Newtown Neurosis

Make the Newtown Neurotic's 'Kick Out The Tories' the UK Christmas No.1 Facebook Campaign

2010-09-29T01:20:00.000-07:00

Not our doing but I can only say that is seems a very good idea to me, fancy joining up and making a purchase leading up to Christmas. It'll make a change from Slade It's a crazy idea but I like crazy ideas and it would be a fantastic way to get this message across especially as due to the nature of it's content it has never had any airplay in Britain since it was originally released in the nineteen eighties. Sign up, tell your friends spread the word.

CHRISTMAS No.1 2010..NEWTOWN NEUROTICS : KICK OUT THE TORIES - Facebook campaign"LETS GET THIS APT SONG TO NUMBER 1 FOR XMAS.....LETS SHOW THAT PARTIES THAT ARE NOT VOTED IN HONESTLY SHOULDN'T BE TELLING US ALL WHAT TO DO... "

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=126912717360216&ref=mf

My book

2010-09-15T23:58:00.000-07:00

Hi, just thought I'd add a little to my blog after all this time to explain that the resurgence of the Newtown Neurotics and my solo appearences has meant that my book has been put on the back burner. It is three quarters finished and I intend to start work on it again to finish the thing off. So far I am very please indeed with it. After that it is anyone's guess if I can it published in this financial climate but we shall see.

The means justifies the end

2007-08-18T12:59:00.000-07:00

Well, that's the end of the gigs set up for the Neurotics to say goodbye, and therefore it is the end of the blog. I am very pleased that I managed to keep it up whilst being so busy especially as before I started it, I was afraid that I would run out of things to say. That fear was unfounded and as such the concept has burst out from the blog format. The 1963 timeline I am going to compile into a book and will continue writing it offline until I feel I have a completed story. At that point I will try to find a publisher.

Consider what you have read so far to be a taster, and if you ever see it on a bookshelf or available on Amazon please buy it, you will make me very happy if you do.

For those of you who have followed what I have been writing day after day, thank you for your perseverance, it was for you that I made sure there was something to read each time you checked the blog out.

Steve Drewett
Sat 18th August 2007

The end justifies the means.

2007-08-17T12:28:00.000-07:00

August 12th 2007 6.00pm

Afterwards in the dressing room everyone is feeling very pleased with themselves and Simon whips out a bottle and some plastic cups to make a toast to the end of the band.
Back in the mists of time after he had auditioned for the Neurotics and we told him he had got the job, we toasted the acquisition of our new drummer with a bottle of Pomaigne!
Now at the end of our career we say goodbye to the band with a bottle of Cava.

We certainly know how to push the boat out.

But this was not about grand gestures, we know what the band has meant to us and it is not measured in the contents of a bottle of alcohol.

From this point on, people approach me back stage, I attend the festival the following day and they approached me on several occasions there and I even got stopped at a motorway service station by people who want to tell me how much they enjoyed the set and if it is really true that it is the end.
They make me laugh, they approach and say “Sorry to bother you but…” No one is ever bothering me if they are telling me how much they have enjoyed the Neurotics.
They would be bothering me if they were coming over to tell me how shit they thought we were but fortunately they don't.

The strange thing about this years gig is that everyone thought the hour we were on stage flew and it seemed like half the time. It certainly felt like that to me and the rest of the band, but we were performing so I suppose it would seem like that to us. However I kept bumping into people who immediately said the same, our crew felt the same way too. Last year we played the same length of set and no-one said it seemed short. It may be because we never got to play ‘Kick Out The Tories’ but that was because some of the other numbers we did were longer than what we performed in 2006.

There was a Quantum singularity on that stage I swear and time was warping for us all.

Just like last year, Clare, Rosa and myself decide to stay on for the Sunday and we spend the day hanging out in the Pirate bar (Yo Ho Ho, let’s go! There I go again, any excuse!) and catching the odd band, like the Adicts, who finished off the festival.

We also managed a visit to the top of Blackpool Tower. Whilst at the top I gazed back at the Winter Gardens hundreds of feet below and could still see hundreds of punks outside, they looked like smoker ants swarming around their hill crying ‘God Save The Queen’ whilst doing a curious dance as they followed intricate trails of larger.

I sauntered around to the other side of the tower to look out at a ruby red sunset. I knew we would be leaving soon and I, like all who have made this annual trek to punk heaven had a heavy heart, I knew I would leave part of me here, forcing me to think of it at totally unpredictable moments.
But unlike some British towns which try to seduce you into thinking you could live there for ever if you had the money, Blackpool is more honest, it treats you as transient and asks you for what ever you have got.

For the people who live and earn their living there it is probably a totally different town. But we will never know that, because we are going home, where ever that may be.

Squinting through the sunset I gazed out to sea and wondered what was out there. Isle of man first, then Ireland and then America. Hmmm.
I then realised that I still had to finish my blog and that it was probably going to go on for a while before concluding.
I thought hard about how I was going to end it. I imaged myself at home at my computer tapping out the final lines and I imaged it would end something like, this...

1963

Later I got bored with being in my room and went downstairs for a change of scenery. I placed myself down in my usual place, on a pouffe in-between my parents to watch the TV with the coffee table in front of me. I leafed through the magazines with little interest and yawned at the programmes they were had on as they held little facination for me. Eventually, at some point my dad would make a sarcastic remark to my mum or he would criticise the cup of tea she had just made him ,anything at all really and off they would go sniping at one another until it was a full scale blazing row, accusation and retort back and forth over my head till mind was ringing with ricocheting bullets of distorted facts that made up the rationale of his idiotic logic.

Trouble is they were a double act. Although my mother was never the driving force behind these acts of demoralisation she was the straight man in this duet of misery. Just like it is impossible for a tennis player to play without an opponent, my parents arguments also relied on each other to play out this game of spite. However where the tennis player needs to anticipate the next move of their opponent; they knew the combinations of outcomes so much that there were no surprises left in this tournament of the tormented. It was a well worn formulae and I too knew it inside out, you just needed to replace certain key elements for the rowing to start from and then it was predictable from then on. However this ball of confusion never touched the ground, it just got hit back and forth with great accuracy with me in the middle. The looser would be the one who finally burst into tears. That would be my mum mostly but it also included both my sisters and myself. You couldn’t beat him, this was his raison d'être and he would have infinite reservoirs of energy to wear you down and grind you into the dust. He was the ultimate long distance arguer. The weirdest thing was I don’t remember him swearing, at least when I was there, that means instead of this being a rage of passion, it was cold and controlled, maximum spite, minimum swearing, ‘to stop the boy picking up bad language’. This was akin to the police interrogation methods in the Seventies of beating confessions out of defendants through a pillow so their faces wouldn’t look bruised in the courtroom the following day. And if the battlefield should fall silent for any space of time, the television would elbow it’s way back into our consciousness filling our heads with now more meaningless words because they had lost all context and therefore had no value at all to our existence , if they ever had.
If there happened to be something on the television that interested me I would try to concentrate on it through a crackling and hissing rage within me and I’d try for all my worth to cut out the white noise of infantile strife. I never managed it though, I didn’t have the self control. If I could have cut half the noise out it might have been somewhere near tolerable but the TV, like my parents could never be switched off.

Unable to bear it any longer I would take myself off to my room and lose myself once again in comics and toys. Later in my life, when my sisters left home, I got their big room which was situated directly above the living room. When I'd had enough of their auguring and came upstairs I could still hear their muffled bloodletting rising up through the floor. Headphones had just appeared in England at this point and I knew why they had been invented. I’d put them on to my head and they wouldn’t come off until it was time to go to bed. Later it would be an amplified guitar that would keep this hateful noise at bay and provide an umbilical cord to reason and sanity.

For now, the comics and toys would simply have to do.

Finally as the weekend came to a close and Harlow prepared to move a further week away from being a ‘New Town’ my mother would kiss my slumbering cheek and with a sigh, shuffle off, to once again sleep with the enemy.

Looking out at you!

2007-08-16T11:49:00.000-07:00

August 12th 2007 5.30pm

‘When The Oil Runs Out’ follows, dedicated to terrorists, Bush and Blair with the audience screaming out the chorus. I’m now relaxed for the first time in days and I’m really enjoying myself, as is the whole band which is showing in how well they are playing.This is a better executed set than last year and I am well pleased to improve onour performance in 2006 which we all thought would be difficult to do.

I introduce the next song by saying that it is really dispiriting to have so little choice politically these days and recognising that many in our audience have probably given up voting, I point out that apathy does not disturb our politicians, they get in anyway on a smaller share of the vote and carry on doing what ever they want to do. Activism is what scares them so getting involved in grass roots politics is the way to go. Then if there are enough of us doing that, we will arrive at the same destination anyway.

We then play ‘Get Up and Fight’ to further hammer home the point. It’s another number we haven’t performed for years but gets it’s third airing this tour.
I’m really enjoying playing this song, it’s like I have rediscovered it and live tonight it is a revelation! It just soars and takes the audience with it.
The band are so tight that when we end a number the last note rockets to the back of the huge ballroom over everyone’s heads and bounces back to us seconds later like an echo sounding, giving me a mental picture of the audience beyond the stage lights in the same way a bat uses sound to ‘see’.

The audience erupts and I am so relieved that we played that so well because I wanted this number to shine and it did.

We follow this with ‘You Must Be Mad’ yet another we haven’t played for years. The choice of what to play is always a hard one, you leave some favourites out to play others and the audience misses the ones you didn’t play. If we played the same set as last year, people would complain that it was exactly the same. Play a varied set and there are still numbers that have to be left out much to the disappointment of somebody. So we just have to go with our own feelings.

This number also has a new lease of life shown in the excitement the band generates with it by playing it so well.

Finally we come to our last number, the grand finale of ‘Living With Unemployment’ and towards the end the audience sing along with great gusto, so I allow the dub section to go on a little longer than usual because they are singing so loudly.

At this point, little do I know but we are running out of time, I had agreed with the stage manager to have a cue flashed up to us to let us know when there was only ten minutes left to go of our time on stage. However instead of flashing it up to me, he showed it to Simon who had no way of communicating it to me being so far back on the stage and not being within shouting distance. Living With Unemployment finishes in a blaze of glory and we go off with the fans screaming for more.

We had planned to do ‘Kick Out The Tories’ as an encore but we had run out of time and the stage manager wouldn’t allow it.

And so on our final gig, we left the stage with the audience wanting more but not getting it.

But then again they would always want more.

The question is, do I? At the moment I am not feeling emotional at this being the last gig, I am feeling a quiet satisfaction that we had played a good gig.

I just thought, “that wasn’t bad!”

1963

So I gazed out of my bedroom window watching people and the occasional car go by. Across the road I can see the square Billy lives in and Graham lives a little further up the street. If Graham were to call on Billy I would see them both from here, but I don’t, they must be confined to their homes too. A green double decker 804 bus stops a little way up the road and picks some passengers up, it’s a Sunday so there aren’t many. The only thing to do on a boring Sunday is go to church, go to the pub or both, I wasn’t interested in either of those pastimes, I just wanted to play with my friends. The bus passes slowly by, the top deck almost level with my window, bored passengers like mobile jurors gaze back at me, taking in a snapshot of my silent misery, I still feel like I’m in the dock. The feeling passes with the bus and I look around to see if I can spot my friends.

I did have friends at this time, they were my gang, I didn’t mean to have a gang but all the kids would couldn’t make it into the proper gangs, the rejects, ended up with me, and I was leader due to being the oldest.
But I was crap at it because this is not what I wanted. I wanted to be in a proper gang, I didn’t want to lead, I wanted to be lead, I wanted to belong and I needed a father figure in the shape of an older boy to seek praise from.
Not that my gang were a bad bunch, they were good friends and we did have a seriously great time together but I just didn’t feel that grown up with them.

At one point I see one of them, Steven Taylor spot me in the window and he mouths, “are you coming out”? I mouth back “I can’t, I’m not allowed out”. He shrugged with as much sympathy as he could muster and then headed off to the “Hills”. His freedom seems to further agitate me and my lack of it. I dragged some toy cars and a few action figures on to the window sill and use the outside world as a backdrop to an imaginary one, where I had as much freedom as I required and I was in control.

One is the loneliest number since you've gone away

2007-08-15T12:34:00.000-07:00

August 12th 2007 5.55pm

Back in the dressing room Simon says to me, “the audience has all gone”
I said, “I know but there’s nothing we can do about it so we may as well just go and play our hearts out, after all that’s what we are here for”.
“Let’s go”, I add and we begin our short walk to face an empty hall.

The traditional opening number ‘Wake Up’ has been dropped on this occasion and we start with an elongated drum intro for The Mess. I walk up to the mike and introduce ourselves and we are off. The nerves, the anxiety are all gone. They don’t exist on the stage, they only exist in the anticipation of going on stage.

The number really rocks, it is great to play on a large stage with an excellent PA and we begin by just enjoying that sound and space. As we play the first number, faces begin appearing below us at the front of the stage and they are singing every word, it’s a little embarrassing as they are remembering them a little better than myself at this stage. The set is designed to have Mindless Violence start directly after the end of The Mess and that happens with great efficiency only allowing a couple of seconds of applause to elbow it’s way in before we are off again.

We are playing really well, I am delighted by the way I feel too, I have managed to get a little more sleep before this gig than I did last year and our appearance is a little earlier in the evening too so I am feeling none of the fatigue I was experiencing the last time I performed on this stage. As I introduced ‘Licensing Hours’ I could see that we had an audience stretching a few rows back and once the number had finished the applause was warm and full.

We then performed ‘No Respect’ for the first time at Blackpool and it was obvious that it had been anticipated last time and disappointed many by its absence. This time though its inclusion delighted the audience and the response was fantastic.
Now it was time to bring Colin Dredd on for his guest appearance. Whilst I introduce him and Don Adams is taking off his bass and handing it to him, I notice that our audience had grown considerably, we now have a more than respectable crowd in this huge Empress Ballroom and I am feeling soooo good.

As Colin readies himself I announce that this is our final gig and that it is only fitting to bring on the man that was part of the Neurotics for so long. The response was a great cry of anguish from the crowd, a huge “NOOOOOOOOO”. This was news they didn’t want to hear. This appearance in the Empress Ballroom at the Rebellion Festival 2007 was meant to be billed as our final gig but Darren the main organiser didn’t want us to split and hoped it would not be our last so he didn’t make a point of billing it as such. Because of this it came as a complete shock to our fans.
We do Blitzkreig Bop and Hypocrite with Colin, last year this point in the set felt like a dip, this time the news that this is goodbye helps to build the atmosphere and it now makes perfect sense.

After Hypocrite, Colin leaves to great applause and I look out at the size of our crowd and here they all are. We have been worried about the earlier billing we have been given and the effect of the smoking ban but apparently the attendance at the festival was 20% down on last year. The smoking ban had changed the behaviour of the audience with a mass exodus every time a band finishes. This results in the beginning of everyone’s set having decimated numbers but the fans come swarming in as soon as the nicotine intake has been satisfied.

