London Calling

I'm never sure what to say when people ask me where I'm from. Generally, I tell them England, but if they're after anything more specific - usually on the off chance of their having spent a holiday there - it's tricky. I grew up in Warwickshire, specifically on the farm which eventually became home to the Teletubbies, which sounds a bit insane when offered as a response to enquiries regarding my origin; so more often than not I'll say London. I'm not from London, but I lived there from 1990 to 2009, nineteen uninterrupted years, which is the longest I've lived anywhere. My personality was probably in flux for most of the years prior to my moving to London, so I'm not convinced I was properly myself when living in Shipston, Maidstone, Chatham, or Coventry, at least not by any terms I still recognise; so it feels as though I'm from London.

London was the first place I felt I belonged, and is therefore high on the list of places I need to visit whenever I return to England to stay with my mother in Coventry. Unfortunately though, it can be difficult. Sat at the PC in San Antonio, it's easy to fire off emails announcing my proposed arrival and reiterating the awful hey, we really must meet up for a drink - awful because it's usually the mantra of people I haven't seen in decades, despite my best efforts to prise open a window in their busy schedules, which always seem to be at least as dense as the crust of stuff you find stuck to the event horizon of a black hole.

Then when I arrive in England, I remember that the train fare from London to Coventry is usually about a million pounds return, and we're talking off-peak; and that I can't afford hotels or bed and breakfast and that I'm far too old to sleep on the floor; and that I haven't actually told anyone I'm coming because I didn't want to be pinned down to an itinerary I might not be able to keep, or in which I might feel trapped; and that I've just spent eighteen hours on planes so I don't feel well disposed towards further travel; and that I hate crowds; and that I hate having to squeeze onto public transport, and how long it takes to even get anywhere in the city; and that I fucking hate London…

I don't hate London, but the circumstances of my last couple of years in the capital were somewhat shitty, which has left a lasting and unfavourable impression; but the bottom line is that I actually have mentioned my being back in the country to a couple of people, so I'll look like a twat if I fail to make the effort.

I've already reeled in my travel plans. Sat at the PC in San Antonio, I had all sorts of grand ideas about taking a bike on the train, then having a couple of days in London, cycling down to the Medway towns and Maidstone, seeing all those people I've been meaning to see for years and years. It would have taken up most of the second of my three weeks in England, and I've now whittled it down to a single afternoon in London, conditional to the existence of a train ticket costing less than a million pounds, and I might stay overnight on someone's floor or sofa, but probably not as I'm already depressed by the idea.

Amazingly, there's a return ticket costing just thirty quid, travelling at specific times with a rail operator no-one has heard of, and stopping at every station, siding, and signal box on the way. The comparative cheapness of the ticket means I'll probably be sharing a carriage with people who've been on the Jeremy Kyle Show, but the price is right.

I arrive at Euston around noon. The promised stopping at every station, siding, and signal box on the way has turned out to be just Watford Junction, Rugby, and the usual places, just like in the good old days when I could afford any old train fare. Not being a regular on the railways, I forget that those ordinary extortionate fares tend to be for journeys at the speed of light stopping at no stations other than the one at the end of the line.

Euston isn't too bad in terms of crowds, and I seem to be on a roll, so I think fuck it, I'll get the tube. I have an Oyster card from the last time I was here, and amazingly it still works and even has a couple of quid on it, so I top up at a newsagent and head for the underground. My memory of travel in London is mostly buses, because I dislike crowds and ended up with a hatred of tube trains. I've been left with a falsely distended impression of how easy it is to get anywhere, and find it weird that I'm stood on Tottenham Court Road in just a couple of minutes. I can't work out if the crowds are less congested than once they were, or whether it's all been so long that it seems like a new thing and I haven't had time to get sick of it.

I head to Forbidden Planet because I'm after the latest issue of Interzone magazine, and Forbidden Planet seems like the sort of place which might stock it. The latest issue of Interzone features a story by Erica Satifka, author of the novel Stay Crazy; and Stay Crazy is wonderful, so I'm trying to support both a new writer and the general concept of visiting shops in order to buy things which have been printed. Amazingly, they actually have the copy of Interzone I'm after, which is probably a first, and so I read it on the train to Greenwich - a trip of about ten minutes.

I left London in 2009, at which point I vaguely recall the first of the new, funny-shaped skyscrapers going up somewhere in the vicinity of Elephant & Castle. At the time I was spunking away three-quarters of my weekly wage on renting a rabbit hutch in Camberwell, despite holding down a reasonably paid, if back-breaking, full-time job; so I felt more than a little resentful as my city went all Blade Runner whilst overmoneyed tosspots banged on about posterity and capital and investment and growth and ways forward. Returning as a foreigner of sorts, carnivorous progress no longer directly affects me beyond that I can't afford to stay in a hotel, so it no longer feels personal; and I sort of enjoy the spectacle of what is to be seen from the window of the train. They're everywhere now, gleaming prongs thrust miles into the sky above London like the city seen on the cover of David Louis Edelman's Infoquake, and not a single one of them is regular skyscraper shape. It's as though the architects have been in competition with each other to come up with the strangest, most ostentatiously surprising design. There's the Gherkin, the Shard, the Cheese, the Sex Aid, the Pokémon…

'Computers,' Carl tells me. It's due to the development of certain architectural software that we are now able to throw up any shape of building we fancy.

I'm at Carl's house in Greenwich.

I arrived twenty minutes ago.

He lives in a square with a small central garden, or at least a barbecue pit and a bench surrounded by bushes. Upon arrival, I sat on the bench and had a fag in preparation for ringing the doorbell of my friend whom I'd not seen in at least a year. As I sat smoking, I heard the sound of a door, then approaching footsteps, then an indistinct verbal address which sounded like Carl's voice. In my mind, it already was Carl, and I imagined him calling out Loz in the usual way, so I went to reply even though I was replying to a call I had only anticipated, and somehow I myself called out, 'Loz!', having mixed up the two components of the predicted exchange.

It wasn't Carl. It was some elderly woman who regarded me suspiciously, possibly because I had just emerged from behind a bush to yell my own nickname at a stranger.

Now I'm within Carl's house watching him finish up and save what he was doing on the computer, specifically retouching photographs of REM for some book or other. He's a designer, and he's also working on a book about Japan.

