Martin Stephenson and the Daintees sang Crocodile cryer (1986)
Martin walked over to me and said: I couldn’t help watching you because you look so much like Patti Smith. I found the comparison very flattering, Patti is one of the few female celebrities that is beautfiul in her own right without reference to standard definitions of femininity.
This girl called Carol was hanging around at the club. When she found out that I lived with you she started getting really really nosey about what you were doing, who you hung out with, what it was like living with you. She was creepy, I didn’t tell her anything. After the club she came back to Glen’s house with us and sat on the electric cooker like she was holding court or something while we made tea. She just kept on being such a bitch about you.
crouching in the back of a black cab, I’d volunteered to hide from the cab dirver so that all 6 of us could travel together and share the cost.
Kaff: I don’t like wendy’s hair, its thick with hairspray, stiff and sticky
Kaff leant forward and grabbed a handful of my hair, yanking my head toward her sharp knees and pushing tears from my eyes. I watched my tears splash on her expensive Italian buckskin suede shoes then silently added a good dose of flemmy gob to the mix.
Glen: wendy’s hair is soft and fluffy, nice to touch, I like it
Glen leant forward and stroked my hair, pulling my head away from kaff’s threatening knees to rest on his tear-drying warm thigh.
The men they couldn’t hand sang rain, steam, speed
Conkers footwear facilitator (CFF): You can have any of these colours, you can have different colours for different feet, different colours for different sections of the boot, what would you like?
Wendy: Oh, Oh, OH, purple, no green, no this electric blue, no brown. Oh! … um, Oxblood red please..
I discovered Conkers shoes in the summer of 1986. discovered after having been sent there by a bouncy student friend from Newton Abbot who’s boots I couldn’t help but admire. By the time I found Conkers they were 9 years old and had a small shop at the top of Totnes High street.
They now have a larger shop half way up Totnes High street. As a student I couldn’t afford the luxury of a well made, durable, easy to repair, natural tree-rubber soled, funky coloured, personalised pair of shoes. I sulked and promised myself that when I had a job I would come back and treat myself. I’ve had one job or another for nearly 20 years. This week I went back to Totnes and now I have a pair of boots being made-up to fit. I suspect I will be back again… for purple, or green, or…
In 1986 a friend was sectioned with psychizophrenia. Before he was sectioned he talked of his fear and knowledge of the condition he suspected that he had. He knew what was happening to him, he knew something of what was to come, he was profoundly scared. Another friend talked her way through why she should take her own life. I listened one night. I listened another night. I listened again. I listened into the early hours of the morning. It was overwhelming, I didn’t have the answers, she did. She killed herself. I moved into the room she had lived and died in. The rape stories, like a gushing tap that you can’t turn-off. You have to listen. The often all to vivid knowledge of how their pain has changed their world-view for them, stays with you. Always.
Meanwhile I was trying to live in a crumbling contorted fantasy where girls had full human rights and fell in love once, forever. By 1986 I was denying the dream was dead while engaged in a futile, depserate, effort to resuscitate it. Everyday could be the day the dream came true…
The The sang this is the day
(warning: this video includes 1980′s hairstyles and a brass section)
I started smoking. The The sang slow train to dawn
In the early 1980′s student’s didn’t have mobile phones.
I lived in downtown Birmingham on the 18th floor of a towerblock full of students. The towerblock had one, ONE, public phone in the entrance way. Always a long queue and no soundproof surround. I rarely phoned mumsie. Only when I was near a phone booth that didn’t have half a dozen people queuing to use it. Normally this would be in the early hours of the morning at gig’s. I would use the change I had saved for the bus home to call mumzie. She wasn’t always best-pleased by my sense of timing. The calls went something like
Wendy: Helllllloooooooo mumsie!
Mumsie: do you know what time it is?
Wendy: It’s TIME to call mumzie!
Mumsie: Have you been drinking?
Wendy: could well be!
Mumsie: Oh Gwendolyn! Are you eating properly?
Wendy: Chips and curry sauce fresh, ahem, from the van, YUMMY!
Mumsie: we worry about you darling
Wendy: ARRRRR!You’re so sweet, there’s no need to worry mum, I’m nearly all grown up but I’m fast running out of change…
beep-beep-beeep-beep-beep-beep
Mumsie: goodnight dear, take care…
One such call happened after listening to the live version of this little gem…
Unlimited travel, freedom printed on my West Midlands Travel pass. Buses, seven days a week, 24 hours a day. Trains too! No more planning my journeys by cost or parental good will. No-one I knew could afford a car. Riding Double Decker buses above the driver with views across the city and into first-floor rooms of street lining houses. Everything is on show through those windows: loneliness; lovemaking; waiting; TV watching; eating; arguments; cats watching me watching them.
Sunday riding the “outer circle”, route 11. A circle by name, squished octagonal by map, and voluptuous curvacious rolling ride by road. Either way if you keep going long enough you end up right back where you started. The route is strewn with churches, graveyards, suburbs, slums, shopping streets, industrial ‘parks’ and other passengers. A couple made love on the back seat of the upper deck. When they noticed me noticing them we all giggled. I respected their location choice because its warm, dry, relatively private, and best of all it lacks the scent of rotting mice …
2006
Commuters reading books. A lady explains to her phone how to treat dry skin then takes its advice on using a tea-bag to treat a sore eye. Everyone looked busy, except me. Passengers in another part of Seattle could make a very different impression. I wanted to ride the buses ’til the sun had long set and the buses carried me home, tired and sated. But
