If you have five seconds to spare
Then I’ll tell you the story of my life.
Chapter 1: The Origins of the Images
‘A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead,’ wrote Maurice Bendix in Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. And Robert Jordan wrote:
"The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose.... The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning."
It's a wet and whimsical sort of day - the sort of day from which to do some looking back - so I'm going to post on here a few memories about Images of Dusk that I've committed to Word. I'm going to pick an arbitrary place to start the story, when the winds of creativity played around the members of the band. It was not the beginning, but it was a beginning ...
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We’re at primary school. It’s 1989. Chris and I are in the same class. It’s the time of the week I always look forward to the most: the ‘free’ afternoon, when (thanks to the ever-sensitive and encouraging Mrs. Rising) we’re allowed to do whatever we like, as long as it’s creative or 'constructive'. I have a photograph of a peregrine falcon open in a book in front of me, and an A4 sheet of cartridge paper, and a few sketching pencils (HB, 2B, 4B). I’ve spent the previous week’s free time drawing out the shape of the body, and wings, and the feathers; now I’m trying very hard to make sure the pinprick of light in the peregrine’s eye is perfect. This is the exciting moment – when the eye is accurately drawn, the bird comes alive.
I look up. Unknown to me, I was being watched by another boy who takes this ‘free’ time as seriously as me. He is busy on his own project – constructing a working model aeroplane, to his own design. His model has been weeks in the making, and he has been subtly enhancing it at every opportunity. I feel humbled – my drawing has taken a few hours, no more, and is a plagiaristic attempt to reproduce the picture in the book. Chris has created something original and unique.
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It’s about 1992. It’s a cold night in autumn, or perhaps just about winter, and it’s been raining hard for days. Chris and I have left our bikes, mudguards and wheels immovably caked from the freshly-ploughed field, further down the path, under a large overhanging tree (probably a willow), in the space where the nettles and brambles haven’t grown because the tree’s canopy has deprived them of light. In the complete darkness, we’re hunched next to each other, a foot away from the swollen, brutal river, attached to the invisible world beneath its surface through the tips of our fingers, along the taut nylon line, along the eyes of our rods, and through the tiny cut the sharp fishing line has made in the skin that is the river's surface. We’re hoping and waiting, wondering what is out there, and where our baited hooks have gone. We’re talking in hushed voices – respectful of the gurgling giant pursuing its strong, speedy, single-minded path through the night.
In the sanctuary of the black and quiet night, and hidden in the intimacy of mutual concentration, we share whispered stories about the girls at school (or rather, in my case, on the bus) and the sorts of feelings that would make us too vulnerable away from this abstract world.
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It’s a Saturday morning in about 1993. In truth, it could be any Saturday morning between about 1990 and 1994. I’m due at Richard’s house at 10, but it’s now nearer 11, and I’m cycling as quickly as I can. My rucksack is stashed with the high elf griffon rider I’ve spent the past three weeks laboriously painting – undercoat, base colours, an ink wash to give the shadows, and dry-brushed highlights. I get to Richard’s, panting, late, a little sheepish, but excited too about showing the others my new model. Chris chastises me but my lateness is soon forgotten and in any event Chris hasn’t finished working out his army list yet. We check out each others’ latest paint jobs (my elf, Richard’s trolls, Hack’s beastman lord, Jason's witch elves and Chris’s steam tank) and get on with unveiling our intricately planned regiments.
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One summer – it may have been before the night of river fishing, or after, I can’t be sure – Chris, Hack and I are camped next to the mill pool in Kelvedon. The pool is serene, and the trees that surround us give the impression of isolation (though in fact, we’re just five minutes’ walk from Chris’s and Hack’s homes). We’re there in search of our own Moby Dick, a giant creature of unknown dimensions we have witnessed (with our own eyes), visible across the other side of the pool thanks to his single defining mark: a pale spot somewhere along his back. Though he may not know it, he is, imaginatively, called Palespot.
After a number of visits to the pool over several weeks (during each visit we have started fishing for perch and gudgeon in the middle of the pool and ended up casting long and hopefully towards that other bank) we have hatched a night-fishing plan, when the dark monster must come out to prowl around his watery lair.
We sit for hours (I don’t remember whether we stay all night, but in my memory it lasts almost a whole weekend). Richard and Jason visit us, laugh at the futility of it all, and leave. I don’t think Chris, Hack or I stay the whole time together, but there is always one of us to hold the fort (or the rod).
Needless to say, we never did catch our white monster. One day, a year or so later, when girls and cheap cider had taken the place of fishing and roleplay, I think I did see Palespot, at close quarters. He looked like a common carp – big when compared to our perch and gudgeon, but not the giant we had imagined.
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It’s 1994. This time I can be more sure, because Definitely Maybe has been released, and Chris has bought a guitar. Chris is learning by day the songs we’re drinking to by night – songs about ordinary people living supra-ordinary lives (‘maybe you’re the same as me/We see things they’ll never see/You and I are gonna live forever’, ‘feeling supersonic/Give me gin and tonic’, ‘you need to be yourself/Can’t be noone else’, ‘in my mind my dreams are real … I’m a rock n roll star’).