Our audience numbers are now very satisfying indeed, sure, they are down on 2006 but then so is everyone’s on this Saturday. Ari Up and the Slits who come on after us have only half the audience they had last time. I feel good because last year it felt hat we had hijacked 999’s audience by default, this time we know they are all here because they want to be, because they are dying to see the Newtown Neurotics.

1963

After the police left having told my father that the boys stories had confirmed that it was I that set light to the lorry, I was given a withering dressing down that left me feeling wretched. I was told that the only thing that prevented me from going to prison was my age and that I had had a close call. The threat of going to gaol had been lifted but my gloom hadn’t.
I was confined to the house and when ever any of my friends called they were turned away with the news that I could not come out because I had been a bad boy. Billy and Graham did not call for me.
Any opportunity to revive my sins in conversation was taken up by my dad. For example, my mum would say, “Oh isn’t it a lovely day out” to which my Dad would say “yeah and if he’d hadn’t set light to a lorry he’d be out there with his friends at this moment.

I knew now that as the seconds ticked by I was getting closer to the whole thing blowing over but with every mention of that act of arson he reset the clock back to the beginning.
The atmosphere was so thick downstairs you could cut it with a wooden spoon. It was only punctuated by various sisters coming and going but not staying. No, escape was the main pre-occupation for the children of this house, to do anything but remain anywhere near arguing parents. This is a common pre-occupation of children in any household but with us there was a grim determination that set us aside from others.

I took myself up to the quiet of my room and gazed out of my window at the road that passed our house. We lived at the start of a terrace of ten houses. Our door number was number 1, I was impressed with that, there can’t be many people in this world that live in the very first house of an estate. We were elite, comprised of families that live at house number 1.
Because of that number I was convinced that our house was the very first one to be built in Harlow and at one time all roads led to our little abode. I cannot recall to this day ever visiting another house in Harlow that was numbered 1.
I’m not saying they don’t exist, I’m just saying that in the normal day to day of one’s life, you don’t often find yourself knocking on the door of Number 1, unless you were in the Drewett family or the police.

The most amazing reinforcement of the specialness of this number was the estate I was gazing at through my window on the other side of the road to us. Spinning Wheel Mead, didn’t have a number 1, the estate started at number 2, what’s the chances of that happening eh?
The word from the street was that in the scramble to build this pioneer town (yeah I know, Welwyn Garden City was the very first) Number 1 Spinning Wheel Mead was designated to be a pub and therefore needed a different set of blueprints for its construction. They built the estate and waited for further instructions for the public house. They never came, for what reason no-one ever found out. Instead the space was turned a square and a large peice of grass.

In my darkest days of low self esteem, I used to look at our door number and think to myself that it was an omen that one day I would be the best, I would be number 1. These days I think it was trying to tell me to look after number 1.

I don’t know, what’s in a number eh?

If I asked that same question to a mathematician, they would say a whole universe can lie in a number, I’m sure they are right, but I don’t really want to know.

The universe I know is as much as I can handle.

Memories and Un-memories!

2007-08-14T13:12:00.000-07:00

12th August 2007 1.30pm

I am enjoying being back in Blackpool and at the Rebellion Festival.

Whilst last year was pretty much a process of acclimatisation, this year, everything is more familiar and it is more enjoyable for it. I really didn’t expect to be back here and now I am, it makes me realise how much I got into it last year.
We went over to the venue at lunch time and had a couple of beers in the Pirate bar, it’s actually called the Spanish bar but it is designed like a pirate galleon so I prefer ‘The Pirate Bar’, it also plays non-stop Ramones tracks (at least through the duration of this punk festival) so whenever we set out to have a drink in there I cry “Yo Ho Ho, Lets Go!”, but I guess you have to be there for the full effect.
We spend some time there just watching the punks and skins coming and going and soaking up the atmosphere, I love it! Next thing I know, we’ve got to return to the Hotel to get ready for the gig.
Because we are playing a couple of hours earlier than last year there is less time to hang around waiting to take the stage and the hours have just flown.

Once we get back, I realise that I should have something to eat before it gets too late. I am now becoming really nervous as the evening draws nearer. I have no appetite but must eat something as I'll only feel like drinking beer after the gig, it will take me ages before I will feel hungry again. We go off in search of a chip shop but could only find a sandwich shop that sold chips. I had a plate of them, they were fresh and hot but tasted like pulped paper, my throat had trouble with them because it was dry through nerves and therefore I had no saliva.

It was a joyless meal and then we returned to our hotel to get ready.

Finally, when we had made all our preparations and were ready to take the gear to the venue, I felt like I was going to pass out, it was a panic attack and I did my best to ignore it and carry on like it hadn’t happened. Clare knows the change in me though, for her it is obvious even if others don’t pick it up, she knows I am feeling deeply uncomfortable and that I will not be easy to be with until the gig is done, and if it doesn’t go well I will continue to be difficult to around for some time after.

We are asked to be backstage two full hours before we take the stage, no-one really knows why and the band think it is excessive, after all we are not trying to take a flight to somewhere sunnier and drier. I take the attitude that if I am going to be nervous I would rather be so backstage where I can see what is going on, than in a pub outside the venue just imagining the worst. The band finally turn up an hour before the performance, a time agreed with me to be the latest they should appear.

Just before they do, I am at my worse and feel like collapsing for the second (and last) time, once everyone turns up it fades and as we make ready to take the stage, I am too busy to think of it.

Once again, like last year, 999 are on before us and once they had finished and vacated the stage I took my guitars over to my side of the performance area.

Last year I looked up and no-one had moved, we had a packed house to play to, this year I look up and everyone has gone, as soon as 999 had finished they disappeared, the hall is empty!!!!

1963

I can’t recall when he died exactly, I can’t remember his birthday, I can’t remember a kind word he may have once said to me.

But what I do know is that I hated him, really hated him. My sisters hated him, my mother hated him but she was loyal to him to the end. Now we all have trouble remembering him and when we do, it is for all the wrong reasons.
Sometimes I look at my daughter and think, “What horrible things would I have to do for this five year old girl to erase me from her memory”.

If that was to happen it would be a tragedy, and yet it has happened, not to me but to him. How tragic is it when the sum of a man’s life is collective amnesia and loathing from his offspring.
Now all these years later, I feel sorry for him, I do. I cannot continue hating him, I cannot continue forgetting him and simutaniously, unconsciously hating him. For in the end it consumes you in it’s subtle and yet damaging ways.

How does this damage manifest itself?

It’s in your relationships with other people, in an unkind word, sarcasm, insensitivity and lack of patience.

When I was a boy, I spent what seemed like forever asking, pleading and whining for a bike and when I finally got one it was an ancient second hand boneshaker. That was all we could afford but because it was old, it needed quite a bit of maintenance. I couldn’t do it on my own so I relied on my dad to help me and in the end I learnt to dread asking him.

It was always so stressful.

As we would work to undo a nut or replace a brake block, everything I did was wrong and the more I got wrong the harder it was for me to get things right. He would start off talking to me in an irritated tone, then it would move to exasperation and then he would end up barking at me. Why are you touching that? Did I tell you to touch that? Can’t you follow simple instructions? It’s quite obvious what you need to do here! Where is your common sense? Can’t you do anything without breaking it. Here, don’t be such a chump give it to me I’ll do it, he would say and then snatch the tool from my hand.

As much as I have done to forget him, he is still here, inside me waiting, lurking and at times he reappears like a ghost.

For instance, my partner Clare sometimes struggles to do something on our PC, she’s not too IT literate but she does try and is improving all the time. There have been occasions when I have been tired and cannot face looking at a computer screen any longer and she has sought my help. When I have discovered what she has been doing wrong I offer advice which she sometimes mis-understands. Later when she is in trouble again I come over and I’d say something like...

Why are you clicking on that? Did I tell you to click on that, can’t you follow simple instructions? It’s quite obvious what you need to do here, where’s your common sense. Can’t you do anything on this PC without breaking it? Here, give it to me I’ll do it. As I snatch the mouse from her hand, I realise I have been barking at her and a chill runs down my spine. That’s when I get the feeling that he is in the room with me, almost standing next to me.

Almost, but he’s not, he’s in me,

I am him.

I am not going let him get to my partner or my daughter, but I cannot reach out to stop him.
The only thing I can do is change myself and I’m going to do that with forgiveness.

I can feel the growing alarm!

2007-08-11T03:58:00.000-07:00

I’m back in Blackpool Central library a year to the day when the Neurotics appeared at the Wasted Festival in 2006. Renamed the Rebellion Festival, the band are back in town to perform again and I am here using the free Internet access of the library to try to keep my blog of it all, up to date.
I must say I failed yesterday, I did try to write something using the Internet access of my mobile but unfortunately after going to the trouble of writing a piece, the form refused to submit, I think it is something to do with the cut down version of Internet Explorer not liking forms, I don’t know.
Anyway, what I was trying to relate was, I had spent a drug filled night trying to get a decent night’s sleep. I had taken 'Ibruprophen' to reduce some pain in my side, 'Milk of Magnesia' to ward of some indigestion I was experiencing, two spoonfuls of cough mixture to fight a tickly cough that was threatening to keep me awake and then on top of all that I awoke to a panic attack realising that I had committed myself and my fiends to stand once again on the imposing stage of the huge Empress Ballroom in the Blackpool Winter Gardens. It was such a great experience last year that when we were asked if we would like to do it again, I wanted to jump at the chance. Simon wasn’t so sure, reasoning that we couldn’t possibly beat what we had experienced in 2006. I had to do a lot of persuading to get him to change his mind. I am now worried that he may be proved right and it will be a disappointment, we have such high expectations of this gig that it is bound to disappoint. I was now lying in bed suffering from stage fright and the gig is still over a day away.
I knew that I was going to have trouble getting back off to sleep in this state of high anxiety so added a couple of Nytol herbal sleeping tablets to the mix sloshing around in my blood.

Fortunately it worked, so a reasonable amount of sleep was obtained.

The following morning we said goodbye to our friends and headed off to Blackpool.

Once again, after spending the evening sampling the delights of the acts playing on the Friday night at the Rebellion event, I was in our bed in the New President hotel on the Blackpool seafront trying to get some quality rest as the following day is the day of our big gig. A good night sleep is the holy grail for me this night. However it was not to be.

In the early hours of the morning the fire alarm went off in the Hotel, which pulled me out of my stupor, I lay there for several minutes in disbelief that this could be happening to me and that I never seem to get a good night’s sleep before a gig. I then thought we'd better get out of here, it did sound like a fire alarm but then again it didn’t, I couldn’t work it out.
I dragged myself out of bed and opened up our door.

Sure enough there was sounds of the hotel occupants ignoring the lift and thundering down the stairs in a controlled panic. I said to Clare, "oh Christ, we’d better get out of hereand quick!" I put my pants on and then thought whether I had enough time to put more clothes on. I then realised that I hadn’t and all I should do is to pick up our sleeping daughter without alarming her and carry her downstairs without loosing my step in my sleepy state and stand outside in the freezing cold in just my underpants.
I put my arms out to pick her up and the alarm stopped. Now completely confused I didn’t know if we should be coming or going. I got on the phone to reception and they confirmed that a fire alarm had gone off on the first floor (we are on the third) but it had been switched off as there wasn’t a fire.

Rosa hadn’t stirred at all during all this so I dropped back into bed with my heart still pumping in my chest and reached out for a couple of Nytol sleeping tablets, knocked them back with a slug of water and grumbled, “I just gotta get some sleep”

Fortunately it worked, so a reasonable amount of sleep was obtained.

Today is the day though, all we are waiting for now is Colin’s arrival, all the rest of the band are here, all booked in to the hotel successfully, all our passes for the weekend and guestlist places all correctly issued with no problem. This is great.

There are a lot of people who are trekking out to the outside of the Winter Gardens on a regular basis to have a cigarette throughout the day and evening. This is a miserable experience as you cannot take your drink outside, so you have to judge it so that when a band has just finished, so has your drink and then you race outside for a quick smoke and then race back in, to the bar, get a new drink and then on to watch a band.

We shall find out tonight if that effects then number of casual audience that have not seen the band before and may fancy catching us.
Our maybe the addiction will win. We shall see and I will keep you informed.

1963

I was too young to feel the wrench in any appreciable way despite having to change schools but I suppose I must have absorbed some of the angst like one can inhale second hand smoke without touching a cigarette.

It must have upset me to some extent, and what about happiness?

I look back and think, I must have laughed, I must have had happy moments, I must have been excited about something.

But I can’t remember hardly anything, it’s nearly all gone.

There is so little there that I have to employ the same methodology the astrophysicists use to discover Exoplanets, these are planets that are too far away to see their reflected light but have been discovered by the gravitational influence they have on their parent star. If the parent’s orbit wobbles it is being influenced by something nearby but unseen.
In this case it was me who was wobbling and sometimes swaying down through those early years and now I am trying to recall the influences that caused those wobbles. Unfortunately it always comes back to my father

I thought that it was happy memories that you retained and bad ones repressed, but for me it seems to be the other way around.

My sister Sandra says she couldn’t remember the first sixteen years of her life!

What are we if we are defined by events that we are no longer able to recall? How can we move forward and try to continue to enrich our lives when we don’t know which way we are facing or where we have come from.
It is very common that elderly people cannot recall yesterday but can relive events from way back in their childhood. If this is the case then I feel I have a very unpleasant retirement to look forward to.

Later I consciously erased my father from my mind. When he died, I stood over this wizened corpse and thought “Well, that’s that then”. That was the extent of the emotions I felt. I was relieved. I had been waiting for this day for years. There were times I contemplated hastening his end but I had been caught doing far too many things bad things in the past and I wanted no more of it. I decided to let time and his illness stop his blackened heart. But it had been a long painful wait.
I walked out of Princess Alexandra hospital and barely thought of him for 30 years.
Until now.

There's no smoke without fire.

2007-08-09T12:09:00.000-07:00

I’m sitting in Warrington visiting some old friends in exactly the same way I did last year before the Wasted Festival. Being here is a chance to catch up and know that the greater part of the journey to Blackpool has already been accomplished. Rosa is with us again and luckily, being a year older, didn’t spend the entire journey saying “are we there yet” like she did last year.
There is so much that is similar to 2006, being in Warrington, the festival continuing in Blackpool, playing the same night in the same venue with the same acts on before us and after us (although all these bands are appearing a little earlier this time). One could lazily conclude that every thing will have the same outcome but I think it is dangerous to believe this.
Regarding the audience numbers in front of each act, where there are multiple stages running all day, there is a big proportion of people who hang on after watching a band to check out the following act who they have heard are good. I’m wondering how the new smoking ban is going to effect the behaviour of this floating audience, and in a way the advantages of having all these venues under one roof makes going out to have a cigarette completely arduous.
When ever we went outside last year there was a sea of punks everywhere around the streets surrounding the Winter Gardens, with the new ban I can’t image what it will be like this year. When ever a band finishes, the smokers will probably wish they could catch a tram out to the front of the Winter Gardens and then, after having a smoke catch one back in to the stage of their choice.

