Dennis and Paul

My first impression of Dennis was of his being a naturally aggravating character, and my second was that he was kind of an idiot - conclusions which upset the delicate balance of my established theories regarding men named Dennis. My initial hypothesis had been formulated at the Royal Mail sorting office in Chatham back in 1988, postulated in order to explain the continued existence and unpleasant character of Dennis Landers, whom I regarded as a tosspot. Consulting with my friend Carl, we realised that neither of us had ever encountered any individual named Dennis who wasn't an arsehole by one definition or another.

'Why would you even name your kid, Dennis? ' Carl scowled as though in the presence of sour milk, invoking the image of some gurgling newborn. 'Baby Dennis,' he offered bitterly by way of illustration, lending the name the same sort of cadence by which one might identify Adolf Hitler or Charles Manson.

Then a couple of years later I encountered a succession of two other men named Dennis whom I actually liked and came to hold in high regard. Now here was yet another Dennis, the fourth to emerge during my ongoing investigations. Unlike his two predecessors, he was initially easy to dislike, and yet unlike the founding Dennis, he wasn't actually evil. My theory of Dennis was in tatters.

Dennis the Fourth was a great hulking Bernard Bresslaw of a man, approaching middle-age, balding and very loud. He always seemed to be laughing, singing or joking, but the songs were usually out of tune, and the standard of joke was generally pitiful. Another annoying factor was that close inspection revealed that Dennis was basically a nice guy, just a very annoying one, and his annoying qualities were therefore unfortunately subjective; in other words, if you didn't like this latest Dennis, it was your problem and probably meant you were a bit of a miserable fucker. Having previously established my being in certain respects a miserable fucker, I concluded that I should try to avoid Dennis and do my best to keep from becoming aggravated by him, which was difficult given that he was essentially a big, happy dog in human form for whom mere eye contact was sufficient to initiate lifelong friendship. If he'd finally figured out some joke he'd been told back when he was six, and had decided that you too might get a chuckle out of what the big chimney said to the little chimney, he would move heaven and earth to make sure you got to hear that joke. Some days the canteen became a no-go area due to his presence, howling and hooting with laughter over his egg on toast as he related another hilarious incident from the morning's delivery.

The little dog had been yapping and jumping up to get the mail as it came through the letterbox. This much could be seen through the window to one side of the front door. Dennis had pushed the mail through the letterbox in such a way as to sail the envelopes up onto the window ledge to one side of the front door. The little dog had continued to bark and jump up, but was unable to reach the mail.

It took him fifteen minutes to tell this story, and ten of those were taken up with the punchline - the little dog being unable to reach the mail now safely atop the window ledge - which he couldn't get out because he was himself laughing too much, crying with laughter and incapable of forming words.

We all sat there watching, drinking our tea, bewildered.

When Paul the Actor started at our office, he immediately compared Dennis to Homer from The Simpsons. As an observation it was both funny and accurate, but by this point, although Dennis was clearly an idiot, some of us felt strongly that he was our idiot. Additionally, it could not be denied that he was a hard worker, which counted for something in a working environment built upon having to do someone else's job for them at least half of the time.

Paul was of presumed Turkish extraction and he spoke like Sacha Baron Cohen's Ali G character, a nasal whine punctuated with plenty of innit. He was, as he explained to absolutely everybody who stood still long enough to listen, a professional actor and film director temporarily obliged to deliver mail for a living. Naturally the first question in response to this information was usually if you're an actor, then what have you acted in?

'I was on The Bill a couple of times innit,' he would tell us, later seemingly contradicting this claim when announcing 'I need to finish work early innit because I've got an audition for The Bill. If I could just get a part in The Bill that would be so good for my career, yeah?'

No-one bothered pointing out that half the population of East Dulwich had appeared in The Bill at one time or another. His story seemed fluid and was subject to daily revision, so most of us lost interest after a while, or at least the novelty wore off. Whilst it was clear that some element of truth informed the tireless self-promotion, it was anyone's guess what that truth could be.

One element which seemed fairly secure was that Paul had experienced a less than idyllic childhood, suffering terrible abuse at the hands of a domineering and possibly criminally-inclined father. The evidence for this was roughly that Paul's account, brief as it was, really wasn't the sort of thing you would make up. Paul had used his own story as the basis for a feature film named My Heart is Broken. Lacking funds, the film wasn't completely finished, but was probably going to be a big deal on the independent cinema circuit when it was ready for release innit. He showed us a publicity photograph, a still from the film, the boy chosen to portray his younger self.

Kingsley was keen to get involved and so Paul lent him the one existing VHS copy of the film. I was roped in to provide the soundtrack music which it was thus far lacking, producing eight or nine instrumental pieces following Paul's instructions. He said they were okay but needed work, which pissed me off somewhat. Sue agreed to help with shooting the new material the film would require prior to release, and it all began to feel suspiciously like school children planning their own television show. Paul seemed to have some kind of professional training, but we could never quite work out what it had been.

