One with Everything

When I was eighteen I got hold of some oil paints and a piece of hardboard and tried to paint a picture of a dream I kept having. The results were rubbish – I didn’t even prep the board and the brushwork was terrible. I stopped having that particular dream decades ago but I did continue to experience another repetitive mental phenomenon which I called pop-ups.

A pop-up is a fleeting thought or image, usually accompanied by a strong but odd feeling. The thought always feels as though it is merely the leading edge of a much longer, more elaborate sequence and it is always concerned with an episode from the past. I have no inkling what these episodes might be but every time something pops up I feel irresistibly diverted and yearn to complete the thought. I get a pop-up every few days – there are about half a dozen of them – and some of them have been visiting for more than forty years. In the essay Leytonstone I write about a newish pop-up, one that’s been in place for only twelve years or so. In Very Birmingham I describe one that’s over twenty years old.

Despite their oddness, I sometimes wonder what would happen if I could fit the pop-ups into my ordinary remembering, that is to say, I would simply decide to hold the memories in consciousness then pursue them. Perhaps they would act as passwords or portals to lost lands of the past. Suddenly I would remember everything. All that is air becomes solid. Cascades of chemistry pour down nano-tubules of the cerebellar backstreets, converting into image modules on the hoof, a picture rises into view, chainlinked to many others, they’re all pulled in, not willy nilly but puzzle pieces falling into place snap snap snap, the dust falling away as they recollect spanking bright after years in perfect storage. As the seconds pass the effect amplifies dramatically, tube after tube floods into action, the branches of the branches are branching. Snap snap snap the jigsaws are now joining together at their edges and now the water is receding from those little islands revealing one reclaimed continuous netherland growing in all directions.

If you believe that vivid recollection is tantamount to reliving the past then the ability to remember everything would bring the possibility of actually reliving everything. On the beach yesterday I was thinking that if you did get the opportunity to relive everything – something would be done to the chemistry of your mind and it would start to rerun, in perfect order, the record of your life etcetera – there would be two viewing options: you could take the passive model, in which you sat back and watched it like it was a show or you could take the immersive option, in which you had no sense of yourself as an observer, you were just doing it all, all over again.

The latter mode has similarities with the idea of reincarnation. In the sixties a number of friends of mine decided to worship an Indian master. Some of them are still doing it. The master told them that if they implemented the stringent and ludicrous constraints that he specified they would get off the wheel of reincarnation in only four more lifetimes. (If this sounds to you very much like dying, rebranded as a must-have experience then read on; if it makes perfect sense then don’t get a life, kill yourself now.) Had you not striven for perfection in the life that you were given then you’d have to pay off the debt you’d racked up with your imperfection and incontinence and run the risk of being reincarnated as a vole or a lettuce or at the least a stupid person.

If this were the case, you would be brought straight back, having passed away, (I’m not clear whether the transfer is in fact instantaneous or if you have to wait around, bodiless, while the computations are being carried out) in order to live yet another life as a stupid person, louse or carrot before the time came for the accounts to be submitted yet again, at which crucial point if you hadn’t paid off the karma or, worse, had incurred more then off we go again you poor sap, it’s forty years of donkey and you didn’t even get to go to the poolhall with the lads and smoke a few tabs before the ears burst through your hat etc.

It occurs to me that in fact some of this doesn’t sound too bad – how long does a carrot live, for example? But the principal weakness in this popular delusion is that while you’re reincarnated as an amoeba, okapi or radio disc jockey because you practised onanism with abandon, you don’t actually know it! So why give a fuck? Who cares if they spend eternity as a springbok or oryx, especially when you don’t even know you were once a major popular entertainer who coveted his friend’s four by four?

By far the more effective punishment for eating meat, swatting flies or running down a bus queue full of schoolchildren while taking a mobile phone call would simply be to make you believe that you had racked up some kind of debt that even prison couldn’t cancel blah blah and that would have to be sorted out by the guys with loose fitting clothes and beards on another plane who’d make you have to be a dog and, crucially, know it.

