by Mat Osman
One night, coming down off MDMA, Rae said, “I always thought that when some huge computer system took over the world like Skynet, it would at least be smart. Evil, but smart evil. Instead it’s going to be dumb as a toddler, and just as destructive.” I always think of that when I hear about “fluctuations in the market”.
Kimi phoned. I told her the Amazon story knowing she liked this stuff.
She said, “But this is exactly how life on Earth was born. Complex systems interacting, making self-replicating subsystems. Amazon will probably be the first company to become self-aware.”
I was only one cup of coffee in, so I tried to steer the conversation somewhere less sci-fi.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in Shanghai?”
Her Asian tour was supposed to start tomorrow.
“Chengdu,” she corrected, “and yes I’m supposed to be there right now, and no, I’m not. Because of this fucking volcano.”
“The Iceland one?” I’d seen something on TV but the sound had been down. It looked like a slo-mo nuclear explosion. “I didn’t have you down as the nervous type, it’s miles from where you’re going.”
“Don’t you watch the news? All flights are cancelled, it’s like some kind of disaster movie. Everyone’s grounded. There are distraught bankers buying second-hand Eurostar tickets for four figures.”
“So? Hire yourself a jet, live a little.”
“Firstly, Bran, they’re all already taken. Early risers and the airport shut-ins got them. Anyway, there’s the all the gear, the band, the projections. We’re going nowhere. I need to come over and talk to Kaspar about something this evening — you want to get dinner?”
How much did I need her? How much could I keep her at arm’s length?”
“I’m off to see Saul tonight. Can we make it tomorrow? I’ll have to recover from The North.”
It took a while to get used to driving on the left again but the traffic around London moved so slowly that I had plenty of time to readjust. It was bright and blowy and cold: funeral weather. Skimmed-milk skies dotted with scraps of fast-moving cloud and afterthoughts of rain. The car radio was set to Radio 4 and by the time I was out of London it made me feel like I was driving backwards into the 1950s. It was a carousel of cricket, gardening, the Archers and austerity. Unlistenable plays, god and the news. I stopped twice, smoking on muddy bits of land, watching fat kids laden with food bags from the service stations. I’d promised I wouldn’t use the sat-nav but after the third circuit around the Blackburn ring road flyover, with my hotel visible but inaccessible below me, I switched it on.
Saul didn’t have a mobile phone — the only such refusenik that I’d come across since my return — but the tendrils of the net had found a way. I’d emailed the booking agent for a Back to ’89 rave that he was playing and said I was interested in offering Saul some work. The agent sounded bored at the very idea. Saul was “unlikely to call” but I should “come see the show”. When I asked about backstage passes he just laughed.
I called him again from the hotel. He sounded amused that I had come all this way.
“I was wondering if I could catch Saul before the show.”
“I very much doubt that, even if he wanted to I’m not sure how you’d get hold of him. I guess he’s driving over from Hebden this evening.”
“Maybe I could catch him there, do you have the address?”
His laugh was shorter now. “No idea, we’re not really at the popping round for sherry stage.”
He was annoying me.
“Fine, what time is he on?”
“Whenever they fancy, not before four I’d warrant though.”
Fuck. I’d been hoping I could drive back to civilisation that night.
“Right. OK. And guestlist is on the door?”
There was a snort that set my phone’s speaker rattling.
“No passes. Buy a ticket like everyone else you tight cunt.”
“Of course, but how do I get backstage?”
“Just ask security, I said you were coming. But I wouldn’t stress. Backstage is going to be no better than out front, I doubt anyone’s fighting to get back there.”
Fuck and fuck. Four in the morning for the show and it was 4pm now. Twelve hours to kill in Blackburn. It was like one of those tests of ingenuity where they dropped cadets into the wilderness with just a box of matches and the clothes on their back. Still something that’d be easier to achieve than finding something interesting to do in Blackburn’s light industrial area.
