It lies in several fragments on the floor. Like Humpty Dumpty. Like God. The book from which I can only escape by finishing  writing it. Exactly which this blog, well my part in it at least, is probably another attempt to do.

 

But Yes I remember then, Tim. Summer ’80. I remember now too. I can even remember the future where I’m sitting. This timeless place into which I slipped all those years ago. But  oh woops there I go again…so easily distracted nowadays!…

 

And just to say, because there really is no hurry to get to the end of this….that meeting at the Iroquois, Tim, that’s not the bit I remember! I remember this, more….

 

That’s us maybe just after a gig, could be later that night, because we’ve all got bottles....more fragments …and the most we ever looked like a punk band. Which of course we weren’t. It’s the picture you used for the Trouser Press interview I think, and later we did too on one of our vast pile of posthumous records. That’s Morris on the left with his Village People ‘tache then, scrolling right, Kimberley and Robyn – two boys with girl’s names – and me, the other M, Matthew on the right. It caught us at a fine time, just weeks away at this point from obeying pop’s most important rule. Be ephemeral. Be good, bad, honest, stupid or brave, brilliant and pretty, but above all DON’T LAST. Then we will worship you. Rockers, funksters, bluesers and rappers can last. But not popsters. Which of course we weren’t either. But that didn’t stop us trying. So shortly after meeting you and getting home from New York, as the nights shortened back in London, we broke the band and went our separate ways….Morris to the gasoline station in Gloucester he wound up working in, Kimberley to help build an Anglo Saxon village in Cambridge, and to start writing songs again, and Robyn to the pub. Me, I can’t remember. But wherever it was, I do remember that the Evening Standard became my morning paper.

 Where did you go next Tim?

Because I do remember you, too, all sweet and smiley and laughing quite a lot. And New York, pretty much exactly as you describe it, all ramshackle and sophisticated although they don’t always go together well, yes it’s all there except for the dripping cooling vents you forgot those, so you might as well have walked down a blazing hot street on a sunny day with an umbrella if you wanted to avoid all that aircon rain. Although looking up wasn’t the only thing you had to do. I remember that week when we were there, some poor soul died falling through a metal grill in the pavement.

 

But Yes, Happy New Year Tim! And a question for you too, because I have just played it maybe a hundred (well, at least ten) times at various occasions all over Sendai here in the snowy north of Japan these past few weeks. If it is a Christmas song, why does John Lennon sing “Another year over, a new one just begun?” Maybe he had slipped a bit in time too? Whatever, it’s still a shocking video….

Well at least he tried!

I love your jumbled poem and butterflies drinking turtle tears...

Matthew and I Meet; I become distracted by Artaud and Odd Animals

In the summer of 1980, New York City was a place of extraordinary shabby beauty.  It was a sepia crumble full of life, youth, and hope, with little sense that its' rejuvenation would lead to its' downfall. 

In the very center of this over-heated factory of sleaze, hope and ringing guitars simultaneously defiant of the past and nostalgic for it, lay an Inn full of seedy glamour called the Iroquois Hotel.  It was where British rock bands stayed if they couldn't afford the slightly more elegant Gramercy Park Hotel, yet had enough money to avoid the truly sleazy hotels twenty blocks to the south (the George Washington and the Hotel Seville, both at that time largely filled with the just barely not-homeless).  

The Iroquois was just slightly to the right of the center of Times Square, a place that is now as lost and as legendary as Constantinople in the time of the Eastern Empire.  It was a beautiful hell, where all the dimmest desires and stretched and sluiced hopes of the Republic had come together in a few square blocks of bleached, collapsing, shambholic high doom that made you simultaneously happy and shamed.  My office (at the time I was a 17 year-old office boy for a much-loved and much-missed alternative rock magazine called Trouser Press) was right in the center of this spectacular collapseum, and I can tell you, it was the best and the worst kind of mess and magic.  

The Iroquois seemed impossibly glamorous to me.  It didn't matter that the carpet was as frayed as the dreams of the hookers and homeless and the tired and the diseased and the furtive and the furious who hung out in front of the hotel; to me, the pissy old hotel was a place where I could frequently find some of my favorite bands, fantastic British men and women who played the music of my dreams, the music that created the path for me to escape the sorrows and loneliness of suburbia, and brought me into the city, The City, that Great Glittering Prize which was, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Kingdom of Outsiders.  

I arrived at the Iroquois to interview a band called the Soft Boys.  Matthew Seligman was their bassist. When I walked in, the band were just getting off the elevator.  The band's vocalist, Robyn Hitchcock, stuck his hand out, and as I was shaking it, he announced to me "I have just finished rubbing fungus cream all over my feet."  The band members fell to pieces laughing.  With nearly 34 years to consider this comment, I suspect it was a metaphor for masturbation, but you'd have to ask Matthew.   

Now, I was fully intending on writing more about this wonderful meeting, this singular and influential band, and this spectacular lost time.  But I got distracted by a fascinating link about weird animals, and I decided to take quotes from this weird animal story, and alternate it with lines from a poem by Artaud. That makes perfect sense, doesn't it?  

So, here's what you're about to see:  A Weird Animal Story meets Artaud, each alternating every other line:  

 From butterflies that feast on the tears of turtles to a two-headed shark fetus:

Besides, the old box of caca humus will return when man has stopped being that low ferret scratching at sex as if to force papa’ssecret out from his very mama mouth,

While some sharks give live birth, others deposit egg cases called mermaid's purses in the water. 

And when papa-mama himself will have given up his seat to man, without hieroglyph and secret keyboard,

134 franken-tadpoles with eyes on their tails and torsos instead of on their heads. 

But it will take a lot of blood to cleanse the shit-box, awash, not with shit, but with god-love.

Had this shark fetus survived, it would have had a promising career as a circus attraction.

It’s the old haggler from Sinai who spread love-essence about;

A boa constrictor eats an adult female Purús red howler monkey whole.

But why didn’t it occur to anyone that to fiddle with the essences?

butterflies in the Amazon have been observed flocking onto the heads of turtles to drink their tears, 

(infinitesimals of principle, principles, embryos, magma larvae)

the orchid mantis is a predator,

was to let in all the microbes that are in the pruritus of the mind :

Enormous toothy reptiles developing the ability to use tools to destroy us all,

Sows, cinders of life.

Happy New Year to You All.