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.

Songs About Sandwiches

I knew Carl well enough to laugh at his jokes, and for him to occasionally laugh at mine, but we weren't close. I didn't know Chris at all. He was just Carl's friend from outside the art college, out there in the real world. They knew each other from school, and Chris would turn up at college parties, his yachting-casual attire presenting an almost surreal contrast with the Oxfam gothic favoured by almost everyone else, this being 1985. He would grin like the silent Marx brother and point at the ceiling and then at the centre of the dance floor - college refectory by day - making moves straight out of Saturday Night Fever regardless of what was playing. Der Mussolini by DAF or Heaven 17, it was all the same to Chris, so it seemed. Whatever you might have said of the man, he knew how to have fun.

They were both in a band called To The Max, Chris playing a tiny synthesiser and Carl singing, with Adam and Martin on drums and guitar respectively - or at least that's how I remember it. To The Max played at college parties. They reminded me a little of the Stooges, maybe with some Clash thrown in. They scored well on energy, but were often a bit of a racket, and now it seemed that they had broken up and this was why Carl and Chris were at my place - Hollytree House, the cottage in the village of Otham in which I rented a room for about a tenner a week.

I still didn't really understand.

'You play guitar,' Carl suggested. 'I've seen you!'

Despite playing guitar, I hadn't really considered the option of being in a band. Most of the music I produced at the time came from me playing all of the instruments, or at least hitting all of the objects from which I derived sound. I had seen To The Max play live and not once considered what it would be like to be involved with that sort of thing. Carl and Chris on the other hand very much enjoyed being in a band and wished to continue, and so they had thought of me. They knew I had a guitar, but had never heard me play. Carl reasoned that even if I was only able to make a noise with one string occasionally held down to produce a second note, thus forming a tune, it might still be worth doing. After all, the Cramps did well enough with a fairly basic sound.

My musical abilities actually went a little further than tunes plucked out on one string, if admittedly not much further; but I could manage just enough of a bar chord to chug out something roughly equidistant between the New York Dolls and the Ramones, so on Saturday the 9th of November, 1985 we formally agreed that we were a band. We called ourselves Total Big, a dubiously translated phrase apparently seen on the packaging of a toy robot of Japanese manufacture promising the consumer that, amongst the toy robot's numerous admirable qualities, he is total big.

On Sunday the 17th of November, 1985 we set up what instruments we could muster in the garage of Chris's dad's house in Sittingbourne and made a racket for the best part of the afternoon. It was cold, and I think I was a little bewildered by Chris's dad's extensive collection of Lledo die-cast toy cars ranging along the shelves of the garage, all still in their boxes; and it was noisy, but it was fun. Afterwards we sat listening to the tape of what was essentially just improvisation, picking out two or three segments which sounded good enough to have been deliberate. These became Rock Sandwich and I Write the Songs, later changed to He Writes the Songs when Carl went through our growing body of work changing personal pronouns so as to reduce the quota of seemingly egotistical first person narratives. He wrote the songs, but these weren't the songs that made the whole world sing, it should probably be pointed out, more in the line of free-form mating calls occasionally appropriating whatever lyric was at hand and seemed to fit the occasion.

Never mind the whole world, we barely made a half-empty college canteen sing on Wednesday the 27th of November, our first live performance offered as part of an all-night occupation of the building mounted in protest against cuts to education funding. Jude Hibbert back-combed my hair for the occasion, and we played Rock Sandwich, He Writes the Songs, and Ouch! which wasn't exactly a new number so much as thirty seconds of the maximum volume of noise we could muster through banging, screaming, and shredding an open chord all at the same time, the sort of thing for which Skullflower accrued much droning acclaim a few years later.

A couple of people submitted bewildered applause, which mainly served to emphasise how many had either failed to applaud or who had even left the room, but Carl, Chris, and myself had enjoyed it, and that was the main thing. It had worked, more or less. My guitar sounded good and crunchy, distorted through Carl's small but formidable Roland Cube amplifier. Despite the songs comprising just rudimentary riffs blasted out over and over, I'd still managed to forget how to play some of it, but had apparently appeared unflustered by my own rock and roll incompetence. Chris had played the drums as ever like he was nailing down the floorboards, as Martin de Sey later described it; and Carl was solidly entertaining, as always.

Carl represented a not-particularly-secret weapon in our line up in so much that even if we sounded terrible, people tended not to notice because they would usually be watching Carl and wondering what the hell he was going to do next. It wasn't really just that he jumped about a bit so much as that he performed every act possible on stage given whatever props were available, and barring those acts which were either illegal or at least required a permit. Regrettably my musicianship was of such rudimentary standard as to require me to keep my own fingers under constant observation whilst playing, so I experienced most of Carl's acrobatics as anecdotes related after the event by members of the audience. On one occasion I briefly looked up to see him stood on two chairs, one per foot, holding the backs of each chair with his hands and walking around the room as though on stilts. On another occasion, we played in a pub in Worthing as support to Soul, the group for which Charlie Adlard was then drummer. I stole upwards glances on four separate occasions during the gig, achieving four brief impressions of the event at roughly ten minute intervals - Carl singing to a full room whilst upside down on the pool table, then singing to fewer people whilst hanging from the back of the door like an Orang-outang, then a microphone lead trailing up behind the drawn curtain of a small window into which Carl had presumably squeezed himself, and finally Carl singing on all fours with his head inside the bass drum. The room was empty by this point, excepting bar staff and members of the band we were supporting.

'Wow! We cleared the room,' I observed as the last song died away in our ears.

'Fuck 'em!' said Karl with a K, the singer in Charlie's group. 'That was amazing!'

I wasn't always convinced of this. I liked playing the stuff we did, but I was never sure I would have listened to it had I not actually been responsible for its creation. I enjoyed the freedom of playing without obligation to acknowledge whatever some bass player or second guitarist might be doing, but on some level it also felt kind of like cheating, or maybe too easy. I yearned to be in some group of portentous vessels of glacial doom, the sort of thing eschewing any on-stage smiling and definitely no bum jokes, and which would result in strangers congratulating me on my profound solemnity and a long line of knockery girls patiently waiting for access to the contents of my trousers. I muttered words to this effect on a few occasions, and Carl would quite rightly point out that I was the one with the guitar, and it wasn't like anyone was telling me what to play, which was true.

We continued to rehearse, or at least to get together and make stuff up, and to go over those arbitrary combinations of riffs which had begun to sound like songs; or sometimes we'd just piss off to the seaside in Chris's car and eat ice creams instead. Fun was the point, and it remained so, and by Thursday the 6th of March, 1986 we played a second gig, once again at the art college, but this time with an expanded half-hour set including Are You My Mother?, He Believes, Armchair Maniac, the inevitable cover of Louie Louie and probably some others. The event carried a glam rock theme and my diary of the time notes:

People danced! People even cheered! We were followed by the Hubcap Diamond Star Halo Band who mimed to cover versions. We were not as popular but we were at least musically and ideologically superior.

Our third performance was on Saturday the 12th of April, 1986 at a student house in Woodville Road, Maidstone. I have a feeling I may have worn a lady's dress for the occasion, a fetching floor-length Prussian blue number picked up in a charity shop because that's rock 'n' roll. We played at a couple of parties after this, it being easy to do because everything could be fitted into the boot of Chris's car, and we took about five minutes to set up and sound check. Chris's kit was pretty minimal, and then there was just the guitar, an amplifier, and a microphone. We managed to play at a party in Bearsted from the staircase, Chris banging away on the upper landing, myself halfway down much like Kermit's nephew, and Carl doing his thing at the foot of the stairs. I'm fairly sure we also played at a few parties uninvited just by turning up and getting on with it, much to the bewilderment of whoever was living there. Carl was keen on the idea that we might inspire a mixture of awe, surprise and horror, sort of like finding your mum in a readers' wives magazine, he explained.

