Beano

There were eleven of us, myself included, and we met up at the Crystal Palace Tavern - Kingsley, Andre, Don, Sav, Big Dan, Rodney, Tuns, Steve Mozzella, Alan the manager, and some bloke seemingly known to everyone except myself. He was some mate of Alan the manager, probably a postman from up Mandela Way and unknown to me because I tended to avoid overtime where possible. Eight hours of that shit each day, plus four at weekends was in itself quite sufficient.

It was Saturday afternoon, just enough time for everyone to have had a quick shower and a change of clothes after work. A van had been hired and we were going on a beano to Southend-on-Sea.

I'd customarily avoided this sort of thing in the past, but I was approaching forty and I'd begun to ask myself what was the worst that could happen. I liked a drink and I liked to get drunk, and I'd even begun to enjoy the company of other postmen. Even Tuns, my former enemy, seemed to have got over whatever problem he'd had with me when I started at East Dulwich. We weren't buddies, but at least he was no longer sneering at me from the other side of the sorting office whilst rhetorically asking who the fuck I thought I was because I'd just chuckled at a joke cracked by someone from one of his other inordinately complex mental lists.

On the other hand, Alan the manager was an unalloyed tosser, and unfortunately the reason that Nadim had decided against joining us; although Nadim also had some problem with Rodney, something about the changing rooms after some football match and how Rodney had sprayed Ralgex on his finger and then stuck it up some young kid's arse. It sounded a bit unlikely to me, but it also sounded like the sort of disagreement for which there wouldn't be much to gain from taking sides; and personally I liked Rodney. He was one of the funniest people I'd ever met and had at least never tried to stick a  Ralgexy finger up my arse.

Steve was a bit of a wild card and was usually to be found at the centre of an actual shop floor fist fight at least once a week. I never really understood why as he seemed fairly amiable whenever I spoke to him. My guess is that he lacked the ability to rise above the sort of shite people habitually come out with at work.

I used to drink with the Catford postmen, not all the time because that bunch would drink until they couldn't stand, but mostly they were fun. The Dulwich bunch didn't really socialise in the same way, probably because so few of them actually lived in Dulwich, so the beano seemed to be a means of redressing the balance, or something along those lines, but with the disadvantage of it being fairly difficult to stagger home from Southend-on-Sea once I'd had enough.

Wikipedia thus describes the etymology of the term beano:

A bean-feast was an informal term for a celebratory meal or party, especially an annual summer dinner given by an employer to his or her employees, probably derived from a tradition in the Low Countries at Twelfth Night. By extension, colloquially, it describes any festive occasion with a meal and perhaps an outing. The word, and its shorter form beano, are fairly common in Britain, less known in the United States.

So the comic which brought us Dennis the Menace and the Bash Street Kids is therefore named after a works piss-up.

We piled into the van and set off. I managed to seat myself amongst Kingsley, Don, and Andre, and significantly as far as possible from Alan the manager, but not so far as to be unable to hear him trying hard to balance his efforts to be one of the lads whilst maintaining command presence. Curiously for a black man, he didn't seem to particularly like black people, which looked one hell of a lot as though he was trying to prove something to white managers - see, I don't play favourites, I'm not like them, I'm like you. He routinely pulled Kingsley up about stuff he probably wouldn't have noticed had it been some white dude.

Yet even here, as just a bunch of cunts in a van with not a uniform in sight, the hierarchy remained. Alan haw haw hawed with the overtime boys, the docket bashers, those for whom getting off your tits with the boss was apparently strategic; and the rest of us - the losers and tag-alongs - kept to the back of the van.

It was a couple of hours to Southend, going via the Blackwall Tunnel, with just one stop at an industrial estate somewhere in Essex so that Don and Andre could urinate in broad daylight against a chain link fence.

We hit Southend, the seafront, and straight into a pub, and I immediately realised that this had been a fucking terrible idea. I'd imagined all eleven of us, maybe even Alan, quietly sinking into pleasant alcoholic haze over the next nine or ten hours, sinking into our chairs, talking shite, and all differences reduced to raw material for jokes and comic digs. Instead, Southend was swarming with arseholes all looking to get pissed and laid, or looking for something which might at least be obtained by exerting downward force upon everyone else. It was loud and chaotic, and the reason we had all gone into the pub was for as quick a pint as possible while getting our bearings and working out which arcade we were going to hit first. It was going to be an afternoon of pings and flashing lights, and even the act of getting drunk seemed to have taken lesser priority.

'What the hell are we doing?' I asked in rhetorical spirit.

'I really don't know.' Andre's answer seemed similarly dour, much to my surprise. Everyone else was getting into the swing of it, off to some pub, agreeing to meet later, announcing preferences for such and such an arcade game. Even Kingsley had been absorbed into the beano gestalt, contrary to his ordinarily temperate disposition.

