Bill Hicks Still Haunts

The sky is the grey of old skin. I walk the Regent to Camden accompanied by bootleg Black Box Recorder. London offers the usual blessing of indifference. Even with an eyepatch and a growling black coat, I am rendered anonymous, all but invisible. Only children seem to notice me, an appropriate canalside figure for those enjoying the Pirate Castle.

At Jongleurs I am interviewed as a talking head for a DVD extra on a forthcoming Bill Hicks documentary. I am not at my best. Paid in trinkets and Tiger beer, I ramble without any of the coherence and insight Bill deserves.

I want to explain how he was an inspiration, how beyond the laughter they evoked, his words did more than make me think. Explain how after listening to Bill, being a hypocrite is near impossible. Explain how he gave voice to my anger at the illusions of the Black Iron Prison. How the truths he told were so deep and universal they will keep resonating no matter how many times the heads on the statues are changed.

Of course, I fail. I do not even explain that I would probably have never written a conspiracy book without him. I do not even begin to convey how Bill Hicks still haunts me. Nudges me to scrape the black spray paint of the lens, reminds me to laugh, to be angry and yet approach the madness of the world with a loving spirit.

Drinking afterwards with fellow fans and interviewees, there is an immediate bond. If you get Bill, you tend to have something in common aside from a passion for a man who referred to himself as ‘Chomsky with dick jokes’. I hold one of the trinkets, a memorial card made up by Bill’s mother Mary Hicks. I turn its words over and over: ‘I left in love, laughter, and in truth, and wherever truth, love and laughter abide, I am there in spirit.’ Their power makes me feel even worse over the hash I have made of the interview.

The rest of the night is spent with Surreal Girl, something always guaranteed to raise my spirits. We drink champagne while eating popcorn, see an unfinished edit of an upcoming movie. It is a strange experience. Not only do I have to contend with hearing the voice of Doctor Who say ‘fuck’, I am front row with 11 lesbian vampires. This results in a lot of unavoidable actress leg and cleavage. Somehow I suspect Bill would have liked that.

Marching to the Fault Line

Politicisation is rarely a process with a clean line. Any easy narrative to explain where we find ourselves on the Nolan Chart is usually a false construct. Why we think what we do is almost always messy.

Our views on liberty, the role of the state and how to make the world a better place come from a hoodoo brew of parental influence, cultural DNA, education and events. Other factors apply as well. I have more than one friend who owes their current political orientation in part to falling for pretty face. Where hormones lead, philosophies on the best way to order an economy can often follow and grow deep roots.

The stuttering route to my current weltanschauung takes in everything from the deep poverty my family experienced when I was a child to dystopian novels and the Dead Kennedys. Individual acts of kindness and pointless bureaucratic obstruction. The power cuts of the three-day week and police brutality at Wapping. A raft of writers from John Pilger to Sébastien Faure. Images from the 1970s nightly news acid-etched in my memory as important to my development as the words of Karl Popper or Moh Kohn.

One element from my teenhood that helped shaped how I think and feel politically was the 1984-1985 miners’ strike. The events of the period spiralled so far beyond industrial action the dispute became a rift in the fabric of the country. It divided. Placed you on a side whether you wanted to be on one or not. You knew at some intestinal level that the gears of history were shifting. After the strike, whoever won, everything was going to be different.

Today, on the 25th anniversary of one of the arbitrary, but most commonly accepted, start dates for the strike, I feel the need to mark it. To ignore, turn my face away from the collisions of history would be a denial of my own narrative. However, London is not coal mining territory. My options for communal remembrance and discussion of the strike are somewhat limited.

It seems the only apposite action I can take is to attend the launch of Marching to the Fault Line – Francis Beckett and David Hencke’s account of the strike. Therefore I leave Millbank and head towards Bloomsbury. Dusk is slow in coming tonight and I enjoy the last gulps of sun before the crowed sodium blare of traffic and advertising begins.

Hitting Whitehall, I walk into a wall of sound. The political artery is lined along the whole length of one side by hundreds of Tamils and supporters of the Tamil Tigers. They are arm-linked in a human chain that simultaneously chants for mercy and shouts for justice. Signs are pinned to their clothing proclaiming ‘Genocide’, ‘Don’t commit a sin, let food and medicine in’ and that old classic ‘We need bread not bombs’.

The high number of protestors wearing Tamil Tiger scarves gives the crowd something of the football terrace mob. For a moment I imagine some parallel dimension where Yam Yam Army hooligans have adopted both Wolverhampton Wanderers and Tamil independence as causes worthy of militant support. This mind’s eye chimera quickly banished by the fact that chants are neither racist, homophobic or related to anyone going home in an ambulance.

Groups of police officers sit in riot vans waiting to be called into action while increasing numbers of their colleagues patrol the crowd’s perimeter. I cross the road, walk crablike along the central reservation. Take in the protestors’ placards and the way their cries remix the sound of Gabriel Fauré playing on my iPod.

