Thursday, March 17, 2005
Retrieval part 2 (of many)
And another one…
Tell me all about 10-year-old you
It's 1989 and I live in the same house I have lived in since November 1979 when I was 6 months old, and which I still live in now as a 25-year-old.
My two older brothers (I am youngest by 9 and 11 years) still live with us but not for long. In fact, JR (21) may have already moved out; certainly he and his long hair wont stay in the house much longer. He is in a band called The Love Children and periodically he will bring home cuttings from the local paper about the "hordes of whirly indie-girls" who attend their sporadic gigs. I occasionally hear music coming from his room as I lay in bed at night. I think it is all, without exception, complete shit. Five years later I will not (he used to play The Stone Roses album sometimes). Jim (19), the other brother, has only recently decided to be called 'Jim'; Mum and Dad still call him Jamie. He plays music too; cheap-sounding punky stuff by men with bad trainers and jeans and scruffy hair. He gives me some old tapes and I love them dearly - Open Up & Say Ahhhh by Posion (this has a song with the word 'sex' in it which I am thrilled by), Apetite For Destruction by G'n'R. I also find and steal a copy of Misplaced Childhood by Marillion; I don't know which brother it belonged to, but it stays on my walkman for ages. From 14 on I will hate it to death. At one point Jim says "shouldn't you be into music and football by now? Are you gay?" I have no answer.
A girl called Skye and a boy called Andrew will tease me a lot at school and make me miserable. I will hate them. I am not cool and have no interest in sport (this will change in a year when I start playing football for fun) but I am good at talking and reading and writing and acting; I am in LOADS of plays and stuff, everything possible at school that involves getting on a stage and talking loudly. I am all set to play Fagin at one point, but I'm ill and the understudy has to take over. I am mortified; I had a false beard lined up and everything. (I desperately want sideburns from about this point, due to seeing Beverly Hills 90210 - I have never mentioned this before to anyone.)
I have my first kiss, a tentative and frankly frightened touch of the lips with a girl called Amanda. I get called 'gaylord' a lot at school even though I'm sure I'm not gay. It may be because I wear a sweatband for no reason. I stop wearing the sweatband. I read a book called 'Airship' which is big and thick and belonged to one of my brothers. It has some shagging in it and I am immensely excited by reading this under the covers. I am so excited I can no longer stand wearing pyjamas and begin to sleep in the buff, a trend that continues to this day.
It's at about this point that the fileds behind my house, always a source of great mystery and excitement whenever me and Jim go adventuring with the dog(s) [we had three at one point, which may have been for a while in this year], start to be developed into a much shoddier, council-funded echo of the estate we live on, which was built in the 70s and modelled on Clovely. My best friends are Jonny who lives down the road and Matt who I go to school with. I have a nascent interest in roleplaying games and stuff, having deemed myself too old for Transformers and Action Force now. I draw a lot, and am a very fine, if overly fussy, artist. I hate paint and colour though; everything has to be drawn in HB pencils with lots of harsh lines and shading. I hold my pen weird and get given one of those strange triangular rubber grips to put round it. My handwriting is awful, but what I write is ace. I still hold my pen weird, and writing for any length of time makes my thumb sore.
I get chosen to go on television! On a gameshow called Clockwise made by the BBC. We spend a day in Bristol filming it and my team (me and Becky - she answers more questions than I do) win! However, we don't win the big prize (a ghettoblaster) and I am mortified; the presenter (Darren Day!) is infuriated that it takes about ten takes of us at the end to get a useable smile&wave out of me in particular. Fuck the Pound Puppies - I wanted that ghettoblaster really badly. I hate ITV. I wont watch it. I don't know why. It scares me. I think it reminds me of Wayne's house, which is smaller than mine and darker too (we got to watch Robocop there on his ninth birthday, and eat egg&chips).
I love The Field at the bottom of the hill, and I dearly love The Swamp which is a small pond with an island at one end, hidden by trees. When i was younger it froze one Xmas and my brother got me to walk on the ice - I think it cracked and I fell in but I can't remember it well. It's in about 1989 that the council dig a larger, shallower pond slightly above The Swamp, and it fucks the water table of The Swamp up, meaning it is no longer a challenge to get to the island, and thus it loses it's magic. From this point on I hate the council. JR has written a song called "TDC No Ball Games" for his band (TDC = Teignbridge District Council).
Me and Jonny race down the hill to The Field on our bikes; mine is a hand-me-down Grifter, his is a flash mountain bike. I bottle out halfway and slam on my brakes, causing me and Grifter to tumble arse-over-tit-over-wheels. Jonny sees this and sees the Grifter land on top of me. It's a heavy bike and he thinks I might be dead so he runs and gets his mum. I am OK; just a bit battered. I don't ride the bike much after that.
NJS
3/17/2005 09:11:00 am
Retrieval
I’ve not used ILX properly in a couple of months. It seems to have totally lost something now. I always promised myself I’d never be one of those people who whinged about it being better in the old days; sadly it seems I now really think that. Several of the older posters have left too. I’m thinking of starting a new forum with Mr Passantino at some stage.
