This is the text of a talk I gave at Borders in Cambridge in October 2008, in the course of the weeklong ‘The City Wakes’ , Cambridge’s tribute to Syd Barrett of the Pink Floyd.

I lived round the corner from Syd Barrett in Cambridge in the late 50s and early 60s. We attended secondary schools a few hundred yards apart in the leafy Hills Road, hung out in Cambridge as the Beat scene slouched into sight and then moved up to London. Syd was the first to leave town, in early 1965, finding a cheap room in a house in Tottenham Street off the Tottenham Court Road. The house was owned by Ella O’Connell, mother of Seamus, a schoolfriend of Syd. A few months later, towards the end of 1965, I moved up to London and stayed on a mattress in Syd’s room for a few weeks before acquiring my own cold-water space next door.

By this time was Syd was playing underground clubs with the Floyd and starting to become well-known. We moved down the road to Cambridge Circus, on the edge of Soho. Syd was taking LSD from time to time. So was everybody else. The flat in Earlham Street was a hotbed of 60s experimentation, in which emigrants from Cambridge met kindred spirits who were streaming in from other towns in order to settle in the British capital of consciousness expansion. A year later I left my West End flat, along with Storm Thorgerson, a close friend from Cambridge and one of the founders of Hipgnosis, who were later to design all the Pink Floyd’s album artwork. We found a place in South Kensington near the Royal College of Art, whose Film School we would attend for the next three years. It was in this flat, in 1967, that Syd came to live with Lyndsey Corner when he had entered the penultimate phase of his troubled years in London. After Syd, by now sullen, silent and staring, left for his final flat in Earl’s Court, I never saw him again.

That outline, ladies and gentlemen, is the most compact account I have ever delivered  of the part of my life that I shared with Syd. I usually bang on at rather greater length.

Every time a new book about Syd Barrett or the Pink Floyd is proposed I am ritually interviewed, along with a number of other denizens of the Cambridge and London scene. I enjoy it. I’m aware, nevertheless, that our recollections have proved unreliable and inconsistent and more than one researcher has pointed out to me that in terms of dates, geography and serial order, our contributions are chronological rubbish, almost as if a curious intoxication had gripped those groovers from longhaired yesteryear, impairing valuable memory functions. As the books continue to emerge I have become aware that the standards of research are consistently improving and more and more witnesses are being unearthed. This is obviously a good thing not least because it may eventually provide an underpinning for an analysis of the issues that, in my view, naturally arise from the stories and myths centred on Syd.

I want to talk about some of those issues today. I’m not going to anecdotalise about Syd much, nor will I dwell overlong on the remarkable Cambridge scene that is being recalled in ‘The City Wakes’ tribute. As the 60s steadily recedes and my ruminations on it continue, I’ve become absorbed by the notion that it might be possible to relate Syd’s plight not only to the drugs, the local circumstances and the rock’n’roll but to currents, contradictions and splits running through the 60s that are usually sidelined in the increasingly stark stereotypes of the period that are offered by the media. Syd, like all of us at that time, was living in an environment of new ideas and changing values that encouraged and, indeed, made fashionable, alternative ways of looking at the self, society, responsibility, work, creativity, the family and madness, among others. These are what I’m going to try to examine.

There are some issues very close to the heart of the matter that actually cannot be further explained with reference to the 60s. I think there’s an important psychiatric conundrum relating to Syd’s sad demise that is impossible to resolve. Did LSD materially damage the mechanisms of Syd’s brain or was his condition purely psychological? If Syd sustained brain damage, then from the period at which this occurred onwards he was beyond the reach of the most sophisticated therapies. If, though, he fell foul of a complex of malign circumstances then we are tempted to imagine that during his years of reclusiveness he was recoverable  – we could get him back.

