by Tom Cox
‘It’s a belt. Why?’ said Edie.
‘And where will you be putting this belt?’
‘Around the top of my trousers, like most belts.’
‘So it won’t be dangling uselessly down your leg?’
‘No. What are you talking about?’
‘Nothing. Just checking.’
‘You’re weird.’
Clearly, I was being somewhat paranoid. I remained on guard, though. Okay, so I felt pretty sure that my best friends weren’t attending The Smash Hits Awards party behind my back, but that wasn’t to say that they weren’t whispering about me in an equally treacherous manner for being unusually old and boring for my age. The more I thought about it, the more it began to sound worryingly true. The unswerving penchant for the music of my parents’ generation, the golf, the fuzzy dressing gowns, the bowel-emulsifying aversion to nightclubs – perhaps, by normal standards, I was freakishly unteenage. I shuddered. Perhaps everyone who knew me thought this about me. Automatically my mind zipped back, microfiche-style, to a moment in 1991 when my golf mate – my golf mate – Ashley Bates had called me a ‘grandad’ for not dancing to The Shamen’s indie dance hit ‘Move Any Mountain’. Perhaps everyone who knew me had always thought this about me – even when I was a teenager.
I was being silly. This was rubbish. Unreasonable, obsessive madness. But I just wanted to make sure, and heading back to my old stomping ground and brushing the dust off some memories from my wild years before they slipped away from me for ever seemed like the best way to get confirmation. Also, by getting closer to The Ninny That I Used To Be, I felt I would gain a greater understanding of Peter.
Not that I told him any of this.
‘Let’s just say it’s a virtual music journey through 1992,’ I explained to him, as I pulled up the sliproad of junction 26 of the Ml. ‘Imagine it: Nirvana’s Nevermind on the listening posts in Virgin Megastore, Smashing Pumpkins on The Late Show.’
‘Cool,’ said Peter. ‘I don’t know what The Late Show is. But, like, you mean Nevermind will really be on the listening posts in Virgin?’
‘Well, no, I doubt it. But we can do our best to pretend it is. And there’ll be other things that really are genuinely like 1992. Such as crusties.’
‘What are they?’
‘Let me think of the best way to describe them . . . They’re kind of like the human version of some two-week-old toast that’s been left out in the rain. Not many of them exist any more, but most of the ones that do tend to linger around the stone lions in Nottingham Market Square. In 1992 they were big news. Some of them were genuinely homeless, but most of them were homeless as . . . well, I suppose as a lifestyle choice. They listened to The Levellers a lot.’
‘Who are The Levellers?’
‘They were a kind of pretend folk band for people who owned combat boots. They had names like Thrug and Sprout, and wrote this song which went “There’s only one way of life, and that’s your own”. Loads of people dressed identically used to punch the air and sing along to it at my local student nightclub.’
‘Ugh. Weird. But what do you mean? Like, how do you be homeless as a lifestyle choice?’
‘Well, for example, there was this girl who my mate John used to go to college with. Claudia, I think she was called. She lived in one of the biggest houses in Bramcote, which is like this pretty affluent suburb of Nottingham, but on a Saturday she would rub margarine on her hair, put on a combat jacket, attach the family terrier to a piece of string and walk around the Market Square pretending to be called Mucka.’
‘Why? Because she was mucky?’
‘Maybe . . .’
‘Is it true that if you leave your hair for long enough, it starts to wash itself? Raf said he heard it somewhere and was going to try it.’
‘Er . . . I’m not sure. I heard that too, but the only person I ever knew who tried it was this kid called Nigel who went to the Nottingham Boys’ High School, and I lost touch with him before the washing process had kicked in.’
‘What I want to know is: does your hair condition itself, too? And if not, how do you know when to condition it? I have enough problems with conditioning mine as it is.’
‘Mmm. It’s a good point. But we’re talking about hair again, aren’t we?’
‘Oh yeah. I’m growing mine at the moment.’
‘I noticed. It’s losing that straw mushroom thing.’
