Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: musician

  • waking up in Africa

    It is my birthday tomorrow and I’ve woken up in Africa! Beautiful Ghana of the glorious peoples. At the spanking new immaculate airport a man was bobbing at his keyboard and singing, in the arrivals hall, “And you’ve all arrived safely on this Wednesday night, hope you’ve had a great flight, welcome, welcome.” My flight was grumpy cos we got stuck on the runway for an hour (in, you know, air-conditioned comfort with personalised movies to watch) and I reminded the guy rolling his eyes next to me and complaining, you are in Africa. You arrived here on a million-dollar machine. A fast-disappearing luxury neither our planet nor most people working late at this airport can afford. We were fed and offered tiny bottles of wine and scented towels to wipe our hands and no one fell out of the sky on long wings of flame *just enjoy it!* Singing and bobbing in the passport queue, overjoyed to see my sweetest honey the kindest most gorgeous man in the world, whom I adore, who waited patiently outside in the crowd an hour for me and carried all my cases. I travel heavy, mostly books.

    He had brought me a malaria tablet and fed it to me in a swallow of boiled drinking water in the car park. Then we got as close to each other as we can on the back seat and drove away into Ghana. What a blessing and privilege to be here, to be with him, even to know him when we have spent our lives on separate continents, to be running a tiny business with big eyes that wants to construct a way for Europeans to offer ‘personal, partial’ reparations to Africa.

  • walloped

    I went to have my hearing tested. This became necessary because a man had walloped me across the face: a man I loved. Needless to say, no man has ever hit me before and I’m damned if any man will again.

    Needless to say, I no longer love him.

    It was my fault as well. Not the blow, which remains inexcusable. The overheated situation in which it came. He had told me, all of a sudden over our omelettes at my place one summer morning, he thought he was falling in love with someone else. I refused to discuss it, threw him out within ten minutes, wouldn’t take his calls. So he went out on the fuck.

    The girl he’d found was married already yet carried condoms in her wallet. She was the kind of girl who rings a guy she likes very early in the morning to say, Hey. I just noticed I’m actually right in your street. I bought an extra coffee by mistake. What you haven’t had breakfast yet? Shall I drop round?

    Within three weeks it had run its course and she had dwindled to an obligation he still felt he should commit: he wanted to ferry her to drug therapy to make sure she would go; he felt if he cut her off, she might hurt herself. All that dreary jazz. He and I began to talk, gingerly. I was outraged and so hurt. One day we met on the riverbank and each brought a beer. We talked searchingly. Then he made a remark about her which I won’t repeat. It stung me to the bone: about her beauty. I threw my empty bottle at his feet and stalked away. He threw his empty bottle at me.

    Oh, we were unadmirable. Toiling in our longterm pain and both of us tipped by this turn in events into our oldest, most dysfunctional patterns. Fear of abandonment. Fear of violence. We argued that night, having followed each other down the street to his house, shouting like sailors, and then I stormed out and went tramping down the street with my hands stuffed in my pockets, muttering with rage. I fell in with a beautiful, soulful gay guy who was walking ahead of me. He said, Are you ok. I said, I’m not. Something horrible has happened and I feel furious and hurt. We started talking as we walked on and he went into a late-night shop and bought a two-euro bottle of vodka and we sat in the doorway of a Lebanese restaurant on the main road after they had closed and smoked a joint, my first ganja in five years, and drank our vodka. We went to an infamous dance club and talked and danced. Then I went back round my betrayer’s house, stoked up on alcohol and rage. I let someone let me in at the street door and jogged up the stairs and terrified him by pounding on his inner, apartment door. He opened it and I barged in. Where is she? I know she’s here.