I am a little worried that this going to affect audience numbers on the night. I don’t just want to play to committed fans, I want to convert people who have never heard us before, lets just hope that those potential Neurotics newbies are not heavy smokers eh?.

1963

Once we had moved to Harlow New Town both made attempts to recreate that close relationship in other church groups, but it was very hard to do and Sandra found it impossible. She had to keep returning to her old school to finish her course and take her exams as the curriculum was completely different in Brays Grove in Harlow.
She returned again and again to meet up with her old friends but the link was hard to keep up.
It was hard for my parents too; they were used to a very polarised close nit community in the East End where friends were all just around the corner and could be called upon to help with babysitting at the drop of a hat. Support in times of trouble was a quick run down the road.

As they closed the door on the first night in the new house in Pear Tree Mead all of that was shut out and was never seen again. The friends they agreed to keep contact with didn’t get to hear a lot of us from then on, we were two far away.
Although the distance doesn’t seem much now, meeting up with them was a long cold wait at a bus stop for a 718 bus that quite often suffered cancellations and then a long journey on the twisting roads that were all we had before the arrival of motorways.
We couldn’t drive to see them, we couldn’t afford a car and my parents had never learnt to drive. The train was expensive and the station was situated on the edge of town on the opposite side of it to us, a separate journey was needed just to traverse it. The tube started in Epping which also needed a separate journey to start the bigger one.

Nothing was easy.

We couldn’t even ring them, we didn’t have a telephone. Communication was by letter only and neither of my parents were very literate. My mother only wrote when forced to and always needed supervision.

The support network collapsed, and because of that so did the relationships with each other, slowly, but surely.

Whilst we lay in our new beds on our first night, the wind blew round our little house, over the big green fields and down the almost endless cycle tracks of our newly adopted town. In this environment, this buffeted silence, so different to what we had previously been used to, everyone must have felt an open claustrophobia even if some of them didn’t dare to admit it

For the very first time we were truly on our own.

Preparing to leave and preparing to live.

2007-08-08T12:55:00.000-07:00

I’m exhausted, had a final rehearsal today and it went very well, talked about some of the logistics of the band making their way to Blackpool separately and generally started getting excited/worried about the festival, the band excited and me worried as usual. Last time we went up there I only had to worry about making a good impression and we went down a storm. Now I’m worried about not being able to match last year. I don’t know, I’m trying to tell myself just to relax and enjoy it for what it is and another part of me is crucified by the prospect of rejection. It must be something to do with my upbringing.

The band leave before the end of the session which ends at 6pm and I remain for the final hour playing guitar on my own, waiting for my lift.
It's 5.45pm when suddenly the door swings open and there stands someone I presume is rehearsing in our room once our session is up.

He looks at me astonished and says “oh, er, are you sure you’re booked into this room this evening?”
Feeling peaved at being interupted, I say “No, but I am sure I’m booked into this room this afternoon and that has a quarter of an hour to go”
“oh, ok” he says “Sorry” and disappears to leave me to restart the song he interrupted.

I love it when I’m assertive.

1963

In retrospect, it seems my mum suffered psychologically from the caesarean and fell into a post-natal depression. I don’t know how much they knew about it in those days but it wasn’t spotted and then she had trouble bonding with me.
Where was warmth in my life to come from? I was heading for a lot of disappointment.

Being supplanted into a Newtown had consequences that were not apparent right at the beginning. There were quite naturally reservations felt by both of my sisters as they were torn away from their schools and their network of friends. However the thought of moving into a brand new house in a brand new town with lots of parks and fields did fill them with some excitement and it was much the same for my mum and dad.

The problem was, the move was to dislocate them from the very anchors that held the family fabric together.

The thing is, everyone had been pretending to be a real family for quite a long time before I was born. What was missing was a closeness and warmth that typifies a close family unit. It must have been quite soul destroying as there was a very strong desire to fill the vacuum it left with something else.
Both my sisters joined church groups which provided the feeling of family that was missing at home.
Not to have done that would have had a very detrimental effect on them, if you cannot define yourself by using your parents as a model then you have to look elsewhere.

Family favourites.

2007-08-07T12:10:00.000-07:00

I’ve got too much to do tonight to prepare for the weekend! My ideal evening would be do some final gathering and then relax but it’s all going to take a couple of hours and then it will be time to climb the wooden stairs.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Blackpool so I suppose that means I’m looking forward to it. The organisers of the Rebellion Festival have left their usual office and have set up camp at the Festival site. I text’d the main man to add a couple of guests for our show and was surprised this evening to find that it had all been sorted. I couldn’t believe that with all the stuff he needs to oversee at the moment that he would remember my little text, but he did and I am very grateful.
Did you read what I wrote about Blackpool last year, in case you missed it here it is again.

"We stand by the concrete road, rails and wires, built for the trams way back in the distant past when it had no competition from motorcars. The wires look like tight ropes suspended between Blackpool Tower and a massive Big Dipper way off in the distance. The sun is muted behind thin slate black cloud, casting a light promising summer but disappoints nonetheless. Although I have never been there, this place reminds me of Coney Island. Funny how you can make a comparison with something you've only seen in images.

Blackpool is like a big smile through clenched teeth. It has a warm heart and will doggedly try to entertain you with its faded glories because it believes that if you are here, it's what you are expecting. It is both defined and shackled by its own past. It wants to modernise and remain the same, as the world moves on around it, it doesn't know what direction to move in, like a tram, it faces both directions at once.

The donkey man lifts yet another child on to back of his little group of four legged employees totally immune to the charms of excited little innocents getting the ride of their lives. He, like the donkeys, move slowly along the beach, yet one more beast of burden. His flat cap and clothes, sand blasted by the wind coming in from the sea. His skin, hard and wrinkled like a treasure map with no gold to point to. His head down, gazing at the footprints of the last time he came this way. Only a few minutes ago. It's the modern day equivalent of the Myth of Sisyphus where a man is condemned to roll a rock to the top of the mountain and when it rolls back down the other side, he has to start all over again. For eternity! It's almost as though when he was a young man working his pitch with the Tower Gypsies selling lucky heather, he had cursed himself. He is now condemned to give children donkey rides, with each squeal of delight and "look at me Mummy, look at me Daddy, I'm riding a donkey" stealing part of his soul until he shrivels up and is blown off of the beach by the sands of time.

The bottom of the hour glass is indeed filling as we arrive back at the hotel, we have little less than an hour to get ready before the band and crew head back to the Winter Gardens, the Empress Ballroom and the event we have been building up to for months. My lack of sleep is getting to me, for a moment there I thought I'd left my donkeys unattended on the beach. This isn't right; I should feel like a rock star! I will, later. I hope".

I wonder what frame of mind I'll be in this time. Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)!

1963

Religion was big in my house at this time, my sisters definitely preferred “Our Father Who Art in Heaven” to “Our Father Who Art in the Living room’.
This was because there was a malevolence underpinning our family life which was ripping the soul out of it. This was happening before we moved to Harlow and before I arrived on the scene.
Before the move he had taken to hitting Sandra but not Lorraine or my mum, this seemed to be motivated by the cramped conditions we were living in (You can measure how cramped things were in that all that could be promised for the girls in Harlow was a room to share but it would be their own and that was an improvement.) and a obsession with noise disturbing the neighbours, Children are noisy creatures by nature and as I said before I think my dad stuck my cot with a wooden spoon to shut me up. I can’t imagine that was a very effective method but never mind.

This smacking is classed by some as a tool for instilling discipline but I don’t think that is a convincing rational. Possibly, if you apply it consistently, you may be able to argue it but to constantly smack only one of your children is suspect and I would imagine have a more detrimental effect on the family than positive. I don’t like the idea that the threat of violence is part of the make up of family life. This is especially true if your father is a bully, and he was, it was as simple as that.
but he was more than just a simple bully I am convinced of that.

He was a master of hurtful sarcasm, he make derogatory remarks to us all, all of the time with my mother baring the biggest brunt and the arguing went on and on and on during the day, the week, the weekend, each month and every year.

Doesn’t sound so dramatic as swift acts extreme violence does it?

But imagine being made to cry, or being made to come close to tears, every waking day of your life and then you have an inkling of what it was like for my mother. Even when these verbal assaults were directed at my mum and not us, we all felt we were being slapped metaphorically. This is what I call secondary violence. My father would continue this assault until the day he expired.

They say that a baby in the womb is aware of the sounds that filter in from the outside world, nowadays mothers and fathers play music of their culture (or of so called ‘high culture’ like Mozart) to their unborn children. I imagine that the sounds I heard was a sort of ‘Two Way Family Favourites’ of arguing, slapping, smacking and crying.

It was almost as though I didn’t like the sound of the family that awaited me and couldn’t face a life of pain so early. I slowly manoeuvred myself so that my mother’s umbilical cord twisted around my neck and began to choke myself.

I was not of woman born, from my mother’s womb I was untimely ripped
(Paraphrased from Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’).

The doctors noticed what I was doing and recommended a caesarean section. They cut my mother open.

As I emerged into the light, they mistook the way I looked as being typical of a newborn. I am convinced differently.

I believe I appeared with a grimace on my face, my jaw was gritted and my little hands where clenched fists.

I believe I was born angry.

A change of mind is never a bad thing!

2007-08-06T12:56:00.000-07:00

I woke up in quite a state, my back hurting, my mind disorientated, excessive sleep in my eyes and unable to feel anything resembling normal. Swallowing back any rise in anxiety that could so easily occur, feeling like this when a big gig is getting closer I drink a couple for cups of tea and coffee and slowly emerge from the haze. Eventually I feel pretty good, the back pain is beginning to subside with the aid of the usual dose of anti-inflammatories and I begin to feel like a 50 odd year old man should, like I’m held together with gaffer tape.

Time will now accelerate for me in the next couple of days and with tying up loose ends at work, home and with the band, the next thing I will find will be leaving Harlow in a state of agitated uncertainty which includes, “did we turn the cat off and put the cooker out”.

I kept thinking of Blackpool today, I would look up at the blue sky and smell the breeze for a trace of salt in the air. I could almost taste it, the mind is a powerful thing, and it does like to play it’s tricks, I wish I could remember what I meant by that.

Oh yeah, umm,

1963

Why am I so scared.

I’m scared at the mind’s ability to forget past events and I’m scared of the will of iron we display when we decide never to mention something that is quite clearly destroying us, slowly day by day, eating away as us from the inside.

In the sixties, a neighbour told my mum she has seen me swinging a cat around by its back legs and then letting go.

I have absolutely no recollection of that.

It’s a horrible thing to do, l love cats,

But I believe it was me.

Let me tell you why.

Our first cat was a very fluffy black and white thing called ‘Whisky’, he was a lovely lap cat and I absolutely adored him and he did me. However I showed my affection to him in some unpleasant ways, Firstly I found that I could do a high pitch whistle which made him meow and then he would come to me and jump on to my lap, I think he was telling me to stop because he found it unpleasant to his sensitive ears, the only way he found I would stop was if he came to me.

I showed off this skill to everyone of-course and Whisky was made to suffer time and time again.

He forgave me, he always did.

I was unhappy and frustrated by things at home I could not understand and it would manifest itself by me being cruel to my little friend. I would stop it walking where it wanted to go. I would pick it up and place it back exactly were it had started, it would try to walk forward again and I would pick it up and would again place it back on it’s starting place. And so it would go, on and on and on, in an obsessional battle to bend it to my will.

He forgave me, he always did.

Eventually when he didn’t do what I wanted him to do, I would smack him, he would recoil, I would then fuss him to make up and then when he didn’t do what I wanted him to do again I would smack him again, affection and cruelty switching on an off, on and off like cruel binary.

He forgave me, he always did.

I would trap him in cardboard boxes and not let him out for hours, then let him out and fuss him. I would throw him high into the air on to the settee and sometimes over the settee where he would land on the floor at the back and would be afraid to come out. I would then drag him out and fuss him.

He forgave me, he always did.

Things began to get worse, I started turning really nasty. I picked him up and placed him in to a large saucepan.

I watched his frightened eyes staring back at me as I placed the lid on top shutting him into a metallic dark prison.
Is there some strange alchemy that allows evil to transmute through metal? This saucepan was made of the skin retrieved from a downed German Meschermsitt during the battle of Britain. Raw materials to make saucepans were so rare that they were eventually made from the scrap falling from the skies.
I wondered if Nazi evil was spreading from this implement up through my arms and making me do this unspeakable thing as I lit the gas and lowered the saucepan on to the blue flame. The evil was definitely spreading from somewhere but it was coming from closer to home.

I was schizophrenic, I could the feel the anticipation of inflicting pain and the power it seem to give me, but I was in turmoil, another part of me was horrified. Jiminy Cricket fought with something indefinable and sickening, and I was in no mood to give a little whistle.

The lid rattled as Whisky fought to get out, he let out a long meow of anguish as I bore more pressure to the lid. I gritted my teeth and turned up the heat. The flames licked up high on the sides of the saucepan. I was about to commit a horrendous act. I looked at the straining muscles of my arm and for a moment saw myself as others would see me if they were here.

In a split second the battle within me was won, by my conscience. I dragged the saucepan off of the heat and removed the lid, Whisky sprung out and darted off into the living room to hide. I slumped onto the kitchen floor drained and frightened at what I had attempted to do. I gazed at my hands as though they were not mine, the handle of the saucepan lid indented into my right palm through the pressure I had exerted. I felt wretched, I got up off of the floor and threw up in the sink.
The heat had only slightly warmed the bottom of the pan, it wasn’t on the gas long enough. But that wasn’t the point!

I found him cowering under the sideboard, I pulled him forcefully out and placed him on the settee and fussed him while I cried my eyes out, to feel better, to show him remorse.

He forgave me, he always did.

He used to wait for me half way home from school and then trot along behind me all the way back. He was so loyal, so committed to me.

It made no sense.

But it did, really.

I was not the only one who rewarded the loyalty of another with cruelty

I had become my father.

A pain in the side is a pain in the neck or a pain inside

2007-08-05T12:57:00.000-07:00

Just typical, I awoke to today with some pain in my side that has got progressively worse as the day has gone on. I hope it doesn’t come to anything. I can’t bear to think of having to pull out of our final gig. I’m not saying it’s that bad at the moment but it’s sort of neurotic anxiety that goes through my mind at times like these when so much has been arranged and so much work has gone into preparing for this.

It could be psychosomatic I suppose but it could be something real hurting too. I don’t know, I’ll just have to see if it’s any better tomorrow. I’m taking Ibuprofen at the moment to take the pain away.