We discuss this for three or four minutes before I realise he's referring to the band rather than the country. I forget that he knows a couple of them, and he tells me they were originally from Catford - which is one of the places I worked for a couple of years. It feels as though Carl and I have been transported into a weird future, a world we never made - whatever the hell that means.

He places the cherry boldly on the futurity cake by informing me that another mutual acquaintance is now working as a prostitute, specifically a BBW prostitute specialising in bondage, domination and the like. This is another eventuality I could never have foreseen, but apparently she makes eight-hundred quid a session and enjoys the work, so why not? I'm somewhat out of my depth with the profession, but I always imagined that dominating people for money would probably be one of the better sex work options providing one could find the right clientele - for example, a frustrated bank manager who would happily clean your toilet and then pay for the privilege, thus avoiding the necessity of finding oneself penetrated by anything too ghastly.

The subject resumes later as we approach Herne Hill station. We've had a wander around Greenwich park, a bit of lunch and then caught a series of trains to Herne Hill. The conversation resumes because I'm reminded that I've recently read Stupid Baby by New Juche, an autobiographical account of life amongst prostitutes in one of the rougher bits of Thailand. It's one of the best books I've read in a while and is written with a refreshing honesty and none of the hysteria one might expect, given the subject. The funny thing is that it's published by Philip Best, formerly of Whitehouse, who now lives in Austin and is therefore almost a neighbour. I consider this funny because Carl and I are on our way to visit Pete.

I was at school with Pete many years ago, back in Shipston, and we were both friends with Graham, who may or may not be turning up tonight. Graham and I saw Whitehouse live in Birmingham back in the eighties, during which Graham was injured by an object casually launched from the stage by Philip Best, who was probably the most hated man in underground music for much of that year.

I've been wondering how to broach the subject.

You remember that time we saw Whitehouse, and you remember the bloke who was chucking stuff into the audience, and how you got hit? Well, he lives down the road from me and we seem to be pals these days, sort of. I think he's calmed down a bit in recent years. Anyway, he seems like a decent guy.

I tell all of this to Carl, and so we talk about Glenn, because somehow we'd both forgotten that Glenn was also in Whitehouse. Carl and I recorded music with Glenn at one point. Glenn left a keyboard at Carl's flat for a couple of months, apparently on loan from William Bennett - also of Whitehouse - who was living in Spain at the time. When you switched the keyboard on, the name Susan Lawly would scroll across the LCD display in greeting, that being the name of Bennett's record label. The connections form a peculiar imaginary cat's cradle in my thoughts. I'm beginning to think that current estimates regarding human population are grossly exaggerated, and that there are actually only about twenty of us.

We arrive at Herne Hill and walk to Pete's house.

I'm hoping Carl and Pete will get on okay, given that neither of them have been in the same room since about 1987, and were never conspicuously close in the first place.

Here's how it works: I was at school in Shipston, Warwickshire, with Pete and Graham back in the eighties. Pete's family had moved to Shipston from somewhere down south a couple of years before, and once Pete left school, they moved again, to Eastbourne down on the south coast. I left school and did an art foundation course, at the end of which I was told I should have a look at Maidstone College of Art if I wanted to take it further. I didn't actually have the faintest idea of what I wanted to do, but it seemed like as good a plan as any, so I went for an interview at Maidstone and was accepted, thus dispensing with the need to bother looking around any other colleges. By sheer coincidence, it turned out that Pete had already been at Maidstone a year, studying graphic design. Carl was also at Maidstone, a former graphics student by that point serving as president of the Student Union, so that's how I met him, and how he and Pete came to know each other.

Back at school, Pete, Graham, and myself had been in a band, calling ourselves the Pre-War Busconductors amongst a variety of other interchangable, wilfully ludicrous names. We barely had any instruments, couldn't really play, but nevertheless churned out tape after tape of scatological songs about people at school whom we regarded as twats. Having spent the last couple of years digitising these tapes, I now have our entire body of work saved on memory sticks, one for Pete and one for Graham. This is partially the purpose of our meeting tonight, so I can hand over the sound files and we'll all have copies.

Carl, Pete and myself walk to the Half Moon. Pete tells me it seems unlikely that Graham will be along after all, presently being in Devon with his girlfriend. We buy drinks and sit outside. Most of the talk is between Pete and Carl, because they're simply chattier individuals than I am, and somehow we get onto the subject of how Pete came to move to Shipston in the first place. I recall that he had lived somewhere down south prior to Shipston, and that somewhere turns out to have been the Medway towns - which is where Carl grew up. Furthermore it turns out that Carl and Pete both attended the same junior school, the Hundred of Hoo as it was known, without having been aware of each other at the time, or having been aware of this fact until right now in the year 2018; and I've a feeling this may also be the school attended by Jayne, Glenn's first wife.

The cat's cradle seems to be approaching critical mass.

Eddy and Neil turn up, which is wonderful as I haven't seen either of them in years. It's also wonderful because I have to ask Eddy whether it will be okay for me to kip on his floor. The latest specific time I can return to Coventry on the ticket purchased from a rail operator no-one has heard of is nine this evening, which would leave thirty minutes in which to have a drink with my old pals. The thing is that I feel awkward asking Eddy because I haven't actually spoken to him since his mother passed away. He's one of my favourite people in the universe, but somehow he only makes sense in person. We've communicated on facebook, but you're either hanging out with him, or arranging to hang out with him which, combined with my not being much of a fan of the telephone, means we haven't spoken for a while and it will feel a bit fucking cheeky when I ask if I can kip on his floor for the night; but like a true friend, he doesn't give a shit and is simply glad to see me, and of course I can sleep on his floor.

So we all catch up, getting cautiously drunk in the way middle-aged men get cautiously drunk. Everyone gets on fine, even though Pete is from a different shard of my existence to the others. Neil is, as ever, darkly entertaining with his tales of dealings with showbiz types, recent clients including Helen Mirren and Idris Elba. He doesn't seem to have a particularly high opinion of Idris Elba.

Eventually it's time to go and Eddy drives, being the one of us with a car and sobriety. His flat, which I've never seen before as he moved in just over a year ago, is small but functional. Money is tight, but he's getting by. Money is tight for everyone I know still living in London. I wouldn't have stood a chance.

