Converse Used To Be Good

Another update and another toilet.

July 14^th 2011. The 100 Club. Oxford Street. London.

I note the above was scrawled on the wall adjacent as I took a leak. It made me smile. On and off, I have lived in Converse for over half my life. I like them so much, I have been known to sleep in them but remain otherwise naked. Used to be good? Nah. They still are!

To understand why I was standing in the Gents at the 100 Club, I need to step back a few years. To a summer day in 2008.

In my last post, I spoke of the cyclical music loops at Topshop that the staff became conditioned to ignore.

I recall a day when I strolled across the shop floor toward some dull but vital meeting with a department manager. As I noted last time, you only really took in the music when it warmed your heart and cockles or spat in the face of all that is musically pure and holy. On this day, my ears pricked up at the sound of an angular bass line setting off at a relentless pace, accompanied by feedback, jarring guitar riffs and an obtuse and challenging chord structure. I couldn’t make out the lyrics but the vocals were delivered at the same break necked speed as the bass. It was all underpinned by a swirling, fairground like organ.

I was smitten. It was utterly magical.

I slowed my walk to make sure I took the whole track in. With no phone on me, I couldn’t Shazam it. Other than realising that it was “greatness” incarnate, I had no idea who or what it was. I felt like Tim Smith (Cardiacs) and JJ Burnell (The Stranglers) had had a car crash and the resulting sound was being broadcast to me.

I knew it was on a loop, so over the following days, I kept returning to the shop floor to hear it again. Over the course of the next week, I made up more and more spurious reasons to eschew the safety and comfort of my ivory tower office and step onto the shop floor into the firing line of the stores demanding staff and pesky customers. All because I was determined to hear this beautiful masterpiece one more time, to maybe get a lyric that I could google.

Despite my best efforts, I never heard it again.

Plan B was to resume my normal working patterns in my office but get a copy of the recent store playlist and work through it in my spare time.

A regular complaint of Topshop from its customers was that they never posted or published the playlists in store making it difficult to ID a song that was played. And I was in the same boat, except I had an advantage of Joe or Joanne Public; I could just go and borrow the various discs from the team responsible for updating/uploading them into the system. So I did.

There were dozens of discs. All with about 20-25 tracks. The team responsible filed them in an unhelpful pile in a drawer. Few had content lists, fewer still had dates or anything that may indicate when they had been issued. What I thought would be a ten minute job seemed to stretch into forever. I was left with the formidable task of sitting through all the discs to explore all the music designed to be ignored and find it.

For over a week, I dedicated a couple of hours each night to the search. My Colliers Wood flat rang out to the sounds of the appalling and anodyne gush that passes as “Alternative”, these days. I’ve said before. I love and hate music in equal measure. At times it was a pretty tough task.

Most tracks were skipped after thirty seconds. They clearly were not what I had heard and they left me cold. Forgettable.

Many tracks that I played through resulted from acts of involuntary masochism. I would sit open mouthed and stunned as the tepid and insipid numbed me to the point of oblivion. Coldplay. Kings of Leon. Foo Fighters. Tragic.

There was some pretty shite stuff being ignored at Topshop in 2008.

But some demanded my total attention. They seemed beautiful. Smitten, I became distracted while I wallowed in aural delight, exploring back catalogues of bands that I had never previously heard. A fair few times, I fell head over heels in love.

After two weeks, I had reviewed each and every disc available. And my song wasn’t included on any of them.

Did I imagine it?

I began to question myself. Had I, created an epic soundtrack in my own mind to take me away from the moment?

It began to convince myself that it was conceivable.

Thinking back to the day I heard it, I was probably on my way to have a conversation with a shoe concession who had lost a pair of shoes sometime in the previous 18 months and wanted someone to look at CCTV images to see who had been near them, or some such nonsense. I would have been walking through the store with leaden shoes, a leaden head and a heavy heart. The meeting was probably offset against a background of dealing with one of my staff who had managed to get another two weeks signed off work by their doctor because they had a slightly sore throat or felt “an ickle bit funny”.