    He was saying, She’s not here, Cathoel, I told you. I’m not seeing her anymore. But I wouldn’t listen, I couldn’t hear. I stalked about his tiny one room apartment spewing out my rage and pain. He was saying, You have to go, you can’t just come shoving your way into my private space. We can talk tomorrow. But I wouldn’t go. I wanted to make him as angry as I was. And I succeeded. He took my by the hair and tried to drag me towards the door. “You have to go!” This was more or less what I had wanted: vindication, proof, a release of the intoxicating vigour we all know, the most dangerous drug, that which fuels every mass shooting: righteous indignation. Oh, how dare he touch me. Oh, how he was a man.

    We began to wrestle. I imagine we woke the neighbours. I couldn’t stop from goading him but when he got goaded I screamed, almost triumphantly, Let go of me, let go, you brute.

    I remember in the delirium and loss of every control of this powerful night the tiny mouthfeel of the satisfying word ‘brute’ fat and meaty in my mouth.

    I said something about his bed, the bed he built for us and had now illegitimately shared. He pushed me onto it. I wouldn’t fall and he pushed me so hard I later found cuts along the sweet inside of the backs of my knees, that private, tender cave whose name I have so long loved to wonder about. Why is there no word in English for the inside of the elbow, the back of the knee? Do other cultures have a better way to love themselves than we do? The cuts took weeks to heal and then I had angry, flame-red welts for months. I flung my hands up in terror. He had gone into the stratosphere at last, this bullied child whose father whistled for him as though he had been a dog, this long-legged stranger chased through the village schoolyard for his sensitivity and height by his entire class all at once. “They hunted me,” he had told me, on one of the few occasions we talked about it. Now he drew his arm back and walloped. He hit me across the face. He hit me! Across the face! The signature that I am me. He hit me so hard a bruise rose up days later and stained me purplish green for several weeks. I wore it with an angry kind of prideful shame. I felt marked: a woman, after all. I was incensed. I got up and grabbed the most precious thing he had: his laptop computer, on which everything he’d made was stashed. I hurled it out the window and it came crashing into the parking lot below. He left me then. Ran outside and began peering over the edge. I locked him out. I was cold with terror. I thought he might kill me. I had that thought. I locked the balcony door behind him and this gave me the time to gather my things and get out of there. The man who had hit me was wringing his hands, he was crying, for his fucking computer, my ears ringing and my head on fire, I left him there and ran away and ran home with my cotton trousers torn across the front as though I had been raped, I saw people looking at me in the dark and then looking away, I was saying to myself, I will never forgive you for hitting me, I can’t believe you hit me, I’ll never forgive that you made me an object of desperate pity to all these strangers, I will never forgive.

    When I was gone the man whose computer I had destroyed had to climb down the scaffolding on the building and knock at a neighbour’s window, and the neighbour let him in, and he had to get a locksmith before he could gain access again to his own apartment, and I suppose he was carrying the smashed computer under his arm, but at the time, I didn’t care. Not that I didn’t care: I felt vindicated, I was glad.

    This was two years ago. We slowly tried to recover, we built on our inimical love, we tried to comfort each other: but it could not work out. That and the baby we had lost and some other griefs had stained us to the marrow so that like a series of transparent microscope slides you could have sliced our love thinly and seen the mark of these traumatic events in every cell.

    Now I had noticed my hearing was fuzzy. I wasn’t sure if this was just the flu. The Berlin flu this autumn that doesn’t go away. It lingers. I noticed because I was dating. I met men in bars and struggled to hear what they were saying. I was always leaning in, forming my hand into a trumpet like some old warhorse chaperone in a turban and lace in a country house in England before the Great War.

    The ear, nose, and throat specialist was Russian. He spoke careful German. I confessed my foul story. “Es tut mir sehr leid für Sie,” he said, courteously: I am very sorry this happened to you. I said, I’m not sure whether the blow might have damaged – my hearing (it was hard to get the words out, hard to let this thought form in my mind) – or whether it might just be age. You know?

    My Russian doctor widened his eyes. Sitting in his white lab coat he said, “But you are young! You are a beautiful young woman!” He drew his stool between my knees and separated them with his own. He leaned in on the pretence of examining me and said, “Sie schwitzen!”

