Simon

It hasn't been a great week. It's been cold and I don't do well with the cold, which was one factor that eased my relocation to Texas. Christmas approaches with all the obligations of time spent in the company of persons whose company can be problematic. My wife is being messed about at her place of work. Carol died earlier in the week, and if I hadn't seen her in a couple of decades, it still felt rough even at such distance. Our neighbour has been whining about the cats again with his usual passive-aggressive charm, seemingly expecting me to tell him God knows what - maybe that I'd happily have them all put down rather than suffer another stray turd to be laid upon his beloved driveway; and Simon Morris is dead.

Simon was the vocalist and driving force of a group called the Ceramic Hobs. I first heard them at the tail end of the eighties, or possibly very early nineties - a couple of tracks someone had stuck on the end of a tape for me, and all I can remember was that they sounded like a bit of a racket. My initial impression wasn't great.

Around 1999, he sent a copy of Psychiatric Underground, the Ceramic Hobs first album, to the Sound Projector magazine with the words please feel free to give our CD a good slagging - we can handle it! I was writing reviews for the magazine at the time and Ed Pinsent, the editor, passed it on to me, suggesting that it seemed to be my sort of thing. I thought it sounded like a bit of a racket, but tried to write something positive:

It's certainly one of the more incoherent CDs I've come across. Tape collages are splattered across its twenty-eight tracks with all the ferocity of the pattern in the toilet bowl after a bout of swallie induced pebble-dashery. All mashed up with the tapes and a few techno inspired remixes is an assortment of occasionally tuneful punky numbers complete with gargled vocals, a drumkit being demolished, and a family of chimps at the mixing desk. They must've got through some PG Tips whilst this album was being made. Psychiatric Underground is like one of those kid's drawings of a circus where everything happens simultaneously, an interpretation which, if true to life, would mean that most circuses would last about five minutes.

Another stumbling block had been the association with Pumf Records, whom I recalled from the eighties back when I too had been involved in the whole DIY weirdy tapes by mail scene. To be fair, I hadn't actually heard any of their works, but had become jaded through a million flyers for Pumf products spilling from everything which came in the mail for a period of about a year. It had begun to feel like telemarketing; but then, I reasoned, there almost certainly would have been persons out there similarly weary of my own shittily photocopied self promotion. I swallowed my pride and struck up a correspondence with Stan of Pumf, and then also the Ceramic Hobs guitarist, reasoning that veterans of whatever it was that we both seemed to be veterans of should probably stick together.

Next came Straight Outta Rampton, the second Ceramic Hobs album, and the one where I finally felt I understood what the hell they were trying to do. The above description still applied, but somehow the random patterns had formed something weird and beautiful; and I suddenly felt guilty about having given Psychiatric Underground away and sent for a second copy; at which point Simon wrote to me to say thanks for the write up, but also:

It's weird to be writing to you really. In about 1983 when I was fourteen I used to correspond with Larry Peterson, and I distinctly remember a Do Easy flyer that he sent - that was you, wasn't it?

It was, and he told me that my writing was the best stuff in the Sound Projector - even though it clearly wasn't - which was nice, and we became pals. Musically speaking, I'd been working on the launch of my ill advised rap career, and it had occurred to me that it might be interesting were the impending CD to include a few voices other than my own. I'd heard Simon rap on tapes he'd recorded with Stan as Judge Mental and the Heavy Dread Beat - amongst other ludicrous names - and while his rapping was basic as fuck, it was also funny and made up for the shortfall with sheer anger. I sent him an instrumental and he sent me a vocal which I striped onto the four-track master without too much difficulty. Then I performed with the Ceramic Hobs when they played at the Garage in Islington, first time jumping on stage on the spur of the moment, and on the second occasion with more preparation. I think I may actually have thrown up on him on one of these two occasions, which is always a bonding experience. I doubt our collaboration made any difference to anyone's life, but they were fun, and we loosely kept in touch from that point on - despite my momentary emesis - through my moving to Texas, through the Ceramic Hobs splitting and then reforming in different configurations.

He suffered from schizophrenic episodes and mostly seemed to have it under control, but was mad by some definition - a term he embraced with punky enthusiasm - and was as such a square peg in a round hole world, as the best people tend to be. He was also fiercely intelligent and I found we agreed on most of the important stuff.

It's like he doesn't get the idea that all this arty music is just another form of showbiz, it's all product. I'm convinced of this so when people seem to swallow the false high/low culture divide it bugs me. The Ramones say more to me as art than Aphex Squarepusher laptop powerbook wank anyway.

As fellow graduates of a certain poorly defined thing, we knew a lot of the same people, same points of reference. When Robert Dellar, the Mad Pride activist who had arranged for the Ceramic Hobs to play at the Garage died at the end of 2016, I took it upon myself to produce some sort of anthology as either a tribute or an epitaph. The book was called Kiss of Life, and Simon's contribution was a letter explaining why he couldn't contribute.

My book from last year and the one out soon are full of death and obituaries. I feel like a fucking undertaker or something. I just can't face writing more stuff like that, not about Robert. Apologies again. You can use this paragraph if you like as an explanation of why I can't contribute - I am still much too upset basically.

I know the feeling.

More recently he urged me to get in touch with Philip Best of Consumer Electronics on the grounds of his having moved to Austin, just down the road from me, and arguably being another veteran of whatever the hell it had been when we were all much younger. Philip had been a member of Whitehouse so I was slightly terrified by the idea, but through Simon's persistent nagging I made the effort; and I'm glad I did because, as I now realise, Philip is one of the nicer - or at least less cunty - people I've met through association with noisy music, and he now runs Amphetamine Sulphate publishing which has been responsible for at least a couple of the greatest short novels I've ever read.

In addition to compiling the astonishing Black Pool Legacy, the double album which at last makes sense of the Ceramic Hobs sprawling body of work, Best also published three books by Simon, and I gather Simon had become a valued gate keeper and collaborator as editor of titles by Meg McCarville and others.

Then, just six months ago, while it would be absurd to suggest that we fell out, he pissed me off on facebook - although that hardly makes him unique. I made some comment about his beloved Electric Light Orchestra and he told me, get over yourself. I wouldn't have minded but the comment had been me taking the piss out of my own long-standing hatred of Jeff Lynne and all his infernal works, a joke amounting to here I am being a dick yet again; but he didn't seem to see the funny side and perhaps assumed I was simply being an actual dick. He suggested I would need to familiarise myself with one of their horrible songs in particular because I would be reading about it in Watching the Wheels, his forthcoming book from Amphetamine Sulphate.

That rather depends, I thought to myself, on whether I choose to buy your forthcoming book from Amphetamine Sulphate.

He'd also taken to posting status updates on what it's like to write books, what books should be, and so on, which I found a bit irritating. I unfollowed him and went off to think about that Nocturnal Emissions album I'd sent him as a freebie because I'd ended up with two copies. We hadn't fallen out, but it's always good to take a break, and I'd reconnect in a few months once he'd moved past delivering edicts and I'd grudgingly read Watching the Wheels, as we both knew I would. It was probably silly, but so is existence.

I vaguely followed his goings on through others. He came to read in Los Angeles at an Amphetamine Sulphate evening, and it was nice to know he was doing well and already had another book in the works.

Then about two weeks ago, all of those mutual friends were suddenly worried at his having gone missing from his home in Blackpool. He'd vanished below the radar on a couple of previous occasions, deactivating social media accounts whilst getting his head together, and I assumed this would be the same; although it was a little worrying that the police were now involved in looking for him.

He'd show up.

He'd turn up and there would be some new novel spun from this latest psychological turnpike.

Just this morning my wife came in from her morning run and told me his body had been found.

Simon is no longer with us.