'What's it actually like?' I asked Kingsley when he bought the videotape back.

'It's good,' he said, himself clearly surprised by the fact.

I wanted to watch it, but Terry was next in line.

At the time my friend Paul A. Woods had become a regular contributor to a fairly well known magazine called Bizarre, mainly covering film and television. I mentioned Paul the Actor to him, and apparently in such intriguing terms as to inspire Paul A. Woods to write a two page feature on my fellow postman, focussing on the lad's efforts to complete My Heart is Broken and to get it released in some capacity, so Paul the Actor made it onto the newsstands despite Paul A. Woods not actually having seen his film.

'Give your mate a dig in the ribs,' he would suggest on the phone. 'It would be great if I could help him out, but I really need to have a look at the fucking thing, you know?'

'Okay,' I said, wondering what kind of film maker only had the one VHS copy of his masterpiece. Terry had watched it and brought it back into work, but now someone else was borrowing it.

'What's it like?' I asked Terry.

'It's better than you might expect,' he explained, clearly as surprised by the fact as Kingsley had been. 'It seems very professional.'

'Really?'

'The only thing is it's quite short, so I'm not sure if you could really call it a film.'

'It's short, you say?'

'It's about ten minutes.'

Somehow I wasn't surprised. I had begun to expect something at the level of the young filmmakers' competition which used to run on Screen Test when I was a kid.

As the single VHS tape slowly worked its way around the sorting office, Paul asked me to paint his portrait, something he could use for publicity material. He brought in some photographs of himself on stage in some amateur production wearing a pith helmet, safari suit and holding a rifle. I painted him as requested against a backdrop suggesting colonial Africa. He was going to pay me, but like the elusive VHS tape of My Heart is Broken, the money never materialised. It didn't really bother me because I had anticipated disappointment.

I don't know if the painting was ever used as publicity material in any form, or if it replaced the postcards he'd printed and had handed around at work. The photograph showed him holding that rifle - presumably a replica - and pulling a moody face. Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels hadn't been in the cinemas very long, and it seemed clear that Paul would be happy to audition should Guy Ritchie be about to embark on a sequel innit.

'Ere Paul,' Dennis called out across the office, 'you got any of them cards left, mate?'

This was the first time anybody had actually requested one, and of course Paul was happy to oblige.

'Thanks, mate - I'll stick it on the mantelpiece when I get home,' Dennis admired the card as he returned to his bay. 'Keep the kids away from the fucking fire!' - and for the first time ever, he completed the full sentence with a straight face before collapsing with laughter. The jokes continued for the next half hour or so as Dennis worked at his bay sorting the mail, not exactly funny, but loud enough for everyone in the building to hear and we were all on his side after the keeping the kids away from the fire remark. He was on a roll.

Mark, working on one of the frames around the back began to call out in response to each brainless gag, mostly retorts concluding with you stupid, fat cunt! Then suddenly, before any of us really had time to process what had been said, Dennis struck back with an unexpected succession of three razor-sharp zingers, the details of which were lost behind the glare of our collective astonishment. It was as though a dog had burst into song. Mark had been silenced by Dennis of all people as belly laughter erupted all around the office.

I looked at Dennis.

I could hear the laughter all around.

We all looked at Dennis, speechless, and I asked, 'Did he really just say that?' I turned to Darren. 'You heard it it too?'

'Yeah!' Darren was wide-eyed, awe-struck. 'Dennis said something funny!'

'Fuck! Nice one, Dennis!'

As with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, no-one who was present when it happened will ever forget that historic day.

Paul eventually vanished from the picture, briefly resurfacing about a year later as star of a television documentary following the basic training and first days on the job of a newly recruited driver working out of Camberwell Bus Garage. Footage of Paul in the cab, frowning with concentration as he pulled out onto the main road was narrated with the voice-over account of how he saw his future career behind the wheel, and how if anything it would probably complement his work on stage and screen. The shot segued to Paul sat upon the grass of what was presumably Camberwell Green. He was explaining how all the lads at work had jovially taken to calling him George, which wasn't, he insisted, due to his full name being Paul Clooney.

'They say it's because I look like him innit.'

He had the eyebrows, but it was hard to believe that all the lads really called him George for this reason, or even that they called him George at all given that his surname wasn't even Clooney, contrary to whatever he'd been telling people since he finished with Royal Mail. He was a nice enough guy in his own way, but you always had the feeling that as he spoke to you, he was trying to imagine how you would one day feel, recalling this conversation with Paul way back before he hit the big time. Ten years have passed, and if Paul has since hit the big time in any capacity, then it's under yet another pseudonym and one I would not know to submit to a Google search; on the other hand if he's out there and still no more famous than any of the rest of us, he should at least take comfort from the fact that we all remember that day when just for a few seconds Dennis cast him in the role of Ernie Wise to his own Eric Morecambe.