You’d know that you were only being a dog because you had yearned for something inappropriate in your previous life and everything you did as a dog, such as shitting on pavements and getting kicked for it or getting locked in a hot car you’d be saying to yourself and anyone you came across who could speak Dog ‘O I am a dog who was once a human in line for a major position in the world of finance but I yearned for biscuits so much that I got reincarnated as a dog who now has biscuits four times a day’ and the other fellow says ‘O dog would that I could help you by kissing you because I see your inner nature’ and the dog says ‘It won’t work, that’s a European tradition. In this one my only chance is to be an exceptionally good dog then maybe I’ll get to be a lowly human in the next life and eventually work my way back up’ and the fellow says ‘Who’s a good boy then?’

The fairy tale traditions clearly offer the crueller but fairer option in this respect – they let you know you’ve fucked up so you regret it but you can do something about it like become loveable. This is why I recommend a syncretic solution wherein reincarnation theory is toughened up with the help-a-pixie-and-get-a better-body option. Needless to say, none of this shit would actually have to happen because the point being you think it will and that’s your real punishment, sucker.

My own preference with regard to the Whole Life Rerun business would be for the TV option, the one where you sit and watch and know that you are. How long would it last though? If you’re thirty, say, and you get the rerun offer, does it last thirty years? Is there an edit button? Is there a fast forward? Would you have to effectively suspend or lay off your regular life for the duration of the rerun – is there even a pause button so that you could eat from time to time and change your clothing? It will be some years before we have to answer these questions and I’m certainly not qualified. Yet. Let me just say though: it will happen and it will be bigger than cinema or DVDs.

And what if – finally – the first few times the boffins bring it off, the subject finds that it’s a one-way thing – you rerun but you can’t get any of it back. Your whole memory is gone. Acres of empty shelving. What could you do? One idea would be to start again, putting it all back together based on extra-subjective records, such as old school reports, postcards you’d written, diaries maybe, what your parents have to say about you, photos your friends have, 45 rpm discs you’d cut in that booth in Liverpool Street station before they took it down, extensive interviews with groups of friends where you provide drinks and finger foods and they tell you what you were like.

Many novels have been written using this slender premise. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work. It needn’t take thirty years either. If you were single-minded and reasonably well organised you could probably get up and running with the reconstituted material in a couple of years. Yes, there would be a risk of contamination, the views and reports of others not necessarily being accurate or uninflected, the possibility that malign or mischievous colleagues would tell you wrong stuff for the hell of it. But just as likely is that a sage and benign friend would think ‘Well, he was actually quite a fucking pain in a number of ways so we won’t mention them and the world will be a better place plus we won’t have to live with it ever again.’

The record thus composed would not be as satisfying as the real thing but it would be all you had and eventually you would make it satisfying because no one likes to think that there might be significant elements of distortion in something as fundamental as your own memory of your own life.

David Duchovny

First published in GQ, November 1996

“I’ve been working with David for six weeks,” says Tim Hutton, who plays Raymond, musing over the pool table at Andy Wilson’s place in the West Hollywood hills. “And he’s still the same. You don’t get close.” He muffs the shot.

“Nice guy, though,” says Andy Tiernan, who plays Cyril, moving in with his cue.

Hutton nods then strolls over to watch the video of the dailies running on Wilson’s enormous TV. Maybe six weeks doesn’t sound so long in the everyday world but in the superheated instability of movie making time condenses and bonds are forged at an unnatural pace. This movie is certainly no exception. Aspects of it are so hair-raising you’d half expect to see everyone get married by the time it’s over.

‘X-Files’ star David Duchovny plays Eugene. Melanie Green, his manager, volunteers an assessment of the man accused of keeping his cool in the hothouse. “The thing about David,” she says, “Is he doesn’t get excited. I get really excited. I get excited for him.” Then, defensively, she picks up on the issue of Duchovny’s privateness. “He doesn’t want to bond if that means hanging out and drinking.”

Well, such is the remarkable state of affairs on the movie that hanging out and drinking has become not only what guys do anyway but the most reliable means of getting some scenes for the following day. It seems that the producers have vetoed a sizeable number of pages from the shooting script, leaving the director and the actors to make it up as they go along. They’ve had four writers in, who have supplied a story-line, it’s just that the producers don’t like the actual words.

It was David Duchovny, eager to squeeze in something completely different after shooting three series of ‘The X-Files’, with a fourth planned for the end of the year, who found the original script, ‘Playing God’. It chronicles the downfall of Dr Eugene Sands, a drug-addicted surgeon who, drummed out of the industry for malpractice, is persuaded to ply his trade for a psychotic mobster. The actor then saw some episodes of ‘Cracker”, from British TV, loved them and procured their director, Andy Wilson, to make the film.