Gone.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

I wonder at the folly of falling out - or at least going silent running - over Jeff bloody Lynne, but not for long. It wouldn't have made much difference to anything, I don't think.

I dig out his old letters and postcards. I listen to Black Pool Legacy and realise we really have lost one of the good 'uns, which likewise doesn't come as a surprise. I always knew it.

He was one of those people who made things interesting, who caused good things to happen, whose art - even with the bleakest and blackest of subjects under the microscope - could not help but sound optimistic, hopeful, even funny by some mechanism I couldn't even begin to understand. He struggled but he always seemed to come through. He made things better.

I will miss him.

The Christmas Concert

Having once been described as one of London's top two-thousand guitarists, I experienced an unfamiliar swell of pride the day Junior, now twelve years of age, brought an acoustic guitar home from school.

'He has to practice,' my wife told me. 'It's part of his homework, to practice for fifteen minutes. He'll be playing in the school concert at Christmas.'

The song Junior was required to practice was called How Much Longer Do I Have to Do This? It was an improvised piece performed by slashing away at the strings as hard as possible with a plectrum so as to produce a sound not unlike that heard on a Derek Bailey record, whilst holding down an occasional note with fingers of the other hand. Additionally the piece required that Junior purse his lips causing his two front teeth to protrude, puff out his cheeks, and go cross-eyed whilst playing, maintaining this special comedy face for the duration of the work, excepting pauses during which he would call to Bess how much longer do I have to do this? or how long has it been? or is it fifteen minutes yet?

I've come to dislike the special comedy face because it usually serves as a substitute for the sort of ordinary human interaction one might reasonably expect. It says I'm not going to answer the question or return the greeting but here, check this out - I think you'll agree that it's pretty darn funny. He pulled the special comedy face on my first day of married life, seven in the morning in the kitchen the day after the wedding. 'Good morning,' I said.

He pulled the special comedy face, stood far too close to me and jumped up and down in the certainty of this being hilarious, because at some point someone had told him that it was, and he hasn't listened to any of the less favourable reviews given since.

'Go away,' I suggested.

Bess explained that the avant-garde nature of his guitar recital was probably put on for my benefit, because he is yet to notice that the special comedy face doesn't really work for me. I retired to the room with the computer, the sanctuary in which I keep my mammoth collection of Doom Patrol comics and A.E. van Vogt science-fiction novels. The music from the front room settled into actual chords, hesitantly strummed, but impressive for a kid who had only picked up a guitar about a month before. I was fourteen when Santa first stuffed one into my stocking, and it took me two years to graduate beyond the bass line of Babylon's Burning picked out on just the two lowest strings.

I said as much to my wife. 'You know, he's not bad at all. I just wish he'd take it seriously instead of trying to be the great entertainer all the time.'

The next week or maybe the one after, he forgot to bring the guitar home from school, apparently having become accustomed to the idea that the point of other people is to remember things on your behalf, sort of like when Alfred reminds Master Bruce that it might be a good idea to fill her up next time he takes the Batmobile out for a spin.

Junior practiced on my guitar instead, breaking a string during a particularly energetic performance of How Much Longer Do I Have to Do This? I was displeased. 'I've been playing guitar for thirty-five years now,' I pointed out. 'In all that time, I've probably broken three or four strings. You've been going a month and yet here we are already.'

I bought new strings, dipping into Junior's allowance for funds, and he continued to practice. By December he still remained some way short of Segovia standards, but at least he no longer sounded like he was attempting selections from a Ramleh album. Now it's two Thursdays before Christmas and we're driving to the school. There's nowhere to park so we drop Junior off at the main entrance and head over to the adjacent park, one reputedly frequented by gentlemen who seek sexual liasons with strangers. It's dark, near pitch black due to it being seven in the evening and the absence of street lights, but no-one attempts sexual liasons with us and within minutes we are back at the school. The church - which is part of the same building - seems packed, so we sneak upstairs to the organ loft. No-one else is there and we have a much better view. It feels a little like we've broken in, like we are somewhere we shouldn't be, but there's no-one to chuck us out so we take seats. We sat up here last time I came to the school for one of Junior's concerts, so I suppose it should be okay. If we weren't meant to be up here, the door through which we came most likely would have been locked.

The pews are filling up down below, and there's a large herd of first graders fidgeting away at the front, green and red colours predominant. Everyone has been told to dress festively. Junior accordingly wears a red pullover with some sort of fluffy white arrangement up front and across the shoulders.

'There he is!' I point to the transept where a group of older kids, the sixth graders, stand around looking bored with their acoustic guitars. I notice how in his red and white top our man looks as though he's come as one of the Doom Patrol from this distance, specifically one of the Doom Patrol from when Paul Kupperberg was writing the comic. I quickly realise there's not much point in my sharing the observation with anyone.

I try to work out whether this is the first Christmas concert I've attended at this school, and what seasonal occurrence the previous concert I witnessed had acknowledged, but it's gone. I saw a couple of equivalent concerts at the previous institution, San Antonio Guantanamo for Boys as my wife and I refer to the place these days, and those were pure arseache. They seemed to go on for hours, and more than half of that time was taken up by the oratory of their used-car salesman of a principal clearly very much in love with the sound of his own adjectives. What is the magic of this thing we call San Antonio Guantanamo for Boys? he would rhetorically enquire with Disney brand sincerity before introducing a series of laboured skits.

'What do you want for Christmas, Lester?'

'Well I always wanted to go to sea, but I guess a boat would cost a whole lot of money.'

'You know, maybe we can all go to sea... in a Yellow Submarine!' and into the song, and it would be that for the next couple of hours, fail then cheese, then more fail and more cheese, then yet more fail and yet more cheese - jokes which wouldn't have made the grade on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-in, and the millionaires of Alamo Heights equating this with value for money with a degree of faith equivalent to Junior's belief in the special comedy face. So maybe the teachers weren't required to have any sort of formal teaching qualification, but all that filthy lucre must be paying for something good, and hey - they're singing Yellow Submarine! That is sooooooo cute!

Junior has been doing significantly better at this school, and no-one gets a headache when asked to attend events of this kind, so everyone is happy.

The first graders launch into song. The evening is a mixture of the traditional and the slightly cheesy but done with such generous spirit that no-one really minds; so we kick off with All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth, or something of the sort. The only real problem is that the once traditional arrangement of kids singing to the accompaniment of their music teacher at the piano has gone out the stained glass window, so we have the little ones singing to the backing of some karaoke instrumental sourced from a laptop at the side of the stage. It's okay, but the percussion on the instrumental skates a bit too close to drum & bass and is as such difficult to ignore, so the whole is a little weird and tends to overshadow the children's performance. This is a pity because they're probably the most tuneful bunch of nippers I've heard, certainly a great improvement on the assembled atonal fog hornery of my own school days.

After a few more songs, we get Silent Night scored for just kids and piano, which is wonderful except that they've given it a different tune for no good reason I can think of. The point of Christmas is surely, at least in part, tradition and repetition and doing the same thing you did last year and the year before. Silent Night was fine as it was. It didn't need jazzing up or improving.

Then we get bell ringing, both traditional carols and a few of the more Christmassy hits of the sixties, most of the actual music unfortunately coming from a laptop; and I consider that this road will eventually lead to Christmas concerts in which we sit around and listen to a recording of Bing Crosby whilst a child stands on stage and tries to keep time with a tambourine. It somehow suggests a lack of confidence in the children.

Junior shuffles on with his guitar, accompanied by another seven or eight kids with guitars. They all strum as the choir sings, and seemingly in time. Then at last we get a song for which every instrument is being played by a kid stood on the stage, even the percussion. It's the Little Drummer Boy, and it lurches here and there with some kids hanging onto previous bars a bit longer than necessary, but it has so much more feeling than the karaoke numbers. This is what we came to hear.