Blinky

It was September, 1989 and I was stood in a room packed with comics professionals, trestle table upon trestle table of big name writers, artists, and editors from Marvel, DC and others. I'd just returned from either the lavatory or from buying myself a massive stack of X-Men comics in some other room of the convention, and as arranged I had found Charlie just where he said he would be, but it seemed that he had made a new friend. The instant I laid eyes upon Blinky, I saw him for what he was - the enemy, the kind of person about which I'd been warned but whom I hadn't really believed could exist in our universe. This was a man without any Elvis in him. As Blinky spoke, I felt as though someone had stepped across my grave, and then stepped back and dropped their trousers to deposit a fecal calling card. I was in the presence of the supremely cloying, of that which inspired the conviction that I must get away even if it meant chewing through one of my own limbs in order to effect an escape. My thoughts would from now on be filled entirely with the matter of how much longer I would have to remain in his odious presence, unable even to conceptualise some sweet future hour in which I would be far away from Blinky, and his blinking, and his athletic name-dropping. Suffice to say, I thought the guy was a bit of a knob.

I met Charlie Adlard back in 1985 as we were both taking a fine art degree at the Time Based Media department of Maidstone College of Art. We became good friends almost immediately. We both liked science-fiction and the music of Simple Minds, and we shared the same faintly puerile sense of humour. A further parallel was to be found in our mutual reluctance to adapt fully to self-consciously Bohemian college society. Charlie tended to dress smartly, at least to job interview standards, always appearing very clean and well groomed; and whilst the same could hardly be said of myself, neither of us particularly enjoyed jazz, free-form poetry, inscrutable European cinema, marijuana, or any of those other beatnik staples our fellows seemed to regard as cultural essentials. Whilst I attempted to pass off grumbling and poorly-executed music videos as art, Charlie's sensibilities often seemed even more at odds with the core values of the course. Having a more openly populist view of film and video, he'd been accepted on the strength of, amongst other things, Sweet Dreams, a home made horror feature shot on super 8mm film which figured amongst his earlier associations with the living dead, effected on this occasion by theatrical make-up rather than ink on artboard. We collaborated from time to time, helping each other out on various projects, Charlie acting or presenting in a few of my admittedly crappy video productions; and Total Big - the group I was in with my friend Carl - supported Soul, a noisy widescreen rock band for which Charlie played drums; and probably most significantly, he got me hooked on comics.

More or less the entire student body of our college had travelled up to London in order to attend a protest march against proposed education cuts, and during a break between chanting and waving placards, a few of us inevitably ended up in the pub. Charlie and our mutual friend Gareth - another Time Based Media student - had nipped off to a comic shop called Forbidden Planet, and now returned with their spoils, which in Gareth's case included a couple of issues of The Dark Knight Returns.

'You bought a Batman comic?' I asked, incredulous, my mental cinema awash with a slightly paunchy Adam West frowning, fist to palm as Robin exclaims Holy Robert Louis Stevenson, Batman.

Gareth's response was probably something more coherent than Pow! Comics Aren't Just For Kids Any More!, but I expect it duplicated the thrust of one of those magazine articles that had begun to appear under such titles. I examined the comic and was impressed by the quality of art and printing, but it still seemed like a strange thing to me. Nevertheless I guess The Dark Knight Returns had sparked my curiosity because some months later, Charlie and I were wandering around the Maidstone branch of Sainsbury's when, passing the magazine rack, I picked up an X-Men comic, specifically issue 211. I didn't really have any sort of comic habit, having given up on 2000AD a year or so before thanks to a sudden surfeit of unusually poor strips - The Mean Arena being one such offender - and I'd had no contact with an American Marvel comic since junior school.

'This still exists,' I noted.

'There's quite a good story running in there at the moment.' Charlie was clearly familiar with the title, and for some reason I found this surprising.

'Who's that supposed to be?' I indicated the snarling figure on the cover. 'I remember Cyclops and the Angel and that lot, but I don't think I know this one.'

'That's Wolverine.'

'What does he do?'

'He has a metal skeleton and he extrudes claws which can cut through almost anything.'

I was suddenly aware of being a full grown man - at least in the physical sense - whilst finding this unfamiliar X-Person intriguing as a concept. It seemed there was a contradiction in there somewhere, or at least something of which I should probably be ashamed. If only it didn't feel so damn good.

'I think I will buy this.' I placed the comic in my basket, boldly, as though having emerged from a notional closet.

