Mark

From September 1985 to August 1987 I lived in the village of Otham in Kent, specifically in Hollytree House, a cottage situated on the imaginatively named Otham Street. Hollytree House was student accommodation and cost me a tenner a week in rent, sharing with four others. I lived in student accommodation because I was a student taking a three-year degree course at Maidstone College of Art. My subject was fine art, specialising in film and video. I was taking the degree mainly because I'd had no other better defined direction in which to proceed after I left school.

My three years came to an end without my having formulated any clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life beyond that I knew what I didn't want to do; and unfortunately, as with both joining the army and working at McDonalds, it had turned out that fine art was one of the things I didn't want to do. Nor did I have much enthusiasm for working in television, the route taken by many others on my course, most of whom were significantly more motivated than myself. I'd discovered that I liked playing in a rock band and I enjoyed comic books - both reading and drawing them - none of which seemed likely to form the basis of a career.

The final term was fun while I managed to avoid dwelling on my distinctly uncertain and potentially miserable future out there in the big, bad world of rent, dole, and job centres. I knew the rude awakening was coming. Once college had finished, I stayed on at Hollytree House for as long as I could manage, although I knew I'd have to be out by October. I didn't want to move back in with my parents for obvious reasons, and yet I was scared to go forward, fearing whichever direction I took would almost certainly leave me beached somewhere I didn't want to be. Simultaneous to this, friends I'd made at college seemed to drift away. There were exceptions, but persons I'd considered myself on good terms with seemed distant, almost as though they were unable to work out what I was doing on their doorstep. I felt like the creepy older kid still turning up at the school gates long after leaving.

As might be gleaned from the above, I may not have been a whole lot of fun to hang around with; and my increasing sense of distance from the college environment brought a realisation, namely that I hadn't actually liked many of my fellow students in the first place. It wasn't that I actively disliked them, but we'd never had much in common. I didn't care about their world, or their aspirations, or that which they held to be of value. I found them self-involved. They had  too much faith in the art world, in contemporary art, and realms about which no-one sane gave a flying fuck.

So my friends were people I came to know through art college, or because I was there in Maidstone at that time rather than because we ate sandwiches at the same government subsidised refectory. A couple of these friends were people I knew from the White Horse, which was the village pub. Technically they were townies, as my fellow students would have referred to them, meaning they were of local origin, worked in regular jobs and probably didn't care a whole lot about abstract expressionism. You could probably substitute the term working class for townies without changing the relationship.

My time at Hollytree House was characterised by my sharing with four girls - as I would have deemed them at the time. I was myself too lacking in either maturity or testosterone-driven confidence to constitute a threat, or so I imagine, and I never tried to cop off with any of them because I never tried to cop off with anyone for the duration of those three years. Even had it seemed like a good idea, which it didn't, I wouldn't have known where to start. This domestic arrangement suited me, and I appreciated being spared the usual macho bullshit generated when you share a kitchen with young men. Naturally, everyone at the local pub was in love with the girls of Hollytree House, usually from afar, and being the token male I was often regarded as someone who might effect an introduction without it seeming too creepy. I never did because it almost always was too creepy. Some of the locals speculated on the topic of what I must get up to surrounded by all that fanny, as they delightfully put it; although half the time I was up the pub because I needed a break from the girl talk.

My townie friends at the pub were Bob, Dave, Mark, and Dez by default because he tended to hang out with the other three. Dez, who resembled Dickie Davies, was usually too drunk to form words and spent most of the time sat grinning and chuckling at a table, occasionally crooning People are Strange by the Doors in response to whatever had been said to him. Bob was, by his own terrifically blunt description, a cripple, having suffered from childhood polio which left him either on crutches or in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. It seemed fair to say that he hadn't had it easy, but his hardship had left him both socially fearless and blessed with a caustic sense of humour. Dave was a smartly dressed wide boy who worked at the local branch of Topman. He was only a few years older than me and was very funny, and we became close enough for the exchange of Christmas cards. I'm fairly sure I remember his initiating our friendship with a monologue along the lines of art and all that stuff you do - it's all bollocks innit, and I couldn't actually disagree. Our friendship was fortified by my ability to quote the lyrics of New Model Army's Vengeance in full, which impressed Dave no end.

'Here, come and listen to this,' he said to some hairy biker stood at the bar. This was Mark. He was roughly the same age, wore a leather jacket, and seemed as though he might be handy in a fight.