Eddy assembles a camp bed purchased from some hardware place. It comprises canvas stretched across tubes of steel and works like a hammock. Two of the steel tubes are missing, but it doesn't matter because I'm not seven foot tall. We have a cup of tea, watch an episode of Urban Myths - which dramatises the true story of a regular dude giving Public Enemy a lift to one of their shows in his Ford Focus - and then go to sleep; and against my expectations, I sleep well because the camp bed is very comfortable.

Next morning we have a walk to the caff along by the Thames. Eddy points to a house over on the other side of the river.

'That's where Helen Mirren lives.'

I have two sausages, egg, and chips in the caff and it tastes fucking amazing. I realise how much I've missed this place and its people. I can still feel my roots here, reaching down into the tarmac and cracked paving, in the newsagents and pound shops and the bite of cold far too early in the morning. I'm quite happy to live a long way away, but I'm glad I came back, just for a day.

Curry with Martin

I'm calling on my friend, Martin. We're going for a curry. Last time I was in England, he said, we'll have to go for a curry next time you're here. I probably should have written those first lines as Grant Morrison would have written them:

I'm calling on my famous friend, Martin Bowes of Attrition. We're going for a curry.

I know it seems fucking stupid, but that's how it feels.

I stay in Coventry when visiting England because that's where my parents live. I myself lived in Coventry for nine months or so at the end of the nineties, then another eighteen ending in 2011. Both periods of residence were - roughly speaking - just me living somewhere while I sorted myself out in preparation to live somewhere else; so I've never really thought of myself as having lived in Coventry, not properly, much less being from Coventry. I was born and grew up in Warwickshire, but that's another story.

I first knew of Martin back in 1980. His fanzine, Alternative Sounds, had turned up at our local record shop, Discovery in Straftford-upon-Avon. I bought a copy because the Abstracts were featured therein, the Abstracts being a local band for which my friend Graham's brother played bass. Alternative Sounds was quite an eye-opener for me - the first fanzine I ever bought - and a great read even beyond the vague thrill of someone I knew having been mentioned; and sadly, seeing as I'd only just discovered the thing, this was to be its final issue because Martin, the editor, wanted to dedicate more time to his band, Attrition.

Attrition came to wider attention a few years later as part of a wave of experimental musicians championed by Dave Henderson of Sounds music paper, others including Nocturnal Emissions, Konstruktivists, and Test Department. The first tracks I heard by Attrition were Monkey in a Bin and Hang Me, which appeared on a compilation tape called A Sudden Surge of Power. These two were among the best tracks on the tape, so Attrition made a big impression. I bought their records when they started to issue music on vinyl, and Smiling, At the Hypogonder Club, their second album, was pretty much glued to my turntable for the duration of 1985.

So it feels pretty odd when, nearly a quarter century later, I spot Martin Bowes heading up Albany Road in Coventry. I've never met the guy. I never even wrote him a letter asking for a tape, but by this point we seem to have about a million mutual friends, having moved in related circles over the years.

'Oi, Martin!' I shout, aware that it leaves a lot to be desired as an introduction, but I can't think of anything else which would seem natural, and all the while I'm aware that this isn't just some bloke, it's Martin from Attrition and I'm terrified of appearing like some drooling fan.

He's probably used to it, because he doesn't seem particularly puzzled, and even gives the impression of having heard of me somehow. Attrition were on the same bill as Konstruktivists at some event not too long ago, and I used to be in Konstruktivists, plus we both sort of know Alan from Stress and Adventures in Reality; so it all kind of joins up; and Martin is a very personable sort of bloke - reminding me a little of characters written by Alan Bennet - and somehow this isn't like an awkward conversation with a complete stranger.

That was 2011, just before I moved to Texas.

We kept in touch.

At one point I needed someone to rescue material I'd recorded on minidisc, a format for which my computer had apparently lost all respect. Martin was running his own studio by then, and kindly effected the rescue during one of my more recent visits. Just as I left his house, Dill from God's Toys had turned up for a recording session and was eating fish and chips in the front room. God's Toys were another local band who had briefly been on telly when I was a kid, so once again I found myself momentarily starstruck by terms that probably wouldn't make sense to anyone else in the entire universe. Dill seemed like a nice bloke too.

So here I am, back in England, back at the house of Martin from Attrition, knocking on his door to see whether he fancies a curry, which of course he does.

We wander up towards the Foleshill Road, talking about England and America, his work as Attrition and mastering the music of other artists at his studio, notably Coil; we talk about mutual friends and acquaintances, of whom there always seem to be more than I realised - this time adding Carl Howard and David Elliott to the list; and then we arrive at Taste of India and eat the best curry I've had in a number of years.

We talk about goths, Whitby, not particularly liking the Cure, Hawaii, New Zealand, getting old, and fatherhood, or stepfatherhood in my case. Martin's son is a grime artist, one of those details which strikes me as both completely peculiar and yet makes perfect sense.

We finish and make our way back and agree we should go for another one next time I'm over.

These yearly return visits to England can be awkward, even uncomfortable, and sometimes feel as though I'm engaged in a forensic investigation of my own existence, establishing a motive whilst trying to verify all of those memories of living here as actually having happened. At worst, it can feel like a particularly morbid type of time travel, going back to times prior to the death of persons who are yet to die. So much of what I experience in England is now prefixed with this may be the last time…

Curry with Martin feels an even stranger experience on some level, like a sidestep into a reality where I actually lived in Coventry, and I have to remind myself that I did live in Coventry for a while. It's like a reconstruction, something imagined by whoever looks back at my life and decides, yeah, he probably would have known that bloke from Attrition. They would have gone for a curry, and let's face it - that would have been somewhere up the Foleshill Road. I had assumed Coventry would be done with the surprises by this stage.

This is how my brain works, and how it will doubtless continue to work, so there's probably not much point in my apologising for any of it; but the thing that I take from it is that, here in this land which is, for me, mostly memories and things which used to be, new stuff can still happen, for which I am truly thankful.

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.