    You’re sweating.

    “Yes,” I said, shrinking back but already questioning myself. This must surely be normal? His assistant behind us gave no sign of dismay when he put himself between my knees. “I rode here on my bike,” I said, helplessly explanatory, almost apologetic: “It’s warm, once you get moving.”

    The Russian doctor took a clean handkerchief from his pocket. He padded it tenderly up and down my neck, behind the ear. Then he returned it to his hidden, inner pocket, carrying my DNA, and leaning in to prod his old-fashioned steel devices into my left ear and then my right, one device after another, while I sat there with my knees parted for him unable to say a word.

    There’s nothing wrong with your hearing, he told me, later in the hallway. I was sitting under a Turkish carpet on a loom which spelled out his name, with the prefix, ‘Dr’, in wool. His assistant had put me in headphones and tested which tones I could hear, and – as they grew louder – how soon. He showed me his chart. “This is normal hearing. And this is you. I think you just have some inflammation from your cold. Actually your hearing is very good.”

    Thank you, I said. I could not wait to get away. The trees outside the surgery window were shifting in a silent wind. The doctor twinkled at me. “A pleasure,” he promised. “And if you need to come back again, for any reason at all – dann zahlen Sie gar nix. Then, you pay nothing whatsoever.” And so I had to thank him again.

  • hand to hand

    I went to a new physiotherapist today for my injured hand, and experienced all the Germanness. Me and the therapist, who is 23, have to call each other Mrs So and So, Mrs So. Her first name is not vouchsafed on her nametag and the surname was very German and unfamiliar to me. I thought of the writer friend whose multilingual office reverts from “Tom,” “Iris,” “Nancy” etc in English to “Herr Geltrausch, Frau Petersilie, Fräulein Kartoffelpuder” when they switch to German again.

    I am learning, with reluctance, the kinds of boring German words which mean “cancellation fee” and “referral” and “health insurance.” She measured the ring finger whose persistent swelling since it was ‘ausgekugelt’, that is, the marble popped out – dislocated – in Brisbane in July, makes it difficult to bend and refrained from making the insensitive joke other hand therapists have made, which is that if I want to marry I will have to wear the ring on my thumb.

    She asked what do I do, and I told her, I used to play guitar, and we both looked down at the swollen sore knuckle and I started to cry. Germans are often so compassionate. But they’re formal. In the waiting room a special chair for children was piled with comical stuffed animals, each in its own way an expressive beast. The sun shone through the window like the first day of Spring. It is cold but the ice cream shops have opened and as I walked home I passed junk shops which have laid out their junk for the first time since September. In the waiting room of the physiotherapist practice numerous framed notices began, formally, “Very Honoured Patients and Patientesses…” then invited us to help ourselves to coffee and tea, therapeutic toys and basins of lentils to sift through, heat pads and cold pads, filtered water, and biscuits.

  • a virgin busker

    On the subway a woman suddenly opened her mouth and began to sing. Her voice was tentative and good. She had a little loudspeaker rigged up through her mobile phone and had set herself to perform some songs in her own native Spanish. She was rugged up like the rest of us in a puffy blizzard jacket, was in her late middle age, and shy: and I would be willing to bet this was her first day out busking.

    She sang, Kiss me… kiss me all over, or as it renders in the Spanish, kiss me a lot. Her voice trembled with nerves but she kept going. She tried to set up a swing with her hips, stiffly, appealing to the stony crowd with outstretched hands. “Music?” her voice, her hands, her eyes seemed to be saying, “remember music?”

    I got up and went over to be nearer. She was standing in the doorway with her back turned to the glass doors. She smiled shyly at me and I smiled shyly back, nodding encouragingly, clinging to the yellow pole and hanging my head against it as though it were a mother.