'What?' he said, looking unusually bored.

Dave pressed me to recite the lyrics to Vengeance a second time. After a minute of coaxing, I conceded because a refusal would have been even more embarrassing.

'Gets a thousand pound fine after months in court, while the lawyers get fat and the law gets bought,' I eventually concluded, voice wobbling like I was at school and had been told to read in front of the entire class.

'That's great, innit,' said Dave. 'Proper song!'

'What a load of bollocks,' Mark observed drily, not actually sounding like he cared either way.

'Don't you think those are great words?' Dave tried again.

'No, I don't.'

Somehow the ice was broken. Mark joined us at our table and we drank some more. I don't remember what we talked about because it was thirty fucking years ago, but there was a lot of laughter and we became good friends. It was unexpected because I'd grown up in a town full of bikers back in the Midlands, which hadn't left me well-disposed towards their type; and this guy was the real thing, but he was smart, and he was funny, and he was great company. It turned out he knew exactly what I was talking about when I told him about the denim clad spotty twats of my childhood in as diplomatic terms as I could muster. He had his own little gang of such kids as acolytes, mostly riding fizzies - junior's first motorbike in the late seventies, the one which makes a noise like a sewing machine. They followed him around and treated him like a guru, forever asking him to describe memorable road accidents and so on.

At the time I was busily writing and drawing a comic strip wherein the Dovers - the band for which I thrashed a guitar - had ludicrous escapades involving plots to take over the world, angry Gods, and the like. My fictitious version of the Dovers were managed by Richard Nixon, former president of the United States and now tenant of a bedsit in Lewisham, but most of the characters were people I knew; and Mark began to appear in the strip because he was a laugh and I didn't know many people who were. The continuing story - all made up as I went along, ran to about sixty or seventy pages before I ran out of steam. I'd intended to publish it as a series of fanzines but never got around to it, which was probably for the best.

One evening, I nervously showed Mark a few pages of the strip because he was in it and I'd recycled a few of his jokes. Amazingly he was flattered and thought it was great, at which point he mentioned his love of Paul Sample's Ogri, a strip which once appeared in the back of Bike magazine. It turned out that we both loved Ogri. My dad had read Bike regularly when I was a kid, and I always nicked his copy after he'd finished which, with hindsight, was probably what set me on the path to drawing comics in the first place.

In response to my strips, Mark read me some of his poetry. It came as a real surprise that he wrote poetry. I knew a couple of poets and they all seemed a bit neurotic, whereas Mark was more like an amiable Viking, someone who surely didn't need to write poetry but did it anyway. Anyway, I recall it as being very powerful, and enough so for me to get over my dislike of poetry, generally speaking.

This guy was a dark horse. He had hidden depths. The bikers I knew back in school days were mostly arseholes defined by the same patches sewn on all their denim jackets - logos of heavy metal bands occasionally drawn on by hand and spelled wrong if they couldn't get the patches - Judes Preist, Motohead, States Quo and the usual suspects; and if you weren't in their gang then you were almost certainly gay. They made it very easy for me to decide whether I really wanted to move away from the town in which I grew up.

Yet Mark was somehow sprung from a different branch of the same tree, and I realised there was something to that whole deal about not judging books by their covers. Mark thought about things. He didn't seem to care about running with the crowd or having a fave band as your entire identity.

After Otham, I moved to Chatham but we stayed in touch for a while. Mark asked me to paint something on his garage door. It was  decorated with a bottle of Newcastle brown ale which he'd painted on there a few years before. It impressed the hell out of me but Mark felt it was time for a change.

So one Sunday - October, 1987 from what I can work out, I went over to his home in Senacre Woods on the outskirts of Maidstone and, for want of any better ideas, spent the day painting a series of non-sequiturs in a cartoon form drawn from the comic strips I'd shown him.

I wasn't really sure what I was doing, but it seemed to go okay. Mark spent the day working on his bike just a few feet away, so we doubtless talked bollocks for the duration. I paused every so often to assess my progress, and also for a fag - cigarette breaks being an essential part of the creative process.

'That's the problem with this sort of work,' Mark observed in philosophical spirit as he stepped back from the bike to wipe oil from his hands. 'You keep forgetting to smoke.'

