New blog page
Category: Writing and Poetry

For reasons too convoluted to explain, I've got a new blog page at http://richardblandford.wordpress.com/.

Go to it, link to it, read it, feed it, smoke it, toke it, lick it, flick it, hold it, scold it, lend it, and spend it 'til it rolls all over the floor like a magic penny.

Currently listening : Ev'Rything's Coming Up Dusty (+ Bonus Tracks) By Dusty Springfield Release date: 1998-03-16

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Flying Saucer Rock & Roll (Chapter Four)
Category: Writing and Poetry

When we got to Ben's house in Latham, it wasn't as bad as I thought it'd be. OK, it wasn't nearly as good a neighbourhood as Quireley, but the houses were mostly the same type, semi-detached, although more likely products of the sixties than the forties, which was when they built most of Quireley. The people loitering on the streets looked a bit scummier to me, though. Still, it felt a darn sight safer than the route through St Anne's we'd just taken.

Two things surprised me about Ben's house on that first visit. The first was the thick smell of tobacco smoke. None of my other friends' parents smoked, or if they did, they took great care to make sure their house didn't reek of it. The other surprise being, despite the overwhelming smell, how nice it all was. I mean, it wasn't in particularly good taste, but the furniture looked quite new, and their sofa was puffier, and would turn out to be more comfortable, than any I could remember sitting in before. Also, they had a nice big television and hi-fi system. CD player and everything. But what was really impressive was the computer, an Atari ST. The Commodore 64 was totally on the way out by then, and kids in school were switching to games consoles, Sega mostly, but no one else I knew had managed to upgrade to one of the new generation of computers like the Atari or the Amiga. I don't know, I just presumed that, what with Ben's dad being a taxi driver, they'd be living in squalor in a bare room with rats or something. But no, it must have been bringing in some OK money. That and maybe credit, I should imagine.

As Ben let us in, I heard activity coming from a quite futuristic-looking kitchen.

'Benjamin, is that you?' a woman's voice called as we stood in the hallway.

'Yeah, it's me,' he shouted back, at a volume no one would consider using in Quireley.

A plump woman, over fifty, with sandy-grey hair flowing loose over her shoulders and a fluffy pink dressing gown, appeared in the kitchen doorway, cigarette in hand. 'Oh, hi there,' she said upon seeing me.

'Hello,' I said back.

'Is this your friend, Benjamin?'

'Yeah,' he said, the word short and low, given reluctantly.

'Kenneth said to say he's still coming, but he won't be here till later. Why don't the both of you sit down and I'll fix you a snack? Would you like that, Christopher, is it?'

'Uh, yes please. That would be very nice.' I didn't know if it would be, as I hadn't eaten in the house of somebody whose dad didn't have an office job like my dad's before, let alone in a house in which all the air seemed to have been replaced by cigarette fog. All I could think of, for some reason, was a plateful of the jelly from pork pies, which gave me an impulse to gag I had to suppress. But when Ben led me into the living room and I saw the sofa, I thought it might be all right, which it was, of course. Ben's mum came in a couple of minutes later with two plates piled with processed-cheese sandwiches, crisps and chocolate biscuits, and two glasses of lemonade.

'Here you go,' she said. 'Put the telly on or something, Benjamin.' Ben had been awkwardly showing me some recent copies of 2000 AD while we waited, telling me about the characters and the artists, but the TV made us both feel a lot more comfortable.

'Do you want to watch The Young Ones? I've got it on video,' asked Ben.

'Yeah!' My parents had never let me watch it when it was on telly, and I couldn't believe that Ben was allowed to watch it in the afternoon, with his mum in the next room and without any cloak-and-dagger operation to hide it. Meanwhile, a black poodle scuttled in on tiny legs and sniffed our ankles before daintily sitting on its own plush cushion in the corner. We could never train Bess to stay on anything that was meant for her, be it a blanket or a basket.

