I lost my password and fucked up my life so it's been six months since anything's been put on here.
Here are some articles I've done for Stool Pigeon, they've all been handed in really late.
This first one was just after everything went to shit
My life has hit the skids for about the fifteenth time since I left school, I’m going to need bailing out and everything’s a fucking mess. I’m losing my job again at the end of this week, last week I lost my house, and the week before my girl left me, which was shit because apart from everything else (I’m crushed, I can’t sleep and it’s all I can think about) I was going to stay with her til I found a new place. At the moment my daily routine is based around trying to not think about how badly everything’s gone; at work I bury myself in the papers and shirk as much responsibility as possible (my job is a no brainer and a joke, more on that later). Work’s over by six thirty and I pick up food and go straight from there to my buddy’s where I’m staying, take some prescription tranquilisers and watch four hours of Sky TV while he works on his politics MA upstairs until I set up the sofa bed around eleven, do some more tranquilisers and go to sleep. It should be noted that I actually passed up the opportunity to stay at a house with seven hot girls in a band on tour from Brooklyn but that place didn’t have Sky and I don’t want to talk to anyone, let alone a bunch of fucking hipster indie girls. It sounds bad, but all this is a symptom of a bigger problem.
As I write this it’s Armistice Day (this has to go to print in less than 12 hours, I have a habit of leaving things late, as you’ll understand in a bit) and I’m reminded of my family heritage. I come from a family of Naval officers of note, my grandfather died in 1951 as the Number One on HM Submarine Affray, which sank off the French coast without explanation (a book just got published about it called Subsmash, which sounds like a very sensationalist name but it’s an emergency codeword you use when your submarine is in trouble), it was a huge deal at the time, a major event that had the Prime Minister making statements outside Downing Dtreet and was all that was in the papers for weeks (Wikipedia it), he was only a year older than I am now. My step-grandfather, Captain Jack ‘Hank’ Henry (he even had a hero’s name) was in the Fleet Air Arm, shot down Japanese fighters in the Pacific throughout the war (he was only a year older than I am now when the war was over), worked with the SAS in Korea, became a test pilot for early jets, then became a diplomat in the US and met Kennedy, Nixon and Louis Armstrong. He died about two years ago and the church was completely full, which never happens if you’re over eighty unless you’re special. My grandmother obviously had a thing for heroes. Even my dad -who I’ve had my problems with over the years- went to war twice, spied on the Russians from a submarine, got an MBE and does something pretty important now.
I am the spawn of these men, and I have never done anything. After school (a liberal boarding school that my father nearly killed himself paying for) I went to art college and spent my loans on drugs, clothes and records, went to rehab, went back to college, did ok after not fucking around for the last three weeks, then worked in a trendy trainer store, did loads of coke, then got a job in ‘new media’, a good first job that I fucked up by being late, lazy, hungover, gacked out and asleep at my desk most of the time. I was then unemployed for three months until my buddy hooked me up to stand in for someone on maternity leave as a receptionist at the management company that looks after the Chuckle Brothers and Jim Davidson among others, mostly the ‘greats’ of light entertainment who had their day in the sun fifteen years ago. So for the last eight weeks I’ve spent my days doing things like looking for the correct brand of pink champagne to give to Julian Clary after his opening night in Cabaret, photocopying Gillian Taylforth’s press cuttings and putting Eddie Large through to his agent’s PA on the switchboard.
So mostly I’ve chased girls, avoided responsibility and never tried hard at anything, even stuff I thought cared about- I’m so fucking lost it’s insane. While I was doing pills all through my late teens early twenties and playing bass in the worst hardcore band you ever heard my friends where sneaking about behind my back building careers, getting real degrees or learning their instruments properly so they could tour in real bands and make a proper go of that shit. I’ve managed to get to 24 without even having my name on an electricity bill, I’ve never left Europe and I definitely never commanded a fucking submarine, I can’t even drive.
I know I’m not the only one who feels like his life is going nowhere, and I’m pretty sure that I’ll probably fall into something worthwhile eventually, it just scares me that I don’t have a clue what it’s going to be, and I literally don’t know what it’s going to take to make me try or to make me commit to anything, a terminal illness or getting someone knocked up are my two best guesses, because I can’t see it coming from deep inside. I do know a few people who have the same thing going on, like, they just don’t know, and they never have, having fun took such a precedent over everything that proper, real life is just a total impossibility, I thought I took the righteous path, as it where, but it turns out I really didn’t -as it stands now, my way of life has gotten in the way of my life. I don’t know if any of this is relevant to anyone else, maybe some of you feel like this too, maybe I’m just venting, sorry.
