Fragments of past, present and future

(*Some vernacular Scots is used here, just a wee note of caution...)

Some musing from the past to the future and then back to the febrile present….Part One...


Stepney Soap Suds

Canterbury: home of the scene and the stuff of my daymares. Some block had nearly stabbed me there in 1987 and I'd never forgotten that, despite the wonderment-inducing music that flowed like mercury from there throughout the 60s and 70s and beyond. Anyway, here I was tipping back the black stuff in The 3 Tuns and looking for a fight. No...I got some Jock pumping my mitt and rabbiting about Aberdeen. Teuchter as the Glasgow folks have it. I scoffed my pint and steak pie and me, Neil and Gordo exited with Paulo in tow. More drink and food to follow. I ended tearing into a Geordie teacher lassie as Neil and Gordo caberet-ed it up with some block out of Coldplay's brother. Summer of 2002. Out on the batter again and loving it. The 3 idiots abroad, circumnavigating the old U of K Glasgow to Newcastle in a horseshoe of arcane geometric intent. Bothwell services gave way to Carlisle as Neil and I ripped into a gross of McEwen's red death. 15 cans and counting. Gordo played a nightmare selection of Abba and Easy Rider in rotation. Morecambe. Oxford. Brighton. Canterbury. Kent coast. Cambridge and The Fenlands. Up to Newcastle for the dregs of the journey. Dregs being the operative as Neil had morphed into O'Toole and I'd kegged on about a stone of Full English cardiac case brekkies and several gallons of the black watter. Gordo still radiated the boxer he was, eyes bright behind the rakish broken bugle. Sound fellows on the road without plan or portfolio. Came in on budget too.
Hatfield and The North: the signage of signages. Love to see it. Love to hear them play too. Sinclair, Miller, Stewart and Pyle. What an outfit!
Fol deRol runs and we're back in the ovum of old Scotia, piling down Ashton Lane and noising up the hoi polloi and arrivistes alike. McAuley was in tow by now: poor wee Valentino Marc, too fine for this old world of ours. RIP Marc, RIP old son. I can hear your laughter from 2002 echoing down the blower as we rapped into the long nights. I wouldn't have finished the book without you, mate.
Back to the East End on the bullshit PR trail, faking fashion with the maximum twattage that I could muster. Fooled 'em 'cept myself. Back home, tail between. Max anger. Many a night with pencil in mitt, pouring whisky-scorn onto the petty page. And now...well, it's a right laugh looking back at the seemingly random collisions that were synergies without an anchor. Interconnectedness of all humanity, despite Witchfinder Dawkins and his bloodless eyes and unpoetic imagination. I take that back, his poetry is synaptic as opposed to romantic, misunderstood Magus? Who cares, eh? Pass the port…


111-Tri-Chloroethane

He was at it again. Pub after pub traversed chasing women in optics, bottles, cans and draught as the man says. I stared at his Old Testament mugshot profile and had a quiet smile to myself. We had done 20 pubs in an hour and my speed was wearing off. I trained it home to Bayswater, stopping off at Jodie ODs for a late night ramble about contemporary Irish golfers and Winston Churchill's lamentably poor judgement. Good end to a enervating eve. Bed before 3 was a comparitive victory for the McCann laddie in The Griffin, The Smoke....
McCann had made his usual sharp exit after soliloquising about wine, women, golf and song. Timed it perfectly. The tube to Queensway at just the right moment, doors closing, coda to the night before I could argue the case for late night Turkish shakedowns in gambling dens, or the casino for a bog standard burger. 1130pm and McCann of The Errors is off at Plumpton. Wish he would curtail the white stuff, as he is getting faster with age; time running backwards as his ageless coupon has morphed from 45 year old Alan Moore Magus into 25 year old fresh faced jokey, blokey bookie's journeyman. An enigma of shapeshifting intensity and good black humour.
Here's me at 3am, downing sour lager and eyeing the local skirt with a wary countenance and slightly bulging midriff. Good living. My promotion's a dead cert. DS McVey is a fitted marking, no doubt. McCann is mired in DC hell and gives not a jot of concern. He's too frantic to actually work at my pace. I do the paperwork, he lifts the tickets. Job done. Still, he lifted a boy at Hoxton for punting eccies and some other shite; still got the steel required to do this undercover lark. Hard in that soft outer. Fast fists and no damage done.
There he was: McCann. Glasgow's finest export, tipping back my duty-free scottish grain and rabbiting about Padraig Harrington. Lovely lad, but mad as the hatter. Always took the proverbial biscuit, dropping in at will and giving me heartburn laughter as he rambled through his routine, eyes ablaze with manic life and love. I sat in my opiated state, arthritis abating as the Diamorphine McCann lifted from the office weaving waves of relief through my wracked corpus. God bless the Scotsman, he was a good 'un. He exited at 2, taking a Brinsley MacNamara play with him, "A Glorious Uncertainty" How apposite!
Jodie OD was an old warhorse of some repute: papped off the force for hitting a so-called superior officer and refusing to climb down from his personal mountain to apologise. He'd come over from Tipp and loved the London liberation of early 60s Notting Hill blue beat, Ska and Irish folk. He'd knocked about the hippie fringes and ended up being at the epicentre of Ronnie Laing's Tavistock experiments. Sound bloke. Like a Magus gone to seed. Massive white mane and beard. Moorcock's Elric's Dad. That sort. Loved Jodie. He'd given me back-up over an altercation with an IRA laddie in Bayswater and I'd never, ever forgotten. I'd always get him that extra dosage as and when required, without his even asking. His eyes would telegraph pain and I'd be off and running. Nick a good dealer and pinch a tincture of his stash of opiates for Jodie. As long as it was 'script quality, my quid was in. Good night sweet Magus. I smell Tippex in the landing of my buliding, those kids from Laddy Grove buzzing away at it for a cheap hit. I sighed a tad as I opened the door to my sad wee apartment and clocked Ginger on the couch. She'd crashed and was making snuffling noises, whilst Hawkwind oozed out of my old Linn bins. Space Ritual on replay.Happy days.