Given that a great deal of romanticising surrounds his legend, the second possibility is the more attractive. It makes Syd more tragic and more interesting: he is the victim of impossible conflicts, one who buckled and bowed out but might have been resurrected. Somewhere behind the 1000 yard stare is a tortured individual who may be, as Antonin Artaud, another madman hero, put it ‘like a victim burnt at the stake, signalling through the flames’. The idea here is that our reality is too unforgiving,  too cruel, for a person who is truly alive. Where some will, as a consequence, retreat behind mirror shades, the hardcore madman hero is walled off behind a mask of blankness, spurned by a world incapable of appreciating him. I’m not belittling Syd’s experience here, rather the melodrama that is often constructed around the figure of the troubled artist.

Melodramas of madness were not uncommon in the 60s. The revolutionary psychiatric or ‘anti-psychiatric’, as it was called, thought of Ronald Laing was extremely influential in this country throughout the decade. R.D. Laing published seven books in the period, the first of which, and possibly the most influential, ‘The Divided Self’, came out as early as 1960. Without attempting to summarise the sophisticated and compassionate therapeutic ideas laid out in the work, it can be said that the most powerful Laingian notion was that the schizophrenic patient is not a purveyor of gobbledygook and nonsensical behaviour so much as an individual in an extreme dilemma attempting to communicate in ways that are intelligible if the analyst is prepared to listen closely and interpret.

In ‘The Conquest of Cool’, Thomas Frank’s study of the changes in the American advertising industry that took place between the 50s and the 60s, the author observes that the innovation and adventurousness of the alternative culture was regarded by the advertisers as both an inspiration and a gift. Frank said that ˜What happened in the 60s was that hip became central to the way American capitalism understood itself and explained itself to the public.’ Advertisers took the symbols and imagery of the counterculture and played them back to the youth, suitably refocused, in order to channel their energies towards consumption.

Throughout the 50s an intensely conservative sensibility had prevailed in advertising and the more nonconformist and creative types were frozen out. When the restlessness of the early 60s began to declare itself some of the suppressed admen outed themselves and rejected the stifling, hierarchised ways of the big agencies. They dissolved the almost military demarcations that had separated copywriters from art directors and inveighed energetically against conformity. They experimented widely with different office layouts and team structures. They admired rebel youth, coveted their fluid way with language, clothes and music and sought to enrich their own lives by emulating the laid-back tone of the kids.

One of the big breakthroughs in 60s advertising was the evolution of the ad that knocked ads. Understanding that new hip youth was profoundly distrustful of the old-fashioned hard sell that assumed widespread idiocy in the citizenry, admen began flattering the potential consumers with copy that congratulated them on their scepticism and plied them with material that attacked not just the solemnity and insincerity of the 50s ads but their corporate ideology.

Sometimes the assiduous arselicking would get out of hand: the most infamous and cringe-inducing  example was Columbia Records’ grotesque bid for authenticity, in 1969, with its slogan ‘The Man Can’t Bust Our Music’. The real message seemed to be ‘Buy this to escape consumerism’

The admen believed not only that youth were an energetic new market but that youth’s liveliness could revitalise their own commercial practice. Frank notes that ‘By 1965 the Creative Revolution (that’s the revolution in advertising) had turned the industry’s theories and management  practices on their head as Madison Avenue entered a period of unrestrained rule-breaking and idol-shattering.’  The parallel with the convulsions in the emergent counterculture is striking.

So stifling had the 50s been for Americans of many persuasions that when the valves blew it wasn’t only the hipsters that were cut loose. It wasn’t even that the admen slowly realised the commercial potentials of the hipsters. The admen got there at the same time as the hipsters and set about appropriating their language in order more efficiently to stimulate then satisfy their needs. The hipsters were keen for new sensations, they craved authenticity, they disdained emotional restraint, they wanted to act on their impulses and they turned their backs on history.