We leave happy as the concert ends, just an hour after it began, and we take with us all of the good stuff - the sweet, clear voices of the first graders, the enthusiasm of the children, and the pleasing knowledge of our boy having done well, holding it all together without feeling the need to break out the special comedy face. Back in the park, our car is where we left it and no-one has tried to have sex with it in our absence. As we head home, we briefly shudder as we remember the days of San Antonio Guantanamo for Boys, and we are endlessly thankful for all that we have now; so seasons greetings etc.

When Marian Fell over and It Was My Fault

The day is here, Saturday the 26th of November and I'm beginning to wish I hadn't mentioned this to Marian. I might have come along just with Rob, or with someone else more attuned to this kind of deal; and we would have had a great time, probably - but then Marian would want to know why I hadn't mentioned it to her, and I'm not going to tell lies, saying oh I just stayed in or whatever, not this early on. It's November, 2005 and we've been seeing each other since September. She would have torn me a new one had I kept this to myself, so I suppose it's not like I had a lot of choice.

You need to take me places to keep me interested, she'd told me as though this sort of ultimatum delivered in the unambiguous tone of a threat were a normal, healthy component of a loving relationship, as she terms our union. I get bored very easily, you see.

Also it turned out that she knew Nigel of the group Nocturnal Emissions. She had lived in the same row of squats in Lilford Road back in the eighties, back when I first started writing to him and getting my mum to make out cheques so I could buy his records. It was twenty or more years ago, and here we are now in the twenty-first century. What a small world it is.

I say she knew Nigel, although what I mean is that she apparently knew him very, very well - you might say - for a short while. At least that was what she told me with peculiar relish. I think she was trying to make me jealous, but I just found it weird. She hasn't seen him since before I left school. I on the other hand have stayed in touch with the guy, and so he told me about tonight's gig here at the Slimelight, as it's called.

It looks like it was once a factory of some kind before it was a club and music venue. I would describe it as a converted factory, except there hasn't really been much conversion. The walls and floors are brick and concrete and there's no heating, and the next day clean-up is probably performed by hose, with a broom to catch the broken glass. The place is full of dry ice and the lighting is poor. It doesn't feel at all like a place in which you would experience anything musical, and I suppose it could be argued that we don't, at least not until Nigel emerges from the fog to take the stage, but that comes later. In the meantime we are stumbling from one room to the next in search of Rob. He said he would be here. The place is full of skinheads in combat fatigues and knockery goth women of varying vintages strapped into military issue lingerie. Everyone looks stern, faces twisted with dark, industrial thoughts. It's a little intimidating.

Mentally I am attempting to assess whether Marian has grounds for complaint, because I know she's probably going to kick off quite soon. I'm not exactly sure what tells me this being as her mouth puckers like a dog's arse even when she's happy. It's like a sixth sense. I will remind her that she told me I would need to take her places in order to keep her interested without expressly stating any specific type of place; and I will remind her that we are here to see Nigel and how excited she has been at the prospect of this meeting by her own testimony; and I will make some attempt to appeal to her Bohemian tendencies. She's always going on about how great it was squatting in Camberwell, hanging out with performance artists on the front line and all that, and how we are about to experience the exact cultural opposite of The X-Factor and Stars in Their Eyes. This will be, by some definition, the real deal. Just look at that cracked concrete.

Years later I discover that she dropped out of the Slade after about six weeks, and she can't actually draw at all. She is without genuine artistic or even creative credentials beyond having briefly hung out with artists. Her native environment would probably be making tutting noises over the profiteroles at garden parties in Twickenham, which is I suppose why she's been rebelling ever since and why squatting seemed so exciting. Twenty fucking years - you would have thought that it would be time enough in which to perfect your schtick, but I guess whilst one may take the girl out of Twickers, it's another thing taking Twickers out of the girl.

We queue with the Judge Dredd extras, then we pay and go in and furnish ourselves with crap beer in plastic glasses which distort as you hold them, forcing the pissesque liquid up over the rim and onto the increasingly sticky concrete floor.

I love a party with an atmosphere.

The performers are Z'ev, Fckn'Bstrds, and Sektion B. Z'ev is doing his thing as we enter, rolling large metal objects around on the floor. The noise is terrific. I bought my first Z'ev record when I was still at school, and as I say Marian has led me to believe that she studied fine art at the Slade, so it doesn't occur to me that we, as a couple, are at any state of remove from what constitutes our comfort zone. That the first musical performance of the evening is a bloke throwing bits of metal around the room doesn't even seem worth commenting upon. Fckn'Bstrds - if they even played, and I'm not entirely sure that they did - make an electronic noise from the stage, fiddling with all of their little boxes and deafening us from behind the dry ice. Sektion B do the same but look more evil - camouflage gear and shaven heads.

'This is all a bit macho,' Marian observes during a break between screaming walls of feedback. She wrinkles her nose as though having noticed that Jonty has once again tracked dirt in from the stables.

'Yes,' I say, because I don't know what she expected. I told her it would be noisy and most likely involve a certain degree of frowning. I can recall no detail of my description which could have been misinterpreted so as to give rise to expectations of dinner jazz with a glass of white and some jolly old sandwiches.

'It's just that it's different for me,' she adds pointedly without actually referring directly to her own height. I myself am not tall, but the top of her head isn't even level with my shoulder. I guess she finds the fact of most people being taller than herself potentially intimidating, or at least this seems to have been the thrust of previous objections jabbed in the general direction of everyone else on the planet.

We encounter Rob at last, and - weirder still - Mark whom I knew at Maidstone College of Art, also twenty years earlier. Mark and I never really kept in touch, but we've run into each other at noisy events such as this gathering on a number of occasions. We can't really talk because Sektion B are deafening. I feel a little guilty seeing as Rob turned up on my invitation, and we hardly get to exchange three words during the course of the evening.

It's okay, he'll tell me a couple of days later, I knew you were with Marian and I didn't want to get in the way.

I will feel terrible, just some cunt abandoning his mates at the first sniff of anything in a skirt; but the truth is that I would rather speak to Rob or Mark. In fact I would rather not be here at all. I couldn't really care less about this noise. I couldn't really care less about seeing bands full stop. It's great when you're a teenager, but these days it's all two hour bus journeys crawling across London in the pissing rain to drink horrible overpriced beer and listen to music which sounded better on the record, ending with the horror of the night bus when it eventually turns up with its crew of angry drunken psychopaths.

Now Nocturnal Emissions are on - essentially just Nigel on stage with his laptop. The music is mostly from Collateral Salvage so it's approximately tuneful, and there are even a few people dancing. Against the odds, this small part of the club slowly begins to cheer the fuck up despite sticky concrete and freezing cold. We're standing on a packed dance floor in our coats, with gloves and woolly hats even, but at least the music is decent.

Nigel plays for about an hour, maybe a bit longer, and then  vanishes from the stage into a room at the side. Marian wants me to introduce her to Nigel.

'I thought you knew him?'

'I did, but it was a long time ago.'

Now I'm her PA, her personal assistant. We shuffle to the side of the stage, to a second doorway leading into the room containing Nigel and assorted noise musicians doubtless all busily snorting cocaine off photographs of Adolf Hitler. This second doorway is divided into two parts, upper and lower like that of a stable. I lean over and attract the attention of a passing skinhead.

'Mate, is Nigel back there?'

He effects a vague gesture, forming an excuse of some kind.

