Shivering Sands: Seven Years of Stories, Drinking and the World Read online

  After a while, I start typing in rhythm. Oasis' "She's Electric" is much reviled as their "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," but I'm fond of it. It's the kitchen-sink, strange-domestic version of what Kieron Gillen called their "triumphalism": it's the sound of having the best girlfriend in the world. I had a girlfriend who I'd go to a lot of gigs with-a dancer and singer, red-headed Irish with a soprano show voice and a body that showgirls spend small fortunes on replicating-and she once told me that after a while I start kissing in time with the music. I can't hold a note to save my life-I once lived with another singer, who admitted she'd rather smother me than hear me even hum bars while I worked-but my head locks on to a beat like a missile. Grant Morrison once described my stuff as "very musical and percussive." My dad was a drummer, in his youth. One night in the early Sixties, he was approached by two Liverpudlians who said they needed a drummer, and they might have some gigs in Germany... he told me this not long before he died, and I remember him sitting over his cup of tea, staring into space: "I swear it was them. I can't think about it too much, though."

  I just switched cadences. The Pixies' "Levitate Me," the song I intend to have played at my funeral. My dad had some thing by Jon Anderson played at his funeral. Jon Anderson's voice hurts my head. I wanted my dad to get out of his coffin so I could smack him, but I realised he would have been laughing at me too hard to mind. So that was okay. So I sat there running the conversation we would have had in my head, trying not to laugh, while my brother and step-brother dissolved into tears. The men in my family tend not to last much past sixty. We run too fast, do too much, stay up too late, shoot around the world and leave blackened bones. It'll be my turn soon.

  You'll think I'm dead, but I sail away... on a wave of mutilation... (You know I can fit you in my arms.)

  Mind Gangsterism

  Written in October of 2004

  Have you ever wanted to just drill someone to the spot and make them gasp, with nothing more than what came out of your head? Ever heard "Telstar"? Instrumental from the Fifties, created and produced by Joe Meek. Inspired by the launch of the first telecommunications satellite, of all things. And it's one of the most purely joyful things you ever heard. I knew a guy who seemed to spend half his life collecting versions of "Telstar." I'm listening to a live recording of a band called Laika And The Cosmonauts covering it at the moment. Joe Meek was Britain's first independent record producer. His later stuff, with the Blue Men, still sounds weirdly contemporary. The best Joe Meek songs, like "I Hear A New World," are like sitting in an alien church. Music that imparts joy and glory from another planet. Joe Meek was a Mind Gangster.

  I think either Chris Sebela or Matt Fraction introduced me to the term, talking about Phil Spector. The term derives from something Brian Wilson said during his craziest period: he believed that Phil Spector was telepathic allystealing all his ideas, and called him "a Mind Gangster". Warren Ellis

  Go grab a copy of, say, "River Deep Mountain High," which a critic once described as the sound of God hitting the world and the world hitting God back. Possibly the apotheosis of his Wall Of Sound technique, that immense wave of presence. He was way ahead of his time. When he started out, the Hollywood recording studios he strived in didn't have the capacity to contain his sound-the mics couldn't cope with the vast surge of information being thrown at them. But when the apparatus caught up with him, my God, Phil Spector could drill people to the spot. He almost single-handedly invented teenage angst in music.

  Mind Gangster.

  Andrew Loog Oldham invented thievery in Western music. When people talk about "pop Svengalis", they're talking about Oldham. He managed, produced and essentially invented the Rolling Stones, at age 21, a feverpitch criminal brain showing Jagger and Richards how to creatively steal from the blues and their contemporaries and any other damn thing that was laying around, and making their every breath into a Media Event. (And, on the side, pretty much signing Brian Jones' death certificate.) In the days before miniature tape decks and dashboard CD players, Oldham was the guy who had a record player in his Rolls Royce. Unlike Spector, he barely touched the production board. He created the ambience. He had the Knowledge. He was conducting, his head out in the Superflow, waiting for the sound that'd make the world skip a beat under its needle.