Even without a pensive bass player, or brooding synth effects, or the sort of mournful dirges guaranteed to get the chicks beating a path to my bedroom door, it was fun to be part of Total Big, and I grew to enjoy it more and more - as I noted in my diary apparently with some surprise on a few occasions. This was doubtless because the three of us enjoyed hanging out together anyway, regardless of all being in the same band. If we weren't rehearsing, or at least making a noise, we would watch Black Adder or old monster movies at Chris's dad's house, or make stupid films or videos to accompany our songs, mostly sped up affairs in which we all jumped up and down pulling faces as soon as the camera was rolling. The Tube on Channel 4 ran a competition, asking aspiring rock bands to send in their own videos, and so we availed ourselves of the thousands of pounds of state of the art video effects and equipment to which I had access as part of my degree course and made a video for the song Armchair Maniac - which if technically advanced, nevertheless still managed to communicate that quality of having been made by chimpanzees. We didn't win, but never mind.

On Tuesday the 9th of December, 1986 my diary records:

Total Big played at the all night work-in event staged in protest against proposed cuts to arts education funding at Maidstone College of Art. Carl, Chris and myself were joined by Mark Smith on saxophone and our set comprised He Believes, Are You My Mother (Or Just A Hole In The Ground?), Rock Sandwich, Louie Sister Joe, You're Okay, Keep Your Dreams A'Burning, Do The Frug, and All Day And All Of The Night.

Mark Smith was a first year time-based media student and saxophone player who had pretty much told us he was joining the band, having seen us play at some party or other. His enthusiastic honking matched our music well, but his forceful introduction came in peculiar contrast to a stage performance during which he continued to drift ever further from his microphone until he was stood hooting and honking away more or less inaudibly on the other side of the refectory, at a greater distance from the rest of the band than most of the audience.

Soon after this, Chris found a job, but it was in Dover on the south coast and so he bought a house down there and moved. It was more than forty miles away, which no longer strikes me as a significant distance, but was at the time enough to preclude the possibility of regular weekend rehearsals.

Carl and I resolved to continue in some form, although it took us a while to work out quite what that was going to be. We had a rehearsal with a first year time based media student succinctly named Mac on drums. It sounded great, so Carl and I thought. Mac was a serious little guy with a permanent five o'clock shadow and a massive drum kit. He was technically very accomplished and probably would have been more at home in some stadium rock outfit. Whether Mac felt the same was unclear beyond that he didn't feel at home in Total Big, and the next few rehearsals were open invitations extended to whoever the hell felt like showing up.

I had a couple of guitars, and three keyboards of varying musicality including both Casio VL Tone and Casio SK1, an early cheap polyphonic sampler. The next few rehearsals or jam sessions or whatever you could call them were chaotic, just groups of people crammed into my bedroom making a noise, all playing something different, songs defined only by the gaps during which no-one was playing. At one point we vaguely decided we would be called the Flaps, possibly due to one number having been distinguished by someone speaking the word flaps into my sampler, then playing it back to apparently hilarious effect because it was, you know, rude and stuff. Then Gareth Roberts, who had turned up for most of these exercises in free jazz, suggested Spinning Pygmies as a name, which at least seemed to relate to the noise we were making in some obscure way, but it was clear that it wasn't really going anywhere.

'We've got two whole songs now,' Gareth notes happily on one of the recordings.

'Yes,' I reply, 'but they're both the same one.'

The tapes sound like what happens when you give a room full of children musical instruments and shout go!, and yet we were actually trying to squeeze out something resembling songs, or at least not specifically resembling industrial noise. The chaos was such that I can no longer even recall who turned up to those sessions aside from Carl, myself, Gareth, and Paul Fallon, although I think the record was seven people on one particularly noisy weekend.

Following the December performance with Mark Smith, I became too lazy to maintain a regular diary, and the next pertinent entry dates from Friday the 19th of June, 1987 reading:

The Dovers play at a party at 5, Terrace Road, Maidstone. Also showing are film and video works by Peter Jones, Gareth Roberts, and Mark Orphan.

We had settled on the Dovers in reference to that being where our former drummer now lived. It seemed a straightforward, direct sort of name, mercifully lacking the wheezing novelty of Spinning Pygmies and the rest. Carl had picked up a small hand held Boss DR220E drum machine from somewhere, and so we became a duo.

In the mean time I still had a burning need to appear on stage in a long coat with my cheeks sucked-in whilst top-heavy female audience members screamed and threw their underwear at me. Somehow the Dovers still wasn't getting me there, and the only interest I had drawn at our 5, Terrace Road performance was from an intense young man with piercing eyes who followed me around after the gig attempting to engage me in conversation about William Blake, and his advances were weird and not entirely welcome. I therefore said yes when asked to join Envy, a Medway group serving as vehicle for the important songs of Paul Mercer, a former fellow student who really knew how to work a frown. I stood at the back playing a Roland SH09 keyboard, pressing the start button on the drum machine, and occasionally hitting an old car door rescued from the side of the road with a baseball bat in an unconvincing but undoubtedly topical dalliance with metal percussion, which was all the rage at the time.

I suspect Carl may have been a little pissed off by this development, and eventually so were the members of Envy, even including myself - just as soon as we realised that the one part of the equation which didn't really work was me. Envy replaced me with a proper drummer, and Carl and I thankfully went back to being full-time Dovers, and full-time gigging Dovers now that I had moved to the Medway towns, having finished college, and found myself on the periphery of a fairly lively music scene. In my brief absence, or at least my brief period of reduced dependability, Carl had been mucking about with a neighbour, a guitarist called Alan Mason; and so as we once again cohered we became a trio comprising singer, two guitars, and a drum machine. We had a few rehearsals and played live a couple of times, but my memory of this period is patchy. I recall that Alan was somewhat more accomplished than myself, and seemed to be playing all sorts of weird chords of his own invention. Additionally he worked out what I was to play when we performed what were effectively his songs, which somewhat threw me as I was more accustomed and much happier to work out my own accompaniment, such as it was; but I guess we achieved some sort of chemistry, as we began to perform fairly regularly in Chatham, mostly at the Sunset Strip, a venue in the basement of a burger joint run by Mr. and Mrs. Amin, parents of Rajun who had been the guitarist in Envy. We supported Sexton Ming's Mind Readers, Johnny Gash, Infinity Corporation, Envy, the Uninvited Guests, Near-Death Experience, Rocking Richard & Whistling Vic Templar, and All Flags Burn. Alan brought a new lease of life to the group, and also a fez for each of us back from his excursion to Morocco, and we wore these on stage but only once in my case because I have a massive head and it kept falling off. Sadly, due to most of our gigs being in Chatham, and Alan being committed to working unorthodox hours in London, he was reduced to an occasional presence as we began to play live with more frequency. It sort of worked due to our being pretty much the opposite of a thirteen-piece orchestra in organisational terms, and on Wednesday the 27th of January, 1988 we played the Sunset Strip backed by Chris from Total Big on drums and Martin, formerly of To The Max playing a second guitar. Occasionally we would invite members of the audience to join in, so we had guest vocals from Glenn Wallis of Konstruktivists and Andy Fraser more recently of Unlucky Fried Kitten, to name but two.

Somehow we even began to acquire fans, or at least people who turned up to a succession of gigs and usually looked like they were enjoying it. Judith Mullarkey writing for her music column in the Chatham Standard also seemed to appreciate us, so that was something.

'Who's your favourite band?,' Carl would call out unto the back-combed crowd crammed into the sweaty basement of the Sunset Strip.

