I Do Know a Way...

I never imagined I would inherit a kid. I always liked the idea of passing on my genes by some vague method, but for most of my life I was never in any place which looked as though it might lead to such an eventuality. I read Susan D. Blackmore's excellent The Meme Machine and told myself that I would instead pass on my ideas, my memes rather than my genes. In any case, it seemed to be the way we, as a society, were going.

I never expected to marry anyone, or to meet anyone I would want to marry within days of having met them, or that a marriage resting upon so seemingly tenuous a foundation ever stood a chance of working; and yet here we all are, complete with a son from my wife's previous spell of matrimony. The prospect of suddenly becoming a stepfather would have seemed daunting had I thought about it, which I didn't because I filed the thought away under the heading of bridges to be crossed when the time is right.

My first meeting with the boy, such as it was, was as a face looming up on a screen as Bess and I were attempting transatlantic communication by means of Skype or YIM or one of those things involving a webcam. He wanted to know what she was doing and so I was introduced as Mommy's friend, the one she'd met in England. He was six or maybe seven and seemed to enjoy the novelty, if not the diversion of attention away from himself. The first thing he said to me was:

poooooooooo,llllkknyyyzxswt

This was followed by further strings of what the Futurist F.T. Marinetti once termed parole in libertá, in this instance spontaneously generated by a small fist hitting a laptop keyboard in preface to an animated fight with virtual water balloons. This was an additional feature of Skype or YIM or one of those things involving a webcam, one allowing users to season text not only with smiley faces and the like, but a button which delivers a smirking cartoon child to my screen, a bratty homeboy who hurls an animated water balloon at the viewer. The projectile grows as it approaches until it fills the screen and then appears to burst with an electronically sampled splash. It's probably funny if you're six or seven but soon becomes repetitive for anyone older.

Meeting the boy in person was different and somehow involved less direct interaction. He didn't seem to understand what I was or how he was expected to process my presence. It wasn't so much that he disliked me, or even resented the intrusion - which would at least have been understandable - but he seemed somehow in awe of me, which was weird, and this was combined with his having become unusually fixated upon his mother over the years. He wasn't shy. He simply didn't talk to me, or interact with me. He gabbled away about nothing to his mother and would seemingly ignore me when I spoke; but it always turned out that he simply hadn't heard the question, his focus having been on other matters, and he's the same even now at the age of thirteen so it's just the way he is. Also, he was weirdly pushy for such a small kid, somehow precocious and yet without either the vocabulary or social skills to quite excuse it as idiosyncratic charm. His apparent confidence seemed astonishing, almost obnoxious, but as I've learnt, none of it is born of malice or is intended in quite the way it can sometimes seem. It's just how he is.

Bess told me that as soon as he was old enough to be costumed and taken trick or treating, he'd insisted they go as a bat and a pirate, his mother in fake paper wings.

'Wait,' I asked, incredulous. 'How old did you say he was?'

'About three, and my Mom took his side.'

'So you let a three-year old tell you what to do?'

I no longer need to ask such questions, having experienced his weirdly single-minded sense of purpose first hand. It's not really coercion so much as just really knowing his own mind, and you get used to it eventually.

We went to San Antonio zoo. It was odd but not unpleasant. He knew where he wanted to go and what he wanted to see, and once there he'd lecture us on whatever animal we were looking at. Did we know this? and Did we know that? but his speech was difficult to understand and some of his assertions were patently ridiculous, and anyway - shouldn't it be him asking the questions? What's that animal called, and so on? It was hard to even get a word in edgeways, not least because doing so would be to engage in a pissing contest with a small child, and we'd all end up feeling weird and bad and wishing we'd just kept our mouths shut.

'No, I'm pretty sure you'll find that elephants are from either Africa or India.'

He'd frown in thought and then announce, 'I don't think so,' like you'd asked him a question; but this came later, our first interaction beyond laptop screens and virtual water balloons occurred at the sand pit. Bess and I were exhausted with the novelty of this new world we were building and so we took the boy to the play area for a break from him lecturing us. He hit the sand pit and began making pyramids, but I could see his technique was pitiful.