A few hundred yards down from the corral of location vehicles, out on the Sierra Highway half an hour north of L.A., dozens of people are assembled by the roadside. Some are wearing sun-hats and reading magazines, others are gazing at a distant bend in the road. A pale grey Jaguar saloon swings into view, cruises towards the crowd then lurches off the highway onto a dirt layby. Eugene, blood all over his head, has to lean over and take the wheel from Cyril, who is completely drenched in blood. Eugene jumps out, races round to the driver’s door and heaves out Cyril, who appears to be dead. In the back you can make out Claire, deathly pale, blood soaking through her red dress. Eugene, grunting, drags Cyril to a hollow by some trees and dumps him. Back at the car, he throws a gun into the bushes and drives off again.

“And cut!” yells Andy Wilson.

Duchovny threads his way through the crew to get some cold mineral water and look at the video replay with the director. He’s panting. “That’s a helluva workout puff puff. They should have that at the gym puff. Corpse Carrying – it’s an Olympic event!”
“And Gun Toss,” adds Sam, the First Assistant.
Duchovny laughs. “Yeah – Corpse Carrying and Gun Toss. That’d be it.”

He puts his arm round Andy Tiernan’s shoulder and they study the replay. The master shot has to be retaken a few times then various mid shots and close-ups are put together. Andy Tiernan and Angelina Jolie, who plays Claire, are wandering about in an odd manner. It’s possible, of course, that Angelina may still be in character. She wobbles about on slim legs and high heels, her pallid face immobilised in a thousand yard stare. Tiernan, who can’t be in character because he’s dead, stands wretchedly in the baking heat, holding his sodden, sticky arm away from his body and baring his teeth in a demented grimace.
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” Andy Wilson observes, “When actors get blood on them they go all grumpy.”

Duchovny is far from grumpy, though. This movie business is a breeze – up in Vancouver, where they shoot most of ‘The X-Files’, he routinely does a fourteen to sixteen hour day six days a week for months at a time. In TV they like to get eight minutes a day but down here in Hollywood they think two minutes is more than adequate! Plus you can stand around between takes and eat turkey and mustard sandwiches and chat to the good humoured crew. Right now, hanging around by the Jag, Duchovny is roaring with laughter at something that Andy Tiernan, now in a better mood, has whispered in his ear.
“David!” shouts Sam from over by the camera, “We’re gonna need that kind of energy again in the next shot!”
“Suck my fuckin’ dick!” retorts the actor previously renowned for his elegance and restraint in the face of all but the paranormal.

Parked across from the catering truck is a glistening aluminium Airstream trailer with smoked glass windows. A white four wheel drive stands beside it. This is the star’s home from home, towed down from Vancouver by his driver and rented to the film company. Having eased out of Eugene’s striped sweater and slacks, Duchovny, still with seeping head wound, relaxes in tee shirt and jeans in the shade of the Airstream’s awning. He is fully focused, gives steady eye contact and, X-Philes will be pleased to learn, is even more laconic than Agent Mulder.

This little matter of the script, then, how are you coping? “What helps in this is a deep, abiding belief that everything’s going to work out okay.” He grins. “The problem with drastic changes at the last minute and with improvisation on a movie set is that you can mistake the excitement of newness for the excitement of greatness. Know what I’m saying? But every scene we’ve done has been really good. The skeleton of the story is there. The arc of the character has been set from the beginning. I knew basically how I wanted to play, where I was – it’s just the words, which are, in the end, very unimportant for an actor. Words are the melody but there’s a rhythm underneath that. Film isn’t primarily a verbal medium.”

This calls to mind one of the curious mannerisms of ‘The X-Files’, namely the inordinately verbose and solemn passages of exposition and summation that Mulder and Scully are obliged to deliver at regular intervals. The pleasures of an energetic, physical plot must seem rather attractive by comparison. “Well, I’ve been doing ‘X-Files’ for three years, it’s the same character – I tend to bridle a little bit at just being perceived as this person. Certain insecurities come up after a number of years. Am I going to be this person for ever? So there was an insecure motivation for me wanting to do something else, but the strongest motivation was the fact that I really liked the story of this film, and films don’t wait around.”