The Don Maclean of the Rapping Scene

I invented rap in 1979. I was a slightly dishevelled underachiever at Shipston-on-Stour Comprehensive school, and I invented rap having found myself embroiled in beef with Gordon Everett who had slandered me in a poem read out before the entire class during the English lesson. Gordon's poem suggested that I farted quite a lot and might consequently be considered a somewhat pungent child, and it cleverly made these suggestions whilst eschewing the sort of language which would have prevented it being read out loud and therefore validated by Mrs. Jones, our English teacher. The poem was pretty funny. I recall the hysterical laughter of my class mates as Gordon painted a picture of my supposedly persistent trumping in awkward situations, and despite the humiliation, I myself laughed because it was funny.

To be fair, Gordon's poem may have been composed in retaliation to some earlier character assassination fired from my own cannon, figuratively speaking, but if so then I don't remember what it could have been. Perhaps the memory of some previous victory was eclipsed in that moment when an entire class of kids were driven to clutch their sides and roll around on the floor by the hilarity of the suggested scale of my energetic flatus.

If Gordon wanted a war, I decided, then I was down for whatever, if not by those precise terms. I wrote Gordon Everett and His Hand, which followed the same basic rhyme scheme as Captain Beaky by Keith Michell but carried a cruder, more confrontational message:

The biggest benders in this land,
Are Gordon Everett and his hand,
That's his hand, his balls and dick,
A-doing things that make you sick.
His hand it then goes up and down,
And Gordon makes the people frown.

I had just turned fourteen and had been given a tape recorder for my birthday, a mono portable with a built-in condenser microphone by which I made hissy recordings of my fluting, pre-pubescent voice. My first act with this fantastic new bit of technology had been to invent the mixtape - as they have become posthumously identified by fedora wearing tosspots. I borrowed Paul Moorman's extremely well played copy of K-Tel's Loony Tunes album and compiled two volumes of what I named Songs for the Hard of Thinking in order to have a whole ton of novelty records in one convenient and hilarious place - My Boomerang Won't Come Back, Susan Christie's I Love Onions, Transfusion by Nervus Norvus and others supplemented by the Goodies, Toast by Streetband, and some Sex Pistols - whom I considered to be pretty much cut from the same cloth because they said rude words; and naturally I drew my own cover for Songs for the Hard of Thinking. I wasn't really into music as such at that age, but I loved novelty records, and inevitably it occurred to me that I could make my own.

Soon after inventing the mixtape, I invented rapping and then sampling. I pressed play and record and flowed with the maniac lyrical of Gordon Everett and His Hand directly onto the tape, punctuating my verses with the trumpet break from the original Captain Beaky 7" by my boy Keith Michell - just pausing, then unpausing and dropping that wax right into the cut. That shit was dope.

I took the tape to school, and although that shit was perhaps a little too dope for the classroom, I made sure everyone got to hear it. I recall Gordon's face, a mixture of amusement and horror as he listened to me drop science, implicating him in acts of enthusiastic masturbation - something I myself would certainly never have done - and possibly also homosexuality, bestiality and cross-dressing. I don't remember the lyrics in their entirety and I don't have the tape to hand, but I don't recall pulling any punches. I'm pretty sure that was where 2Pac got the idea for Hit 'Em Up.

With hindsight, I find it all a bit regrettable, not so much because of the juvenile homophobia - which, in case it isn't fucking obvious, might be blamed on it being 1979 and my being fourteen years of age - but because I liked Gordon; and even though I haven't seen him since the early eighties, I still theoretically like Gordon and have no bad memories of him as a kid. Anyway, I suppose what matters is that from conflict was born innovation and enterprise, in this case my inventing both rap music and sampling - or at least scratching given how I was cutting Keith Michell's beats on a wheel of steel. Many sources will credit my developments to that guy out of the Fatback Band, or to the Sugarhill Gang, or Kool DJ Herc and his Bronx pals, but they're all lying.

Anyway, the point is that I was messing around with tape recorders at an early age. The machine upon which I'd recorded my damning indictment of Gordon's alleged love of wanking conked out after about a year and had to be replaced. Specifically the pinch roller wore down meaning that tapes were eaten as often as they were played, but the tape head still worked so I yanked it out of the casing, reattached it on a length of wire, and drew sections of magnetic tape across it by hand in order to create sound. Laurie Anderson did the same thing, mounting her tape head upon a violin body with which she would play lengths of tape suspended in a violin bow in place of the traditional strings. Emboldened by the success of my experiment I also made clunky cassette sized tape loops, and larger ones played on a 1960s reel-to-reel tape player donated by a friend of my mother. By the time I first came to hear a Throbbing Gristle record, I was already acclimatised to the notion of raw noise as music, of blocks of sound jammed together as part of a larger composition.

Around the same time I had joined the Pre-War Busconductors, roughly speaking a punk group with three of my friends from school. We improvised and recorded songs through a combination of ham-fisted instrumentation, cardboard box percussion, noises and shouting. Thematically we explored areas not dissimilar from those investigated in Gordon Everett and His Hand - songs about people we knew and whom we suspected of engaging in amusing sexual practices. At least a few of the songs featured rapping mainly because Graham had worked out how to play the bassline from Good Times. Unfortunately, although we were all familiar with Rapper's Delight, our rapping was very much the rapping of clueless white people who don't really understand rapping - the singy-songy bollocks heard on twee, light-hearted news features about rural schools who record their own charity rap single.

Mr. Thompson is always in class,
Unless he's shouting 'keep off the grass!'

Still, pitiful though our efforts were, we all liked the general idea of the form, and before I left home much of my final summer in Shipston was spent cruising around the tiny market town in Anders Longthorne's car blasting his tapes of Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa and various Street Sounds label compilations whilst pretending to be American. We had outgrown the Pre-War Busconductors - just about - but I was still recording my own music as Do Easy - a name taken from a William Burroughs novel on the grounds that I'd seen some bigger boys do it and I wanted to be like them. By now I had a double cassette deck with a fancy microphone input and was able to layer sounds to create complex if slightly hissy pieces of experimental music. I made covers for my tapes and sold them mail order through the posthumously eulogised network of DIY tape folks. I didn't sell enough to make a living out of it, but enough for the operation to at least pay for itself.