But in the meantime, internet-instability paranoia and the sheer volume of words I wrote on that forum over the years impels me to salvage some of my words from there, and the best place to stick them is here. The ILX FAQ states that the author holds copyright over his or her own words, so they’re mine to use wherever I want.
TB reckons this is the best thing I’ve ever written, hands down. Some other people agree. I think it’s a bit mawkish, to be honest.
Anyway…
got a question for ya, nothing vulgar this time, i promise
Nick12; Why do we still live with mum and dad?
Nick24; I can't afford to move out yet.
Nick12; Why not?
Nick24; I only work in a library.
Nick12; Why aren't we famous yet? We're going to be famous, right? An actor or a writer or something.
Nick24; I don't know. I’m planning on writing a book when I'm 30.
Nick12; Why are we waiting?!
Nick24; Virginia Woolf said so. I don’t know. Just because I’ve got nothing to write about yet. I need more time.
Nick12; Why are we still pudgy?
Nick24; I lost it! I wasn’t pudgy at all from being, like, 13, all the way through to 21!
Nick12; Then we got pudgy again? Thanks a bunch. I see we’re still wearing glasses. Please tell me we’re not a geek. Please.
Nick24; I used to be able to out-drink almost everyone I knew. I play football! I’m a music journalist! Look at my jeans, my shoes, my hair, look how fucking cool I made us!
Nick12; A music journalist?
Nick24; Not really. Kind of. On the internet.
Nick12; I’d ask about girls but I’m afraid.
Nick24; Don’t ask about girls.
Nick12; How long have I got to wait?
Nick24; A long time.
Nick12; Are we gay?
Nick24; No, but we’re open-minded.
Nick12; What does that mean?
Nick24; You’ll find out in about 9 years.
Nick12; It still sucks being me, right? Doesn’t it?
Nick24; No.
Nick12; Did we go to Oxford?
Nick24; No.
Nick12; Why not?
Nick24; I got… distracted. And angry.
Nick12; …
Nick24; Why are you crying?
Nick12; Why aren’t you crying?!
Nick24; I can’t.
Nick12; Since fucking when?
Nick24; Since you cried all the tear-quota, you fucking wimp.
Nick12; Does it get better?
Nick24; Um… a lot of the time you don’t notice that it’s bad, or that it ever was bad, or even could be bad.
Nick12; What do you mean?
Nick24; You just get on with stuff… More people like you than you realise. Seriously. A lot more. Listen, I want you to do us a favour.
Nick12; What?
Nick24; Well… Don’t be afraid… Take risks. Don’t just do things because people expect you to. Never be scared to tell anyone how you feel, or ask them how they feel. Never let people forget that you care about them. EVER. But don’t let that care limit what you do. Go where you like, do what you like, see who you like. You don’t realise just how clever and cool and good you can be right now. People keep telling you, but you don’t listen, or don’t understand. You read books, you play football, you paint pictures, you write stories, you do whatever you want. Do it all. You can. You really fucking can. Just don’t, please don’t, spend all those evenings, mornings, nights, afternoons, sitting on your own, thinking about what might happen. Don’t waste those chances. Never ever feel guilty or embarrassed about anything, especially not all those stupid little things. Masturbate more when you’re young and less when you get older. Learn to tell people that they’re beautiful. Mean what you say, even if you don’t mean it immediately afterwards. Don’t fuck people around. Don’t fuck yourself around. Ride your bike more. Work at things a little more rather than just assuming you’ll be good enough to pass without doing any work. And try not to swear so fucking much.
Nick12; …
Nick24; Does that make sense?
Nick12; A bit. Some of it.
Nick24; Good.
Nick12; Who are we going to be, Nick?
Nick24; We’re going to be me, Nick. All the time. Every day. We’re going to be me.
NJS
3/17/2005 08:53:00 am
Monday, March 07, 2005
I am having an affair.
Ah, London. Waterloo facilitated an Apex ticket, meaning an outlay of only £20 and something pence. It may take an hour longer than the Paddington route, but surely it’s worth it? Fuck knows, but eight hours on a train over the weekend is more than enough. To get up before 7 and head for another one to get into work this morning was almost too much.
