Part 16 (2/2)

I glance at my watch. b.u.g.g.e.r. Twenty past midnight.

”Sorry, did I wake you up? Need to ask you something.”

He does that maddening trick of not replying, leaving the phone line a silent void which only I am required to fill.

”Err ... you know when we saw Nirvana at Reading in ninety-one?”

”Uh-huh.”

”Were they really that good or were you guys just winding me up?”

His usual scoffing-burp sound comes speeding down the wire from Crouch End. ”Doesn't it say anything about this in my sc.r.a.pbook?”

”Yeah, it-”

”Because part of the reason I gave you the d.a.m.n thing was so I didn't have to answer daft questions at times like this. I've got to be in Cardiff by eight thirty.”

”Sorry. It says they were a 'b.l.o.o.d.y revalation.'”

”Well, there you go.”

”Yes, but was it, like, life-changing?”

”Oh, probably not.”

”Do you think it changed me?”

”Changed you?”

”Yeah.”

”You missed them, didn't you?”

”Yeah-I mean, do you think not not seeing them changed me?” seeing them changed me?”

”How the h.e.l.l should I know?”

”Sorry, it's just that ... I've suddenly realised, everything that's happened to me from that moment onwards has been vaguely disappointing ...”

”Oh, for G.o.d's sake.”

”And that it might have been the start of me ... you know ... losing it slightly.”

Unexpectedly, this heralds a laugh.

”Losing your edge,” Alan chuckles. ”And you were there, off your t.i.ts at Spike Island, 1990. 'It'll never catch on,' you said.”

”Did I say that?”

”Something along those lines. Forget it. Listen, put that c.r.a.p away for the night, finish your can of beer [how'd he know I was drinking one?], get some sleep and stop being so b.l.o.o.d.y hysterical.”

But Alan is an expert at the slick closure of a phone call, even agreeing to a swift morally supportive coffee tomorrow afternoon before I meet Webster. I can't say I feel an awful lot better, though. I ignore his advice, return to the fanzine, and yes: the post-Nirvana results are quite remarkable. According to our reporter, Pop Will Eat Itself and Ned's were both ”a disappointment.” The Fat Lady Sings ”didn't deserve an encore.” The Sisters of Mercy were ”ridiculous.” Flowered Up and Teenage Fanclub were ”boringly similar” (which seems unlikely), while Blur ”only have one good song.” The Family Cat's actual performance on the Sunday doesn't even garner a review. Only De La Soul sparkle-watched, as we know, with the a.s.sistance of Steve the Swede's apple schnapps-but this judgement is accompanied by a sophisticated observation that ”drinking at a festival is actually quite fun, all the bands sound great when you're a bit p.i.s.sed, and no one cares about the weather; this could be the way forward.”

f.u.c.k.

I drain the last of my can, pull on my hooded top, grab my keys, stumble through the kitchen and just go, out into the northeast London night. I know from experience that feelings like these are only soothed by walking. It doesn't really matter where I go, but naturally I always end up heading in a south-westerly direction, as if magnetically drawn towards London's centre. I don't really spend much time there these days, but its pull remains compelling. It's a dry, windless night, and after an initial stiffness (I haven't left the house since yesterday evening) I'm soon up to speed, hurrying out of my locality, past a few stragglers contemplating a kebab after leaving one of the later-shutting pubs, beyond the church, past the final bus stop and out onto the road bordering the park. There was a time when I would leap over the fence and cut across, but nowadays even I-naivete and slightly disposable att.i.tude to life aside-take the long route round. Not that I've ever had the problems with muggers and nutters some of my friends have had. I put this down to perpetually marching at breakneck speed, pulling my woolly hat down to my eyes and doing my best to look more barmy than anyone else.

There are two things I always see on these small-hour jaunts. Indeed, both appear with such clockwork regularity I think I'd be concerned for the state of the universe if I didn't see them. One is a collection of elderly African ladies with huge multicoloured shopping bags. Doesn't matter what time it is. Once I saw them at three in the morning. It's extraordinary. They always look perfectly happy, gossiping away, never in the same place (tonight they're ambling along Green Lanes; another time they were coming out of a house in Finsbury Park; once they were even as far away as King's Cross). When I spy them this evening I almost feel like saying h.e.l.lo. The second thing I habitually encounter is an old chap walking his dog. Again, time seems to make little difference-one o'clock, two o'clock, even around six on one occasion. Both man and dog always look totally miserable. The bloke's probably got one of those jobs with crazy s.h.i.+fts, like Alan's tenure a few years back in a certain banking department that required him to be there from 11:30 p.m. until 8 a.m., Friday to Tuesday; the bizarre upshot being that his working week kicked off just as everyone else was getting plastered at the end of theirs, and his ”weekend” began first thing on a Wednesday morning. Typically, Alan made d.a.m.n sure he didn't miss out on a proper ”Friday night,” rooting out some meatpacker's boozer near Smith-field Market, where he would sup away happily until lunchtime and then drunkenly retire to bed. ”Sat.u.r.day-morning hangovers are so much nicer on Wednesday evenings,” he would tell people, ”plus there's better telly on.”

