there is life in that body, you’re just not using it. you can walk the length of this street and not trip over a sponge but behind you there is a contrail of wheelbarrows collecting pointlessness and dumping it in the allotment of middle age. really, I would, but you don’t know that. as for that one who precedes herself, there is surely a slabbering hoard of shed dwellers trotting shuffle-clad to peggy lee and assessing her age by how many times they think about it today, hopelessly treading the life mud of clack magnets through the polished hallways of sky sports, their tip tap tip tap on the brylcreemed keyboard of beelzebub sending clag missles to their watery island caravans.
today I shall forego a punishment in order to visit the post office. while I am there I will shuffle behind a see-through woman buying one second-class stamp and smile witheringly at somebody who treads on my foot reaching for the manilla envelopes. I’ll push my package through a grinder and they’ll tell they’re not packages but enormous letters which cost four times as much and I’ll nod and wither and shuffle back to the car while an asbo from mildenhall stumbles out of somerfield with a banana and twenty lights straight into the betting shop. not really. but anyway, it will be thirty minutes of my life that I might as well just have given to charity or something, which, if you work it out by the hour, is about ten quid, or what I’ll spend in the post office.
I bet you’re thinking the grand prix stuff was funny but this is just stupid.
look at that. blimey. you don’t expect me to really remember because its too late now and you would be lucky anyway. I just about pulled my finger from the wall socket when the birds started wailing at the window and I had to sweep them off with a broom. it was still dark but then it is now all the time and just look at that its a good job I’m not recycling. today everything is labelled happy twee and so I’m waking up slowly thankyou I probably shouldn’t have looked at that but as its at the end of list its sticking out like some broken appendage and I’m expecting some uncomfortable treatment because I did it before and they do it all the time so why couldn’t I etc. but you see its more complicated I know you do it all night but where is everybody else in the house? you see here we’re still extracting trumpets from wall cavities and posting factors on the wall of doubt until the whole thing collapses under its own weight and we prostrate ourselves at the altar of Trevor Eve.
I dig them up from the end of the 70s and wrap them in the daily mail before transforming into a 6-legged pantomime dromedary whereupon a malapropped oaf bangs his clavicle with a crucifix and it’s 3-2. after that you try and prise open the door with a boot scraper and an elfin twig basher rolls the boden catalogue into the road and we all drop to the floor like bruised monkeys at clacton where the high tide spills over the car park like black milk. is this something that has already been discussed? I had to mention it to eugene because he is the lord god of the known world and everything must be mangled through his immense brain portal immediately like so I’m just checking. you know. they do their own thing. we do ours. except we don’t go on and on and on and on and on and on and on about how wrong yours is and how right mine is and anyway I’ve looked at your own website and it’s rubbish right? we couldn’t do the other one because our internal organs were playing musical cavities and we’d lost the knob.
it was only 1976 when danno was hoiking his FS1E round the playing fields churning up sods and giving two fingers to the head he was an easter leaver you see so incumbent on hair-drying the flatlands he bespoke a jackson pollock on the geography block wall and punched a goalkeeper just before a jumper for goalpost got mangled in his spokes and the smell of burning acrylic wafted over earlham like a pall of doom. but twas the least of things when not the night before the barn fire of the vanities was out of control on the outskirts of sprowston and two-wheeled heliotropes barged through the melee wielding axle grinders and pumps for the sake of our skin whereupon we rolled uncontrollably under the tracks of a tank on super 8 while 17 bags of rubbish tried to get into tramps with jeans on
we were almost just sitting around and having a nice cup of tea in the dark as waily captain beefheart lookalike departed the stage to a single clap and relative to a norwich appreciation level that was a deafening roar considering there must have been at most 90 of us packed into the waterfront with maybe 10 square feet each to ourselves so when it all kicked off and we thronged, guardian reader-like, to the crush barriers at the front, I almost knocked someone’s deck chair over and woke them up.
we assembled as usual at the altar of Robyn Hitchcock looking our customary socially inadequate and middle-class dad selves and all did that little nod and hopelessly off time dance step which doesn’t involve much more than moving your head backwards and forwards and occasionally punching the air at waist height while ironically and whimsically smiling to yourself because you know all the words to the songs from Perspex Island. only this time is wasn’t just a guitar and morris slapping the bongos in falsetto, it was the latest roving incarnation of a rock royalty support band in the shape of the Venus 3, who, as Robyn points out, are 3/4 of R.E.M. and 3/5 of the Minus 5 or something as it is made up of Peter Buck, Bill Rieflin and Scott McCaughey who all feature on the Olé Tarantula album which made up about a quarter of the set which also included a selection box of previous solos and enough Soft Boys to keep the hardcore, which in this case means old, happy, and the usual rambling english intellectual twitness from one of the archetypal english eccentrics, who happens to have most of the others featured on the album or co-writing
as R.E.M. are having a year off, most of them are touring tiny clubs as the Venus 3 in front of about 100 people at a time and when do you get to stand 10 feet from Peter Buck as he changes electric 12-strings for fun and rips power chords and byrdsy twangdangles looking like he wishes he could do it like this all the time? well, actually, he looked like somebody had just told him his cat had been sucked into an irony vortex and the challenge for the evening was to see if he ever curled his lip. but he never does. even after the gig when he’s stood behind a formica table with a few robyn cds because they left the merchandise in brighton and is surrounded by about 15 of us telling him how great it was, he still looks like he’s been slapped by the invisible man. I mean, I know he’s having a ball really.