Saul might be trickier than the others. I’d taken (however briefly) Baxter’s girlfriend, and the money that I owed Kimi was a fair old chunk, but Saul had been a friend before he was a band-mate. My very public fucking-up was on his shoulders once I’d disappeared. He that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed. Well it enriched me a bit. I tried to remember the last time I’d spoken with him. January ’99. “Praise You” at number one. Remote/Control a dead band walking, existing only in name and in the cold, cold hearts of our creditors.
There was a trend in LA towards less threatening bouncers — even the occasional woman, lighter on muscle and heavier on the let’s-talk-about-this attitude — but this idea had clearly not hit Blackburn. The two doormen were twitchy masses of muscle with the same lopsided boxers’ faces. A Doberman idled at the end of each one’s leash so now four faces were looking accusingly at me, just willing me to start something.
The slightly bigger, considerably more ugly one shone a torch in my face. “Ticket?”
He was twitching in a way that sent warning shots right across my bow. A steroid-head, the drugs even now trying to tug his short-fibre muscles ever tighter. He looked blankly at me. A walking 404 error if ever I saw one.
I turned towards the light and adopted my least threatening tone. “I’m a friend of Saul’s, he’s playing here tonight.” Nothing. I tried again only to be cut off with a low growl of “Tickets” again. I fished around in my pocket. “How much?”
“Twenty.” A hand reached out from the light source and I handed over the twenty. He switched the light off.
“He’s on in about ten minutes, you might just catch him before his set.”
I couldn’t work out what this place would be when it wasn’t being used for raves. It was high-ceilinged and topped with a corrugated iron roof that reflected back snare hits like pistol shots. Doorways around the edges gave way into municipal-looking spaces: olive corridors, windowless rooms with whiteboards, disabled toilets. As I walked through the din it didn’t get any clearer. Was that a cattle grid in the corner where the concrete floor sloped down? And what were the floor-to-ceiling poles that were festooned with laser lights and speakers? The music was brutally loud and so hollowed out that all I could hear was a harsh bottom end and nightmarish, cartoon vocals. The dancers flailed, eyes closed, and a row of smoke machines failed to give the hall any kind of atmosphere. What was missing from the kind of raves I remembered from the actual 1989? Young people, human interaction, that sweaty, E’d up close dancing/dry humping that for an indie kid like me had been the main attraction. Here the dancers were atomised, each lost in their own tiny forcefield.
The MC, a chubby, bald guy in a Chelsea top and bad jeans took to the mic. The music was faded hard, leaving us with his patter. “Oi oi oi OI OI OI OI.”
Around me everyone danced on. If they realised the music had stopped they showed no sign.
The MC did his ringmaster thing. “Ladiez and gennelmen, legends of the early days, Survivors of Spectrum, Shoom and the Blackburn raves. Bass-bin bangers and low-end legends, I give you Kontra Band and Risk E Bizznis.” No one looked up as they took the stage.
Klaxons, air horns and crowd noises filled the air. All on tape I guessed. Field recordings of those early days, made by someone who knew that it was going to be worth capturing the Summer of Love because the Winter of Hate was going to last decades.
A spray of dry ice failed to add an air
of mystery to Saul and his partner clambering on stage. He looked good. Still rangy and sharp-angled but gym-fit too now: biceps like something from an anatomy drawing, veins as thick as electrical cables. A weird pattern covered his arms and neck and he wore a glistening black headdress that reached nearly to his waist. He played a cycle of ominous chords on an old Korg.
I moved closer. Beside him a bespectacled black guy with the kind of fade I’d not seen since the Fresh Prince slowly shifted his weight from one foot to the other in time to the music in his head. He held the mike in his palms, rolled it like a cigar, looking pleadingly heavenwards.
Saul stacked up thick notes in horror-movie intervals until the speakers rattled with a high-end like knives being sharpened. Not quite music, just a shriek so invasive that even the mongs in the far corner had their arms in the air, then… without warning, he triggered a huge breakbeat, and he was jack-knifing back and forth in a troublingly Hitlerian way. Up, up and away with the knives again and then — as inevitable as taxes — the bass drop, the filling of the abyss. The singer began to unwind a pretty melody, his voice as supple as a teenager’s, skating across the rough surfaces of the noise. In front of me guys pogoed, made shapes in the air with fat, ringed fingers. A shirtless guy in sweatpants swallowed a couple of pills and then doubled over to throw up. On stage a snare roll drilled through eight bars, sixteen. The guy sightlessly felt in the puke for his undigested pills and swallowed them again. This time they stayed down. Eyes rolled back, fights broke out. It was fucking hellish.