Within the year I was a connoisseur, tracking down back issues, collecting obscure editions of other distantly related titles through which some sprawling storyline had taken a detour, and making a monthly Hajj to the comic shop Forbidden Planet by means of National Express coach. Parallel to the onset of my addiction, my friend Carl had introduced me to the more underground comics of Robert Crumb, Bill Griffiths, Jay Lynch, Drew Friedman and others, either responding to my increasing interest in the medium, or else attempting an intervention in the hope of saving me from the spandex ghetto. I took to producing my own comics, inspired in equal parts by the mainstream titles, the undergrounds, my own abandoned formative efforts from a few years earlier - which had in turn been inspired by the strips in Sounds music paper drawn by Alan Moore and Savage Pencil - and, most significantly, the fact that I was bored absolutely shitless with video art and needed some sort of creative outlet.

College came to an end, and by 1989 Charlie and myself, still united by an appreciation of X-Men comics, had arrived at similar artistic places albeit by different routes. He too was keen to pursue a career as a comic artist, and exhibited an endearing faith in my ability to crank out a half decent story. I'd been drawing my own absurdist pseudo-underground strips for various fanzines, but my ability fell some way short of my ambitions with respect to more mainstream work of the kind which would at least catch the attention of 2000AD or similar; and so resumed our creative partnership.

I had written some of a strip called Berserker, a generally lamentable effort involving telepathy, psychokinesis, aliens, the theories of Richard S. Shaver and all the usual stuff all bundled together and named after a Gary Numan album. Charlie did his best to illustrate the script I had provided but was hindered by the fact that it didn't actually have a story. Nevertheless we soldiered on, at last producing a few short eight page strips titled News From Nowhere which turned up in small press publications such as Inkling and Sideshow Comics.

We began to attend comic conventions, lugging samples of our work around in the hope of it catching the eye of a larger publisher, notably at UKCAC - the United Kingdom Comic Art Convention unfortunately acronomised as yoo-cack - held at the University of London in September, 1989. I had never before found myself surrounded by quite so many comic book enthusiasts, and never having been a fan of crowds, the experience was bewildering, even with the excitement of showing our work to persons whose comics we'd been reading. Marv Wolfman in particular stood out as a name I somehow recalled from as far back as the 1970s, and as the then current writer of the New Teen Titans of which I was a fan; in addition, he was not only American, but Jewish and from New York. This made him seem very exotic and exciting to me. He considered the work that Charlie and I had lain before him and smiled indulgently, this probably being the ten-thousandth time someone had tried too hard to impress him that day.

'I like what you guys are doing, but this thing with the originality of your ideas,' he began in response to some bumbling crap I had offered by way of an explanation. 'Well, I mean you can have a guy with a banana in his ear,' - and at this point both Charlie and myself thrilled at the broad and unfamiliar American pronunciation of banana - 'but I mean, Banana-in-the-Ear Man may be original, but you still have to tell a story.'

We remained awestruck for the next few minutes, energised by our encounter with greatness and oblivious to the fact of our having fallen a long way short of making a sale. We joked about producing a Banana-in-the-Ear Man strip for the sake of having created by Marv Wolfman tucked away in the corner of the title page.

After a few more attempts to sell ourselves as the next big thing I began to experience convention fatigue, possibly due to Charlie having a bit more drive than I did. I went off for a wander, either in search of the lavatory or to buy myself a massive stack of X-Men comics in some other room of the convention.

When I returned, Blinky had already introduced himself and was now schooling Charlie on how best to get ahead at comic conventions. He had scripts and he needed an artist, and his confidence in his own talent was terrifying to the point of bordering on the obnoxious.

His name wasn't Blinky, obviously, but I've renamed him a quarter century later after an involuntary tic which caused him to blink at least once a second, sometimes twice. Whilst it is undoubtedly poor form to make light of this one unfortunate physical characteristic of the boy - and he was a boy, fifteen years old at the upper limit I would guess - specifically referencing him by a name directly mocking what I suppose could be classified as a disability, I do so on the grounds of his being a thoroughly unpleasant tosspot who would later engage himself with a number of bewildering attempts to sabotage Charlie's eventually burgeoning career, so screw him and his big red shoes.

Blinky was young and precocious with an unpleasantly smooth face which was yet to require the attention of a razor blade, and always appeared to be looking down upon whomever it was addressing at the time; and he spoke just a little too quickly, a faintly upper class whine cultivated in an affluent suburb of north London, a voice which lent itself to dismissing the listener as uninformed.