Of course, The Young Ones was hysterically funny. I was laughing so much I was in pain. Waiting for Kenneth, we got through the first two episodes of season one, and halfway through episode three. It was strange hearing Ben laugh so unguardedly after his tough-guy act of the morning, and then his quiet sheepishness following the window incident. His voice was getting lower, but had not yet fully broken, and had a strange quality, like the sound of blowing through a pipe. His laughter was that of a child, and like his need to share his comics, it undermined all his efforts to appear grown up.

Sometimes his mum would wander in, and she would laugh at The Young Ones too. This was odd for me. Toilet humour, mild swearing and people hitting each other were not things any parents I'd encountered before approved of. Here, a new, freer order prevailed, it seemed.

There was the sound of a key in the front door.

'That'll be Kenneth now, I expect,' she said.

Kenneth walked in, wearing motorcycle leathers and carrying his helmet. About thirty-five, balding, with weathered face and hands, like an aged version of Ben after putting on a stone or two. Thick neck. Small eyes hiding far back in his face. Hard like stone. Way too old to be anybody's brother.

'Hi, Mum. Hi, Ben,' he said, kissing his mum on the cheek.

'All right, Ken,' Ben said. I could tell he was pleased to see him, although I don't think I was meant to see it.

'Ah, brilliant, The Young Ones,' said Ken. He watched it with us for a few minutes, sitting on the armrest of the sofa. All of us, me, Ben, Kenneth and their mum, leaning in the doorway, were laughing unreservedly. Ken's laugh was a low chugging sound, while his mum's was a piercing whoop, both utterly unlike the softer, considered laughs of my parents and their friends.

Madness appeared in the mid-episode musical interlude, to Ken's excitement. 'Ah, Madness, brilliant,' he said.

'You said you'd show us how to play power chords today,' said Ben, oblivious to his brother's enjoyment.

'Yeah, OK,' said Ken softly. Then he clapped his hands, and said much louder, 'Right, I'm going to go upstairs and change, and then I'll show you.'

'Shall we come up in five minutes or something?' asked Ben.

'Make it ten, yeah?'

'OK.'

We watched the episode to the end, then almost reluctantly, because there was a whole other tape with another three episodes, we went upstairs. Past the pink lavatory and along the landing, we came to Ken's room. The door had posters all over it. Ben knocked, and a voice from inside shouted for us to come in. Inside, it was a shrine to what I would learn was called the New Wave of British Heavy Metal from the early eighties, with tattered glossy fold-out posters of bands like Judas Priest, Motörhead, Diamond Head, Saxon and Tygers of Pan Tang covering the walls and ceiling. A large picture of Iron Maiden's mascot Eddie hung in an antique gilt frame next to the wardrobe, which itself was plastered with magazine cut-outs. It was strange, you could have almost imagined it being the bedroom of a twelve-year-old girl, if the pictures had been of New Kids on the Block and Big Fun. But this room was the work of a grown man.

The floor was a tip, covered in collapsing piles of magazines, empty cassette boxes and disembodied pieces of electrical equipment – circuit boards and wires that led nowhere. Ken was on the bed, his leathers in a heap to his left, next to his helmet. 'Right, lads,' he said, 'take a pew.'

Ben sat on the bed next to his brother. I realised that under a pile of faded and suspiciously smelling band T-shirts, there was a chair. 'Oh, just chuck 'em on the floor,' said Ken, which I did.

'Right, could you pass me my geetar, please, Ben?' he asked, and Ben dutifully unearthed a guitar case from behind half a television. Kenneth clicked open the locks and took out a Fender Stratocaster, spray-painted black with various band names stickered all over it. A beautiful thing, nevertheless, or so it looked at the time. Indeed, in that moment, just looking at it and the antici?pation of holding it filled me with a rare excitement.