'Screw it,' I told myself and went to join him. I sat on the wooden edging and started piling on sand, so he began directing me, making suggestions; and we opened negotiations. Later we collaborated on his latest Star Wars Lego piece, and I got the hang of how to tell him he's got it all wrong without it sounding like I'm calling him an idiot, after which I began to understand what made him tick a little better, if not why. We drove to Austin a few days later, which was tough with the continuous monologue coming from the rear, but I just had to go with it so I climbed over the back of my seat and submitted myself to an extended lecture on the numerous beasts of How to Train Your Dragon, illustrated with action figures and delivered as a seemingly endless series of lists. It would have been more entertaining had I been able to understand a few more of his words, but his enthusiasm made up for the shortfall. Much of the return journey was taken up with the animal guessing game. He wasn't very good at it but compensated by ignoring the rules with amusing abandon, finally defeating both Bess and I with the mystifying initials RB, which turned out to be rock buddy, which I suppose is what you call a rock who happens to be your buddy; which was the first time he made me laugh.

Bess and I were married and we all settled into a routine. The boy's personality remained forceful, unusually focussed, and occasionally a little abrasive. I'd ask him to do things and he wouldn't, or I'd ask him to stop doing things which he'd keep on doing regardless, and all because he's a kid and that's how they are so there's no point in taking it personally. I began to turn our yard into a garden by digging the whole thing up. This yielded huge mounds of large stones and so I made borders for flower beds, packing the stones tight as though making a drystone wall.

'I need bugs,' the boy tells me, and so I point to the borders I've made. 'There were quite a lot out there. Look under the stones, but put them back in the same places when you're done,' and he does this, but his interpretation of the same places means roughly within three or four feet of the original position. I am displeased, and my displeasure will be referenced each time I mention how the boy never goes out into the garden. It's because he's afraid of you, I will be told, and there'll be nothing more to say; but right now I've dug sixty-five paving slabs of red porous stone up from a corner of the garden and am planning to relocate them in a more practical setting at the rear of the porch. I've excavated a large rectangle of earth, levelled it as best I can with sand, and now the boy comes out to help me. He likes the look of the digging. I give him the other spade and he gets to work on a hole of his own, one which has more to do with art than landscaping.

'You realise I'm going to be covering this whole patch over with paving slabs?' I tell him.

He looks around. 'But what about the hole?'

'Well, that's where I was hoping to put the slabs down, so it will be covered over.' I'm silently kicking myself for my failure to deliver the cruel truth, that the hole he has dug is without purpose.

He considers this a little, then makes an announcement. 'I do have an idea.'

This is a really odd tick of his, the I do statements delivered as though in answer to a question we've all been asking ourselves.

'Go on,' I suggest.

He explains how we can finish the hole he's been digging, and how we can then lay down the slabs as I've proposed with the hole left intact. Therefore whenever we need to access the hole again, we can just lift the slabs and it will be there. I don't know why he thinks we will need to revisit the hole unless in the interests of nostalgia. There is a dreamlike logic to many of his suggestions.

We're out walking and we pass a fallen section of tree trunk. He'll run to it, climb over, start jumping up and down on it and looking for bugs, all inevitably leading up to, 'can we take it home?'

'It's five foot long and is too heavy and we couldn't fit it in the car if we tried,' we tell him; which is true, but we don't want to crush his dreams with the more honest there is no good reason why we should take that tree trunk to our home. We silently think of the other crap he's found now living in his room because no-one could come up with any good philosophical argument against his taking possession of a three foot length of telephone cable or the rusting hub cap from a truck.

We walk on and then it comes.

'I do know a way we could take the tree trunk home with us,' because he thinks we've been puzzling it over, trying to come up with a solution.

How can we make this happen?

He does know a way, and it's always something ridiculous which wouldn't work but nevertheless has its own internal logic of sorts. I do know a way has been applied to everything from abandoned cars to actual fully grown deer which he's already given a name and added to our expanding roster of household pets. He acquires things, or aspires to them because he likes the look of them and for no other reason that either of us can fathom. Trips around Lowes or Home Depot were once characterised by the boy asking for purchase of something he would have no justification for owning - as though we're in a toy store - a length of plastic pipe, a sink plunger, a box with holes by which one may sort different sizes of nails and screws. My wife and I now have a game between ourselves, what would Junior want based on who can pick the most esoteric item in the store, the thing the kid would ask us to buy him for no sane reason.

