The Spirit Lives (2008)

Originally published by The Fly

There’s a lot to be said for just standing onstage making a right old racket, amps up to 11 and eyes burning with belief as the sweat runs down the distended veins on your temple at the sheer damned visceral explosion inside. 

It’s how I spent a good couple of years in the old band, after all, scrapping around shoddy stages, smashing basses against faces and hammering out claw-fist rhythms in dust-clot basements with graffiti on the walls and piss dripping out from underneath scum-toilet doors.

It’s all well and dandy and a staple of the kind of primal therapy that underpins the motivation of the briny bastards at the bottom, scrabbling around in the purple-thorned undergrowth and revelling in the spirit as much as – more than – the music itself. The process is designed, or undertaken, to provide some kind of conduit to a power that’s hard to pin down but more powerful than anything else when it can be caught.

It is that self-same spirit of independent, alternative and slightly angsty gravel that underpins also a wider vision of music. It’s a spirit that runs through rock n roll music since day one; since Robert Johnson made his pact with devils unspoken at the crossroads, in truth, Johnson’s own muse having been borne on the horrors of the past itself. 

The same spirit and wariness of the establishment that catalysed rhythm and blues, that made Elvis Presley himself at one time a rebel, that fired up the Stones and The Who, that raked through the eyes and hearts of the Velvets, the Stooges, the Lost Boys: the spirit that powered punk rock, and any number of subsequent splinter factions since.

It’s the same spirit, too, that initially fired Jack White: you can hear it every time he explodes into sky-squeal; be it those pained, strained, excruciatingly beautifully fucked vocals or the craziness led by a guitar extortion, exhorting the instrument into greater, flame-filled, harridan-Hendrix flights of dastardly fancy. A sound-sourced grasp out of the darkness that bites and bristles at your neck, and your hair, and the pieces of clay within and it’s petrifying, in the best kind of way. In the White Stripes (if ever they’re going to play again) it is (or was) undeniable, Meg’s dum-dum drumming the simplest of tribal beats round which Jack could weave and tangle and gibber and fly, an instant fix of the primeval urge to blast back at the world in confusion or in joy.

In the slightly more conventional set-up of The Raconteurs his Icarus-soar is more controlled, counterpointed masterfully by Brendon Benson’s more fluid approach and the anchoring basslines beneath. Benson and White together is quite something, two virtuosos in tandem – the craftmaster and the wild-eyed visionary, and when the sparks fly, the venue lights up in astonishment. And when it comes together in something as magnificent as Blue Veins, you can start to understand Robert Johnson’s motivations in the first place.

It’s fair also to say that The Raconteurs would not countenance a gig in an underpowered, underlit, dangerously-wired shitehole. 

And nor should they, because the vibe of which we speak is not dependent on shouting at the spiders or useless, cheap excuses for amps. It doesn’t, and shouldn’t, follow that if you just turn it up loud and scream the spirit will appear. And conversely it obviously doesn’t follow that buying a vintage Custom SG and a Marshall 900 will make you play like Angus Young either. We can all reel off lists of over-polished, boring-arsed bands who could do with spending a few gigs running away from irate cowboys, fending off the attentions of over-eager flobbers and generally getting their smooth sides roughed up a bit.

It’s an odd one to pin down, really, which is why the most interesting manifestation of The Spirit at the Liverpool date of The Raconteurs was rather a surprise. It was, of course, there in some of Jack’s more incriminating licks, but that wasn’t quite the whole story. The band played, the sound was sharp and gravelly, and the drapes behind the group shivered, shook and undulated. And I realised: it’s there. In the shadowplay behind the lights there were dancing sprites of pure rock n roll, enticed by the music and the audience and the dusty dressing room, but brought through the portal between netherworlds by all and none of these things.