I love London, in an unfaithful way, a non-committal way. Every time I see her I tell her I love her, but that I also love my wife. London knows I’ll never leave my kids for her, knows I’ll never give in to her charms, to her Italian cafes just off Carnaby Street where we breakfasted on Sunday, to her proliferating Muji’s with their attractively utilitarian clothes weaved in khakis and blacks, to her Fred Perry shops, her waffle stands, her trend-hopping Oxford Street tat emporiums selling cheap imitations of non-expensive-in-the-first-place fashion items, to her Chinese noodle bars where a box stuffed with streaks of eggy goodness replete with chunks of carrot and cauliflower and sweet & spicy chicken cooked the Cantonese way (sugar coated rather than battered) can be purchased for less than the price of a Big Mac and fries with added beef hormone, to her smattering of record shops on Berwick Street, her enormous HMVs and Virgin Megastores, her wide avenues in Kensington where people park Chelsea Tractors in the centre of the road because a million pound home doesn’t come with a garage, her street entertainers in Covent Garden who risk hypothermia in the name of… standing extremely still… her gangs of middle aged Harley Davidson enthusiasts presumably retired from work in the city and who can’t bear to leave her, her shoe shops, her Dali statues on the South Bank, her bridges, her buildings, her abundance of conversations being enthusiastically or laconically made in languages I can only just identify (and certainly not understand), her buses, her cycle-taxis, her black cabs, her tube system (how many people pass through the Circle or District or Bakerloo or Northern lines everyday and never stop to ponder what a remarkable feat of engineering it must have been, 100 years ago, to excavate those tunnels which criss-cross the capital in a bizarre and intricate fashion, to plan those stations which wind in three dimensions downwards and backwards?), her habit of blackening the insides of your nostrils if you use said tube system for more than 20 minutes in any given day, her beggars, her posh people, her celebrities, her sushi bars, her whole shops devoted to labels and brands which are only ever a small department of a larger (yet still smaller) store in other parts of the country, her arrogance, her blackened brickwork, her claustrophobic rail network inlets which allow a sneak glance at the backsides of city houses, her townhouses, her monuments and enormous Ferris wheels, her hotels on Holland Park Avenue with their extortionate breakfasts, her music venues-
Stop.
The purpose of the trip, ostensibly, was to see Embrace at Brixton Academy, to meet up with strange people I have communicated with digitally but not tactilely, to see friends who I love dearly again, to spend time with my mistress again (in the company, this time, of my actual, ahem, “partner”), to stay in a hotel rather than on someone’s floor (or hotel floor)-
Stop.
Brixton Academy.
I have been ill lately – a cold turned into a stomach bug and I have shed a stone, near enough, in only a week and a half. I am not drinking at the moment and intend to maintain this and see if I can shed more weight. I am (largely) avoiding spicy and fatty foods (noodles on Sunday being the exception thus far) because, frankly, they go straight through me and make me feel ill again. I’ve only ever been to Brixton Academy when absolutely wasted before – twice in 2000 and both times I was literally carried from the pub to the venue, once after (allegedly – I wasn’t paying attention) consuming 15 pints of Guinness over the course of an afternoon. I can’t, quite simply, do that anymore.
Even plastered I knew that Brixton was a shite venue. Sure, it looks nice with the balconies and ramparts, part castle, part amphitheatre, but a; backstage is shit, windy, confusing and the VIP bar is tatty (I’m comparing almost exclusively and unfavourably to Shepherd’s Bush here – it’s certainly better than Bristol Academy), and b; the sound is fucking criminal. It’s all drums and reverbed fuzz, the ceiling too high… If you stand by the mixing desk it’s bearable, but after Anechoic’s set I went into the foyer to buy their single, got talking to some people, and before I knew it Embrace had walked on stage and the world and his dog had rushed the lower auditorium. One look at the maddening throng put me off fighting my way through it, so we headed for the top balcony and positioned ourselves right at the back, just where the sound is worst, just where you can no longer hear any guitar at all, just where some pissed lad was standing doing a chimp dance with his arms outstretched and his drunken body bobbing like a wading bird dipping for shellfish as he spatters Guinness over all and sundry, before the woman sort of next to him gets pissed off with her boyfriend and throws her pint at him, swearing and waving her arms until he fucks off, and the bobbing pissed guy with the outstretched arms starts high-five-ing her and then hugging her and… beery lads who’d batter you in a pub in the midlands if you weren’t dressed right, wailing along to heartbreak anthems, is not what I love about this band.
I described Anechoic (Korg, guitar, drums, keys, squiggly electronics, MBV, Aphex, Elbow) as being like “having your brain cleaned with noise”, a sensation I am very keen on as my brain is busy and messy.
Embrace, at their best, at the moments when I’m unutterably in love with them, are like having my soul cleansed with noise. And I don’t believe in a “soul”, as I’ve said before and at length. The slower, ballady ones don’t do much for me live because they’re about melody and live you can’t hear that (especially not at Brixton). CBTWYK does little for me live cos I’m not into singing along massively 90% of the time. It’s… the climax of AYGGP, the white noise squall at the end of “Out Of Nothing”, the clattering rhythm at odds with the melody of “Spell It Out”, the upsurging rapture of “Save Me”… it’s the sublimation into something, even if I’m only standing at the back and nodding my head, if I can close my eyes and have the noise wash over me, the grand rise of “My Weakness…” (too brutal, too harsh, too dark to be a singalong, surely?), the screaming wail of “New Adam New Eve”, the new dub riot of “One Big Family”, the thumping tide of “Ashes” (and “New Song Number One” as well – keep that working title, there’s an insouciant arrogance about naming a song that which I love). Live, Embrace squeegee my brain and heart clean with noise and melody. This is why I love them. You can take your Doves and Coldplay and any other band of that “ilk”, and shove them up your arse. None of them make the right NOISE.
I had three beers all weekend and bought one CD single. London is a cruel mistress, but I am becoming numb to her nefarious commercial charms, to her planted desires and avaricious encouragement.
I still love her, though. I love the way she smells.
NJS
3/07/2005 11:17:00 am
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