I pulled into the multi-storey car park of Nottingham’s Royal Hotel. To Peter, this might have seemed like any old car park, but in fact I’d chosen it very carefully. Like the remainder of today’s itinerary, it had a rock and roll history attached to it. For starters, it had been the place where I’d traditionally parked my mum and dad’s rusty Seventies Toyota while attending Alternative Night across the road at the East Midlands’ stickiest nightclub, Rock City. Additionally, it had been where Duran Duran had shot the inside cover photo for their Rio album. I thought about informing Peter of this last point, then reminded myself that I was being teenage today, and that during my adolescence I’d renounced Duran Duran as the height of uncool.
In order to get a true understanding of the way a teenager thinks, my initial idea had been to spend our Nottingham trip being my seventeen-year-old self. For a couple of days, I would drive like him, wear his clothes and call his old friends to invite them to Alternative Night. Peter, meanwhile, would pose as ‘Pezza’, my underage yet surprisingly grunge-savvy sidekick. In one sense, this was a more practical plan than one might have imagined (1992 seemed a lot less far away in Nottingham than it did in most other parts of the country), but there were the inevitable barriers.
1. I’d sold all my punk and grunge t-shirts at a flea market in 1995, in an attempt to raise funds for my first microwave.
2. Rick, of Rick Argues fame, now owned my Dead Kennedys baseball cap, and would no doubt argue if I said that I wanted it back.
3. Most of my grunge and punk friends’ phone numbers were now obsolete.
4. The chain on Peter’s trousers lacked grunge authenticity.
5. Alternative Night no longer existed.
6. The whole exercise would make me feel like a wanker.
There had to be another way to create our own educational time warp: it was right on the tip of my brain. I just needed to think it out. So I thought for a moment. Then, when I’d thought for a moment, I phoned Roland. It seemed kind of obvious, in retrospect.
I first met Roland in the summer of 1992, in the moshpit of a Senseless Things gig. I was the one moshing; Roland was flailing around at my feet, having been knocked over by an overzealous crusty. I helped him up and accompanied him to the bar – surreptitiously elbowing the crusty in the back on the way – and we got talking about our mutual love of the first Smashing Pumpkins album. Over the next three years, Roland would get knocked over a lot at gigs and in nightclubs, but would always remain in even humour. In fact, in the decade that I’d known him, I’d never seen Roland in bad humour – or particularly good humour, for that matter – about anything. Roland looked a little like a prematurely bald version of John F. Kennedy, but, when drunk, would miraculously transmute into Bob Hoskins. Yet even this unfortunate side-effect was not enough to upset his equilibrium.
My only reservation about Roland was that, even after dozens and dozens of gigs and Alternative Nights, I didn’t really feel like I knew who he was. I knew that he owned a limited edition copy of the first Stone Roses album with a much-sought-after bonus track, and I knew exactly what his favourite five Afghan Whigs b-sides were, in order, but I knew relatively little about The Real Roland: whether he was right or left wing or somewhere in the middle, whether he preferred Indian or Chinese takeaways, whether he’d ever cried after watching a sporting event, what his ambitions were, whom he fancied (who didn’t happen to be in a band), whom he aspired to emulate (who didn’t happen to be in a band). For Roland, music was a form of communication as well as an obsession. When you picked up the phone and said, ‘Hello,’ to him, he did
n’t say, ‘Hi, how are you?’, he said, without preamble, ‘I’ve just got the new Fuckweasel album on Dogwater Records out of Ohio – limited edition pressing of two hundred and thirty-one. Really low-fi.’
When I split up with my girlfriend of six and a half years, most of my friends talked to me in relative depth about it and enquired as to how I was feeling, but Roland just looked nervous, mumbled something sounding vaguely like ‘bummer’, and asked me if I still listened to the first Superchunk album or if I thought, on balance, the third one had a greater longevity. This kind of behaviour hadn’t seemed all that unusual to me back in 1993, when Roland was by no means the only male I knew whose principal form of social interaction constituted a game of Name The Lyric, but more recently it had started to come between us, and I’d got the impression that Roland was stuck in a perpetual cycle of the Indie Rock Years, 1992–95. Call it growing apart; call it a new set of priorities; or call it the fact that Roland had pushed a few too many of my female friends off the pavement in an attempt to talk to me about God Is My Co-Pilot’s unreleased demos. These days, we communicated primarily through a pair of monthly emails: the one from me, which would attempt to provide a round-up of the least mundane details of my everyday existence and make a perfunctory enquiry about life in the record store where Roland held a part-time job; and the one from Roland, which would attempt to list and rank the highlights from 1993 episodes of the John Peel radio show.