I spent the day today at a multicultural celebration day. It was held to celebrate the diverse make up of Harlow and it was real fun being with Chinese, African and pale skin families enjoying watching their children having the time of their lives under a recently parked African sun. Rosa is nearly five and asked this boy why he sp sp sp sp speaks lik like thththis, before I could chide her for asking such a personal question, the boy replied “It’s called a stutter and sometimes my mind is running faster than my mouth and it doesn’t come out properly”. “Oh?” Rosa said. Children ask such direct questions sometimes.
Yesterday she asked, “Daddy, are you the boss of your band?” I answered, “yes I am” and then she said, “Is that because you have the best voice in the whole wild world”. I replied “I would love think that was the case.” Which was my way of saying neither yes or no.

I got away with it she was satisfied with that response.

1963

Other acts of violence? Well another time he pulled my trousers down and took off his belt to strike me with it, but he didn’t.

I remember my mum hitting me, I remember the very piece of pavement I stood on. It was at the back of the rent office in Bush Fair as we were climbing the hill to go home after I had ‘helped’ her with her shopping chores. I was playing up for some reason, as you do, and I turned round to her and told her to ‘Fuck Off’. It was the first time I used a profanity against her and I was rewarded with a very hard slap across the back of the legs. Ouch!

As a father now I await the fateful day when my lovely daughter Rosa turns into a malevolent teenager and crosses that line in the sand. I’m sure it is inevitable. But I never want to hit her, because I know now that If I do, I would have failed. I’m not saying I think my mum was wrong to give me that slap but I do not want to become my parents.

I want to be me,

I want my path to be different.

If there was more violence in the family, I don’t remember it, that doesn’t really mean it didn’t happen, I must have received more smacks than that one. But if I cannot remember any others, then the level of it must have been small or at least manageable
Or, it was so traumatic that I have buried it in my memory, but I don’t think so. I don’t recall much evidence of that from conversations with my sisters but when we meet up we tend not to use that precious time going over past traumas. Perhaps there is another reason for that, I could ask, but should I?

I may regret where that might lead.

Standing in court and lying

2007-08-04T12:28:00.000-07:00

Been trying to relax a little bit today as quite soon we will be really busy trying to do everything we need to do to be ready for the Blackpool gig. I am looking forward to it and dreading it at the same time.I’m a Neurotic ok, people are puzzled by my nervousness before a gig after all the stage experience I have had over the years but that’s the way I am. To try to put this into some context so you may understand what emotions I feel at a time like this I will describe is as such.

I feel like I am on trial every time I play a gig, the gig it’s self is a court room in which I make my case with the help of my co-defendants (the rest of the band, I am of-course referring to here) to a large group of judges and it is their reaction which determines if I am ‘Guilty’ or ‘Not Guilty’ to bringing rock ‘n’ roll into disrepute.

If I am found ‘Not Guilty’, that only stands until the next gig and then I have to be put on trial again.

Like anyone facing a real trial the lead up to it is a very unsettling time and can start days before. Therefore I find the whole thing very wearing.

Of-course after all the worry and the pressure, if the verdict is ‘Not Guilty’ I am then filled with the sort of exhilaration that can be found no where else and with that, a dependency on the thrill that can only be repeated by doing it all over again.

If the verdict is guilt as charged, then I am thrown into a dark cloud and feel I have been lead away in chains to a dark, dank dungeon.

There is a part of me that wishes to be free of this cycle of craving acceptance and there is a part of me that just will not let go.
I told you a was a Neurotic!

1963

Next to him just inside my door was one of the many things dumped in my room ” just in case we ever need it”, a sort of kitchen wardrobe. It had storage space on the top part for packets and tins of food, a deep area in the middle that held the bread basket and had a single drop down door that revealed an enamel work surface on the other side of it, this coupled as a preparation area. Under that were two drawers that held cutlery and below that storage for pot and pans. It now held anything but the above in it.

He half remembered it in his frenzied anger so turned and pulled out the knife draw.

Why would he go to that drawer?

All he found was a single wooden spoon, we no longer used it because it was replaced by some rather modern plastic ones and the old one was now to be hidden from sight as a punishment for being old fashion.

He grabbed it and lunged at me just at the moment that my lungs had finished filling with air again, which allowed me to let out a long piecing scream as he hit me and hit me and hit me and hit me and hit me and hit me and hit me and hit me over the head with it, until it splinted on my brow sending pieces of it ricocheting around the room.

He kicked the side of the bed threw down what was left of it and spat out “You’re going to pay for this, mark my words” as he stormed out

It was a strange thing to do.

But it was not the implement he intended to find.
I am sure of that.

Now, loath as I am to admit it, as the omission would allow the continuation of a flow of narrative that would be familiar to anyone who enjoys a story of the struggle of the individual attempting to overcome a violent upbringing, none of this happened!

From the point of the cell door opening in the dream of captivity, I made it all up. I did it to make a point, there was hardly any violence that I can remember during my childhood but there appeared to me to be the threat of it, always present in the background which affected me in a slow creeping sort of way.

There were a couple of grains of truth in that mini tale.

My sisters were not happy to have been dragged away from their fiends and an environment they were familiar to the brave new world and vistas of the Newtown experiment.
My dad did come at me with a wooden spoon but it was when I was young enough to be in a cot. I remember it to this day, my earliest memory. I must have been crying as children tend to do, I must have carried on too long.

He struck the side of the cot with the spoon with a force so great that a piece it flew off, probably into the cot, I don’t know.

That spoon was never thrown away, it was useless for the purpose it was designed but it was kept, for what reasons I do not know.

What I do know is it was kept in the knife draw of the kitchen unit I described earlier and that did stand in my room.

That’s why I never forgot the incident, every time I came across the spoon I remembered, and it burned that act of violence into my brain so that I could not forget it.

In the past I used to take some beating!

2007-08-03T12:41:00.000-07:00

Making final arrangements for accommodation at the Rebellion festival has been stressful as today was the 'sort of' final day to get everything agreed. Granted we are a week away from it but I cannot imagine how much still needs to be attended to by the organisers so I just hope my second proposal for who’s staying and for how long, is agreed. One thing is for sure, we are in a hotel a lot closer to the venue than last year and it is on the sea front near the north pier. I just hope we have some nice weather, I love the sea and if I am near it, I need to get down on to the beach and walk along the waters edge.
Last year I stood watching the waves on a boiling hot day and at that time thought that we had played our final gig. Little did I know that a year later we would be back. However this time it is the final gig.

But I know no one will believe me anymore.

Anyway I spoke to our entire crew via telephone today and everyone is getting excited and looking forward to the weekend starting on Friday 11th August. The final arrangements came together so we are pretty much ready to go.
We have a lot to live up to as last year Wasted was a dream gig playing in front of 1500 Neurotics fans, surely this years one can’t match that. Maybe not, that would be too much to ask but I have to be sanguine about that and just enjoy it for what it is and nothing else.

1963

I sat bolt upright in my Pear Tree Mead bed and there stood my dad.

He looked angrier than I had ever seen him before and a feeling of dread washed over my body.

“The Police have been back”, he said, “They’ve just left”

“Oh” I said, which didn’t mean anything but at least it was a response. I thought that silence would be construed as an act of defiance rather than being stumped as to what to say so “Oh” it was.

“They have been round to interview both Billy and Graham and their stories match up that it was you who set light to the lorry”

“Was it you?”, he barked, and I jumped again as though I had being struck.

“No, it wasn’t me, it was Billy!”, I read the situation wrong, I thought that if it was this bad now, how much worse would it be if I admitted it.

I got it wrong.

You’re lying, you’re a liar! You’ve been lying all along, haven’t you? Haven’t you? Look at me when I’m talking to you.

My mum appeared behind him.

Leave him alone Len, it’s not helping, it’s not going to change anything.

He turned to her and said, “and who asked you?, go back down to the kitchen, if you hadn’t have been so soft on him in the first place none of this would have happened, this is YOUR FAULT.

He turned back to me “admit you burnt that lorry to the ground!”

I had run out of what tiny voice I had left, my bottom lip just quivered as if I was whispering the 'Lords Prayer' at breakneck speed.

“That’s not fair” she replied, how can this all be my fault, I’ve done my best to bring him up properly.

OH YEAH, and this is the way he repays you, we came to this town for a clean break, a new life, a brand new home a bright future for all the family and the girls have just moaned about wanting to live back in London and him, him! You and the move and this town has produced this idiot.

“I’m not an idiot” I manage to protest with a cracked voice.

He paused mid-flow and reconsidered

“Oh you’re not?”, no you’re not, no I was wrong to say that. His voice now softened.

He crouched to my level and looked me in the eyes.
“You’re are much more than that” he paused for another moment.

You are an arsonist, a liar and a fucking idiot he yelled.

Then just stars……

I then realised that my head had hit the head board of the bed and came to rest on my pillow. I had an incredibly sharp pain shooting down my nose and blood was now pouring over my bedspread.

My mum was screaming, leave him alone, please leave him alone Len, please! She was clawing at his cardigan which was now beginning to stretch completely out of shape.
The corridor directly outside my room was very narrow, bedroom door, airing cupboard door, bedroom door on the left side, on the other a small wall to prevent you falling down the stairwell. It didn’t leave a lot of room.

By now the commotion had attracted the attention of both my sisters but as horrified as theH were to hear what was going on and as concerned as they were that it should stop, there was no way they could get past my mum to help, one lent on my mum and was shouting stop it, and my other sister lent on her and was shouting the same.

It must have looked like they were dancing a macabre conger.

We’ve had the police coming to our front door two days in a row, what do you think our neighbours think of us, eh? Eh?. I’ve had in the pub last night, everyone knows, and it hasn’t even been in the local paper yet.

"Oh yeah, isn’t your son the arsonist?" They said

I’ve fucking had enough of you, you’re fucking useless, I’ve always said you were, you are a fucking curse.

I never wanted you, you were a mistake, you should never have happened.

Just a mistake, and what a mistake you turned out to be. When we had you, we couldn’t afford it but we had you because your mother wouldn’t get rid of you!

And what happened? We couldn’t afford to pay our way. I was out working every hour that God almighty gave and we still couldn’t pay the rent. Why do you think we were being fucking evicted.

He was winding him self up to a fever pitch, both my mum and both sisters ware crying and pleading, it sounded like the choir of the anti-christ as a fundamental Christian preacher smote the possessed child with holy water.

It was because of you, always you, and all of this is you.

Our last chance to have a normal life and you’ve fucked it up.

My mums reasoning turned on a sixpence to an accusation. “Leave him alone, leave him alone for god’s sake leave alone Len, leave him. You’re just as much to blame, you’ve never be a proper father to him!

I’m trying to stop the blood pouring from my nose with the aid of my fingers I have been so shocked that I had unconsciously held my breath, now no longer able to do so I began to fill my lungs as my anguish was welling up and it was reaching fever pitch. My father responded to what my mum had just said by slowly turning round, he jerked his arms violently out with the palms of his hands in a vertical position, making contact with my mums shoulders and drove her backwards, flying on to the floor, this had a domino effect on my sisters too who all landed in a heap. He stood there and gave her an almighty kick.

I said fuck off back down to the kitchen didn’t I? And that means all of you. Fuck off.

I’m gonna do what should have been done a long time ago.

Friends, Heros and Foes!

2007-08-02T13:37:00.000-07:00

I got confirmation today of our accommodation for the Rebellion Festival, which is a relief and it turns out that we are placed really near the venue this year which is fantastic. What is not so fantastic is that I feel there may be some misunderstanding of some of the agreements we had struck with the organisers, which is a bit depressing and wearying. I will have to try to get this straightened out but I was hoping for a smoother ride in the days leading up to the event.

We’ve been getting increasing amounts of MySpace Friends requests and I haven’t had enough time to go through them all. I take my time, I check out everyone’s site that makes a request and only when I am sure that they are true believers do I accept them.
I’m really fussy, I’m sure most bands accept them all just to get the numbers up, but not me, I want to feel it is a real fan base.

But it is difficult, if the Carpenters were still around today I might request to be their friends as I have a soft spot for their ultra-clean, dumb girl and boy next door trash. Yet they may have looked at a request from a punk rock band and said, this is a joke, just deny it.
So I get requests from greek electro pop boys and from the United States, a vocal impersonator who can sing in the style of every artist or group from Frank Sinatra, U2, to the Pogues and Elvis Costello. Then there’s a famous Latin American dancer from South America and Canadian comedians, and I agonise over whether to deny them or not.

I like to think our music could be enjoyed by just about anyone, because we have good tunes and people’s perception of musical styles is not so rigid in other parts of the world.

To deny someone because they don’t look like the sort of people who would be into our music is both confirming my own prejudices and ghettoising our MySpace site to just punk fans.

But then again, they might just be trying to get their ‘Friends’ numbers up, making it look like they have a big fan base.

Very hard, anyway requests from punk rock record labels, recording studios and promoters I have never heard of are dumped unceremoniously.

Take a look at the Neurotics ‘Friends’ at www.myspace.com/theneurotics, see what you think.

1963

I so wanted to be Captain Video, I wanted to be a hero and as I watched his adventures I could almost believe it was possible. When the show was over, the Odeon ejected us out through it’s doors on speeding spaceships, and streaking Galaxy II star fighters as we raced the girls on their white stallions (Captain Video was a mixture of sci-fi and a western) through the Town Centre weaving in and out of startled shoppers as though they were merely debris in a meteor field. When finally we would run out of breath propulsion at the bus terminus and there I would board my protobus 804, destination – Bus Fair and then the outer rim, Pear Tree Mead.

However, the feature in my head on this miserable morning was an entirely different thing. The room darkened, but darkened too much, it went completely black. The pale yellow screen turned to dazzling white and then lifted high into the air and shrunk to the size of a court order.
I peered up at it, it looked like a window far away.

I’m in a jail, a dungeon or something like.

I’m imprisoned, trapped.

I have lost my freedom!

I positioned myself a little to the left so the sun shone directly onto my face, I could see dust made up of the skin cells of former inmates abseiling down the ray of light towards me. It was true, once released from a period of captivity, a part of you always remains.

I could hear a slow drip drip drip of water somewhere in dark and when I put my hand down I found a puddle and an empty tin cup on its side by my foot.
I had become startled at my new environment and kicked it over. I could also hear the sound of children playing, a long way away outside the window, how I wished I could join them. How I wished I could be them.

I couldn’t see any thing and I desperately needed to, so I located where the ray of light fell on to the floor exposing a grey flagstone and I thrust my hand into it.

NO, NO NOOOO, it can’t be true, not me, not now, this shouldn’t be happening to me.

There like a follow spot in a theatre had fallen upon it, was a wooden hand, and all it’s fingernails had been pulled out.

Complete panic gripped me as I clattered purposelessly around in the dark trying desperately to find a wall.

Then I spotted it, a very thin line of horizontal light on what I perceived to be the floor, it was light coming from somewhere outside, it was a door. I ran over to it, located what felt like a handle and placed my hand clumsily upon it.