'The Dovers!' Sarah and Lynne screamed back in response as everyone else talked amongst themselves and wondered what time Johnny Gash were coming on. I'm pretty sure it was Lynne who won the Tiffany album when Carl offered it as a prize for whoever could applaud the loudest halfway through our set one evening. It was ludicrous, but at least somewhat less ludicrous then setting one's innermost anxieties to a tune and expecting to be congratulated for it; and the possibility now existed of there being people who enjoyed watching the Dovers more than I enjoyed being one, which actually felt quite good.

Then on Saturday the 16th of April 1988, Envy had to pull out of a performance at Chatham Town Hall, apparently part of some broader arts event. They asked us to take their place for some reason, and so suddenly we were on a proper stage and getting paid fifty quid to play our yappy novelty songs. Friends of Jeremy, Planet Mushroom, and ourselves were all to play as support to a group called the Claim. Planet Mushroom included various school kids we vaguely knew from hanging out at Gruts café on the High Street. They played vaguely psychedelic garagey music and were fucking great. They were almost worth seeing just for sheer enthusiasm alone. The Claim had records out and a following, and were thus a big deal. They seemed to regard their support bands as amateurs, which we were, and therefore saw no reason to allow us any time to sound check. They were a proper band, and they apparently found it insulting that their self-important constipated power pop should be prefixed by schoolkids and then a man singing about sandwiches. As we ended our set, I took the microphone and told everyone that Johnny Gash were playing at Churchills next door, adding 'I don't know about you lot, but that's where we're all going, so hopefully we'll see you there.'

We had been busy in 1988, but in 1989 I moved to Coventry and the Dovers went into suspended animation for a little while, re-emerging at the end of 1990 when I moved back down south, to London, and Carl acquired a four-track portastudio. We ceased playing live, mainly through having lost touch with anyone who might hook us up, but we started to record our songs, and even to compose new material of a less blunt disposition, the sort of thing which probably wouldn't have worked so well in a live setting. These songs revealed the more subtle aspects of Carl's voice, which actually proved surprisingly emotive and versatile once released from its obligation to foghorn out rock mating calls expressed as songs about sandwiches. Our work drew closer to the sort of thing I would listen to through choice even were I not somewhere on the recording, but for some reason it never really occurred to us to do anything with this music, or if it did and I've forgotten, we never got around to it.

However, Carl still longed to perform live, that being the area in which he excelled, and which he seemed to enjoy the most; and then bewilderingly, at some point in 1992, we were offered a gig, at some sort of community centre in Amersham. It was something to do with Carl's girlfriend - her sister was a member of one of the bands we were supporting or something along those lines. I don't recall much about these bands other than that they seemed like they might have one or two Dungeons & Dragons enthusiasts amongst their number, and they didn't seem to like us much presumably for the same reasons that the Claim hadn't liked us.

I was excited to be playing again, but after all the new music we had recorded - none of which would really lend itself to live performance by just two people - I didn't want to go back to what we had done before, having developed a fear of turning into a variant on Carter the Unlistenable Sex Machine, or anything which could be confused with the same. Carl and I worked out an entirely new set based on drum machine, vocals, and my keyboard through a distortion pedal. It sounded great in rehearsal, sort of like Suicide fronted by Bugs Bunny, and it might have sounded great live but for the fact that I drank so as to overcome my nerves, and inadvertently also overcame my memory of everything I was expected to play live on stage before a paying audience. I did the best I could, blasting out a vaguely tuneful drone whilst Carl did his thing, but it wasn't going down well, and the band we were supporting stood to one side of the stage, apparently hating us even more than the crowd and dooming us to invisibility within great sarcastic clouds of dry ice. There was so much of it that I could barely see my keyboard, although moving to one side I experienced just enough visibility to appreciate the sight of Carl retaliating, still singing whilst jumping up and down on the main band's carefully arranged and sound-checked array of effects pedals, reducing them to chip and transistor pizzas.

We finished, and before the dry ice could clear to reveal our destruction, we were in the van and driving hastily back to London. The sense of relief was incredible, and I was just happy that it was over. We didn't even talk about the gig, and I'm not sure we have ever discussed it to this day. It was horrible, and particularly because I'd had such high hopes of having at last escaped from my own chugging guitar riffs. I'd pushed the whole thing just a little bit closer to that band I'd always wanted to be in, and realised it had been a fucking terrible idea all along; and regrettably, that somehow became the end of the Dovers.

Carl and I recorded together again, and we remained bestest friends regardless, but musically it was over, and for no good or clear reason I can really remember. Carl sang in other groups, at least one with Alan Mason on guitar, and I saw them live on a couple of occasions. As with the Dovers, I'm not sure I would have played the records had there been any, but live they were fucking fantastic, and left me wondering if Total Big or the Dovers had ever been that good from the perspective of someone stood in the audience. I will never know, but I suppose the main thing was that it was fun, and as such it always did more or less what it had promised on the tin.

Gruts

Signing on for a three year fine art degree at Maidstone College of Art back in September 1984 was a big move for me. I'd just turned nineteen and probably had not previously been away from home for longer than a couple of days. I was loosely familiar with beer and the genitalia of one specific member of the opposite sex, but I was otherwise generally naive; and now I was living in Kent amongst complete strangers. Home was Warwickshire, which may as well have been on Mars, or so it seemed at the time.

Whilst I was doing my best to remain open-minded to new experiences, I had developed a general scepticism regarding poetry as something which really wasn't for me. What poetry I'd been obliged to read at school and then in further education would, so I believed at the time, have worked better either converted to prose or set to music, and poets themselves seemed a self-involved bunch. Admittedly I didn't have a great wealth of experience with poets amongst my vague circle of friends, but I'd watched The Young Ones on the box, and Steve the poet with whom I now shared a student house in Leeds Village was doing nothing to disabuse me of the impression fostered by Rik Mayall directing condescending odes at his enemies. Steve was both funny and amiable at a certain level, but I always had the feeling of everything being part of some larger chess game to him. He was barely able to buy a packet of crisps without it resembling strategy. His poems, so far as I could tell, amounted to everybody stop what you're doing and look at me. He almost certainly would have told me about the Medway Poets, about Billy Childish and Bill Lewis - these being people he clearly admired - but it wouldn't have made much sense to me. As I say, I wasn't really drawn to poetry as a medium.

Traci Emin, a noisy Turkish girl in second-year printmaking was in the habit of scaling tables in the college canteen to announce some event or other, and she would do this roughly every two or three days. The events for which she evangelised were rarely ever anything which caught my interest, and I wasn't sure what to make of the girl, so I generally paid her no attention. She knew Carl, then Student Union president, one of the first people I got to know at Maidstone, and still a close friend today. Carl had briefly introduced me to Traci, just as she barged into our conversation to haggle over Student Union business of some kind. She scowled at me and observed isn't your 'air 'orrible! with her wonky gob, dropping the aitches like a younger, vaguely Turkish Irene Handl.

Charmed, I'm sure, I didn't bother replying as I began to weep bitter internal tears of self-loathing.

Now she stood on the canteen table bellowing like a lonely mountain goat, and the words resolved into something about a poetry reading in one of the lecture theatres. My curiosity outstripped my scepticism as I recognised the name of one of those who was to read - Billy Childish. I didn't know much about him, beyond whatever it was that Steve had told me, but apparently he was a local name of some distinction. I now realised that I had read about his band, the Milkshakes, in Sounds music paper a year or so earlier. I'd never heard their music, but it seemed like it might be interesting to watch some bloke who had been in Sounds reading out his poems, and it was something to do.

The hour came and the lecture theatre was dark with just a table at the front. Billy Childish had short, severe hair and wore what appeared to be his grandad's demob suit. He didn't smile. He didn't look like a man who had ever found any good reason to smile. In the midst of flourishes of artistic flamboyance, he appeared streamlined, efficient, even ruthless. He rattled off his poetry as though reading out a statement in a police interview room. He demonstrated neither charisma nor stagecraft, a deficit which seemed curiously highly charismatic in its own way. He sounded bored, as though he was trying to get through the fucking things as quickly as possible. The performance was, in spite of itself, incredible.