Years passed and I drifted in and out of making my own music, just as I drifted in and out of bands formed with other people. By the mid-nineties I had reached a sort of crisis point. I was done with bands and with being helping hand to someone else's vision of a band. The Dovers had sort of fizzled out for no particularly good reason that I can recall. I hadn't really liked the single compact disc I'd helped record as a member of Konstruktivists, and whilst I'd enjoyed playing with UNIT - or Academy 23 as they had been when I joined - the task of remembering how to play someone else's increasingly baroque chord changes and time signatures was becoming more chore than fun, and Andy - our main man - had proposed a number of Doctor Who themed tracks, one of which was to be called Travels in the TARDIS. Deciding I would rather repeatedly slam my penis in a fridge door than be involved with such tomfoolery, I brought my guitar home and elected to concentrate on War Drum.

War Drum was the name for whatever it was I was doing during the nineties, rhythmic but mostly instrumental music produced by unorthodox means, sometimes harsh and noisy, but not industrial because I still had some measure of self-respect. War Drum was thematically fixated on Mesoamerican culture because that was my absorbing passion and it seemed like an area I could explore through the medium and at least come up with something a bit more interesting than David Tibet's milkman grunting Aleister Crowley's favourite limericks through a digital reverb with the decay set to fifteen minutes.

I was trying to make the music which I wanted to hear simply because no-one else was. I felt I had learned a great deal from the process of putting out my earlier tapes, and this time I was going to do it right. So I borrowed as much equipment as I could, and took my time playing and recording, refusing to regard anything as finished until I was absolutely confident of it being the best that could be achieved within the limitations of what technology was at my disposal. Over and over I revised that which could have been better until it was better, and if I couldn't get it working it was scrapped. I spent time on the design of the covers, and the printing of those covers, and had copies of my tapes professionally duplicated onto high quality TDK chrome cassettes at Gold Dust Studios in Bromley - which was a good and somewhat hilly hour away by Royal Mail bicycle. A great deal of work went into producing those cassettes as a quality product, as something aspiring to represent the tape cassette as a vital, democratic, and accessible medium.

Sadly not everyone took the same view. I received the occasional enthusiastic fanzine review, and shelled out for advertising in the pages of The Sound Projector, but cassettes were apparently over, and no-one cared. I could barely pay people to listen to my music. Scat Feed Fever fanzine - which seemed to loom relatively large in weirdy music circles of the time - had denounced cassettes as the unworthy fruit of those who were merely mucking about on the grounds that the true artist would blow sailors for five dollars a pop if that's what it took to press a compact disc. The editor of Scat Feed Fever - just one of many Gira-felating industrial music autograph hunters busily turning himself into Phil Collins - seemed to typify the process of an underground becoming its own orthodoxy, which was depressing.

This didn't really make much difference to my recording habits because while an audience numbered in double figures would have been nice, the music was its own reward. By the end of the century, the composition of that music had changed considerably in reflection of my own evolving tastes. I'd more or less given up on listening to rock music, bands of four blokes with guitars or grunting industrial wankers programming their way back to 1988. From where I stood, the music I had known was half-lifing into a jangly sludge of undifferentiated corporate toss. Meanwhile all I heard at work was hip-hop, rap and R&B, and that's what the people whom I liked at work generally listened to. With Oasis and the Kaiser Chiefs as the alternative, it was probably inevitable that my ear should drift in that direction.

Whilst I'd never been what you might call a hip-hop head, not by any definition, I had kept tabs on the form at least up until the advent of LL Cool J, whose career had struck me as largely pointless. I didn't mind putting my hands in the air, but it took more than was on offer to induce me to wave them in the manner of someone who just didn't care, and I was fucked if I was going to listen to some bloke reading out his bank statements over a tinny drum machine just because the record had turned up in the same section as Whodini and Public Enemy. By the time I'd taken my fingers out of my ears, rap had become huge and confusing, and it was difficult to know quite where to start so I didn't bother; but gradually and inevitably I did bother, because for the most part it was sounding pretty good on the radio at work. I picked up a couple of CDs - having finally caved in and allowed my friend Eddy to furnish me with his old compact disc player - and I liked what I heard. The music had thankfully evolved beyond whatever that tinkling sound had been on those LL Cool J records, and no-one seemed to give a shit about what all the ladies in the house were saying; and as music built from sources which themselves weren't always conventionally musical, it suddenly began to make a lot of sense. Having served the first quarter of a twenty plus year sentence in Royal Mail, I could at least appreciate the mood of the shirtier rap numbers, so I bought more and more of it, immersing myself in the form until it became obvious why it had taken me so long to get it.

Rap, I realised, is more or less its own self-contained world. It draws references from all over, but there's no point in expecting a rap record to provide a variation on that which is done by other musical forms. It is something which can only be truly appreciated on its own terms, not some pool into which toes may be dipped between Killing Joke albums. Rap is, amongst other things, about being shat upon from a great height whilst maintaining a sense of humour, or at least venting screw-faced wrath in entertaining terms. My job was my life, and it was often hellish, and MC Ren rapping about shooting as many white people as possible before the cops took him down made more sense than it probably should have done given that I myself am white. The anger was universal, and it it made Motorhead sound like flies buzzing around in a jar. This, I would suggest, is because rap speaks mostly to the individual, usually specifically to three or four mates of the bloke holding the microphone. It tends to take a personal rather than a general view, and is as such the opposite of Sting telling us all to behave. The bottom line is that if you don't get rap, then it probably wasn't speaking to you in the first place; and yet for some reason it was speaking to me.

Inevitably its influence began to emerge in my own music, although initially as a shift of emphasis rather than any radical revision of what I was already doing; at least until I went back to rapping. I had to try it, just as I'd kicked off twenty years before with Gordon Everett and His Hand - my own version of the novelty records which constituted everything in my collection not featuring Ringo Starr. My first efforts weren't much better than charity raps about Mr. Thompson telling us to stay off the grass, but they were fun to write and record, and failure only inspired me to try harder. On the twentieth anniversary of the formation of the Pre-War Busconductors I commemorated the occasion with a CD single released in a limited edition of two copies, one for myself, one for Pete, the only other former Pre-War Busconductor with whom I was still in touch. I built the track from samples of our tapes and the sort of unlistenable crap that usually emerges when white people decide that it's funny to pretend to be a gangsta. In my defence, it wasn't actually much worse than most of Kid Rock's oeuvre, but that's hardly a recommendation.