'No no,' I say. 'It's okay. He'll know who I am. Can you tell him Lawrence is here?' I'm aware that I sound like an arsehole, but I spoke to Nigel on the phone a few days ago so it seems justified. A moment later he emerges. Given that we haven't actually met in person since 1986 or whenever it was, it takes him a moment before he realises who I am; same with Marian, but the surprise is greater, a more unexpected pleasure. They stand yacking away for five or ten minutes, and I realise that I now really am just Marian's personal assistant.

How is Danny?

How is this person?

Whatever happened to so and so?

Nigel lives in Cornwall and has to leave because he's sleeping on somebody's sofa tonight. We also have to go, but first Marian needs to pee.

'Will you come with me?'

'What for?'

'Well, you know - this place...' She glances around. She is nervous. Some of these people are probably common labourers or the unemployed. Some of them might even be into drugs, and not the kind which put you in touch with the cosmos. I don't know if this is what she's thinking, but I expect it's a version of these thoughts shorn of anything directly contradicting her Bohemian self-image as being down with the working classes, black people, and the kids from the street.

'Okay,' I confirm without any trace of a sigh, at least none which could be used against me in a court of law. To be frank, I just want to get out of here. The longer we stay, the more something or other is going to be my fault. I already know that, Nigel excepted, she has hated most of the evening and is presently building up the case for the prosecution.

The toilets are suitably terrifying, more cracked concrete and splintered wood. I have to wonder if the place is legal as a venue, or whether somebody just broke in and set it up as one, except it seems unlikely given that the club has been around since at least 1994. Marian disappears into an empty cubicle and closes the door, holding it closed with her foot. I stand guard as specifically directed, watching the goths and the skinheads, reading the graffiti. I am a man hanging around in a toilet for no clear reason. I'm just following orders. I continue to admire the graffiti.

Behind me I hear the sound of Marian emerging. I begin to make some observation about that which has been written across the walls in colourful paint, but Marian is suddenly on the floor apparently having launched herself through the air. The fall looked painful. She's picking up her glasses and one of the lenses is broken. She has cut her leg and there is blood. I notice a crater in the cracked concrete just outside the cubicle from which Marian emerged, two or three inches deep and it's immediately obvious why she fell. She is spitting like a cat, violently shooing people away, goth girls stepping in to help should it be required. It isn't. She's screeching at me as though this is something I have done. I kneel down to help her up, to make sure that she is okay, and she is screaming at me. I am seriously fucking confused.

She's getting up telling me how stupid I am and how she doesn't need my help thank you very much. I have done quite enough already. I'm mentally replaying my inner CCTV footage over and over, trying to work out what I've done this time, but it's difficult to concentrate over the screeching presentation of the prosecution. I say nothing because I know any utterance of mine will now be wrong.

We get a taxi because there is no way I am standing at a bus stop for an hour in the freezing cold listening to the seemingly endless testimony of how shit I am. Why didn't I tell her that the Slimelight was a venue with massive craters in the floor? If I did not know this, then why did it not occur to me to call in advance and find out as to what sort of condition the building was in from a health and safety perspective? Why am I so stupid and selfish and why does she have to do everything herself?

Hello, I'm just calling to enquire as to whether there are any large holes in the floor of your venue. You see I'm very concerned about my girlfriend falling over.

Marian fell because I was in the way when she opened the lavatory door to effect her exit. She couldn't see and I was in the way, and she was distracted because I was talking, burbling on and on about nothing as I always do. She fell and in that moment she felt as though I didn't care, as though I was not protecting her.

I still give no answer because there is nothing I can say other than pointing out the obvious, that she is full of shit, and no way am I going there. I sit in silence in the back of the cab and take my punishment like a man. From time to time I say sorry because that seems to be what she wants to hear, although I'm pretty sure I haven't actually done anything wrong.

I am insensitive.

Marian was having the worst night anyone has ever had, and there she was pouring out her heart to me, and I said nothing for the duration of the cab ride because, as she points out, I am insensitive and selfish. Why did I not rush immediately to her aid after effectively pushing her over, causing her to fall? Where was I?

I point out that she was screaming about what an idiot I was and how it was all my fault before I even knew what was happening. I add that I am unconvinced of it being my fault, given my inabilty to control either matter or gravity in the immediate vicinity of my person by the power of mind alone. She doesn't even dignify this with a reply, and the fare costs me thirty quid.

Two hours later, she eventually concedes that she may have contributed in some small way to her own falling over in the bogs at a horrible club, and agrees that there is a lesson here, and that we could both have handled the situation better than we did.

A Conversation

Shaun, then marginally better known as a sound artist recording tapes under the name factor X, came to stay at my place on Lordship Lane, East Dulwich at some point during the summer of 1995. Jim came over for a drink and ended up sleeping on the sofa. Next morning, a little hung over, we listened to Ringo Starr's first post-Beatles solo album, a choice suggested by my having attempted to start my own religious sect based on worship of Ringo Starr as the luckiest man in the world and the true brains behind the Beatles. I pressed play and record on my tape recorder just as Shaun finished casting aspersions on my choice of music.

JIM: But you've got bad taste, Shaun.
LAWRENCE: Yeah... yeah...
JIM: Fuckin' square, mate.
SHAUN: Fair enough.
LAWRENCE: You will love these songs one day.
JIM: A lot of industrial bands owe their careers to Ringo.
SHAUN: But I'm not an industrial band.
JIM: I mean like what would Philip Best be without Ringo, you know?
SHAUN: Who?
JIM: Philip Best from Whitehouse.
SHAUN: Yeah, though he's a wanker isn't he!
JIM: He might be a wanker, but he's more successful than what you are, Shaun.
SHAUN: Eh?
JIM: He's more successful than what you are.
SHAUN: Well success isn't everything, is it?
JIM: No, but it's something.

Silence ensues as we listen to the coda of Oh My My.