  Mind Gangster.

  These are all stories from the days when rock and roll was new, the music business was small, everyone knew everybody but no-one knew anything. There was space.

  Joe Meek killed himself. Phil Spector went crazy. Andrew Loog Oldham fried himself with money and drugs and now lives quietly in South America. Because, you know, crime doesn't pay, and even Mind Gangsters come up hard against natural law in the end.

  But isn't it worth it, for those blazing years when you can control someone's breath and take them somewhere they didn't know existed?

  March of 2005

  Written in March of 2005

  SMS chirps across the pub. 2005 in Britain and it sounds like 1998 in Iceland. The cars creeping past the window have barely changed shape in ten years. White boy in a flop hat and a hideous backpack that looks like repurposed Seventies furniture strides past: drainpipe jeans and shiny new Adidas. Indian kids on the corner in blue baseball caps and nylon hoodies. Tiny little blonde toddler in Nike knockoffs and a yellow fleece poncho. A pale lime new-style Beetle that hasn't been washed since the day she bought it, looking like it's been shoved up a chimney as it parks by the Chinese medicine place. She comes out wearing an 80s A-line skirt and old man's knitted fingerless gloves.

  The local junkies hover by the payphone: the early Nineties kind, that just takes coins and has no internet access. Ten minutes' walk from here to the nearest public internet booth.

  A resigned-looking middle-aged woman in three-quarter length blue jeans with turned-up cuffs walks slowly next to an old man in a green jogging suit, aviator shades and grotesquely swollen feet, buzzing along in an electric mobility scooter.

  There's not a sign here, not one, of being in the 21st Century.

  The old guy makes a face at me as he trundles past the pub window.

  I give him the finger, and wonder if those electric vegetable cart things can be made to explode.

  Ah, such quaint ferocity. So 90s/80s/70s/60s/50s. We don't have time for that sort of thing, here in the sparkly 21 C. Our rock stars are crackheads who sing songs about being Peter fucking No-Mates and not being loved enough and sorry I broke into your gaff and stole all your shit and sold it for rocks but I'm really fucking sensitive and the world is very hard. 21 C is far too sedate for that noise. The sound of the new year: Amy Winehouse, for people who found Sade too threatening. The Bravery: Steve Strange's Visage without the make-up or fucking, with that standard-issue Julian Casablancas vocal filter that every NYC rock band has to use by law now. It's all recordcollection shuffling by the nutless and the hopeless. Recapitulation time, still. We've spent the last few years using the new perspective we've gained over the whole of the last mad century. I have a huge case of beentheredonethat about the whole enterprise now. It was both fun and important, at one time. But, my god, five years of being hunched over the 20th century now?

  Y'know, babies aren't afraid of leaving their cribs. They clamber over the fuckers like hump-maddened gibbons detecting a scent of estrus-swollen arse on the breeze. So why the hell are we so afraid of leaving the 20th century?

  The Situationist writer and translator Christopher Gray once said, "Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit."

  Bruce Sterling's gig as house visionary to design students in California is about imagining, preparing for and selling the future. Note how quickly and insidiously his students have learned the game. Tasked to reinvent something as simple as apple juice for five years up the line, they produce:

  "ORGANICANA 100% Naturally Enhanced Apple Drink.

  A Pepsico organic foods category killer."

 
If the Situationists had been this good at the Game... well, they were always a bit shit, to be honest. But look at this. You can't sue someone for false advertising over a name that simply contains the word "organic" as an element. Doesn't it just evoke purity, abundance and health? "100% naturally enhanced." Sterling is growing a clutch of New Automatic Satans over in Pasadena. He doesn't care. We're acquainted enough that he can mock me for always looking shattered and deadline-blasted in website photos. When he got a digital camera, he told me that he would only ever appear in fighting trim, radiating health and "accompanied by fine consumer products."

