My Year in the Avant-Garde

I was still sixteen in May, 1982, and things felt as though they were moving, artistically speaking, even if I wasn't quite sure of their direction. I'd produced my first cassette of formative industrial music made by hitting a bedspring with a pencil, then taping over the end with a sinister sounding television news report about a local man arrested for terrorising ducks; Rod Pearce of Fetish Records had told me that he would give my tape a listen, which I'm fairly sure he did because that was the last I heard from him; and I'd joined some sort of avant-garde band on the side.

The invitation had taken the form of a postcard pinned up in Renton's Records in Leamington Spa, which seemed to be the only place which stocked music by the Residents. Persons wanted, it said, for avant-garde band based in Stratford-upon-Avon. I'm paraphrasing but the request definitely specified avant-garde, which I'd recently learned referred to artists such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and myself. I phoned the guy, who told me his name was John Mullins. I said that I was a guitarist, roughly speaking, and he assured me that musical ability wasn't really a consideration.

My best friends at the time were Eggy and Graham, and Graham had an older brother named Martin, occasionally known as Peewee for reasons I didn't quite follow. I never saw much of Martin but regarded him as an elusive and mysterious role model. He had an amazing record collection comprising albums by Alternative TV, Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, Faust and others, and on the few occasions when he spoke to us, he always said something cool. Additionally, he played bass in the Abstracts, who were amazing and who impressed me most by being the first band I heard where the bass and the guitar seemed to be playing two entirely unrelated yet somehow complementary parts of a song. Just this year, someone on facebook shared a photograph of the Abstracts taken at the time, and it was kind of shocking to see three grown men with some little boy. The little boy had been Martin, and so at last I understood the nickname. This realisation brought with it the understanding that Graham, myself, and my other contemporaries must have seemed like foetuses to those older kids.

I mentioned the possibility of my joining the John Mullins band to Graham and he told Martin, and Martin was surprised because he knew John from school and knew him well. John Mullins, so I was told, suffered from epilepsy, which worried me because I didn't really understand what it was. What little information was passed onto me from Martin suggested I should proceed with caution for reasons which remained unspecified.

My dad dropped me off in Stratford-upon-Avon on Saturday the 15th of May, according to my diary. I bought some blank tapes, the 12" single of Temptation by New Order, and borrowed an album of Stockhausen's Stimmung from the local library, after which I went to meet John Mullins at his parents' house in quite a nice part of Stratford.

John was tall, distinguished, fairly handsome with floppy blonde hair and glasses. He dressed like a concert pianist or someone who had been to one of the better schools, which I suppose he had given that he knew Martin. He seemed intelligent and witty, someone who probably wouldn't respond to fart jokes, and I tried hard to avoid coming across like some immo - as was Mark Harrison's blanket term for the terminally immature. It was therefore probably fucking lucky that I'd chosen that day to check a record of Stockhausen rather than Blaster Bates out of the library.

Naturally we talked about music. I think he may have mentioned Cabaret Voltaire as a potential influence on the phone, to which I had responded favourably. Now I had to admit that I hadn't actually heard anything by them, although I was a big fan of Throbbing Gristle, of whom John had heard only very little. He played me The Voice of America, which I found electrifying. He'd just bought their most recent album, 2X45, but said he'd found it disappointing because they hadn't fed the drum kit through any special effects. This led directly to tracks from Soon Over Babaluma by Can. I'd never heard of them. I was impressed by the cover printed on some sort of foil, but I found their music underwhelming then as I do now. This, John suggested, was the sort of thing he was hoping we would play, something in this general vein.

As the morning swung around to noon, Andy turned up with Vanessa - whom I took to be his girlfriend. She was still at school and presumably the same age as me, albeit more emotionally developed, as seemed to be more or less everyone else in my age group. Andy was the other guitarist. Vanessa briefly left to retrieve Paul from the pub, and Paul turned out to be Paul Gardiner, the drummer from the Abstracts, which I found massively exciting. Paul brought someone called Henry with him. Henry was into Queen and Ted Nugent.

John directed us in a couple of extended jams, himself accompanying us with funky bass and prepared tapes of short wave radio noise. The first piece had a vaguely Latin feel, which we followed up with something in C major, which I noted in my diary without quite understanding what it was. My job was to agitate my guitar by scrabbling fingers across the strings like a spider, slowly allowing two particular high notes to emerge, to chime like a bell. It was all a bit of a racket and I found it hard to tell whether what we'd just done had been amazing or shite. I wasn't getting much feedback from the others, who possibly regarded my presence as puzzling - a sort of foetal scarecrow from one of those Deliverance themed towns on the way to Oxford. Anyway, John seemed approximately happy, or not actively displeased, and proposed another session on Tuesday evening.

