Random Access Memories

‘Don’t kill your wife with housework – let electricity do it.’ 1950s advertising slogan * After Dave left, dispersing those final clarinet notes to the wind, a new era was ushered in. Calm descended upon the streets of north London. The Greek guy had moved out from the house adjacent to my brother and our ramshackle assortment of musicians had been pared back to the bone. As a 5 piece we’d commandeered the living room by sheer weight of numbers and lack of space to accommodate us elsewhere, but now we were neatly annexed away in the small back bedroom at the rear of the property. With the departure of those who could sing or play instruments to some level of competency, my brother was left to do what you might term the ‘heavy lifting’. So the next move was to engage the services of some machines to help us out. Computers were still at a primitive stage back then, but music software was beginning to trickle down to the home user. One such example was the arrival of the Amdrum. H...

Gotta Catch ‘Em All! – English language slogan for the Pokémon franchise. * I was filling a hole in my musical knowledge the other day by listening to Wish by The Cure. As a teenager I loved The Cure. Their poppy, post-punk debut album was crammed full of catchy little songs. Then they took a complete left turn and produced two dreamy Goth albums that sort of pre-dated the whole shoegaze scene and made them stand out from the crowd much more than their early work had ever done. Then came Pornography , which was dark, noisy, fucked up and a very immersive plunge into madness and depression. Sixteen or seventeen year old me definitely had a deep crush on that album. And then… I don’t really know the rest of the story. I guess whatever came next could never beat Pornography and then they went poppy again for a bit and they were just there, but I had so much other music to consume that I kind of left off following where they were at. The Cure (probably unfairly) felt to me like...

Dave played the clarinet. It was a post DFTND era. Trevor had set off to buy milk and never returned. We’d lost touch with Fiona. There was just me and Tim and Dave, in the small upstairs back bedroom of that narrow house in Ponders End. It was probably the last time I saw Dave. Adding clarinet to the palette of sounds was great. It added life, urgency. It was an imprecise sound, captured imprecisely with our limited recording equipment. I think maybe Dave was playing out in the hallway so it didn’t outbalance all the other sounds we were recording. I still have a tape with those tracks. It doesn’t amount to much and I don’t credit much value to what there is. But I like its promise. It was the reverse of when Trevor first turned up with his violin but was already desperate to jettison it and acquire the role of a cliché lead guitarist. We lost a lot once Dave moved away, to where exactly I forget, but working somewhere as a speech therapist. But that last session, the unexpected...

The seasons change and it gets dark earlier. Sometimes I’m in bed by nine which means I might wake again around midnight. Insomnia. My mum had it and all she had for company was the radio. Or the pills, that progressively lose their effect. There’s an alarm going off somewhere else in the building. A constant beep – like a smoke alarm when the battery needs changing. I don’t know which flat it’s in. Or maybe it’s a life support system and I’m already on the edge of death. Everything’s a simulation and all the people reading this are about to cease to exist. Farewell to all the voices in my head. Someone asked if I had a chest problem, because my voice always sounds croaky. I told them not to worry – I live and work alone, so I don’t really talk to anyone. The voice is a muscle and if you don’t exercise it then it atrophies like any other. I guess I lost my voice the same time I lost my brother. No more four hour Sunday morning workouts for my vocal chords. It’s okay though, I d...

This started life as a playground argument between myself and Keith Simpson. It concerned two TV shows long since consigned to the dustbin of my memory. The crux of the argument, as I recall, was that I had talked about two kids TV shows I’d watched the previous evening and Keith Simpson had questioned this, stating I couldn’t have watched both shows as they clashed with each other. I stuck to my guns and we ended up with a wager with winnings to whoever was proved to be correct. Bear in mind this incident takes us back to the mid 1970s and we were probably both about nine years old – so the stake of this bet was 5p. Anyway, one of us was tasked with bringing in the relevant TV listings from the previous day's newspaper to settle the dispute once and for all. Keith supplied the newspaper and claimed victory because one of the shows had ended at 5.05 pm and the other show started at 5.00 pm. Now to me, that was clearly not proof that two shows clashed, it was merely proof that t...

When I lived in Bristol and my parents were living in Sussex (a small village near to Chichester), I would travel by train to visit them. The main route was a direct line from Bristol to Portsmouth and then a short ride on a local service to Emsworth (and latterly Bosham). The way services connected meant there was often a long wait between the two trains. On the return journey it was close to an hour. At first I’d wait it out at the prescribed interchange, which was Fratton. Fratton was one of the bleakest, most exposed, run down and uninviting stations to be found on the network. Waiting there was never a good time. Latterly I’d go one stop further, to the cities main station of Portsmouth and Southsea, a more impressive grade II listed structure on the outside, but also pretty bleak and cold and uninviting as you waited up on the exposed higher level platforms. But that almost hour long wait meant you could break your journey and head into the city. The centre of Portsmouth didn...

Why must you record my phone calls? Are you planning a bootleg LP? 'Gangsters' by The Specials * At the town centre end of York Road there was an open market where you could buy band t-shirts from one of the stalls. I bought a Cabaret Voltaire t-shirt there and later on, one of Julian Cope which featured the man himself in full length pose taken from the cover of one of his albums. I used to wear a lot of ‘merch’ in those days, often for bands I barely knew, or owned much actual music by. Truman’s Water for one – go look them up if you’re interested. I can’t remember why or when that stopped. Now all my t-shirts are plain and dark green in colour. You’ve got to have a system. Anyway, we digress. Beside the open market, there were a series of covered arcades that housed more secure. but still often itinerant businesses. York Road was at the bottom end of the town, towards the seafront. It connected to the high street, but what at that time was the ragged end of the hig...

I was thinking about Report on Probability A , a great work from one of the great English writers Brian Aldiss. I’m sat on a bench at St Erth railway station, out in the sun on a hopeful spring day, returning from a trip to St Ives. At this same station, several years earlier, Cath and I are reading from a collection of short stories by Patricia Highsmith. And so it goes. At Lelant Saltings, a short but unappealing walking distance from St Erth, I’m engrossed in a collection of classic mystery stories penned by Agatha Christie and other female writers of a similar vintage (but of a less similar level of fame). Or I’m sheltering from the rain in a small wooden enclosure in Salt Mill Park (now demolished) placed beside a wilded area designed to encourage birds, and I’m reading Aldiss again, this time Greybeard . The award-winning SF novel Stand on Zanzibar – featuring a prescient version of what we now know to be the world wide web – fuelled me across both islands of New Zeala...

'It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.' From Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner    * Leaves don’t have the grace of snowflakes when they fall. On a still day they mostly don’t fall at all, but every so often one will drop and then, as if it’s contagious, two or three more will descend from the same or a neighbouring tree. I know it’s bad to flaunt your ignorance, but I kind of like not knowing stuff and trying to figure it out for myself. Why are sailing boats predominantly white? I’m staring across at 30 or more in the distance and there’s one with a blue hull and one that’s red, further back there’s yellow, but all the rest are white. Seagulls are massing at the shallowest part of the river at low tide, restless, but not really doing anything, like a playground full of children on the first morning of a new school term. When a group of six swans all take to th...