  Bruce has a higher ethical purpose: he's hugely involved in the new green movement, trying to make people understand that controlling carbon and fighting climate change isn't about eating granola and hugging trees. But there's a demonic little bastard inside him: he wants you to buy nicer, kinder, cooler garbage disposal units. He will implant the Viridian, Worldchanging purpose into his plainly extremely gifted students. But, ultimately, he will send them out into the world of work with that particularly Nippo-American viewpoint that informed the cyberpunk Movement he was a central part of: people want to buy the future and have it on their table at home. Make it a good future, sure. But make it something that the drones will yank off the hypermarket shelves in their slavering fucking droves.

  J. G.Ballard,2002:

  "Thirty years on, the future will still be boring. I see an endless suburbanization, interrupted by notes of totally unpredictable violence: the sniper outside the supermarket, the bomb outside the suburban hypermarket, the madman with the Kalashnikov in McDonalds. But this random violence is totally without connection to peoples everyday lives. This will lead to a feeling that the world is arbitrary and illogical, insane even. That's a frightening kind of landscape."

  Thirty years on, or three?

  §

  April 28, 2008

  The last half of this month has felt completely out of sync. Like the planet jumped tracks. Everything's a bit 1986.

  Gather, children, and I will tell you of 1986. It rained all the time, no-one could smile without bleeding, and Boy George was on The A-Team. 1986 was one of those years where we were waiting for the spaceship to land... Things were so bad we were actually having to talk about Paul Simon's "Graceland" like it mattered. now, 1987, that was an interesting year... (descends lnto senescent unconsciousness) Where's my fucking coffee Buried under messages reading: "i was a discoloured zygote floating in the pool of beer and sperm that was my mothers womb in 1987."

  §

  Stories, Drinking and the World

  Written in June of 2005

  The literary critic Harold Bloom once said that we weren't fully human until Shakespeare began writing: that Shakespeare completed our sapience. Which is both interesting and stark, utter bullshit. Stories are what make us human. They're an advanced form of play. Cats have play. Sometimes very sophisticated, dramatised forms of play. But they're not communicated or externalised. So far, only humans use stories to dramatise the way they see the world.

  And we've always had them.

  Go out to the ancient standing stones at Callanish in the Orkney Islands, at sunrise. You stand in the middle of the stone circle and turn to follow the sun. From that position, the sun is alternately occluded and revealed by the curves of the surrounding hills. The sunrise is dramatised as a struggle. As a performance. Shadows fall and twist around you like spokes, until the sun claws free of the hillside and sends light right down the middle of the circle and on to your face.

  Walk down the great processional avenue to Glastonbury Tor, and you experience a similar effect. The walk is designed to sequentially reveal and present aspects of the surroundings, until the Tor is brought out of the backdrop to stand in front of you. It's intended as a religious experience-a walk that becomes an experience of mystery and revelation. It's a plotline.

  Cave paintings are comics. Standing stones are art installations. It's all stories.

  And I don't mean that in an ethereal Gaimany "the world is made out of stories, mine's a nice cup of tea" kind of way. I mean that we make the world into stories. From scratching our perceptions of the day into cave walls to dramatising the landscapes we're born into, we make the world into stories to make living in it all the sweeter.

  Millions of us, every day, add art into our daily mundane experience of the world by playing a personal movie soundtrack into our ears.

  I knew a guy who'd put a tape into his car's player and would wait until Lemmy tore into "Ace Of Spades" before standing on the accelerator and pulling out into the street. I must've nearly died a hundred times because of that bastard.

  An acquaintance of mine had a Lemmy story. He was living in an apartment building in New York, and heard a terrible banging outside his door. Going out into the corridor, he found Lemmy, throwing himself into the walls, gripping a huge wooden spoon in one hand. Lemmy, he said, why are you outside my door with a wooden spoon?

  You know how some people have a little silver coke spoon? Lemmy said. And then he held his wooden ladle up like it was Excalibur and yelled, This is MINE!

