Double-Cut McKenna

Double-Cut McKenna was a man outa time

Hopped the train to Memphis til the end of the line

When the guard demanded tickets it was surely unwise

A moment of pure tension as the two locked eyes

Then Double-Cut McKenna sliced him up with both knives

Double-Cut McKenna got his ass off the train

Guitar case in one hand, a grim smile on his face

Made his way to Beale Street where the music was blue

Drank his fill of whisky in a filthy saloon

Baby let me tell ya he was dancing with doom

His guitar safe encased the whole damn time

The barkeep laughed at him: you gonna play for us or sit?

Or are you just another poser thick in his drink?

I bet there ain't even no guitar in that thing

Double-Cut McKenna stared from under his hat

Eyes of raging fire shut the barman down flat

No-one talks to Double-Cut McKenna like that

He said:

Listen here, Slick, cause you’re coming down fast

and your mind is writing cheques that your body can’t cash

you better hope it’s quick when fate comes back for you

So listen here, Slick, cause these words are my last

and your mouth is writing cheques that your fists can’t cash

you gonna get it double when the devil knocks on your door

Crumpled on the floor in a mess of crimson blood

A bartender who bore the brunt of Double-Cut’s grudge

The knifeman took his guitar out and picked out a tune

And all the whores stood silent, awed, enraptured by blues

Whilst the devil sneaked around them and cursed their souls

With each note a demon flew and cackled alive

Down the throats of every single person inside

And each one felt malevolence like nothing before

So Double-Cut McKenna made his way to the door

To ride the train, his only home forever

Some say that you can hear him in the clicks and the clacks

Strumming out those rhythms in the tunnels and tracks

Looped in time eternally paying off his debt

His punishment for cheating in a rigged game’s bet

And all who hear the devil’s tune will sing it out in terror

Of Double-Cut McKenna:

Listen here, Slick, cause you’re coming down fast

and your mind is writing cheques that your body can’t cash

you better hope it’s quick when fate comes back for you

So listen here, Slick, cause these words are my last

and your mouth is writing cheques that your fists can’t cash

you gonna get it double when the devil knocks on your door

No More Brown Paper Parcels

He’d love that one.

That’s perfect for her.

But there’s simply two fewer

to shop for this year.

No brown paper parcel

with slippers and socks

that were half the price

of the postage’s cost.

No charity cards

with soaring white doves;

no more cursive content,

no message of love.

And, in your notebook,

in your tidy hand,

addresses updated.

But nothing to send.

Exhausting, enraging.

Still unfair. Still sick.

Half-blind, reaching, flailing,

through translucent mist.

But when I see presents

that I’ll leave behind,

I will value the fact

that our lives intertwined,

Cause you taught this lesson

through all that you did:

It’s the thought that matters

not the price of the gift.

365 Days Into A Deal

“I’ll put you on this cutting edge medicine,” he said.

“But no alcohol. Deal?”

We shook on it.

(Even if I hadn’t agreed, he’d have put me on it. I mean it’s not a binding kinda zero sum thing is it.)

It was a good deal for me. My bones were turning into cinder toffee. My back had collapsed on itself. I had thirteen – 13 – pressure fractures in vertebrae. That’s a lot. It hurt. I couldn’t walk without sticks.

I've lost six inches in height after my spine collapsed. I'm lucky to be walking at all, I know that.

Thirty five years gone in one handshake.

I meant it, too. No alcohol. Deal. Shake. Done.

Fuck, the evenings were boring. Long. Weird.

Fuck, the journeys home were longer and bumpier.

But weirdly I didn’t mind going for a pint which was non-alcoholic. The main problem there is that you get bloated way quick.

That first pint, the cold, wonderful nectar on a hot day – still magnificent. So it wasn’t really the alcohol there that was doing it was it?

I’ve not been on a long-ass away trip with footy though. That’s a tricky one to navigate. But I probably will do it. And I probably will navigate it. (I reserve the right to access herbal medicine, though. Come off it).

I have to say that the Universe is doing its best to make me get pissed. But so far, I’ve managed to swerve that somehow.

And if I did slip, did drink – well, just don’t do it again. I mean that’s the way to be kind to yourself isn’t it. Nobody’s perfect and all that.

It gets easier. You can easily fill the time with searching for the perfect NA drink. It doesn’t exist in the same way that the perfect pint doesn’t exist, and nor should it. The fun is in the search and the trying and the putting-it-on-ice and the supping. The whole point of beer is that it’s there to be drunk then pissed away again. Alcohol or no. But after a couple of months it’s kind of a dull thing to consider anyway. Drink, don’t drink, who gives a fuck and what the hell was all that fuss about?

Stu, a brilliant writer and top bloke, said once that he hated drinking but wouldn’t stop. That’s familiar (he has stopped, and continues to be stopped, but if he slips – he’ll get back up and start stopping again). Wouldn’t, not couldn’t. I think that’s an important distinction.