SHAUN: That's a nice bit of sax.
LAWRENCE: Yes.
SHAUN: How old were you when you first heard the good news?
LAWRENCE: Eight probably.
SHAUN: Eight, yeah? Would you say that you were overly excited by it?
LAWRENCE: I remember liking it a lot at the time. It grew on me after I suddenly realised that Ringo was very good indeed. That was about two years ago.
SHAUN: Did you automatically associate Ringo with the Beatles or was it—
LAWRENCE: No.
SHAUN: You didn't?
LAWRENCE: No
SHAUN: So then you discovered—
JIM: Ringo was the Beatles.
SHAUN: Well, yes.
LAWRENCE: Yes.
SHAUN: So you discovered one song and then you discovered a whole backlog of amazing material?
LAWRENCE: Yes.
SHAUN: Some things have happened to me like that. They totally blow you away.
LAWRENCE: I didn't actually like it all at first. I bought my first Ringo album a couple of years ago—
SHAUN: You had to attune yourself to the material.
LAWRENCE: I thought this is terrible when I listened to it, but I ended up loving it, much more so than with the other three.
SHAUN: A living and a dead legend.
LAWRENCE: But only a legend because Ringo wanted him to be.
SHAUN: But that's a technicality for which there is no proof. Paul may be a millionaire but Ringo is a millionaire every single day.
LAWRENCE: Paul is universally hated though.
JIM: He's just a useless tosser
SHAUN: But not by most people, the ordinary Joe down the street.
LAWRENCE: I think if they were given the opportunity to really think about it, they would realise that they hated him as well.
JIM: He should have been shot just after he brought out The Frog Song - you know what I mean?
SHAUN: We don't want to dwell too much on Paul McCartney
JIM: He's irritating.
SHAUN: George Harrison is also more successful—
LAWRENCE: You're saying Ringo isn't successful?
SHAUN: No because I myself have listened to late Beatles records and the drumming has been rather spectacular.
LAWRENCE: Yeah.
SHAUN: Loose, half way between jazz and rock, and a little bit of expermentation there because he's finding his own rhythms.
JIM: Well he's a cool dude.
SHAUN: He is a good drummer. There's no-one like him, I must admit. Some of the Beatles told jokes about him being a bad drummer...
LAWRENCE: There was a question asked, is Ringo the best drummer in the world? and John Lennon said he's not even the best drummer in the Beatles.
JIM: Yeah—
LAWRENCE: And look what happened to him in 1980!
JIM: The last laugh was on Ringo, you know what I mean?
SHAUN: How do you think Ringo would feel if you met him and you said you liked him as much as you said you did?
LAWRENCE: I dunno.
SHAUN: Would he just think you're a stupid little squirt?
LAWRENCE: Well he might do, and if he thought that, I guess he would be right, really. I'll go with whatever Ringo decides.
SHAUN: So if Ringo says go and kill yourself, would you do it?
LAWRENCE: I'd have no hesitation.
SHAUN: Really?
LAWRENCE: Yeah. No... yes...
SHAUN: I don't think that's cool at all. I just think it's a cop-out.
LAWRENCE: Well—
SHAUN: With the snacks did you feel the Christian thing like the host, where you're eating part of Ringo in a way, like the bread and body of Ringo?
LAWRENCE: Yes and no. There are salt and vinegar Ringos and there are cheese and onion Ringos. After eating the cheese and onion I found out that Ringo is allergic to onions, so I realised then that Ringo wants us to suffer as he has suffered. So subsequently I enjoyed the salt and vinegar much more because I realised that Ringo would have enjoyed them more, you see.
SHAUN: So there is Christian ideology behind a lot of this?
JIM: Jesus wore women's clothes. Ringo is totally different.
SHAUN: I'm sure Ringo has a dress.
JIM: But Ringo wouldn't do it in public, and if he wants to wear a dress in the privacy of his own home, what's wrong with that? Anyway, he's got far better dress sense. I mean would you ever see Jesus wearing a waistcoat? You wouldn't, would you?
SHAUN: No.
JIM: You know where I'm coming from?
LAWRENCE: It's a good point.
JIM: Yeah.
LAWRENCE: The way I see it is that the Bible and all the world—
SHAUN: So are you two members of this Ringo fraternity?
JIM: No, I'm just a bystander. I will initiate at a later date but the time just isn't right for me.
SHAUN: Have you found Ringo in any way?
JIM: I've read the pamphlet
SHAUN: Yeah?
JIM: And it did move me.
SHAUN: It moved you.
JIM: Especially the bit on the back about Paul McCartney. That was a classic.
SHAUN: So would you say that you're getting into Ringo through the hatred of Paul McCartney?
JIM: Yeah, because Paul McCartney is a twat, ain't he, basically.
SHAUN: Allegedly.
LAWRENCE: Not to mince words.
JIM: I mean, married to Linda McCartney - that's reason enough to hate him, isn't it? I mean who wants to eat Linda McCartney's individual vegetarian pies?
LAWRENCE: I've got to admit those are quite nice actually.
JIM: But they're expensive. They're not nice because she made them though, are they?
LAWRENCE: No.
JIM: She's just cashing in.
SHAUN: Let's try and get back to the—
JIM: No listen, I've got something important—
SHAUN: To get back to the—
JIM: No listen - a packet of Ringos—
LAWRENCE: I've just noticed there's a picture of Linda McCartney on the cover of this album, so obviously some of Ringo's greatness has rubbed off on her.
JIM: How much are your average bag of Ringos, like twenty-five pence?
LAWRENCE: Something like that.
JIM: And there's a nourishing meal in each bag; and how much is one of Linda McCartney's individual little tarty pies out of Sainsbury's?
LAWRENCE: Exactly!
SHAUN: Have you ever thought of using this man as your spokesman?

DISCLAIMER: Any suggestions of killing oneself in the name of religious belief, or seemingly proposing the execution of any ex-Beatle as punishment due for the recording of We All Stand Together, or indeed any other remarks of a threatening or insulting nature transcribed above were made twenty years ago in the general spirit of humorous off-colour banter and as such should not be taken too seriously by the sort of individuals or agencies who make it their business to take this sort of crap too seriously.

Kids Farting into a Tape Recorder

I date the arrival of my first tape recorder to 1978, and almost certainly to my thirteenth birthday in September of that year. It was a Crown CTR-300, a mono portable and pretty basic, but nonetheless magical so far as I was concerned. Within a couple of weeks I'd got hold of a five pin DIN lead by which I could connect it to our family radio and tape songs from the Top 40 Countdown on Sunday evening, and amongst the first songs I recall having taped were Public Image Ltd's debut single, Germfree Adolescence by X-Ray Spex, and Tommy Gun by the Clash - all prominent around November 1978 according to Wikipedia. I almost certainly recorded other, patently shittier chart toppers during those early efforts to kill music through home-taping - Olivia Newton-John, Sarah Brightman and the like - but some subconscious process tends to select those memories which better allow me to think of my younger self as a cool little dude. I suppose we all do it to a greater or lesser extent.

It's all delusion of course, and I should probably be thankful that my formative recordings were all committed to a single ninety minute cassette, because I was unwilling to save up my pocket money and invest in a second tape; so any regrettable evidence of my once having enjoyed the rocktastic sounds of both Racey and Showaddywaddy were erased within weeks, and by 1979 I'd turned my single C90 into a canvas upon which was painted a moderately more creative effort which I vaguely remember calling Pirate Radio Burton. I'm no longer even sure I actually knew what a pirate radio station was, but I'd picked up the term somewhere and apparently liked the feel of it. I did all of the voices and played all of the characters, executing ham-fisted pre-pubescent parodies of things I'd seen on television, and it was shite, but even at the age of thirteen I understood my branding it pirate radio to be an ingenious acknowledgement of it being shite, which paradoxically made it even funnier, so I believed. Of the great and subsequently lost tonnage of comedy gold submitted to my crumbling overworked 129 metres of ferric oxide, all I can recall was a wry satirical sideways glance at the Cadbury's Flake advert from the telly comprising my attempt to sing the only the crumbliest, flakiest chocolate refrain, concluding with a racist observation likening the chocolate bar to a specific kind of penis; and because it was still the seventies and I was thirteen and nothing like so witty as I believed myself to be, I stood in our kitchen, proudly holding the tape recorder as I played Pirate Radio Burton to my mother, all twenty minutes of it including the racist penis joke. She laughed, although with hindsight I suspect it was probably uncomfortable laughter.

At least I was doing something creative, I suppose.

Eventually I graduated to more considered works, notably a semi-pornographic take on Keith Michell's Captain Beaky alternating the trumpet break lifted directly from the record with my spoken verses, toilet-humoured variations on the original turned to the cause of amusingly slanderous allegations made against my friend Gordon. By 1980, possibly due to an increase in pocket money, I had also graduated to the habit of buying a new cassette tape when I wanted to record something, in preference to adding another notionally archaeological layer to my long-suffering C90; and I took to making covers for these tapes, turning my felt-tipped pens to the design of amusingly titled compilations such as Songs for the Hard of Thinking.

Well, possibly not that amusingly titled, as I realised even at the time. Songs for the Hard of Thinking had a second and final volume before I switched to a new series of compilations of stuff taped off the radio under the banner of The Illegal Tapes as a witty challenge to the home-taping is killing music lobby - who seemed to be kicking up quite a fuss at the time - inlay cards rendered with Jamie Reid style ransom note lettering to show them I meant business. The Illegal Tapes volume one kicked off with a Simple Minds live set recorded from In Concert on Saturday 19th July 1980. This time I would get it right, I told myself: my own private library of free music, and only the cool stuff - no Racey, no Matchbox, and definitely no fucking Barron Knights. Novelty records were behind me now, given that I was a big boy and nearly fifteen, although my good stuff was not so Cromwellian a term as to exclude episodes of The Burkiss Way as broadcast on BBC Radio 4, a weekly comedy show which was actually funny despite the possibility of having provided some of the inspiration for Pirate Radio Burton. I've a vague feeling that the name the Pre-War Busconductors may have derived from The Burkiss Way, specifically from Fred Harris dully intoning an increasingly ludicrous itinerary of invented band names in parody of John Peel.