'OK,' he said, putting the strap round his neck and hunching over the guitar, 'to play a basic power chord, you need two fingers – this one,' holding up his index finger, 'and this one.' He forced his other fingers down with his thumb so only his ring finger was up. For a moment, I thought it might be rude but then realised it wasn't. 'Now, what you do with this first finger is place it on the bottom string on any fret, it doesn't matter. Except if you want to play E. Then you just leave the string open. Now with this one, you put it here, two frets up from the other one, over the fourth and fifth strings.' He demonstrated the shape, and then deftly carried out a downward strike on the bottom three strings of his guitar. I was expecting an almighty blast of rock greatness, so was a little disappointed by the tinny sound that it made. Then I remembered that there was no amp. It would sound better with an amp, I reasoned.

'So, with this shape,' Kenneth continued, 'you can play any chord just by running your hand up and down the fretboard, like this.' He did just that, playing a dark, satanic riff very fast.

'Wow,' I said, in a stage whisper.

'How do you play minor chords, then?' asked Ben.

'Ah, that's the beauty of it. In a power chord, you're playing your root note, the same note an octave above, and a fifth. You're leaving out the third note of the triad, so the chord is neither major nor minor. So you can use them instead of either.'

'Wow,' said Ben. I didn't know what either of them was talking about, but it sounded very exciting and useful.

'OK, do you want to try it?' said Ken, passing the guitar to Ben. Ben took it, and after shuffling his long fingers about for a few seconds, got them in position, and there and then struck a perfect power chord. First time. He ran his hand up and down the fretboard for a full five minutes or so, sometimes linking chords that clearly didn't flow, other times hinting at potential riffs. It was as if that guitar and him, that chord shape, belonged together. It was meant to be. Ken just looked on in admiration. 'Yeah, you've got it,' he said.

'Want a go?' Ben said to me, after what seemed an age.

'Yeah, sure.'

He passed me the guitar and I struggled to get the strap over my head. The Stratocaster seemed to sit much lower in my lap than the school folk acoustic, and it felt like it was in danger of slipping off my leg completely. The strings were insanely loose compared with the cheese-cutter tightness of the school guitar, and I found it hard to get a grip on the thin neck. Finally, I tried to get my fingers in the right position, and though I thought I had it, when I gingerly hit down on them, the strings made a horrible scraping sound that, even amplified, wouldn't have sounded any good.

'Um,' said Ken, his hand rubbing his chin. 'Um. That's all I can say really. Um.'

I tried again, but it just got more scrapy and clanging the more I stabbed at it.
'No, what you want to do is only hit the bottom three strings. And you really need to push down with your ring finger on those two strings so you get a good sound. You'll need to learn how to do that with the other finger as well. Pass it back here and I'll show you why.' I did what I was told, and Ken played a riff I would later learn was 'Smoke on the Water'.

Ken went on to play us lots of different things on the guitar, most of which I didn't recognise, except some Iron Maiden stuff. Ben knew most of it, though. As well as riffs, Ken could solo too, although nowhere near as well as Joe Satriani or Kirk Hammett of Metallica. Watching him play was my first experience of that strange fascination you get watching someone messing about on an instrument, riffs mutating into other riffs, songs half-started, songs abandoned halfway. It made me nervous too. Was this the same song as before? Or a different one? Was I expected to know? After a while, Ken stood up and stretched and said, 'Right, I've got to shoot off soon, so you two had better scarper.' He shooed us downstairs while he got on with whatever he was up to in that tip of a bedroom.

I would learn later that he didn't live there at all – he had a girlfriend and a little boy who he lived with on the other side of town. That was his old bedroom, which he used for storage, a place to keep all the electronic junk he liked to fiddle with. At some point I would hear about his musical journey: a hard rock and prog kid in the seventies, a brief flirtation with punk, then a switch to heavy metal when he grew dissatisfied with punk's low level of musicianship. Apart from heavy metal, he also liked music that made him laugh, like the songs from Monty Python and Spitting Image, 'Star Trekkin', 'The Winker's Song' by Ivor Biggun. He'd been a bit of a social misfit during his twenties, hence the room full of posters and clippings, but at some point in the last few years had got his act together, finally moving out of his parents' house at the age of thirty-one. He'd given a lot of his old records from the seventies to Ben, which explained Ben's thorough know?ledge of music made several years before he was born.