Then there was Bill Lewis, loud, theatrical, and intense. It was poetry performed more as I had anticipated it would be, and yet it was impossible to keep from being swept along by the force of his words and their delivery. He had a presence with which one could not argue.

Traci later made an announcement to the effect that she was selling various books of Billy Childish poetry. I had a hunch that I would regret it if I didn't go and see what she had, and so I did. I ended up buying the lot - Poems from the Barrier Block, Prity Thing, Will the Circle Be Unbroken and five or six others. Poems from the Barrier Block was a proper square bound collection, but the others were slimmer volumes of cranky dyslexic verse - if you could really call it verse - all hammered out on a broken typewriter. There were few concessions to grammar or spelling, but for want of a better qualifier, you could tell it was the real thing, the genuine article:

t.v. poetry scotch n piss

the t.v. said - 'we wanna make a film'
they said 'you read with this group of poets'
so i said 'yeah'
n they get us to do some readings
n this producer said to me -
'yeah great stuff - this is your program - you make it - we just film it' n i said 'yeah'

the contract said -
they give us a couple of qwid
for the filming then they could
use the film anytime they liked
with no payment
they said time place n the way to dress
this was ment to be a documentary about the real stuff

well a thew qwids a thew qwid so i said 'yeah' n signed
i got a cigar of one t.v. bloke n a double scotch of another
i went to the bog

i couldnt find the gents so i went to the ladys
i put me scotch down n had a piss
most of it got in the bowl
but some spatered in me scotch

it stank of piss but i drank it anyway

Reproduced without permission and probably (c) Billy Childish June 1982.

The oldest of the books I had bought was called The Man with Wheels, dating from 1980 and revealing Billy's formative interest in Kurt Schwitters, which made one hell of a lot of sense to me. I could see the progression. His poems were made of the dirt and the rubbish. They were unvarnished - raw and invigorating. Poetry had been men in silk cravats scoffing vol-au-vents and spicing overly elaborate love poems to unremarkable girls with a naughty word here and there, not so much to let us know that they were themselves from the mean streets, but that they knew at least one chap who was, and he was a really splendid fellow with his working class accent and leather jacket. Whatever Billy Childish was doing, it bore no relation to such distractions. It was not something in which he dabbled for the sake of something to do. It seemed like he was writing in an effort to keep himself from braining someone.

Some of the books were signed for Traci, with love - Billy, or addressing her more intimately as Dolli. The two of them had been romantically involved for a while, and I guess that this was around the time they began to drift apart; and so she sold me his old stuff, the books he'd had printed and had dedicated to her.

Over the next couple of years I became acclimatised to Kent, it being the county in which my adult personality was formed, adult in this case quantifying age rather than development. Finishing at Maidstone, I moved to nearby Chatham because half the people I knew seemed to live there by that point, and the town had some great bands. In fact the town had a scene in the sense by which Liverpool and Manchester have on occasion been described as having scenes. There were pubs which put on gigs, bands which played live and even put out records, fanzines, poets, artists, and people generally doing their own thing regardless of whether anyone else liked it.

Alun Jones of the Dentists said that Chatham, or specifically the larger Medway conurbation of which Chatham was part, was in some respects like a northern town transplanted to the south of England. At the time I rolled my eyes a little, having come to resent the popular cliché of the north of England as some sort of cultural Mecca inhabited by a friendlier, more down-to-earth, somehow more valuable people. I've never found people in the north of England significantly friendlier than those in the south, nor more culturally vital, and as for down-to-earth...

What would I need with your fancy book learning and your so-called toilet paper and indoor lavatories? I'm down-to-earth, me.

Nevertheless, Alun was right. Medway was a reasonably tightly knit community with its own distinct identity founded upon a major naval dockyard established in the 1500s and significantly expanded during the industrial revolution, around the same time as all those sprawling northern towns founded upon coal, iron, weaving and Hovis advertsing. Even in the 1980s Medway felt like the setting of Ada's Apron or some other typically harrowing television drama in which pramfaced chain-smoking schoolgirls made veiled references to men's cocks and disapproving matriarchs would address each other as chuck from across the washing line. It was the rain-soaked rooftops of utilitarian housing, row after row after cramped bricky row of hardened smokers coughing up their lungs in time to Herman's Hermits. You get the picture.

Within weeks of my settling in to the septic tank I had rented in Glencoe Road, I discovered Gruts café, a small establishment just before the railway bridge on Chatham High Street. A couple of summers earlier, my friends and I had discovered Ivor Cutler and had become so quickly and dramatically obsessed with his haunting monologues that by the time school came back around in September we were having trouble shaking off the soft Glaswegian lilt we'd developed during the holidays.

I walked past the café a couple of times, deeply impressed that there could be an eaterie named after one of my favourite Ivor Cutler pieces. Eventually I summoned the courage to go in, probably having at last spotted someone I vaguely knew sat on the other side of the glass. Being unemployed and without access to a television by which I could watch children's programmes and other daytime broadcasting at the taxpayer's expense, I became a regular customer at Gruts; and given the pitiful state of both my cooking and the cupboard which served as my pantry, the toasted ham and cheese sandwiches prepared and served by Gerald and Caroline - mine hosts - were probably what kept me alive long enough to see the nineties.

I had mastered the art of sitting around in pubs a few years earlier, and had reached the stage at which one realises that it can sometimes be fun to walk in a straight line or to wake in the morning without a splitting headache; and so I quickly adapted to the Chatham equivalent of café society because it was cheaper than the pub and better than sitting at home. Of the regulars I already knew there was the aforementioned Alun of the Dentists and Prez of the Martini Slutz, one of the most entertaining bands I've ever seen live. Tim Webster of the Sputniks and later Johnny Gash ran his own musical instrument repair business out of a workshop over the road, and would wander across for lunch with his apprentice, Tim O'Leary - lunch being one of Gerald's guitar maker's fancies, which Tim O'Leary recalls as being possibly the best egg mayo baguettes I've ever had.

Bill Lewis has written of Gruts as having been known as the poets' café. I don't remember this at all, although maybe that's because I was never a poet. The description is probably justified by the regular presence of himself and Billy Childish, and even Sexton Ming on a couple of occasions. I got to know Bill Lewis fairly well as it turned out that we were almost neighbours and had mutual interests. Any idea I've ever ripped off from an American underground comic artist can most likely be traced back to the huge stack of comics by Harvey Pekar, Robert Crumb, Skip Williamson and others that Bill sold me. Bill would drop around for tea and tell me about Sandinistas and his time in Nicaragua, tales from a world I was yet to discover. I tried to paint his portrait, but my efforts were so awful that I threw the thing away. Like Billy Childish, he seemed in some ways a man out of time, someone who always seemed like he should have known Allen Ginsberg and Lenny Bruce; but it was only that he contrasted so dramatically with the feckless apathy of our respective generations.

I had never been introduced to Billy Childish and was slightly in awe of him. He was an imposing presence before which I was sore afraid, suspecting that whatever came out of my mouth would probably be dog shit.

Excuse me, Mr. Billy, I think your poems are really ace!

Happily the fears of my inner teenage girl fell by the wayside as Billy spent so much time in Gruts that my self-consciously marinading in silent awe whilst attempting to effect nonchalance in the presence of relative greatness became impractical, and obviously ridiculous. Aside from anything, it turned out that he was, if not exactly a nice guy by conventionally sappy terms, thoughtful, ruthlessly honest, and very, very funny. He was also pretty good at chess, a game I'd only recently been taught by Tim Webster and Prez one afternoon as we sat in the café slurping tea and smoking. The game became something of an obsession, and I took to playing every day, but unfortunately everyone else was better than me. I played Billy, and the match was over in about four minutes. He wiped me off the board. He'd spent most of that time staring out of the window or talking to Gerald. His matches against Alun, Prez or Tim Webster lasted longer, and were more enjoyable for the spectator. I seem to recall that he usually won, although I could be mistaken.

