Random Access Memories

Imagine driving a car – that’s the easy part for most people reading this. Not for me. I can’t drive. The only time I’ve been behind the wheel of a car is in my dreams. Anxiety dreams where you find yourself driving in busy traffic and you’re fully aware that you don’t know how to drive. And then something in your subconscious forces you to wake up. But I digress. Imagine driving a car. You’re approaching a speed bump. And instead of slowing down you push hard on the accelerator. There’s a moment where it feels like you’re flying and then suddenly you’re somewhere else entirely. Some when else. Imagine. Where we’ve come back to is a bus stop on Woodgrange Drive. A major artery leading out eastwards from the centre of the town of Southend-on-Sea (town then, now a city). At one end you’ll find posh, detached houses inhabited by rich city traders and at the other end the houses are run down and the owners are likely unemployed or working blue collar jobs. Somewhere between thes...

Is it better to burn out than fade away? I suspect Mark Hollis, singer with the band Talk Talk, would have profoundly disagreed. Talk Talk were a band who used every note until all that was left was silence. That it seems was the perfect way to go. Talk Talk came from Essex. They were a band who were local to me. But also not local to me, because they seemed to live in their own world. In their early days they had hits with a sound not dissimilar to other synthesiser led pop acts of their time, chief among these I suppose being Duran Duran. (The repeated word element in both band names is pure coincidence). At that point in their career I was probably barely aware they existed. The hits were catchy and in later life I grew a fondness for them, but at the time my musical compass was directing me elsewhere. I only discovered them for myself on their awkward second album. The moment between adolescence and adulthood. I’m not sure why I became so obsessed at that point. The songs we...

If you missed part one of this story, you can go back and read it here: I'm Your Fan   *  I don’t have a date for when I got my first letter from Joey. In fact I don’t even remember how Joey found me. Somewhere through the ether, through an interest in Icelandic music perhaps, she had come across my address. It would’ve been on flyers designed to promote the catalogue for the record label I was running. Someway, somehow, from all the way out in Nowheresville, USA she had found my address and written to me. I don’t remember if she was ordering any of our records or just wanted to ‘chew the fat’. I don’t remember much. So let’s add some context. We’ve graduated from the 1980s to the 1990s.   The Daisy Hill Puppy Farm followed up their attention grabbing debut with a darker, denser second ep. This one was on 12”. I think I’d fully financed this release. I no longer had to sell copies out of the garage at my parent’s house. Based on the success of their debut, I’d found ...

Cath once told me she didn’t understand why I wasn’t married with fourteen children. Not married to her, but to some mythic other person. She wanted children herself. At least three, preferably more. Someone who would look after her when she was old and needed the support. (The more kids you had, the better the odds were that one of them might care for you.) I’m not sure how she got the notion that I’d make a great father. I couldn’t see it myself, but I wasn’t quite arrogant enough to tell her how wrong she was. Here’s the problem with children. They’re both vulnerable and invulnerable. On the one hand they can say whatever they like and get away with it. They have no filter. On the other hand, they need to be looked after. If they’re sick or if there’s an accident, they can’t fend for themselves. Their vulnerability and their invulnerability scare me in equal amounts. Spoiler (not much of a spoiler if you’ve read this blog), I don’t have kids. Never had, never will. Aside fro...

 So there’s the narrator. Then there’s Dani. And Daniel. Ah, two Dans. That’s clever. Are they twins? No. Brother and sister? No. Okay, well… The narrator is married to one of them. Oh, I get it now. The narrator’s married to Dani and then- Why is the narrator married to Dani? Well the narrator’s male, right? I didn’t say that. Well I assumed since you’re male. Well you should never assume anything. Ask first. But yes, the narrator is male. And he’s married to Dani. So I was right. He’s married to Daniel. But… Oh, I see. Fine. Maybe you could tell me one of the jokes. Jokes? Yes. One of the jokes from the show. I bet you’ve got some real zingers. There aren’t any jokes. But … this is a comedy, right? Yes, it’s a comedy. But there are no jokes? Have you not watched any of the comedies your channel puts out? They don’t have jokes. Are you saying our shows aren’t funny? I didn’t come here to be insulted. It’s not an insult. The comedy oc...

I know why Tim’s here. He’s my brother. I know why Dave’s here. He’s Tim’s best friend. I guess Fiona turned up because she’s a professional. She’s been on other records. She was one of the backing singers on a top 10 chart hit by The Beat Masters or House Masters or some such 80s dance act. (I should look this stuff up, but hey, I’m enjoying the unreliable narrator thing at the moment). I’m not quite sure why the drummer turned up, but I guess it’s a good thing that he did. Anyway, let’s back track. Where are we?  Thornton Heath. South London. When are we?  198- ooh, let's say 1987. Why are we here?  Good question. * There was a band (a collective?) called the 82 Downers. I can’t tell you their story, only my interaction with it. I believe they began life in Coventry, where my brother had done a degree and then been a student union rep for a year. The 82 Downers were a group of students who shared a house in Coventry and made music. And then they were just Ti...