So punishing is the schedule in Vancouver that one wonders why Duchovny doesn’t just use these eight weeks to have a nice rest. “It was a question of whether taking time off or having a change of venue was going to be the most rejuvenating. I don’t tend to rejuvenate very well in a sedentary way. I don’t tend to rejuvenate very well at all! A week or two just sitting on my ass, that’s enough, really.”

As if on cue, an assistant approaches the trailer. “They’re ready for you on camera, sir.” Duchovny retires behind the smoked glass to get his bloodstained clothes back on.

The remarkable appeal of ‘The X-Files’ to an American audience can probably be attributed to its muffled but consistent endorsement of an array of topical paranoias. The paranormality that regularly engulfs Mulder and Scully is not constructed simply in terms of alien agencies that would unstitch the fabric of society – there is an additional crucial inflection that has the Government and its agencies turned, conspiratorially, against the community they are supposed to protect. In this fearful state of affairs, aliens acquire an ambivalence they never had in the days when America faced the simple, external threat of extinction by deranged Communists. These days the enemy is within and the aliens, in some instances, might actually turn out to be more supportive than the Government.

The ‘X-Files’ scenarios succeed in touching a nerve of disaffection that may find ultimate expression in Waco or Oklahoma yet runs unchecked through a body politic whose ranks swell with peaceable but increasingly suspicious ordinary citizens. In Britain, where our paranoia has yet to become so florid, ‘The X-Files’ impacts upon more conventional susceptibilities.

Now that certainty is a thing of the past, the comforts of the paranormal are in demand everywhere. The Brits, however, while buying eagerly into much that lies beyond our ken, are also up for a bit of aesthetic innovation. The lack of narrative closure in ‘The X-Files’ – whereby you get a whole story per episode yet it’s somehow never fully resolved – is a refreshing alternative for a TV viewership reared on impeccably structured dramas that take you, via the beginning and middle, to an unambiguous end.

Although Agent Mulder will be with us for at least four more series after the current run, syndicated and repeated throughout the English-speaking world, the fact remains that David Duchovny is still only Small Huge. Being a household name on TV counts for so very little in film. To be galactically, as distinct from globally, stellar – Large Huge – you have to crack movies. If David wants to get more than say, two million per movie, he’ll have to make an impact like Jim Carrey, who went from less than one to a current twenty over the course of just two films.

Not that Duchovny is in it for the money – he’s already got quite a lot. Not that he’s new to movies, either. ‘Playing God’ may be his first quality lead, but it was preceded by substantial parts in ‘Kalifornia’ and ‘The Rapture’ and useful roles in ‘Chaplin’ and ‘Beethoven’. Few of us will have forgotten, moreover, his role as the transvestite detective Dennis/Denise Bryson in ‘Twin Peaks’. But that was TV.

The man who would be Mulder was born 35 years ago in Manhattan. His mother, Meg, came from Aberdeen and is an elementary school teacher in Manhattan. Amram, his father, is a retired publicist. The parents separated when Duchovny was 11. After attending the élite New York Collegiate School, he went on to major in English literature at Princeton then took a Masters Degree at Yale.

Academia continued to be attractive. Duchovny signed up for a Ph.D and started to work on his thesis, titled ‘Magic and Technology in Contemporary American Poetry and Prose’. ‘Duke’ also wrote his own poetry and was very good at basketball. These pursuits fell away when he started hanging out with the Yale drama crowd. “It’s such an ascetic frame of mind required to write a dissertation,” he explains, “that once you step one foot out it’s very hard to have any efficiency in that world. It’s like a secular priesthood, it really is. I didn’t have that devotion.”

Less ascetic was the Lowenbrau commercial for which he auditioned when cash wore thin at Yale. He got the part and determined to pursue acting full-time. Not all his early roles were small. Before landing the movies people have heard about he had the lead in the low-budget ‘Julia Has Two Lovers’, where you get to see his bare behind. In 1992 he teamed up with Melanie Green, who persuaded him to read for the TV pilot of a new series to be called ‘The X-Files’. You know the rest.