I instantaneously flicked my arm back again, the handle was already turning. The door opened very suddenly and there stood the silhouette of a huge man with blinding light behind him.

Get up, he shouted.

Roll up, Roll up, experience the wonders of the moving pictures!

2007-08-01T14:09:00.000-07:00

I am slowing catching up on all the sleep I lost over the weekend and my hearing has returned to normal which I am really pleased about. Trouble is, I have a cold now from getting caught in various summer downpours over Saturday and Sunday and being generally run down.
I don’t care, it was worth it, I think of the weekend now and it all seems a blur of drinking and laughing and rock ‘n’ roll.

Friends of ours caught a bit of the Spitz gig on their phone and have placed it on YouTube.
It’s a section of ‘Living with Unemployment’ and considering that it was filmed on a phone and that the PA sound was ropey it’s not all that bad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRymxFJkF6s

It’s bizarre to have such a good time and yet know these are our last gigs. On the other hand, everything comes to an end eventually and it is better to end it the way you want it to than have other events bring the show to a close. So now we only have the Rebellion Festival gig to go and par for the course we have to have something to fret about as it gets nearer.
I emailed the organisers to get our accommodation confirmed and they replied that one of their hotel block bookings had pulled out and now they had to look around for other accommodation. They told me not to panic, (which gave me the impression that maybe I should be) and said they will sort it out and then email me the details when they have. I am awaiting further news.

1963

The following day I had one of those awakenings, those unpleasant ones, they are cruel and I hate them.’

You start to come round, your eyes open to a sunny morning and for a moment, just a moment all is well and a new day of excitement and discovery is about to begin. The next moment is an explosive flash of what happened the day before and then a sinking feeling that makes you wish you hadn’t woke. I rolled over and faced the wall as the events of the following day replayed in my head.
My wall was painted a pale yellow and it just so happened to be much the same colour as the illuminated Cinema screen at the Harlow Odeon in that moment between when the curtains were pulled back and when the feature began to appear on the screen. When the first image began to shine through (usually a black certificate with a massive ‘U’ on it) the yellow light was faded down and we entered another world.
I would stare at my wall and it would dissolve into a screen and then my imagination would play out all sorts of scenarios as though they were features being projected into this space.
My earliest memories of the huge somewhat futuristic Harlow Odeon was going to Saturday morning pictures. The programme began with a God Save The Queen clip (not the Sex Pistols one!)played every single week, a Scouts or Brownies advert then the real stuff. A cartoon, a serial and then the main feature. My real love was the serial, a black and white re-run of an American TV show called Captain Video and his Video Rangers. This programme, being a cheap filler, a TV show long ago axed by the American syndicated networks was a revelation.
Into this brave new vision of a newtown in which I lived, in this huge Odeon which in itself was an architectural statement of modern living, this serial space adventure was the first sci-fi epic which depicted technology not so much of the future but more like tomorrow.
This cinema was huge, later to be turned into a muti-plex, later to be bought by a local entrepreneur (polite term) to thwart the Council’s redevelopment plans for the area. It now stands an empty sulking hulk drowning in a sea of DVD movies and flat screen televisions being purchased in the town.
It was designed with a big square in front of it seemingly just to accommodate large queues of people waiting to get into it. And they did, when the first James Bond films were shown there, it produced a queue so long that it snaked back and forth through the square and around the corner. Hundreds of people escaping the black and white programming of their little valve televisions to be bathed in Technicolor where the blood was really red, and the 007 travelog gave breathtaking glimpse of countries we couldn’t afford to go to and killings we were sure we would never be capable of. Although most of us, when we got older, eventually managed the first (and I dare say there might have been the odd person sitting in the dark with the light flickering in their face who achieved the second. We will never know for certain fortunately).

Saturday morning pictures were different being for kids but I remember the ceiling being so high that the little recessed lights looked like stars, and hanging from that ceiling all the way down at regular intervals were spuntnik like shapes with a series of spindly arms springing out from the sides and then facing downward each with a bulb in it’s end. It was like fireworks ejected from body of a 'War of the Worlds 'machine.

I liked sitting at the back where I could survey all below me, the slowly descending rows of seats disappearing into the dark and illuminated again in what seemed miles away, by the light of an enormous screen.
I also knew that if you sat right at the back you were not going to get a half consumed Jubbly (sold in a orange cardboard, pyramid shaped container, sold by IDRIS) thrown at the back of your head.

You learn fast when “you come along, on Saturday Morning, Greeting everbody with a smile”.

Will I get away with it?

2007-07-31T13:37:00.000-07:00

The dream sound check moment ended when ‘The Men They Couldn’t Hang’ realised they hadn’t done a number to check the level of Swill’s acoustic guitar, he wasn’t present at this point so it needed to be done for him. Instead of them stepping off the stage for us to occupy the moment we walked in, we did have to wait while the headliners did one last number.
Fine, not too much of a problem but I stood there mourning the loss of the 'Dream Sound check moment', even if we took the stage in a couple of minutes, we had lost it, it wouldn’t be the same.

I shouldn’t have worried, things were about to get a lot worse.

We eventurally climbed on stage and prepared to run through a couple of numbers to get our levels set, when Chris, our sound engineer came over and gave us the bad news, in an understated way.

“The PA amp has blown, so you can take five minutes as nothing is going to happen for a while. It just burnt out, can’t you smell that burning smell?”.

Yeah we could, but take five minutes? I don’t think the venue is going to get a replacement amp at 7.00pm on a Saturday night in five minutes.
Anyway we drifted downstairs to get something to eat whilst loads of scenarios ran through my head with ever increasing disaster ratings.

The amp turns up late so…

We don’t get a sound check but we get to play and we can’t hear a thing on stage.
We don’t get a sound check, we don’t get to play till really late so we can only do half a set and we can’t hear a thing.
The amp turns up so late that we don’t get to play at all.

This is depressing for two reasons…

We don’t get to play very often and this is one of last gigs so if anything happens to it, we lose a gig and will not be able to replace it.
There are people who have travelled a long way for the concert (Paris, Southhampton and Wales to mention a few) and I cannot bear the thought of them being let down.

Totally out of character for me though, I decide not to let it get me down and I become, witty and charming with everyone I’m chatting to (although they may have judged my behaviour as merely odd). This keeps their spirits up and mine too so the evening doesn’t flag.

Apparently there is a service that is available at a price, to venues in London called ‘Dial an amp’ or something like that, which is an emergency service for venues who have amps blow up at the last minute just like ours.

All they do deliver one in the end, however it is only half the power of the one that has blown.

This is depressing for three reasons…

We won’t be able to hear a thing on stage.
The audience will have a less of an enjoyable experience as the sound quality will be ropey, and
This is just unfair!

We deliberately chose The Spitz to do a final London appearence because of the quality of the venue and PA. This is a prestigious gig and now we are reduced to playing with a PA which would have pissed us off in the Eighties had it been some Wednesday night punk night toilet in Reading let alone here.

But there is nothing to be done than to just get on with it. Now I feel sorry for the ‘The Men They Couldn’t Hang’ because they spent time on a sound check that was pretty much a waste of time. They got to experience the good sound only to have it snatched away from them at the last moment. They are not pleased.

In reality, because we are a three piece (a four piece for the two numbers with Paul) we are a simpler sound for an under powered PA to cope with, plus The Neurotics are dab hands at coping with shit PA’s. We have a degree in it.

In the end, it all worked out fine. We played a brilliant set and the audience loved every minute of it. The way I saw it, there was absolutely nothing I could do to improve the PA but if we could deliver a good performance, we would ensure that the maximum pleasure could be obtained regardless of the difficulties.

I explained to the audience the technical problems we had experienced and asked them if they could hear us ok, to which we got a resounding thumbs up so I stopped worrying and played my heart out, I also got to talk to the people from Paris and they had enjoyed themselves too.

After we finished Clare and I watched ‘The Men They Couldn’t Hang’ and enjoyed them immensely, we drunk to really late and then caught a taxi to our bed for the night in Hackney.

It was two in the morning and we knew Rosa will wake us in only a couple of hours.

I really must get some sleep sometime soon.

1963

I moped about in hiding in the bushes for quite some time watching people passing by not knowing I was watching them. I looked into the back gardens of the houses that were the start of the Little Pychons estate and watched children playing out the back before bed time arrived. I wished I lived there instead of where I did.

But all this wishing was getting me nowhere, I too had to be home before bedtime. If I could stop today becoming tomorrow I would have done it because there wasn’t just the going home I dreaded but as the sun set on this Newtown day it would surely rise to bring more dread. Was I going to prison? Will I be taken from my home to be left to rot in a dungeon? I just felt someone was going to come after me, but I didn’t know who.

But I felt It would happen tomorrow.

Back at the house I knocked on the front door and when it opened I entered with my tail between my legs and my head hung low. I was told to go into the living room.
What followed was my father bellowing at me, my Mother interjecting whenever she could get a word in edgeways and we just went round and round in circles with me saying little more than I had already said and telling it all to my lap.
A great big blanket of disappointment hung in the room and it was all of my own making, I had let my mum down, that’s what hurt the most.

It was all my fault, in reality it was, no matter what I said about Billy. Make no mistake I knew I had done wrong.

Trouble was, knowing that made it impossible to ask for help.

And I was going to need it.

I was sent to bed early and without any tea. I lay in my little box room listening to muffled sounds of my dad arguing with my mum, although after a while things simmered down this was now a house of condemnation and when ever I heard a knife drop or a door shut a little louder than it should do I felt it was in anger and frustration at what I had done to besmirch the family name.
Every now and then someone would come up the stairs and I hoped that they would come into the room and say “How are doing? It’s all right don’t worry we forgive you” but they would just go into the toilet and then head back down stairs again. I could hear my sisters still enjoying the freedom of the rest of the house and that hurt too.
This I imaged, was what it was like being in prison, being confined to a small room with the world being angry with you and I knew I couldn’t bear to be like this for very long. I’d had enough now, I didn’t want to go to prison. I wanted this to stop.

After dusk had filled the little room, my mum came up with a drink and said goodnight, she kissed me and stroked my hair, it felt good, but it wasn’t right, it was a jumble of emotions she gave out with her caress.

She left and then I lay awake listening to the Tommy Cooper comedy show on TV drifting up through the floor and up the stairs, it was telling, there was no real laughter coming from my parents. In my room there was just cruel, cruel canned laughter and my sobbing mixing together as a concentrated soup of misery.

Now, it was sink or swim time for me. My choice!

2007-07-30T13:26:00.000-07:00

Tired and emotional!

2007-07-29T12:10:00.000-07:00

We were so hyped up over the success of the gig earlier in the evening that we celebrated big time when we got back to Simon’s and lost all track of time. When finally, fatigue got the better of me and Clare and we decided to go to bed it was 3.30am. We woke early at around 8.30 because there were children in the house and they were excited about beginning a new day.
I realised then that I had made a mistake about going to bed so late. I was exhausted and we had another gig to do, we are not used to having one gig after another these days, normally it’s a single gig on a single weekend so we over did it last night considering what we still had to do.

Don left early to go back to London, and after a morning of chatting and drinking coffee, Clare and I packed the car and headed for London. Chris, our sound engineer and Paul Howard made their way to London on the train and Simon drove up later.

Clare and I intended to get to my sisters house in Hackney and then have a nap for awhile but that never happened. We made the mistake of going through Central London on a Saturday when the roads were at their busiest (not a wise move, shows you we were not thinking straight) and then we got lost in the City. I think we passed every tourist attraction in Central London that day and by the time we found the right roads to get us to Hackney there was no time for a nap. We pulled the equipment out of the car, called a cab, loaded the equipment into the taxi and then made off for the Spitz.
I had spent the entire afternoon sitting in a car and had no chance to have a snooze.

I was now beginning to worry that the band would all be too tired to pull this gig off and then I would blame myself for not getting some decent sleep the night before.

As we approached the venue I started ringing the band to see if they had arrived yet. Don was five minutes away, I checked Simon, he had met up with Paul and Chris and they too were in a taxi and were also only five minutes away. Ok, I didn’t find out if the main band ‘The Men They Couldn’t Hang’ had finished their sound check and were waiting for us but I did find out that we were all close to arriving.

There was a wonderful moment were everything seem to come together like magic. A dream moment that had never happened to me in all the years I have been playing music.

The dream moment was when I finally got my equipment in to the venue and stopped to relax for a moment. All of a sudden Don arrived, Simon Chris and Paul walked in behind him and ‘The Men They Couldn’t Hang’ who were sound checking at the time said ‘yeah that sounds fine, we’re done’. Never had I played a gig where everyone turned up at the same time and just at the moment we were to start our sound check, immaculate timing meaning no hanging around patiently waiting of the headlining band to finish, no bored band members wandering off and then can’t be found when the time comes to set up on stage.

Little did we know that this moment was as fragile as a soap bubble on a breeze.
It hung for a moment as we savoured it and then just popped!

Then it turned into a nightmare.

1963

Now Billy was bigger than me in height and build with brown hair and eyes that was a radar for weaknesses. He was born to be a bully and when he grew up, he eventually joined the Army to train to be a better one. Where as the rest of the little girls and boys at Pear Tree Mead school were marvelling at what the world of Junior school had to offer them, Billy had learnt all he needed, the power that you can have over people by just being insensitive and threatening. Like all bullies, he was a coward but he understood that if he and a friend or two menaced the rest of us then he would be left alone to do exactly as he pleased.
I, however, took a different path.

Unable to sustain any level of premeditated nastiness, I had only one choice left, to try to befriend the bully in the hope that it would exclude me from the sort of attention people feared from him.
I was starting from a very low vantage point, I was close to ginger (I’m not ginger, I’m fair, I used to cry which is uncannily like what Cartman from ‘South Park’ used to say, “I’m not fat, I’m just big boned!”)

However my protests fell on deaf ears because I had a sort of disability.

I had freckles!

Adored by parents, sisters, teachers and female shoppers alike, they were cute on a girls face, but not on mine, they were despised by most of the boys in my school so I got called ‘freckle face’.
Again and again and again.

The crime was so heinous that I would often be sent to ‘Coventry’ because of it. The image of a large city full of freckled people horrified me so much that it was years into my adulthood that I could summons enough courage to set foot in that city of the damned.
When I heard that it was carpet bombed by the Nazis in the Second World War I drew the conclusion that Adolf Hilter hated people with freckles easily as much as the Jews. I wondered whether Jews suffered with freckles too because if they did that was really bad luck and not very fair on them at all.
I knew that freckles were nothing to do with being naughty, I had them long before I had a chance to sin. But to this day no-one has ever justified their presence,

There are explanations on the original use of spleens, tonsils, body hair and other vestigial parts of the body but not freckles. They were like spots for the fair of face. It would have felt so much better if I had an explanation for them and why they covered so much of me.

