My Year in the Avant-Garde

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope he found whatever he was looking for.

How Shipston Has Changed

My family moved to Shipston-on-Stour in 1977, the year I turned twelve. Shipston is a small market town in Warwickshire roughly equidistant between Oxford and Coventry, and it felt like a small market town. I left in 1984 with memories of having grown up there, not terrible memories, but not particularly rosy either. It felt like a place from which you escape.

I'm not sure how often I've been back since, but it may not yet be into double figures. My parents separated around the time that I moved away, and both ended up living elsewhere so I never had much reason to go back beyond simple curiosity.

This time, it's because my dad and I were going to have a couple of days in his caravan up near Skegness, but the plan fell through, so instead we've chosen to visit his sister, my Aunt Pat, in the village of Ilmington. With Shipston being just down the road, it seemed like we should at least stop by and have a look.

Prior to moving to Shipston in 1977, I attended the junior school in Ilmington, so I have a lot of history spattered around this whole area even if it isn't anything I'm able to recall in detail. Aunt Pat is lovely, one of those people who somehow twinkles, and it's always a pleasure visiting her. She is married to Steve, who - by funny coincidence - is the older brother of Neil, one of the few kids I can remember from the class above mine at Ilmington Juniors. I remember Neil because I didn't like many of the kids in the class above mine, but Neil was okay and he was funny.

One day I took a couple of passenger carriages from my train set into school to show around. Neil picked up the OO/HO gauge Pullman buffet car and grinned. 'This is the best one.'

'Why?' I asked.

'It's got all the nosh in it.'

This made me laugh a lot, but perhaps you had to be there.

Several decades later, I tell Steve the story, such as it is. His younger brother now runs the Eight Bells, Chipping Campden's oldest pub, and has built up something of a reputation for the food served therein. I like to think that it was my OO/HO gauge Pullman buffet car which first set him on that course. I ask Steve to pass my regards on to Neil, adding that I realise he probably won't remember me. Weirdly it turns out that Neil does remember me, or he did the last time Steve passed on my regards, which is impressive.

Around noon, my dad and I head off for Shipston. We park in the West Street car park, adjacent to the police station, which is itself adjacent to number fourteen - which was our house. It's changed a lot. Somebody has added an extension since we lived there. Also, the police station is no longer a police station, although it's hard to tell what it has become.

'It's still a police station,' my dad insists.

We stand and look at the row of houses on the opposite side of West Street. It was an orchard when we first moved in, and we both remember the new houses being built. One of them was occupied by Pete Emberer, a typically flared seventies character halfway between George Best and the Yorkshire Ripper. He was friends with my dad up to a point. They bought each other pints in the George or helped start each other's cars on frosty mornings in this very same car park - or at least they did until someone borrowed the battery from my dad's vehicle without even leaving a note. A few months later, our other neighbours - the cops - invited my dad to have a look at some of the things they'd found in Pete Emberer's garden, and there was the missing car battery. Pete Emberer therefore ended up in the cells at the rear of the police station, prior to trial at Sheep Street magistrate's court, just over the back. Everything pertaining to the crime - scene, victim, perpetrator, arrest, detention, and sentencing - was therefore to be found within a single area of about fifty square yards.

My dad and I take the alley to Sheep Street, noting that the bread shop has vanished. We wander down to the town square in search of refreshment. The choices are the George or the White Bear, but the George looks as though their food will be served on square plates or even lumps of slate. The White Bear doesn't appear to serve food, but on the other hand you can still tell that it's a pub so in we go. I was last in this pub for a school reunion about ten years ago, and it's changed a lot since then.

Talking of school, I'm pretty sure the bloke sat at the bar right in front of me is Paul Boulton. I've spent the last half hour staring at every passing stranger and wondering whether they might be the old and fat version of someone I knew; but when you actually see someone you did know, you can tell immediately, no matter how much they've changed.

Paul and I were sort of friends, or at least sufficiently close for me to have taped a couple of singles from him - Bowie's Ashes to Ashes and This World of Water by New Musik - and we almost started a band. He had a guitar and was definitely going to learn how to play it, but more importantly he had a name and we were going to be called the Suburbans.

Then thirty years later, he completely ignored me at the school reunion, looked right through me when I said hello Paul, remember me? Perhaps he blamed me for the Suburbans having failed to take off as he'd hoped, or even to exist in any form.

Anyway, I'm not going to bother this time. He's seen me, and once again there's that uncomfortable flicker of recognition followed by nothing. In any case, he's in a conversation with the bloke at the next stool, who looks similarly familiar but it may just be that everyone seems familiar if you look hard enough. He has the demeanour of a fifties rockabilly who smokes too much, slightly gaunt in the face, but wearing an immaculate white suit, shirt, tie, trousers, jacket - all white, like a band leader.