Regarding the Pre-War Busconductors, I was up to the eighth volume of The Illegal Tapes and for no reason I can remember, it occurred to me that it would be fun to take my tape recorder around to Grez's house and to record ourselves making a noise. Santa had furnished me with an acoustic guitar the previous Christmas, and Grez had been teaching me to play a few things - Babylon's Burning or Kings of the Wild Frontier plucked out on single strings.

Grez was in my class at school, and had weened me off the same four Beatles records by lending me a Devo album, which freaked me out at first but was ultimately for the best. I got to know Grez a little better and began to make regular trips to his house to listen to Stranglers albums, which was how I met Pete, a boy from the year above our own at school, and who lived in the same street as Grez. One evening I called around on Grez and found himself and Pete sat at the living room table inventing bands. They had exercise books and were drawing album covers for groups existing entirely in their own imaginations, chronologically ordered catalogues encompassing line-up changes, singles, b-sides and so on. I probably should have found it strange, but it seemed in some way related to my Songs for the Hard of Thinking compilations. Clearly it was some intensely personal thing, possibly not unlike having imaginary friends, and yet neither Pete nor Grez seemed particularly troubled that I had caught them engaged with such an indulgence.

On Saturday the 13th of September 1980, all of the above factors came together with our forming a band. We were around Grez's house. It was pissing with rain, too wet to do anything outside. We had instruments and it seemed like it might be fun, and the name Pre-War Busconductors had lodged in my head from somewhere or other. To be specific I recall the entire undertaking as having been my idea, as something to which I recruited the other two, but then it was a long time ago and most likely I'm remembering it wrong.

We had an acoustic guitar, a harmonica, and a semi-acoustic bass owned by Grez's older brother who never seemed to be around enough to object to our borrowing it. Also, Grez had an ITT Combat radio which came with its own microphone and could be used as an amplifier. It wasn't particularly loud, but we could produce a terrific overdriven din by placing the microphone inside the guitar. Somehow we also had a pair of drumsticks acquired from somewhere with which we bashed away at a drum kit assembled from whatever was to hand - cardboard boxes, an upturned biscuit tin, Grez's space hopper, and an Action Man assault craft - basically a big solid lump of injection-moulded plastic in the shape of a rubber dingy for your action figures - which made a great snare drum. The first problem we encountered was that we couldn't really play, although we didn't see this as either a problem or even necessarily relevant. Grez could handle a few hesitant chords - enough to hammer out something at least bearing passing resemblance to a tune; I could manage notes on one string, and if our collective sense of rhythm was a bit on the undeveloped side, we made up for it by enthusiastically failing to give a shit. More significantly, Pete could really sing and was spontaneously funny.

He was an unusual child, always seeming confident and quick witted, but occasionally he would overload and effect transformation into some kind of human jack-in-the-box, refusing to communicate in anything but siren noises and generally running riot. One of the most vivid episodes ended with myself and Grez stood in his driveway, both watching Pete bouncing up and down on a spacehopper on the garage roof whilst serenading us with a song comprising mostly bleeping noises. Grez was going wild because his parents were due home any moment.

Meanwhile back on that wet September afternoon, we'd just pressed play and record. Grez thrashed out an uneasy sequence of bar chords. I plucked out random arrhythmic notes on his brother's bass whilst singing in the voice of a thick person, like the little man from Monty Python with the knotted handkerchief on his head, or some skinhead grunting away on a television documentary. Diligently dropping my aitches, I made up the words as I went along, words which were repeated and even harmonised with embellishments by the astonishingly soulful Pete. This is punk at its worst, he half-sang, half-boasted as we came to the end of a chorus, and it was. That was the whole idea.

We all read Sounds music paper every week. Grez and Pete read Grez's brother's copy, and I'd been buyin' one for meself since about February; and if there was one fing we agreed upon it was 'ow much we enjoyed Garry Bushell's articles, albeit for the wrong reasons. For the most part we listened to the sort of music which Bushell 'ated, but nevertheless found ourselves drawn to his enthusiastic Alf Garnett-style traditional workin' class knees-up themed reviews of the Cockney Rejects, Angelic Upstarts, and others associated with Oi! music, as it 'ad become known. We were fifteen years of age, rustic, and clueless, but even we could see there was somethin' weird and 'ence immensely entertainin' in Bushell's testimony and the world 'e described as though terrified that anyone might ever mistake 'is little 'ooligan scene for anything posh, poofy or otherwise stuck up. Each time 'e set pen to paper, 'alf the word count was taken up wiv some wheedling testament to 'ow these boys weren't afraid to kick in a few 'eads if they didn't like the look of you, just so that we'd know his lads were the real fing and would put you in fackin' 'otspital, you caaaant; usually followed by disclaimers of 'ow they loved their mums and wouldn't 'urt a fly, and it was just workin' class culture wunnit, and it definitely ain't racist or nuffink to love yor country. He told us the Cockney Rejects were the best band he'd heard in two years and then quoted the lyrics, the immortal words:

I like punk and I like Sham,
I got nicked over West Ham.

Something about those two lines from Police Car entertained the living shit out of us, and I don't think it was just us either. I've since met people who've never heard a note of the Cockney Rejects, yet who are nevertheless familiar with that couplet. One evening we saw Oliver - one of the older kids who now worked at Discovery Records in Stratford-on-Avon - staggering home from the pub with a friend, singing those same lines from Police Car over and over, then muttering bloody brilliant and collapsing with laughter.

Of course, we all liked punk, and I for one liked Sham 69 and still play their records today; and it wasn't that we were better than the Cockney Rejects, or that there was anything wrong with good, honest, stupid fun, or that rock lyrics had to suggest something dripped from the quill of Shakespeare himself; but Police Car was just a bit too fucking stupid for its own good, and then there was Bushell trying far too hard with his desperate impersonation of a Cockney barrow boy, and this whole idea of taking pride in being a thick fucker, a position with which we were painfully well acquainted at school on a daily basis. We just couldn't not take the piss.

Accordingly I can't even bring myself to name our first ever song because the whole thing was horribly racist, and that was the point of it. We were trying to make something so stupid that even Bushell would have sighed, shaken his head in despair, and dismissed us with an amusingly witless quip about our being about as much use as a copy of Men Only in Larry Grayson's dressing room. I listen to the song now and it sounds like badly executed Alf Garnett, and I doubt anyone could ever take the words on face value; but it will nevertheless stay under wraps because even taking all of this into account, our first ever song remains uncomfortable listening. We were fifteen and had grown up in rural Warwickshire in the seventies, and there were two black kids at our school of about six-hundred. Black faces were not particularly common on British television, and although Pete, Grez and myself shared an inherent understanding of racism as essentially absurd and we listened to music by black artists, a certain lack of cultural sensitivity came with our environment. Racism seemed ridiculous and was therefore funny to us because we had no experience of it. I had learned nothing since that Flake advert on Pirate Radio Burton.

Five years later, my friend Garreth came to see me at the house in which I lived in the village of Otham, Kent. He was looking through my cassette tapes, all the Pre-War Busconductors albums with the hand-drawn artwork.