Peter got on brilliantly with Roland.
The three of us convened, at Roland’s suggestion, outside the Nottingham branch of Selectadisc, the Midlands’ largest independent record shop. The idea was that we would take the afternoon to peruse the landmarks of The Indie Idiot Years, with me relating instructive anecdotes to Peter, and Roland providing ambience and such useful supporting facts as ‘Yes, I believe Mudhoney were playing at the time’ and ‘No, I think it was actually Student Night, not Alternative Night, when that happened – I remember because we’d been to Punk Night the night before, and they’d played “This Is Radio Clash” for the first time ever’. Selectadisc seemed like a good place to start, since it had been the daytime meeting spot of ninety-nine percent of my social encounters between 1992 and 1994 (the night-time one being the left lion in the Market Square). Plus, if you ignored a brief period during 1998 when he became convinced that one of the sales assistants was ‘looking’ at him and opted to shop at QVC instead, it had been Roland’s favourite shop for over ten years. Ultimately, he’d always wanted a job here, but had never quite made the grade at interview level and had had to settle for a position ‘working for The Man’ (I feel certain he’d prefer it if I didn’t get specific about which branch of The Man), but even this monumental Life Tragedy had failed to chip away at his love for Selecta’s five floors of esoteric treasures. When Roland didn’t answer his phone, the easiest way to get in touch with him was usually to wait next to one of the shop’s many Guided By Voices bootlegs. He’d turn up sooner or later.
It hadn’t taken long for Roland and Peter to hit it off in Selectadisc and adjourn to the section marked ‘US Alternative’, and as we walked towards the Market Square, I found that now it was me who was getting pushed off the pavement, trying my best to earwig.
‘So, you really think “Vegative Creep” is better than “Breed”? . . . Interesting,’ Roland was saying to Peter, with an arched eyebrow.
‘It’s just, y’know, heavier,’ shrugged Peter.
‘But I always thought it was a commonly held opinion that “Breed” represented the pinnacle of Cobain’s angst, yet married to a pop sensibility. But then I suppose it would have been even, y’know, cooler if it had had Albini producing.’
Roland was always saying things like ‘represented the pinnacle of Cobain’s angst, yet married to a pop sensibility’. When I’d packed in writing for the New Musical Express in 1997 and declared to Roland that the paper was by and large run by identikit indie élitists getting revenge for having their lunchboxes stolen at school, he’d looked at me as if I’d just insulted his mother, and, I suspected, had never quite been able to bring himself to view me as a full human being since.
‘Do you like Suede?’ he asked Peter now.
‘Nnhgh. Er. I think so.’
‘What do you think of Brett Anderson’s ambiguous sexuality?’
‘Not sure. I guess it’s cool. He’s got good hair, I suppose.’
‘He once said he was a bisexual who’d never had a homosexual experience. I guess it was a publicity stunt, but it was kind of a cool thing to say.’
‘Yeah. Er. Yeah, I suppose.’
‘Tom says you live in London. Do you get many good indie nights there?’
‘I dunno. I’m a bit too, like, young to get into them. I get into pubs sometimes, though. And I did go and see Kitty at this really cool place where you didn’t have to be eighteen.’
‘Kitty? Mmm. Are they a bit like L7?’
‘Who are L7? I think I’ve heard of them.’
‘Didn’t you see them on The Word? One of them took her pants down. It was soooo cool. I remember it well: 26 November 1992. Around eleven minutes to ten. Tom used to like stuff like that – I mean, he used to own the first Babes In Toyland EP. But now he listens to all that Seventies stuff. I mean – ha! – what an indie traitor. A lot of the stuff he listens to now is, like, the sort of stuff they play in Asda!’
A bus hurtled along Market Street, splashing muddy water up the back of my cardigan and forcing me further back up the hill. I didn’t catch the next thing Peter and Roland said, but as I returned to their side they were laughing conspiratorially.