I suddenly knew I absolutely could not spend the next eight or nine hours in the company of these people. It was nothing personal but the fact of being stranded here and obligated to engage in someone else's idea of fun until the van took us back to south-east London around nine in the evening was like some massive concrete block I simply couldn't get around. I'd anticipated some social event, but these people didn't want to talk. They wanted to get pissed and play arcade games. They wanted fun activities.

'Fuck this,' I said, seizing the moment. 'I'm going home.'

Only Don, Kingsley and Andre had heard me. The rest were in different bars or battling illuminated aliens or stuffing burgers into their faces.

'I'll come too,' said Andre, looking slightly ill.

We followed signs for the railway station, making our way against the tide of people piling onto the seafront in search of fun. We passed some goths, not the sort I'd grown up with, but the new generation, the ones who were into Marilyn Manson. They were the first of this batch I'd seen, and this was the first time I felt old.

They looked like children. They wore black clothes so clean and tailored as to seem fresh from the box, ridiculous flared trousers and silver spikes in stupid places. They looked like products, like things which came in sets, as though they had all been designed and marketed according to specific guidelines.

Andre and I took the train back to Liverpool Street, sharing a compartment in silence because he was genuinely ill - something he had eaten before setting off that morning.

I, on the other hand, had no such excuse, just the usual error of judgement.

Simon

It hasn't been a great week. It's been cold and I don't do well with the cold, which was one factor that eased my relocation to Texas. Christmas approaches with all the obligations of time spent in the company of persons whose company can be problematic. My wife is being messed about at her place of work. Carol died earlier in the week, and if I hadn't seen her in a couple of decades, it still felt rough even at such distance. Our neighbour has been whining about the cats again with his usual passive-aggressive charm, seemingly expecting me to tell him God knows what - maybe that I'd happily have them all put down rather than suffer another stray turd to be laid upon his beloved driveway; and Simon Morris is dead.

Simon was the vocalist and driving force of a group called the Ceramic Hobs. I first heard them at the tail end of the eighties, or possibly very early nineties - a couple of tracks someone had stuck on the end of a tape for me, and all I can remember was that they sounded like a bit of a racket. My initial impression wasn't great.

Around 1999, he sent a copy of Psychiatric Underground, the Ceramic Hobs first album, to the Sound Projector magazine with the words please feel free to give our CD a good slagging - we can handle it! I was writing reviews for the magazine at the time and Ed Pinsent, the editor, passed it on to me, suggesting that it seemed to be my sort of thing. I thought it sounded like a bit of a racket, but tried to write something positive:

It's certainly one of the more incoherent CDs I've come across. Tape collages are splattered across its twenty-eight tracks with all the ferocity of the pattern in the toilet bowl after a bout of swallie induced pebble-dashery. All mashed up with the tapes and a few techno inspired remixes is an assortment of occasionally tuneful punky numbers complete with gargled vocals, a drumkit being demolished, and a family of chimps at the mixing desk. They must've got through some PG Tips whilst this album was being made. Psychiatric Underground is like one of those kid's drawings of a circus where everything happens simultaneously, an interpretation which, if true to life, would mean that most circuses would last about five minutes.

Another stumbling block had been the association with Pumf Records, whom I recalled from the eighties back when I too had been involved in the whole DIY weirdy tapes by mail scene. To be fair, I hadn't actually heard any of their works, but had become jaded through a million flyers for Pumf products spilling from everything which came in the mail for a period of about a year. It had begun to feel like telemarketing; but then, I reasoned, there almost certainly would have been persons out there similarly weary of my own shittily photocopied self promotion. I swallowed my pride and struck up a correspondence with Stan of Pumf, and then also the Ceramic Hobs guitarist, reasoning that veterans of whatever it was that we both seemed to be veterans of should probably stick together.

Next came Straight Outta Rampton, the second Ceramic Hobs album, and the one where I finally felt I understood what the hell they were trying to do. The above description still applied, but somehow the random patterns had formed something weird and beautiful; and I suddenly felt guilty about having given Psychiatric Underground away and sent for a second copy; at which point Simon wrote to me to say thanks for the write up, but also:

It's weird to be writing to you really. In about 1983 when I was fourteen I used to correspond with Larry Peterson, and I distinctly remember a Do Easy flyer that he sent - that was you, wasn't it?

It was, and he told me that my writing was the best stuff in the Sound Projector - even though it clearly wasn't - which was nice, and we became pals. Musically speaking, I'd been working on the launch of my ill advised rap career, and it had occurred to me that it might be interesting were the impending CD to include a few voices other than my own. I'd heard Simon rap on tapes he'd recorded with Stan as Judge Mental and the Heavy Dread Beat - amongst other ludicrous names - and while his rapping was basic as fuck, it was also funny and made up for the shortfall with sheer anger. I sent him an instrumental and he sent me a vocal which I striped onto the four-track master without too much difficulty. Then I performed with the Ceramic Hobs when they played at the Garage in Islington, first time jumping on stage on the spur of the moment, and on the second occasion with more preparation. I think I may actually have thrown up on him on one of these two occasions, which is always a bonding experience. I doubt our collaboration made any difference to anyone's life, but they were fun, and we loosely kept in touch from that point on - despite my momentary emesis - through my moving to Texas, through the Ceramic Hobs splitting and then reforming in different configurations.