We lit up, and contemplated my efforts on his garage door. I felt a bit of a fraud and half expected my patron to ask, what the fuck were you thinking?, but somehow it was exactly what he'd wanted. It was a long day, but pleasant and satisfying just as the right sort of labour should be. It probably wasn't equivalent to that Pope asking Michelangelo for something nice on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but it was fun, and I liked creating art for someone who obviously appreciated it.

We lost touch soon after. I ended up moving around a lot over the next couple of years and lost touch with a lot of people, and by the time I'd noticed that Mark was among them, it seemed too late to do anything about it.

Thirty or so years later, I'm living in San Antonio, Texas, and the internet is a thing. Of all the long lost friends I'd managed to track down on social media, Mark remained frustratingly elusive; so it was a great day when he resurfaced on facebook, or when I resurfaced on facebook, depending on how you look at it. So much time had passed that I don't think we knew where to start, so we didn't, instead settling into the routine of occasional jovial exchanges. He'd changed, but not in a bad way, and he was still a warm, funny guy - one of those rare people you somehow can't imagine being disliked by anyone. We looked at pictures of each other's cats, and all of the usual thing. He asked me to design a tattoo for him but I never got around to it. I've never really understood tattoos and the idea that some shit I might come up with would be reproduced on an actual person felt like a lot of pressure, at least compared to painting over a lovingly rendered bottle of brown ale on a garage door.

More recently, I made vague plans to go and see him when I was back in England but it never worked out.

Now, as it has turned out, he's gone. I'm not sure I even realised he was ill. It seems incredible that one can be hit so hard by the passing of a person you haven't seen in decades, but I guess he made an unusually good impression.

There's not much more I can say.

He was my friend and it was a privilege to have known him.

It turns out that the above is more or less a rewrite of a more detailed post from eight years ago (when Mark was still with us but before he'd resurfaced on facebook) which, should anyone care, can be found here. This probably goes some way towards explaining why this is the first post on this blog in over a year.

 

World of Sport

We were in a pub having a drink, very probably watching some band when three young men approached our table - two white guys and a skinny Asian with a leather jacket and long hair. They wanted a quick word with my drinking companion, Popeye the Sailor Man. They were forming a band and wanted to know whether he would sing for them. I kept a diary going for most of 1985 and yet can find no reference to this encounter, although I've a hunch it may have been Saturday the 23rd of March, upon which I noted:

Today I went to Rochester flea market with Popeye the Sailor Man and Olive Oyl. I found out that I am not so overdrawn at the bank as I thought, and by quite a margin in fact. That cheered me up. We visited all sorts of shops and places. I like Olive Oyl. She is a nice person, childlike without being childish. I also met Rosa who was also nice. She is a professional fashion designer who has been in i-D magazine and Look Now! I watched Doctor Who, which was ace, and went to the Good Intent to see the Product who were excellent. Some flat-top beer wallies were slam dancing at the front, although surprisingly there was no violence. Popeye the Sailor Man did an hilarious impersonation of the really fat one. Olive Oyl also came to the pub a bit later. I love Chatham. It is such an interesting and diverse place with nice people and no arty types.

Obviously this wasn't really Popeye the Sailor Man. The individual concerned was hypothetically my best friend from our course at Maidstone College of Art. He lived in Chatham, and I laughed at all of his jokes and regarded him as a musical genius. We had little contact with each other once our course came to an end in 1987, but just enough to have subsequently fallen out for stupid reasons, specifically either because I posted unkind remarks about his favourite television programme on facebook, or because I think I'm cool but I'm really not, or because I've failed to remain exactly the same as I was thirty years ago. People change and these things happen, and these days he may as well be Popeye the Sailor Man so far as I'm concerned.

To get back to the point, I was there when Andy, Rajun, and Alun asked Popeye the Sailor Man to sing for their band. The band was called Apricot Brigade and was, I suppose, something in the general direction of contemporary psychedelia - nothing so obvious as a revival but approximately post-punk with occasional nods to the Doors or the less ponderous regions of Pink Floyd's oeuvre. By way of contrast, Popeye the Sailor Man was himself of a more traditionally gothic sensibility, tending towards tortured songs of self-loathing, regret, and that feeling you get when you've drunk the last of the rum with two days to go before you hit port. Oddly, the four of them all seemed to match each other quite well, and Apricot Brigade became regulars on the Medway live circuit, even attracting something of a following.