The song was called 2 Deadly 4 Fame.

Of course it was.

The thrust of 2 Deadly 4 Fame was that the Pre-War Busconductors had been such a potentially revolutionary force that the authorities had found themselves obliged to ensure that we remained just a bunch of potty-mouthed school kids whom no fucker had heard of making a racket in Graham's bedroom whenever his mum and dad went to Stratford. I played the track to Nadim from work, seeing as how we spent most mornings comparing notes and he had become, by default, my rap sensei. He listened in silence, and then regarded me with genial pity, somehow finding it in himself to concede some points for my at least having a go.

'Your beat is nice,' he observed generously, and in that moment I heard the lyrics through his ears as borne of Peter Glaze wearing a backwards baseball cap on Crackerjack whilst complaining about Bernie Clifton's comedy ostrich to Don Maclean in rhyming couplets. I threw myself into the task of becoming less shite, writing and rewriting over and over until the smell was at least not quite so bad as it had been. This music was rooted in honesty, so I was fucked if I was going to let myself turn into Tim chuffing Westwood keeping it hot to death for the yoo-kay. I had a ready-made angle in that it was difficult to miss the parallels between your rap basics and the punky DIY tape aesthetic which had informed my earlier efforts; so I emphasised this with samples from old Sex Pistols or Adam & the Ants records. I had recorded 2 Deadly 4 Fame as Loc Dogg B in a general spirit of piss-poor satire, which I abbreviated to the more pragmatic LDB, roughly a variant of my initials suggesting decibels.

I bought a CD burner and began to work just that little bit harder, bouncing between four-track portastudio master tape and a CDR, playing samples by hand on my tinny Casio SK1 keyboard or a borrowed Alesis Quadraverb, cueing and dropping in tapes with the sort of split second timing I hadn't realised was possible. The music began to take shape, and my vocal began to improve to the point of becoming something I could listen to without wincing.

'You've gotta let me jump on one of your tracks, Lawrence,' Nadim told me after the latest tape I'd sent his way. I was keen. By this point I had thrown my efforts entirely behind rap, reasoning that if people preferred Current 93 and Lustmord to my previous, more abstract and atmospheric work, then that was their tough shit and they got what they deserved. The weakest aspect of my new music was my own voice. Lyrically I felt that I was okay, or not too much worse than the average, but my delivery lacked force. It wasn't convincing. If I could just get more able tonsils to talk shit over my beats...

I'd given a tape of one of my instrumentals to Bert, another guy from work who already had a successful day job producing R&B flavoured garage at his own studio. One of his tunes had received heavy rotation on Kiss FM back before the station turned into the audio equivalent of Nuts magazine. He had an incredible voice and would wander around the office singing about his own penis with the lungs of Alexander O'Neal or one of those guys. My head is small but my seed is large, he crooned in surreal fashion, then why is my top lip so big? suffixed with the bewildering locative Brixton, yeah!!! running up and down the scale with the kind of flourishes which made the aforementioned O'Neal sound like Mark E. Smith. Bert seemed impressed with my tape, having apparently assumed my musical endeavours would probably be a bit of a tuneless racket. He said he would work something out and already had a few ideas. I said I was quite keen on the big, big seed in Brixton theme and he seemed to lose interest. With hindsight, I suspect he didn't like the idea of being a performing seal on my track.

Eventually I settled on the idea of pulling together an album length CDR, simply as something on which to focus. I recorded and re-recorded the tracks over and over until they sounded right, and I even managed to get in some guest vocals from Andy Martin and members of the Ceramic Hobs with whom I shared common ground in the DIY tape thing, and who at least understood what I was trying to do. Eventually I finished a thirteen track album called May Contain Sexual Swearwords but found myself unable to burn a definitive CD master copy for numerous tedious technical reasons which inevitably arise when reliant upon faulty or borrowed equipment because, despite working a back-breaking forty hour week, I still couldn't afford decent gear; or I could have done had I been prepared to live on bread and jam for a few months so as to prove my worth to the editor of Scat Feed Fever, but I'd been down that particular aisle of Morrisons in my twenties and had no desire to return. Additionally, my day job was so physically and psychologically demanding as to require a certain degree of post-toil luxury in order to keep me from spazzing out and doing a Hungerford - real milk rather than a big weekly can of powdered, that sort of thing.

Unable to mix May Contain Sexual Swearwords, I kept on recording, honing my craft, then going back and reworking the aforementioned May Contain Sexual Swearwords as soon as it began to sound a bit rudimentary. I continued writing, working on my rhyme schemes, getting metaphors to perform double or even triple duty, how to build secondary internal rhythms into each line, and so on. The more I wrote, the more I began to appreciate just what you can do with rap. It isn't just about making stuff rhyme, because any wanker can do that. The skill of rap is in saying whatever the hell you want to say, regardless of the limitations of the most obvious available terms, bullying the language into doing exactly what you want it to do. Whatever you want to say, there is always a way to say it even when every other word has to rhyme with bicycle.

Anyway, as I waited for equipment repairs, the tracks kept coming. I put tapes together for the sake of keeping tabs on my own progress, and Nadim seemed to think I was getting somewhere. He particularly seemed to enjoy a number called Fuck the Boss.

You fucked up good. Top marks. Well done.
When you started this job we all thought you might be the one
guy we could rely on to not be a cunt,
But now you're hated by almost everyone.
Almost? Yeah okay, Joe still thinks your cool,
But the poor fucker never really was the sharpest tool
in the box. You cock! You pain in the neck!
No-one fucking likes you and you look like Shrek.

'I've got to get on one of your tracks,' Nadim told me with renewed enthusiasm.

Either I'd been asking him to drop by and record some vocals after work for most of the previous six months, or I'd only imagined myself doing so and had in reality said nothing.

'Okay,' I told him. 'Have you got any tapes?'

He had sent plenty of cassettes and CDRs my way, but mostly mixes of the Dogg Pound, Xzibit, C-Bo and others; nothing of himself. I'd begun to doubt that he had amassed much actual time on the microphone, and the claims that would suggest otherwise had been made so long ago as to make it difficult for me to recall the details.

'Come over this afternoon. We'll sort something out, yeah?'