It was entirely possible that my little, fizzy brain had given up on the bollocks that was weighing me down and I had created something that would make me feel momentarily happy… If only I was able to have transcribed what I had imagined; I could have made some money.

Step forwards to a night out in late 2008 or early 2009.

Somewhere in London.

I meet up with my brother, who produces a small CD sized bag and offers me a Birthday or Christmas present. I doubt that it was around either my birthday or Christmas when this happened. My brother and I have a habit of presenting and receiving gifts early or late. Year’s merge into one.

Unsurprisingly, as usual, the bag contained a CD.

Silvery. Thunderer and Excelsior.

My brother enthused – he had heard them on the Gideon Coe show on radio 6 – and kept using the words like, “Cardiacs” and “Sparks” and “Incredible” and “Best Album of the Year” and “Whhhhaaaahhhhhhooooowwwwwwww” all the while grinning like the type of demented cat only Lewis Carroll could imagine. 

I had already latched onto two key words. Sparks and Cardiacs.

These two words were enough to make me need to hear the album. But Alex went on to explain that one of the tracks appeared to have Sparks lyrics being spoken across a solo (still haven’t found that, yet), another detailed the demise of a class of UK diesel locomotive and a third listed off a series of London’s Lost Rivers as a near chant during a fade out.

My brother had clearly thought through his sales pitch well. He sold me three irresistible ideas and concepts. What more could I want from an album?... See notes, below.

But he missed out a few more surprises…

>> Allusions to ghosts and flying saucers above cemeteries.

>> And a muse about the demise of a ship which was crewed entirely by mice, bar the ships cat.

But I think that it still took a couple of days to find the time to give it a listen. I was probably locked in the rota-cokey shift patterns I wrote about last year.

You can guess the rest?

Track two. Devil in the Detail.

The sound of an angular bass line setting off at a relentless pace, accompanied by feedback, jarring guitar riffs and an obtuse and challenging chord structure. I couldn’t make out the lyrics but the vocals were delivered at the same break necked speed as the bass. It was all underpinned by a swirling, fairground like organ.

Sitting in my Colliers Wood living room, I was immediately taken back to that solitary walk across the sales floor at Topshop. Although the album turned out to sound like the inside of my head, I realised that I hadn’t imagined it to make myself feel calm and free of daemons. It was real. Very real. Almost flesh and blood. And it became more beautiful as I listened to it over and over and over.

It’s late 2015 and I still feel warm each time I hear the album.

By the time I got to see Silvery live, for the first time at The 100 Club on July 14^th 2011, I’d found a live bootleg from the Bull & Gate (RIP) and waited at the edge of my seat for the second of three official album releases – Railway Architecture. Back catalogue entirely absorbed, I’d read a million words about them and become lost in their old world videos. I’d had a moment where, back on the shop floor, on the receiving end of an earnest whinge, for something I or someone else had done or hadn’t done… who cares? I’d bitten my tongue to the point of bleeding to stop myself shouting at them:

“Blah Blah Fuckity Blah. Don’t trouble me with your bollocks! I’m listening to Nishikado!”

And that night in 2011, alongside my brother and about another twenty fair souls they were as good and great as I imagined that they would be. Like the best gigs, I was pulled into a vortex where my brain could relax and swirl around and around like something out of The Wizard of Oz leaving me giddy and wound up like a clock-work toy by the end. But – for all my passion for the moment - I sensed that James Orman wasn’t feeling it that night. He seemed disengaged and remote… the rest of the band had to persuade him to play “You Give A Little Love”.

But it mattered not, to me. I was lost. But found.

Now, I’m not going to encourage you to visit Topshop. I doubt they play Silvery anymore.

And I’m not going to say that you should all go out and buy everything that Silvery have ever released. That would be senseless.

But, I will say that, if you don’t go out and buy everything that they have ever released, I consider you an idiot.