A little bemused, I looked round the room and ended up quite by chance looking at the lighting engineer who was rocking backwards and forwards, ratty, long, resplendent locks shaking and whirring behind his nodding head. I could see the whites of his eyes but the pupils were enormous. He was possessed by it and as I smiled and watched his fingers flit over the lighting desk like Stevie Wonder plays the Rhodes I realised that the engineer was a conduit, too. His desk was his instrument, the lights the manifestation of the same primitive urge of expression that Lemmy has when he ‘sings’ and Future Of The Left flirt with gleefully.

 In one split second a cymbal crashed, Jack White’s craw blasted unearthliness, Benson’s guitar squealed and a strobe flared vicious vindication. A gasp emanated from somewhere, and I was surprised to find out it was my own.

Suddenly I felt an uncontrollable urge to turn and face the lighting desk. I shivered: the engineer was staring right at me and I felt, I knew, I was staring into the eyes of a lion. Intimidating, powerful, and proud, it was a gaze of challenge and timelessness, of a world where rather more immediate rules of life and/or death applied.

I stood, transfixed, caught in the beam. The blood drained from my face; my heart missed a beat. I felt insignificant, and infinite, and I understood everything was part of a bigger, never-ending tale that was never truly meant to be fully spoken of; that never could be expressed aside from only partly in the occasional instant of cymbal-crash, lights-flash, guitar-smash. Suddenly the venue was silent, and time was irrelevant, and the world fell asunder, itself in thrall.

Point duly made, the lighting engineer shook his head and his dreads clicked as he looked away, his fingers prowled back to the vista of his desk, the venue snapped back into sharp focus as the crowd’s roar seeped back into my consciousness - and the band played on.

The true and melodious story of when I got bored and drank lots of cup of teas (2008)

There was a time not so long ago when I and lots of my music-making, writing, photographing, arseabout artists and ambivalent artisans were on the dole. Or, as Dave Davies, the hardest man in Bangor, would put it, ‘The Rock And Roll’. He battered Alan Minter once. Anyway. 

Generally, and in line with the alphabetised schedule of signing on, we’d have our giros on different days, even alternate weeks of the fortnightly cycle. This meant that our own financial ecosystem was nearly always rescued from the verge of utter extinction by this alphabetical serendipity; because we were all Rockin And Rollin we could always find just about enough to scrape a couple of quid together for a three litre bottle of Frosty Jack and quite possibly a half ounce of baccy. 

This made for some hugely forgettable nights, which is the general idea when you’re drinking white cider and can only deduce the previous evening’s entertainment – and personnel – by the occasional knocked-over ashtray, or a glass with the suspiciously lumpy remnants of someone’s final drink in it. Stepping over rumpled bodies, holding your nose, the morning after was triumphantly filled with hideously rancid gurgles from protesting guts.

Good times.

But there was, nonetheless, the occasional time where this fragile and pulchritudinous system of mutual support would fail, perhaps because one of our number had been forced to take a few weeks work to, as it were, zero the dole clock. And this meant that the darkest night before the dawn was damned dark. The night before giro day. The Thursday of distress. Strange things would happen on these days; the sofas had been ransacked for their pennystrewn contents, the house turned upside down for stray copper coins, the penny jars were laughing in their cobweb. 

There was no cash, anywhere. And we would wait for friends to come round, smokers who could be identified by the length of their butts; one of our number, a film-maker and affable cameraman, would leave nearly two thirds of an Embassy No. 1 unsmoked in the ashtray after a visit. Maybe he did it on purpose, now I come to think of it, cause he was and is an unremittingly grand duke of a man, but nonetheless on his exit the lynx-eyed scramble for these near-virgin butts was on. Another of our mob, a singer and beautifully wasted talent of a footballer, was superb at ekeing out rollies from fags – once, memorably, getting 10 new smokes from out of a single Royal.

It was not a unique situation, by any means: we were all at it, and it was tacitly accepted that talking about it outside the rock n rollers would probably lead to some awkward embarrassing situations. But it was fair game amongst us, because we all understood each other and without such trust the ecosystem would utterly fail.