Then at some point which I've failed to record in my diary, presumably during either the spring or early summer of 1986 - I was asked to join the band. I was already in a band - Total Big, with my friends Carl and Chris - but whilst it was a lot of fun, Total Big hadn't quite been the sort of band of which I had ever envisioned myself as a member. It was loose and conspicuously lacking in Joy Division style bass lines, and I'd always aspired to something a little more self-important and po-faced. I didn't really see why I shouldn't be in more than one band at the same time - although I later learned this to have been the cause of some frowning for Carl and Chris; and besides, Popeye the Sailor Man and myself had played together with some frequency in the course of our respective solitary musical dabblings at college, and so it didn't seem like my joining his group would be such a wild leap.

Alun Jones - Apricot Brigade's drummer - had gone into the studio with the Dentists - a more conspicuously popular Medway band - and contributed to the recording of their Down and Out in Paris and Chatham EP around Easter 1986. This had inspired some debate over Alun's loyalties particularly as the Dentists had recently lost their previous drummer, Ian Greensmith. It was probably also significant that Alun and Popeye the Sailor Man didn't appear to get along particularly well, which with hindsight I would attribute to Alun having been a fairly good judge of character, possibly excepting his friendship with Bluto. Amongst the solo recordings made by Popeye the Sailor Man in the sound studio at Maidstone College of Art is a track called The World of Alun, apparently named in a general spirit of sneering at that which he considered saaaaaad in some respect, the world of Alun presumably being a modest realm characterised by jumpers your mum knitted for you, quite unlike Popeye the Sailor Man's important cosmopolitan multiverse of existential contemplation and tortured poetry. I chose not to notice it at the time, but Popeye the Sailor Man seemed stricken by a pathological need to define himself by means of his enemies, possibly adapting to the fact that he made enemies fairly easily. This was effected mainly through drinking to excess in combination with shagging whoever seemed available, activities which tended to generate self-loathing on his part and open hostility in others.

Popeye the Sailor Man inevitably regarded Alun's jumping ship as a betrayal on the scale of that which it might have been had their initial encounter been characterised by some sort of oath drawn in blood; but on the other hand it also meant that Alun graduated to a better band, one which released records, and that I was presented with a new opportunity for scowling meaningfully before a paying audience in the hope of some of them consenting to sexual intercourse with me.

Of course the most obvious objection to my replacing Alun as drummer was that I had no drum kit and no experience of playing one. I expect this may have initially made me something of a tough sale so far as Rajun and Andy were concerned given that they had no reason to view me as anything other than the scruffy bloke who always turned up at the pub with Popeye the Sailor Man and laughed at all his jokes. I was to operate a drum machine, play keyboard, and help take the band in a new direction. I had the feeling this new direction was driven mainly by Popeye the Sailor Man, but I could be wrong.

Uncle Fester - as Andy insisted we would now be called - had its first rehearsal at his dad's house in Chatham on Saturday the 14th of June, 1986. We worked our way through five or six Apricot Brigade songs, shifting them around a little so as to accommodate my presence. Rajun provided me with a Roland TR606 drum machine and Roland RS09 polyphonic keyboard, in addition to which I played manual electronic percussion on an MPC Industries Kit and Clap. I also had a small four channel mixer and a couple of Roland pedals to beef up the otherwise unimpressive rhythms I was either playing or programming. Andy provided an ironing board upon which I could set up all of this equipment; and if I wasn't playing two fingered organ melodies or tapping the pads, I was out front drumming away on whatever bits of metal were to hand. This was because it was 1986, and we weren't going to be left out of the loop in terms of what Nigel Ayers describes as fashionable metal percussion in the sleeve notes of Nocturnal Emissions' Drowning in a Sea of Bliss album.

So the line-up of World of Sport - as was Andy's next suggestion for a name, and the one we really should have stuck with - was Popeye the Sailor Man on rhythm guitar and vocals, Andy playing bass, Rajun playing lead, and myself doing something else depending on the song. I was in essence a musician without portfolio - possibly excepting the musician element - and this was probably what doomed me to failure, namely that I wasn't really required to do any one specific thing, and it was sometimes hard to tell quite what was expected of me; and given that I wasn't quite sure what I was doing, I tended to take a back seat.