    Shyness in public. It makes life so much more challenging. A little way into the song she switched up the tempo and the backing music began a familiar rumble. “Bamboleo,” she sang, wistfully but clear, “Bamboleah…” A moment later she was saying, thank you, danke schön, and pulling out of her jacket pocket a crumpled waxed-paper cup. It is easy to fall on hard times so rapidly. Well-dressed people are begging and collecting bottles for the deposit all over the city. I gave her two euros saying, Sie haben solch eine schöne Stimme, eine echt schöne Stimme. You have such a lovely voice, a really beautiful voice. This was perfectly true and she knew it. We thanked each other bashfully and she went off down the swaying carriage where to my surprise people pulled out their wallets and broke the fourth wall. I, too, am afraid to sing in public; I, too, have a voice. Her courage by this stage had moved me to tears and when the door at my station opened unexpectedly a second early, while the train was still moving, I stood back saying, “Whoa,” and smiling with surprise. German trains are seamless. The man waiting outside the doors stood facing me as the platform slowed. He smiled back. We smiled at one another. In the stairwell a man with his face turned to the wall was shooting up into his elbow, bared in the literally freezing grey cold.

  • it has sun

    In the cafe he showed me the pictures he had taken on his walk here, of a dog skateboarding in the park. “You should animate those into a thumb-book!” I said. Amy Winehouse was singing. “Or maybe a – gif.”

    We watched a couple walking past in their somehow sweet and somehow matching outfits. He had on a blend of waterfront worker and Clash renegade, a scarlet beanie; she was doused in a long, woollen coat with skirts, like she had stepped out of the moors to take the city air. I was struggling to put all of this into words and he said, “Their cute sort of karate look.”

    I pressed his hand. “Karate-karaoke-paparazzi.”

    We walked back past the housefront biliously painted with darker green highlights which says at arm height worst green ever. He had a conversation with the guy whose dog is wrapped in a torn army blanket, on the metal access ramp to the ATM foyer at the bank. This man is American and clearly made his life here years ago, but his German is poor. As is he. His devilish rock and roll grin greets bank customers and he swoops the door open, when they leave and when they enter, so courteously and with an infectious warmth.

    In the park, drug dealers and old ice: the frozen water kind. A girl cycles past, singing. The sun has been brief. “You should gig there,” he says, pointing over to a bar sunk underground with golden windows. “They host acoustic stuff.”

    “I’d love to,” I say, looking in at the knee-height windows shyly, as we pass. “If I ever start gigging again.”

  • apple a day

    Saturday night, home with the one I love. We cycled over to the Korean grocers’ in the freezing cold mist to get ingredients and I made soto ayam, my favourite Javanese chicken soup from childhood. He is nutting something out for himself on the guitar. I read him something I had written earlier, while he was shredding the chicken. Then we lay down for a while in silence and after a long time I said, want to hear the song I wrote on my phone the other day? I can’t remember how it goes. And he listened to it and then said, Cathoel just drop the ‘& the New Government’ and publish your songs as Cathoel. I said, but why? It’s my favourite band name of all time! And so then he told me why, mentioning some features of what he hears in my voice that made me curl my toes with delight.

    The song, I tell him, reading off the tiny screen, is called In the Human Senses of the Word. He closes his eyes. Outside the window it is silent and completely dark. I can see a few lights on in a few other houses. What’s your day like right now? Catch me up.

  • where it hurts

    What a strange feeling to watch Mitch Winehouse, father of the Amy who died young, telling the camera after her death how he felt it was not his place to save her. You can’t force treatment on somebody, he says, and shrugs. Meantime he is running the Amy Winehouse Foundation, his income derived from her work. After everything that’s happened, still an unawakened person: living in an unreflecting stupor, so it seemed, entirely selfish, he has milked his cow to death and still has no idea what went down, or who she was, or what life is like for a sensitive – that is, a wakeful – person.