For Reference:

Christ On A Bike

The Charge of the Light Brigade

                                      

NOTES

I suppose that the album could include Sarah Nixey making a fake BBC public announcement regarding an imminent nuclear threat to London. I would have to wait until 2015 to have that appear on an album, thanks to Luke Haines.

The Mission

It was a mission.

But it was the result of a journey.

A journey where, despite acknowledging that we had achieved everything we had set out to do, it felt as if we had failed. We had ended up in Haywards Heath drinking the worst Guinness ever served, rather than being able to say “Fuck Brighton!”…

It started in 2008. On a cold, winter afternoon in The Sultan in South Wimbledon.

The Sultan says "Fuck Brighton!"

Or rather, I should say, that is where it started for me. Lukey picked up the dregs of a conversation that he had had with Davey about the possibility of travelling to Glasgow by bus. Not a coach. Not a simple turn up at Victoria Coach station and travel for eight hours to awaken as you cross The Clyde. No. They discussed the possibility and plausibility of travelling on scheduled local bus routes, hopping from town to town, city to city, county to county. Lukey and I quickly discussed potential routes and reckoned – finger in the wind – that it was probably achievable but incredibly difficult. We concluded it would take days but the journey would be so eye opening that it would be incredible to try.

“The Journey” was a dry run. We decided to find out how easy, with no research or preparation, it would be to travel from Tooting Broadway to Brighton. We chose to catch the first bus heading vaguely south, get off at it’s destination and then seek out the next bus heading vaguely south. We figured that we would reach the South Coast eventually. We guessed Brighton was the most likely end to the journey. But we agreed that the journey was more important. Even if we reached Brighton, we would not waste time staying and looking around.

We failed, as I have already said, but we learned that it was incredibly easy if you chose to put your mind to it. We had got caught up looking around Reigate and going shopping for a new tie at Gatwick Airport. If we had been more determined, planned a route and less inclined to amble, we’d have reached Brighton and been home before tea.

So we set ourselves a greater challenge. We would travel to Bristol. It was to be a mission. We would research. We would plan.

At around 5:45am, one Saturday morning in early March, Lukey and I met up with Davey at a bus stop on Colliers Wood High Street. You know the one. Just down from the River Graveney. The one outside the bathroom showroom, opposite the “modern” tandoori restaurant that glows orange at night. Yeah. The one where the friendliest staff in the World work make you feel such a leach when they see you walking away with a takeaway from the substandard competition on the other side of the road. Yes. That bus stop!

Davey was early. Very early. Beyond early. About an hour earlier than we had agreed to set off. We boarded a bus to Kingston. It may have been a 131. I cannot recall. We were in good spirits which improved when we realised that leaving early meant that we were banking precious minutes for delays along the route. Kingston was a blur and we remained a full hour ahead when we reached Heathrow Airport to board our bus to High Wycombe.

High Wycombe seems a strange route to take to get to Bristol and you are right. But it got stranger. We were heading for Thame, which sits to the North East of Oxford, before heading to Swindon, Chippenham, Bath and – eventually – Bristol. All in it took about nine hours, I guess. Nine hours is better than the ninety to one hundred and twenty minutes by car.

The geographical reasons for the unusual route are locked in economics clashing with the physical environment. I won’t discuss it in detail here, I did too much of that at UNL in the 1990’s…

But, you probably want to know why we were doing this. And – my dear friends – I am unsure whether I will ever be able to quite explain. Certainly, I know I will not convince many of you to re-tread our steps and I don’t seek to. But I will give a go at thinking through some of my motivations:

As a starting point, I loathe advertising.

