Music Is The Only Time Machine You'll Ever Need

Pulse were a band. A duo. Think Pet Shop Boys. Think Soft Cell. Think of all those 80s acts where a charismatic singer captivated an audience while a musician behind them coaxed music from an array of strange electronic devices.

Both members of the band were called Steve, so in lieu of a description it's easier to say that one of them was referred to as Thin Steve and the other... Well, you get the idea. Thin Steve created the music. By day he was a teacher at the local tec college. He was young. I was young back then too -- well on the cusp of turning 30, but these things are all relative. He was a generation below me. We talked about equipment. Probably not often, but at least once or twice.

We met at Paul's. Paul had a rehearsal room full of junk. And above the rehearsal room he had a studio full of even more junk. And a dog. A rescued, retired greyhound, the name of which I forget. The name of which doesn't really matter.

These rooms were on a tiny industrial estate (Estate? One large building subdivided into units. At front there was a car mechanics. Somewhere else a woman created art from melted glass. Other businesses came and went or passed me by). This space - at Paul's - was a nexus to be returned to. The plug of the bathtub, pull it out and a lot of water gravitates and swirls around chaotically until it ebbs away.

Fat Steve was the art. He rode the tube in London, making videos of the passing landscape or spinning around on the floor of an empty carriage and capturing transitions from light to darkness. Or something like that. We're mid 90s here. Pre camera phones and the internet and YouTube. I didn't see the stuff he filmed. I probably heard it described in second hand form from the other Steve.

Fat Steve was the voice. He was the words. He was the presence. Pulse were at Paul's to rehearse. To record. To avail themselves of the random equipment that passed through there, mostly attained from car boot sales that Paul would assiduously attend. So there would be old synths that worked by patching lots of wires into different holes. True old school analogue. Potentially wonderful. Or you might waste half an hour just to attain something that sounded like an asphyxiated cat. There were drum machines. A lovely, big boxy Roland CR-78. The beats you'll hear on early OMD records. Later came a 606, a small silvery beast with a beautiful snare and a liquid hi hat sound.

Stuff came and went. I guess the good stuff sold on. The asphyxiated cat  machine with its dense manual and imposing aura of needing a PhD to operate it was probably there the day I came and remained there beyond the last day (unknowingly so, as is the way in life. Endings? No just a slow fade...) when I left.

There was a buzz about Pulse. Or perhaps it was merely that I felt a buzz about Pulse. Fat Steve had a presence that captivated. Thin Steve was smart and personable. Maybe it was all my dreams as a failed musician, certainly as far as being in a real band, being projected on the nearest object within my orbit. I didn't really know them. How much hunger they had. Or whether this was marking time, filling the spaces you have when you're young and you're in that dip between adolescence and a settled adulthood.

I only saw them live once. At a venue in town that wasn't a pub, perhaps more of a club. Or a wine bar. Something incongruous. Paul was doing their sound for them. And I was acting as some sort of assistant. A couple of bits of gear were mine. Or maybe just some cables and wires. I remember there was a slightly temperamental 4-way plug adapter drafted in to allow for all the electronic machines to be connected. I remember praying it would hold out for the duration of their set.

I don't remember much else. Time does that. There was an audience. It was a small venue. I suspect the bulk were friends of the band. Pulse were great that night. It worked as a live experience. You'd find plenty like them in the 80s and 90s. No reason they couldn't have made it. Fat Steve with a presence and a voice and some cool lyrics, none of which I remember. And Thin Steve with the music, the beats, the pulse. It comes back to me now, an American band called The Crystal Method -- that was the influence he - or maybe both of them - would cite. I didn't/ don't know their work. Probably too industrial for me - from a genre of music I'd moved away from by then. Also I'd guess there would've been Depeche Mode. How could you be from estuary Essex, making electronic music, and not cite or be influenced by them?

The concert was great. I felt the buzz. Then it was over. Things moved on. We were all itinerants at that bath plug nexus of Paul's. There were no endings. Pulse didn't make it - to the big time or to the shadows of the big time. As far as I know, anyway. Maybe Fat Steve made films. And Thin Steve advanced his career at the local tec. Real life supplanted their dreams. Or they split up. Fell apart. Drifted away.

I don't think I ever owned any recordings they made. I'd still have them otherwise. Collected in a musty holdall filled with old tapes destined to move with me from one place to another, randomly picked over for lost memories until tapes stopped being a thing (they later became a thing again, of course) and the majority were disposed of in a final move.

So nothing to look back on - listen back on. But they recorded, they demoed, a song or two in that studio above a rehearsal room. Among the junk and the dog and all the other comings and goings. They were a moment. A memory. The buzz. The pulse. 

Pulse.

Years later I wrote a story called Secondhand Daylight, about a London based graffiti artist. There's something of Pulse in that story, although you wouldn't see it without some prompting. I mean it's unconscious. Even I wouldn't have seen it without writing this out now, 30 years later, to the rattling clack of an insomniac typing one handed on his laptop at 4am.