I imagined, they were left over from a time when cave men were so into art that they were for ever coming out of their caves with specks of paint on their faces. As they didn’t have mirrors in those days they didn’t notice these speck so they just stayed there and coloured the skin. Being very defensive, when ever one of them pointed out the paint spots with a sort of grunt and a pointy stabby finger, the other would think he was saying
“Watch out there’s a sabre toothed tiger about to jump you from behind” to which the paint speckled man would just duck. The other guy not having the language to say ”You misunderstand me, what I meant was…” just could not get the concept across. So in the end they would both give up in frustration. They weren’t very good at colour at this point either as they had had only just invented brown, but it had become very poplar at the time. My partner Clare likes brown, see that goes to show, it all goes round in cycles.

Anyway there was no good explanation I could feebly bleat on about and therefore I was the brunt of everyone’s jokes.

I was easy pickings for Billy and his faithful sidekick Graham. Could it really be true that they liked me hanging around with them because I made them feel big? How small were they if they if they used me to measure themselves? We all moved to a new town for the green green grass and the wide open spaces and yet our horizons were still shockingly low.

Avoiding the look of displeasure on my parents face by continually staring at my lap gave me vital moments to concentrate on my plight.

Then I had a sudden realisation.

A looming disaster?

2007-07-28T09:27:00.000-07:00

The journey down to Brighton was problem free and the weather was pretty good too, a result we thought.
However, it clouded over and as we made our way to the Prince Albert pub where the gig was taking place it began to rain heavily. This made my mood change from relaxed and happy (very unusual for me before a gig) to anxious and quiet.
We loaded the gear on to the stage and started setting it all up and it was at this point that Don said “There’s no bass amp”. Those words made me freeze, we were the only band on that night, the other performers were solo and wouldn’t have a bass amp with them. We travel light whenever we can and rely sometimes on using other peoples equipment. Originally there was meant to be another band on and we thought we could use their equipment. In the end they couldn’t do it but before we could discuss the implications of that, a rather big argument flared up between a couple of people in our party with the end result that we nearly pulled out of the gig altogether.
Some time past with the gig in limbo and then eventually we agreed to do it.
Because of this disruption we hadn’t thought the whole of the logistics through and now we realised that we should have ensured that a bass amp was brought with us.
There then ensued some frantic calling to see if we could get someone who lived nearby to lend us an amp.
By now I was depressed, this was embarrassing and was really unprofessional, it wasn’t like us to forget something like this but we had, and it hit me hard, it was almost unforgivable. I was then on a emotional rollercoaster ride for a while as one person after another was rung who would definitely have an amp only to discover a minute or two later that for one reason or another they didn’t.

In the end we decided to DI the bass (that stands for Direct Input) which means instead of pluging the bass into the amp relying on a microphone in front of the bass cab to push the sound of the guitar out through the main speakers, the bass would be fed straight into the PA. It works fine but the sound is a lot different, much cleaner and less punky and we would not hear so much of it onstage which meant the performance would sound shit to us whilst not sounding too bad for the audience.

Despite the gig being sold out, I was so fed up that I felt I was in the completely wrong mood to play the gig and I didn’t know if the audience would get pissed off at our performance if I were to be affected by this frame of mind.
It is so weird to walk on stage in that mood and then to feel something completely different a couple of minutes afterwards, we played our opening number ‘Wake Up’ really well, the audience went wild, and we then played a blinder. It was fantastic, completely different to the way I thought it would go.

We were cock a hoop afterwards and retired back to Simon’s place to celebrate, and celebrate we did.

A little too hard!

1963

I looked at my nose to see if it had grown, Pinoccio’s nose had grown when ever he lied; his goal was to become a real boy. I was a real boy, or at least that was what I had been led to believe, but I felt I was beginning to lose that as my alibi’s became more wooden.

Where were you at this time then, the other policemen enquired?
I was over the ‘Hill’s all afternoon, I quietly replied.

The ‘Hills’ were a load of dumped earth near Pear Tree Mead swings left over from the construction of the Little Pychons housing Estate. It had become overgrown with thick grass and was a playground for us. We used to play fighting here, mimicking punches and kicking like actors and stunt doubles do when making a film. Because the grass was so thick we could propel ourselves into the air from the top after taking an imaginary punch and land with a thud on to the ground below with out any hurt or injury. We loved it, it was the only fighting we were any good at. When ever any of the big boys turned up we would quickly disappear for fear of getting real punches and kicks.
When ever we went over there to play and we could see in the distance that they were free of any other kids we’d cry “Run for the Hills” as we tore off.

But that afternoon I wasn’t there, I had run past them on the way home but I wasn’t there.

I looked at my nose to see if it had grown.

“You were seen in Bush Fair this afternoon and there were two other boys with you too. Could you tell us the names of these boys?” The first policemen asked

I don’t know any other boys, I continued to lie.

I checked my nose again

We have a witness, a neighbour who says they saw you with two other boys in the car park opposite the doctors at the time the lorry was set alight.

Well, I did go down to Bush Fair for a while but I didn’t go near any lorry.

I could swear my nose was getting longer.

Are you ok Steve? my mum enquired.

Err, yeah, why?

Well, you’re eyes keep going funny, I thought you were going to faint.

No, no, I’m fine, I reply somewhat unconvincingly.

My eyes uncrossed and returned to my lap as I mumbled, “I just want to be a real boy”

Preparing for the best/worst!

2007-07-27T01:59:00.000-07:00

Good morning,
Err, nothing much to report as yet as all I have done is wake up and have a shower, my nerves have started up but the sun is shining and as that is such a rare thing these days I am grateful for it. Because I am nervous I am irritated with the final preparations before we leave, I just want everything to jump into a bag like in the 'Sorcerers Apprentice'. On the other hand I don't want my guitars to grow legs and go marching out the door either. I'll have to settle with doing it myself and go easy on the frustration.

God dammit! I 've just remembered something I still need to do.

I gotta go, I'll report back as soon as I can. Brighton awaits!

1965

My mum walked forward to answer the door and for a moment I hoped the shadows were a couple of army firing range targets propped up against the door.
She open it a crack and peered out.

Mrs Drewett? Someone said,

“Yes, that’s me” she replied.

“Hello madam, we’re Police Officers, we need to talk to you about your son Steven, is he in?”

Yeah, err, yes he is, would you like to come in?

“Thank you”.

And with that and a polite offer of a cup of tea which was declined, the Police were brought into our home for the first time.

This was still a small town then and everyone used the buses. Someone who lives in my street had walked to Bush Fair shopping centre to pay their rent and had then decided to pay the four pence required to take the bus to the Town Centre to do some serious shopping. Whilst waiting for a bus to arrive they had seen me arguing with two other boys and then witnessed me jumping into the lorry after which smoke poured out of it, the windows blew out and finally it burnt to the ground.
When the Police arrived they were more than willing to tell them who one of the boys was and when he lived.

I was summoned into the living room, its shape a long narrow oblong with a fire place in the middle of one wall around which my parents sat like bookends. Opposite and not far away was the television. This made it very difficult to hold a court hearing with everyone in close proximity. I sat on a sofa to my right of them, facing my mum but a long way from my dad who was sitting glaring but silent.

Most disconcerting.

He may have tempered his normal boorish bluster because he had once been a policeman himself. Despite being handed to him another excuse to vent his anger he may have found this situation very interesting. I was once told that during the Blitz in London he was once put in charge of an unexploded bomb, keeping people away until the bomb disposal squad arrived. He must have been there a while; they were probably very busy people at this time. Now this little boy with a short fuse was blowing up lorries. Dejected, staring into my lap I had nothing else to do than become aware that my fingers still stunk of sulphur and I began to imagine that my hair smelt of smoke, It didn’t, It was just guilt pouring out of my follicles. It was obvious that saying I was nowhere near Bush Fair and I don’t know anything about it was not going to work.

A Policeman had been given a chair to pull up to the right of my mum almost opposite me whilst the other perched on the sofa next to me again to my right.

“Now Steven, (Only my dad calls me Steven, this is horrible) do you know anything about a lorry being set light to in Bush Fair this afternoon?”

I was taken aback, he’s talking to me already, I expected them to give my parents a synopsis before turning to me but now they were learning this first hand, as it unfolded.
I didn’t know what to say, I couldn’t bear the thought of the words needed to admit it, forming in my mind, the air vibrating around my vocal chords and the resonance of my mouth adding weight to the admission. It seemed such hard work, it seemed such a hill to climb, it was the very last thing I ever wanted to say in my life.

“Steven, answer the Policeman!” my dad barked, it made me jump and momentarily I was forced to look at his angry face, I returned to staring at my lap.

There was a long pause and then I mumbled something very quietly.

Can you speak up? The Policeman asked. “And look up when you are speaking” added my Dad.

I jerked up my head and after another long pause managed to finally speak.

“I was nowhere near Bush Fair, I don’t know any thing about it.”

Station to Station

2007-07-26T12:22:00.000-07:00

Well, we are off to Brighton tomorrow to play the first gig of our trio of dates starting off at the Prince Albert just near Brighton Station.
I am already beginning to get nervous as usual but then whole reunion thing that was meant to be for 2005 only is now in it’s third year and I’m feeling settled with the potential of the band. Also, now that we have decided to call it a day after these dates I don’t have to worry about when it should end.
It has been very enjoyable and when it is like that it’s hard to say “enough is enough".
I’m going to spend the first part of this evening putting new strings on my guitars and playing them in whilst cooing to them about how much I love them and hope that my efforts spur them on to play some blistering rock ‘n’ roll on Friday night.
Unfortunately we won’t have time to savour the delights of Brighton the following day as then we are then off to the bright lights and wet streets of old London Town where we will be playing the Spitz club, which is bizarrely right next door to Liverpool Street station.
I hadn’t made that connection until this moment, how about that? We should do an entire tour of venues right next to stations and then we could travel on the train to all of them.

Anyway, if you’re going to be there tomorrow, I’ll see you there.

If not, I’ll see you here, and you can read all about it.

1965

Murder was no longer on my mind when I decided it would be an idea to play to take my mind off of the events of the day. However, now it changed to rescuing people at the last minute, putting out fires and rushing people to hospital where they came out a little later having completely recovered.

I was trying to win favour with the Gods, Lorraine my oldest sister told me there was only one true god. I was uncomfortable with this because I needed another to turn to if I fell out of favour with the first, I’ve always been unconformable with monopolies. As the years rolled by I became relieved when I learned that the Asian Indians had found almost a full set and a load started popping up all over South America and then eventually, all over. That seem very sensible, because if you were here from another country and you couldn’t speak much English it would be good to be able to pray to one that knew what you were going on about. If you are asking a very powerful deity to do something for people and it mis-understood, anything could happen, that’s why I thought so many earthquakes and floods were happening. They were just misunderstandings, so the more gods the better.

Finally, the thrill of saving people didn’t last as long as the thrill of killing them, perhaps God often feels the same, I don’t know. So I decide to mooch on downstairs for a while, I descended with a series of thuds as the burden I was carrying was betrayed by the heaviness of my feet.. At the bottom of the stairs I turned right into the ‘middle room’ as it was known. This little narrow utility area had a door at its entrance and another at the other end that opened inwards to reveal the kitchen. These doors were very rarely shut which then gave free passage to the warmest room in the house. A door at the other end of the kitchen lead out to the garden and if you stood with your back to it, you were looking straight through the middle room and straight at the front door with it’s three rectangular mottled panes of glass.
As I turned the corner and headed for the kitchen three loud staccato cracks like a Walther PPK pistol being fired straight at my back, one shot to the head to disable motor functions, one into the back of my neck which instantly shattered my voice box so I couldn’t cry out and one to the heart to cease blood circulation, it was a classic neutralisation . I stumbled and as I did so I looked at my mum, she was looking over my head, she said, “I wonder who that is?”

I turned slowly round and there fuzzily silhouetted through the three panes was the ominous shadow of two large men, motionless and waiting.

Blood drained out of my face but fortunately stayed within my body.

Do you know the true cost of this?

2007-07-25T14:13:00.000-07:00

I am worried about this town.

At the time we first got the news that Essex County Council were going to stop the Square from being a live venue, the Head of the Youth Service in Harlow stated that the Square wasn’t closing as such, it was just closing the bar, which effectively closed it as a venue.
I and many others pointed out at the time that as large chunks of the Town Centre is to be levelled by developers for a new Shopping district and all this was to happen almost to the steps of the Square itself, that the real reason the venue was being closed was because they knew the lease was going to be pulled early.

This is what seems to be happening, the Youth Service will have to re-locate and everything they told us in the public meeting in the Civic Centre was a bunch of lies.

This nationally renowned venue will be levelled for shops and no replacement set to appear for years if ever. This was a cultural catalyst in the Eighties for Harlow bands and has continued to be a safe environment for young people to socially network and watch great live music up until it’s closure.

Now there is nothing.

We lose our only venue and yet the Odeon Cinema building stands empty. Anywhere else some entrepreneur would have opened that up and turned it into a music venue

Meanwhile, the Playhouse is always vulnerable to budget cuts, undermined by councillors too feeble to argue the case for its closure yet retched enough to talk of cutting it, which if they do, will mean it will only be able to put on shows of ever declining quality. Eventually everyone will agree that it isn’t worth the life support system and cut the final funding. Sound harsh? Remember it was closed before and stood empty for a year.

I wouldn’t mind it so much if we had far too many theatres and music venues in Harlow and a venue and theatre folded. But we only had one of each and now there is just the Playhouse.

Welcome to the Brave new world of modern Harlow, you will be mindless consumers even if you don’t want be. For the people that control your lives in this town know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

1965

It may also be uncomfortable for you to know that I was always contemplating murder but I was, is that so unusual for someone my age?

My imagination was full of killing and maiming by gun and explosions day in day out, and no-one stood a chance. Weapons technology far in advance of my opponents would be turned onto these hapless victims and so, for example, my Native American Indians toys had to endure strike after strike by the screaming banshee of the German Stukka Dive bomber.

I had grasped, so early on, the real truth of the American Dream that weapons superiority made even genocide a breeze. They didn’t win over the Native American with ideas or the promise of a fundamental democracy that was the right of human kind, no, they just shot and cannoned them all. They didn’t need a Stukka Dive Bomber, but if they had had one, they would have used it.

You know they would.

Modern warfare for the rich nations of the world had reduced killing to an abstract, where tracking and slaughtering large numbers of people was like playing a video game and evoked feelings no more disturbing than playing with a toy. George Bush Junior and his pals recognised that only the press and public was left to have the potential to understand the pain of the slaughtered innocents.
So, he imbedded the journalists with his troops and fed them Mcfacts and logistics and turned the illegal invasion of Iraq into an abstract by saying it was a War on Terror. Now there were enemies everywhere and if the coalition of the willing killed them in scores, then they must be guilty.

We were left to feel nothing but a love for our toys.

I love the sound of breaking glass.