Six years down the line, it has become easier - no less weird, but at least somehow more familiar. His voice has broken and his vocabulary expands into increasingly baroque realms by which every other sentence is qualified with if I'm not mistaken or if I remember correctly, but it's easier to understand what he's saying if not why he's saying it. Every thing is still an announcement, often prefixed with a question - 'I do know [general outline of subject],' followed by 'would you like me to tell you about it?', and then a series of hesitations and bullet points. 'Well... wait... let me see... number one: the thing you really need to know about sharks is that...'

Six years down the line and it's more funny than annoying. He's weird, but not in a bad way, and we're probably all weird by one definition or another. The three of us have taken to family walks each Sunday afternoon, based on Danny Trejo suggesting that a good parent will make memories by dragging their kid away from the iPad whether they like it or not. The boy is still operating from a position of peculiar focus, and he'll probably never grow out of delivering long, long lists of fascinating facts to an audience which may not even be particularly interested, and occasionally he'll still find some object which we're not bringing home under any circumstances, and yet it will turn out that he does know a way...

It's been exhausting, but educational, and thankfully some of it has been fun. I'm not sure I'll be passing on an inheritance of any of my ideas after all, but maybe it doesn't matter.

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.

Painting the Gods of Mexico

Artistically speaking, I've always been drawn to work which defines and is in turn described by its own unique semiotic language, art which seems to inhabit its own distinct interpretation of the universe running parallel to that occupied by the rest of us; paintings and images which in declaring a divergent view of consensus reality may sometimes appear quite extreme. Here I refer to a philosophical process which leads one to an alternate view of the world as much as to the associated imagery, regardless of whether the philosophy in question is compatible with one's own beliefs, because it's always good to step back and take a look from a different angle.

This is initially what drew me to the Italian Futurist painters, and particularly to Fortunato Depero - one of the lesser-known second wave members of an expanding group whose reputation - despite a recent resurgence of interest and reevaluation - remains somewhat tarnished through varying degrees of association with Italian fascism of the 1920s and 1930s. Depero, for what it may be worth, was at least not a fascist by our contemporary understanding of the term, and certainly not enough for such unfortunate brainfartery to taint his art or diminish its power:

Fortunato Depero - Il ciclista attraversa la città (1945)

I discovered the work of Depero in the early 1980s when my mother would take me to Warwick University - at which she was then a student - leaving me to wander around its library in search of obscure books by William Burroughs or pertaining to my developing interest in painting. The library had a copy of the notorious Depero Futurista, a facsimile of the 1927 edition bound with two huge metal bolts in the spine, which obviously proved irresistible; and the art of Depero came as a revelation to me - bright, funny, childish, brash, excitable, and yet somehow uncompromising. For whatever reason, I felt I had an immediate and intuitive understanding of what the artist - and in this instance quite an unconventional artist - had been trying to do, and this was what inspired me to take up painting in earnest, at least beyond the level of the customary pictures of skulls and space rockets I'd churned out at school. Happily I discovered that the skill of a Velasquez or a Titian were not essential for the production of my own Depero inspired efforts, and so I managed to scrape my way through art college without developing any conventional representational drawing ability, or skill as it is sometimes termed by fussy traditionalists.

Semi-Sex Act (1985)

Having always felt somewhat rootless in certain respects, as though I never really belonged to any one place, I believe that many of my artistic endeavours have represented attempts to define a personal psychological territory, to build myself a private universe or at least a set of references amounting to the same. Quite aside from anything else, this possibly relates to why I've moved around so much during the last thirty or so years, up and down the length of the British Isles before ending up here in Texas, somewhat like Alan Moore's Halo Jones pacing the galaxy, trying to get out I told myself during my more pompous moments of introspection.