An exchange student from Germany named Andreas became a regular for a couple of weeks. He and Billy would talk about Hamburg, and he too was drawn into the never ending chess tournament. After one particularly long, drawn-out game he beat Tim Webster and Billy bought everyone a round of tea in celebration.

'I don't get it,' I said. 'It's not like this is the first time anyone has beaten Tim.'

'I know.' Billy sported the faintly disturbing smile of Harry H. Corbett. 'But this is the first time he's had an international thrashing.'

Gruts became much more than just a place to hang out with friends and talk crap. It became our place, almost a livelihood. Poets and writers sold their work from a small bookcase next to the counter, and Billy's own Hangman Records had taken to releasing an album more or less every month - beautifully pressed brand new long playing vinyl records of himself, Sexton Ming, the Pop Rivets, and others, and these were joined by releases from the Dentists' Tambourine label. Even the subject matter was locally sourced in Wally the 2nd Hand Salesman - one of the noisier compositions on Sexton Ming's Which Dead Donkey Daddy? album - being named for Wally, the proprietor of a junk shop just on the other side of the bridge. Billy had gone in there to give the man himself a copy of the record, so he told us. Wally had mumbled some token of potential gratitude and tossed the album into an open trunk full of rusting nuts, bolts, spanners and the like. He didn't really seem like a big record collector.

'Well, that's nicely filed away for future reference,' Billy observed, although I'm not sure if that was what he said to Wally or simply part of his account as told to the rest of us.

The albums were a fiver each, which meant that Gruts actually served as a better record shop than Our Price a few hundred yards along the road, not that Our Price was really up to much in the first place.

At one stage, I hung a load of my own pseudo-Futurist paintings on the walls of the café, following on from previous exhibitions by Billy and others. Mine weren't for sale, but the main point was that they were seen, and this even drew interest from the local newspaper, the Chatham Standard, who sent Judith Mullarkey along to do a short feature on me. The first entry in my comments book came from Billy:

I've seen this man's work before, and I said, and say it again - to the funny farm with him!

Sometimes we would watch the local crazy woman as she passed by outside, shouting mysterious accusations at the river. She too seemed to appreciate the art, and once dutifully came in to hand Gerald a drawing she'd produced of crabs at large on Easter Egg Island, according to the caption. Her technique wasn't great, but you had to admire the spirit in which it was done.

For a while life seemed to revolve around Gruts to the point that my friend Carl phoned the café on a couple of occasions, knowing I would be there, sat on my arse and weighing up my employment options. As I had no telephone, it was a better option than calling directly at my bedsit in the hope of my being at home.

It felt like being part of a family, and at the same time, because of all the stuff that was going on in and around Medway, it felt like we were part of history even at the time. It felt as though one day we would all be looking back and recalling where we were when we first heard Billy's calypso cover of Anarchy in the UK.

We were in Gruts, obviously.

He'd just bought in a freshly minted stack of the Blackhands album, and Gerald had stuck it on the record player so we could all have a listen. Some people remember seeing the Beatles at the Cavern Club, and some of us remember Gruts.

Naturally it didn't last, there being a limit to how much tea anyone could reasonably be expected to drink in a single afternoon, and although the place was nearly always full, or at least rarely ever empty, whatever Gerald and Caroline were making out of it wasn't enough. They closed, and it became the Bridge Roll, a well intentioned but similarly doomed tea room style café with laminated Gingham tablecloths run by a couple of middle-aged women, whose enthusiasm reminded me of my grandmother once harbouring an ambition of being known as good for a cup of tea and a bun amongst long distance truck drivers. The Bridge Roll wasn't terrible, but the new decor had the feel of something aspiring to the custom of a better class of diner, or at least better than we were.

Like all good things, it was over.

The Job

At some point during February 1989 I made an entry in my notebook suggesting that anyone in possession of jiffy bags already containing dog poo or other unpleasant substance of a kind you really wouldn't wish to receive in the mail, might like to address them to Dennis Landers of Lapwing Close, Lordswood, Chatham, Kent. The entry is written as though addressing those representatives of a future generation who would one day find my notebook an endlessly fascinating glimpse into the formative years of a great artist, cartoonist, musician, or master of some other craft upon which I hadn't yet quite decided, but which would be easier than working.

I'd bought the notebook earlier that month, without quite knowing why, and had taken to carrying it around with me, presumably in the event of my witnessing any occurrence so momentous as to warrant taking notes. John Jasper who lived in Gordon Road and who wrote darkly hilarious Pinteresque plays for his own amusement always seemed to have a notebook about his person, and I had adopted the habit in case there was something in it.

A slightly later entry dated to Monday the 27th of February 1989 reads as follows:

Chaos is the absence of order and hence in one sense an artificially imposed state of being. Also it could be said that it does not exist, being as mankind is as much a part of nature as is weather. A nuclear reactor is in a sense no less natural and no less a part of chaos than a dog turd or an owl pellet. If all is chaos, including order (within that chaos - true order can only be imposed from outside) then there is no chaos just as there is no night without day. Order cannot derive from or be produced by chaos by the very nature of chaos.

In the same way, good is surely some form of evil. Evil is the absence of empathy. An animal killing for food cannot be considered evil - it is killing for food to sustain itself, and empathy does not enter into it. Killing for pleasure alone could be said to be evil for the motivation bears no relation to the continued existence of the killer. Hence the death is meaningless. If the killer could truly experience the feelings of the victim - empathise - then they would not be able to see that the fear outweighs their pleasure. However, this is rarely considered. The human race seems to be 99% incapable of empathy and is by this definition evil. This would go some way towards explaining why Dennis Landers is such an utter wanker.

Suffice to say, I was not overly fond of Dennis Landers.

To start at one of many possible beginnings, by June 1988 I'd been unemployed for almost a full year, and had been regularly obliged to attend a daily DHSS initiative known as Job Club for most of that time, one of those soul sapping exercises in governmental number crunching entailing a lot of enforced bonhomie and the sort of jargon by which even the act of scraping effluvia from between the cracks in the tile floor of a public lavatory can be redefined as an opportunity.

'They're making you attend Job Club?' one of my friends observed with a sceptical and yet amused frown, 'but you can already read and write, can't you?'

'Ha ha,' I conceded.

Glenn Wallis referred to it as Joke Club, and Alun Jones would make wisecracks about whether or not I'd had a chance to play in the sandpit that day.

We would spend three mornings a week tarting up our CVs, seeking opportunities in local newspapers, using the DHSS telephone to enquire after possible vacancies, or writing out applications. I seemed to make an impression on the young woman who led the group and occasionally gave us pep talks involving flip charts and further overuse of the word opportunity. Specifically she was impressed by how many applications and speculative letters I was sending out, thanks to stationary and postage stamps paid for by the Great British Taxpayer. She was less impressed when she read one of my speculative letters. The glue on the envelope had apparently failed, and my letter had fallen onto her desk before she could take preventative measures in order to keep herself from accidentally reading the whole thing.

Glenn Wallis had somehow come by a postal address pertaining to the group Yello, the Swiss electronic band of which we were both fans. I had written asking if they had any jobs available and whether they could be induced to listen to a tape of my own music. For this introductory letter I'd adopted a fairly informal, conversational, even chatty tone. This really wasn't what Job Club was about, my group leader explained, now coming around to a revised impression of me as a cranky and probably unemployable weirdo - which on reflection may have been a reasonable assessment.