'Sure.'

He lived in one of the Bredinghurst flats, a peculiar architectural jumble resembling a Cubist ocean liner just off Overhill Road, the road in which Bon Scott, the singer of AC/DC, was found dead back in February, 1980. Bredinghurst was on the top of a hill and could be seen from all over East Dulwich and beyond. The story ran that the architect had committed suicide, and the flats certainly looked as though they had been conceived by someone busily in the process of losing their shit. I chained my Royal Mail bicycle to the fence at the back, overlooking Dunstans Road, and entered the labyrinth. After ten minutes of walkways leading to nowhere, I found the place by following my ears. I banged on the door for about five minutes until the music dropped a few decibels and Nadim emerged.

'Come in, man. I was listening to some music.'

'Yes. I can tell.'

I went in. He had one of those CD turntables, the first I'd ever seen. It seemed weird and futuristic and had been set up at the centre of the main room. Deafening bass rumbled through the red tiled floor, rattling large glass windows overlooking the road of much sorrow and pilgrimage for AC/DC fans all across the world - deafening bass like a truck passing and with something electronic pinging away. It sounded familiar.

'What's this?' I had to shout, mime and point.

Nadim had already slipped his headphones back on and was cueing up the next track. I had kind of expected come in, my brother followed by cups of tea and maybe even a few biccies, but that scenario was looking increasingly unlikely.

He picked up a CD case and waved it in illustration - the Goodfellas album by the 504 Boyz. I had it at home and now I realised why I hadn't played it much, because it was supposed to sound like this, not the bass-free twanging with which I was loosely familiar. I knew Goodfellas as mainly a pinging noise over which Master P suggests his listeners might like to Wobble Wobble.

A secondary, clearly unrelated noise intruded. I looked around and saw the rubberised tip of a walking cane banging against the window. We were on the fourth or maybe fifth floor, and the windows of these flats each surmounted a thin balcony with walls dividing each section from that of its neighbour. Some person living next door was out there, leaning over and reaching around to bang their walking stick against the window.

The music stopped dead.

I could hear just the tip of the cane bouncing off the glass and some tinnitus from the music. 'Maybe he wants you to turn it down a little,' I suggested helpfully.

'That fucker!' Nadim slid back the window frame and leaned out but the walking cane had already been withdrawn. He cursed and shut the window. 'One time I pulled it out of his hand and threw it.' He gestured in illustration and I imagined a walking sticking spinning into the sky, high above the grass towards Overhill Road.

'He probably thinks the music is a little bit loud.'

'Every time I play, that old cunt always starts up.' Nadim sucked at his teeth and shook his head. He hit a button on the deck and the 504 Boyz came back, still inviting us to Wobble Wobble.

I thought of my own upstairs neighbour who would stamp or drop heavy furniture in protest to the volume of a television set turned down so low that I could only follow half of the dialogue.  Nadim was a funny guy, but I was glad I wasn't his neighbour.

After about an hour I left. There had been neither tea nor biccies, just myself stood watching Nadim cue up tunes on his CD turntable until it was obvious that I've got to get on one of your tracks had been meant as a sort of figurative suggestion, a measure of approval rather than preface to anything which was going to happen in the real world.

I soldiered on, eventually accruing the material for a double CD - my second album, I suppose - and my best work, I thought. Equipment came back from being repaired and I was at last able to capture the definitive mixes and burn copies of both albums. I wasn't sure how to go about promoting any of this, but I'd paid for eighteen minutes on Godspunk, a compilation CD released by Pumf Records; and on the 21st of June, 2003 I jumped on stage with the Ceramic Hobs and performed a three minute rap at a Mad Pride event held at the Garage in Islington. I did okay. I'd rehearsed my lines over and over for weeks, and I remembered most of them, and I drew a polite round of applause as Jim MacDougall called out very swanky just in case anyone had stopped thinking about him for a minute and because he'd seen it all before.

Then nothing happened.

I had vaguely intended to build up a decent back catalogue before attempting to promote any of it, and LDB now sort of had a decent back catalogue, but nevertheless nothing happened. No-one was interested in the Pumf Records compilation, or the two that came after, and I eventually ended up leaving a huge box of my contributor copies outside Oxfam. I'd had a single enquiry as a result of my paying to put tracks on those discs, and that had been from one of the other bands. More depressing still, I didn't even particularly like the compilations. They sounded disjointed, as I suppose is inevitable given that the selection process was based on who felt like paying to be included; and the sound of my own tracks had been compressed into something I wasn't sure I really appreciated.

Equipment continued to fail, and a number of the discs I had burned degraded, becoming unplayable after about a year, a problem which I've never had with cassettes but have often found with CDRs; and I simply became fed up of paying for the repair of equipment which should have been better made in the first place, of catering to a seemingly unanimous lack of interest whilst Andy of my previous band referred to me as a gangsta rapper in the manner of an indulgent elderly uncle. I was nearly forty, and suddenly none of the effort I had put in over the years seemed to matter, or to have amounted to anything in the real world. Even had I managed to fool someone into buying my LDB tapes or compact discs or whatever, it's not like I was ever going to take to the stage with this stuff, or do anything to push it any further. That one night at the Garage had been fun, but not the sort of thing I cared to repeat.

My rap ambitions had never really been any more substantial than those of Nadim, and in 2005, faced with the prospect of having to get my borrowed portastudio - already an obsolete piece of equipment - repaired yet again, I stopped caring. I'd given up on band membership, and now I was dropping music entirely. I'd sold a few tapes over the years, but no-one had ever really cared, and I'd spent most of the time banging my head against a wall. People don't really want anything they haven't heard before, whether it be rock or rap or yet another dolt who once met David Tibet in a betting shop releasing another droning album with Crowley on the cover. People want product, something they recognise, something with a logo serving to guarantee certain expectations. Novelising, writing and publishing aren't even significantly better, but I find myself able to take more satisfaction from the finished work.

So I suppose LDB - or whatever the hell that was - has left the building. It was fun while it lasted.

While My Castanets Gently Weep

'So, tell me a little bit about the Chekists.'