  Which brings me to drugs, which accompany storytelling cultures. Being southern English, my own culture is an alcoholic one. Mead culture. I'm from a village that began as a Norse settlement. Thundersley. It translates from the old English as thunder clearing or Trior's clearing. It was a small centre of worship for Thor. There was and is another Thundersley, fifty miles north, and the old story was that every Thursday Thor would fly over both of his English clearings. Thundersley was all forest and weir, back then. When I lived there, the weir has been paved over, and the only trees in the centre of the village were around the school I went to, on a gloomy tree-lined alleyway called Dark Lane. A dramatised little passageway. We still do it. Over in rural Rayleigh, five miles away, there's a road called Screaming Boy Lane. I've never found out why it's called that.

  My dad told me about that. He never found out either, and it was one of those things that bugged him to his grave. He was one of those people who stories happen to. He was a drummer in the Sixties. One night after a gig, a couple of Liverpudlians came up to him and asked if he wanted to join their band, as they were without a drummer at the time and on the promise of playing some gigs in Germany...

  "I can't think about that too much," he used to say.

  He was in the Household Cavalry, the Queen's mounted soldiers, and once responsible for giving the Queen a horse with the shits to ride during a public event. He was in the Merchant Navy, and once imprisoned on Fiji for accidentally jumping ship-said prison being a thatched hut that he was asked to return to at night, if he'd be so kind.

  You become part of your father's story, and you can feel like maybe you haven't done enough to live up to his stories. My dad was an unpublished writer, and I didn't realise until late on that he felt that he'd become part of my story, and that he loved it. I'd phone him on my mobile from other Countries, places he'd never visited, or had only seen once. From my usual hotel in San Francisco I can see Telegraph Hill, where he'd gone during his single trip there. I called him from the black shoreline of Reykjavik. Our stories, then.

  Dad and I had similar histories in our drinking. Both woke up in our late teens/early twenties finding ourselves doing a bottle of something in a single sitting without trying. For the rest of his life, I never saw him have more than a small can of beer at Xmas. I just control mine, ferociously. I know to the drop the point at which I can't return from, and can fine-tune my drunkenness so I don't wake up naked and halfway up a tree. Again.

  Alcohol, of course, is as much a drug as anything else, and I use it to get to a certain place just as any psychedelic person uses acid, mushrooms or some brew of vines mixed in and served out of a shaman's arsehole. Some stories just can't be found on the natch, as it were.

  Terence McKenna, a writer I'm fond of, found his best stories in psychedelic visions, the muck stirring up the muddy boghole of learning and dreaming that fil
led his head. An Irish-American from Colorado, he should have been an epic bardic drunk, and indeed he was a bullshitter par excellence. But he took drugs to screw with his forebrain and make new connections.

  My favourite McKenna story was the vision of a time bifurcation he had. It's basically a science fiction story, but the level of detail and the obvious reconnection of memory pathways in his drug-scrambled head makes it something remarkable, as does the clear sense that it speaks directly to his perception of the world-that we're in a world that's gone very badly wrong.

  All he does is subtract Jesus from the equation of history. A soliton of improbability, he called it-a particle of change in the event stream, passing through the earth until it struck Mary's womb and sterilised an ovum.

  No Christianity means that Hypathia, the genius Greek mathematician, isn't stoned to death by Christians, and gets to live to complete her work. Hypathia was by all accounts stunningly beautiful, and took no bullshit. When a younger guy claimed to be in love with her, she gathered the rags she used to staunch her period and waved them in his face on the end of a stick, saying "this is what you love, young man, and it isn't beautiful."

  And what was her work? The elaboration of the calculus, which we didn't get until the time of Newton. Right there, human invention gains a thousand years back. Steam trains in ancient Greece. A Roman Empire that takes in sun worship without the destabilising Christian cult. A technological flowering that gets Greco-Roman civilisation to South America before the Incan civilisation climaxes. McKenna's vision showed him a Roman emperor attending the coronation of Three-Flint Knife in Tikal at the end of baktun 8. Humans on the moon by the year 1250 or so. The human race is bought a thousand extra years to sort itself out.