Random Access Memories

I was planning to write a piece about the five weeks I spent backpacking across New Zealand in the winter (their late summer) of the year 2000. But I’m not sure there’s much of interest to share. I have one story set in New Zealand called Quicksand and it’s one of my favourites. It’s set in Taupo and was built from slender pickings. A couple of middle aged women who’d approached me in a local park and tried to convert me to Jesus. An incident outside a bar where someone made a passing (unsuccessful) attempt to snatch my belongings. And a train journey to Christchurch spent in the company of a friendly Māori lad wearing a Red Hot Chilli Peppers sweatshirt who shared his bag of crisps with me. What was most striking about Taupo was the large lake it nestled beside, formed in the crater of an ancient and violent volcanic eruption. I liked the contrast of this vast, largely empty space and the claustrophobia of small town living. Aside from that, New Zealand was unfeasibly pretty an...

Cath used to compare me to the seagulls. Seagulls, she’d observed, had this trait of moving their heads to the left and then the right, of looking up and then looking down at the ground. There was something comic or endearing in these jerky motions. I was doing it to avoid making eye contact. (Seagulls also stamp their feet rhythmically on the soil to fool worms into thinking it’s raining, so that they will rise up to the surface and then the gulls can eat them. As far as I know, I’ve never done that.) Cath liked the gulls, where most people didn’t. Even the grown up babies that were big and an ugly brown colour; they’d follow their mothers around ceaselessly, emitting a shrill peeping noise. In Canada, the seagulls were less aggressive and tended to mind their own business. They were polite, because that was the Canadian way. I didn’t really care for the gulls, but one day I stumbled upon some newborn chicks (Cath coined the term seaglet to refer to the young) upon the roof of a f...

Humans are incredibly fragile but also remarkably resilient. The Dictaphone was for work. Cath used it for her interviews, dozens of them transcribed later as part of the research for her PhD. When she came to Penzance the first time, I didn’t expect her to return so soon. But she did. Three times that first summer. She’d record our conversations as we sat on the beach late at night, the ocean a vague outline that you could hear by the progress of the waves advancing across the sand. We’d speak in soft voices, although there was mostly no one else around us to disturb. If you listen back now you’d hear everything – the wind, the waves, a stray gull circling above us or the rumble of a late night train arriving at its final destination. But tape degrades over time. That’s the beauty of an analogue life, it has a finite span. It grows old gracefully and then departs. In the digital present everything is too harsh and too permanent. It will haunt you forever and it will never forget. ...

Cath was in Bucharest (Romania) carrying out market research. A week later she’d be doing the same again, this time in Poland. In between she’d booked a week’s leave and I was coming to join her for an eastern adventure. We’d rented a place in Brasov (capital of Transylvania) and this late birthday treat (for me) was going to include a trip to Bran Castle (Dracula’s home) for Hallowe’en. But first we had a weekend in Bucharest. Cath had a room at the Hilton hotel (paid for by her employers) and I was going to join her incognito as her guest. A clandestine rendezvous in Eastern Europe gave off cold war spy vibes, but obviously I would’ve made the world’s worse spy. For my sins (and the sake of my wallet) I was flying out of Luton airport with Whizz airlines, a Polish cut price air carrier. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but what I got was a three hour flight delay. This was bad news as we’d arranged a meeting point in advance outside the Hilton for a specific time. I couldn’t text to...

I left Penzance in 2018, but I didn’t leave Cornwall. The Yorkshire coast had been found wanting. North Wales was a pipe dream that an angry tide might on any given day wash away. There was Wick, a mythic-seeming town at the opposite end of the railway network, but while the concept of moving from one to the other appealed to me on a conceptual level, the practicalities of pulling it off proved too big a barrier. And the cold and dark winters would never have been profitable for my mental health. I nearly made one more sojourn north, this time to Berwick (conveniently placed one hour by train from two appealing cities in Newcastle and Edinburgh) but online investigations failed to illicit many promising leads. Why move at all? Well I’d pulled myself from my 2009 financial slump and I’d also inherited some money from the sale of my parents’ house in Sussex after my mother passed away. I couldn’t live in rented rooms forever. Freelancing (which was the route I’d chosen after my job...

I’ve always wanted to write something substantial about music in the late 70s/ early 80s. About the music I grew up with through my adolescence and early adult life. About what made it great and about some defined events that changed the way that music sounded and developed. Societal factors. The arrival of digital technology. Drugs. Things that killed off the music I loved and altered the creative process. In an alternate reality I take the time and effort to hone out my thesis. I interview the musicians and producers that were there when this all happened. It makes for an interesting book and maybe Penguin or Faber or some such marque publisher agrees to publish it. But this is not that reality. I am not that person. And all the key people from that era keep dying, until eventually there will be no one left to talk to. I’ve already written on here about Echo & The Bunnymen. And I’ve written about Mark Hollis and Talk Talk. Now I’m going to write some words about The Associate...

Marcel Proust says that most of us end up doing what we’re second best at, which begs the question: What was his real talent? Poker? Stand-up comedy? Or fixing the propellers on vintage WWI bombers? I’d probably know if I’d ever read any Proust but sometimes big books can intimidate me. Not always. Wilkie Collins gets a fair crack of the whip. And I’ve read Dhalgren twice and if I live long enough I might try my luck a third time at wounding the autumnal city of Bellona. But what if you’re not best at anything? Spare a thought for Jo(e) Average. They’ve drawn up a list which they have to present to some mythic careers advisor – “I’m sorry, sir, but it turns out I’m pretty mediocre at all these things.” North Wales, Barmouth, could’ve been my second best. That neglected top floor flat with its spectacular view across to the railway bridge. Because what had come first, a year earlier, had been a trip up north in search of somewhere new to live. It started with a notion for Cleethorp...

In 2008 I retreated from reality. The clue’s to be found in the CD I released. The title was We’re Going Somewhere Else Now… The title came in quotation marks, to imply it was a phrase someone had said (or thought to themselves). I was good at disassociation and the ‘we’ was standing in for me. There are a lot of clues scattered in my music. They’re easier to find since I started writing lyrics, but they’re usually hidden to a degree. I’m not Jarvis Cocker, recounting my actual life experiences verbatim. A good twelve years (and they were mostly good) had passed since the first Ghostword release, the 12” vinyl in a bright orange cover with just a sticker to tell you the name of the band and the title of the record. There’d been plenty of music recorded (some of it shared online) under the Ghostword imprint, but nothing officially released until now. I like this album. It’s not great, but it has at least a couple of tracks on it that I’m very fond of. I like the cover too – a phot...