It’s lunchtime on the shoot and Duchovny, assembling a salad at the catering truck, is having a remarkable effect upon some women. Which is to be expected, really. As well as good-looking – albeit with a slightly big nose – and the laconic business that we already talked about, he’s also extremely droll. But first some background…

In American supermarkets just before you check out they don’t have Sainsbury’s ‘Family Circle’ with features on the joy of summer fruits but an array of magazines full of stories about how a man’s dog sings like Elvis and sleeps with an actress from ‘Baywatch’. In one such publication, the ‘Star’, they have a feature entitled ‘David Duchovny’s Sex Files’. I wish I’d thought of that. It seems that not only is the Duke, ‘TV’s coolest star’, back with his ex, Perrey Reeves (he isn’t), but he’s seeing as many as six other women as well. Case 4, as the ‘Star’ has it, goes like this: “He’s also dating a sexy location manager from his latest movie, ‘Playing God.’ ‘David flirts with Molly Allen all day on the set,’ a set insider tells ‘Star’.” Clearly some ruthless investigative reporting is in order.

Back on the set David is talking with Molly about his bloody head, watched by other women from make-up, costume and associated. David dabs at his brow and says to Molly “Oh! I hit my head on the car door! Did I break the skin?” Everybody giggles, including the reporter who, while not running tape, is not missing a thing. Then David breaks into a riff which has them all howling. British readers will notice the absence of political correctness from this scene:

“It’s okay, I’m standing in for Maxipads (a brand of tampon). ‘Hey fellas – when she’s on the rag do you lose your rag? Listen – if your girl won’t use Maxipads then I’m your guy.'” As the riff develops Molly doesn’t just laugh, she throws in comments and pushes Duchovny playfully in the chest. TV’s coolest star winds down on a thoughtful note, with a glance towards the British reporter. “That’s the best thing Prince Charles ever said. I think it’s really cool he said that.”

After lunch, returning to matters of the mind, Duchovny starts to elaborate on the legacy of his academic background. “Sometimes somebody’ll say ‘You threw all that schooling away’ and I think ‘Possibly’ but what it did give me was discipline – from the root of the word – doesn’t it mean ‘student’ in Latin?” This must help in countering the asceticism of life inside a long-running series. “And life outside. I’m very private and possessive of the free time that I have. So maybe I’m a little closed off, maybe I don’t like to have dinner with people I don’t know and things like that.”

It’s becoming apparent that despite the beach-house in Malibu, despite his winning ways with the ladies, Duchovny inhabits a world of unbending rigour that is not sustained merely by your standard overweening self-absorption. The man is a little driven. “Yeah. I think it’s both a blessing and a curse for me – sometimes I think if I did a little less I’d be a little more free. But that’ll come later.” He goes on to describe his anxiety about such a change of gear: it’s something that has to be earned, you can’t risk it until you’re absolutely certain the work won’t go away, you do all the work you possibly can until you get to that point, and even then “I’m not there yet.”

How can Duchovny believe this? Will he ever be able to let go? He talks about his admiration for Harold Bloom, a Professor at his old university and a widely respected writer of psychoanalytic literary criticism. “He wrote about the Freudian struggle between writers – the precursor father-figure-writer and the son. He wrote a book called ‘The Anxiety of Influence’ in which he makes literature an Olympian struggle for fame and power. The true father-writer is almost always effaced. So, for example, if Eliot said the writer he was most influenced by was, say, John Donne, that would be a dodge. The true father would be repressed and that would be the one he would be in mortal combat with. That’s where the literary critic comes in and uncovers the true father from within the poem.”

Do you apply this to actors? “Oh yeah. Definitely.”
So who’s your father figure? He doesn’t hesitate, “Brando.”
Are you thereby effacing somebody else? “Haha! Montgomery Clift, possibly. I don’t know.”

Duchovny moves on to a notion he has brought up before: the curious proximity to great acting of failure. “Brando always had a real self-loathing about acting. He thought it was trivial, not masculine. But his work read wonderfully. Like, today, Nicholas Cage fails in a really interesting way. I’d rather watch him fail than other people succeed. Nicholson does that too. That would be the next level to go to – I don’t have the security or confidence to go there yet. I may not have the ability.”