    It is cold in Berlin at night the end of the summer, I drew my feet up on the chair. Two dogs kept tangling in a hassle of growls every time someone got up to buy a beer. Would be great, said the announcer in English and in German, if you could all carry your deckchairs over to the stacks afterwards, and bring your ashtrays back. Her fingers tangling in her afro loomed larger behind her like fame.

    The last film I saw here, a month ago, was about another tormented musical artist: Brian Wilson. I remember afterwards standing in the queue laughing as though crying again, watching all the Germans patiently waiting, chairs folded, to hand back their deckchairs to the two fellows rapidly stacking and folding.

    Today I discovered I have cried so much in the last week that the skin round my nostrils is all chapped and eroded. Standing in front of the mirror rubbing oil into it in little tiny circles I was thinking of the psychologist I spoke to on Friday, a much younger woman I have met a few times now, who is Danish. We speak in English. She said, I am sorry that these sessions just involve an hour and after that I have to let you walk out into the world all alone. I wish I could come with you for a few hours, and spend the afternoon beside you, just sitting with you. “There is nothing I would like more,” she said. I walked across the bare floor of the old sewing factory to the bathroom and dunked my face in the cold water several times, patting down the aggrieved and swollen skin, the red. I tipped my bag onto the floor and twenty-one sodden tissues rolled out on the tile. Later that night woken by street noise and unable to stop from weeping I rang my parents’ house. It was 3am here, there almost noon. “Have you tried concentrating on the positive things in life?” My dad searched for something to say when I became so entrailed in sobs I no longer could speak. “I meant to tell you,” he said, “about the friend from Engineers Australia I ran into at the spinal clinic. Lovely bloke. But he has broken his neck and now he’s paralysed from the neck down.”

    Amy Winehouse’s ex husband, the reprehensible Blake Incarcerated, lounged in his splendid corner chair. He was being made up for a biopic about his famous wife, had filled out, was feeling self-assured. He spoke about himself and then rolled on over her, already dead. Wha’ I fought was, he said Londonishly, the emblem of fake punk, I’m earning good money now, I’m a good looking man, I dress well – what ve hell am I doin’ wasting my time wiv ‘er? He had drawn her into the tiny heroin room, and left her there. In the film she climbed onstage, booed by the people who’d been chanting her name, and began beseechingly hugging one big black man after another – musicians who reminded her, I would imagine, of one of her only true friends, a bodyguard who used to stop her from going out for more booze. Her girlhood friend’s voice broke describing how they had rung the father imploring him, please, do not let her tour. But she ‘ad commitments, innit. So he put his wretched daughter, skinny and cowering, on stage in Belgrade, where she stood trembling and evasive until she was booed off.

    In the outdoor audience, no one stirred. The story was heartbreaking and base. A person eaten alive by the public, undefended by her nearest loves. We were aware in our deck chairs that we had all feasted on her, like Diana, like Marilyn. We are entitled to feed on the female: the role of a woman is to cater our eye.

    A slight wind rattled the screen. In eerie silence they showed slowly the unhappy photographs she had taken of herself in her house in a daze, a woman hounded on the street. She only had to show her face at a window to be blinded all over by mega flash bulbs. Her husband himself and her father, deserter of his family when his daughter was ten, are in their own ways mega-flash bulbs, though dim: yet both have survived and now flourish on the messy heap of her memory and her fame.

    We are a cruel culture. We trash the wild. The queue round the corner to see this girl’s life, the silence that spread from one person to another, were a searching in the self and a tribute. The film makers had pieced it all delicately together from the home movies she’s left behind – and from footage in the vocal booth – and from interviews with those who loved her and those who exploited her gift.

    This outdoor cinema is set up in the green in front of a famous smoking squat, where rivers of drugs have been consumed. It now houses galleries, the summer cinema, and a restaurant which is always booked out. Gift in German means poison. Tony Bennett said, she had the true jazz voice. Jazz singers don’t want to be up in front of 50,000 people.