He was speaking to Charlie at ninety miles an hour, somehow effecting to sound both excited and yet at the same time oddly jaded by his own words, as though this undeniably wonderful information was the sort of thing which really anyone with half a brain should know. The information was something to do with a man called Neil, referred to with the familiarity of a personal acquaintance, someone with whom Blinky would be meeting later. Furthermore, it turned out that we would also be meeting him, because Blinky had recruited us as his street team in my absence. After a few minutes I realised he was referring to Neil Gaiman, just then beginning to accrue some fame in comic book circles.

'Well, we'll just have to see what Neil says.'

Blink. Blink. Blink.

I understood then that my initial assessment had been correct. This person was a tool, someone for whom status was directly related to relative fame within the established parameters of fandom. This, as Mojo Nixon would surely concur, was a person with no Elvis in him, the human personification of a beige cardigan or a packet of cheese and onion crisps consumed whilst reading a Batman comic.

We bustled along in the crowded hall, the three of us apparently subsumed by Operation Blinky. I wasn't sure what to make of this development. Charlie seemed to be okay with the guy, and I wanted to trust his judgement. On the other hand, I myself was fairly secure in my reservations, but found myself unable to really clarify them with enough resolve to be worth voicing. Operation Blinky came to nothing because, it was surmised, Neil was probably too busy or something.

In the months that followed, Charlie began to find paying work, notably regular strips in collaboration with Tim Quinn for the BBC's Number One magazine and The Sunday People. He'd even drawn a few strips written by Blinky, notably the portentously titled They Call Him The Marshal which, so far as I could tell, seemed to be Pat Mills' Marshal Law for some reason revised as a straightforward superhero adventure; but the partnership hadn't worked out so well, because Blinky was essentially a nutcase. My understanding was that Charlie had admired the kid's ruthless networking more than his scripts, and a visit to the family home in north London had been awkward and uncomfortable. Blinky's parents were good people, but the boy had revealed himself as prone to the weird temper tantrums of the unbalanced.

Meanwhile the two of us had worked together on a four part story titled A Reflection which we hoped might be picked up by Trident Publications, publisher of Mark Millar's Saviour amongst other titles. Charlie's artwork was really coming into its own by this point, but my writing was at best probably unremarkable, and A Reflection never found a home. A few years later it became subject, along with David Britton's Lord Horror, to discussion in an article on crime comics by Paul A. Woods which was featured in an issue of Knave, the monthly gentleman's interest magazine, but that was otherwise the end of that. We'd also produced a number of other prospective efforts, complete stories - such as they were - fired off to Marvel, DC, or IPC in the hope of their landing upon a sympathetic desk. After a while it became obvious that Charlie's ambition and enthusiasm had somewhat outstripped mine, as had his ability. This never became a subject of contention, but was simply the way things were. My main focus remained on the shorter, more underground strips for fanzines which I drew myself, and which I found more fun to produce.

At the next UKCAC we attended I was surprised and a little irritated to find we were met once again by Blinky. I'm fairly certain that by this point Charlie was already drawing in a professional capacity at some level, although Blinky still seemed to regard us as potential ladder holders by which he might continue his ascent towards caped destiny. On the first morning I found myself stood in a reception area as Blinky set a video camera on a tripod, directing us with tersely delivered suggestions. Charlie was helping in some capacity, but I don't think he knew quite what was expected, so perhaps we were a posse, the guys stood around in the background making funny shapes with our fingers so as to present the appearance of something so large that it must be taken seriously.

Neil had promised Blinky an interview for some private project, unless it was Alan or Grant or someone else with whom this pushy and faintly unpleasant schoolboy preposterously affected to be on first name terms; but Neil or Alan or Grant or whoever was running late had failed to appear, consistent with all odds. Blinky's elder and entirely more personable brother made some suggestion which was greeted with a snappy dismissal of the kind which inevitably arises when an important person finds himself obliged to rely upon incompetent inferiors.

Unsure of quite what I was doing there, I found myself talking to Phil Elliott whom I'd spotted passing through the reception area. Phil Elliott is a comic artist and designer now best known for his work with Escape and Fast Fiction, the seminal English small press publisher and distributor. I knew him better as the artist of The Suttons which had appeared in The Maidstone Star, which had been my local newspaper for a while. He seemed pleasantly surprised that someone should remember The Suttons and we enjoyed a briefly conversational chat about life in Maidstone. Blinky hovered around at the periphery, apparently hoping to deduce whether I was talking to someone who might be considered famous. I'd heard him endlessly gibbering on about X-Men comics, Watchmen, Frank, Neil, Grant, and so on and so forth; and in my mercifully limited experience I had not had him pegged as someone with even the slightest interest in comics beyond the caped and mainstream variety.

'Excuse me, Mr. Elliott, I wonder if you could spare five minutes for a short interview.'

Blink. Blink. Blink.