It was still a while before I was expected home, so Ben suggested we watch the second Young Ones tape. But I wasn't finding it as funny as before. Maybe because even the funniest things wear thin after three hours, but mostly because I was hacked off I couldn't play that fucking chord and had ended up looking so useless in front of Ben and Ken. That might also explain why suddenly, and without reason, I kicked my leg out and sent a half-full glass of lemonade across the room, soaking the carpet in froth.

'You stupid monger!' Ben snapped at me. I couldn't argue with him on this one.

'Benjamin, don't talk to your friends like that,' his mum said, running into the room, still in her dressing gown. 'What's happened? Oh dear.'

'I'm really, really sorry,' I said, doubling up in embarrassment.

'That's OK,' she said. 'Could have happened to anybody.'

'Yeah, if they're a spastic,' said Ben.

'Benjamin, do not use words like that!' said his mum.

She fetched a cloth and bent over to clean it. As she did so – and there was no way I could avoid it – I saw down her dressing gown and caught a glimpse of most of her tit. It felt funny, nearly seeing my first real-life tit, a combination of excitement over the fact of it, and disgust at the strange crêpe-paper quality of the skin of the middle-aged breast and the blueness of the veins. That night, I would try and talk myself into believing I had seen a nipple, but I knew I hadn't.

Ben looked at me when she'd left the room, his voice covered by the sound of the TV and the washing machine. 'You looked at my mum's tits,' he said.

'No I didn't,' I said, now feeling terrible at not only defiling the loveliness of this proletarian home with spilt lemonade, but also being caught trying to catch a sneaky eyeful of my host's knockers.

'You did,' said Ben.

I had to think quick. 'Well, if I did, so did you.'

'Don't be stupid.'

'You must have been looking to know I was looking. Which means you're a dirty pervert, cos you just stared at your own mum's tits.'

'Just shut it, all right.' I let Ben get the last word, because I knew I'd won.



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Currently watching : The Young Ones : Bambi/Nasty/Time Release date: 1996-09-10

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Flying Saucer Rock & Roll (Chapter Three)
Category: Writing and Poetry

I met Ben at eleven o'clock, Saturday morning outside McDonald's in the High Street. Like me, he was wearing the teenage metaller's uniform of a denim jacket – an affordable substitute for the leather jackets we could only dream about. He had more patches sewn onto his, though, and most of them were for bands I'd only vaguely heard of – Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple.

'Wotcha,' he said, the established metaller greeting at our school.

'Wotcha.'

It was funny, up until this point I wasn't even sure he was one of us – a metaller, I mean – but just looking at him, I could tell that he had tasted of metal's goodness to a level I had previously not known to be possible. I felt rather puny in his presence, like a novice confronting a master wizard in one of Scott and his spazzy mates' Dungeons and Dragons games.

'So what's the plan then?' asked the wizard of his pupil.

'Dunno, really. Um, what time's your brother going to be round?'

'Dunno, mate. Probably about two.'

'Um, well, we could get something to eat, then go round the record shops for a bit,' I said, hoping that would satisfy the wise one to whom I had become apprenticed.

'You mean down St Anne's?'

'Yeah.' I hadn't meant that at all, of course. I'd meant HMV and Our Price in the High Street. I'd never even been to St Anne's, much less heard about any record shops that might be down there. The suburban roads of Quireley and the High Street were practically all I knew of the town I'd spent my entire life in, apart from occasional visits to the sports centre and the swimming baths. But the wizard knew more. He knew about the other record shops, and I would have to follow him, without letting on that I really knew nothing.

'Sounds good,' he said. 'Shall we go in then, or what?'

'Yeah, course.'

