Let's Think About Living

I first saw Tim Webster perform at Maidstone Art College, probably late 1984 or thereabouts, most likely with the Sputniks. It would have been a college party organised by my friend Carl, who was president of the student union at the time. He'd known Tim since they were kids due to their dads having been good friends. I don't remember the music because I'd only just discovered drinking and was trying to do a lot of it so as to effect my transformation into someone more interesting, or at least more shaggable.

My usual drinking assistant was a fellow student who lived in Chatham, and whom I won't name because he was a massive twat. He shared a house with Tim's girlfriend, about whom he whinged and whined at length because complaining about that which didst emburden his Bohemian soul was his thing, and he'd given me a long list of Chatham persons whom I should consider enemies. Tim was one of them. I don't remember the details, but one of his supposed sins was the noisy and enthusiastic sexual intercourse in which Tim allegedly engaged when visiting his girlfriend. Also, Tim was in one of those fifties revival bands, and they were the enemy too. Having a general suspicion of nostalgia, it sort of made sense to me at the time.

A couple of years passed and I ended up living in Chatham, and because I was unemployed and therefore a gentleman of leisure, I spent most days hanging around a café called Gruts on the high street, near the Nag's Head. I met a lot of people who had been classified as the enemy by my former drinking assistant, and I had realised that actually I liked them more than I liked him because, as stated above, he was a massive twat. Tim's girlfriend - by this point ex-girlfriend - was funny and lovely, for one example; and Tim himself had a workshop just across the road from Gruts, so he spent a lot of time in the café and that's how I got to know him.

On the surface of it, it might seem like that mid-eighties rockabilly revival - the thing which brought us the Polecats and their like - had been a big deal in the Medway towns of Chatham, Rochester and others, but really it felt like something different, as I slowly came to appreciate. Billy Childish, the Milkshakes, the Sputniks, and others - and we may as well include the Prisoners, the Dentists, and the Daggermen while we're here - seemed to be responding to something inherent to their locality, something ingrained within those streets. It wasn't really a revival so much as something which still sounded good, which still worked now reclaimed from the soap powder salesmen who had tried to turn it into Seaside Special. Even understanding this, I was initially wary of Tim because he seemed like a big shot on the local stage, one of the cool kids, or at least someone too cool to bother talking to the likes of me - given my then representing an evolutionary intermediary between Worzel Gummidge and Roy Wood.

Happily I was wrong. Tim was fucking great, one of the best. Now passing fifty, looking back at the list of those I've known - and I'm assuming this will be true for many of us - it's depressing how many people turned out to be nothing like so wonderful as you thought they were at the time, notably my former drinking assistant; but Tim is one of the exceptions, someone you can genuinely say you were lucky to have known, possibly even a living legend by some definition.

He usually spent a couple of hours a day in Gruts, and it turned out that he was interesting, very, very funny, and an Olympic level spinner of yarns, many with shagging as the punchline, and many giving account of his frequent accidents and injuries, and the most viscerally memorable relating his employment at the local crematorium, the only detail of which I recall being a treatise on the art of disposing of ashes around the grounds without leaving them in big grisly piles, and the use of a shovel to smash up any bones which had survived the furnace.

He repaired guitars, amplifiers, motorbikes, scooters, pretty much whatever you had that was broken in his workshop, and in the evenings he was usually playing in some pub or other in one of his bands, the Sputniks, Timmy Tremolo & the Tremolons, Johnny Gash & the Sweet Smell of Success, Dean & the Hammonds, and I've no doubt there were others I never even heard about. I'm sure there were nights when he played twice at different venues with different groups, doubtless tearing across town on foot, somehow changing shirts as he went still with a guitar slung over one shoulder. He was always into something; he was one of those people who kept things interesting and he was great live, always tearing the proverbial roof of wherever the band found themselves that evening.

He taught me how to play chess, possibly so he'd have someone to play against as we sat around in Gruts. He referred to the pieces as prawns, horsies and so on, and I assumed he was some kind of undiscovered grandmaster because he always beat me. I eventually noticed that I seemed to be the only person Tim could actually beat; and Billy Childish routinely thrashed Tim, even if the games seemed to go on for a long time.

At one point, Tim had me draw a strip cartoon - which was sort of a commission - based on Johnny Gash, one of his bands. The idea came from a running joke about all four members combining like Voltron to become the Gashman, a weird, pulpy supernatural figure with a shitload of country and western in the mix. I don't think he knew what to make of what I came up with, but he was polite about it. I don't think I'd quite grasped what he was after, and in any case my efforts weren't really the sort of thing which would have made sense as a poster for a gig.

Eventually I left Medway and lost touch with Tim, but ran into him from time to time during occasional return visits. He always seemed overjoyed to see me while I was sort of surprised he'd even remembered who I was. He always seemed to have some new distracting injury - cast, neck brace or crutches - incurred during the most recent road accident, and his life still seemingly bore resemblance to that of the character played by Robin Askwith in the Confessions films. Tim had always been unusually popular with the ladies, or so it seemed to me, and his testimony often left me imagining him shinning down drainpipes at 3AM or in trouserless flight from enraged shotgun wielding fathers; but it was thirty years ago, and my memory may have exaggerated some of the details, hopefully.

Then he turned up on facebook, as we all do eventually, but hadn't effected the usual transformation into the Duke of Wellington, as tends to have happened with everyone you knew from school. I made the mistake of pointing out a spelling error he'd made during some exchange or other, to which he replied I'm dyslexic, you cunt, or words to that effect, then elaborating by explaining that he'd been expelled from school at fourteen or thereabouts, still unable to properly read or write. I hadn't known or even suspected this, but have to assume it to be true, or roughly truthful, which still surprises me even if it probably shouldn't. The man was a force of nature, like nothing could stop him. He could do anything, and often did. On some level I always knew I'd run into him again at some point, and we'd have a drink and a chuckle over his latest ill-advised escapades, and it would be like no time had passed. There was something fundamental about him and he would always be there doing his thing.

He was living on a boat, possibly on the Medway, or else somewhere up north - I never quite worked out where he'd ended up. I gather he had health problems, but I'm not entirely sure about that either. One evening he went out on the deck of his boat for a fag, then was found dead in his deck chair next morning. I can hear a little voice muttering that it's how he would have wanted to go, although I doubt that it was. He taught me how to play chess and got me through a shitty couple of years, and my life is better than it would have been for having known the man. I'm sure others will say the same. He was the heart of the music scene in Medway for a long time, yet is mentioned only once in Stephen H. Morris's Do It Yourself: A History of Music in Medway, and then for guesting on someone else's album. He taught Billy Childish how to make woodcuts. Traci Emin painted a portrait of him before reinventing herself as whatever she is now, then flatly denied it was her work when he tried to sell the piece. The Sputnik's released one great 10" album, and aside from a few tracks on compilations, that was the full extent of Tim's vinyl footprint.

He seems like someone who should be better remembered.

He seems like someone who should still be here.

Even during this last year, having come to resemble something in the general vicinity of old man Steptoe, it took only one glance to see that here was a man with character, a man of genuine substance; and he would have read this, rolled his eyes, and barked oh fuck off with that Sid James laugh of his.