Tonight's dog-walking man is looking extra p.i.s.sed off, tramping past Canonbury station as his dog feigns enthusiasm for a clutch of weeds.

”Ivan!” he shouts. ”Git a bladdy move on!”

Loosely following that stupid bus route that doesn't go anywhere useful, I enter the no-man's-land between Canonbury and Highbury, my mind frantically sifting through a mult.i.tude of topics-my bank balance, Nirvana, Alan's continued indifference to my plight, Spike Island (why did he have to bring that that one up?), the ubiquitous Mr. Webster, my ubiquitous ex-girlfriend-although my anxiety is beginning to recede thanks to my ferociously marching along. It works every time. The gaunt, alert figure of a fox appears from behind the council block a few hundred metres ahead, then vanishes up that posh tree-lined road I always turn down by mistake when waywardly returning from nights at the Garage. I wince as I pa.s.s the school where I vomited after one tequila too many on Alan's thirtieth birthday. I round the corner where I had that huge row with The Ex (I wanted to walk, she wanted to get a cab: a recurring theme) and stride past those silly-looking cafes that precede Highbury Corner, finally shooting straight down the strip of overpriced shops and restaurants that is Upper Street. one up?), the ubiquitous Mr. Webster, my ubiquitous ex-girlfriend-although my anxiety is beginning to recede thanks to my ferociously marching along. It works every time. The gaunt, alert figure of a fox appears from behind the council block a few hundred metres ahead, then vanishes up that posh tree-lined road I always turn down by mistake when waywardly returning from nights at the Garage. I wince as I pa.s.s the school where I vomited after one tequila too many on Alan's thirtieth birthday. I round the corner where I had that huge row with The Ex (I wanted to walk, she wanted to get a cab: a recurring theme) and stride past those silly-looking cafes that precede Highbury Corner, finally shooting straight down the strip of overpriced shops and restaurants that is Upper Street.

Given that I've never been overly attached to this particular thoroughfare, it's remarkable how effectively it h.o.a.rds memories and unleashes them as I walk, like one of those slow-release vitamin-pill things. That's the problem with living in one corner of a city for too long, I suppose, and this top mile of the main Islington drag is all about (again) The Ex. No wonder she moved to Camberwell. Example: when I look at the Hope and Anchor, I don't see a semidecent music pub with a creditable punk heritage, I see the place I first met the friend of a friend who joined us for a pint after we'd seen Arab Strap at the Union Chapel. When I see that petrol station on the left, I see the first packet of sandwiches we shared while waiting for a cab to take the two of us and a paralytically drunk Polly home. The King's Head pub is the place I spilled my first pint over her. The Turkish restaurant is where I took her for a date on that first Valentine's Day and my debit card got rejected. The Bull is where I used to listlessly wait for her to finish cackling with her work colleagues on a Thursday evening. Then the cinema, where I realised once and for all that she'd never fancy me as much as she did Ralph Fiennes. The Slug and Lettuce, where I got into that huge argument with a male friend of hers about his method of getting to work (he used to drive drive from Hackney to Willesden every morning; had he never from Hackney to Willesden every morning; had he never heard heard of the Silverlink train line?)-the argument which finally precipitated The Conversation. of the Silverlink train line?)-the argument which finally precipitated The Conversation.

Which I'm not going to bore you with.

As I reach the southern end of the street the memories are older, often of an Islington that no longer exists. The Camden Head pub, once the second-best jukebox in London, now replaced by the questionable music taste of the bar staff. The old pizza restaurant, long since replaced by something trendier, where Alan and I used to do the all-you-can-eat buffet thing for about three quid, scoffing vast amounts of stodgy, nutritionless mush before going to gigs at the Powerhaus. The old tube station, prerenovation, without ticket barrier, an essential bolt-hole for every discerning student fare-evader. And then: the Powerhaus itself.

Today, the idea of an impossibly dingy, dirty, sick-smelling indie hole parked squarely on the front line of Islington's retail paradise is as incongruous as ordering a snakebite in Starbucks, but exist it did, and we f.u.c.king loved the place; the scene of some of our crunchiest, sc.u.mmiest gigs: Extreme Noise Terror, Die Cheerleader, Tad, Cardiacs (I've also heard Alan boast to people that we saw a very early Radiohead show there, which I regret to say is b.o.l.l.o.c.ks). It was the perfect alternative venue, a fabulous, feedback-drenched sin bin of head-crus.h.i.+ngly loud musical chaos; you could smell the clientele as they rolled across Islington High Street, particularly after the gig, when the cider, beer, sweat and patchouli oil had blended to form a now sadly extinct compound we christened Powergunge, caking the boots, leather jackets and hair of the faithful as they headed home. That the Powerhaus was replaced in the mid-nineties by an All Bar One tells you all you need to know about London's descent into chain-driven consumer nonsense. That the All Bar One subsequently became a branch of the Halifax is where social commentary and I go separate ways.