2007-07-24T13:55:00.000-07:00

I am delighted to say my ears seem to be returning to normal, I walked home today in the sunshine and I could clearly hear the birds singing, the wind blowing in the trees, the water tricking through the Asda trolleys lying sideways in the stream and my feet crunching on freshly broken glass. I also heard, before I even saw it, the Kentucky Fried Chicken box skipping gaily past on a sudden gust from behind me. It continued off down the road and disappeared in the distance as it raced to beat me home.

I say, my hearing has returned to normal but what I mean by that is the only thing that not right about my hearing is the usual tinnitus I suffer from which I only really notice if I think about it, like right now, or when things are really quiet.

I forgot what day it was today, and thought it was Wednesday, one look at my blog would have put me straight but that would have been bizarre, needing a blog to keep track of my life.

Tickets are selling really well for the Brighton gig and are hopefully for the Spitz gig in London too. I’ve been getting emails from people travelling some distance to attend the gigs including from Paris. You know it is weird to not playing very often and then when we do, we play two days in a row, I am going to be completely knackered by Sunday and I’ve got to try to keep this blog thing going through it.

I can’t stand all the preparation and organising that is needed for these things though but you can be sure that when I am on stage, finally ready to play, I am all there for you.

I matters to me that if you have turned out to see us, that effort should be rewarded by a fine performance by the band if humanly possible.

Then we all go home happy.

1965

My imagination was always full of explosions, every toy car, boat or plane of mine had been blown up countless times by evil villains, I ran a whole department of secret agents from my room and they were always returning having nearly lost their lives with their car or boat or plane completely wrecked. By the time I was old enough to see a James Bond film I could completely empathise with M.
One agent, just called 7 (these weren’t double ‘o’s, they didn’t have a licence to kill, they were a clandestine unit run in parallel with MI5’s, they were technically illegal so they didn’t need a licence for anything.), was a promising young man who we originally issued with a Robin Reliant, it was a really crap car even then but it was brand new. He managed to retrieve a consignment of Nazi gold by swerving it under fire, into on coming traffic on the road just outside the Gothenburg tunnel in Switzerland. He jumped out at the last minute and the baddies crashed into it and all died. But not 7, he survived and was favoured by our organisation, each time he completed a mission successfully and his car was a write off, we would issue him with a slightly better make and model of vehicle. He eventually became the proud owner of a brand new Austin Martin DB4 just like James Bond’s. They were made for one another.

Unfortunately the following day he broke his neck under my shoe when I had too many toys out on the floor.

I wasn’t allowed to acknowledge his death, to the rest of the world, he didn’t exist.

The life I lead is hard. Too hard.

Tinnitus and the Sounds of the Suburbs

2007-07-23T13:27:00.000-07:00

My ear seems a little better today, I say a little better because they are both ringing now which is at least consistent and not making me feel lopsided. I’ll have to take earplugs to the gig on Friday, I have never used them before on stage but If my ears are sensitive at the moment I don’t want to do any permanent damage to them. Now I’m wishing the wax would come back.

Never satisfied me.

Bizarre thought though, the last thing one of my ears ever being able to hear was one of my songs played too loudly, it would be like a gunsmith being shot by one of the guns he designed or walking into your own bear trap or being run over by your own car because you left the handbrake off. As we get closer to a run of gigs like this I am forever worried that something will happen to one of the band to prevent us from completing our commitments. As I have said before we don’t play very often so that would be very hard on us and our audience especially as these are to be the very final gigs.

1965

I hammered on the front door and waited impatiently for what seemed to be for ever for the door to open. I can’t remember who opened it, I just remember a pair of legs as I passed them mumbling “going to my room to play” and ran upstairs to seek sanctuary in my little box room.

I was living in this house with my mum and dad and my two older sisters Lorraine and Sandra. Being the youngest in the house I had the smallest room which I shared with various bits of discarded kitchen furniture and suitcases which never made it into the loft. You took your life into your own hands getting into our loft, it entailed hanging from the ceiling over a steep stairwell to get anything in there. No, dumping it in my room was the easiest option.

I don’t remember being angry about it but then again I was always angry, we all were, we were angry with each other, always, so the crap in my room didn’t really figure. There was just room for my few toys, my bed and my dreams but there wasn’t enough room for all that and this nightmare. I fell heavily on to the bed with the pressure of events bearing down on me. I put my head under the pillow and hid.

No matter how I tried I could not get what I had just down out of my head, it was replayed time and time again, each time getting exaggerated to the point were it got to burning Rome proportions. I tossed and turned keeping the sound of intermittent sobbing to myself.

What if my parents found out? I’m really for it! Should I tell them? Noooooo! How can I go down stairs and say. Mum, Dad? I’ve just burnt a lorry down to the ground. I’ve never heard of anyone doing that, but I didn’t know of anyone who had burnt a lorry down to the ground. This was new territory for me and I felt that it wasn’t a thing you voluntarily admitted to, you got caught doing it fine, but you’d never just say I’ve just set light to a lorry. That was absurd.

I was in agony and I couldn’t lie on my bed anymore, I didn’t know what to do with myself.

As I expected, I'm coping with the unexpected

2007-07-22T12:26:00.000-07:00

Aahhh my ear, I’m really worried about my left ear. We had our final rehearsals today and once we had finished setting up I realised I hadn’t brought any ear protectors. I don’t usually need them as my ears are normally full of wax to some degree. However I had my ears syringed last week and since then I have had the best hearing I can remember having for ages. They were therefore vulnerable and the only thing I could find to put in them to protect them was some toilet paper.

The boys turned up with Paul Howard who was here to rehearse for his guest appearance with us at the gig on Friday night in Brighton, unfortunately he was feeling ill yet was still detrmined to try his best. Struggling to fore fill his commitments but not well enough to be entirely with it, he kept forgetting the words and the band were a bit ploddy because I kept starting the songs off too slowly, so it wasn’t too good to begin with.

One of the problems was that Paul had to be away early so we set out to practise the songs we were doing with him first of all. The band hadn’t warmed up so we were not at our best and when Paul left I think we were all feeling a bit frustrated with ourselves. The last number of that session with him, his voice was the loudest thing through the PA and midway through the song it managed to penetrate the toilet paper I had in my left ear and actually hurt my ear drum about three times during one number.

After he had gone the band started to warm up and the rest of the rehearsal went really well.
When it was all over and we were packing up, I took the toilet paper out of my right ear and all the sounds of the room flooded in, then I took the paper out of my left ear and nothing really changed apart from my ear ringing.
I hope I haven’t damaged it, it’s really making me anxious. Even one good night’s sleep is not going to tell me if it’s recovered as when I’ve had ringing ears before it’s taken a day or two.

I feel like I’ve still got paper in it when I haven’t. Usually I’m used to both my ears ringing but because it’s only one this time if feels really strange, it is sort of unbalancing me sound wise.

Fingers crossed It’s all right!

1965

Fucking hell!

“I thought you said it was an abandoned wreck”

“Well, it is really old, no-one used it anymore, it’s been there for weeks and had been left there unlocked.

Why then are there two men running towards it.

Fucking hell Billy shouted.

The two racing figures stopped suddenly when the heat was no longer bearable on their faces and just stood there with their mouths open.

I said “I think we better get out of here before they see us”

Then…

At that moment there was a huge BANG! A explosion that blew out the windows showering the men with broken glass. The people waiting at the bus top instinctively ducked and held their arms up over their faces.
Although with the car park wall and a road in-between them and the lorry I don’t think any debris reached them.

“Fucking hell” we all said in unison, run I shouted.

We tore off out of the car park, I ran with all my might. My breathing was accelerated, I was gasping for air but is sounded like quick fire sobbing.
I could feel my stature decreasing as I ran down the slope between the Doctors surgery and Patie and Pakins which led to the entrance of the underpass. As I entered I hoped the ground would swallow me up but instead the passage to the other side just amplified my distress and chillingly threw it back ten fold.
By the time I exited the other side I felt as small as an ant with the foot print of my conscience bearing down, threatening to crush me.

“Split up” Billy cried.

Split up? I not trying to be in a gang at this moment I’m just heading straight to my home. I jumped off the path on to the grassy hill and started to make my way towards the back of the Pear Tree Mead estate.
My partners in grime scattered off somewhere, I don’t know where, I didn’t care, I was glad to be on my own now.

At this moment I realised that I needed to calm down, I couldn’t enter the house like this so I ran into the nearest bushes and sat down. I was exhausted and although I was beginning to catch my breath I was far from recovering.Away from my gang, quietly, so no-one could hear I cried my heart out.

The need to get safely home returned after a while, I cuffed the tears off of my eyes and onto my sleeve and started to run the last stretch to my street.
As I emerged from the bushes an ear splitting siren rang out from Southern Way, the road on the far side of the field that let to Bush Fair. A double decker bus further delayed from picking up it’s impatient passengers had driven up on to the grass verge to let two fire engines pass.

Two fire engines! As if by magic children from every estate suddenly appeared and ran towards Bush Fair to see the spectacle of a fire being put out.

There was one child running the opposite way.

Catch a Fire!

2007-07-21T11:42:00.000-07:00

Hands up who believes that the government was lying when they said there was no cash for peerages being handed out?
Ok, hands up those who think they are telling the truth?
Only one, ok Mr Rammell, being Harlow’s MP we know where you stand, anything that Blair said was god’s honest truth to you, when your constituents were convinced otherwise.

This government long ago lost the moral high ground, the moment Blair lied about the reasons for Invading Iraq, the moment he went against the majority opinion of the country and sanctioned a war without even involving his cabinet, was the moment we stopped believing them full stop.

We are also going backwards regarding the drugs war, they are now talking about re-classifying cannabis to a class C drug because it is damaging some people’s mental health. At the same time, whilst alcohol does more damage to people in this country, their approach to that is different, they make it easier to get it by allowing pubs to open as long as they wish.
Now I am happy with this liberalisation of the licensing laws but I fail to see how locking people up for wanting to relax and get a little stoned is going to help them or us. We are back to criminalising people who happen to make cannabis their drug of choice and once they have had a spell in one of our overcrowded Victorian rat infested prisons and have lost their job, they become a bigger danger to themselves and society when they get out.

Remember the 'War On Terror'? They don’t call it that anymore because it is a meaningless phrase for a meaningless war. However this wasn’t the first meaningless war, the first one was the 'War On Drugs', one that the United States (and to a smaller degree ourselves) have put billions of dollars and destabilised several countries, and murdered many in it’s epic struggle only to find it had little or no effect what so ever. The invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11 liberated the farmers of that country from the ban on opium production the Taliban had enforced and the fields are blooming with billions of poppies again. Where is all this fresh opium heading for? You guessed it, the USA and Britain and that’s why our (British) soldiers are supposed to be over there, to destroy the poppy economy. They're not helping to replace that income for the Afghans with anything else though so it’s likely to have little effect.

Too little, too late!

I think we should be consistent with our approach to drugs, we should legalise the lot, cut out criminal underworld and armed drug gangs, tax them and feed that income, not to helping to fund illegal invasions of other countries but to pay for drug education and properly funded national clinics to help those who could simply not take notice of the warnings.

To believe that our society is not already drenched in drugs is like believing that Guantanamo Bay is a humane interrogation centre. We should grab the means for production and start to take control before it is too late.

Oh, and the Neurotics have got their final rehearsal tomorrow before the first gig in Brighton at the Prince Albert on Friday 27th July.

I thought I’d mention that.

1965

We ran, we really ran.

oh man the buzz, I was so tingling with excitement, relief and bravdo that I was giggling like the very girl I was accused of earlier.
But it didn’t matter now, I was a hero, I was in, I’m in the gang, they’ve never done anything like this.

We didn’t run far, we couldn’t, because we were transfixed.

We ran a little way further into the car park, ducked behind a car and then popped our heads back up to view the lorry.

It seemed so quiet now, either that or I couldn’t hear a thing over my thumping heart. We looked at a thin spiral of smoke winding it’s way out of the open door, it stopped.

It started again, a car passed by on the main road, I absent mindedly noted that it wasn’t a bus, we returned to silence and then BANG.
A split second later, a second Bang. I punched the air, this was as good as it gets, I did it, I am not a sissy I’m daring, I am courageous, I AM IN THE GANG! I am a GIANT!

I looked excitedly at my co-conspirators, they were caught up in it too. I could see by their excited faces that they were dead impressed. Look at them, look how small they seem now. How could I have felt intimidated by these fools, I’m never going to let that happen again, I promised myself.

As, in that frozen moment I savoured my triumph on their faces, the corners of their mouths dropped, dragging their eyebrows with them. They suddenly looked sick, their faces had turned a bright sickly orange.

The penny didn’t so much drop for me, but spun giddily in an hypnotic spiral into the collection of a lost cause.

I turned around to see, and my vision tunnelled into this huge flickering dancing orange like I had a ViewMaster strapped to my face and I was looking at the surface of the sun. I raised my hands as if to click onto another image but just cupped them over my brow to cut out some light.

Fucking hell!

I'm always burnin' on a short fuse.

2007-07-20T12:42:00.000-07:00

I was in a meeting at work today with every manager above me in my chain of command reviewing our website (Harlow Council’s). We were picking through recommendations made by a government agency for Local Government website compliance.

The conversation turned to biting one’s fingernails and I was challenged to show everyone what my nail’s were like (I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP!).

I proudly showed my neatly trimmed nails and declared, "I play guitar so mine always need to be short."

It occurred to me that I must be the only Neurotic that does not bite their nails!

The head of my department is fairly new and it was interesting that when I brought my Les Paul in to work having collected it from Tones music shop after a service, he showed great interest in it and I think he stifled a drool. Anyway, he asked me if I had a band and I educated him on The Neurotics and what we did in the Eighties and that we had reformed for a while.

He admitted that he had completed missed punk as he was living in South Africa during the Seventies and Eighties.He then asked me if he could borrow one of our CD’s and I agreed to bring one in for him.

A week passed and he finally said to me, “ by the way, I really enjoyed that CD you lent me Steve.”
“I’m amazed, you were so….angry!”

“Yeah” we were", we still are!

“hhhmmm” he said, “can I buy a copy of this?”

“Why of- course”, I beamed!

And do you know, he did!

I’ve spent most of my life confronting my bosses, this was a welcome change.

Almost all of the people in the building I work in know about my alter ego, my secret identity, and perhaps my political beliefs. It is Harlow after all.

I think, they think, I am a responsible man and would never have done anything too stupid in my past.

1965

I opened up the door of the brown Bedford open back truck, I put one foot on to the footplate and my free hand on to the leather passenger seat and sprung two or there times on one leg until I judged that I could make it up with one last push.

I made it, the cab smelt of oldness, of leather, tobacco, petrol and a thousand curses. The passenger seat worn out by getting in and out a million times, this was the home of exaggeration where there was only one truth and it was shared between the driver and his mate.

As I scrambled in I was faintly aware of the bus stop with it’s neat queue of hopeful passengers visible through the driver side window, they looked like they were a sketch done in pastels hung on the side of the cab.