This latter point is moot. One school of thought has it that Duchovny lacks range – as Agent Mulder he specialises in not doing very much and furnishing low affect in scenes of high excitement. More charitable armchair analysts of acting feel that ‘not doing very much’ is an unobservant term for an actor who has great control over the minutiae of expression. Within the frame dictated by the scripts, Duchovny-as-Mulder is able to produce fine shades of interiority for the FBI man with obsessions that lead him to the most unsettling margins. This view puts Duchovny in Steve McQueen territory, where toughness and vulnerability are evinced simultaneously, thanks to strong technique and intuition. Even McQueen lacks assets that Duchovny displays off-camera yet rarely uses in his work, namely strong verbal and physical comic skills.

Andy Wilson, when asked what his leading man is truly interested in, is succinct. “Basketball, Beckett and freaks,” he asserts. Speaking warmly of Samuel Beckett’s trilogy ‘The Unnamable’, Duchovny also enthuses about Joyce, Mailer and Pynchon and explains how he makes time for regular reading. Not a man to hang out much, as we have observed, the actor is wont to return to his Malibu house of an evening, work out, swim, then read a book in bed. At the moment he’s engrossed in a biography of Diane Arbus, acclaimed for her bleak and melancholy photos of freaks, misfits and plain, uncomfortable people.

Does he see any similarity between Arbus’ subjects and actors? “Actors are made freakish by the attention that’s given them. What’s happened to me is you start to think of yourself as an object. Maybe children who are not used to feeling like a subject – used to feeling like an interior being, used to feeling the object of something, who have been objectified – maybe they more easily become actors, maybe they seek that feeling again.”

Back at the shoot nobody is mocking David Duchovny. It’s the end of a long, hot day, and half the crew are packed into the tropically humid bar of an old roadhouse to shoot Eugene coming in and asking the barman for help. Andy Wilson, jovial as ever, is blowing raucously on his arm to demonstrate the fart sounds that, he says, his young daughters find hilarious at bathtime. Duchovny is shaking with laughter, causing Melanie Green to make a mock apology for her client’s intemperateness.

The camera rolls, the actor jumps off his seat, gets straight into character and does a longish dialogue scene. As soon as it’s over he berates the camera crew for farting during the take. They indignantly protest their innocence and start blaming each other. The sound crew then calls for complete silence while they record a wild track of background ambience. The boom operator has just yelled his warning when Duchovny, leaning nonchalantly against the bar, blows a loud raspberry. “That’ll match,” he murmurs.

Apoplectic and herculean attempts by forty people to control their guffaws prove hopelessly inadequate. A great groan of hilarity rocks the bar. The Duke grins. “It’s a wrap!” hollers the second assistant. “Six o’clock tomorrow morning, please!” Actors are jumping in cars so they can race back to the city for a beer. For Duchovny, it’s a solo drive back to the beach house for a work out. Despite putting aside time for that quiet read later, he’s having a very full day, just like in Vancouver. With every minute so thoroughly used up, is he, dare one ask, ever going to settle down and find time for family life? “If it’s going to happen, it’s just going to happen – I’m not making time for it. But I think I’m ready. I think about it more often. Recently. I sat down and thought ‘God, I’m 35!’ Yeah. I’d like to have a child in the next five years.” He ruminates for a moment, then announces “I’ve got to get to work!” He’s talking about finding a partner, not pumping iron in Malibu. You could be forgiven for not being quite sure, though.

November 1996

The City Wakes

is the title of a Cambridge-based festival celebrating, from October 22nd to November 1st, the pre-London years of Syd Barrett, one of the founder members of Pink Floyd. Syd died in 2006 after many years of reclusiveness that followed his withdrawal from the band as a result of a slow but irreversible breakdown that was probably precipitated by an excess of LSD.

I grew up in Cambridge with Syd from about the age of 14 and went on to share flats with him in London in the Swinging and Delirious ’60s. A number of his friends, including myself, will contribute to the city-wide programme of tributes, exhibitions and events in his home town. I’m doing something I’ve always wanted to do in a parallel universe, namely conduct guided tours of something. In this case and universe I shall be guiding enthusiasts around ‘Syd’s Cambridge’ – an excellent opportunity to revisit the Hallowed Hippy Havens that mapped out the angel-headed youth that many of us were sure we were navigating. I’m doing a talk at Borders and also presenting an Especial Cooch. The latter is an extension of what has rather rapidly become a London must-have occasion: David Gale’s Peachy Coochy Nites, details of which can be found here.