Her suspicions had been aroused by the great number of speculative letters I'd been sending out in comparison to what few responses were coming back. Equally curious was my status as longest serving Job Club member, having put in close to a full year's loyal jobseekage when the average dole scrounging sponge monkey usually lasted about three months before ascending to their employment destiny either at a burger bar or as one of the local council's elite litter picking team. Twelve proud months and I hadn't yet fooled anyone into even granting me an interview. The problem seemed to be that I was limiting my applications to jobs I thought I could stand to do, and for which I was in some way qualified.

Grudgingly I conceded to take what my group leader termed a more inclusive approach, applying for jobs I either couldn't do or didn't want. This secured me an interview with a corporate design company in Gravesend. The interviewer explained that my application had seemed so peculiar that they just had to bring me in to see what the hell I was about, given that I had neither experience nor interest in corporate design. In interview terms I was a palate cleanser, although on the positive side, the Great British Taxpayers paid my train fare, so thanks for that, you lot!

Then came the missive from Royal Mail, specifically an interview date. It hadn't occurred to me that they would bother to reply, but I guess they replied to everyone. Having disliked the necessity of doing a paper round as a kid, I wasn't sure if I really wanted to engage myself with the grown-up version, but the appeal of actually getting paid for something I could do was overwhelming.

I was interviewed by a man named Cliff, an unambiguous authority figure with the moustache of a detective inspector from a cop show. He was personable, but wasn't interested in making friends. He asked me about art college, about my fine art degree. I had been doing my best to sound like a normal person, someone unfettered by the sort of absurd ambition that would render them  unreliable in the workplace. I would not be pulling a sickie because I wished to go and see the Brancusi at the Southbank Centre.

'I'm not really interested in that,' I said. 'It's all behind me now.'

The words sounded fake as I spoke them, about as convincing as  John Simon Ritchie's no more heroin for me, thank you very much, but apparently they were what Cliff had wanted to hear. I was the correct man for the job.

A week later I was sat in a room in the Best Street sorting office taking an aptitude test with eight or nine other applicants. Amongst these were Mike Barfoot and Mr. Logic. Mike was probably a nice enough lad, although I never really found out because he was from Newcastle and I literally couldn't understand a single word he said. Mr. Logic was a tall, skinny youth with a huge chin and pudding-bowl haircut resembling the character from Viz comic but for his unsettling, staring eyes. He delighted in regaling anyone within earshot of random facts and observations as they occurred to him.

'Now that is what is known as a U-matic video recorder,' he informed us in his slightly nasal voice, smiling as he indicated the video player by which we had just viewed an instructional video describing the life that awaited us as part of the Royal Mail family.

No-one had asked, but then none of Mr. Logic's previous addresses had been requested either. We were all hoping he would shut up, but he began to explain how U-matic video recorders are used by professionals working for large television companies.

'I know,' I interrupted with enough volume to make it clear that I knew I was interrupting. 'I've just finished a three-year degree course specialising in video. I know it's a U-matic recorder. I've used them before, many times.'

I may have sounded like a wanker, but he started it, and it did at least shut him up for a few minutes.

The aptitude test had taken half an hour or so, comprising a booklet of multiple choice questions testing basic ability to reason, to spot the difference, and that sort of thing. I couldn't imagine anyone being unable to pass it. Nevertheless only Mike Barfoot, Mr. Logic and myself made it through from the original group. Given that a seagull probably could have passed the aptitude test, I suspect the other four or five simply hadn't been able to face the prospect of working with Mr. Logic. They needn't have worried. After three weeks of explaining different types of spigot or finding himself inspired to oratory by certain door hinges, he stopped turning up, apparently having found the work more demanding than he'd anticipated.

It was indeed more physically demanding than I myself had expected - carrying fifteen or so kilos around on one's back for a couple of hours every day and starting work at five in the morning - but it was good exercise and I quickly got used to it.

Slightly more terrifying were my colleagues, or so it seemed to me. They were white working class males of various ages, and most of them were interested in drinking and football, and there were only three females working in the entire building, excluding canteen staff. I had come from the same socio-economic background, but I didn't like football, and I did like reading books and had spent three years at art college. I had no problem with them, but felt it likely that they would view me with suspicion, hostility, or at least some mockery on account of my occasional use of long, fancy words. I knew that it would be vital that I blend in to some degree, that I attract no undue attention, at least until I had enough of an understanding of the environment to appear sociable without coming across like David Attenborough amongst the bonobos.

I'd already shot myself in the proverbial foot by having a strategic haircut prior to interview in an attempt to make myself seem employable. I had grown my hair at least as long as that of any member of a 1960s psychedelic band and hadn't had it cut for years, and being a cheapskate I asked a friend - Sue Chinn - if she could have a go at it. Sue did a great job but for having to battle against my whining resentment of a world in which a haircut equated to improved employment prospects. Fearful of leaving me so radically shorn as to induce trauma, she held back, and ended up unwittingly styling my hair in a pseudo-medieval form reminiscent of that worn by Rowan Atkinson in the first series of Blackadder. A few years later at least two thirds of the population of Manchester would sport the same look whilst declaring themselves mad for it, but it was 1988 in Chatham, and I was less able to pass my appearance off as resulting from a love of either having it large or anything that might be considered top.

At Royal Mail I was immediately given the name Baldrick, because although my haircut bore no resemblance to that of the character played by Tony Robinson, the fictional Edmund Blackadder was given to frequently calling out the name when requiring the attention of his servant. I tried to point out how as a nickname it didn't actually quite work, and was essentially the same as naming someone Mr. Grimsdale because they resembled Norman Wisdom; but it worked for my new colleagues in so much as that it made everyone laugh, and that was the point.

Communication became difficult, because introductions could not be effected when the other person already knew me as Baldrick, and already had a few ready formulated lines by which to take the piss, usually quotes from episodes of Blackadder with the humorous content replaced by something more directly pertinent to life at Royal Mail. The fact that I found this slightly annoying only served to make it seem all the more funny amongst my colleagues, and so I kept myself almost entirely to myself for at least the first six weeks. I was there to do a job rather than to make friends. I had nothing against my colleagues beyond those few keeping the Baldrick jokes going, but neither did I have any strong desire to accumulate friends just for the sake of it.

Of those my own age, there were few with whom I really had much in common. The loudest were Ian Young - imaginatively nicknamed Youngie - and Nappy. I never found out Nappy's real name, but the nickname was apparently an oblique reference to his behavioural age. They would laugh hysterically at each other's jokes.

'My girlfriend asked me if I loved her last night,' Youngie reported over his egg and chips in the snooker room next to the canteen. He spoke quickly, and I sometimes found it difficult to catch what he said.

'Yeah?' posited Nappy, grinning in anticipation of a punchline.

'I told her to fuck off,' Youngie guffawed.

Nappy laughed, throwing his head back and shaking his mullet like an excitable Bay City Roller.

Those who regarded these two as the heart and soul of the sorting office either laughed, or at least grinned so as not to appear too craven. I didn't laugh.

'How's it going, Balders?' Youngie grinned at me. Baldrick had been shortened to the less formal Balders.

'It's going fine.'

'Good old Balders.' He paused in the name of comic timing.  'What a cunt!'

Oh how we laughed, except for me. I knew it would be pointless to even attempt to compete whilst Youngie's team of writers kept him supplied with material of such calibre.

The Gay Bandalero would smile broadly, just enough to show his allegiance without openly joining in with the humiliation of a colleague who might one day make fun of his own considerable weight and resemblance to a Russ Abbot Show version of a stereotypical Mexican bandit. His name was Phil, and his presence served to illustrate how Mr. Logic might have worked out had he stuck with the job and developed a sense of humour. Working next to Phil became something of a chore because he would spend the time either congratulating Nappy on the most recent hilarious remark, or otherwise taking his work far too seriously. Despite my being slightly older, he briefly seemed to imagine himself as Yoda to my young padawan, officiously instructing me in the performance of tasks I already understood quite well, and with which I'd coped just fine over the previous six months.