I loathe being told what to think, what to buy or how I should feel. I distrust any organisation that tries to convince me that something that I might covert, want or desire is something that is an actually necessity. Want and need are two words that have become synonymous. And that is wrong. I have a default setting of “contrary”. I always have. Perhaps it’s born of arrogance, I don’t know. But back in late 2007 or early 2008, around the time of Lukey and my conversation at The Sultan, I had been annoyed seeing a poster at Stockwell station day after day after day on my commute to work. It told me that if I was feeling lost or direction-less, I needed to visit Goa in India. The advert implied that it was only here that I would be able to clear my head and make sense of my life and place in the World. Of course, I may have been reading too much into it, but that is how I was perceiving it. And – given that this was my perception – at a level it was “true”. The opportunity to travel by bus, I decided, would demonstrate that I could do exactly the same sitting on the back seat. You can "find" yourself anywhere you wish to. Sales executives are liars. 

Whether travelling from Redhill to Crawley or Thame to Oxford, I knew that I had as good a chance of “finding myself” as I did giving a holiday company a stack of cash to travel half way around the World to stay on a Western owned, compound holiday resort in India. Beautiful beaches or no beautiful beaches.

This encouraged me to make the initial journey. We decided that we would head to Brighton but not stay. Once we arrived, we would turn around and hot foot back to London by train. We would not be drawn in to the idea that Brighton was our destination. It was just the end of our journey that day. 

Fuck Brighton!

I like the idea of seeing what space looks and feels like. How towns fit together in the landscape. Modern travel destroys this. You set off from one location, cocooned in a vehicle, and magically appear in another sometime later. Automotive travel has made it progressively easier. Roads cut through hills and valleys to fit the most practical lines and routes. By-passes allow you to avoid bottle necks and make the world a far smaller place. 

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. It serves mankind well, but it can be a bit boring, can’t it?. I mean, how much do you miss seeing while you sit in your plane, train or auto mobile? 

Local buses take the long way round. They provide those links to places off the beaten track. They need to dwell and pause in order to fulfil their function. They can be laborious and - at times - tedious, but they give you an opportunity to watch and see and listen and observe. They make it easier to better to understand the space around you. Better to build your mental maps…

Sometimes it is good to be “slow”.

I love people watching. And, buses are a great place to watch people.

Here is an example. Back to The Mission. 

We encountered DJ Choons.

DJ Choons joined us one stop beyond Oxford Coach Station. Not quite at the railway station. There was immediate tension. Davey, Lukey and I had spaced ourselves out across the back three seats of the bus making it’s way to Swindon. Route 66. Given the iconic route number and our own pilgrimage to the West and all the opportunities available in Bristol, Severn Beach and Clevedon, we had high expectations. Something good was going to happen. DJ Choons meant that we would not be disappointed. It was clear that we, or more pertinently, I was sitting in DJ Choons preferred seat. The spacious one by the fire escape. The one with the leg room. The best seat in the house. To the obvious hilarity of Davey and Lukey, DJ Choons spent the first ten to fifteen minutes of the journey intermittently staring me out.

DJ Choons boarded the bus with a skate board. I forget the design but it was scuffed to shit. He had all the kit befitting his attitude. He was no poser. It was clear that he skated and he was serious in his pursuit. Wearing cans that put my little £2.99 bud earphones with a loose connection on the left ear to shame. Perhaps they were Beats, I cannot honestly recall. He added this to a garish hoodie, a beanie hat, faded/worn and loose fitting jeans finished off with a battered and bruised a pair of Vans.

And a Freedom Pass.

DJ Choons was in his mid 60’s.

He eventually forgave me for the theft of his seat. We ended up in discussion with him about skateboarding. Turns out he was there since it’s (inexplicable) rise in popularity in the late 1970’s. Once a month he crosses from Oxford to Swindon to visit what he told us was one of the best skate parks in the country.

I’m never going to understand skate boarding. Never. As a kid, I was rubbish and that was my best chance to learn. Even if I had the spirit and heart to give it a go, I doubt I could get over the embarrassment of failure. Sheepishly, I would claim defeat and give up. But, regardless, I genuinely hope that when I reach DJ Choons age, I have the spirit, passion and desire to keep doing what I want to do for myself and on my own terms, regardless of convention or what others may think or say.

DJ Choons is an inspiration.

A terrible little sketch of DJ Choons from my notebook.
Inspirational.