The ashtrays at home would remain unemptied in awful anticipation of The Day Before Giro Day, and rightly so: an overflowing ashtray at such times became a box of tricks, a chamber of secrets and a lifesaver. Ironic. The horrendous soot would get everywhere; opening up old rollies for their unsmoked contents yields a range of different tobaccos in different phases of dryness but when it is a desperate situation then needs must. There’s many occasions where I can truthfully say I followed smokers round the city where I then lived, hoping that they would drop half a faggy marvel in the gutter and please don’t stand on that, I was hoping it would be for me.

It was grim, and it was wonderful. 

It was the day before giro day and I was skint.

And on one particular such occasion, when the ecosystem broke down and even the ashtrays were smoked to their utmost, and the sofas and the under-the-carpets were crying in their terror lest we try once more to ransack them for cider pennies, we were sitting together. Three of us, each as skint as the other and each smiling in unutterable boredom. The clocks stopped. There was nothing on television. We were sick of playing countless games of Goal. The cider had ran out. There stretched in front of us not just hours but lifetimes of anticipation, the wait for the green giro to plop through the letterbox as breathlessly unbearable as the eternal moments before your first kiss.

We sat, gormless, inside a fug of filth and squalid recycled smoke. Nobody could be arsed to move. It was beautiful.

Daniel scratched his bollocks. It sounded like someone scraping their nails down a blackboard.

Amazingly, he stood up as we watched him without any interest whatsoever in his vertical stance. A moment beated by as an ambulance went past the window.

“Anyone want a cup of tea?” he asked, in an intonation with all the resonance and interest of gruel.

Myself and the boy Andy grunted in assent.

“How many?” asked Daniel, for some reason.

“Seventeen” I said, for some reason.

And so seventeen teas he made; cup upon cup of No Frills tea-flavour pine-needle floor-scraping bag-type drink came out from the kitchen. He had called my bluff. So I called his bluff back and I started to drink.

The first three weren’t too bad; refreshing even. I had, after all, been subjecting my lungs to the sort of noxious emissions an eighteen-wheeled Monster Truck would be ashamed of. I felt rather lubricated, all told.

As mug four, five, six went down I started however to feel rather an ominous gurgle in the gut. No matter, Daniel and Andy were enjoying it and I was having a lot of fun in a hysterical kind of way. Nine, ten, eleven and the cups were starting to become lukewarm now. The milk – semi-skimmed, quite possibly the grubby UHT from the back of the cupboard – was cloying and sickly.

I began to sweat.

Daniel brought out more mugs; most had no handles, one was a milk jug and one was an empty coffee pot. Doggedly, I drank, and drank. Where it was going, I had no idea; fourteen, fifteen cups and the room began to spin and foam before my swimming eyes. More, more, and I thrust my last one down. Sixteen cups of tea. 

Daniel and Andy were by now doubled over on the floor, unable to breathe in their hilarity of pain.

My eyes rolled in my head and I felt light-brained and weird, my stomach was distended and now palpably sloshing. A cement mixer without sand, an ocean of tips.

I could hold it no more and ran to the bathroom upstairs (the same one I had decorated with blood not so long ago after an interesting nose/cider/floor configuration had been unwisely, semi-consciously undertaken). And so came the torrent.

The puke hit the toilet water and bounced back over my head, drenching me. The sound of the expulsion was like Brian Blessed exploding. And, head swimming, sweating, prickly with pain, I breathed and breathed in as much oxygen as my blackened lungs would allow. Not much. I puked, and I puked, and I puked. Minute after minute it came up, and up, and up. Unending, whirling, rancid and churning. It came, and it came, and it came.

Daniel and Andy were still pinned to the floor, spatchcocked in hysterical laughter downstairs. I could hear them, they were underwater but I could hear them. I staggered down toward them.

I rushed back upstairs immediately. I needed to piss.

It was the night before giro day.