By this stage in my thoughts I'm standing right opposite our former glory hole, getting my breath back. It's just hit me how knackered I am and how many beers I've had, and considering it's now quarter past one in the morning and I've still not put finger to laptop for the Webster project, I probably ought to start thinking about home. But an unseen force is drawing me across the wide road. I skip across to the central reservation and wait for a half-empty police riot van to pa.s.s, its pa.s.sengers eyeing me suspiciously as I itch the back of my legs. I hurriedly take off my woolly hat and tidy my hair-my typical, feeble knee-jerk attempt at looking innocent-and the van switches on its siren and speeds off in search of real criminals, leaving me to stroll over to our old haunt with its unchanged mock-Tudor front. I stare through the sterile windows, now advertising tax-free savings and personal loans rather than appearances by The Fall or Huggy Bear, and wonder if customers ever feel the Ghost of Indie Past as they fill in their deposit slips, whether the staff realise their quiet, carpeted office is exactly the room in which three hundred unwashed lunatics rucked to Crazyhead, spat at The d.a.m.ned, gaped at Polly Harvey or blissed out to Orbital, or if they know they're interviewing new mortgage customers in the very same s.p.a.ce of air from which Wayne Hussey once breathed to serenade his eskimos. It's doubtful.

I linger awhile, not entirely sure what I'm trying to find. Perhaps nothing. I suppose it would be enough to think that, very occasionally, an office junior s.h.i.+fts some file boxes in a back room and wonders what that foul smell is, or speculates on the origin of the awful substance clinging to the bottom of the filing cabinet, or asks why his suit always reeks of patchouli oil after working late. Satisfied by this notion, I'm taking a deep breath and turning to go when something odd-no, make that b.l.o.o.d.y extraordinary-catches my eye.

On an otherwise standard-issue black signpost between the Halifax and Snappy Snaps are the remnants of a sticker: a black, triangular sticker that somehow resisted the efforts of the graffiti removal teams. Although it's faint, I can still make out an unmistakable red-and-yellow comic-book-style emblem, formed from the letters A and H, an emblem I first beheld about sixteen years ago, not ten yards from this very spot, emblazoned on the cover of a fanzine ent.i.tled Alternative Heroes Alternative Heroes. The geeky bloke enthusiastically peddling the fanzine to the gathering pre-gig crowd was none other than Mr. Billy Flus.h.i.+ng.

My face is now so close to the signpost I'm practically licking it, but I still can't believe what I'm seeing. When did the Powerhaus close down? 1995? 1996? I'm pretty sure Billy wasn't still doing his fanzine right up until that point, but even if he was, a sticker like this couldn't have remained on a signpost for the eleven years since. Stuff like this gets blasted off almost immediately these days, even in Camden. No, this sticker must have been slapped on recently. What's more, unless there's another oddball out there with a job lot of Alternative Heroes Alternative Heroes promotional stickers, it's Billy himself who's been doing the slapping. promotional stickers, it's Billy himself who's been doing the slapping.

This established, I don't hang about. I turn and run back up the street, frantically hailing a pa.s.sing bus. I whip out my mobile and call my own number, leaving one of those ridiculous aural notes-to-self as I pelt down the Ess.e.x Road, after which I sit down for a moment and ransack my memory.

The Powerhaus gig Billy showed up at with his stack of fanzines was a fan-club-only Thieving Magpies show to launch the single ”Roundpeg Squarehole” in June 1991. By this point our once enthusiastic friends.h.i.+p had completely evaporated, but I nodded at him outside the venue and strolled over to look at his creation while Alan scoffed and went inside.

I must confess my heart sank when I examined it. Evidently using Billy's brother's stationery resources to the full, Alternative Heroes Alternative Heroes had a glossy cover and proper, newspaper-style pages. Inside, Billy had combined his knowledge of music with his deeper love of comics, creating double-page strips featuring some of the alternative world's current stars: a wacky, had a glossy cover and proper, newspaper-style pages. Inside, Billy had combined his knowledge of music with his deeper love of comics, creating double-page strips featuring some of the alternative world's current stars: a wacky, Beano-style Beano-style battle between Faith No More and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a ghostly drama concerning The Cure's Robert Smith, a seaside caper involving The Wonder Stuff, a sitcom with the Pixies as a dysfunctional American family, and on the front page a swashbuckling adventure story starring all four members of the Thieving Magpies. It was imaginative, original, witty, frequently surreal and decidedly well-constructed. In those terms at least, it was streets ahead of battle between Faith No More and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a ghostly drama concerning The Cure's Robert Smith, a seaside caper involving The Wonder Stuff, a sitcom with the Pixies as a dysfunctional American family, and on the front page a swashbuckling adventure story starring all four members of the Thieving Magpies. It was imaginative, original, witty, frequently surreal and decidedly well-constructed. In those terms at least, it was streets ahead of Vorsprung Durch Peanut Vorsprung Durch Peanut-and Billy, of course, knew it.

”Nice 'zine, Billy,” I offered.

”Thanks!” he replied, neglecting to look

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