fsycho Bi … www.forbiddenplanet.co.uk/ … /Fmag/Features/Billyflushing.htm – 19k – Cached – Similar pages – Note this
And that’s just the first five.
With a movement straight out of Fawlty Towers, I slam the lid of my laptop and wait for a second, then reopen it and look again, desperately hoping all the references will have magically disappeared. They haven’t. Resisting the temptation to instantly phone Alan, I delve a little further, first checking Google Images for proof that this world-beating graphic icon really is my gormless former schoolmate (it is—he wears funky white space-age specs and his hair is a bit spiky but otherwise seems quite unchanged), then reading some of the articles just to check he hasn’t written them all himself (he hasn’t; there are simply dozens of the damn things, in online newspapers, magazines, on the BBC, art-gallery websites, publishing briefings—the list goes on). In addition to his artistic prowess, the Xcarto company he founded some ten years back appears to have acquired most things worth bothering with in the comics world, providing proof that the embryonic business acumen I suspected all those years ago grew into something formidable and produced—most surely—a hefty bank balance. He’s had his own exhibition at the Tate Modern and even warrants a compendious page on the Internet Movie Database, thanks to an abundance of technical and artistic-consultant credits, some stretching back as far as 1998, and a story of his—Dawn of Zfly (I mean, really)—being turned into a 2004 Paramount film starring Crispin Glover, Brittany Murphy and Michael Gambon, the existence of which has somehow completely eluded me.
As my mother would say: Hell’s teeth.
Two questions immediately spring to mind.
Not, you may be surprised to hear, “How the hell has that total dweebhead loser boy managed to become such a super-successful, globally inspirational graphics megabloke?”—which is certainly the first thing that would emerge from Alan’s lips. In fact, I can totally see how the Billy I knew became the high-achieving eccentric guru who stares at me from his home page. It was all there from the very start. All he needed was to not be at school. No—the question I really want an answer to is “How the hell did I manage to miss it?” Granted, I pay about as much attention to the ins and outs of the comics industry as I do the history of agriculture in Lithuania, but you’d think I’d have spotted his (far from common) name at least somewhere.
The other question I’m now pacing up and down my room mumbling to myself is the following: If he’s this successful, this busy and this artistically satisfied, what on earth is he doing plastering stickers of his long-forgotten indie fanzine on a signpost outside a former scuzz-rock venue in Islington?
And the immediate explanation my dazed, confused and self-centred brain settles for? That Billy Flushing—wherever he is now—is trying to communicate with me.
I click on his website’s “contact” page—annoyingly, it’s just one of those mailing-list forms, and there’s no actual address. Returning to my original Google search I get myself to the Xcarto website and do the same. There are two addresses—one in New York (but of course) and one in London. A glance at the postcode—EC1V—tells me the London office can’t be more than a few streets away from my old work. Who knows, I could have been buying my lunch from the very same Tesco Metro as Billy—when he wasn’t having his caviar coptered in and carried to his drawing board on a velvet cushion by a team of trained meerkats.
(A quick aside to this fascinating stuff: in all seriousness, I sometimes wish there was a Web site that could tell you other people’s movements throughout their life in relation to yours, so you could type in their name and see a kind of joint route map; how many times have people said, “Oh, I was at that gig too” or something. With this site you could see how close you actually got; perhaps you were unwittingly waiting next to each other at the bar or some such … but then I also wish there was a device that could magically tell you all sorts of random facts and figures about your life, e.g., how many Jaffa Cakes you’ve eaten, which is the bus you’ve taken most often, how many times you’ve been through East Croydon station, which is the person you’ve had sex with the most. Like a sort of itemised phone bill of existence … a universal statistics engine … hmm …)
The Xcarto site’s contact page displays a few email addresses—the standard “info@” one, a few named entries for the sales and marketing people, but nothing for their exalted CEO. However, I notice the format is pretty standard, “firstname.surname@”—so, it being too late at night for procrastination, I take a wild stab in the dark and quickly bash out this:
From: CLIVE BERESFORD ([email protected])
Sent: 27 April 2007 01:57:04
To: [email protected]
Subject: the geeks shall inherit the earth
Dear Billy
I hope this has reached the correct destination! Blast-from-the-past time. Yes, it really is that Clive Beresford. Sorry. Imagine my surprise when I passed the old Powerhaus on Liverpool Road this evening and saw an Alternative Heroes sticker on the signpost. Can’t imagine it’s been there for over a decade, so I figured maybe you’d been feeling nostalgic? You seem to be one of the few people from school doing something slightly interesting with their lives. Glad to hear it. It’s amazing what dull jobs people have ended up with! I’ve actually lost touch with almost everyone, apart from Alan Potter, who you probably remember. You may shudder at the name, but Ben Simons sent me an email recently (maybe he did the same to you?), which I have to admit I completely ignored. If the photo on his MySpace page is anything to go by, he’s exactly the same—slightly overweight and perpetually angry.
Despite my cynical tone I haven’t become some completely bitter 33-year-old drunken mess. I’m actually quite happy with life, doing what I want (most of the time). Hope you are too—it appears so. Drop me a line if you get a sec—take it easy.
Clive
p.s. sorry about Spike Island
Okay, so there’s a couple of fibs in there to give it a bit of sparkle. I refresh my inbox page a couple of times and nothing comes hurtling back at me saying the email address doesn’t exist, so it seems to have gone somewhere. Well then, we’ll see.
Having accomplished this task of dubious benefit, I’m just about to shut down and finally make a move towards bed when I remember bloody Webster and this fabled novel I’m meant to have started. Satan’s arse. As I’m meant to be seeing a job agency tomorrow morning, I really need to have a go at the bloody thing now.
Wearily, I open up a new Word document and—risking a second encounter with my naked, toast-eating flatmate and her bit of equally naked posh totty—return to the kitchen to put the kettle on.