He phoned me once I was home from school on the Tuesday and  said the session had been cancelled due to something about Andy being crap, but he would let me know as soon as anything else happened. This was kind of weird. I'd assumed that if anyone was crap it had been me, but Andy had apparently kept sneakily introducing tunes to our improvisations. Additionally he'd been playing in time with the percussion on the second track despite having been expressly instructed to do otherwise.

My diary records that John and I spent one afternoon in June messing around with reel to reel tapes, although I don't remember it.

Another few weeks after that, he let me borrow a stack of albums as clues to where he was coming from, musically speaking - Cabaret Voltaire's Red Mecca, James Blood Ulmer's, Are You Glad To Be In America?, plus Gruppen and Carré by Stockhausen. He told me he had a gig at the Green Dragon on Tuesday and that I should come along and see; so obviously I wasn't in the band, whatever it was, which was something of a relief as I still didn't really understand what John was trying to do. If he had some great vision, it wasn't anything I recognised.

I didn't go along, and Martin relayed that it had been a bit of a disaster with John pissed to the point of being unable to stand whilst hectoring the audience to vote Labour.

We didn't really speak to each other over the summer. I was too busy shitting myself over having left school, feelings of alienation, and all the usual stuff. I was feeling particularly alienated by Eggy who had taken to referring to my seemingly sophisticated friend as John Muggins. Eggy had become somewhat Cromwellian since leaving school and had delivered at least one speech in which he lambasted the sort of people who can record a piece of music which is just one note going on for a hundred hours and yet who don't know how to make a cup of tea. He wasn't naming names, but he didn't really need to. It wasn't like I was even listening to much Stockhausen myself, let alone forcing it upon him or going on about it; and I actually made a pretty decent cup of tea.

By September I was at the South Warwickshire College of Further Education in Stratford retaking all of those 'O' levels I'd messed up. Happily this meant occasionally bumping into John at lunchtime, going for chips, or maybe just a pot of tea in the second hand bookshop at the end of Henley Street. We talked about music, or he talked about politics while I listened. We both seemed to understand that our band was never going to happen and was therefore not worth discussing. Being politically naive, I'd heard somewhere that Tony Benn wanted to abolish private property, which obviously upset me given how long it had taken me to build up my collection of twenty albums, not to mention all of those back issues of 2000AD comic.

Our conversation therefore ground to a massively awkward halt when I told John I wasn't too sure about that Tony Benn. Strangely, he didn't set me straight, which was either down to his good manners, or that it didn't seem like I'd yet developed the brain capacity necessary for any sort of understanding.

Our phone calls and random encounters became more and more infrequent, eventually reducing to just a series of anecdotes. He was living in London. He was working as Peter Tatchell's secretary in the run-up to the Bermondsey by-elections. He was dead, an alcoholic, or had been almost incapacitated by his epilepsy. While I remain ignorant of his eventual fate, I can entertain the thought that maybe things worked out well for him, because he was a nice guy and I wish we'd known each other better. We may not have much more to discuss now than we did then, but he made my teenage years a good bit more interesting than they otherwise would have been, even if I still, to this day, don't really understand what any of it was about.

I hope he found whatever he was looking for.

My Australian Cousin

My Aunt Lynda moved to Australia in January, 1974. She corresponded with my mother - her older sister - for a little while, but silence eventually fell. I would have been eight-years old when she moved, and although I remember Lynda, it was a long time ago and the details are a bit sketchy. I remember Eddie, her husband, whose name turned out to have been extrapolated from Edwin rather than Edward, which would be at least one reason why more recent Google searches never seemed to come back with anything. I remember the block of flats in Leamington Spa where they lived, possibly because it was the first block of flats I ever entered, what with my being a rural lad and everything. The climb to the eighth floor stuck in my memory, and weirdly I remember it as a peculiarly circular activity in which we went up one flight of steps, then down the next one back to the beginning, over and over as though it were some sort of ritual undertaking designed to unlock the upper floors of the building. 'We're just going up and down again,' I kept trying to tell my parents. Realistically, I'm almost certainly remembering a dream about the ascent, which at least indicates how significant it seemed to me at the time. Big cities full of tower blocks, urban architecture and concrete were places I only ever saw on Doctor Who on the telly, usually subject to invasion by beings from other worlds.