'What's this?' he asked, bewildered. He'd picked out the tape carrying the title which shall remain nameless, its general concept illustrated on the cover by four cartoon Pre-War Busconductors in smiling Al Jolson tribute, jazz hands and bones through noses above the somewhat unconvincing promise, a pisstake of racism.

'It's a piss-take of racism,' I explained unconvincingly, trying as hard as I could to sound casual, as though I hadn't just been rumbled. 'Like those skinhead bands, that sort of thing.'

I longed for the ground to swallow me whole, and in case it isn't obvious, Garreth was black.

'I understand,' he said, and I felt terrible - a king-sized arsehole.

I spoke about this to friends some years later, and it turns out that almost anyone of my generation and background who was ever in a band went through a phase of shocking Bushell-inspired ironic skinhead anthems.

The second song the Pre-War Busconductors ever recorded - just a few minutes later - was executed in much the same spirit of militant stupidity as the first, but thankfully without invoking Oi the Elephant in the Room. This elephant was Little Blue, the star of his own animated children's cartoon series who had taken his mummy's fountain pen and broken it in two. The ink had squirted in the water, as the theme song reported, staining him blue in colour, hence the title, with predictably hilarious consequences. I'd never seen the show and had no idea of the tune - which admittedly didn't make much difference - but Grez had, and he improvised an impressively nihilistic adaptation of the lyrics.

Little Blue, Little Blue,
Farting in the bath as some of us do,
He pulled out the plug and he got sucked down,
He couldn't swim so he had to drown.
The blood it spurted in the coffin - wow!
His mummy's got a dead boy noooooooow.....

We came up with two further tracks - a pitiful cover of the Stranglers' In the Shadows and something called Sodding Off - and that was our first session, immediately followed on volume eight of The Illegal Tapes by a couple of Jam singles I'd borrowed from Grez, When You're Young and The Eton Rifles. Playing back the tape and hearing our own clanking efforts alongside proper music like you would get on the radio seemed to legitimise what we were doing, and so we carried on, reconvening the very next day at my house to thrash out another four songs, notably a terrifying cover of the theme song for the children's show You and Me. Somehow it felt as though what we were doing was important, and it clearly wasn't just some one-off experiment.

We got together most weekends at whichever house contained the fewer parents and began to build up a body of work; and the more I listened back to our efforts, the better they sounded; and I realised it would make sense to have everything on one cassette. I borrowed Grez's tape recorder, plumbed it into mine with my five pin DIN lead, and copied all we had thus far recorded onto a single C90. This was to be our first album, and we came to this decision without being aware of the wider independent cassette scene which was just getting into gear at around the same time. I decided my tape label would be called Busconductor Records, and got out my felt-tipped pens and set to work on a cover.

In December we acquired a fourth member, Eggy who was in the same class as Grez and myself and had begun to wonder why we never seemed to be around at the weekend. He wasn't particularly musical, but it wasn't like he could make it any worse. We remained more or less a complete fucking racket for the first six months - enthusiastically cacophonous covers of whatever we felt like taking the piss out of, everything from the usual kid's show theme songs to the BeeGees' Tragedy; or potentially libellous songs about people at school; or further Bushell-inspired stupidity. Usually there was a tune tucked away in there somewhere behind the sound of something being banged hard to a rhythm more closely associated with home improvement than music; and usually there was some less melodic accompaniment, one of us honking away on the harmonica or similar. We would take it in turns to sing, depending on who had the most inspiration, and usually either Pete or Grez were the best at this, both having a better developed sense of surrealism than either Eggy or myself, even genuine wit you might call it; and so it didn't matter too much when Pete decided to sing an entirely different song to the one we'd apparently been playing, often a freshly improvised eulogy to the impressive girth of that which could be found within his trousers. Even pausing the performance to fart directly into the tape recorder made little difference to the thematic integrity of our songs.

The sum of the parts may have sounded a little less like a complete fucking racket were it not for our approach to mixing which amounted to each one of us trying to be either louder than the other three, or else nearest to the tape recorder; and the occasional disruption of proceedings by the intrusion of something so fucking funny it just couldn't wait: me yelling nipple blue into the condensing microphone as we recorded Little Blue for one example, which was funny because of tits, and because it sounded a bit like the title of the song. Nipples are rude, you see. This was why Pete and Grez were more suited to vocal duties than myself.

The elevated musicality of Grez and Pete was rudely illustrated when they went solo, breaking away as a duo under the name of the Desolate Accountants. Specifically it was Saturday the 15th of November, and we'd planned to convene as the Pre-War Busconductors, except I'd gone to the local cinema to see Breaking Glass at the last minute leaving the other two to their own devices - Eggy not yet having joined at that point. Desolate Accountants recordings were less raucous than those of the Pre-War Busconductors, and surprisingly musical in places because Grez could actually play and Pete could genuinely sing. Of all the cacophonous crap ever committed to tape by any combination of the four of us, the Desolate Accountants were the lot you might get away with pressing onto vinyl and selling to people, and in our small private universe their formation seemed to mean that we were not merely a band, but an actual scene. No longer feeling obliged to spontaneously piss about only when all members were present and incorrect, Grez and I recorded together as AA Book of the Road, and with Eggy as Half a Pound of Pork Sausages; and once Eggy had joined the Pre-War Busconductors, we rebranded the original three man line-up as Eddy & the Ogdens and recorded a series of Coronation Street themed cassettes.

Having acquired a second mono portable tape recorder - specifically a Panasonic RQ2106 - I was now able to bounce terrible quality backing tracks from tape to tape to produce my own multilayered solo material as the Post-War Busconductors, just like that Brian Eno. Grez similarly took to solo work as the Anthropod Lithontriptic Band, producing songs which, if poor in terms of recording quality, nevertheless still sound good today, at least to me. He was developing a definite style with the guitar and he really knew how to string a tune together, often using chords of his own invention; and it helped that he was witty, and that he really understood the romance of stupid:

Don't wanna take no exams.
Don't wanna take no CSE.
I just wanna break things,
And have bricks chucked at me.

Don't wanna know no long words.
Don't wanna learn to spell.
Every other word I say,
Is usually fucking hell.

Don't wanna live in a loony bin,
Or any snobs' place like that.
I just wanna smash in windows,
And go round being a prat.

This could have been half the kids at our school, and singing about it kept us sane.

The first Pre-War Busconductors album was completed in February 1981 and was named Little Blue after the cartoon elephant. I drew a cover, and Pete made a copy for himself, duplicating my cover in his own somewhat neater hand - it being another few months before any of us discovered the magic of the photocopiers which had only just begun to turn up in public libraries and the offices of estate agents. Neither Grez nor Eggy seemed too bothered about having  copies of our work, presumably preferring the performance. I on the other hand began to ruthlessly archive everything we did, even paying a few quid for the original tapes of the first two Desolate Accountants albums when Pete and Grez decided that they weren't very good and that they might as well record over them.

After the Sex Pistols, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, and all that self-aware Jamie Reid artwork, I'd become obsessed with the idea of music as mythology - for want of a better way of putting it - as an art form divorced from its own creation. The Pre-War Busconductors weren't so important as the understanding of ourselves as important, regardless of how scatalogically ludicrous the songs may have been - when you could even call them songs; and so I kept a copy of everything.

We recorded a traditional disappointing second album which was called PWBII, and then a third, by which point we had somehow began to develop rudimentary musical qualities. Grez was playing well, and I was at about the level of musicianship at which Grez had been when we started - good enough to pluck out a rough bass line on the Teisco electric guitar I'd bought for a tenner from Andy Scrivener down the sportsfield. Inevitably we began to play live concerts, although to be fair these concerts differed only from the studio recordings in so much as that we all cheered, clapped and whistled at the end of the songs, impersonating an audience, shouting out requests to ourselves and then introducing the next one as being a little something off our new album. Sometimes there would be a double bill of the Desolate Accountants and the Pre-War Busconductors, keeping the count of audience, support band, and headline act to just the same four people. The venues were our respective houses, usually when parents had gone out somewhere for the afternoon, although Grez's mum had become something of a regular at both our live performances and studio sessions.