Luckily for me, my friend Carl had also stumped up the price of admission that year, and he had no intention of being drawn into Blinky's web of low-level sociopathic manure. I knew Charlie had grown weary of the Machiavellian little turd, but not so much as to allow for the necessary cessation of manners by which he could tell him to piss off. My own tolerance was less robust, and Carl understood this so we went off to browse for comics, this being why we had come to UKCAC in the first place. At some point later Blinky tracked us down and deposited himself at our table as we sat drinking tea in the canteen. Charlie was off somewhere showing samples of his work to a publisher, he told us. Blinky explained that he was proud of Charlie, apparently somehow unaware that we both knew Charlie substantially better than he did. Another thing Blinky had somehow failed to appreciate was that we had nothing in common with him and no interest in what he had to say. He began to offer his unsolicited views on Batman, Wonder Woman, what Neil thought of this, that and the other. We finished and got up, then began to walk away. Blinky followed, reluctant to deprive us of his monologue. Carl and I walked faster and Blinky increased his pace accordingly, still talking all the while. 

'On the count of three.' Carl took a deep breath, a quick glance to ensure that I understood as his voice sank to just above a whisper. 'One - two - three—' We ran, sprinting away from Blinky as fast as we could without falling over, howling with laughter at the absurdity of the situation, that such a schoolboy act should have proven necessary. We never saw him again other than as a distant face to avoid observed as it moved within a crowd, and neither did Charlie further enjoy the benefit of his advice so far as I'm aware. In any case, Charlie's efforts were beginning to pay off as he began drawing Judge Dredd strips, and then secured a regular gig as the artist of Armitage in the Judge Dredd magazine.

Blinky, apparently having abandoned his attempts to break into comics on the strength of They Call Him The Marshal and whatever else he'd come up with, settled down to writing about what others were doing, producing a comics industry fanzine capitalising on the cancellation of the long-running Speakeasy. The fanzine has done well, and is still going even now. It began on the premise of there being no publications then covering both comics and music; just as there were no publications specialising in both American foreign policy and celebration cakes, or classic cars and ironing. So Blinky's Charivari as it wasn't actually called stepped in to fill the presumed gap, covering comics just as Speakeasy had done before even to the point of recycling some of the regular features of its predecessor, alongside reviews of records by Nirvana, Suede, and all those other bands struggling to get by without coverage in the many, many existing music papers and related magazines. I saw a few issues but all I can recall - aside from a tone of self-congratulation and constant reminders of which famous people had praised the magazine that week - was one of those big head caricatures accompanying some review, badly drawn macrocephalic Kurt Cobain and that Dinosaur Junior bloke bumping fists to represent a cool and awesome meeting of awesome minds, which was of course awesome; and Blinky's scathing summary of the Armitage strip in Judge Dredd magazine which hilariously observed that Armitage was also the name of a company who manufacture ceramic toilet bowls, and the art of Charlie Adlard was like something found in a toilet bowl.

I expect he was referring to poo. Do you see? 

Ha ha.

Charlie continued to slave over a hot drawing board, getting promoted from one title to another, before ending up as regular artist on Image's absurdly successful Walking Dead, the enduring appeal of which means that Charlie now lives in a hollowed out volcano complete with ICBM and his own private army.

You probably won't have read about that in Blinky's Charivari, but never mind.

Goodbye Andrew

Andrew Cox: 14th July 1961 - 26th January 2009

I moved to Lewisham in south-east London in August 1990. Sue, my father's second wife, prompted more by the need to make conversation than any burning interest, had asked 'has that always been your dream, Lawrence - to live in Lewisham?'

It really hadn't, but it seemed roughly like a step in the right direction, and I don't think Sue was overly familiar with the various boroughs of south-east London. Had she been, she probably would have phrased the question differently.

The overpriced rabbit hutch in Ryecroft Road into which I squeezed myself and all my worldly belongings wasn't really the sort of place you'd associate with sane people. It was a large, five bedroom house with just myself and some conspicuously and understandably unhappy guy called Greg renting the two smallest rooms. The rest of the house sat empty - all tenants driven away by a landlord who was basically a massive arsehole - and the fridge was full of ants. It was therefore nice to get away at weekends, and within a month of moving I was on the train to Norwich to stay with my friend Glenn. Historically speaking, Glenn had achieved minor notoriety as roadie to Throbbing Gristle, then as a founder member of power electronics band Whitehouse, but his main thing had always been Konstruktivists - never really an industrial band, maybe more of a krautrock deal with a few other ingredients, and resistant to easy classification. I'd done record sleeves for Konstruktivists and Glenn had now asked me to play guitar, so we spent a few days working out some  material on his four-track recorder.