I had been taught by an older postman called Pete, a likeable old clown who frowned quietly to himself when he heard me addressed as Baldrick. In my first week he took me out on his regular walk - Snodhurst Avenue and Harptree Drive in Walderslade. We would return to the sorting office after the first delivery, usually to a hail of jokes about how little I would learn from my mentor.

'The blind leading the blind, I call it,' Pete would agree.

By the second week I was doing the walk myself without a safety net. The job really wasn't that difficult to pick up.

'How you getting on with it?' Nigel asked.

There were seven or eight of us all sat in the back of a Royal Mail transit van being driven out to Walderslade. I was perched upon the wheel arch watching the tarmac as we motored along. The rear roller door was open and the sun was coming up over Magpie Hall Road. It was a strange moment, one of those that inspire one to ask how did I get here? It felt as though we were going off to war.

Six o'clock in the morning,
And I'm the last person in this plane still awake.
Y'know I can almost smell the blood washing against the shores,
Of this land that can't forget its past.

Nigel was a young soul boy, traditionally my enemy according to the sort of morons I tended to listen to as a teenager. He chewed gum constantly, wore dazzling white socks, and rarely cracked a smile without good reason. He seemed to regard both Nappy and Youngie as idiots. He was all right.

'It's okay, I suppose,' I said in reference to the job. I had a fear I might suddenly find myself talking about Viennese performance art or something else that would expose me as being out of my depth.

'Better than the old jam roll though, innit!'

'Jam roll?'

'The dole. It's better than signing on, yeah?'

'Oh yes.'

I didn't say anything about being called Baldrick, or my dislike of the nickname. It was something I knew I just had to take in my stride. I was trying to get along with people. Eventually I got there, or at least most of the way. Eventually I began to feel at home, and had earned the luxury of being able to regard some of my colleagues as dicks, if that was what they were.

'Oh yes,' Phil observed in the wake of another wisecrack. 'He's a damn fine postman is Nappy, a damn fine postman.' He affected a far away look with which to garnish his retired colonel style delivery. The comment was predicated on the assumption that we all enjoyed Nappy's humour, so I said nothing.

By Christmas I had come to the realisation that most of the staff were okay, and most of them were also very funny without needing to submit regular broadcasts to the rest of us. There was Steve, who called me Baldrick with more venomous enthusiasm than anyone, and whose main hobby was starting fights outside Gillingham night clubs on Saturday evening, but who had a kind of brutal honesty about him that was difficult to dislike; and there was Johnny Hollands, a man approaching retirement age who still wore the older grey uniform, and whose patter recalled the sauce of the London music hall, which as such had me crying with laughter on a regular basis; and Henry who became my regular van driver, a little round man resembling Roy Kinnear who was probably the first person I could have called a friend at Royal Mail. I'd weathered the first six months of bullshit and conversational equivalents of being sent to the stores for a tin of striped paint without too much flinching, and I had achieved a degree of acceptance. I was a postman rather than a former art student, and only a few people continued to refer to me as Baldrick, presumably having tired of my continuing failure to react. These were Nappy and Youngie whom I'd come to regard as harmless if not particularly funny clowns; and Dennis Landers, who seemed to hate me for no reason I fully understood.

Dennis was middle aged with thick glasses which reduced each eye to a vague tadpole swimming around behind a crystal ball. He would burst into song without warning - I like it, I like it, but only ever that opening line of the one crappy song by Gerry and his bloody awful Pacemakers. Dennis seemingly considered himself a bit of a character.

I worked next to him for a week and we spoke from time to time, and he took a profound dislike to me. Sometimes he would complain that I smelled bad, scowling at me whilst fanning a hand in front of his face for the amusement of Doyle, his sidekick with the blonde curly hair of Andy Pandy, the children's television puppet, and a face made for gurning. Doyle would gurgle with delight and mutter something identifying me as Baldrick - what a loser I was, or something of that general theme.

I asked everyone I knew whether I smelled bad, seeing as no-one had actually mentioned this to me before, and the conclusion seemed to be that I might occasionally benefit from a more thorough application of underarm deodorant, but otherwise it was not generally anything noticeable.

'He wants us all to be like him,' Dennis sneered in my direction after a loudly broadcast discussion of my failings which was otherwise somehow oddly lacking in specifics. 'He wants us to be all serious.'

I hadn't laughed at any of his jokes, but then I tended not to laugh at anyone's jokes unless they were funny. Neither had I rolled my eyes nor expressed any damning testimony on his general lack of wit. In truth I'd hardly spoken to the man because I didn't feel we had much to say to each other. This was an acknowledgement of differences rather than any sort of value judgement.

Now apparently I required that my colleagues be all serious. This was my crime. It seemed like an accusation made by a five-year old. It was bewildering. I couldn't have cared less whether my colleagues walked around in face paint and big red shoes so long as they didn't call me fucking Baldrick. The rest was up to them.

The lowest, most ridiculous point of this war of nerves was reached as I entered the office one morning, passing Dennis and Doyle as they worked at the sorting frame. I had my waterproof coat in my bag, and it seemed sensible to take it out and stow it on top of the frame right then rather than later, for all sorts of boring reasons which would make the story far too long were I to list them.

I placed my bag on the bay.

I opened my bag.

I took out my waterproof coat.

'What's he fucking think he's doing?' Doyle sneered with a venom that would have been appropriate had I taken out my penis and started talking to it. 'A fucking Paul Daniels magic trick?'

Dennis exploded with laughter.

Now the little Doyle too laughed to see such fun.

They both stood howling, almost crying with hysterics at my ker-raaazzzy coat extraction routine, the funniest three seconds of hopeless Baldrick saddo loser tomfoolery to ever split the sides of Chatham sorting office's two most violently dynamic men.

A month or so later, I found myself assigned to the walk upon which was situated the home of Dennis Landers. I delivered his mail dutifully and without complaint or temptation towards rancorous acts, aside from jotting down the address in my notebook as a deserving destination of unpleasant parcels sent from anonymous sources. This coincided with the cessation of hostilities. I knew where he lived, and he knew that I knew.

In May, 1989 I transferred to the Coventry sorting office, having been employed at Best Street for less than a year. Chatham hadn't really worked out for me as I had hoped, and my father had moved to the city of Coventry a few years earlier, and it seemed like a change of scenery was as good a move as any. During the three weeks it took for my transfer to be processed, I spent some time wondering as to whether it was the right decision. I'd begun to make friends at Best Street, but then I'd spent five years in the county of Kent and it seemed like enough; and Royal Mail had forced evolution upon me, transforming a somewhat neurotic ex-art student into someone who could at least deliver letters, bring home a wage, and eventually handle the occasional insult from witless twats without wishing anonymously mailed parcels of fecal matter upon them, an impotent response if ever there was.

I have no idea whether Dennis Landers continues to draw breath, but if so I would hope he's evolved beyond courageously picking on such easy targets. If not, I suppose it doesn't make much difference. I haven't yet grown out of the pleasure taken from imagining him stood in his hallway horrified by the delivery of a bowel movement by first class post, and nearly a quarter century has passed. For me, it remains a pleasing and enduring image, which I suppose must be why I made that entry in my notebook in the first place.

Thank You, Santa!

It was the run-up to Christmas 1988, a weekday afternoon at the Pentagon shopping centre in not-even-remotely-sunny Chatham, Kent. I didn't want to be there. It was cold and had begun to get dark. I had been working for Royal Mail since summer, and my labours had impressed upon me that afternoons were precious, something to be cherished and not to be wasted on people I didn't really like. I didn't really like Aiden Bibby, but thus far I hadn't had much say in the matter.