And this pulls me back to another reason why I enjoyed the adventure.

After the failed trip to Brighton I happened to reread “45” by Bill Drummond. 

Later that year, “17” was published. Both feature inspirational stories of journeys that he has or may not have conducted. I still find Bill’s observations of the norm or the mundane hopelessly inspiring and have been absorbed and lost in videos of Gimpo’s adventures on the M25 or listening to his rambles as he filmed the Docklands Light Railway. I've lost hours of my life far, far too often. With the buses, I didn’t start with an intention to ape Bill’s attitude and approach, but his work resonated in my heart and head. I recognised the spirit of the journey as a worthy endeavour or adventure.

And, finally, I guess, I made that journey "just" to be with my mates. Doing something a bit different that sitting in a pub. Looking for a different stimuli that would allow us to spark and spar off each other, like mates do. So, we ate Tunnock's Caramel Wafer Biscuits and tried to work out what possessed Lukey to bring so many Scotch Eggs. We decided that Pheasants had evolved and changed their natural call to mimic "The Fonz" from Happy Days and generally talked a lot of bollocks.

But why am I writing this today?

I happened on a series of posts on Instagram by an American/Cambodian psychedelic band called Dengue Fever. They are travelling to playing some gigs out in the Far East. But it made me recall that day travelling to Bristol.

Chhom Nimol of Dengue Fever on Instagram

All through “The Mission” I had a Dengue Fever track running through my head. “Seeing Hands”. I’d just bought the “Venus on Earth” album and was in love with the opening track.

Before Lukey and I set off to meet Davey at the bus stop in Colliers Wood… you know the one etc… I played “Seeing Hands” to him. I explained that it wouldn’t leave my head and that it would be my soundtrack to the journey. And it was, all the way through Kingston, Uxbridge, Thame, Wootton Bassett, Box and Keynsham.

Back in my post titled “22^nd August - Alive With Pleasure”, I noted how a Viva Voce track got me thinking about cycles and closure. Fate. Well the same thing happened that day.

Arriving in Bristol we stumbled over a bar on Balwin Street called “Start the Bus”. Inevitably, we had to go in for a drink. We didn't know it existed and had walked into Bristol aimlessly looking for somewhere that was "calling" us. We passed and declined a fair few venues, before "Start the Bus" came into view. Inevitably, “a drink” turned into “many”. But as soon as we were first served our first, Dengue Fever's “Seeing Hands” fired up on the PA… I didn't request it, I didn't expect it. It just worked out that way. It told me that the mission was complete.

Here is a cracking live version... Check it out... If you listen closely to my head, you can hear it playing, still...

But how does all this relate to my time in the Middle East?

I’m not sure. Perhaps I’m choosing to tell this story because I have waited too long to write my version of events down. I've tried and failed a few times. One day, it was inevitable that I would reach the end of the story.

Alternatively, I could include references from my past couple of month’s experiences to support or illustrate some of the points that I have made. I mean, I’ve travelled to and from Riyadh a fair few times now but seen nothing of what is between. To me, it is just an endless, tiresome strip of tarmac through a dusty, yellow, grey desert between Dammam and Riyadh, but a journey at night betrays the number of settlements that lie between. The continual lights on the horizon show how little I have seen so far in my stay. And that inspires me. I want to take the long road. I want to stop and to listen and to see how Saudi Arabia slots together settlement by settlement.

Grey Road From Dammam to Riyadh

Or you could take another look at the photographs of Khobar posted a couple of weeks ago. Again, I deliberately stepped away from the bright lights and undoubted, impressive beauty of The Corniche. The photo’s sought to seek out an alternative real life in Khobar to the one that is so readily available to see online. My urge to seek the mundane, the average and the normal continues.

A Little Version of Khobar

Of course, it may be that I chose to tell the story because I have little to say this week (I’ve been locked into work and physically and mentally broken) but that I am enjoying the discipline of sitting down and writing.  

Who knows?

Does it matter?