The dressing room was behind the only closed door in the building. The agent had been right, it was no better here than outside, it was simply a place without the gurners. Saul was lying face down on a yoga mat between stacked filing cabinets. His shoulder blades rose and fell in time with some breathing exercise as the room vibrated to the music outside. Every ceiling panel and light fitting took the brunt of 140 explosions a minute, adding a brittle echo to the whomps of 808 kick. The singer sat in the corner with twin pillars of incense smoke rising either side of him. Even the smoke twitched in the air on the beat. He looked up as I entered and pushed a bare foot into Saul’s midriff.
“Not now,” he said, voice muffled by the mat.
“Your friend.” I caught a whiff of West Country in the voice.
Saul rolled onto his side and propped himself up on a bony elbow.
“Well look what the cat dragged in.”
Time had been annoyingly kind to him. He had one of those flat, angular faces that reminded you of sharks or those sharp-muzzled bulldogs, and his buzz-cut was as neat as an Action Man’s. At some point in the last twenty years he’d broken his nose, or more likely had it broken for him. It hadn’t been fixed properly and it added a quirkiness to a face that could otherwise be over-hard. He rolled himself smoothly up into a squat. Of course he did fucking yoga: it’s what his generation has instead of philosophy. The tattered bracelets and eastern tattoos told the story of his last twenty years more clearly than any bio.
“Enjoy the set?” He looked birdlike, perched there, his head tucked to one side.
What was the safest response? “I did. Amazing reaction you were getting, tons of energy.”
His partner had gone back to his book but kept shooting glances over his specs at us.
Saul pushed his chin up. “From that lot? They’d cheer a fucking car alarm if you put 138 bpm underneath it. What did you call them Andre?”
The singer folded down a page in his book. “Cyborgs,” he said. “Wind them up and off they go. Eight, nine hours at a time. Pure destruction of every single thing that made this scene so beautiful.”
It felt uncomfortable standing up, looming over him but there were no chairs in the room, so I squatted down myself. Again Andre shot a glance over his glasses at me. Saul had obviously said nothing good about me.
Saul switched his weight from one foot to the other. “So what brings you to the People’s Republic of Lancashire Brandon? Nostalgia?”
The two of us had met in a place not unlike this, back in ’88. I’d been living in the attic of an old student digs in Whalley Range, a turreted Victorian house full of nurses who’d arranged their shifts so that five bedrooms did for eight of them. Every time I went downstairs the space seemed to have shifted; rooms were divided by tacked-up sheets and beds had migrated into hallways. The only constants were the nylon uniforms drying over radiators and a fug of dope smoke. It wasn’t until Vegas that I found anywhere else so totally unconcerned with any outside concept of time. Four in the morning would find girls ironing in their underwear, eating cereal and gabbing on the phone. One in the afternoon and I’d have to pick my way through slumber parties full of facemasks and vodka-laced hot chocolates.
I wasn’t a student. I’d hitch-hiked my way up to Manchester to check out the scene from the music press: the Mondays and the Roses and the long-forgotten also-rans that followed them like Pig-Pen’s personal miasma. I rehearsed with bands called things like the Grooverobbers and Personal Devils in the cheap mornings at Strawberry Studios and slept in the afternoons. At night I’d watch band after band after band and try to hook up with like-minded individuals. The word was about parties up in the hills. Raves, orbitals, whatever. I got a flyer from a guy at Afflecks Palace who was handing them out to anyone whose trousers were the requisite width.