The admen realised that a new style of consumerism could be cultivated: hip consumerism. Before too long the hip advertisers had conjured a group entity that compensated for the nonconformity of the hip youth by defining their tastes and thereby enabling  producers of product to supply appropriate goods. The longer term impact of advertising’s own 60s revolution was to be found in the widespread promotion of youth in advertisements for products in which youth had little interest, such as family cars. The hipsters had helped the admen to realise that the energy of youth appealed to consumers for whom it was just a distant memory.

So what does all this have to do with the tribulations of Syd Barrett? I don’t suppose that Syd was any more aware of the recruitment of his values to the cause of consumerism than anyone else among his peers. What he and his friends in Cambridge at that time had in common was an appetite for new ideas and their cultural manifestations. I look back fondly to the times spent in flats and bedsits when my fellow Beatboys and I would read plays by Beckett and Ionesco out loud together or intone spontaneous poems into reel to reel tape recorders. Many happy hours were spent in avid  absorption and discussion and, thanks to the shoplifting skills of certain friends from surprisingly good families, there was no shortage of the latest books by the Beats or volumes dealing with the dadaists and Surrealists. These evenings bore an odd resemblance to Victorian parlour gatherings although I doubt that those gathered round the piano would have been quite so blasted on Dr Collis Brown’s Chlorodyne – an opium-based cough mixture – and they certainly wouldn’t have been zonked on dexies and grass.

Our enthusiasm for all that the new scene had to offer extended also to music. The combination of dope and jazz was potent and deepened a musical appreciation already primed by the wonders of rock’n’roll that had arrived in the mid 50s with Elvis and evolved into the Beatles by the early 60s. When ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ was released in the Summer of Love in 1967, an awed hush fell over the flat in South Kensington as Storm Thorgerson removed the cellophane wrapper from the album that had become legendary within hours of its release. Two months later the Pink Floyd released ‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ and it felt for a while, in London at least, that the cultural revolution had changed up into overdrive.

A few thousand miles east ‘Operation Rolling Thunder’continued in North Vietnam as American bombers entered a second year of continuous bombing designed to force North Vietnam to cease its support for the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF) by threatening to destroy North Vietnam’s air defenses and industrial infrastructure. In 1968 ex-Chief of Staff General Curtis Lemay would recommend  bombing North Vietnam ‘back to the Stone Age’.

And we also needed clothes. The early Beat look could be constructed from Levis purchased from American servicemen in the fearsome Criterion pub in Cambridge and shirts and military fatigues found in Milletts. By the time the Summer of Love came round it was necessary to hunt down paisley shirts, velvet trousers and afghan coats from Kensington Market, Granny Takes a Trip and their ilk, with coloured leather,  zip-sided, cuban-heeled boots purchased from Gohil’s in Camden Town.

That was a pretty cheap juxtaposition that I just offered. But, as Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse Now’ was to point out in 1979, dope and dexies were not just being consumed by hipsters but by grunts, at the same time, with the same music, on the other side of the planet. The cultural revolution wound down precisely because its agenda for change was politically disconnected. The hippies didn’t have the full picture, they had decamped to a less material world.

In 1970, a period presided over by President Richard Nixon, the faultline opened up irreversibly when the Ohio National Guard, called to the campus of Kent State University, shot and killed four students and wounded nine others. The most famous photograph from this dark night of cool shows a young woman screaming over the body of Jeffrey Miller, a student who had been shot in the mouth. The young woman was a fourteen-year old runaway, Mary Ann Vecchio. It is highly probable that Vecchio had run away as a result of Timothy Leary’s initially exhilarating injunction to’Turn on, tune in, drop out’. She was, however, apparently one of those who had straddled the faultline for she had been involved in the campus demonstrations against the invasion of Cambodia and was near Jeffrey Miller who had been standing closest to the Guardsmen of all those killed or wounded.

The iconic photograph was retouched for magazine distribution. It was felt that a vertical fence post apparently rising from the back of Vecchio’s head was unnecessarily distracting.