I also remembered Dawn - Eddie and Lynda's daughter, my cousin - who would have been about three by the time they boarded the boat at Southampton; or at least I remembered her in the sense of remembering that she existed.

Decades flapped past and we all began to wonder what had become of this Australian branch of the family, but Google searches came back with nothing. Then in 2017, my wife got on the case, having run out of her own ancestors, or at least hit a wall back in sixteenth century Bermondsey - which was itself an eye opener given my own more recent association with south-east London. Bess, by agency of one of those genealogy websites, discovered that Eddie had been Edwin rather than Edward, that his surname had been Brown - a detail which the rest of us had somehow mislaid - and that, if this was the same guy, the trail led to Lynda and Dawn, both still resident in Australia. So emails were exchanged, and yes - it was them, after all this time. They had similarly been looking for us, on and off, but never found anything.

One year later, and I'm back in England visiting my mother. I'm here for three weeks, and my visit has been timed to coincide with Dawn and her family coming to England. I try to get back to see my folks once a year, and I knew Dawn was planning a trip so it seemed too good an opportunity to miss. Dawn's trip lasts two months and seems to involve whizzing around half of northern Europe while they're up this way - even bits of Iceland and Norway. I suppose, if you're going all the way to the other hemisphere, you may as well try to see as much of it as you can.

So we've exchanged emails and we seem to get on fine, but I'm still a little nervous about the meeting, not least that it will take place at my mother's house, because they've hired a car so it's easier for them to drive over to see me from their current hotel, which is somewhere in the Cotswolds. I've met plenty of Australians, and only ever one Australian I didn't like - although he seems to have been the exception which proved the rule - and they probably number in my top ten favourite nationalities, possibly top five; and yet still I have this image of my mother - who generally doesn't do crowds - besieged by gregarious Aussies laughing and chucking tinnies to one another across the couch.

Thankfully and obviously, such ludicrous fears are unfounded. Dawn is with Darren, her husband, and son, Sean. They file into the front room and occupy the sofa as though entering a stately home.

There's a distinct familial resemblance between Dawn and my mother, her aunt; which is, I suppose, consistent with how my mother and Lynda have grown to resemble each other quite closely in recent years, which is surprising given how different they were as children. Dawn seems an outgoing, happy presence, someone whose company warms the room.

We talk about the sort of things you always talk about when you haven't seen someone for forty-five years, and my mother appears quietly delighted by the meeting. This is a relief, because I felt a bit awkward as the intermediary introducing people who may as well be strangers to her home. We talk about the family, and what little we can remember of it, and we talk about England and America and Australia. Darren is a miner, so he's interested in the old mines they've visited in Wales. He works at an open cast mine and I get the impression that it's one of those jobs involving huge, strange looking bits of digging equipment, like the trucking equivalent of the attractions at Jurassic Park. He seems a nice bloke and very much reminds me of my friend Glenn, quiet but with an endless supply of one-liners and with a face accustomed to grinning.

Darren is driving, so we drive to Kenilworth which is a couple of miles down the road. We spend most of the morning plodding around Kenilworth Castle on the grounds of it being there, and that Dawn was almost certainly wheeled around the place in a stroller back in the seventies. They seem to like it, as do I, because it's always good to see a place through the eyes of someone who doesn't know it so well as you do. All the same, given how much the three of them are packing in on this tour of the northern hemisphere, I'm surprised they're not beginning to suffer castle-burn. They've already seen Sudeley Castle, and I suspect it may not have been the first.

After the castle, we drive up to the Mews, as the cul-de-sac is named, to look at the house where our grandparents lived, and where Dawn herself supposedly lived for a couple of months.

'It's that one,' I say, pointing at number thirteen.

We look at the house.

Dawn had been wondering if the memories might come flooding back, which they haven't, but never mind. We drive on, around a couple of corners and end up on Rouncil Lane.

'I think that's where your mother went to school,' I say as we pass Kenilworth Sixth Form, emphasis on I think because this is only a vague impression I have, probably based on the fact of it being a school in Kenilworth. I wouldn't like to claim I'm anything special as a tour guide.

They drop me back off in Coventry and we say goodbye until what we all hope will be a next time. It was short and a bit of a whirlwind, but I'm really glad we managed to work out the dates; and once again I take pleasure from the fact that we're all still alive.

...and thanks to Dawn for the photographs!