    A breeze stirred the trees in the prolongued, painful silence. It was cold and growing dark round half a moon. We were Berliners, many of us people who have tried at some stage to suicide by substance. Four lights came on in the big house, a hospital before. She drank so much that her heart just stopped. The treetops stood there stately, shaking a little. I drew a sigh in the immaculate silence.

  • madre de dios

    Following a little family down the long walkways of Terminal One to reach Terminal Two and the mouth of the subway, I kept seeing how the little girl held tight to her mother’s hand and how the little boy held his father’s. She was scarved and wore a baby close against her chest. On the other side of the glass stood a queue of twenty-five-year-olds waiting to board our flight back to Berlin.

    The Metro ticketing machine offered little flags: press which language you want. I put “Spanish,” because I am stubborn. The trains are suffocatingly heated. People kept climbing on board to beg or to busk. The four men from the Andes with their squat amp and teensy guitars, held high on their chests the way you’d nurse a machine gun or maybe a baby; people looked annoyed at the racket but I gave them some money thinking, these guys are only here at all because Spain built ships, and crossed all the way the world and found their Country, and stole millions and killed millions. Now with their long obsidian hair and their colourful backpacks and their Pan flutes they are back bringing a little music into everyone’s commute: an unfair and gracious exchange.

    A man whose face has been eroded by what looks like an acid attack came holding out his two stumps of hands palm upwards, smiling and wheedling. A man whose right foot is crushed and slanted made his way painfully down the carriage, telling his story and asking… for bread, there was a young man beautifully upright in his wheelchair and begging and a Caribbean man playing joyous reggae and all of this happened in between airport and town.

    I dragged my suitcase and changed trains twice. The driver came out his side door when I climbed out at Manuel Becerra saying, something something something descapacitado… seeing my expression he gestured, unmistakeably, repeating himself very slowly: the disabled staircase (an emphatic sweep of one arm) is reached by dismounting on the other side of this train: and I looked, and sure enough the doors on both sides were open. “Gracias,” I told him, struggling with my suitcase and box of books back across the open carriage in which everybody stared, “Muchas gracias” – how amazing that he should care. In the next train a man gazed and gazed. Another man next to me was reading the National Geographic in Russian. I bought, very carefully, something to eat from the man running his glass-front stall, and he taught me a new word to add to my existing Spanish stock of two (“por” and “favore”). Something something some? “Non hablo espanol,” I hazarded, awkwardly. He said it again with gestures: “caliente?” Blowing on his pursed fingertips to show how it was hot. Oh, did I want it heated? “Por favore.” He went on, helpfully: “friore” (I think) means “cold.” “Muchas gracias.” It just amazes me how people living in an ancient city awash with lenses can be so welcoming and go out of their way to be kind to a person who clearly knows nothing of their country and speaks barely one word: god love them for that. So far Spanish people are wonderful. Though it also made me proud that I found my way using a photo I had taken off google maps in Berlin at 5am from the Metro stop to my hotel without asking help of anyone. It was raining and I arrived wet and splashy. At the corner across from some huge splendid palace a car swept past drenching me and another man in rainwater and we shrugged at each other, smiling, starting to laugh. The “caliente” man gave me a little receipt with my 2€ pastie and I picked up off his counter another receipt, left by another customer, which had been folded into a boat shape, or perhaps a hat; I slipped it into my pocket and will take it home – all the way home to Australia, if necessary.

  • my god, I’m so drunk

    My god, I’m so drunk. What happened is: it’s all Diamond Dave’s fault. What I mean to say is: we went out to see him play. We were walking and on the way several bauhinia trees stretched themselves across the cyclone-wire fence of a local public playground, I pulled them down towards the ground and took half a dozen flowers, thinking: I have never seen Dave play, I can throw these to him on the stage. In the pub.