I went with three of the girls from downstairs. Nurses, with nurses’ glorious love for life, dancing and unmarked pills. Jammed into a Fiesta with malfunctioning heating, the windows dripping in condensation, the air heavy with bodyspray and booze sweats. When I look back I see it as in a film. A birds’ eye view, vertiginous above the moors, the line of the A666 (it’s true, the original Road To Hell, look it up) trickling through moorland. We swoop down, through thin clouds to a lane lined with parked cars, looking for all the world like they’d been dumped there, and a trickle of kids heading towards the noise. Saul I’d met outside on a dewy bank sheltered enough to be the designated joint-rolling spot. He’d been friendly, distracted, positive about everything while his hands and feet tapped metronomically to the beats from inside. He played guitar and keyboards, I sang; back then that was enough to form a band.
“Nostalgia? Yeah, not that. This is all a bit more hardcore than I remember.” Back in ’89 I thought driving fifty miles to neck unknown pills in a field was about as full-on as it got but compared with this horror show it seemed like some unspeakably innocent time.
Andre started up, “Scratch the music business and underneath it’s just criminals, criminals, criminals. That’s all the big labels ever were — an attempt to put some business between us and the thugs.”
My cue. “Well, how would you like to get back at them?”
Saul bounced on the balls of his feet. “Tell us at the house, this place is bad for the soul.”
They were on a sooty old Triumph Bonneville, so I had to get a taxi. I’d left the car behind because I’d thought the evening might get heavy but Saul and Andre were clearly clean-living now.
Everything about the cab was soporific: the warmth of the heater, the sickly air freshener, Magic FM from the front speakers. Outside looked alien after two decades of California. Drably green, littered with patient knots of rock and veined with scaly dry-stone walls. After a couple of miles burnished pools begin to appear in the hollows. The road was straight and gently rising, rising fast enough to pop my ears and give me pangs of envy for everyone in the planes flying above us. Keep. On. Moving.
Until. We took a long, looping right-hand curve and the lowlands opened up before us. In the distance the nuclear plant puffed clouds into the massed greys of morning.
“There you go,” said the driver, nodding towards it.
At first I thought he meant that Saul lived there but then I followed the line of the road down towards the entrance and saw a patch of colour by the road, a knot in the string. It was a wooden sailing boat, weather-beaten and as ship-shaped as a child’s drawing, sitting amid an exact square of b
lue. We reeled in the short miles of moorland and drew to a stop on the gravel outside.
The square of colour was bluebells, carpet-thick around the boat in a square so precise that it must have been trimmed with scissors. The stern disappeared into the swell of the earth, its prow rearing up to vault an invisible wave. It was painted white and navy. The masts reared back, pointing tattered sails at the sky. A limp skull-and-crossbones at the front and a smiley to the rear. I bent down to scoop up a handful of the gravel: seashells, crushed and soft-edged. Saul and Andre must have heard the car pull up because a gangway lowered from the side of the boat. They stood, arm in arm, in the doorway, like minor royals getting off a private plane.
“You made it.” Saul did not sound excited about the fact.
“I did. This place—” I encompassed it all in the sweep of an arm: the desiccated cacti in their gravel beds, the driftwood sculptures, the hopeless vegetable patch, “—looks amazing.”
Inside was too small for even the pair of them. With me there too every action was a choreography of “after you” and “mind the windows”. I sat on a low bench with my knees round my ears while Saul made tea. (“Herbal, mint, rooibos?” he asked. “Don’t you have any tea?” I countered.) For the first time since I crossed the Atlantic I wished Rae was with me. She’d have liked the Eastern crap that barnacled the boat’s walls — she knew her dreamcatchers from her mandalas — and they’d have been eating out of her hand. It all looked much of a muchness to me and I had an abiding fear that one of them would offer to read my palm.
“This is beautiful,” I said, voice raised over the whistle of a kettle, “It feels like the ark.”
Smiles bounced between them.
“We found it in Tintagel, you know the King Arthur place? We played a party on the cliffs there. It finished up about six in the morning and me and Saul went for a walk while the guy cashed up.”
“Still owes us two hundred,” said Saul.
“It was propped up on the beach there, deck gone, a hole in the side that you could walk right through, and we sat on the deck and watched the sun come up. We weren’t the first there.” His hand traced the wall beside him where names were cut into the wood. MO 4 AM, SKINS, hearts and crosses.