The protective sheath around the base of the gear stick had long since crumbled away and I was staring through the gaps around it to the floor of the car park and the broken glass that lay scattered around it.

I attempted to order the things I had in my hand in such a way that I could succeed in doing what I had promised to do.

I was so scared that my hands were shaking, I intended to jump in and then jump out quickly but time was sslloowwiinngg dowwnn ssoo mmuucchh. More haste, less speed popped into my head, it was something I had learnt from my parents, I had no idea what it meant but it felt good to remember it and it was if they were giving me guidance, like they were supporting what I was doing.

I know, it was stupid.

I pulled the glove compartment door down, these were the days they really expected you to put gloves in them. All this space had in it was the detritus from countless dirty finger nails as they searched for items that never seem to be there. Also oil, there were traces of old oil everywhere, as though they had to constantly coax the engine to do its job, to get them successfully to hell and back.

None of this made an immediate impression; this was a slow exposure, a picture that would be so definite in later years, such high definition that it felt I had made it all up.

I threw two Brocks bangers into the small space pushing aside some pages from the Harlow Gazette which had once been rapped around a greasy spanner or two and positioned the fuses so they pointed accusingly back at me.
I picked up the matches, took one out of the box and struck!

The head snapped off and skittered off on to the floor, "bloody Polish matches" I cursed imitating my father. I pulled out another and struck.

It was already spent, I never could fathom why, when people idly struck matches they would place them back in the box. It made no sense and it made me mad, especially now.

Third time lucky, I stuck, it lit, I received an instant hit of sulphur up my nose that made my head jerk back and delivered the promise of burned fingers if I didn’t get rid of it soon.

Recovering some composure I lit the two fuses, dropped the match, pushed open the door of the cab and jumped down to where Graham and Billy were staring wildly at me whilst their bodies were already pointing in the opposite direction.

Run! I shouted!

Girls are sugar and spice and all things nice and guitars are wood and wires!

2007-07-19T13:47:00.000-07:00

The lyrics of my songs play a strange game with me, they go in and out of focus at different times. Sometimes they are just threads of rhyme and reason that are interwoven with the music to make a whole. Other times they stand out in stark contrast to the music and I get a new insight, just like a fan might, and I think, “Did I write that?”
Elements like that are surprising and pleasing when writing and performing songs and I sometimes say to myself, "you’ll leave that all behind if you stop playing".

True, but I went through the nineties without playing and I survived.

True, but I was probably impoverished in some way because of it.

Taken once a day vitamin Cminor 7th is guaranteed to keep the blues away.

I caught myself looking longingly at a brand new Gibson Les Paul this very lunch time. I was in Tones music shop buying some strings for my current guitars.
Once I realised I was doing it I quickly looked away, feeling like a cheat, like I’d been admiring and longing for another woman. This analogy is not perfect I might add as I have three guitars but I do not have three women who share my bed. I must admit to using this metaphor regarding guitars before but it is a way to describe the closeness I feel to my instruments without appearing to be one string short of an Ernie Ball ‘Not Even Slinky’ set.

Guitars are very personal though and coveting another person’s only works if you love the model itself. Richard Holgarth, guitarist with Eddie and the Hot Rods recently invited me to admire a wall full of his Gibson SG guitars. I just stood there admiring the wall for taking the weight, not what he had in mind.

It was nonsense for me to fantasize buying a new Les Paul, not just because it cost £1,500 but also that I am trying to give up playing with the Neurotics, still old habits die hard and the lines of that famous guitar are very seductive.

When you think how much technology has changed over the years, whether it be computers, recording studios, the apparatus (apparatus that’s an old technology word) we play music on, the formats on which it is available, synthesizers and samples. It is comforting that we still want to make an ungodly racket with a piece of wood with wires strung on it.

Long may it be so.

1965

I blinked first. Why should it be me that does it? I bleated unconvincingly.
Because it's your fucking turn you moron. I did the first dare and jumped into Patty and Parkins yard and I came out with a handful of wood and some rare Green Kryptonite.

( that was true, he did come out of their premises with a strange dark green plastic square that shed it's outer layer to expose a lighter green underneath and it ticked when you placed it up to your ear. I didn't like being near it, if it was green kryptonite I had so little power as it was that, I couldn't afford to have anything else taken away!)

and Graham climbed the roof of the service bays and ran right the way to the other end.

You ain't done nuffing!
I have, I've done loads of stuff, you know I have!

That was yesterday, this is today!

Oh you’re so useless we may as have a girl with us cissy boy, never mind I’ll do it…

There was a moment left to save this, I either do as they say or pay the consequences, it was quite simple. I just needed to find the courage.

In my mind to do it or not to do it was like a tug of war but the rope wasn’t moving

It was a waste of time, I’d pay the consequences anyway, they’d just be different consequences.

I let go of the rope.

Oh for heavens sake, give it to me. I said,

They dropped the stuff into my hands as they stumbled backwards.

Preparing to be good, preparing to be bad!

2007-07-18T11:48:00.000-07:00

The rehearsals in Brighton have resulted in the revival of a little gem. After not being played for around 25 years we have resurrected ‘Get Up and Fight’ from our first album ‘Beggars Can Be Choosers’ and a mighty thing it is too.
It sounds fresher today than it did when we first recorded it and we are very excited to be playing it in the three gigs we have coming up soon.

Just to let you know, Colin Dredd will be making a guest appearance again at the Rebellion Festival gig on Sat 12th August but he will be away having his annual holiday at Womad before that date so will not be in attendance at the Brighton or London gigs. For those, we are having our good friend singer/songwriter Paul Howard pop up to sing a couple of Neurotics songs that my vocal cords cannot reach anymore.

Apart from the rehearsals at the weekend there was time to relax, it was Simon’s and my partner Clare’s birthday so we went out on Saturday night to Brighton. We had a fantastic Indian meal and unseen to us around the corner in the room was a woman who laughed hysterically for most of the evening and we never knew why. I fantasised that this is what happens when you go out with a professional comedian but the opposite is probably true, they are probably all depressives.

One of the lovely aspects of this social time together was that Don, who has only been playing with us for three years (when it was originally intended to be one gig, has fallen in love with the Neurotics and the songs and wanted me to know that, which then sparked off Simon to say similar things.

There is nothing like having a band this committed, this close, and this enamoured by the songs, I am really honoured and to me it is a thing of beauty.

Pity it will all come to an end soon, but then every thing does, without fail.

1965

"Do it now or else, do it now or you’re a just a fucking johnny bag, just a fucking girl!"

I hate these people I thought, I hate these people so much and I hate myself for being with them. I was petrified, it wasn't just a fear of violence, it was a feeling of being ostracised, I needed to be loved so much at this time but I couldn't get enough, I couldn't even get to be liked, my last chance was to be accepted. Now I was loosing that, that's why I was scared, I was rooted to the spot, unable to walk away and unable to do their bidding, They were asking too much, but they always did. Oh how I hated them, did I tell you that? I did? Oh, I'm sorry, I tend to use repetition as emphasis, did I tell you that already? I didn't? Oh I have now. Yeah I hated them and the only reason I was here was because being one of their friends was far preferable to being one of their victims, but I seem to be on a never ending apprentiship of humiliation without getting the stinking diploma!

We were standing in the large car in Bush Fair that serviced both the shops and Keat’s House doctors surgery, over a small perimeter wall a stones throw from us was a bus stop where a queue of bored people waited patiently for a bus. They had nothing to do to pass the time but listen to a small group of kids arguing.

We didn’t really see them, they were not in our world.

Driving Missed Crazy

2007-07-17T12:17:00.000-07:00

I have been putting olive oil in my ears to soften the wax and then placing cotton wool in my ears to keep it from running down my neck. I was the only one at our rehearsal on Saturday and Sunday that didn’t need ear plugs.

Yesterday I got my ears syringed two days early due to a cancellation for the ‘Practise Nurse’and the world of sound returned to me again in its crystal clear beauty. I can safely say the letter ‘S’ has been put back onto all the places it was meant to be.
My ears completely block up after every twelve months or so and I have to go through the same routine to get them clear each time. I found now that blocked ears begin to kick off my vertigo and I have been getting sick again, hopefully now they are clear I should start to feel better again.

I have a theory that they block so quickly because over the years they have been hammered by poor PA’s and bad rehearsal rooms and so they accelerated the production of wax to protect them. My hearing is still pretty good, so my system has been looking after me over the years.
My fingers are beginning to heal after our recent marathon rehearsals, my voice is returning and all my aching muscles are recovering after a couple of nights sleep.

It was our first time in this studio and in line with tradition it was an oven. We were having trouble concentrating and had to have more breaks than we intended just to prevent ourselves from passing out. In one such break we were informed that air conditioning was being installed a few days later.

For us that was unfortunate, it was bad timing, we missed it.

Earlier I was driving over the Queen Elizabeth Bridge in Dartford, listening to the Stone Roses first album playing from a dusty old cassette as we slowly made our way to Brighton. I was looking at the view when I decided that I’d better put my full concentration on the road. The traffic wasn’t moving very fast but you never know.
Later I found out that two crashes occurred either side of the bridge near enough to the same time we were crossing. In one accident a man died, in the other a man was injured when he lost control of his motorbike, his son who was riding pillion was killed.

You never know what is going to happen in front of you when you’re driving.

For us, we were fortunate, it was good timing, we missed it

1959

My mother worked in the defence industry which was cool then as she had been one of the unsung heroes of workers building the radar systems that helped us beat the Nazis during the Second World War. Nothing grand mind you, she just did copper winding year in year out and kept food on our plates. Not so cool to be working in the defence industry now as it has little to do with defence, more to do with killing people in far off countries who are getting in the way of our dodgy foreign policies or making profits from supplying arms which will eventually get turned back upon us.

No, it was different then and Cossors, the American company that employed her decided to open a new factory in Harlow, Essex. They then asked their employees if they would like to work there with the incentive that they would have a brand new home in a brand new town and get help with the moving expenses.
My parents jumped at the chance. Having spent the war in London and finding it slow to get back on it’s feet in the years following it, this was the break that they needed. A fresh break and a new future.

It might have been something to do with an impending eviction too!

We became New Town Pioneers, and we had London, Hertfordshire and the rest of Essex outside our circled wagons.

I was five when I arrived in Harlow and I still remember my first impressions to this day.

It was like a gleaming Citadel beamed down in a ray of light from the sky.
The houses, the streets, shops, were so new, the concrete so clean and white that when the sun shone it was difficult to look at it.

I began to squint…

For the first time in my life I needed sunglasses and I wasn’t on holiday.

Yeah, a fresh break and a new future, anything was possible here…

I worked my fingers to the bone for you!

2007-07-16T15:44:00.000-07:00

I opened my eyes slowly like I was dreading seeing something I didn’t like, but I was staring at nothing more than the wall of my bedroom. A fog of exhaustion was clouding my thought processes and it was confusing me. I never sleep this heavy, never. A second wave of panic momentarily gripped me as I pondered the possibility that I had been slipped a sleeping draft in a bar in Brighton led out side and then dragged into a backstreet and robbed. My back was killing me and my fingers felt like someone had stamped on them,

I flexed each digit.

Strange, they only hurt on one hand. I must have had one hand free. I reached out to a stale glass of water to pass a little liquid over my parched lips. My throat felt like I had fallen asleep with my mouth open. As I clasped the glass, pain shot down my finger tips which made my arm recoil without actually waking me to any degree. An automatic defensive action hardwired into every human being, it’s only at times like these you realise it’s there.
I have to get up, I have to try to get on, I have work to do and I’ve got to make it in today. I struggle to lift myself off of the bed and a pain shoots up my back, I drop back down. I shout “ah fuck” and am surprised that I sound like I’m listening to my own voice from inside my head.

Why is everything sounding woolly?

I don’t seem to be coming out of this sleep very quickly and blobs of eye shit are floating around my face and no amount of blinking seems to shift it. Hope it’s not blepharitis again I think but then return to worrying about my hearing. It’s so quiet around here, not quiet because things aren’t very loud, quiet because quiet things are deafening, like my breathing, gastric juices, creaking bones, and my thoughts, confused thoughts. Normally on a weekday I’d just ignore the siren call of the morning erection to go and put the kettle on, but this was no normal day, but I couldn’t remember why. Why is my hearing so strange.

I reached up to touch an ear for reassurance, stupid thing to do really, did I think I’d fallen asleep with a pair of unplugged headphones on? I don’t know what I thought but the action paid dividends, I put my fingers into my ears, used finger and opposable thumb and clasped something, it came away easily and silently, it’s removal made no difference to my hearing at all.

I placed the thumb and forefinger in front of my face and stared.

All I could see was like lumps of cotton wool floating in front of my eyes.

I blinked.

The lumps all jumped and changed positions but didn’t clear, I still cannot see. I blink again and again and yet again. Things clear a little so I can see my fingers but still cotton wool is getting in the way of seeing what I am holding.

I blink and blink and blink again.

No change, but this time I notice a feint yellow colour and it is on…

Cotton wool! It’s not my eyes now, I am holding cotton wool with a little bit of yellow on it. I decide to check my other ear and low and behold another piece looking just the same.
What the hell I cried,

but I didn’t .

Nothing came out, I still couldn’t hear but I could hear enough to know that I was having trouble speaking. It sounded like a shouted whisper and it wasn’t right, I’d been robbed of my voice.

Wait a minute, I have no voice, no hearing, I’m exhausted and my fingers hurt.
I’m beginning to wake now, and I quickly bring my finger tips right up to my eyes. I squint at them in the morning light and adjust my focus to account for the close proximity. I blink and I blink and blink again.

Well I’ll be damned, I whispered.

The fingers in front of me, only visible to their owner, was a little groove cutting through callouses running along the tip of every finger of my left hand.

Then I realised I’d been rehearsing punk rock for 12 hours the preceding two days, with both ears full of wax from the ear drums themselves to the open air. I had been putting olive oil in my ears and then cotton wool plugs to try and soften the wax.

Now like a weird version of the film 'Groundhog Day' I have woken up realisation that the Newtown Neurotics still exist. This should not be happening, the last thing I remember was that the Neurotics had called it a day immediately after playing the final chord on stage at the Wasted Festival in Blackpool 2006 and that they were in the past participle, they were dead and gone. The last thing I remember was standing on Blackpool beach gazing wistfully out to sea and thinking about America.

In all the years the band were together we never made it to the States. To be quite honest it wasn't a major priority for us so it didn't really disappoint us that we didn't. Things have changed over the years as we have gained more and more American fans, and it grieves me now that these people will never get to see the band live. As we moved towards our final gigs in England in 2006 we had signed a US deal for a two cd retrospective album and been asked if we would be prepared to tour the West Coast of the United States. Our plan was to play our final gig English gig at the Wasted festival and then do a short tour of the States to round off our careers.

It didn't happen,

life is not that neat,

I should have known,