Always Duck In The Presence Of A Helicopter

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 Southend and headed west to Bristol. And my parents had moved south towards Chichester soon after. So here I am. Sleeping on a cold stone floor, with only a thin piece of grey felt padding between me and the concrete. Washing each morning in a dingy toilet block at the back of this collection of industrial units. Purely nonresidential - this is what the future planning adjacent, local council worker in me would be thinking - but Paul lives in the studio above the rehearsal room 24/7, as does the artist woman who rents one of the adjacent units.

So it's me and the dog. And the dread of dealing with the poop. I can't recall the rest of that outing. Did I have a ball for the dog to chase? How long was I out there for?  Did I meet the ghost of my younger self and my friend James Lee, collecting samples from the bank of the stream that flows through the park, as part of a school geography project?

Paul was probably striking deals at the nearest car boot sale. He inhabited the unit on the industrial estate rent-free and in exchange was ostensibly a form of round the clock security guard. The site - and night - watchman, if you like. But briefly, between tenants, there was a time when he also had access to another, bigger unit at the front of the building. He filled this up with all his assembled junk and opened a temporary second hand goods store. I remember going out in the rain on a Saturday afternoon to flyer cars in order to promote the business. We've time shifted back a couple of years now. I'm still living in Southend at this point. I'm employed part time at the local tax office, processing VAT forms. I recall passing a colleague as I plastered flyers behind the windscreens of cars in the car park beside Roots Hall, home to Southend United football club.

The flyers were mostly ignored, tossed away, or simply scattered by the breeze. In one instance I remember watching a car drive off with its windscreen wipers going and a flyer moving back and forth in situ, doggedly refusing to be shifted.

Later on I spent a day helping out at Paul’s makeshift junk store. There were only half a dozen customers - perspective customers - that wandered by in the hours I was there. Someone bought some random screws and other bits of hardware store detritus. A woman flicked through a collection of old records for sale, but didn't buy anything. There were multiple TVs and video recorders filling out the space, maybe even a washing machine or two. Toasters. Random musical equipment. It felt like I was existing within the setting of a Philip K. Dick novel, one of those early non SF ones.

To kill time we watched a movie on one of the bank of TVs that crowded the far wall of the unit, something unremarkable that I only half took in until a scene where a man had his head sliced off by rotating helicopter blades. That and the exploding head in Scanners are things you don't casually forget.

The junk shop sale didn't last long. I guess the space had to be vacated when a new tenant was found. I doubt Paul sold much. But the TVs and the other bulky items must've gone somewhere. Probably exchanged, or sold, later on at boot fairs scattered across south east Essex.

*

In the end the dog didn't poop. And I returned with the precious beast after an allotted time. I was ostensibly at Paul's that weekend to record music. To play with the weird synths and the drum machines and capture whatever emerged on to DAT.

Digital Audio Tape.

A musical format of its time, somewhat equivalent to video tape. Digital was king back then. You could record in digital. Capture every sound precisely, hiss free. You could even burn your own CDs using the same technology that became standard in desktop computers a decade later. My portable DAT machine was in demand at that point, not just for myself but for other bands rehearsing or recording at Paul's studio.

Exactly why or what I was attempting to achieve musically is lost to the mists of time. I'd made a record the year before, released by someone in Scotland, and it had somehow been picked up by John Peel and played a couple of times on his late night radio show. And reviewed positively in a dance music magazine. And aired on a Scottish indie music show. And I'd even got fan mail from a truck driver who'd heard the track on the radio and said it had transported him to another dimension ... well, maybe not another dimension, but late at night out on the road it had had some kind of transformative effect.

500 copies of a 12" were pressed up. I think 2-300 of those were picked up by a distributor in the Czech Republic. Maybe the clubs of Eastern Europe were throbbing to the beat of my fabulous techno music - in truth no more than a slight piece that juxtaposed an acid riff against some sampled drum loops, basic pad chords and an eerie voice sample taken from an episode of cult SF show Space 1999. Did anyone make money from this venture? For sure it wasn't me. And for sure it wasn't the Scottish guy who put up the funds to have the record pressed.

So here I was - hard floor negotiated for the long weekend of my stay - trying to build on my very minor successes. I'd acquired the nickname Tricky from Paul because I was living in Bristol now and trip hop was the genre of the moment. Bristol was happening. But I was back in Essex recording random bleeps and blurps, dull chord progressions, and trying to perform a musical alchemy that was, and still remained, quite beyond me.

At night Paul would hang out with his friends and take drugs, conversing on a range of seemingly random topics that were often themselves drug related. There was acid and mushrooms and other assorted less than legal options available, none of which I chose to partake in. I did drink beer - or more likely, it would’ve been cheap tinned lager.

When the guests had left, we stayed up drinking tequila until sunrise (although these units had no windows, so any sense of time was quickly lost). We watched a series of old B&W movies starring Alastair Sim and later became mesmerised by the curling being beamed directly from the winter Olympics taking place out in Japan that year and shown endlessly through the lonely hours of the night.

It was an odd, dissociated time. It was out of time. It was an alternate dimension. There was a visiting band who lived and travelled in a converted ambulance, now temporarily parked up outside the front of the building. A ping pong table filled half the space in the rehearsal room where I slept. I'd brought the first Faithless album with me and Paul and his friends became fervent converts to this new band who had at that point not made their big chart breakthrough.

And then eventually, via circuitous train shenanigans, I found myself back in Bristol. Life was in colour again. Well, in different colours. The greyhound and the park and the ghosts of my youth, and everything else that went with that lost weekend, had melted away to become something akin to a vivid but half-remembered fever dream.