We went under the golden arches, and for only the second time in my life I bought fast food with my own money. It was that bygone time – the end of childhood, when fast-food restaurants were bright, magical places, before you had started to notice the food on the floor, and the surliness of the staff, and the never-ending screaming of the babies, or had been so zealously informed about their role in the destruction of the rainforest, what their food did to poor people's health, or the sparseness of the wages they paid. In those days you could eat there and feel good, instead of guilty and worried someone will see you when you leave.

'So what bands you into, then?' asked Ben as we sat down. Obviously I did not have enough patches on my denim for him to glean that information, and for that I felt ashamed.

'Oh, thrash metal mostly,' I said. 'Pantera, Megadeth, Slayer. Also Metallica, Iron Maiden . . .'

'Yeah, they're good bands,' said Ben. 'Do you like any of the older stuff, like Sabbath, Led Zep?'

'Yeah, I like them too.'

'Have you heard Physical Graffiti? That's a fucking amazing album.'

'Not sure,' I said. 'I think I have but not all the way through.'

'Jimmy Page's guitar playing is fucking mental on that album.'

'Yeah, yeah,' I said, nodding my head like a toy dog in a car window.

'Do you like Hendrix?'

'Yeah, they're good. I like their earlier stuff, anyway. Good band.'

Ben looked at me with his eyes wide. 'Hendrix aren't a band, you monger – he's a bloke!'

I sank about a thousand feet inside. 'Oh, Hendrix! I thought you meant someone else. Yeah, I thought you meant . . .'

'Yeah, like fuck you did.'

I felt still more ashamed. I'd failed my master already, and he'd caught me trying to deceive him. I was also curious as to what a monger was, although already I was pretty certain that I did not want to be thought of as one, especially by Ben.

'I've got to educate you, man,' said Ben.

God, yes you have, I cried inwardly, tell me everything.

'Come on, let's get a move on,' he said, standing up from the padded seat of the McDonald's booth. I hadn't finished, and was going to make an issue of it, before thinking better of it. That wouldn't be cool. It would be babyish.

'Wanna get my hands on some vinyl,' said Ben, apparently to himself, as I followed him out.

I walked beside Ben down the High Street, trying to give the impression of knowing where we were going, until he took a sudden and unexpected right that left me waiting by myself by the traffic lights.

'This way, you monger!' he called out to me, waving sarcastic?ally from some feet away.

'Sorry,' I replied, smiling a silly apologetic smile.

'You will be. Jesus. What's wrong with you?' he said as I caught up. 'Do you like Hawkwind?'

'Uh, yeah, they're good.'

'You haven't heard them, have you?'

'Yeah, well . . . no.'

'They've got an album of theirs I want in Weasel's. In Search of Space. It's got "Master of the Universe" on it.'

That made me think of something funny. Maybe Ben would also think it was funny. 'You mean, like He-Man?'

'No, not like fucking He-Man!' Ben slapped me round the back of the head. I looked for affection in the gesture but could find none. 'The song came first. It's been around for bloody ages.'

'Sorry, I don't know it.'

'Right, here's a trivia test for you. What famous bassist and lead singer of another band started out in Hawkwind?'

'Ummm . . . I don't know, who?'

'Come on, think!'

'I really don't know, sorry.'

'Lemmy!'

'Oh right.'

'And what band's Lemmy in?'

'Hawkwind.'

'No, you monger, what band's he in now?'

'Umm . . . I don't know, sorry.'

'Motörhead, stupid!'

'Oh, yeah, I knew that,' I said, in a small voice I couldn't will to be any bigger.

'No you didn't,' Ben said gruffly. I knew he was irritated with me now. I had to find a way to please him somehow, but I was feeling too ashamed to think of anything right then.

Ben led me further down the strange road, at the end of which was a dual carriageway. On the other side was a strange construction of metal pillars and a corrugated roof. It had the words 'Queensbury Market' written in bright green metal letters on the side. There seemed no way to get to it across the road, as the traffic was fast and thick, and of course a barrier in the middle blocked the way. Did the council or whoever was in charge of these things expect us to jump over it?