If I were pressed to make one useful comment about Syd it would be that before the surly craziness came he was a delightful, delighted, sunny, beautiful and amusing man. This photo from The City Wakes site finds him in typical shape at the age of 19.

23.08.2008

Leytonstone

Often I’ll be going along and I’ll find myself thinking about Leytonstone. Leytonstone is an area on the northern edge of London. As far as I’m concerned it is unprepossessing. I pass through it now and again when I drive out of London to the north. In mid 1972 I saw Roxy Music play live in a room above a Leytonstone pub. This was a seminal occasion but it’s not why I think about Leytonstone. My friend Andy lived up there for several years and despite the fact that his company was inspirational, I always regarded it as tedious that I had to trek up the Central Line for an hour to get to his house. It’s a nothing place, as far as I’m concerned. It’s good for the M11 motorway if you want to get to Cambridge, my home town, by the non-scenic route. But I always took the A1(M) anyway. More to look at.

I often find myself thinking about a particular part of Leytonstone, a particular road, near the entrance to the M11. This road is fairly yellow, it has a coach and horses trotting along it and it runs alongside Blackheath, the actual heath part. Blackheath, however, is actually in south London, maybe thirty miles south of Leytonstone.

I’ve just looked in the A to Z (those were the days, Ed.) to see if I can find the road and put a name to it, but H7 on page 33, covering most of Leytonstone, is entirely confusing, an intimidating meeting of eight major roads while my road, the one that comes so often to mind, well I know it’s off one of these and it’s between two roundabouts, it links them, but it just can’t be found.

It’s not a long road, about three quarters of a mile long, maybe. I must have been on it sometime or else why would it come to mind like it does?

Next time I’m up that way I’ll try to remember to look out for the name of it. It’s conceivable that pinning it down like this would make the road lose its yellowness and its coach and horses but somehow I think not.

Perhaps Leytonstone comes up because it is a portal to Away. But I doubt this. There are better portals, such as the Hogarth Roundabout, leading to the west, where good things are, on 6A page 74. It might be because of its proximity to Blackheath, running alongside that parkland of unexpected elegance and the olden days. If this is the case then it’s to do with the adjoinment of city and country, that promise of easy access to either while residing in either, jumping in spritely fashion across the line whenever you please, depending on mood.

The problem with that, though, is that actually the countryside, with respect to this particular road, is on the city side and the city is on the side where the countryside should be. This is an anomaly insofar as it must be obvious that, on the north side of London, the countryside will be on the outside, the north side. So things are a bit upside down here.

I have worked, more than once, the last time several years ago, near Leytonstone, in Loughton, near Epping. The East 15 Drama School is out there and I often think of that, but not in the same way. Leytonstone comes to mind whereas Loughton I will often conjure, just for pleasure or simply because of its being provoked as a routine association in a routine manner. Loughton, with the Drama School and its pleasant converted barn theatre and the memory of several pleasant projects conducted therein back then, is six miles further out of town.

Leytonstone comes to mind. It just pops up. And ever since I met my wife Deborah or, to be precise, her sister Jessica when she, in turn, had met her enduring partner Mark, Jessica and Mark come to mind as well, unconjured. This is not unusual. I will, of course, also conjure them frequently but that’s to be expected.

What I find strange is that Jess and Mark often come to mind in Leytonstone – as if they live there. I say ‘in Leytonstone’ but that’s not what I mean. Jess and Mark don’t live in Leytonstone, they never have. I have never been there with them. They may have been there but who cares? Jess and Mark, since I’ve known them, which is at least 15 years, have lived in Crouch End and then, quite recently, Walthamstow. Walthamstow is a red herring – it can be regarded as en route to Leytonstone but Jess and Mark have been coming to mind in Leytonstone well before they moved to Walthamstow.

I’ll be going along and then, without warning, not that I need a warning, and without any provocation, I’m thinking of Jess and Mark and I’m thinking of Leytonstone. It happens regularly. Jess and Mark aren’t doing anything in particular, they’re just there. I can’t stop it happening and I don’t want to. It just pops up. What can I do? No need to do anything really.

23.08.2008

Very Birmingham

Birmingham pops into my mind all the time, unbidden. There are good reasons for this. In the early 70s we took Lumiere & Son to the Birmingham Arts Centre several times, on tour. I couldn’t believe what a shithole the city was. I had seen shitholes in my time but this was the clear winner (Sunderland came close). Ugly wherever you looked – that was something. Not a single vista that could even be described as tolerable.