I can’t play a note, and I can’t be bothered to learn, though I am impressed with Chris’ sudden desire to reach competence, and the ability to make those songs his own – those songs that are themselves about taking old songs and ideas and making them new (‘sail with me in my yellow submarine’).
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New Year’s Eve, 1994, and I’m at William’s house in Dedham. William has taught me to play a D chord on his red Fender Stratocaster, so I can now just about pick out the arpeggios of REM’s Everybody Hurts. Chris, Richard, Hack and Jason are in Feering. After quite a few drinks, I’m on the phone to them, wishing they were here. Ben downs a pint of vodka. I finish the night collapsed on the floor next to Ben, now quite ill, desperately trying to soothe his pain with the aid of Everybody Hurts, until I fall asleep.
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November 1995, Ben’s Big Room, The Mount, Colchester. It’s Ben’s 18th birthday party. Pinstripe (or at least Alex and William, half of the band) are going to play an acoustic set (covers of Suede and Violent Femmes classics). I am to be the ‘support’. I still can’t play the guitar, so I decide to dress in my ‘toga’ (a long green curtain-come-cape) and ‘perform’ a reading of William Blake’s The Rose (‘oh rose, thou art sick’). Strangely, given that I have freely volunteered to take the ‘stage’, I become cripplingly nervous, and find myself guzzling pints of Sainsbury’s strong dry cider (three litres for three pounds). Farrah arrives, and is (understandably) appalled to find me almost unable to stand. She barely says a word to me (at least that’s how it seems), so I drink more. My night ends before the gig has started, with me inconsolable, my Dad summoned to take me home, and a pool of vomit left outside Ben’s window.
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It’s October or November 1996. Chris is in Norwich, I am in Oxford. It’s a Victorian autumn: suburban roads and red brick houses, cold fog that catches in your throat; William Morris wallpaper, the Divine Comedy’s Liberation; Browning and Tennyson. Farrah’s decided to start afresh at University (how could she?); all my friends have been left by their girlfriends (except Chris – somehow he’s managed to hold on to his); I’m feeling a bit giddy and emotionally all at sea. I’m sitting cross-legged on the threadbare carpet in Julian’s college room. Julian is playing Caught in a Downstream on his (unplugged) Fender Telecaster, and I am transfixed. He is my contemporary, my friend, and he is singing an intelligent and sincere song, a genuinely original composition. He can sing and play; his song has a melody, intriguing lyrics (what is his biography?). I am profoundly moved by the immediacy of the experience, the honesty and vulnerability of Julian’s performance. I feel ashamed of my lazy arrogance in having presumed that I was a creative and sensitive person without doing anything to prove it to myself or anyone else.
I play the D chord William taught me, clumsily, and at some cost to my fingers. Julian shows me an E minor and an A minor 7. They open up new, darker, more interesting moods. I come back almost every day to be taught a new chord, though I can’t strum at all yet, and playing for even a couple of minutes hurts. I want to be able to play the way Julian does to The Cardigans, Corduroy, and on his own songs.
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Early 1997, or thereabouts, and Chris has sent me an email about the new band he’s joined in Norwich. I’m sitting in the dingy old computer room in the middle of the night with a skinful of cheap booze, picturing Chris pulling rockstar moves with a bunch of people I’ve not met before. I’m impressed that he’s got the balls to play in front of strangers. I’m still struggling to communicate with the girls down my corridor without the assistance of more alcohol than can possibly be healthy. I go back to my room and I can hear people I don’t yet know singing along badly to Definitely Maybe downstairs while I sit with my window wide open and watch stragglers walking across the quad.
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I think we’re in the summer of 1997. Hack, Chris and I are holed up in Hack’s garage. I’ve bought an ugly red Fender Stratocaster copy with an enormous white pick plate from Arjun at College. Hack’s borrowed a bass (from Sharpy, I think). Chris is now endowed with a beautiful new sunburst Telecaster, an eighteenth birthday present, I believe. It’s the inaugural jam/practice session for PJ, BJ and the Mad Dixta Woof Woof (sadly, Rich and Jason aren’t there for this one, though we have plans for Rich as a rapper and Jase on his euphonium). I’ve copied the idea from a Belle and Sebastian song I heard them play at the Union Chapel - This is Just a Modern Rock Song – specifically the verse:
This is just a modern rock song,
This is just a sorry lament,
We're four boys in corduroys,
We're not terrific but we're competent.
I’ve nicked the chords and rhythm from one of Julian’s songs (Boring Blondes), taken the idea of the lyric from a Philip Larkin poem (When first we faced, and touching showed – specifically the lines ‘There stood how much the meeting owed/To other meetings, other loves’). And, in the spirit of T.S. Eliot’s allusive Wasteland (or so I told myself), I’ve ‘written’ a song, and called it Another Teenage Lament. I’m too scared to sing it, so the jam consists of Hack playing a bass part Chris has suggested, me strumming and humming, and Chris adding some ‘whap – whoah’ octaves on his Tele. We’re completely rubbish – I can’t keep rhythm, Hack’s getting nasty blisters from the bass strings, and we only have one ‘song’. AND this is our warm up for the planned Hackstonbury/Hackstock ‘festival’, which is due to take place in September.