Going For A Pint is alright isn’t it. Running to catch the offy and buying two bottles of cheap wine in case you run out and want a drink is not alright, I don’t think. Being a grown-up on paper means being able to buy small bottles for the journey home and a big bottle to have with dinner and another big bottle in case we want more after the big bottle runs out, and oh fuck it another one for tomorrow but yeah ok one more before bed and let's open it and away it all goes. Being an adult by dint of age means being able to buy a bottle of cheap rum and necking it all to chase down oblivion.

But you always wake up again and feel like shite.

If you drink, you get hungover so deal with it. I used to tell people and myself that all the time. It’s true but at some point drinking ceases to be social and fun and begins to be an activity that is circular and thus pointless. Drink-bed-wake up-work-drink-bed-wake up-work etc etc. That I could function for so long on that locus isn’t anything I’m proud of, or actually ashamed of either, and now each and every second of every minute my bones tell me I fucked it up.

Mind you, says a little voice in my brain, it could easily just be a quirk of genetics.

Also true, I suppose. Also true.

I mean I smoked like an absolute bastard for 10 years nearly exactly: 20-40 rollies a day, unfiltered. Cough cough, horrendous stink, and my desk was a fucking nightmare of ash and crud. Disgusting, really. Now that’s a fool’s game, smoking. Terrible. Bad For The Bones. (The worst blues song of all time.) I’ve done nearly 20 years off of that stupid shit and I think technically it means I am back to the baseline of a non-smoker. That does feel good.

So a year NA done and I don’t think I feel a single iota better in general, given the pain and whatnot. On the other hand, maybe I’ll get to still be able to walk properly for the rest of my days. On the other foot. Strange phrasing. Strange days.

Stopping getting drunk, stopping taking alcohol, is not the same as stopping smoking was. I did like being drunk – sometimes. What’s the equivalent for a smoker? A really nice cigarette? Nah. They do exist now and again, nice cigarettes, and sometimes a rollie could inexplicably taste of coffee or something. Tastebuds burning out with a last flourish, is all. Drinking leads to being drunk. Turning the world off outside and inside your head, if you’re lucky. But a lot of the time it just pokes demons and traps them inside you, which is way worse. And the doom’s never too far away.

Taking alcohol. That's how David Nutt describes it in his ace book about it. Taking it. A drug. If only that framing dominated.

A year. My mind is clearer, I think. I used to think I could feel my brain losing its power. Maybe I could. Maybe my vocabulary’s returning: I can even remember where I am in books I’m reading now.

Still, if they invented alcohol without the bone-crumbling side of it I’d probably be one of the first in line to give it a go. As I write that I can hear most of my brain railing against the prospect. That’s gotta be good, hasn’t it. Something's being reprogrammed. Overwritten. Tentatively, then stronger.

Logic has nothing to do with it, though. Feeling will always take the lead. Alcohol without the bad shit? Bring on the cocktails: I’d line them up and neck them one by one, and let the devil take the hindmost.

The cutting-edge medicine doesn’t appear to have done a great deal for me. I’m not gonna have any more scans til the course is over, and I’m only just coming up to about a year on it. The first year of two. Perhaps by the end of the 24 months I’ll be absolutely flying and pain-free. At this moment I am neither. Trying to calibrate various pain-relieving tips and tricks, medicines from various plants and molecules. Some send me to semi-sleep. Some put a half-smile on my face. But none of them have the wonderful, deeply treacherous blanket of familiar sinking self-abused comfort as a quarter bottle of whisky does. So they pale in comparison.

Hey though. A year. That’s good. That’s great. I don’t need to drink and never did. I needed to fuck everything off, including my whizzing brain. And alcohol could do that. A bit. Sometimes.

All I need to do is walk (stumble, stagger, limp) less than 50 yards and I could re-up my booze again. It’s legal and I’m old enough to do it. I just haven’t for a year, and I don’t think I’m going to do it today either.

No guarantees, mind. Just a handshake with a consultant a year ago. 

Really though it was finally a handshake with myself.

Ultimately, that’s the only real deal that ever matters.

Beats Surrender

I’m having second third fourth thoughts about The Beats

Daddy

O.

See: Kerouac. Well. I read him dry when I was 16. 17. 18.

and

thought

He and his crew were cool. They were not. They are

try

hards.

Burroughs? Murdering junkie dickhead rich kid idolised then

and

now;

Think they all went to see him. Cobain recorded with him

didn’t

he?

But it was all on paper, see. When it really, and it did, come down

to

it

They looked after number one first. Left trails of wives

and

kids -

Their own or others' - from coast to coast and wherever else

they

fled.