He suffered from schizophrenic episodes and mostly seemed to have it under control, but was mad by some definition - a term he embraced with punky enthusiasm - and was as such a square peg in a round hole world, as the best people tend to be. He was also fiercely intelligent and I found we agreed on most of the important stuff.

It's like he doesn't get the idea that all this arty music is just another form of showbiz, it's all product. I'm convinced of this so when people seem to swallow the false high/low culture divide it bugs me. The Ramones say more to me as art than Aphex Squarepusher laptop powerbook wank anyway.

As fellow graduates of a certain poorly defined thing, we knew a lot of the same people, same points of reference. When Robert Dellar, the Mad Pride activist who had arranged for the Ceramic Hobs to play at the Garage died at the end of 2016, I took it upon myself to produce some sort of anthology as either a tribute or an epitaph. The book was called Kiss of Life, and Simon's contribution was a letter explaining why he couldn't contribute.

My book from last year and the one out soon are full of death and obituaries. I feel like a fucking undertaker or something. I just can't face writing more stuff like that, not about Robert. Apologies again. You can use this paragraph if you like as an explanation of why I can't contribute - I am still much too upset basically.

I know the feeling.

More recently he urged me to get in touch with Philip Best of Consumer Electronics on the grounds of his having moved to Austin, just down the road from me, and arguably being another veteran of whatever the hell it had been when we were all much younger. Philip had been a member of Whitehouse so I was slightly terrified by the idea, but through Simon's persistent nagging I made the effort; and I'm glad I did because, as I now realise, Philip is one of the nicer - or at least less cunty - people I've met through association with noisy music, and he now runs Amphetamine Sulphate publishing which has been responsible for at least a couple of the greatest short novels I've ever read.

In addition to compiling the astonishing Black Pool Legacy, the double album which at last makes sense of the Ceramic Hobs sprawling body of work, Best also published three books by Simon, and I gather Simon had become a valued gate keeper and collaborator as editor of titles by Meg McCarville and others.

Then, just six months ago, while it would be absurd to suggest that we fell out, he pissed me off on facebook - although that hardly makes him unique. I made some comment about his beloved Electric Light Orchestra and he told me, get over yourself. I wouldn't have minded but the comment had been me taking the piss out of my own long-standing hatred of Jeff Lynne and all his infernal works, a joke amounting to here I am being a dick yet again; but he didn't seem to see the funny side and perhaps assumed I was simply being an actual dick. He suggested I would need to familiarise myself with one of their horrible songs in particular because I would be reading about it in Watching the Wheels, his forthcoming book from Amphetamine Sulphate.

That rather depends, I thought to myself, on whether I choose to buy your forthcoming book from Amphetamine Sulphate.

He'd also taken to posting status updates on what it's like to write books, what books should be, and so on, which I found a bit irritating. I unfollowed him and went off to think about that Nocturnal Emissions album I'd sent him as a freebie because I'd ended up with two copies. We hadn't fallen out, but it's always good to take a break, and I'd reconnect in a few months once he'd moved past delivering edicts and I'd grudgingly read Watching the Wheels, as we both knew I would. It was probably silly, but so is existence.

I vaguely followed his goings on through others. He came to read in Los Angeles at an Amphetamine Sulphate evening, and it was nice to know he was doing well and already had another book in the works.

Then about two weeks ago, all of those mutual friends were suddenly worried at his having gone missing from his home in Blackpool. He'd vanished below the radar on a couple of previous occasions, deactivating social media accounts whilst getting his head together, and I assumed this would be the same; although it was a little worrying that the police were now involved in looking for him.

He'd show up.

He'd turn up and there would be some new novel spun from this latest psychological turnpike.

Just this morning my wife came in from her morning run and told me his body had been found.

Simon is no longer with us.

Gone.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

I wonder at the folly of falling out - or at least going silent running - over Jeff bloody Lynne, but not for long. It wouldn't have made much difference to anything, I don't think.

I dig out his old letters and postcards. I listen to Black Pool Legacy and realise we really have lost one of the good 'uns, which likewise doesn't come as a surprise. I always knew it.

He was one of those people who made things interesting, who caused good things to happen, whose art - even with the bleakest and blackest of subjects under the microscope - could not help but sound optimistic, hopeful, even funny by some mechanism I couldn't even begin to understand. He struggled but he always seemed to come through. He made things better.

I will miss him.