We were in some pub off Charing Cross Road and I had my little black notebook with me. It was open on the table and I was ready with my pen. This wasn't an interview or anything quite so glamorous, and I was never a journalist by any description. Both Joe and myself were members of a group called Konstruktivists, formed back in the early 1980s by our mutual friend, Glenn Wallis - minorly famed as the fifth member of Throbbing Gristle, depending on who you ask; and also a founder of Whitehouse, arguably the original power electronics outfit. Glenn wasn't with us, but I'd agreed to put together a short, occasional newsletter about the group as I was the one with some sort of fanzine credentials. It was to be published as Konsort in keeping with our imperious leader's love of words beginning with the letter K, and his nibs had suggested I pump Joe for information.

'What do you want to know?' As ever, Joe seemed to have an angle here, some understanding I could not quite follow. He was probably basking in what he'd mistaken for admiration, which truthfully hardly even ranked as curiosity. I had yet to hear a minute of his own music which didn't sound like the work of someone else, and I was still to be impressed by the famous names he would drop into conversation as casual acquaintances.

'It's just a little four page thing,' I tried to explain. 'Just tell me something about what other music you've done.'

I recalled that before joining Konstruktivists, Joe had recorded under the name Batra, which I still can't help but associate with Godzilla films as it sounds like the name of one of the monsters. Presently I knew he was working with some other guy as the Chekists. I mentioned this, and Joe somehow heard me preface the question with what our readers will be interested in hearing is...

'Well, of course there was Public Safety Unit.' He smiled as though caught out, like he was Michael Winner and yes it was true, he had been at that restaurant on a date with Raquel Welch. I guessed it made him feel a little bit famous to be asked for this sort of detail.

'Public Safety Unit?' I somehow managed not to groan out loud. I felt almost certain that Public Safety Unit would be characterised by militaristic electronic beats and barking snippets of Generals ordering bombs to be dropped, insurgents to be pacified, and seabases to be monitored. This was the sort of thing Joe liked, and which inspired his music. It was fine in itself, I suppose, but not terribly original. I had, some months before, sat in a different pub listening to him and the bloke out of Lustmord comparing notes on footage of tanks and related military activity they'd both recently taped off the telly for use in live shows. It was one of the dullest conversations I'd ever heard.

'That's interesting.'

Far beyond our crazy world of showbiz, the Public Safety Unit had been the means by which President Idi Amin had rooted out enemies of the Ugandan state. Again Joe smirked like Michael Winner and explained how he always named any band of which he was founder after an authoritarian secret police force. Similarly the Chekists had once been a Soviet organisation responsible for executing dissidents. This was, I guessed, one of those details Joe imagined his many, many fans would appreciate, nudging each other with knowing smiles.

So the Chekists were Soviet secret police! Ha ha! Oh that Joe!

I rolled the revelation around in my head. I had assumed Chekists was simply a lame name. It sounded like a group of people who went around checking things. Did this new information really make any difference? I decided not, and that it wasn't worth writing any of this down. It just wasn't that interesting.

'We have a track on a seven inch compilation coming out soon, just something a local label are getting together.'

'Really?' This sounded more like it.

'Our track is called Filing Down Your Teeth!'

Of course it is, I thought, and Joe smiled happily as his many imaginary fans rolled their eyes indulgently. Oh that Joe!

Somehow, I just didn't have it in me to be impressed, which is probably why I always had the impression he just didn't like me that much. He would phone quite often, but mainly, so it seemed, in order that I might ask him questions about his work. Through Glenn he had come to know Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti, formerly of Throbbing Gristle, and I always got the impression that he really wanted to make sure that I knew this.

As I was saying to Cosey the other day...

We liked some of the same music, but it always felt as though I was talking to an aunt who had bought me a Shoot! annual for Christmas because I was male, and regardless of the facts of my being forty years old and without any real interest in football; and somehow we were in a band together, the Philthy Animal and Fast Eddie to Glenn's Lemmy, except Joe seemed to regard me as our Ringo, the bloke Glenn had met in the pub and who would from now on be playing the castanets whilst siphoning off a third of both the royalties and the credit.

Possibly my impression was wrong, and I certainly wanted it to be wrong, but nevertheless it has remained as it is.

Later, we recorded an album called Forbidden at a studio in Harlow, Essex. I was a postman at the time and unable to take leave at short notice, so for three days I raced around my walk in Catford, south-east London in the mornings, raced home to Lewisham for a bath and a change of clothes, then spent an hour and a half on trains and buses getting to Harlow to find that the album had been more or less recorded in my absence, and all I had to do was to add guitar parts to tracks I had never before heard to prove that I'd been there. This wasn't in itself an inconvenience as I'm all for a bit of spontaneity, but it was annoying to find that in at least one case my improvised doodling as I tried to work out what I would play had been recorded and was to be considered my finished contribution due to time restrictions.

The album turned out okay, but it never exactly felt like something of which I should be proud, and ultimately I couldn't see the point in either my having played on it, or the considerable effort expended on my daily sixty miles round trip to a studio in a town made of Lego bricks. The material that Glenn and I had done on his portastudio in his spare bedroom sounded better to me.

I put together the cover artwork for Forbidden, aided greatly by my friend Carl, a professional designer. Although heavily distorted, the images on the cover are of myself, Glenn, and Glenn's young daughter. I asked Joe to send some photographs of himself for inclusion, and I asked him each time he phoned to tell me that Chris and Cosey were thinking of buying a new sofa or whatever; but he never got around to it, and seemed to have lost interest in the album since our label had started making noises about putting out Chekists material.

The album came out, and people bought it, and we got paid, albeit not in sufficient quantities to have anyone thinking about buying a yacht; but it did it's job, whatever that was. Joe didn't seem too happy about the cover artwork, now disgruntled that I had neither consulted him nor even asked for a picture by which it might be shown that Konstruktivists comprised persons other than just Glenn and myself, somehow having failed to notice that I had done both of these things, and several times; but beyond this, he didn't really seem to care that much. Neither did I.

Years later, I took out the compact disc for a listen, hoping it may have improved with age. It hadn't, in so much as the disc was now an off-putting bronze hue, having degraded due to a chemical reaction with the ink by which the label design had been printed. So whatever qualities the music may once have had were lost to an unreadable digital mush of degraded zeros and ones. The signal had become noise, and none of it really seemed to matter so much as it had once done, at least not to me.

Oh well.