I must have looked confused, because Ben elbowed me in the ribs and pointed to our left. 'Down there, come on,' he said, sighing at me in frustration. It was something I'd never encountered before, a tunnel, going underneath the road, with an ?unsettling mixture of dank urine-tainted air and sodium glow. I didn't like the look of it, and it seemed exactly the sort of place you could expect to be stabbed, but there was no way I was going to let Ben know I was afraid. So I went down the slope after him and into the tunnel, certain that we were being watched and followed as I entered a subway for the first time. It may sound bizarre, but it really was something I'd never come across before. This was simply a thing they did not have or need in Quireley. Even by the standards of the time I suppose I was a sheltered child. Ben walked ahead, taking giant strides with his long pipe-cleaner legs that I could not hope to match. Silhouetted against the light from the other side, he turned. 'Are you coming or what?' he said over his shoulder. I scurried along, my dignity trailing far behind me, until we emerged onto another slope leading up, taking us into what turned out to be the market car park.

'We'll go through the market, it's quicker,' said Ben, who now seemed resigned to the fact that I clearly didn't know where I was, and had apparently never been outside ever, and that he had to lead the way completely.

It was another world. Spoilt cabbages and oranges were at our feet as Ben took us through the market. It was bustling with trade on this grey January Saturday, a forest of anoraks and pacamacs and shell suits, with the smell of fruit and clothing damp from the drizzle. Shouts about things I didn't understand, market stuff, jokes I didn't get ricocheted off the corrugated roof. 'Ron is a coppers nark,' read some graffiti on the wall. I had never had cabbages at my feet before, and I had never come across any mention of narks except on the telly. That graffiti was the closest I'd ever got to real criminality. But what I found really strange was, well, the people. They didn't look like the sort of people you'd find in Sholeham High Street. I mean, I'd seen the working classes before, I hadn't lived totally in a shoebox, even though I hadn't seen a subway, but here in the market, en masse, they all seemed – I suppose 'damaged' is the word. The young, the old, trader or customer – there was a strange look in their eyes I hadn't ever seen, something I couldn't pin down back then, but I suppose I would describe now as a kind of matter-of-factness. I mean, and this is hard to describe, not visibly enjoying where they were, and not obviously hoping for something better, but just being. But I remember them smiling and laughing too, loud working-class laughing. It's confusing.

I don't know, I'm probably talking rubbish, I'm just trying to articulate how they appeared to me at the time, that's all. If you showed me the same people today, maybe it wouldn't seem that way. Anyway, the market's been totally redeveloped since then, probably looks and feels completely different. And I'm a lower-middle-class arse and that probably accounts for everything. But that's what places like Quireley do to you. However much you experience, wherever else you go, it will always seem a bit alien. Anything that's not suburban, anywhere that's not quiet, won't feel quite right. The only places that will sit right with you are places that are like where you came from. Places that are nowhere.

Ben led me over a zebra crossing. I could see that we were somewhere dark and scary, but very, very exciting. This was something new, I remember telling myself, something necessary and good. We walked past shops that had boards for windows, and signs on them indicating that they were for over-18s only, and that there was a back entrance for discretion. Along with the discovery that a copper's nark had been in the vicinity, the mere sight of these shops made me feel that I was a man. 'This way,' said Ben. 'We'll go to Underground first.'

I can only remember a few things about Underground Music now. Dark and dank, with the smell of second-hand merchandise in the air, it's long since gone, but I remember that it had posters of the type of bands that meant nothing to me on the walls, the sort of music that Neil liked, probably. I didn't really know how to behave or what to do, so I just copied Ben as he flicked through the records nonchalantly. Even though I didn't recognise half the stuff I was looking at, I picked up the records the way Ben did, slipping the inner sleeve out, then the vinyl out of that, and inspecting it for scratches. The guy behind the counter didn't pay us any attention. He just read his Melody Maker. I prayed that Ben wouldn't spot me looking at a record he didn't approve of and have a go at me. To prevent it I always looked at the rack he'd just looked at, and sometimes even the same record.