    The pub it turns out is, like, the happiest bar I have been in for several years. There were six people in there when we came in, plus a barmaid whose long slender legs had tattooed across the hem of her leather skirt, “forever young.” “If only she knew,” I said to my Berlin companion, whose height people in public places remark on. But fuck them. Dave’s number one fan came reeling up to us and gasped and let his hand fall open like a slow present. “You!” he said, “are like the new Jerry Hall. Oh. My. God.” I was laughing. “When I die and I finally get reincarnated… I wanna come back AS YOU.”

    My darling bought us a beer. It was a German beer whose name the scribbled bar girl could not recognise when he pronounced it the German way. “Oh,” she said, “Doppeldingsbum.” Our friend Diamond Dave, or so he claims (“Is that really my name?”) was playing covers as though his life hung from them. I felt ashamed, abashed, totally awakened at the sound, I had never heard him play in all those years we had been friends and yelled into my companion’s sweet ear, “He’s just a natural born rock star!” He was. He is. The bar filled with revellers. Some of them were 21 and some were 62. The bald guy making eyes from across the bar began to dance as Dave poured himself into “Love is the Drug,” an exquisite cover, absolutely defined again by his rolling bass.

    Probably my favourite song for the night was the Sunnyboys, “Alone With You.” Lord, was I dancing. That just never gets old. And then Dave struck up something of Elvis’s, can’t remember what it was, oh! “Hound Dog”! and the bald guy across the bar left off leaning and started slowly grooving. Like he was wearing a hole through the floor. I strode round to join up with him, sashaying good, and we both sang it out as people do who love music and are perhaps drinking, who knows, it’s the Valley. A whole pile of people poured in. There were two gigs upstairs and one in the back room. “It’s a labyrinth,” said my friend when he came offstage. I left my beer standing there and the man I’d been dancing with bowed with his hands, like Thai masseurs do, “Thank you, lady,” he said, “thank you, love.” Later on he turned up at my elbow saying, “Can you introduce me,” and then grinned into both our faces, saying, “You are suited, you look right together.” He told my boyfriend, “She’s a great girl. I mean! She’s super great!” But I let my beer stand and went out to explore the back. It was noisier. Death punk vibe. There was the girl with cherry bomb hair and long black leather jacket. There was – hey! Dusty Anastasiou waved cheerily, next on the bill, I promised I would go see them play but then my boyfriend threw an accidental beer over me, I forgot. Anyway we slunk home cold and reeking of alcohol. “I can’t believe you threw that over me, I am so cold, I’m so wet.” But we had climbed up the stairs and found the skinhead gig right up under the roof, the boys clustered at one end the girls coiled at the other, we looked out the clotted windows on the Valley, Friday night concupiscence, all the sleek taxi cabs stopping and starting at the curb, the people stumbling in and out of places, the girl who looked like Ashley Judd and the post-traumatic-stress-disordered Scottish Falklands veteran who told us all his archaic and sad, tired, unpleasant history and by his side the little punk boy whose girlfriend, fiery-dyed and fearlessly tattooed up like a Maori warrior queen, sang along every word with some Nirvana song I’d never heard of, such is music, the shared ecstasy and the narrow individual dream that takes up all the moors and can encompass every wonder, every effort, every thing. I came home stripping off my beer clothes and barely knowing anything, deep in the serenity, close friend to a rock star and light as lager foam in my soul, on my feet, all down the front of me, wherever you’d want to be: the music has always been there first and is what guides us, canary singing in the coal mine, “You’ll be safe here, you’ll be sweet.” Good night, canary dear. I love you.

  • fight for your right to part ways for the night

    My boyfriend and I had a huge fight and I went storming into a bar and ordered a dirty martini. I was wearing a big scarlet onesie with a Danish flag down the back, had jumped out of the car and wasn’t dressed for city life. This blonde girl came up to me, drunk on her swaying heels. “Excuse me. Are you a musician?” I started to laugh. “Is it the ugg boots?”