Nevertheless, it was initially fun, not least being in a band which sounded more like the sort of thing I would listen to at home, and less like the sort of thing which traditionally would have had me as a member. To point out that the songs were self-involved and lacking in humour is at least as much of a dead end as suggesting that the Barron Knights lacked gravitas; and Rajun was a great guitarist, and Popeye the Sailor Man had a great voice. It sounded at least as dark and serious as the Sisters of Mercy, without necessarily resembling them; and it was fun in a social sense as well.

I would cycle the eight or so miles to Chatham every Friday evening, stay the night at Andy's place, and then we'd have a rehearsal on the Saturday depending on the state of the hangover incurred by Popeye the Sailor Man. Andy's dad never seemed to be around, and I don't even recall if I actually ever met the man. I believe Andy's mother had left some years before, so it was usually just the two of us. It was odd and a little awkward - although not to the point of being unpleasant - because I didn't really know Andy well enough to be staying at his house with such regularity but he was the only one with a spare bed. His house was spotless, almost a show home, large and suburban middle class of the kind associated with sitcoms in which Terry Scott shits himself because his Rabelasian boss is coming over for tea on the evening of June Whitfield having scheduled a visit from their unusually prudish vicar. I felt vaguely guilty simply walking through the front door, as though I might abruptly find myself sans trousers and about to deposit a turd dead centre of the pristine living room carpet before I knew what was happening. Additionally, while Andy was generally both amiable and very, very funny, he tended towards the sort of quiet reserve which leaves you wondering what he's thinking, even when he may not be thinking anything, which did nothing to allay the fear that I might be imposing upon his hospitality.

On one occasion I stayed at Rajun's house for some reason, although it was less practical, Rajun's house also being occupied by his parents and his brother, Prez. I'd met Prez a few times and got on well with him, and vaguely knew their parents from the Blue Lagoon, the combined burger bar and music venue they ran in the high street. I didn't know them so well as to strike a casual attitude when crossing the landing in the middle of the night in need of a pee only to encounter Rajun's dad stood glowering in the dark in just his pants.

'Hello, Mr. Amin,' I squeaked pitifully. 'Just needing the er...'

Mr. Amin glowered and said nothing.

Maybe he was sleepwalking.

Anyway, ambiguous silences and nudist fathers notwithstanding,  I got to know Andy and Rajun reasonably well and grew to enjoy their company. Peculiarly I even got to know Alun whom I had replaced, and found him considerably more personable than Popeye the Sailor Man, which was strange and unexpected. Despite Popeye the Sailor Man being the one member of the band whom I'd known for longer than five minutes, I never stayed at his place, if he even had a place at the time. Let's just assume that Olive Oyl probably didn't want strangers trudging through the house waking Swee'Pea.

At some point or other, we settled on Envy as the new name. Inspired by one of Andy's more surreal monologues, I'd come up with a logo for World of Sport - a candle burning gothically atop a football, but Envy sounded a bit like Greed, which was an album by the Swans, so that was it. As well as a name, we had our first gig - Friday the 8th of August, 1986 at Pickwicks in Rochester High Street. We were support to a band called Robert Underwater, and according to my notebook of the time our set comprised Pale Orchid, Cut So Deep, an untitled instrumental, Cat & Mouse, We Will Fall during which Andy had some trouble with his bass, Twenty-One Years, I Yam What I Yam*, No Sound, Goodnight, and Howling Moon. I don't remember anything about it because it was thirty years ago and I was almost certainly drunk, although I have a feeling Robert Underwater all wore sunglasses despite it being night time.

Our next date was Friday the 29th of August, 1986 at Churchills in Chatham as support to the Strookas and Swinging Time. Our set comprised the still untitled instrumental, No Sound, Carmilla, Goodnight, We Will Fall, Twenty-One Years, I'm Strong to the Finish 'Cause I Eats Me Spinach*, Cut So Deep, Pale Orchid, and Cat & Mouse. I have dim memories of this performance being better than the previous gig, but that I felt vaguely ridiculous in my role, essentially an imposter. The other three were producing music. I was pressing buttons or hunkering down on the floor to hit an empty petrol can with a tack hammer; and I wasn't the only one having doubts. In my sketchbook, a note dated to Saturday the 30th of August, 1986 reports:

Andy has just said he's left the band. He may have changed his mind by the morning, although I doubt that he will. I'm sad, and I hope that he does change his mind, but I can fully understand his decision. It's all gone bad - very bad. We argue constantly, and so far as I'm concerned a drum machine should provide fast bone crushing rhythms that kicks the audience in the teeth rather than something which could quite easily be replaced by a metronome. Also I'm sick and tired of having to apologise to Popeye the Sailor Man for pissing him off by finding myself sick and tired of his shit.