Still – we all have to start somewhere, and a rock n roll beginning wouldn’t really have been in the spirit of PJ BJ and the Mad Dixta Woof Woof (or Images of Dusk, for that matter). In the event, Hackstonbury (I preferred this, myself – we are English, after all) never really materialised. I think we’re still hoping that one day it might.
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Another term has passed, and Chris and I are back in Essex – it’s the Christmas holiday in 1997. Chris has a Tascam tape 4 track, and we have decided to make a record, sitting in Chris’s bedroom. Probably a bad case of trying to run before we could walk – we could barely stand – but we won’t let the fact that we only have one song stop us. We don’t use a metronome; using a cheap mic we record my rhythm guitar (the red Fender Strat), Hack’s bass (I have to play this – Hack’s busy), Chris’s lead. It’s a hesitant performance, shall we say. Then it comes to my turn to sing. With Chris in the room, I can only manage to speak the lyrics in something approximating the melody. Singing in front of someone for the first time is about as difficult as I used to find swallowing pills – the more I think about it, the less I am able. Eventually, we manage to force something out of me; we quickly move on to the next song.
About the same time, Chris has bought himself a big shiny second hand Fender Twin amp, which sounds beautiful, and has two input channels. We spend a long time ‘noodling’ together, one through each channel. Julian has shown me a blues/pentatonic scale on the fretboard, but I’m better at playing simple rhythms. A few early attempts are captured through the tiny mic attached to Chris’s PC – on one, based around an A minor and E minor, there is a thrilling moment when I unexpectedly hit an F major 7, just as Chris’s solo melody was changing tone. We sat and listened to it over and over again, amazed that we’d created this tiny, crackling snippet of actual music. Eventually, we plug into the 4 track, and one such meandering ‘noodle’ is captured. We call it This Ship.
I come back a day or two later, and Chris has come up with his own composition, which is undeniably more original than my own – The Way. It sets the pattern for many Images of Dusk songs to come, especially with its nostaligic 'brought back a memory/of how things could have been/but that’s the way it goes/I suppose'. Chris remains a considerably better guitarist than I am so the song is rather more confidently executed than Another Teenage Lament. Emboldened by the simplicity of the bass line on Another Teenage Lament, I add bass to The Way. Chris plays some chopped bits of guitar and I’m allowed to have my first go at lead guitar with a little run of notes that I think sounded like Radiohead but actually sounds like – well, like someone who’s just learnt to play the guitar. But the song builds to something approaching a rousing finale and we’re both delighted with our work – a genuinely multi-tracked effort.
Meanwhile, my reading of gothic novels and poems leads to a peculiar fantasy composition that doesn’t really sound like anything we’ve tried recording since, particularly with Chris’s hideous wailing lead guitar discordant all over it. I was actually delighted with the song – I thought I’d combined Bernard Butler guitars with dark, arty lyrics ('and as my vision decays/in a bloodshot haze/I wonder whether you’ll be happy' and the final line 'my corpse is a crumpled heap'). We even recorded my guitar with a mic next to the fretboard on my electric guitar because we’d heard that’s how Suede recorded The Living Dead (or was it the start of The Wild Ones?). In fact, it was an ugly, muddled recording, but did mean that we almost had enough songs for an EP, so we decided that it was in the bag and moved on.
What was missing, though, was a contribution from J, J and the Mad Dixta Wuf Wuf. Chris solved this one day by sitting Hack and Rich down with a mic and copies of the Undead and Empire Warhammer army lists and the tape flipped over so that they could read over Another Teenage Lament playing backwards. With the perfect 'or maybe it was all the onions', our final “song” was complete and we went back to our respective university towns ready to bask in the glory of our achievement.
A month or so later, I visit Chris in Norwich. He has compiled our five songs into a “track listing” and burnt them on to a CD (a real, live CD that actually plays on a CD player). He’s also added a sixth track, which consists of some strange guitar noises and me bemoaning another failed attempt to play a guitar part (called Words of Wisdom). The CD has a cover (an anime image of three people around a corpse, with one saying “Low Fidelity EP” and another replying (rather bizarrely) “There’s nothing we can do …leave him.” – with reference to my macabre composition Crumpled). Seeing the finished CD (and, more important, listening to it through a stereo) opens up whole new worlds. Suddenly we feel that we've crossed the line between artist and audience and, despite its manifest amateruishness, we realise that there’s nothing stopping us, in our own way, having a go at making our own music.
Hello !
http://antergerd.com
Thank you! I delighted!
There was merrily!
Posted by: Arcaxia | March 19, 2008 at 06:34 AM
Great work.
Posted by: Vivian | October 29, 2008 at 04:01 AM