Event One (1986)

As the 1980s drew to an end, my pseudo-Futurist style began to expand and evolve - at least within the limits of my admittedly narrow ability - incorporating aspects of Surrealism, Dada collage, and the iconography of ancient Egypt. I'd spent a few months reading up on the ancient Gods and Goddesses and found the mythology fascinating, it having been very much its own distinct version of the universe running parallel to that occupied by the rest of us, as I saw it. I had a vague notion of these symbols and hieroglyphs rendered as part of a living system, as opposed to mere copies of something that had died thousands of years before - an idea of the symbols as having some inherent quality beyond the subjective understanding of a viewer. Immersing myself in this work, I felt I was conducting something akin to a thought experiment, although I probably wouldn't have been able to express it as such at the time. In hope of articulating something that lacked coherent intellectual content, I was trying to understand a theological environment from the inside, roughly speaking, to see if this was possible without pulling the wool over my own eyes through effrontery to either common sense or the laws of physics. Having said that, I'm not sure why I was quite so picky considering all the other crap I used to fall for hook, line and sinker. But as the next decade rolled in and I slipped sideways into cartooning, my urge to paint burned itself out. All those mythologies mashed together had made for interesting pictures, but it hadn't really gone anywhere.

Some time in 1994, intrigued by a title which sounded to me like that of an unreleased Nurse With Wound album, I picked up a book by Kate Orman called The Left-Handed Hummingbird. It was science-fiction, A Doctor Who novel set in pre-Hispanic Mexico which instilled in me an emergent fascination with Aztec culture. Within the week I had raided the local library in search of further material. It was the first time since the Futurists that something had taken such a profound hold on my imagination. It seemed like a lot of loose strands had all converged at once, and I had found something which at least resembled a sense of purpose - that for which I had apparently been searching without even realising it. I was no longer pacing the galaxy, trying to get out. My interest in ancient Egyptian lore had turned out to be only another passing indulgence, but - regardless of how much of a berk I will seem in making such an admission - Mesoamerica made perfect intuitive sense, and on some level it spoke to me. It was a language I could appreciate as language, even if the precise meanings were not always immediately clear, and it seemed by some definition alive.

I threw myself into reading up on the subject, for the first time in my life really getting into the details of a subject; and the more I read, the more my fascination grew, until I'd reached the point at which I was beginning to notice contradictions, and even to consider that I in my arrogance might have better interpretations for certain aspects of the mythology. I began to take notes, to set down thoughts and observations, encouraged when my own independently deduced interpretations of certain aspects of the mythology were borne out by further reading with surprising frequency. 

Ultimately of course I realised that there is only so much to be learned from the material available in your regular bookshop, particularly when you've either bought everything you can find and borrowed the rest from the local library. So, coming at the subject from a slightly different angle, I took up painting once more. I'd built up a goodly head of obsessive steam and needed to get it out. With hindsight I would consider this as being something along the lines of intuitive research, an effort to think in Mesoamerican terms and which you could probably justifiably call ritual if you felt so inclined.

Having failed to reincarnate as Fortunato Depero five or six years earlier, I'd tried and failed to make a living as an underground cartoonist in the vein of Robert Crumb or Bill Griffiths, which had at least taught me how much I had yet to learn about representational art. My figures were terrible, which probably wasn't too surprising as I'd steered clear of life drawing classes at art college, unable to imagine myself in the same room as a naked person without exploding with embarrassment. Nevertheless, I began to labour away at a few of these new Mesoamerican themed paintings depicting individual Gods and mythological figures, but soon realised I had fallen into the old trap of running before I could walk, aiming no higher than something which just looked kind of cool but lacked substance, and I had limited myself through avoiding the depiction of any visual element which might betray my obvious lack of skill; so aside from anything else, I also had to learn to actually paint.

I started again, stepping up the reading and writing to an exhaustive level, setting down page upon page of notes and observations before approaching my canvas. Through this process it became apparent that in order to remain true to the subject I would need to attempt to paint at least partially in the language of that subject - a perspective from the inside looking out rather than yet another predictable Western take on feathered Gods as either demons of pulp horror or new-age gurus. Not having been born in fifteenth century Tenochtitlan, I realised it might seem dishonest to pretend that I had, or that perspective was somehow beneath me; and with an aesthetic grounded in Futurism and cartoon strips it seemed I might be best to start off from what I knew whilst striving to elevate my art beyond these origins, to raise it towards something approaching the religious paintings of previous centuries. It seemed unlikely that I would ever rival the work of Delacroix, I told myself, but it didn't seem like there was any harm in trying; and aspiring towards the art of subject rather than the knowing postmodern object, it at least felt good to distance myself from any present day obsession with contemporaneity.