Syd Barrett was one of hundreds of thousands who were engrossed in the culture shifts but whose political engagement, as I recall it, was modest, and typically so. The Vietnam War was deplored but in some unspecified way it was not as pressing a concern as the cultural forces inexorably moving society towards transformation. Emancipated youth, in the mid 60s, fell broadly into two camps, the hippies and the politicals. Both camps were radical, in their way, and both felt a strong sense of entitlement. Hippie aspirations to a society transformed by culture gradually expired on both sides of the Atlantic as the Vietnam war ground on. It became clear that those with political connection could change the behaviour of the Man. 8 million students went on strike after Kent State, contributing further to the political division of the country.

‘Consumer culture is a gigantic fraud. It demands that you act like everyone else, that you restrain yourself, that you fit in with the crowd, when you are in fact an individual. Consumer culture lies and seeks to sell you shoddy products that will fall apart or be out of style in a few years; but you crave authenticity and are too smart to fall for that Madison Avenue stuff. Above all, consumer culture fosters conventions that are repressive and unfulfilling; but with the help of hip trends you can smash though those, create a new world in which people can be themselves, pretence has vanished, and healthy appetites are liberated from the stultifying mores of the past.’

Those last few lines are also a bit of a cheap stunt, insofar as they are taken directly from Thomas Frank’s ‘Conquest of Cool’ and, in the context of their chapter in the book, are prefaced by the following lines: ‘The central theme that gives coherence to American advertising of both the early and late sixties is this:…’ There then follows directly the critical stuff about consumer culture. Frank makes the point that American admen predicted the rise of an affluent youth that would be preoccupied with individuality and nonconformity. The admen surmised that despite their often stridently proclaimed antipathy to advertising, the youth would not be disinclined to consume.

From the early 60s then, advertisements in American magazines were pitched to an audience that distrusted them as a matter of course yet might respond well if they were addressed on their own terms. Ads pandered to the notion of the principled, nonconformist individual. For example: in 1967 the Oldsmobile Toronado – a car – was promoted with the line ‘Frankly, the Toronado is not for the average man.’ The notion of the authentic but unrecognised self was raised in the slogan for Colby’s furniture chain ‘The real you is alive and hiding out at Colby’s’. Suzuki’s 1969 motorbike copy borrowed hip slang to make its point: ‘To move. To grab at the wind. To get out of the “where-it’s-at” bag. Suzuki has the power to free you.’ Despite the crass obsequiousness of the Columbia Records ‘The Man Can’t Bust Our Music’ slogan, ads that promoted hip consumerism were ubiquitous. The admen were playing chess with the hipsters: they foresaw critical or resistant stances, ran around them and played them straight back to a burgeoning demographic that craved clothes, music and books. Not only that, they used the idea of youth to sell goods to people who had lost their youth, still yearned for it and were not, therefore, averse to being addressed as if they were young.

In an explanation of the psychiatric notion of the double-bind, R.D. Laing offered the example of the mother who dangled her child from a high balcony and exclaimed ‘See how much I love you: I don’t drop you!’ Laing suggested that the protracted experience of comparably irresolvable conflicts – ‘double binds’ – within a family setting was an aspect of the schizogenic power of the family. He might have observed also that the experience of having ‘The Man’ warn you against ‘The Man’, or the utterly conformist advertising industry side with you in your critique of the conformism of the advertising industry was sufficiently confusing to induce chronic destabilisation. It could drive you nuts.

For many, if not most, of my own hippy acquaintances, such pandering was all too obvious. ‘Jesus, how stupid do they think we are, those advertising shitheads?’ But I wonder if such indignation is quite the point. British advertising is probably some of the most reflexive and ironic in the west and connoisseurs of those ads have enjoyed decades of feeling, if not superior, then very much ‘in on the joke’. If this self-congratulation is admitted then the ad has already won the contest. Our connoisseurship is our Achilles heel. Sliding stealthily beneath our declarations of knowingness are persuasive forces that appeal to the pre-ironic individual and make him or her feel like a valued confidante.