The launch is somewhat dispiriting. The red wine is good, the bookshop redolent of the time when Thatcher was the enemy. However, hearing members of the Left still fighting battles lost decades ago rubs with an exasperated tiredness. The dreamed revolutions of then are corroded. Lost in a now which has forgotten so much more than just the names of the past.

Amid and on top of this scrummage for blame and dominant analysis, Beckett and Hencke’s are on fine form. Anecdotes roll, questions volleyed back with grace and humour. Marching to the Fault Line is a grand example of good journalism. It is also the perfect model of how FoI requests can further the recording and understanding of events already receding into the fuzzy horizon of history. It exposes secrets, helps capture the hidden factors that at times seemed to be pushing towards undeclared civil war. I am glad to get my copy signed.

I drift home. Try to take in a country where the spirit of resistance is found more easily in expat Tamils than my own generation. The strike really did change things. Later, canalside, I drink tea and enjoy a supper of beans on toast. Simple pleasures, resonant of the year I have spent so much time remembering today. The television adaptation of David Peace’s Red Riding plays. Channel 4 might have missed a trick. Tonight of all nights, they should have been broadcasting GB84.

The Eye of Providence

I am in the shadow of Thames House. Sixth floor. Windows open to defeat stuffiness. The droning circles of a military helicopter crowds the room. Low in the sky, a trajectory taking it towards the Babylon-on-Thames building. Its bullying sound obscures the 11am chimes of Big Ben. It passes quickly, but the thworp thworp of its blades dominates until it has nearly crossed the river. Over the next two hours, more follow.

Desensitisation to my surroundings is rare. The city lives in my senses and imagination. I can navigate by the smell of agarwood incense and fried sambusac along Edgeware Road. Close my eyes, listen to the soft exhalation of traffic and know whether I am in Kensington or Earl’s Court. Still the psychic static and I can feel temporal echoes of history occulted by the exigencies of everday life.

Yet in this particular corner of the Westminster village, I become strangely insensitive to the stories of stone and brick. Numb to the paranoid reek that should sting my eyes. Inside the security triangle, some protective mechanism kicks in and forces you to tune out the whole industry of fear embedded in the territory. Tune out Five and all its manifestations of the Eye of Providence.

Today, after the intrusion of helicopter flights, ignoring my milieu is not an option. The spell is broken. Armoured Range Rovers charge down Horseferry Road like metallic black rhinos. I cannot help but recognise chaps I know from Five emerging from Starbucks. View architecture as a series of adaptations to the risk of explosives measured in the clinical horror of high yield numbers.

England occupies little more than 0.1% of the globe’s inhabitable land mass, yet boasts more than 20% of the world’s CCTV camera. It seems as if a good proportion of them are concentrated in this section of Millbank. Step outside the blast doors and the invisible tyranny of constant observation begins. Smart and suspicious software analysing number plates, faces and gait. Cameras chittering data to distant electronic brains. Kick-starting paranoid pouring through stored information for recognised faces, walks and numerical sequences.

Walking here turns us into data ghosts. Our movements translated into a virtual world where our very existence is reason for distrust. Each camera capture a new scene in a fragmented narrative obsessed with trying to discern motive from detail. We have become extras in a film we will never get to see.

English Pop

In London, walking 200 yards can take you to another country. You can drop several socio-economic classes. Time travel from steel and reflective glass to medieval stone. Emigrate from Little Lebanon to Little America with no need for a green card.

Therefore it should not surprise me that travelling a couple of miles to Kilburn always feels likes an expedition. A feeling enhanced by the fact NW6 never ranks in my mind as a destination of choice. It is a place I only ever go to for specific reasons. There has to be a mission element to get me walking down Kilburn High Road.

Tonight the mission was simple. Enjoy a curry and watch the sardonic pop monsters that form Black Box Recorder play their first headlining gig in five years. If I had been able to accomplish the two objectives simultaneously, the evening would have probably taken on mythic proportions when recalled years from now.

Indian food should be a sensual, satisfying experience, but too often in England it is reduced to little more than the serving rubbish smothered in a generic curry sauce.* Looking at the garish signage and its Life On Mars wood-panelled walls should have put me off eating at Vijay. However I had heard rumours of good vadai and dosai and Ragam had already taught me the value of disregarding appearance when looking for decent southern Indian food.

While no Cleveland Street miracle, Vijay’s food was good. Its heat came from chillies, the tingle on the tongue from freshly crushed spices. The selection of vadai and coconut chutney comfort for my soul frayed by lack of sleep. Surreal Girl pined for her cauliflower Manchurian, but I think even she might be persuaded to make a return visit.

The gaudy retro of Vijay was echoed when we got into the Luminaire. Unintended and without irony at the restaurant, the mirrorball scattering light off of velvet and black walls, the union jack backdrop emblazoned with gold lettering shouting: ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Not Dole’ were wonderfully deliberate. The effect was like being in a working man’s club taken over by students putting on a punk benefit for striking miners.