A couple of years earlier, Dave Henderson of Sounds music paper had compiled The Elephant Table Album, a double vinyl collection of tracks by a variety of left field musicians - Portion Control, Nocturnal Emissions, Nurse With Wound and others. Konstruktivists had a track on there, so Glenn had been sent a freebie of the 1989 reissue, which, no longer possessing a turntable, he passed on to me. As I sat reading the cover, I noticed that one of the bands had listed a contact address in Lewisham, presumably some place quite near the overpriced rabbit hutch of doom and ants. They were called MFH - I knew of them by name alone, some guys whose tapes I'd seen reviewed here and there in various fanzines, but that was pretty much the extent of my knowledge.

As I didn't actually know anyone in Lewisham, and here was this mutual interest in weirdy music distributed by cassette tape, I wrote to MFH as soon as I was back in London, and we met up in The White Horse, opposite the kebab place at the lower end of Belmont Hill. The two of them were waiting with a wooden duck on the table, the sign by which I was to identify them, thus avoiding embarrassing mix-ups involving any other experimental music duo who might have been in the pub at the time. Their names were David Elliott and Andrew Cox - by this point collectively known as Pump rather than MFH - and as soon as I realised this, the penny dropped.

Well, not really a penny of any great revelatory thrust, but Glenn had given me a tape about five years before, something he'd been sent in the post and thought I might appreciate: Methods - sixty minutes of droning home-recorded ambience by Andrew Cox. Of all the tapes to ever randomly settle into my collection, Methods had actually made a significant impression and so I'd listened to it a lot. Also, it turned out that David had once produced a fanzine called Neumusik which I recalled as having been praised in at least a few of the fanzines I'd read. So whilst there were gaps, there was surprising acreage at the intersection of our Venn diagram. We hit it off immediately, although I grew to know Andrew better being as David was soon to marry and move away from the area.

Andrew worked as a programmer at Cazenove which, for better or worse, paid well enough to feed his wine and song habit - ten or more CDs a week I seem to recall in regard to the latter. It wasn't that he had any particularly Bacchanalian tendencies, quite the opposite in fact - Andrew led a solitary lifestyle. He was a man with, as we say, issues, and had taken to quietly drinking himself into a relatively happy place more or less each evening. The thing is, as his friends none of us ever quite fully understood what those issues could be, only that they were serious for Andrew, as suggested by his having severed all lines of contact with his family some years before. Like many who struggle with genuine psychological obstacles - as opposed to the sort of whining crap associated with self-help literature and a pathological need to tell anyone who will listen - Andrew didn't really like to talk about it, and got along as best he could with little complaint.

We would meet in The White Horse, initially every day around five, later rationalised to Wednesdays and Fridays when I realised that three or four pints a night was beyond the capacity of both my liver and my weekly wage. Andrew would always be immaculately dressed, usually with carrier bag containing a bottle of wine and whatever he was planning to heat up for the evening; and for a guy with problems, he was rarely anything less than great company up until the point at which I'd notice he was pissed, and with the monosyllables home and then food, he'd trundle off into the night. We would talk about music, anything from Schoenberg to The Ramones to Nurse With Wound - Andrew having been one of the many guests on their Sylvie and Babs Hi-Fi Companion album in the case of the latter. We would talk about books, films, writing, science, philosophy, art, mutual acquaintances from other realms of our shared cassette culture Venn diagram. He introduced me to the writing of Charles Bukowski, Jean-Paul Sartre, P.J. O'Rourke and Bill Bryson; to the music of Tad, Wire, Curve, My Bloody Valentine, L7, Karl Blake, and others. We covered just about everything because, for all that he was often withdrawn and always softly spoken, Andrew was one of the most interesting people I've known, incapable of being boring, and often very, very funny. His puns alone were of such strength as to interfere with radar and bring down low flying aircraft. Within the space of an hour and roughly two pints he could reduce me to tears with some random observation - a hypothesis that the landlord's son being conspicuously and suddenly in possession of a girlfriend could only be explained by possession of a penis the size of Norfolk - then effortlessly segue into an explanation of Kierkegaard's most tortuous assertions without coming across like a dick. It seems fair to say that Andrew was very much unique.

I was still distantly involved in the cassette thing, and I had this somewhat nebulous plan spun from the fact that both David and Andrew vaguely knew Glenn - a tape of both Konstruktivists and Pump Live at The White Horse, Lewisham which would just be the four of us sat around a table, getting pissed and talking bollocks for ninety minutes. Thankfully, it never happened, although I did collaborate with Andrew in a musical capacity on a couple of occasions, notably sarcastic renderings of Whitehouse songs for Impulse magazine's White Stained Covers compilation. Also I'd played cardboard box drum kit for Henry during one rehearsal; Henry comprising Andrew on guitar and Paul A. Woods as east London's Johnny Cash - Johnny Readies, I suppose.