All the service seems to be in the saloon bar, so my dad and I go out into the street then return through the other door, and thus we too are served. We have pints and a table from which I can no longer watch Paul Boulton looking uncomfortable at the public bar. The barmaid seems familiar, but she only moved to Shipston in the nineties, so she can't be. The other couple also seem familiar. In fact I'd swear the guy is Richard Benfield. I ask, and he tells me that his name is Trevor in a Birmingham accent, although his wife is from Shipston. Typically, I don't recognise her at all.

My dad is the gregarious type and we all get to talking - where we live, where we used to live, how it's all changed and so on. The police station - which is adjacent to where we used to live - is no longer a police station because they're cutting back. Crime is therefore a growth industry in Shipston, not that the place was ever what you would call crime free. We all share happy memories - albeit some more recent than others - of local cops dedicated mainly to tackling the scourge of after hours drinking, occasionally being so dedicated as to investigate scenes of the crime in an undercover capacity, even getting too pissed to stand so as to avert suspicion.

Trevor shares a vivid memory of Constable Beard and a colleague attempting to find their way back to the station through fog at two in the morning by following the line in the middle of the road with a flashlight subsequent to a particularly heavy bout of investigation.

'I never liked him,' my dad says. 'He had it in for me.'

'Wasn't he the one who found your car battery in wossisname's garden?' I ask.

'That's true,' my dad admits. 'He always had some problem though, whenever I came home on me motorbike. There was always summat. He didn't like my bike being up on the pavement.'

'Maybe he wanted you to lift it up and carry it into our front yard.'

I remember Constable Beard mainly because he rather helpfully had a beard, and I knew his daughter, Janice. She and a couple of her friends had showbiz aspirations and had written songs, vocal arrangements for which they invited me to score music. Their influences seemed to be mostly Andrew Lloyd Weber, Abba, and show tunes, where mine were Joy Division and Throbbing Gristle, so the results were a bit cranky; but the undertaking meant that girls spoke to me, so I couldn't really say no, and Rebecca Jacques was sort of foxy.

We talk about all the famous people now flooding to Shipston. It used to be just Roy Dotrice, father to Betty from Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, but now there are apparently all sorts knocking around, Tim Henman, sporty types, actors... I wonder if the man in the white suit is somebody famous.

Eventually my dad and I reach saturation point. We purchase sandwiches from the Co-Op and walk down to the river to eat them. Then we come back through the square. My dad goes into a junk shop to have a look around, and I head for the public bogs in the Telegraph Street car park because I need to take a leak. As I pass, there's a girl stood on the corner of Sheep Street with an iguana at rest on her forearm. I take a piss, and she's still there as I come back the other way. She's no-one I recognise. She wears black clothes with bare arms revealing elaborate tattoos and she has the iguana - a bearded dragon, I realise.

'Hello,' I say because I'm too pissed to care. 'Is that a bearded dragon?'

'Yes.' She smiles. 'I just bought him out for a bit of sun. He likes the sun.'

'He's great.' I can't take my eyes off the lizard. 'My wife used to have one, so I thought it was probably a bearded dragon.'

There's nothing more to be said beyond the grinning, so I go off to find my dad. Between the man in white and the lizard lady, it's all gone a bit David Lynch.

Shipston has changed a lot since my day. For one thing, it's a lot fucking weirder.

Oxford

A few months into our relationship, some time around the end of 2005, my small, pushy girlfriend and I took a coach to the city of Oxford. A few months earlier she had informed me with characteristic charm that I needed to organise day trips, to think of places we could visit in order to stave off her becoming thoroughly bored of our association. This was to be my role in the relationship, it seemed. I was the entertainments committee. I was never quite able to pin down the nature of her contribution, but never mind.

I'd been planning to go and see my grandparents for a while. They lived in Clanfield, a village not too far from Oxford; and as the city had come up in conversation as being somewhere we both liked, it was an obvious choice. I found us a bed and breakfast because I was entertainments manager. I got hold of a National Express timetable, and phoned my grandparents to tell them we would be dropping in to see them.

We stepped off the coach in Oxford and Marian began to describe a previous visit when, travelling with a group of horticultural types, she had been to Waterperry Gardens and Garden Centre. This, she told me, was very near Oxford - although she was unable to remember quite where - and it was amazing. We would have to go. I listened as she gave further account of the wonders of Waterperry as I hauled her luggage along to the bed and breakfast. We checked in at around midday, by which time Marian had decided we must visit Waterperry that very afternoon. To do otherwise would be madness, plain and simple.

'But what about your grandparents,' she asked as though this spontaneous change of plan had been my idea. 'Do you think we'll get time to visit them as well?'

This was a familiar trap. Even the world's most optimistic moron would have had no trouble assessing the practicality of these options - two destinations in a single afternoon with Marian in tow, means of travel presently undetermined, and the location of one of these places as yet unknown. I offered a hopeful sounding possibly, knowing it was unlikely in the extreme. Marian did not respond well to no, or indeed to any conclusion which suggested she might have to tailor her ambitions in accordance with reality. Had I said no, I might still be there now, still listening to a speech about my negative attitude and the depths to which I would stoop in order to prevent Marian achieving her numerous goals.