Second one:
Like the Banana Splits said, I Enjoy Being A Boy. I want to fuck and fight and see blood and sometimes I hate myself for not being man enough, and sometimes I can be cruel and hateful and arrogant and bloody-minded and pathetic, and I love doing coke and seeing dead bodies and I worry about length and girth and I’d probably fuck a fifteen year old if I knew I could get away with it. That’s how I feel about my shit a lot of the time, it’s my base masculinity getting the better of me. I get really male, not like sports and war male, more thinking about fucking and heavy revenge on my enemies male. I can really hate someone when I put my mind to it, and it really makes me feel alive. I would love to kill a man.
I spend much of my time searching for a reflection of the above ugly, childish maleness in music, because I like music reflects how who I am and I am an ugly, childish male. Real maleness in music is weird because although most musicians are men, they’re not real men, political correctness invaded music in the eighties and it’s still castrating honesty to this day, so that it’s almost unacceptable to not have a cause or agenda beyond telling the world how you feel without apologising. I don’t listen to indie music at all because of all the bookish types telling me how clever they are. Everyone in music was bullied at school, but with a lot of those bands a lot of the time you know they weren’t bullied because they were slight and didn’t like games, they were bullied because they were smug little cunts. A lot of those bands to kitchen sink lyrics, but they’re too fruity and not normal enough to sing about being normal, it always sounds so affected, that band Los Campesinos are the worst for it, awful. Cutesy little bitches. The only band that did that properly was Arab Strap, because Aiden Moffat was brave enough not to hold back, he talked about things in the most intimate possible terms, not sexy intimate, truth intimate. He talked about things that pop music doesn’t often address without dosing up with romance, like reading your girlfriend’s diary while taking a shit, borderline stalking, creeping insecurities and suspicions, horrible things. He obviously understood something that the bookish, fey indie bands never could: that life and human relationships aren’t about clever rhymes, a commitment to veganism, rare seven inches, Sylvia Plath or a vintage naval coat -they’re not about the things you’ve built onto yourself, that pop culture has made you become, they are about an interaction on an intimate level where all your lies are exposed. We all know the most immaculately turned out scenesters are usually the fruitiest dudes, the men who spend time on their hair and who have had a Stalinist revision of the past whereby at no point they were ever anything but in the scene they are in now, they’re not real men, they’re liars. If girls are down with those boys, they’re idiots because they’re not real people, they’re constructs. They check the scene manual to see how they’re supposed to feel. Arab Strap spoke about being disgusting and awful, being stupid and cruel and mindless, there was a genuine confessional aspect to what was being said, without self pity and with humour. That’s how real men tell the world how they’re feeling about shit.
That confessional shit can go too far though. The problem with Bright Eyes is he’s too overwrought to be the next Dylan, Dylan has dealt with the whole gamut of emotions over his career, we’re quite a few albums into Conor Oburst’s career and all we’ve really got from him is ‘inconsolably sad’. He trembles and wallows like he’s in therapy, it’s so humourless and it’s a bit embarrassing, like when someone you just met at a party tells you about their eating disorder way too soon into the evening. I guess some people listen to him when they’re into a girl and it’s not going their way, but then you just end up feeling like him, like it’s the end of the world. The thing is I’m as much of a fag about girls as anyone, and it usually is the end of the world, but there’s no dignity in self-pity, you’ve got to pick it up, compose yourself. I mainly play Nick Cave’s last few records for that, he’s got a million ways of telling a girl he loves her without for a second breaking down or making anyone uncomfortable. It’s like he could turn up at her house, wearing one of those great suits with an open collar that he wears, say the shit he needed to say and walk away with his head held high, even if she told him fuck off. No trembling, no wailing and gnashing of teeth, keeping it together because he knows he needs to. I don’t care if it’s his pop record, The Boatman’s Call shits on all other break up records because it’s so dignified, there’s no regret, he just accepts his mistakes and gets on with shit. Grinderman really had a handle on the seedy frustrations of manhood too.
I haven’t cited as many examples as I’d have liked, I had this whole spiel on hardcore and metal, and how if you don’t like shouting and loud guitars you’re not a real boy (buy a Cro Mags record you girls) but the point is that life is hard and you’ve got to be hard too, don’t bitch and whine and spend time on your hair because that’s not being a man that’s being a spoilt kid. My friends have developed this phrase that’s really helped me recently, it’s ‘man up’, in short: be a man, son, do what you know you need to do, not what you want to do.