The Luminaire might lack Bush Hall’s Edwardian pomp and finery, but it has a wonderful intimacy. It also has a militant no talking while musicians are playing policy which I adore. Even when packed to its 300 capacity, it now gives BH a close run for title of my favourite music venue in London.

Support to Black Box Recorder was a skeleton crew Madam. This meant the band imagined as duo featuring a chantreuse called Sukie with Pat Butcher style earrings and cellist called Sarah who I would have instantly fallen in love with if I had been sixteen. Between them they performed songs of noir romance and corroded hope which veered from the achingly beautiful to nail scratch sharp.

Without any undue poncing around, Black Box Recorder came on stage a little after 9:30pm. John Moore and Luke Haines looked like aged Teddy Boys, Sarah Nixey the polished, posh divorcée who has enough glamour and Machiavellian nous to cause a lot of trouble. They exuded something between a childhood gang taking secret delight at a bit of undiscovered mischief and a disturbing menace a trois. It looked promising.

From the opening anthem swell and lines: ‘The English motorway system is beautiful and strange/It’s been there forever, it’s never going to change’ I instantly remembered why I am devoted to BBR. They are pop. English pop. Pop about England’s peculiarities of place and people, about the hidden menaces of the home counties, the unspoken terror and insecurities of childhood, the ablation of living somewhere like Southend-on-Sea.

From joining ‘the order’ in Wonderful Life to ‘keeping your mouth shut’ in Straight Life and ‘doing the decent thing’ in Brutality, the class, coldness and conformity I have spent my life kicking against were all paraded. Tonight the brilliant chill running through England Made Me was more inescapable than ever. The disappointment that Jackie Sixty did not get an airing softened by compensation of new song Do You Believe In God?

The convulsing guitar crash of the boys was just about kept in line by the caramel ice of Nixey’s vocal. Despite the extra guts of a live performance, you were constantly reminded of just how powerful and splendid a proper pop tune can be – even if it is about Lord Lucan. The Black Box Recorder school of song remains a triumphant mix of sugar and razor blades. Five years on, they are a still a bloody good reason for a Kilburn expedition.


*What I usually refer to a ‘dirty curry’ though the term ‘Jacksinated curry’ is also apposite.

Clipper of the Yard

I miss the days when the rather fabulous Martin Holmes was my stylist. Now that I am reduced to infrequent haircuts at random locations, whenever I visit a barber, my luscious glory exists in a state akin to quantum uncertainty. It could go from flowing uncontrollably to the patchy static buzz of bughouse patient in a few short minutes.

Having reached the length where my collar had long since disappeared, I decided today that the mane needed taming. The nearest place for a cut at the moment I reached this verdict was Clipper of the Yard. Nestled next to New Scotland Yard in Dacre Street, it is firmly established as the unofficial hairdresser to the Metropolitan Police HQ. It probably deserves to have a Met warrant, its window emblazoned with the same design used on the constantly rotating sign of its neighbour.

Wander in with boots, dark trousers and a blue shirt and the other patrons tend to assume you are a copper. Banter about transfers and the latest stuff-up by the CPS or SCD8 can come in your direction. You cannot really expect less of a place when its obligatory celebrity endorsement photo on the wall is of Leonard ‘Nipper of the Yard’ Read.

Clipper of the Yard has an undeniable feel of the early eighties; all black, white and chrome with leather sofas. The sexist nudge-nudge wink-wink chat between coppers when the stylists are preoccupied is avatism perfectly in keeping with the décor. At any given moment you expect Gene Hunt in his Ashes To Ashes incarnation to open the door, sit beside you and start telling you how he only comes in hear to have his: “Bonce banged by the Polish bird’s boobs.”

My few minutes in the chair are functional. I do not feel like chatting. There is no energy in me for small talk. Directions are given and inches of hair come away. First my collar, then my ears reappear. Tonsorial archaeology. I walk away, the proud owner of a police haircut.

The Black Dog Tracks Behind

The serrated knife edge of cold that had been at my throat every morning this month was dropped today. I walk without dragon breath. Sun blessing my bones as it cracks the thin crust of ice on the canal.

Not thwarted by sunlight, the black dog tracks behind. The combined joys of the weather and the first day in a week when I have not been blinded by a headache, means he is further back than usual. He might catch up later, but right now I have a start on him.

The Premier Photographer of the Three Bridge Kingdom

One of my photos of London as Hoth ended up migrating from the semi-secret photo blog into the local paper. This may have less to do with my merits as a snapper than I would like to think given I live with the publication’s deputy editor. Nepotism is such a dirty word.

My little moment of glory was further diminished by the fact the picture was incorrectly credited to Surreal Girl. Not only did she upstage me by getting her own Hoth shot on the top of page five, she stole my chance to be recognised as the premier photographer of the Three Bridge Kingdom. I am crushed.

London as Hoth

For those following the semi-secret photo blog, there will be a special London as Hoth posting a wee bit later today.