Ultimately, I began to conceive each piece as though it were a map, with each part of the painting carrying a specific potential according to the symbolic import of each of the five cardinal points of the Nahua universe - thus East (at the foot of the image) tends to refer to origination; North (the right) to death, cold, and inertia; West (the top) to fertility; and South (left) to penitence and sacrifice, with subtle variations upon these themes as the subject demands. The great majority of my Mexican paintings therefore adhere to an aesthetic built upon a roughly consistent framework of symbols and pictograms running through most of the various series, even if it is not always directly expressed. The entire Nahua-Mexica mythology is founded upon the metaphysics of balance and symmetry, and so I have striven to use this as a foundation upon which to build these images. I like images which oblige the viewer to work towards an understanding, paintings which reward those who make the effort to figure them out.

The Left-Handed Hummingbird (1997)

Accordant with this emphasis on symmetry, my first cycle of work comprised 104 paintings in total - 52 male Deities and 52 female Deities, both 52 and 104 being multiples of 13 and thus ritually significant in Nahua lore. This cycle was ostensibly produced for a mammoth volume of text comprising both paintings and pages of my notes turned into essays with most of the bum jokes taken out. At the time of writing, I'm still not too sure about how this will develop or whether I will ever complete the undertaking. A great number of newer versions of individual paintings were produced after I'd finishing the initial cycle, due to my realising that some of the earlier efforts looked shite or were otherwise rendered symbolically redundant by my improving artistic ability and increased understanding of the subject. So I have a feeling this may ultimately be one of those hopefully great works which, like the painting of the Forth Bridge, will never achieve completion, but I guess we'll see.

The process of producing these paintings has felt very much like a prolonged act of defining something, of calling something into existence, bringing it back to the world; and yes, I am aware of how that sounds. Nevertheless, I prefer science and physics to a world of wood goblins and spirit guides, but for reasons to which I will return I find little in Mesoamerican culture to contradict the empirically established foundations of our universe. Irrespective of whether or not I am depicting - or even calling back - something that is real, the ideas themselves are real and that for me is the crucial detail. Additionally, the process of painting was in itself at least as important as the result, simply as a point of focus. When working on a specific image for nine or ten hours, particularly one laden with symbols, you tend to get a lot of thinking done, and so each piece might even be deemed the result of a prolonged meditation - if you'll pardon the associations.

I will conclude by attempting to illustrate some of this cognitive process with a brief discussion incorporating some of the ideas developed during the course of painting, with specific reference to the Gods Xipe Totec and Itztapal Totec.

To clarify just who I'm talking about here, the term Aztec is obviously the most widely understood, and is thus generally used in discussion of a wide range of peoples encompassing the Mexica, Acolhua, Tecpanecs, Culhua and many others, all speaking variants of Nahuatl and sharing numerous cultural traits and beliefs; although it is also perhaps a little misleading. The Aztecs were the ancestral tribe who mythically left their island home somewhere in the north of Mexico some two hundred years prior to the founding of the city of Tenochtitlan. Shortly after embarking upon this great migration - delineated in Codex Boturini amongst other sources - the group adopted the name Mexica, reputedly after Mexi Chalchiuhtlatonac, a tribal leader - although other accounts give a different origin to the name. After many years of nomadic life, high spirited battles and generally enthusiastic acts of good natured violence, the Mexica settled in the Valley of Mexico and forged dynastic ties with the Culhua of Culhuacan on the western shore of the great lake, shortly afterwards founding Tenochtitlan upon the largest island of the lake. Therefore from at least 1325 onwards they would have referred to themselves either as the Tenochca after their city, Mexica, or Culhua-Mexica.

By 1325 the term Aztec was only used in an historical context, and in an historical context exclusive to the Mexica. A Tecpanec or an Acolhua person would therefore be no more an Aztec than I myself am Celtic. Aztec as a generic reference was first popularised in W.H. Prescott's mammoth two volume The Conquest of Mexico published in 1843. Prescott's book wasn't the first narrative end-to-end account of the conquest, although it was possibly the first to be read by a wide audience, and it employed the term Aztec in order to avoid the confusion of Mexica with Mexicans in the wider post-Conquest sense of nationality. As a general term, I prefer Nahua which at least refers to the language spoken by all of those concerned.