We’d reached the Market Square. Disappointingly, there weren’t any crusties about, although I did spot the first Ned’s Atomic Dustbin t-shirt I’d seen since 1993. As I attempted to find somewhere to sit between the pigeon shit on the steps near the left lion, and watched Roland assiduously examining the print on the back of Peter’s Nirvana t-shirt, I reflected that I’d come about as far from my idea of a horizon-expanding road trip as possible. I couldn’t even see a horizon. I was back in my home town, it was raining, I had a cold coming on, I couldn’t find a crusty to ridicule, I’d long since given up on my one attempt at a rock-and-roll form of transport, and I felt seventeen again. The last of these facts at least spoke of some sense of wish fulfilment, but was nonetheless difficult to find solace in.
‘So,’ I sniffed in Peter’s general direction, ‘picture the scene: a typical Thursday night in 1992. Hundreds of teenagers in ridiculous stripey grandad tops, all purchased from the same alternative boutique, and para boots, all purchased from the same army surplus store, descend on the left lion, then filter off to the city’s three non-townie-populated pubs, before dancing away their cares at Rock City’s Student Night.’
‘Nnngh,’ said Peter. ‘Then what happens?’
‘Well – er, nothing, a lot of the time. We’d all drink watered-down beer, some of us would ogle girls in PJ Harvey t-shirts but not do anything about it, and Roland would get pushed over. Then, when it was over, I’d drive really fast down the ramps at the multistorey car park across the road.’
‘Oh,’ said Peter.
‘Tom, you make it sound like I always fell over,’ said Roland. ‘I mean, be fair – it was only once or twice.’
‘Yeah. Per week.’
I’d be lying if I said I felt completely proud of my late teenage years, but I had hoped that, given an impressionable audience, I’d be able to paint them in a romantic, fantastical light as my own minor but perfectly formed response to a rebel adolescence in late-Sixties Haight-Ashbury or late-Eighties Manchester. Now, though, I discovered it wasn’t going to be as easy as I’d hoped to inject the necessary amount of glamour into the re-enactment of The Year That Grunge Broke, Midlands-style. The more scenarios I tried to recreate, the more intensely Peter seemed to examine the packet of French fries he’d bought. And Roland wasn’t proving to be as useful a prop as I’d hoped either, chipping in with plenty of stories about
some indie band or other that I’d orphaned, but consistently failing to back me up on what I considered to be the day’s most action-packed stories.
‘Do you remember what happened here?’ I asked him later, as we pulled up outside my old college.
‘No. What?’ he said.
‘You know. When I was driving everyone to college and I went across the grass for a laugh . . .’
‘Nope. Don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Oh, come on! The car spinning out of control, the boot of that Mini looming in the wing mirror, all of us ending up in the ditch. Surely you remember! We all agreed it was a life-changing experience. All eight of us.’
‘Neh.’
‘Anyway,’ I said, swallowing my irritation and turning to Peter, ‘the lesson here is not to drive while listening to the New Bomb Turks. Too much automatic adrenalin.’
‘Right,’ said Peter.
‘First album or second album?’ asked Roland.
‘First,’ I said. ‘I don’t think the second one was out by then.’
‘Now I remember,’ said Roland.
For four hours or more, the three of us zig-zagged across Greater Nottingham, analysing my murky past and Roland’s only slightly less murky present. For each case study there was a story and a music-related lesson for Peter. Outside an office building that used to be a pub called The Narrowboat, there was the story of when a crap new wave of new wave band forgot that I was supposed to be interviewing them for my fanzine and left me sitting in the corner of their dressing room feeling scared (the lesson: don’t interview crap new wave of new wave bands). Outside my college radio room, there was the story of how me and my mate Surreal Ed were supposed to be broadcasting an American indie rock show to a ten-mile radius, then didn’t (the lesson: don’t imagine that college lecturers who use the phrase ‘Let’s have a brainstorm and address the problem’ a lot will help further your musical career). Outside the Forte Crest Hotel, there was the story of how I’d failed to get a snog off a beautiful Spanish woman by not knowing the lyrics to the second verse of REM’s ‘Losing My Religion’ (the lesson: never underestimate the pulling power of sensitive ballads). And outside Marks and Spencer, there was the story of the time that Roland, accompanying me on a college radio project, asked a blind saxophone-playing busker what he thought of Brett Anderson’s ambiguous sexuality (the lesson: don’t talk indie crap to a blind busker).