Those ads in which ordinary housewives profess their unaffected amazement at the power of a detergent are strangely powerful. The housewives are so real, surely they can’t be actors. But they are. Really good ones. Really really good ones. I remember Nick Mason telling me that Syd was taken aback by the chores that attend the business of being a famous pop star. You have to get up in the morning  and do a photo shoot then go to see your accountants then discuss tours with your manager then do interviews with magazines. It goes on and on all day and Syd didn’t like it.

When he turned up late for ‘Top of the Pops’ he said that John Lennon didn’t have to do that programme so why should he? Perhaps Syd was taken in by the really good acting of John Lennon and other stellar figures. When he had to step on stage, both literally and figuratively, perhaps he was taken aback by the increasingly work-like quality of the experience. When he stood on stage and strummed an out-of-tune guitar not only through the numbers but between the numbers perhaps he was describing an experience, not resisting one. This was towards the bitter end, when he was particularly bitter.

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the figure drawn from a chapter in Kenneth Grahame’s ‘Wind in the Willows’, would not come to Syd’s aid. The Piper is the god Pan who legendarily caused terror and confusion – panic – when encountered in lonely places. In his benign mode he is the god of shepherds, fields and fertility, places where Emily can play, where little gnomes stay in their homes, eating, sleeping, drinking their wine. Syd encountered him in a lonely place, only months after the release of the album that bears Pan’s name. By January 1968 Syd was out of the band. Panic, perhaps, had seized him and the only recourse was to back off. For forty years.

Syd had repeatedly taken heroic doses of a strong hallucinogenic  drug that temporarily dissolved egos and resistances and, one imagines, exposed the subject to the full force of any normally muffled messages that might have been circulating among his friends, in the music industry, in the fashionable end of radical developments in psychiatry, in the culture at large. The hip scene in England took many of its cues from the USA and, in Cambridge and London at least, were many visitors, emissaries, artists, zonked saints and evangelists of vagueness from across the Atlantic whose impact was part of the remarkable, ceaselessly transmuting cultural landscape.

Some of these value systems were fragile. The worldliness that the hipster was required to evince was based on a world that he was vacating. The disdain for connection produced a synopsis of the world that was low on detail and failed to acknowledge its great weight, other than in declarations of dismissal. It was in this weakened world that counter-countercultural forces were slowly but surely leading the hipsters back into the consumerism that would possibly form their behaviour and exploit their compliance for much of their subsequent lives.

It was in this world weakened by defection that transcendental projects were readily confused with regression to childhood and spiritual endeavours served further to dematerialise the place that you found yourself in when you woke up in the morning, namely the world that provides the earth upon which your house is built. This was a place in which widespread and wilful misreadings of the value of madness made being fucked up attractive and interesting. In this rickety world Syd became a rock star, an icon of whom it was expected that, simply because of his artistic and commercial achievement, his beauty and his genius, he would weld together all the splits that defined the age. Asking a bit much, really.

I hope I haven’t tried to understand Syd’s psychological makeup. This has not been my purpose. I’ve attempted to link him into a context that, in tandem with whatever he was like, may shed some light on why he lost his way.

The text below is extracted from a stab I made at an autobiography. The writing of this page-turner initially went well, right up to the point where I realised that merely describing the many fascinating things that had happened to one was not quite the same as producing a structured work that had a point and was going somewhere. I retired the project until I felt I could return to the partial draft with a more insistent shaping impulse.

The excerpt hereunder follows some material on my youthful visits to my father’s laboratory, where I was allowed to play with very sensitive scales that could weigh thousandths of a gram. My father was enchanted by the microscopic – he worked on antibiotics for much of his career – and my own daydreaming was sometimes taken up with fantasising about just how light something would be before it became unweighable and undetectable. When I got to my teens, entered the 60s and encountered the sudden onslaught of ‘spiritual ideas’ that characterised the period, I found that my thoughts about atoms, weights, traces and vapours fitted, perhaps eccentrically, into the whirl of ideas about spirit, essences, auras and rays. I also found amusement in imagining detection technologies that would operate at a miscroscopic level and tie atoms to their owners.