'It's been going on all day and it's far too loud,' she would desperately opine, meaning we knew to limit ourselves to no more than another seven or eight numbers, and probably none of the angrier protest songs like Police Harassment. We always assumed disgruntled, temporarily deafened parents were exaggerating about the volume, and simply wanted to censor us because they were squares and their lives were over whilst we were the kids on the street with something to say, until one day, as the Desolate Accountants played live in the spare room of my house, I wandered out into our garden to see how much I could hear from out there. The spare room was on the top floor of a three story house, with only a small air vent in the wall overlooking the garden. Pete and Grez were playing acoustic instruments, without amplification, and yet somehow - even from about fifty yards distance through a thick wall - it sounded like angry giants fighting in a scrap yard, albeit marginally more tuneful.

Aside from the gigs at our respective houses, there were a couple of outdoor events too, one at the Nodder Nest - a secluded corner of the local sportsfield devoted to romantic pursuits, judging by all the spent johnnies - and the public bogs in the Telegraph Street car park. It was a quiet Wednesday afternoon as the town geared up for the royal wedding celebrations in the evening, and I kept watch while Pete and Grez vanished into said public lavatory with a guitar and a tape recorder. A moment later, a terrific noise emerged, amplified by the acoustics of ceramic tiles. It was a new song, one specifically tailored to the occasion.

Public bog - the place to be,
Public bog - the public lavatory.
Public bog - the place to be seen.
Public bog - the local latrine.
It really stinks around this place,
And you get peed in the face.

The song lasted about a minute, and then we ran away, laughing like hyaenas. As gigs went, it wasn't quite Elvis at Caesar's Palace, but as performance art it made even the best of them look like wankers.

We kept at it throughout 1981, relentlessly filling one cassette after another, slowly evolving towards a point at which the chaos began to sound almost composed. It wasn't so much that we'd improved as simply discovered our weaknesses and learned how to play to our strengths, such as they were. The songs remained essentially shambolic and puerile, but were easier on the ear in certain respects, and so our ambition increased accordingly - although more in terms of what we were already doing rather than becoming a real band or taking it needlessly seriously. In this adventurous spirit we wrote and recorded The Truth About Croydon, an epic undertaking by our standards spread across three C60s, a trilogy in fact. The Truth About Croydon was our Hard Day's Night, our Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, except it was on cassette tape rather than film for obvious reasons. The Truth About Croydon was partially autobiographical and mythologised the story of the Pre-War Busconductors, our formation and rise to imaginary fame, before going off on a traditional quest narrative in which we attempted to track down Simon Jordan, a kid we'd known at school who had supposedly gone to live in Croydon a few years earlier. We played ourselves as well as most of the other characters, but for the occasional bemused parent drafted in for lacklustre readings of it's been going on all day and it's far too loud, or my mum helping to recreate the historic phone call of that fateful day when Grez called and she had to tell him that I'd gone to see Breaking Glass. Of course there were songs - seminal numbers from the early days of the group for the historical section, then songs about what was happening within the story, new material for the fans - that being ourselves - effectively classifying the undertaking as musical theatre.

The Pre-War Busconductors became our identity, the closest thing we had to being in a gang. It gave us purpose, and of course an endless supply of jokes which only the four of us understood. Writing exercises in both French and English at school became marginally more engaging when we found ways to sneak in some mention of our band. If word didn't exactly get around, a few selected kids borrowed one of the two existing copies of Little Blue, although I don't really remember what they thought of it; excepting Steve Harris who apparently thought enough of it to join the band, becoming the potential fifth member but for only appearing at a couple of recording sessions; and three decades later my friend Crispin told me he'd always been impressed by my having recorded a song called Nine Inch Turd in the S-Bend.

Inevitably it couldn't last. Pete was the first to go due to his parents moving away. The rest of us carried on for a little bit, limping along with just the three of us but it wasn't the same, and sixteen seemed a bit old to still be thrashing out ironic covers of the Get Up and Go theme music. It was probably for the best in so much as circumstances pulled the plug on the Pre-War Busconductors before we started taking ourselves too seriously and bought real instruments. We sort of kept in touch, but something always seemed to get in the way, possibly ourselves.

By coincidence, Pete and I ended up at the same art college at the other end of the country, by which point he had his friends and I had mine. Grez went to university in London, then ended up dropping out under circumstances I never really liked to ask about given that he'd clearly had a rough time. Eggy lived about three streets away from me in London for a decade or more, and I only discovered this three weeks after he had moved to Dublin. I'm pretty sure I delivered his mail at one point without even realising. Similarly absurd - given that we'd all started out in rural Warwickshire - Pete ended up living at about two miles distance from where I had settled in London, and although we spoke to each other on the phone from time to time, we met on maybe two or three occasions at most.

He turned up with Grez on one such occasion and we got out the guitars and began recording. Pete's voice was as great as ever, and Grez had become an accomplished guitarist during the intervening decades, but somehow it was difficult to work out what we were trying to do or what we expected to get from the session. Forty-year old men chugging out a jazz-funk Eggs, Beans & Mayonnaise in 2006 would have been too depressing.

In 2015, having lived in Texas for four years, I flew back to England, to my mother's place in Coventry, with the intent of bringing back as much as I could of the crap for which I hadn't found room in all the boxes shipped over in 2012. This comprised mostly cassette tapes, and these had been left behind mainly because I wasn't sure what to do with them, and partially because I was scared of discovering that they were all blank, the ferric oxide having crumbled from the tape years before. Amazingly this not only turned out to not be the case, but the quality of them is astonishing - material taped over thirty-five years ago sounding as though it had been recorded just yesterday. I guess the lesson in this is not to take too much notice of the aggressive turnover of new and purportedly improved formats pushed by the music and consumer audio industries every five years or so.

I have all these cassettes, and I'm slowly digitising the collection so as to save it for posterity if and when the tapes finally degrade, as promised by those who want me to throw my lot in with downloads and soundbars, whatever the fuck those things are. I still find the songs funny and even kind of musical, or at least sonically interesting in places. I've spoken to Pete and Grez about this essentially archaeological exercise, but I can't tell what they make of it. I even have the impression - possibly wrongly - that Pete is in some way embarrassed by our body of work, possibly regarding Little Blue and others as damning evidence that he was once less cool than he is now; and whilst it's true that some of it is awful in certain respects, I can't see the point in regretting any of it. Nevertheless he insists it be not only kept to ourselves, but off the internet, and shared between us only in physical formats. Indeed, his concern has been expressed with such vigour that I considered giving him a false identity for the purpose of this essay, but the idea has struck me as ludicrous so he'll have to make do with my having withheld his surname. In any case, I can't see that he's even particularly likely to read this, so it probably won't make a lot of difference.

When each conversation with a friend concludes with either we really must meet up, or else we must do this more often, chances are it isn't going to happen, and there are usually good reasons why you've lost touch with each other, reasons which might seem awkward should they become subject to examination. The Pre-War Busconductors happened for a short time and it did its admittedly stupid job, and then slipped gracefully backwards into the realms of an origin story. Even if we all remember it differently and with different degrees of affection, it's how we came to be here, and this much will remain so long after the tapes have crumbled. The sad thing is that I sometimes wonder if those tapes of the four us farting into a tape recorder weren't as good as it will ever get, the last honest art made by any of us.

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.