A Fly in Aspic
The drones. Always hammering away at the backbrain. Primal fear drummed into my wiped mental slate. Patinas of shifting realities competing for attention. The drones. It was coming: the end point, in a heavily quilted sense. I was being suffocated in white noise and cotton wool-mouthed I raised my eyes to the strip lighting as the DMT took effect. I was acceding to the madness. Capitulating to the reassuring voices as they played my favoured choices over a huge invisible rig in the hidden wall speakers...And now I was belting along Old Street, my years at Porton Down and elsewhere a memory frag replayed when conscious of the body heat of the local constabulary invading my icebox existence as fringe player on the East End intelligence circuit. Who was I anyway? A fictive self, created by The Outfit for none other than the amusement of the trapeze artist falling without safety net humour of my faceless handlers? Or was I still being filmed by Chris Petit or Stewart Home for some Situationist event, played out over a vast endless looping slowed-down movie of my ever-shifting lives?

The Rev and The Errors looked at McGhee pound down Old Street as they laughed at his shuffling gait and aching trainered feet awkwardly make their way back to his bed-sitter nether-hell. The joke was on him for a change as they lit imaginary cigars and wound their way into some crap boozer or other for the search for intelligent life in this domain. The grey reaches were in danger of swallowing up their last reserves of Caledonian humour sparks and The Errors' endless cabaret of bullshit was wearing him out. The Rev merely was after birdage and pints or 12. Expense accounts would cover another day on the lash, then results would have to rear their ugly mugs. 2 dealers in a fortnight was smallest of the small ales. Hitting the 4-0 and not getting promo was not putting DCs McVey and McCann off; they couldn’t care less as the money merely kept them in booze and books, whilst the occasional arrest kept bored bosses off their seconded backs. Bottom feeders. Flies in aspic. McCann laughed as he tipped a 150-1 shot in the 330 at Kempton. McVey knew now why he was dubbed The Errors; he revelled in his incompetence as a means of perpetuating personal mythos. That and the fact that his speed habit was the talk of the canteen culture at both The Met and up the road in Grampian. Flies in fucking aspic...