I did not get a wink of sleep because every time I emptied my bladder it filled to bursting once more. I have no idea from whence it all came, but came it did and I slept no minute that night. Cold, shivering, pissing magic. Up, and down, like a fiddler’s elbow, like a wanker’s elbow. I could not settle, I twitched, and I went to piss.

And because I had not slept, and could not sleep, and was twitching and trembling, I heard the flutter of the post at 7am; a time I’d never have been usually up unless I was still up, or to put it another way, quite possibly still up. It was on this rare occasion my alarm clock rather than my signal to go to bed.

I smiled.

It was giro day.

I had only two hours to wait til the post office opened. And I finally slept because I knew the Night Before Giro Day was finally over. Until the next one.

There are thousands of ways in which people prove that they are fundamentally idiotic but now I come to think of it this one wasn’t really one. Because when it comes down to it someone’s giro will always come, friends are there because they believe in nothing more than happiness and they will never judge you by any standards aside from the moral code by which you share a bond.

 Everything is more important than money, but you need to have a tenner more than you can spend in your pocket in order to realise how true that is.

To those who left the party early

Caymanwent

Wearable poem no. 3

Wearable Poem 2

I am in Aldi on Tuesday night looking for wine and comfort food following a multi city video conference about poetry and alternative press

What is that smell? It’s like. No biscuits today. Bread looks good. Got some already. Sort of not barbecue but smoky. Cheap chocolate. Not the cheapest. Suzy asked me last time if I thought she was cooking with it. A joke. Not that funny. More ironic. Ironical? 39p for four bulbs of garlic. Roasted garlic. It is really something. Just squirting a bulb of brown roasted slimy roasted gorgeous garlic into my mouth is reason enough to be alive. Tomatoes. Shit raw, great cooked.

Gunpowder. That’s it. Cheap fucking jeans. Why gunpowder? I think I smelt it when I got them. Eight quid you get what you get. And people died in that factory building. Safe to read in Guardian, anyway. No collapses there. Words are fictions. I read that too. Olive oil. Nope. Two quid here, a fiver for a tiny bottle in the stupid hippy shop, rebranded as medicine. Lamb reared under humane standards. So cute in a field, tasty on a fork. It is indefensible. The tongue is mightier than the brain.

Breaded ham. Bearded ham. Gordon’s ALIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Gordonzola. Gianfranco Zola at the near post backheel flick goal a hunchback genius everyone loves him. I like it when John Terry cries, he crumples like a soggy biscuit dunked just a second too long in a nice cup of tea. Skimmed milk. Diet cola. Three bottles of wine. Cotes du Rhone. Coats of Rome. Pasta in the shape of cock and balls on sale next to Trevi Fountain. They say the water is bleached these days. And so what anyway. Tourists. Everyone hates and are, is, them.

Dark rum, white rum. No price difference. Curtis pours you extra if you tip him more. Wednesday club in the sun. Shorts on for four years. The first rule of Wednesday Club is: No girls. Unless they are serving us booze. Aqua Beach is bikini Wednesdays. Unbearable. British. The urge to look and appreciate is the same as the leer of guilt. Head down then passing a note to the bar manager. Aii dios mio.

Fucking jeans. Making me sick. Everyone can hear that smell. Yeah well done you idiot, put your stuff right at the back end and watch it trundle down to the till. Then we can all hold our nice heavy baskets for a few seconds longer. Fuck off. God if only I could kick you up the arse just once that would be reason enough to be... but not. Never as good as it seems. Not as grand as roast garlic. Garlic pills ten quid for 30. Four bulbs for 39p. Rots in the fridge in the Caribbean. Potatoes too, shit. Take my word for it, life is all about a perfect potato. You don’t know the half of it.

Shit is that all? Not even twenty quid. Why am I always surprised?

Ah fuck, I think I’ve been thinking in poetry prose bollocks.

Fucking conference calls.

Fuck off.