Andy changed his mind, and we played another gig at Churchills in Chatham as support to the Herbs and the Martini Slutz on Wednesday the 3rd of September, 1986, possibly not representing a significant improvement because in my sketchbook on the following Tuesday I note:

I am in a band of which I don't really know if I want to be a member. It isn't fun any more, and that should surely be the most important part of it. It isn't even as though I add anything to the equation.

Murmurs about the worth of my contribution accordingly began to emerge, mostly voiced by Popeye the Sailor Man, and unfortunately lacking any concrete suggestion of what was actually expected of me beyond some nebulous definition of loyalty dependent upon my understanding of how lucky I was to be in the group, and how many strings he had pulled to bring this about. I'd seen him pull this same sort of passive-aggressive shit before, and was at last beginning to recognise it for what it was - just Popeye the Sailor Man playing divide and rule.

So I contributed a song, not a very good song, but a song nonetheless. It was called Said I Was A Reptile and it sounded like Portion Control impersonating the Cure. We rehearsed it once at the Blue Lagoon, in the basement which also served as bar and music venue. It felt like a waste of everyone's time.

The next diary-equivalent note to appear in my sketchbook, and the last to refer to the group, dates to Wednesday the 17th of September, 1986 and reads thus:

Today was my twenty-first birthday. Andy gave me a small baseball bat so I can hit things during gigs. Envy played at Churchills in Chatham with the Sceptres. Our set comprised the instrumental, No Sound, We Will Fall, Twenty-One Years, Cut So Deep, Pale Orchid, Carmilla, Sailor's Hornpipe*, Goodnight, and Cat & Mouse.

I'd found some more old oil cans on a bit of waste ground, the kind which would have held three or four gallons, and I pounded these with the baseball bat during whichever song it was we had decided would benefit from inept metal bashing. It was probably a novelty in terms of Churchills, but doubtless looked absurd to anyone who'd ever been to see Test Department. Another couple of rehearsals slid past, possibly even a gig I failed to note in my sketchbook, and the moment inevitably came.

We need to have a talk.

It had been a decent Saturday afternoon on Rochester High Street, possibly following some sort of Dickens related public festival - more or less a weekly occurence in that part of the Medway towns - and I was as usual lightly but pleasantly drunk. We all went to sit upon the grass opposite what is now the Tara Baker Hair Studio, and may have been the Tara Baker Hair Studio even then for all I can remember. I had assumed we were just going to talk about stuff, but immediately realised it was a sacking.

'It's not working,' said Popeye the Sailor Man, making it clear that this wasn't something to be negotiated.

'But but but,' I countered ineffectively.

Andy stepped in with unexpected anger, pointing out just how many weeks I'd had in which to scour local rubbish dumps for the sort of scrap by which I would transform Envy into a sort of Kentish Einsturzende Neubauten, and how I hadn't actually done this. In fact it was difficult to say what I actually had brought to the group, and obviously he made a good point.

I had no defence, and although I'd become accustomed to the passive-aggressive observations of Popeye the Sailor Man, these harsh words from Andy came as a complete surprise and a shock. I don't think I'd even seen him angry before that moment. Weirdly, I started crying, which probably didn't help my case. I felt ashamed because I'd really wanted it to work, but I knew it had been a waste of time all along. Possibly the others had also known this, but it had still seemed like it was worth a try.

They carried on without me, acquiring a proper drummer, and continuing for as long as any of the respective members could stand to be in the same room as Popeye the Sailor Man, each eventually and inevitably making it onto his enemies list for one reason or another. I have seen both Rajun and Andy since, and it was great to see them again, and to be able to have a decent conversation without giving a shit about that stupid band we'd been in. I resumed full-time pissing about in Total Big, appreciating it all the more having briefly gone through the misery of being in a serious band performing songs about what is to be seen as one gazes stony faced into the blackness of the human soul vowing that never again shall those shallow fools laugh at thine tortured musings as scribbled in diseased hand upon the cursed parchment of eternity...

You live and learn.

*: Not really.

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.