Surfing With Alice

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 photo of Truro taken along the river at low tide (it’s mostly always low tide in Truro), that I’d then tinted a vivid aquamarine using the open source equivalent of Photoshop (which was called Gimp).

 I designed the label too, in a contrasting pink and then had them printed up (50 copies, using a company based somewhere near Southampton). The CDs themselves were blank and I could burn them as required on my laptop. I was thinking old school, as though nothing in the music world had moved on since I dropped out in 1992. Which in retrospect was daft of me and of course I never shifted any.

But I liked that album. It was short (always a good thing) and it had a cohesive feel to it, which made up for any deficiencies in the quality of the tracks themselves.

One of the tracks was titled ‘Surfing with Alice’, not for any reason other than that I liked how it sounded. Surfing is a Cornish thing. Alice was Alice Levine – but not the famous one who was a radio one DJ and then presenter of a hit podcast and also a contestant on Taskmaster. This Alice was a work experience student at the local council offices where I worked for much of the first decade of the new millennium.

They came in batches, these students, stayed for a year and then often got taken on for full time positions. The first one I got to know was called Emily. Alice came with a co-worker, Chloe. There was a Charlotte. (Charlotte Hatherley, but not the singer/songwriter who started out as guitarist with the band Ash). Often times I would end up chaperoning these teenagers and training them on the basic admin jobs for our department. Opening the post. Locating old files from a basement room, dusty and ill lit, in the subterranean part of the Grade II listed building that made up part of the Penwith District Council offices back then. Answering phones. Sending faxes. Printing off copies of site maps for people making planning applications.

The replacement for Charlotte – I forget her name, Kerry? – once told me I’d make a great teacher. This was almost as funny as the time Cath suggested I should’ve been married with fourteen children. A lot of my family were teachers, but I would never have stuck out even a single lesson at a job like that. But it was still nice to be told I had skills (even where I didn’t).

Cath had returned to Canada by 2008. After finally completing her PhD she acquired a job in marketing for a pharmaceutical company. They had offices or connections in Europe and for a while she did work that sometimes took her back there. One such trip led to us having a week’s holiday in Romania, about which I might write elsewhere. There was even talk of a permanent move over here, but the problem was she wasn’t happy in her work. Her bosses were bullies, they drove their staff too hard and stress levels were difficult to cope with.

Canada was a distant land. I’d contemplated a year out there (via a holiday visa) when my last contract was up with the council. But they wanted to renew that contract and as I was sitting in for my friend Greg who’d been seconded to a better paid position, his future was tied to mine and so I couldn’t just walk away from the job without it having consequences for others.

So Canada drifted away from me, as did Cath. Which was for the best. For her. For me. For the both of us.

So that was what the album title referred to. The ‘somewhere else’ we were going to was I suppose an inner space. A reclusive lifestyle. Back into the grooves and the beats of the music. Back to nature. Back to books. Back to square one. You’ve climbed the ladders and now here come the snakes.

I made two or three more albums off the back of that first, but I never released any of them officially. There is now a compilation that collects a selection of these tracks, but as albums in their own right they didn’t have the same cohesion. The music might have been stronger if you considered them track by track, but albums don’t work that way. Albums (good ones at least) should always be more than the sum of their parts.

The revival of 91 Vibrations was still 4 years away at that point in time. From there came my first guitar, my budding songwriting career and the relaunch of the record label. Which makes this sole Ghostword album an outlier. It feels somehow like it doesn’t belong anywhere and it was recorded by someone who felt like they also didn’t belong.

If there’s a better summation, you’ll need to look elsewhere. I just do what I’m told. If you have further questions then don’t ask me, after all I’m just the stenographer.