The Nahua held to a belief in matter as having inherent qualities which could be discerned in its behaviour and properties, qualities such as strength, weakness, warmth, cold, even a tendency to stick to other objects. In illustration of this last example, one passage of the Codex Florentino records how the Nahua considered it unwise to eat a tortilla which had stuck to the hot stone during cooking for the reason that one might become infected by this sticky quality, and hence find oneself similarly stuck in some sense. A better known example might be the period of five Nemontemi days occurring at the end of the solar year. These five days fell outside of the regular festival calendar (12th through 16th March Julian time) and were distinguished by the suspension of activities for the duration. Each person strove to do as little as possible for fear of any activity which might allow for the occurrence of any mishap or accident. If one stumbled and fell during Nemontemi, it was believed that one had been infected with the character of the accident quality and would thus continue to stumble and fall throughout the coming year.

So keeping in mind that we have inherent forces, abstractions which influence the interaction of base substance, and as such seem reminiscent of certain ideas surrounding Plato's ideal forms - perfect spiritual templates which prescribe the form and properties of physical matter - for which I coined the term ixihtec in my novel Against Nature - let's move on.

Having studied the broader subject of Nahua-Mexica culture until it's coming out of my ears, it has struck me as likely that what we mean by God, and what the Nahua-Mexica meant by God may be two entirely different concepts. From a western perspective, the image of spear chucking types jumping up and down in front of an idol that would have made Picasso wince presents the lazy assumption of belief in something real by the same terms as belief in the reality of the chair on which I am presently sat, some strange superbeing perched upon a cloud with a frown and one ear cocked towards the prayers of the devoted. Whilst this assumption might not necessarily be untrue of every single individual living in a pre-technological society, the Mesoamerican example appears to contain numerous Deities who can be more properly compared to the inherent forces described above, inherent forces which have been historically described in anthropomorphic terms simply because this was the language by which such ideas were discussed rather than any literal statement of substance.

Nahua supernaturals tend to be portrayed as discreet self-contained individuals only depending upon the context of the account. Quetzalcoatl, for example, is a human ruler of the city of Tollan in one tale, although at the close of that particular legend he ascends into the heavens as Tlahuixcalpantecuhtli the God of the Morning Star. In another tale, the same Tlahuixcalpantecuhtli is pierced with arrows fired from the sun which effect his transformation into Itzlacoliuhqui, the Frost God. At this point of the theological arc we find something very curious, for in turn Itzlacoliuhqui is elsewhere identified as an aspect of Tezcatlipoca - the Fate God and thematic opposite of Quetzalcoatl - a transformation analogous to that of Christ into his own infernal counterpart. Surviving codices are similarly rife with Deities presented as having characteristics which more commonly identify other, often quite different supernatural figures, even to the extent of changes in gender. It therefore seems possible that in the instances described, Nahua Deities are used for the purpose of illustration, different concepts juxtaposed in order to forge some third meaning lacking in the individual components. Their fluidity is pronounced, sometimes with little to distinguish related Deities from one another, sometimes with different aspects of the same Deity each having qualities that seem incompatible with the other; none of which does much for the idea of this pantheon as a group of superbeings neatly lined up on a cloud like an archaic version of the Justice League of America.

The Flayed God (1996)

Xipe Totec (Our Lord, The Flayed One) presents a particularly vivid illustration of this conception of Gods as ideas personified as Deities. Xipe Totec is a maize God, one of a group comprising the Centeotl cluster, and as such he personifies the ripening corn just as others represent said corn at earlier stages of development. During the yearly Tlacaxipehualiztli festival, Xipe Totec's devotees would be sewn into the flayed skins of their sacrificial victims and go begging for alms. They would remain encased head to ankle within these grisly hides for twenty days - forty by some accounts - by which time the skins would have rotted away or else fallen apart through wear and tear, thus revealing the living and presumably somewhat aromatic person inside. This is in essence a symbolic re-enactment of the corn husk drying out and coming away to reveal the ripe cob within. Taking the allegory a stage further, it may also be viewed as a fairly explicit illustration of the cyclical nature of life and death, or even - if you'll pardon my flippancy - no pain, no gain.