This piece isn’t strictly about rays but it does deal with traces that are so slight that they verge on the immateriality of rays.

26.08.2008

Go along to the Anti-University in Rivington Street in Shoreditch any night of the week in 1969 and, without paying any money, you could attend lectures, participate in encounter groups and witness tirades designed to take a wrecking ball to comfortable habits and cherished assumptions. The place hummed with insurrection and was eagerly attended by an extraordinary cohort that sprung from the street, the squat, the commune, the asylum, the drop-in clinic and the academy. The toilet had no door, the phone had no dialling lock, the clients no patience.

One evening at the Anti-U, anti-psychiatrist David Cooper was talking about Vietnam to a group of thirty young men and women. He put it to us that America behaved as if it were a fair but stern father correcting the errant child that was Vietnam.The group was excited by this mapping of the psychopolitics of the family onto a scene of international conflict. The windowless room was thick with smoke and the Cooper Groupers, as we called ourselves, ran with the idea, elaborating it on the hoof. Cooper, shaggy red beard and shoulder length hair, puffed awkwardly on his cigarette yet remained bear-like and imposing. I had known him for two years and found him kind but often scaring in the extremity of his prescriptions for the death of the family and the triumph of a world of melted categories.

A voice from the back of the room cut through the discussion. “Of course, what we’re really all talking about is who’s got the power in this room – Cooper or us.” The debate skidded to a halt. Cooper nodded sagely. I knew that I had just come across one of the great Secrets of Life, a paranoid truth that I have come, over the decades, to rely on as much as the A to Z.

I saw that there, beneath our noses, all the time, whatever we’re doing, whenever we do it, lies a remarkable covert operation. We talk about ourselves all the time! Power articulates us! All conversations on all topics are mere tissues, scarcely opaque, draped over an unceasing, frankly brazen, project to analyse power relations and optimise our place in them. Even when we talk about matters of vital importance, matters of the world and its pain, we are covertly discussing, with additional help from our stances and gestures, how we experience our interlocutors.

I turned to study the speaker. Slouched against the wall, beyond the last row of chairs, was a dark-haired young man of about my age, wearing a suit, white shirt, no tie. He had a long nose, beetling eyebrows and piercing, shifty eyes. I’d seen him at the Anti-U before – his name was Patrick Schofield and I knew he was a patient of Cooper’s.

I made friends with Patrick and embarked on a crash course in forbidden knowledge. The son of the owner of the renowned and eponymous Leeds department store, he lived alone in a large flat off Queensgate in South Kensington. At some point in his university education he had drifted sufficiently far from a state of equanimity to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act and committed to Scalebor Hospital near Ilkley. Not craving any species of salvation that his doctors might proffer, he battled through the vegetalising drug regimes, endured the intermittent offhand interviews and sluggish group therapies, consistently managing to nurture and preserve an acuity of vision that, on a bad day would make him see things that were not there and, on a better day, allow him to assay that day and its denizens with a soaring clarity.

Patrick’s doctors were gratified, despite his general lack of compliance, when he asked to edit the Scalebor monthly magazine, hitherto an unprepossessing clutch of stapled and gestetnered white A4 sheets with a cover of another colour. He decided that in addition to the patients, the doctors and nurses should be invited to contribute and the whole would be prefaced with an essay written by himself.

The essay proved so incendiary that its author was promptly discharged into the community, where his capacity to endanger the mental hospital staff would be considerably reduced. In a coolly argumentative prose, Patrick had systematically uncovered a dreadful secret: there was no therapeutic agenda at the hospital, patients were kept there in order to legitimise a constant battle for power between the doctors and nurses. The objects of the struggle were the patients and the prize for the winners of the battle was control over the patients’ lives.