Trouble Follows in Dark Pints

Company. Sometimes the only factor between you and the hereafter. Even when you're dead inside, as I was when I took the film that sealed the fate of a certain politician, it was company that swooped in on wings of intervention and prevented the certain demise of a certain Ivan Anthony McGhee. MI5 spooks may come and go, but the cabaret of friendships goes on forever. Moorcock had been impressed by my snaps and touch of the poet about me, but reckoned I was too close to the negative muse of Downing Street and the scandal sheets to be of any use to even myself. He was right of course. Sad case McGhee. Still trying at nearly 60 to be in on the action and all that rotten stuff. I was finished. It was 2010 and I reckoned 4 years would see me out this world, with maybe a few billion fellow psychonauts with me. It was an end in itself my life and the recession-ridden UK I had come back to from LA was a nightmare of Pre-War grey. I felt like I had skipped a generation and was back in my grandfather's Highlander forelock-tugging Cromarty croft. Subsistence economy and paying through the nose for it.
My nose was twitching as The Rev and his mate, Sean of The Errors came into The Electricity Showrooms; a pair of doom prophets from up the road in anarchy riven Scotia. The Caledonian invasion had started and this pair were prime movers. Errors tipped me a cheeky wink and The Rev blinked kinetically and shyly smiled. I merely shrugged and tipped another expensive Czech lager down the thrapple and sighed. The Rev was over like the proverbial shot as Errors jemmied a laugh out of the heavily pierced barman and tossed his mane provocatively. Big bleeding poseur out of the west of Caledonia. The Rev on the other hand was too low-key for his own good. And a sly fox too. Camera at the ready I snapped Errors as he trailed The Rev with a pair of whiskies and pints of Guinness. The terrible twosome. The gallows humour in the air I asked after my old pal Alec up in Glasgow. Errors snorted and slapped my back heartily with the air of a sideshow bare knuckle boy as The Rev tried to prise out info about Jodie OD. I balked as two twenties were pressed into my open mitt. Errors had a roll of dough that would land an elephant. He gave me the blue vulpine eyes and got in close. Circling the corpse. He was mild enough to be really intimidating. Loud voice/soft voice. The Rev disappeared to the bogs to look for tuppeny dealers as The Errors continued his soft soap hard talk. I sighed again and tipped the dregs of the lager. Errors shrugged said nothing and pressed another twenty into my jacket pocket. Invasion of personal space: a favourite tactic of the psychopath. He cracked his knuckles and plainly stated "Three minutes Ivan, 3 mins" as he followed The Rev into the bogs. I'd known that Garry the Bong was in there flogging cheap grass and poor speed. I'd had a lucky escape as I exited at some lick. Pair of shits. Undercover and on expenses. Still, they'd let me off. Result.

Quite obvious, really!

I am crazy. Good family. Oxford main chance. But no, shoot yersel' in the foot, wee man!. What shite! I was a 22 year old dude in an unusual academic setting. I mean, these dudes thought Gerry Rafferty was fucking American! Jesus! What rot...all the time thinking of poor Sean Sheridan; dead at 36, my uncle's best mate and a good mentor o' mine...
Then Floyd kicks in with its bad-time blues and all is forgotten. Bourgeoisie boys giving us the way forward, saloon bar leftist, as Geldof wearily put it. Easy for the cunt to say that; pumping Paula Yates and getting plenty wedge for his miniscule role in The Wall. Us mere dole cunts were panting in the boy's wake. I'd seen him with The Boomtown Rats in The Glasgow Apollo in '82 and was non-plussed. Fuck...I'd hated Hawkwind and Marillion and my pathetic hippie credentials were pretty much shredded. It took John Leckie in '89 to lift me out of my ghetto mentality as regards working class hippies. There were plenty in Paisley; all good guys to a person... I still love those hazy days, my asthma precluding any searching drug quests. Bless us all...we fucking tried!

Oxford Hazing

Fountain of Salamacis creeps out of massive speakers as Vol. Con and I down pints and wrestle with the existential horror of essay deadlines whilst keeping a weather eye on the ladies. Dipso-wide bhoys floating on a sea of prog and Guinnesses. Vol. Con makes a quip about my straggly barnet, saying I was becoming a white Rasta, and why didn't I go the whole hog and get some dreads? I choked on the ruby red pint and burst a gut laughing. Vol. Con's Van Cleef gimlet eyes drilled into my backbrain as he eyed me winking at all and sundry. A rare talent: comedian and sentinel. His large ivory mitts twisting a roll-up and rubbing sensual fingers down his jet black strides, his brows fast twitching a telegraph of libidinous intent. Two lassies entered our pub tutorial snug and gave us a barely-concealed look of pig-tail tugging coquettish come on. We winked a smug glint of Gaelic pride and downed our pints. Another day at the chalk face.

A 1000 Names, all of them wrong...
Free aether. Solar energy assails my pellucid Gaelic skin as me and The Rev traverse more of the forgotten and erased, trying to compose a homage that neither stoops to conquer nor soft soaps; a difficult doxology. Old Lady Time is never kind to the navel gazers. Quickly we rush through over an hour of footage and I tootle off for an early bath. I'd prefigured Ayrshire so wrong: my childhood experiences and expectations were the right ones, the adult mindset of educated scoffing was well wide of the mark. Ayrshire both confirmed a belief and sullied a political mapping. People were interconnected in so many ways that my stolid Stalinism Lite was worthy of trashing. And I did. My childhood was a glorious time of wonder, even into so-called adolescence. Burns had burned his way into my consciousness, despite my opinions to the contrary. So had the sun-dappled landscape and deep topography: an all-round day of wonderment.