Third:
Sometimes I really hate rock and roll, I think it might have ruined my life, for two decades it has distracted me from reality. I could be a banker now like all the kids I went to boarding school with but instead I’ve got sailor tattoos and no money because rock and roll helped me ignore my actual life. Here are a few examples of why rock and roll made me an idiot:
I can trace all my wayward, childish and delinquent behaviour back to when I was seven. My father taped Blues Brothers off the TV and I watched it and I think something went in my head. I was a pretty good kid before but that film turned me, like, it made me hate squares and want to kick against the pricks and stuff. The Jailhouse Rock cover at the end of the film got me into Elvis and as a reward for my first week of staying away from home aged nine I got a double cassette of his hits and a model of a pink Cadillac. I’m kind of a daydreamer and I had a Walkman with big headphones and a lot of time on my hands in the Hampshire countryside, so I sat in my room and got lost in the stories and characters in the songs, picturing Elvis and sometimes myself as the protagonist in them. I got really into the romance, I pretty much took the lyrics as documentary of love and adult life, and I think I’m still constantly disappointed that they were not.
After the Elvis years came Britpop at the dawn of my teens, I really expected teenage life to be like Different Class and the Sleeper record, but life at a single sex rural boarding school isn’t really alluded to on either of those albums, so I continued to live my life in my fucking head. I think I really believed the events on those records were realer than the events in my own life. You know when people think they should have been born a woman? I was pretty sure I had been born in the wrong body too, I felt like should have been able to walk home from school and live in a city and know girls and hang out in the park. Perhaps if James Blunt had been making records when I was 14 I would have found some music that related to the dire public school experience, but to be honest I think I just liked the sound of this other existence more.
I kind of got more and more ridiculous and less sophisticated about that shit too, when I hit fifteen the only band I cared about was Rancid, who sang almost exclusively about ‘back in the day’, hanging around on corners, listening to Desmond Dekker with skinhead girls, their fallen comrades in the great punk wars and that. The romance of it all was irresistible to me and I overlooked the highly suspect fact that although they looked like Discharge and The Exploited but with more facial tattoos, they sounded like an over-produced new wave band with false English accents, and fell in love with the pictures they painted in their songs. History will not judge Rancid or any of their ilk kindly, they will be considered to have been of no artistic merit, and their slick faux-Clash stomping will be mocked for having missed the point of the original forbearers of the sound.
They and the many similar American bands of the nineties are doomed to be aligned with the cock-rock bands of the eighties as examples of vacuous, charmless rock and roll played by opportunists. I can’t defend these accusations, it’s all true, but at fifteen I had already missed the point, I just wanted to be punk. Living the life I did, the lifestyle I aspired to, of squatting, sniffing glue and “getting hassled by the pigs” was probably as remote and fantastical to me as the mythological, Dungeons and Dragons lyrics of the metal that I gave my dorm mate a fucking hard time for listening too. I am a dickhead and rock and roll turned me into one.
I guess this last example isn’t strictly music related, but I guess you could say the show was pretty much the grunge show, but my full-on, head-over-heels first love was Claire Danes in My So Called Life. Angela Chase was her character’s name, plaid skirts and big boots and red hair over her eyes, fuck man, she was incredible. As well as being in love with her I got most of my angry teen steez from her in a constant state of self-reassessment and emotional upheaval. You’d think it would be exploitative, preachy shit, but was really well written. She had a lot of problems, a fraught relationship with her parents, low self-esteem, drug-addict friends and problems at school, and I wanted to experience it all with her, then rescue her from it and marry her and obviously bone her. The thing that held the show together was Angela’s voiceover, her inner monologue, deeply personal thoughts and feelings, these were the first deeply personal thoughts and feelings I had ever heard aside from my own idiotic, hormonal rantings (everything in my head is still like that now btw). The show was on every weekday morning for about a month the summer that I was 13 or 14 I think, and I recall the theme tune would send my stomach into knots that meant I couldn’t finish my Pop Tarts. I felt that horrible/thrilling yearn in my gut every time she appeared on the screen or her sad-sounding drawl voiced-over a montage – that feeling is love, if I feel that feeling now about someone I think first about Angela cos she’s the benchmark and will be forever. When each episode was over, I looked around at my own comfortable but essentially dull and really very un-sexy existence and felt ashamed. Real life is very immobile compared to well written teen drama. I think this was kind of a turning point cos about a week in I realised the best way to combat this sudden, ugly return to reality was to consciously ignore it, and just think about the show and Angela for the rest of the day. I was in love with a fictional character for about two years and I really think rock and roll has ruined my life. There’s a million more examples of this stuff in my adult life too, it’s embarrassing. Maybe next issue.