Sometimes, while kicking my heels before shows, I would walk out of the Arts Centre and look around. I found a pub nearby, possibly called the Sack of Potatoes. I came to think of it as the Sack of Shit. Such was the tourweary spirit at the time that I would say to my fellows “I’m off to the Sack of Shit” and they would not grin because I had said it several times already. The pub itself wasn’t too bad. You could sit outside on a bench and gaze across at the unbelievable mess of flyovers and roundabouts. You’d feel mournful and then you’d say “Still, being mournful is part of this adventure of being on the road” and then you’d feel worldly and weatherbeaten.

Then, a couple of years later, I was up there again for some reason, nothing to do with touring. I had to stay the night and I stayed in a cheap hotel. Instead of rooms they had cubicles with walls which stopped short of the floor and ceiling. Partitions. I stood on my bed at night and looked across the tops of the partitions. Under a blue light men and women were sleeping; sighing and shifting. It was utterly mournful. I don’t know why I was there. I had no reason to be. I can’t think of a reason.

I think this happened in Birmingham but I can’t be absolutely sure. It was, however, very Birmingham. I say ‘very Birmingham’ a lot. To myself. It wouldn’t mean much to other people – they’d think I meant “This is like Birmingham” when what I meant was “When I stood on the bed and when I walked in the streets something happened. And now it comes back, like an unbidden odour.” The thing is it doesn’t just come back when I am reminded of it by a place. It comes back unsought and unasked, for no particular reason.

But something happened in Birmingham. No incidents, nothing like that. One wouldn’t expect that. Although it must be said we were in our dressing rooms the night the bombs went off round town (November 21st 1974) and we heard the thuds and wondered then realised and rang our parents and loved ones who already knew what it was and we said don’t worry we’re fine, no we’re not going to go for a drink afterwards. But something else happened and it made Birmingham very indelible, a single chord mixed from fragments of that time, and it comes right back when the conditions are right.

Possibly what actually happened was that so little happened in that city apart from the IRA or seemed at all likely to happen that it became a non-event of great moment. A place where absolutely nothing will happen. Chilling. Reassuring.

And still it comes back. The Sack of Shit. The partitions. Often prompted by a single vista or particular shade of gloom. Bonnie Tyler singing ‘Holding Out for a Hero’. Or a singer like that, blonde in a blue light. Very Birmingham.

And when it comes back it’s a perfume not a picture. It’s moved away from the city with all its junctions, the place where I wandered aghast. Now the pieces have blended and it’s a distinct thing of its own, a taste. It has a very appealing drabness, so much so that I think I miss it.

But how could you miss Birmingham? I never liked it when I was there, as I believe I have already indicated. Or Sunderland? Or Lund? Or Dundee? Dundee wasn’t that bad. There was the bridge over the Tay and the landlord of the hotel, Jimmy, peering out of the dining room window and intoning “A…vast…Siberian…wasteland.” Or Eindhoven?

But Birmingham is the perfume while the others are the mere eau de toilette. Birmingham is pure uncut mauve mood. Very the distillate.

The thing about this kind of thing is if you go back there, to renew the mauve – a perverse act, for sure, I mean, spend money on fuel, walk around the appalling streets, try to recover something melancholy from all that long time ago – it probably isn’t there. But, on the other hand, were you to do this, to go there, just suppose, then what might come back, in 2009 or whenever, is traces of the new visit, a new distillate. A melancholy recollection of an attempt to find the source of a melancholy recollection. And that would be another story.

But it’s a perfect match. On the outside, in the world: the city wastes, and on the inside, in your mind: any number of wan, drear, disconsolate moments. They belong together.

That’s not quite right, it’s the other way round. Birmingham is on the inside now, a reserve of mauve that will suffuse those lacklustre occasions that crop up, as they crop up, either in the world or in your mind. A place that comes with a raft of associations, like Waterloo, Henley or Land’s End. And when such an occasion does arise, suddenly the partitions are in place and the windswept traipsing and those singers, Bonnie, Jennifer Rush, just as they were in 1974 or whenever it was (Jennifer’s ‘Power of Love’ was 1985 and she came from New York City), and I see that blue light again and I say to myself “Very Birmingham.”

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