Eventually, girlfriend number two showed up at my slightly roomier rabbit hutch in Boyne Road, so I took a break from bachelorhood and moved to East Dulwich, still popping over to Lewisham for the roughly weekly drink because it would have been strange not to do so. Andrew's nightly bottle of wine had by this point begun to exact something of a toll, and he was ordered to pack it in on peril of his liver exploding. Cazenove turned out to be the sort of company that valued its employees, or at least valued Andrew, paying for his private care, drying out, recovery, retreat and so on. It worked, and we all adapted to the peculiar routine of going to the pub with Andrew same as before, except we'd moved to The Watch House as our beloved White Horse had been refurbished in order to appeal to arseholes, and Andrew was now downing three pints of Red Bull before departing with the promise of home and food.

On one occasion I went back to Andrew's flat to borrow a DVD and realised that something really was wrong - not always apparent from his generally smart appearance and cheerfully sober temperament maintained even whilst obviously three sheets to the wind. It was a nice flat, but movement within was difficult due to every available surface, including even those in the bathroom and in the tub itself occupied by skyscrapers of books, CDs, cassettes, newspapers, and empty wine bottles. It wasn't exactly unclean or dirty, but seemed like a slightly crazy person had been turning their living space into a scale model of New York City. It was worryingly easy to imagine this spectacle as resembling the contents of Andrew's head.

Unfortunately, the amazing and convincing recovery was not to last. For whatever reason, Andrew just coped better with booze; and it became increasingly difficult to stay in touch given that he'd always been solitary to some extent and was someone you rarely saw outside the context of alcohol. Medically retired, or at least ordered to avoid work until he was better, he moved to Portsmouth and was further reduced to an internet presence which, in February 2007, reported:

I am indeed still alive. Life has, as ever, been something of a roller-coaster ride, involving a fractured kneecap, a noisy neighbour, clinical depression, moving house, a stay at the loony bin, and Zen Buddhism. I was off work for eighteen months, but am in the process of returning at the moment.

I'm also back on the booze, but not in an over-the-top way. And the meds I'm on seem to prevent me feeling shit the next day, which is nice.

Serendipitously I received the new single by The Cravats and Paul Hartnoll today, and lo it is good. Surely this is a sign...

Sadly it wasn't, and in January 2008:

Sorry that I haven't been in touch for some time, but life has been shit. I've been in and out of the loony bin until my medical insurance ran out. I'm currently on some seriously heavy medication, and drinking a litre of vodka a day.

The news we had all been expecting came a year later when David Elliott wrote to me:

Although there was a tragic inevitability about it, I'm still greatly shocked and above all hugely saddened. I knew Andrew for nearly thirty years. I can still remember the day we first met, at Sussex University in October 1979. We shared a passion for music which led to recording our own stuff on-and-off throughout the 80s and a little beyond. I treasure our times in pubs planning art projects, writing, talking about literature and life... for a time with you too. He was both incredibly intelligent and highly creative.

Sadly, he had his personal demons and the way he chose to battle them was through drink. I was relieved when he went teetotal in 1998 and have happy memories of an outwardly contented, sociable friend at Liz and my wedding a year later - just before work took me to Japan and Thailand for most of the last decade. Distance and my family meant that we didn’t see too much of each other during that time but I always tried to see him on trips home and we corresponded regularly. The last couple of years had seen Andrew spiral back into alcoholism and depression and in the last few months his emails got increasingly desperate. I visited him in March and July last year; he knew how perilous his situation was, yet seemed calm and almost optimistic. I’m just so sorry I couldn’t help him more.

Four years later I'm still not sure I've entirely processed any of this.

About a month ago my wife and I went to the CD & DVD Exchange and I picked up the Lazer Guided Melodies album by Spiritualized, recalling that Andrew had taped it for me over a decade earlier. We played it in the car on the way home, and completely unexpected, as it got to the track 'Shine a light' - always an emotionally potent number - I realised I was crying like a baby. Not having heard the album since Andrew was alive, the song had somehow become instilled with his presence; and for a few minutes it seemed like the whole world had gone wrong.

I still don't know what to say except that it hurts, and that he, of all people, really should have had a better life, and that he should still be here.

Andrew was barely a blip in the great scheme of things, but he was a major, major event in my own faintly ludicrous narrative. The list of influential artists, musicians, and writers whom I discovered through Andrew is astonishing. He bought me Terror of the Autons, the Jon Pertwee era Doctor Who serial for my birthday when it came out on VHS, thus - against all expectations - reintroducing me to a show about which I had all but forgotten; and that led to the books, which inadvertently led to an interest in Prehispanic Mexico, which ultimately led to my moving to Texas and getting married, and to my writing Against Nature - roughly speaking my third novel and the first to be published.

In short, I can't even begin to imagine where I would have been right now were it not for Andrew. I only wish he were here too.