The function of Xipe Totec therefore seems to be the summation of this idea, or perhaps it might be more accurate to suggest that Xipe Totec is the idea; and once we have the idea, do we really need to argue the reality of a disembodied supernatural intelligence working behind the scenes, or might that not be missing the entire point? One is not required to believe in ghosts in order to understand that Xipe Totec is real in so much as the idea of Xipe Totec - as a bundle of concepts regarding the cycle of life and death - is real. So if this assertion is valid, a God in Nahua-Mexica terms might just as well be viewed as an inherent force written large, even a law of the universe in terms of human experience.

A lesser known member of the pantheon is Itztapal Totec (Our Lord, The Stone Slab), generally regarded as an aspect of Xipe Totec, although arguably with enough distinct qualities to distinguish him as having at least a degree of autonomy. Xipe Totec, when mentioned in those short-on-detail Big Bird's Book of Mythology affairs usually gets one sentence amounting to Fertility God of Ripened Corn and patron Deity of Metallurgists. Given what I've written about Xipe, the metallurgy aspect may appear somewhat arbitrary as it initially did to me when I first came to consider this figure, and so I will attempt to elaborate.

Xipe Totec was alternately known as Yopi, and as such was honoured at dedicated temple in the main square of Tenochtitlan, the Yopico temple - meaning Place of Yopi - which was famously used as a repository for the captive idols of foreign Deities, in other words those of conquered peoples. The element of foreign Deities may be significant here for Xipe Totec himself appears to be an imported form of an earlier God of western Mexico, a Deity of the Tlappanecs whom the Mexica regarded as nomadic savages with little in the way of culture. Further to this, and returning to the subject of metallurgy, Tenochtitlan was a great importer of goods from neighbouring tribes and city-states, not only tools and precious objects, but also Gods, various crafts, and those who practiced them. Tenochtitlan itself was not renowned for its own metallurgical practice and seemed to prefer to bring in specialists from amongst its neighbours. There was, for example, a Mixtec ghetto in Tenochtitlan where migrants from coastal Oaxaca forged many of the more spectacular gold objects with which Hernán Cortés later supplemented his income. The Mixtecs innovated or were at least famed for the lost wax method of casting which produced small and beautifully intricate objects of the kind that would eventually help make Erich von Däniken rich. Other metalworking techniques found in the Mexica capitol bear comparison to those of western Mexico, beyond even the Tlappanec territories.

So we have an imported corn God and imported metalworking practices, both originated from the same general direction. There would seem to be an association there at least in terms of geography, but perhaps we can take this a stage further.

Our Lord, The Stone Slab (2001)

The name Itztapal Totec translates as Our Lord, the Stone Slab. Which stone slab, you might quite rightly ask. Given the the God's patronage of metalwork and the fact of not absolutely every aspect of Mesoamerican symbolism being about human sacrifice, I'm ruling out the stone slab as sacrificial altar for the sake of argument and looking to the stone upon which one might beat metal - copper or gold thinned to workable sheets, such as those from which much surviving Mesoamerican jewellery is formed.

At this point it seems relevant to return to the theme of inherent qualities of matter as dictated by incorporeal forces or essences, for the two Totecs may be viewed as essentially the same idea expressed in different media. Xipe embodies the corn husk, the template which is stripped away to reveals its perfectly formed fruit. Itztapal Totec may therefore represent the husk analogue in the metallurgical counterpart, itself a similarly generative process and the culmination of work upon a substance likewise born from the soil.

So there, for what it may be worth, are some associative observations regarding two particular Deities who might initially seem to have little in common, and whose relationship had struck me as a bit of a non-sequitur prior to my focusing upon the issue during the research and execution of the painting. Furthermore, there are another hundred or so Deities to whom I have given similar consideration by similar means, and several fat binders full of the accompanying notes. It is my intention that one day I will have all of this work assembled in a more coherent form, but for the time being I am content to have gone through the process, and to have learned that the process turned out to be of significance at least as great as that of the destination.

This essay constitutes an extensive revision of material previously posted on the Ishtar's Gate message board back in February 2009.