With forensic doggedness Patrick considered the roles, purported and actual, of all the various classes of clinician, therapist and carer in the Scalebor system. He described an intricate lattice of struggles and alliances, demonstrating throughout that each faction craved an intimate dominance of the drugged inmates. I read the piece, so it seemed to me, without blinking or breathing. The essay reached beyond the walls of the gothically named institution and offered a critique of all institutions. Patrick was a magus, to know him was to be initiated into the dark art of the seer of everyday life, one who found the behavioural world at his fingertips a wasteful irritation, a candied rind to be peeled peremptorily away before you could get the pips to squeak.

The world began to race. The combination of counterculture, LSD, my own radical anti-psychoanalysis and Patrick was steadily stamping out pockets of resistance in hitherto troublesome areas. Armed with a portfolio of exceptional insights, I felt exhilarated yet beleaguered. One problem I had was my conviction that, despite the occult nature of the behaviours I was discovering, everyone knew what was going on. They all knew what we were all up to and had conspired to conceal it from each other, out of a sense of shame and embarrassment. This is certainly what Antonin Artaud thought, and look what happened to him. Rather than glide through my new life on the ice-skates of insouciance, I found myself growing more guarded in case I inadvertently gave the game away with a knowing look or a fumbled Masonic handshake.

If all this threatened at times to rear up and turn the world inside out, it was processed by Patrick himself with unfaltering logic. Effectively oblivious to the ostensible, he moved though a terrain of threats, violence and betrayal in which all whom he encountered were stained with perfidy. Many of the assaults he endured were barely acknowledged by the miscreant – they were everyday violences perpetrated blindly in the shadowy cut and thrust of the universal secret struggle. On one occasion, for example, I was sitting in an armchair in Patrick’s flat, talking with the degree of unease that I often felt in the presence of his effortlessly merciless gaze. He interrupted me, pointing to my right foot, which was supported by my left knee and projecting towards his chair. I had been pointing and flexing my toe in a heedless, jiggling way. “Your foot,” he observed, “kicking at my chest.” I’m afraid he was absolutely right. There was no other explanation for it. To deny ownership of the gesture would be to compound the assault.

When it got too much Patrick would rearrange the environment to make more room. As I suggested, this was a logical operation. Others took it as proof of his insanity. Troubled by his relationship with David Cooper he determined to embark on a quest which would heal the situation at many levels. Boarding a train at Paddington he set off for Wales then, alone in a first-class carriage, shaved off all his hair, including his eyebrows. He was now the Sacrificial Lamb. Fiercely inspirited but still wary, he concealed his true purpose from others by donning a woman’s wig of short, curly hair. After a couple of hours the train seemed to slow down. Patrick peered out of the window and was delivered of an awesome sign. Writ large, in black on white, the words CARMAR THEN slid into view and stayed before him, obscuring all else. He knew then that he was most significantly attuned, whether to the wellsprings of providence or to the abyss, he could not tell.

Bonkers now, heading further and further west. He will not eat or drink, for he must present himself to Cooper in a condition of purity. The train will go no further. He steps down and wanders through the streets of a little town. A little city, to be precise. The smallest city in the United Kingdom. He had arrived at St. David’s Head. It was a logical operation.

Patrick wouldn’t ring up after an episode, I’d go round there. He would tell me about his capers, acknowledging that they were, perhaps, a bit off, but always explaining their symbols and teasing out their meanings. There was no question of resisting an imminent caper, any more than you would resist going to the corner shop for milk. He found it strange that the lives of others were not similarly punctuated, given what was going on.

I didn’t see him for a while. The phone rang. I chatted with a friend. He said “Sad about Patrick, wasn’t it?” What? “Sad that he’s gone.” Where? Where’s he gone? “Oh, you don’t know! He went to Beachy Head. He jumped off.”

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.

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

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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