 Don’t unplug the jukebox There’s time for one refrain And if we miss the night bus We can walk home in the rain   Statistically there are over twice as many pop songs written about the rain as there are about the sun. (Don’t ask for a citation, this is not Wikipedia). That Beatles song is just an outlier. Misery loves company. Lately I’ve taken to walking in the rain. I don’t have much choice. I consult the local weather forecast and study the radar maps in the hope of finding a break in the clouds, but when the next dry day is predicted to be four weeks from next Wednesday you just have to give up and get on with it. Once you’re soaked through, it’s not so bad. You might as well just keep on walking. I like to wear sunglasses when I go out. It’s taken many years, but I feel I’ve refined my sense of irony nicely at this point. The glasses get wet, steam up and everything becomes blurry.   I sort of like that. (There’s a great line in the film Amores Perros ...

Eleven year old me wrote a story for my end of year English Language exam. I scored top marks out of around 120 people who were in my year. I don’t remember what the topic was, but essentially all you had to do was make up a story based on a picture you’d been given. I seem to recall it was a photo of a creepy looking forest. I’m sure it was right up my alley. Across the following years my marks for English Language gradually declined. End of year exams stopped asking us to write stories and instead made us write essays. There were dry topics like the rise of football hooliganism or politics or other subjects I had no skills or interest in tackling. I think the zenith was when I was reduced to writing a piece about society. I wrote in the manner of a famous Ray Bradbury short story (although I’d not read any Bradbury at that point, aside from perhaps Fahrenheit 451). I was the narrator, an outsider walking the streets of my home town late at night and commenting on all the people s...

"If you like our music, drop us a comment down below. Or give this video a thumbs up. Want to buy our latest release? Just head over to Bandcamp and download it. You can pay at the click of a button via Paypal." So that’s how things work in the internet age. Nice and simple. Frictionless transactions or some such marketing jargon. There’s still a process taking place somewhere, but it’s discreet. Behind the scenes. It probably involves a data centre out in Iceland and is a tiny tiny part of the reason the planet will shortly kill us all via climate change … but as we always say at times like this, that’s a different discussion for a different blog that you haven’t heard of and probably won’t ever read. My first interaction with a fan came about – ever circuitously – like this. It was the late 80s, I had somehow wound up running a small independent record label. The main intent had been to release my own music via tape - and later also on vinyl. But a label of one act – an...

As a child I started out reading, and latterly writing, science fiction. That was my genre of choice growing up. From the space adventures of E.E. Doc Smith to the poetic works of Samuel Delaney and the paranoid futures of Philip K. Dick. Dragons with Anne McCaffrey. Fantasy door stoppers featuring the adventures of Thomas Covenant. It wasn’t a straight path from pulp to serious writings, but I guess there was a kind of loose progression that started with Smith and ended with Delaney and Dick and other more mature works. What I wrote back then was definitely pulp. It was derivative. I ended up consciously or unconsciously mimicking the styles of the authors I most enjoyed reading. But I could no more convincingly conjure up the California settings of a Philip K. Dick novel, than I could plot anything even remotely as wild or original as one of his stories. My dreams of a literary career took equal place back then with my dreams of making it in the music industry. But publishing you...

I collaborated in a number of bands with my brother. These included 91 Vibrations, which started life back in 1986 as a solo project with Tim guesting on a couple of tracks. The band was on hiatus between 1990 and 2012. After that we released one ep and one more album. By this point it was mostly Tim recording and me guesting on a few tracks. After 91 Vibrations in their original incarnation fizzled out, there was briefly the time of C.O.M.A. No one knew what C.O.M.A. stood for. Not even me, and I named the band. We made up many preposterous possible meanings – the worst of a bad bunch being Christians on Mega Acid. This one must’ve made it into a press release somewhere, because it was quoted in a review we got in Underground which was an indie music mag that existed briefly in the early 90s and could be bought at your local branch of W H Smiths. The genesis of C.O.M.A. came from a break in at my brother’s house. He’d been away on holiday and thieves had forced their way in and...

“Oooh. Wheee. Wooah.” There’s a guy walking across the street from me, headphones clamped to his head, exclaiming loudly at passersby: “Whooo. Awwwww. Yeeee.” Strange people on the streets are not unusual, even out here in this modest town   where I live, with its largely elderly and reserved population. I tend to keep my head down at times like this, stare straight ahead and get on with my business. But this time my initial assessment was incorrect. A little further on, in a neighbouring street that narrowed towards the one I was walking down, there was a man with a child carried on his shoulders. This was the person I’d heard and he was merely entertaining his child by jogging them up and down as he carried them along and adding sound effects to compliment the actions.   “Oooh. Yeah. Wheee.” Last summer, on an early morning where the temperature was already climbing steadily and the sky was a piercing blue, I stumbled across a young man (clearly on some kind of s...

So I'm walking Paul's dog. The greyhound. The one whose name I don't remember. And I have a plastic bag in case I'm required to pick up the poop. Naturally I'm uncomfortable about this. Also, I don't really get on with dogs. Dogs also don't get on with me. I'm a cat person. I like cats. Cats like me. Or else they're   completely indifferent - which is, of course, their right. Me and the greyhound get on fine though. The greyhound as a rule just exists. Paul is besotted with him. They are a (non) dynamic duo. I'm not sure why I've been entrusted with walking the dog. Paul must have business elsewhere. And I'm his guest, sleeping on the cold, hard concrete floor of his rehearsal room for free. Because this is the 90s and there's no local Travelodge. This is Southend and there are doubtless numerous guest houses - an avenue of Fawlty Towers clones that I'm too scared or too poor to contemplate. By this point in my life I had left...