Aiden Bibby was a friend of Glenn, at least in so much as he could be considered a medical condition that Glenn had unwittingly passed on to me. I think Glenn had contracted him either from living in the same house, or maybe from knowing the guy in a social context back in the days before he'd become a complete pain in the arse. I met Aiden Bibby whilst visiting Glenn and his wife Jayne when they lived on Meadowbank Road; and because I hadn't actually said leave me alone, you hairy fool out loud, he'd assimilated me into his platonic spider web of association. At the time I had similarly long hair, so he probably saw me as a potentially kindred spirit, somehow failing to notice my general hatred of marijuana, narcotics, psychedelic music, hippies, and the second half of the 1960s.

I had lived in Glencoe Road, Chatham for about a year, a year characterised as my first out and alone in the big wide world. I had finished my degree and was ready to become famous, although that didn't seem to be happening. I was socially awkward and, I suppose, a bit stupid and therefore disposed towards expecting the best of people. This was more than enough for Aiden Bibby, and soon he was regularly dropping around for tea, intruding upon afternoons when I would otherwise either have rested or drawn cartoons that no-one would read.

Knock knock knock.

I'd peer out of the window and there would be his stupid face grinning up at me, a huge pink egg that had been covered in glue and rolled around the floor of a barber's shop, little round John Lennon glasses to complete the effect. He would enter my one room bedsit, hulking and awkward in denim waistcoat, crappy trainers and tattered flares, still grinning for no good reason and always looking like he was trying to find a way to say sorry. He would sit and talk and I would listen, and most of the time it felt like a Cheech and Chong record without the jokes. He told me about a girl he'd seen waiting at the bus stop from time to time. He was fairly certain she had smiled at him and therefore believed he was in with a chance, but wasn't sure how best to proceed. I was hardly qualified to give advice, although even I could tell that his was a lost cause; and of course I said nothing.

One evening he ended up staying the night because he was scared of going back to his flat. He'd had an argument with one of the other tenants and it seemed the other guy had become violent and threatening. I didn't have the full story, but I could easily see how that might have happened.

'I'll just read,' Aiden Bibby told me, still grinning and settling into my armchair, rolling himself a cigarette and reaching for a stack of comics.

'Okay,' I said, wondering how this oaf had become my problem. I pulled the covers over and pretended I was sleeping in a tent so as to put some notional distance between myself and my unwanted guest. I lasted about two hours of him turning pages and chuckling at the antics of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, but it became too irritating and I needed my sleep.

'Do you think you could go home?' It was now three in the morning.

'I'll be quiet.' His face fell. Somehow he hadn't anticipated this.

'I can't sleep with some bloke sat reading comics in my room and I have to be up for work in two hours.' Resentment had built to the strength required for honesty, and my words had become an irresistible force. Incredibly he left, shuffling off into the night, back to the house shared with a person to whom he owed money, or whose refrigerated goods he had eaten, or whatever it was that had inspired the argument.

I had come to understand that Aiden Bibby was a friend in need, a human sponge absorbing energy from those around and forever requiring validation. I have a feeling his father may have beaten him, which is terrible if true, but still wasn't enough to warrant my unconditional sympathy. My heart would sink as I saw him approach, having spotted me from across the street. I would find myself making a mental calculation of how many hours I would have to sacrifice before I could reasonably expect to get away. His eyebrows would wiggle like those of a cartoon character, the kind of facial greeting that also serves for hey man, have you got any - you know...

I recall one occasion when I'd been sat in Gruts, the café frequented by at least a few of my friends and acquaintances, people in various bands and so on.

'Hey man.'

Aiden Bibby was suddenly there, sitting himself at my table, as incongruous as Spiderman turning up in a Charlie Brown comic strip. I remembered that I had excused myself from an afternoon drink in some pub by telling him that I planned to meet other friends in Gruts. I was playing chess, probably either against Prez, Tim Webster, or Alun Jones - one of the usual gang. These people didn't know Aiden Bibby, and I envied them. There was no use pretending that I didn't know him as they had heard him greet me, then watched as he sat at my table and proceeded to roll himself a ciggie, looking all around and grinning.

'This is a pretty cool place.'

Gerald, the proprietor approached our table. 'Yes, mate?'

Aiden Bibby waved a hand in the air. 'Nothing for me. I'm just here to—' he made a vague gesture but could not complete the sentence, suddenly aware he had presumed too much on the hospitality of our host. My head sank into my hands.

'Out!' Gerald pointed to the exit as though addressing a dog he had discovered going through the bins at the back.

Aiden Bibby stood up, protesting, but his defence was vague.

Gerald now held open the door. 'This is a café not a homeless shelter. If you're not buying you can piss off.'

I wanted to laugh because this was the tone of the sort of thing I would have liked to say to Aiden Bibby, but I lacked courage and humour was not the dominant element of this situation. I stood.

'You're all right. You don't have to go.' Gerald seemed a little surprised, even concerned, which came as a relief. He understood that Aiden Bibby was a medical condition, something from which I was suffering, not someone I had deliberately introduced to his café.

I paid my tab and went, offering some vague excuse, then followed after Aiden Bibby. Somehow the relief of his expulsion was not the comfort it should have been. I had no respect for this man and yet still I worried over what he might think of me. I had a paradoxical urge to show some solidarity with this underdog whilst knowing his critics invariably had a point. I could not bare the thought that he might imagine me a traitor, still sat in Gruts laughing and raising a mug of tea to toast the exile of the hated hairy one, which was of course a fairly plausible scenario.

I caught up.

He was angry, ranting to himself.

He had not understood why a man who ran a café would not  happily allow complete strangers to just hang out without buying a cup of tea. He lived in a world of joints passed around the front rooms of complete strangers, listening to Gong or Pink Floyd, everyone united in mutual appreciation of a plant. He whined about the unfairness and the way he had been spoken to, clearly without realising that my sympathies lay entirely with Gerald.

Why do I know this arsehole?, I wondered to myself for the millionth time. Yet my friendship, such as it was, was nevertheless appreciated, I suppose by virtue of my being one of the few people lacking the fortitude to just tell him to piss off. This appreciation was to be expressed in a Christmas gift.

I had been on my way to somewhere else, and Aiden Bibby had seen me before I saw him, and now for some reason we were in the Pentagon shopping centre. I stood outside WHSmiths, waiting for Aiden Bibby to emerge, resenting the delay, and mystified by the fact that I had not simply taken the opportunity to be on my way.

'Do you like the Monkees?' He grinned, as he always did, at last emerging and bustling me away from the door then walking quickly towards the High Street exit.

It was a strange question, completely divorced of context; he may as well have asked whether I liked the Andromeda galaxy for all the sense it made. I didn't actively dislike the Monkees as such, but in the same way that I don't have anything bad to say about Arnulf of Carinthia, King of East Francia from 887 to 899.

'They're okay I suppose.'

'Happy Christmas!' The hand that had been secreted within his jacket emerged to present me with a pre-recorded cassette of The Best of the Monkees.

'Did you just nick that?'

He nodded, and told me of other goods he had managed to pilfer from the store, presents for Glenn and Jayne and others. He was doing his Christmas shoplifting.

You shouldn't have, I would have said had I thought to do so.

I listened to the cassette a few times. It was okay, providing you like the Monkees.

The Christmas after that I had moved to the city of Coventry, a long way from Aiden Bibby, whom I neither saw nor heard from ever again, and that was a better present. I still have the cassette somewhere because I felt sorry for it as I sometimes do for inanimate objects - a mediocre product recorded on a disposable medium, the stolen gift of a loser given to someone who didn't want it; and every time I hear Last Train to Clarksville or Pleasant Valley Sunday, at least now I smile and feel glad, reminded that I am no longer living in Chatham in the late eighties, hounded by a friendless man.