I suppose Howl is good and On the Road captures something of

their

essence,

And that they kinda smashed thru the 1950s to enable the 1960s,

but

then

The 1960s and their psychedelia inevitably dribbled into the 1970s

heroin/

coke;

One drug makes you a boring weasel and the other so full of shit that you won’t

shut

up.

Well, I suppose it depends on how closely, or how wide you decide to focus

your

lens,

And I suppose therefore and thus the fact we know to focus

our

lenses

Is a kind of testament to how the Beats did have an impact, even if

it’s

irritating,

And even if their morals and ethics and pseudo-Buddhist proclamations

are

moronic.

Cast No Shadow

‘Bittersweet Symphony’ 

I one hundred percent understand this now. I mean. Fuck. It’s about his dad dying isn’t it. I think most of his songs were around then.

-

I think you have to have lost someone. No, not lost. They have to have died, then you can really get the actual sentiment of this stuff. Not sentiment. That word seems weak. 

The song of it. The primality. The expression. The confession.

I used to write about music using words like that years ago too. But I only had the odd glimpse of the real significance. I wasn't equipped by life yet.

Now I understand it more it’s too big to even comprehend how someone can distil that into a four-minute pop song.

I suppose that string sample helped, but if you really listen to it at the start there’s some absolutely beautiful synthy keyboard work that is tuned and in tune but not really transcribable notes. It gives the song a breathless itchy forward motion.

-

That’s why that video of Richard Ashcroft walking down a street and people bouncing off him is so good too.

I always thought it was just him being a cokey New Lad Twat at the time and – well, it was, a bit. But also and underneath it was the sense that no matter what, then you are forced to be, or cursed with, ever walking forwards. The destination is not as important as the motion. 

People come in and out of your life; some bounce off. Some you shrug off. Some face you and sneer. Some turn away. Some even smile and challenge like the girl near the end. She is hope. She is the reason, if there was one, to travel from where you were to where you are.

At the end he’s joined by his band. Compadres. Cause friends can and do walk at least some of the way with you. They haven’t walked your entire path but there they are, and there you are.

We don’t know what will happen after the song ends, of course, and there the metaphors all break down. We’re back out of the track, the video, the conceit.

There’s a good case to be made that the conceit is life. 

A life.

-

Go back to the start of the video. Richard Ashcroft gets himself into position whilst the strings and the tuned non-notey synthy stuff begins.

He takes his first step when the drums and the band kick in.

But he’s ready, somehow.

So you can find agency, even if it’s not deviating from your forward motion-to-nowhere-in-particular.

NME And Me

NME used to be one of three music weeklies, if you can believe that, and there were also loads of music magazines knocking about. People were thirsty for music writing back then, and were happy to pay for it. Or, prepared to, anyway. The Internet has pretty much killed that way of thinking, particularly with news exclusives – even a daily paper couldn’t compete with social media’s unbelievable pace of scrolling new info. But back then we didn’t have broadband so there were no pics or music coming down the pipes.

NME and its ilk served as news aggregator, gatekeeper, trusted reviewer, and general touchstone for the current music scene. Because there was also Melody Maker, Record Mirror, and loads of mags to be had, you could find most of your bands across the various publications.

More than that, the only way to hear this new music was either by catching a song on the radio or by someone taping it for you. Someone with more money, or someone who knew someone who’d bought the original. You’d go ahead and buy the LP if you liked what you heard, most of the time. Originals were always better. You could double-check by going into a listening booth in the record shop and spinning the record to make sure. People with headphones, bopping away behind glass, every day of the week.

But you couldn’t do that with every band in the mag – you’d be there for days on end.

So NME and the rest would from time to time have cover-mounted compilations on cassette tape, then later on CD (and sometimes flexidisc, but that’s another matter for collectors to worry about). No extra charge: the paper, and a cassette of the music they were talking about – absolutely brilliant.

One week me and DD knocked up a load of cassette copies of our Dogshit on Toast EP Yamaha Potatoe, which had as its A-side a song called ‘Poppers Blues’, which was my mate on drums backing me on guitar doing a fairly dunderheaded 12-bar riff. DD’s job was to sing the lyrics and do a guitar solo.

Both takes – vocals, then the guitar - done whilst sniffing amyl nitrate constantly. DD can’t play the guitar at all anyway so it hardly made that much of a difference, although he was groaning for respite in the background. I think it’s got an authenticity to it that really does make the music quite extraordinary as a result.

We did the inlay cards, put stickers on the tapes, and whilst the Saturday staff were all busy in WH Smiths we stuck as many as we could to copies of that week’s NME.

So if you were wondering what the fuck that weirdo no-fi tape that you got free with the paper was that week, now you know.

Way before Banksy did that thing with Paris Hilton’s album. Way before. She might not even have been born yet.

Gloriously futile; but then, life is isn’t it?

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