it’s not about R.E.M. though. long before things went all Green, R.E.M. and Robyn were already mutually respectual, as the Virtual Brighton magazine notes: Beginning as a strummer in Cambridge’s folk clubs, Hitchcock developed into a bandleader, heading up folk-pop iconoclasts the Soft Boys, one of alternative rock’s least sung but most influential bands. Yet by the time bands like R.E.M. and the Replacements quoted the Soft Boys as a major influence, Hitchcock had moved on to what would become his distinguished solo career. In other words, people were here to see Robyn Hitchcock. The support band were something of a novelty. a good one though. The BBC Oxford site sums up the whole things pretty nicely, but then again, Michael Stipe joined them on stage at the Zodiac and Thom Yorke was in the audience.
they’re full again. hallelujah. look, a baby in the back going to castle mall with mum and dad. that’s nice. it’ll arrive tomorrow. that man’s looking at me funny. time to start on the kitchen. I’ll go three times a week. perhaps he’s waiting to go fishing. january 12th then. bop it. nice hair. they’re coming back already. only two bottles of red. he looks like something out of the sweeney. blue peter best of the year. stop looking at me. hahaha, look at the state of that. office furniture. where’s my sun ray?
d’you know. it was the funniest little cinema I’ve ever been in. I have to turn off when they clamp his eyes open. I was a droog in my head back then. but then I started writing poetry about it and on a marina in the south of france I realized I wasn’t much cop. more like james joyce on cbbc. ulyssless.
mary clagnugget is over the dog toilet again, flipping slazengers from a plastic stick, while hairy flinches through the perilous overcroft, pushing sheep with his nose and dancing around flapjacks. it’s just a normal 9:30, but the eerie mist has descended, and amidst the pea soup of beelzebub, strange stirrings are afoot. she’s sure that the clanging of the gate seems much louder than usual, and the incessant butchers have swapped their cleavers with weavers, while the saxon man with the undistinguished skin and a handful of gibbons, is, for some reason, not prowling around the forecourt today. maybe it’s winter at last. she can’t keep pasting pages from New Woman on the mirror.
one more lob and the tennis ball clatters over the bones of the playarea, and stifles a yawn, as it bobbles over a duck and dribbles down the embankment. hairy sniffs the air and then darts over the cleavage, leaving a wisp of bishop in his wake. mary is left, treading offal into the grate to keep herself warm, when she’s suddenly aware that all around is stillness and menace. there go ambleside and jemima up the city, but she can barely make them out. mrs plantagenate and her mule are just billowing over the coals with their ham, but they are as obvious as waffles in blakeney. all around, yellow cake is rising, and hairy, where is hairy? a twig snaps behind her. it’s just a man-faced child, probably. a leaf rustles. another twig snaps, closer this time. patsy kensit is popping her finger in her mouth in the bird’s eye advert. snap. yellow. hairy.
an asbo cycles up the pavement, clattering a sheltered house, as if nothing has happened. dave pulls his tights out of the tumble drier and thinks about cheese. what are you looking at? ha ha ha!
I’m sure Lou can appreciate the irony of having my blog tagged by other blogs and not a single piece of metadata changing hands. Martin sent me a carrier pigeon, but he did also send one to Will and MaryMary, so I guess I’m in good company. far be it for me to try and obfuscate this simple yuletide community exercise (oh yes it is! oh no it isn’t! oh yes it is! oh no it isn’t! oh yes it is! oh no it isn’t! oh yes it is! oh no it isn’t! oh yes it is! oh no it isn’t! oh yes it is! oh no it isn’t! behiind yoo!) so I have to dig up a few things that I didn’t even know about myself before colorado disappears under a day after tomorrow blizzard and heathrow airport implodes under the sheer volume of disgruntledness which has created a time shift vortex into which grounded laplanders can hop while BA twiddles a knob somewhere and we’re all wearing santa hats while sliding around the concourse uncontrollably. so there.
1. I’ve made eleven albums but I’m the only one who listens to them oh yes I’m a regular brian wilson including the unnerving sideways smile and a brain like a sieve but I was only on stage once as part of the ill-fated we also hire vans and cars who had a singer like richard ashcroft in C&A but who was rubbish like the rest of us were although we did our own songs and from that point I decided I should do everything myself so I did including listening to it
2. I never take notes so when I say I’m just making a note of that it really means I’m just asking you to stop a moment because if I think about that right now I’ll understand it so hang on a minute and anyway if I don’t I’ll have at least 7 email sources reminding me what you said but maybe in a different way which actually makes it make more sense so it was worth waiting for right?
3. I can’t remember anything between the ages of 18 and 21
4. when I was a car valet under the the shadow of sheffield united bramhall lane stadium I was so good they gave me the chocolate brown rolls royce to go over which was going onto the front forecourt later that day and so I rolled it into the steam cleaner and sorted out the engine and the undercarriage rolled it into the workshop and got hold of the nasty pink polish that we used on all the sheds and fords that we normally worked on for about 2 pound each in between barm cakes and jokes about fat lasses and I proceeded to squirt an enormous spiralling arc of chemical over the expanse of the bonnet only to realize when attempting to work it in and buff it up with me greasy rag that the enormous spiralling arc of chemical would leave an enormous spiralling arc of a chemical stain which would forever remain. not even a bit of t-cut would shift it. I just pretended it wasn’t me and slid it into the multi-story before I strolled out the showroom and disappeared forever, well, to spend another 10 months unemployed in early 90s post-mining sheffied, anyway.
5. I’ve never hit anyone even though after 6 years working in Andy’s Records in Norwich on christmas eve and I got drunk behind the counter and started abusing customers out of hand for no reason other than I wanted to go to the pub I probably came closest or maybe when I actually got to the pub later and spent 4 hours on Bomb Jack for I ruled on Bomb Jack when everyone else was waiting behind me moaning about my most excellent scores and when they could have a go which they couldn’t and it’s amazing how long you can make half a john bull last but I can’t remember I wasn’t taking notes.