It wasn't worth it.

We strolled back into the centre of Oxford as I pored over guidebooks and leaflets obtained from the tourist information centre, attempting to work out a route to this place so that Marian wouldn't have to do everything for herself as usual. Following what was apparently the quickest route, we took a bus four or five miles out of the city to the village of Wheatley, then walked across two miles of open field in the freezing cold to a large privately owned garden filled with plants that were either brown or dead due to it being November. It was dark by the time we made it back across the fields to Wheatley to wait an hour in the rain for the bus back into Oxford.

My phone rang. It was Madge, the woman who had married my widower grandfather back in 1977 and whom I had come to regard as my grandmother, roughly speaking. She'd been expecting us and wanted to know where we were, particularly as it was now dark. I explained that we were running a little late as though it was one of those things over which none of us had any control.

We eventually made it back into Oxford and went for something to eat in a restaurant. We were freezing cold, having stood in the wind and rain at a bus-stop for an hour. I ordered a mug of hot chocolate, and then phoned Madge to let her know that we wouldn't be coming after all as it was now eight in the evening. Marian had fallen quiet, but I was pissed off and not greatly concerned by whatever her latest imaginary problem could be. I'd just wasted an entire day visiting a patch of frozen organic mush in the middle of nowhere for no reason. Nevertheless after a little while she overcame her reticence, raging at my selfishly ordering hot chocolate, then drinking it in front of her in full knowledge of chocolate being forbidden by her current dietary regime. I had forgotten this detail as she seemed to change her diet every few weeks. It was difficult to keep track of what she could and couldn't eat from one month to the next, and on days such as this it was even more difficult to care.

That evening we managed to have a row over an unrelated matter. During the 1990s I'd written, drawn, and published a great many of my own small press comics. As a result I now had a sideboard packed tight with boxes of unsold copies of my work, with no idea of how, where, or to whom I might dispose of them, and I wanted my sideboard back. This was mentioned in passing as part of a meandering conversation in much the same way as one might make an observation regarding the weather.

'Well, what are you going to do about it?' Marian demanded to know in peculiarly stringent terms. I wasn't sure and said so, explaining that this was why I had raised the subject; I was thinking aloud. She didn't seem to understand this, but then I'm not sure she ever quite grasped regular human interaction outside the staples of bullying and appeasement, the currency of a power struggle. As subscriber to countless ineffective self-help philosophies, it seemed she was attempting some sort of intervention on me, some crap apparently born of the idea that the process of decision making is more significant than what decisions are made. She suggested I take all my self-published magazines to a paper recycling place. I said that given the work that had gone into producing this mountain of crap I found her solution unsatisfactory, which prompted an argument based on the question of why I'd bothered to ask her advice if I wasn't going to follow simple orders and change my life around completely according to that which had been sprung forth from the font of her wisdom. I'd had enough that day and for the first time in our relationship I was happy to let the bullshit evolve into a shouting match. It didn't go anywhere, but it felt okay.

We were only months into our relationship and I was still expecting things to settle down, even hopefully to improve at some point; but now, on some level, I understood that this wasn't going to happen. She had already told me to rearrange all of the furniture in my flat according to the principles of feng shui, and even though I knew feng shui to be the sort of mumbo jumbo to which only a serious simpleton could possibly subscribe, I did it because she had to get her way; and when she didn't get her way she would start on the tears and the blackmail about how she felt undervalued, as though her opinion didn't count for anything. There was no point in arguing, but sometimes it was nice to know that I still could.

The next morning I got out of bed and did my push-ups as I was then in the habit of doing on a daily basis. Marian, recognising an act of self-improvement, became excited as she sat up in bed and began babbling away like a small, hyperactive bird. The distraction was too much and my arm twisted behind my back in a moment of wrenching pain so profound that I screamed. It was agony, and months passed before I was once again able to do such exercises.

The rest of the day was spent in Oxford, visiting botanic gardens within the city, the Ashmolean Museum and Blackwell's bookshop on Broad Street, Marian as usual browsing for further self-help books. She had two shelves sagging with the things at home in London, but always seemed to need more, perhaps realising she was not yet perfect. I once saw her spend twenty-five pounds on a hardback entitled How to Spend Money More Sensibly or similar, naturally oblivious to the irony. The matter of visiting my grandparents did not come up again, and I said nothing because I'd realised I didn't want to subject them to Marian. She would only have made things complicated and unpleasant as she always did.

Later, once we were back in London she said, 'I feel like I'm partially responsible for the fact that we didn't get to see your grandad.'

I said nothing, and as it happens I never saw him again. He passed on about two years later.

There never was a happy ending to this one.