'What are those tapes in that box?' I asked, pointing to a collection of D60 cassettes with home-made photocopied covers.

'They're bootlegs.'

'They're what?'

'Never mind. Come on,' said Ben, 'let's go to Ferret's and Weasel's.' Then he walked out of the shop, not bothering to hold the door for me.

Ferrets and Weasels? Was he suggesting we go to a pub? But we were too young! Still, I'd learned from the 'Masters of the Universe' incident not to question anything Ben said, and so I followed his gigantic stride as best I could, down the street, past the porn shops, bookies and haberdasheries, until we approached another record shop.

'Ferret's', it was called. Now I was really confused. Ferret's, yes, that made sense, but why had Ben mentioned weasels?

'All right, we'll spend a few minutes in here,' said Ben. 'Then we'll go across the road.'

'What's across the road?' I asked, stupidly forgetting that I wasn't meant to ask questions.

'Weasel's, of course! For fuck's sake.' Ben grabbed me by the neck and pushed my head up to the glass of Ferret's, so that all I could see were picture sleeves on display.

'This is Ferret's!' he snapped. Then he swung me round to face the other way. 'And that's Weasel's!' There, across the road was still another record shop. 'Weasel's' said the hand-painted sign.

'Ferret's sells singles! Weasel's sells albums! They're both run by the same people! Is that fucking clear, you stupid monger?'

And something inside of me stirred. I knew at that moment that I was not as soft as Ben thought I was, or indeed as I was acting. Yes, I had not been in a tunnel under the road before, or seen many working-class people, but I knew I could cope with both and more. If I was going to survive in this new world that was opening up for me that day like a strange and exotic flower, then I was going to have to toughen up. I knew then that I didn't have anything to fear from Ben, and neither would he desert me. I could taste his loneliness in his anger and saw that he desperately needed my company, despite his unpleasantness.

'Look!' I said, as I elbowed Ben squarely in the stomach, winding him. 'Don't ever grab me like that again, OK? I know I don't know as much about these places as you do, but that's because I don't live round here, innit? Now get off my back and let's go to Weasel's cos I'm not interested in buying singles.'

Ben shifted from one foot to the other and looked to the side of him. 'No need to elbow me so fucking hard,' he mumbled. 'OK, let's fucking go, then.'

So Ben and I crossed the road, dodging the traffic that travelled so much faster than any of the cars I'd had to deal with in Quireley, to Weasel's, a record shop that would prove to be in possession of even greater magical beauty than Underground. Turned out neither of us had the money to buy anything after McDonald's, but it didn't matter. To be near the music was enough.

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Currently listening : In Search of Space By Hawkwind Release date: 2001-08-27

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Flying Saucer Rock & Roll (Chapter Two)
Category: Writing and Poetry

'Chris! Chris!'

A voice from the school gates called to me. There, a boy was waiting, gangly, blond and pale, almost albino. Neil. As always, he'd got there ahead of me, to make sure we walked home together. This being a Friday, he was no doubt also hoping that I'd invite him round for an hour or so before tea and, if my mum was in a good mood, which she usually was when Neil was there, that he'd be allowed to stay and eat with us and spend the evening. Sometimes, I admit, I wished he wasn't waiting for me, so I could be free to invite someone else round for once, or even actually go round theirs. But I never minded too much because, for all his awkwardness and occasional inconvenience, Neil was responsible for some of my happiest memories. Not so much actual specific events I could pin down, but little fleeting moments of remembered pleasure that came with Neil's face attached when they popped into my head.

Neil waved to me as I got near, beaming his usual goofy grin. 'Hi, Neil.'

'Chris, you'll never guess what!' he said, as we swung through the gates to freedom.

'Dunno, what?'

'I heard the new Morrissey single on the radio last night!'

'Really?'

'Yes! It's called "Piccadilly Palare"! It's mega!'

'Sounds . . . good.'

This was a lie. Aged thirteen, someone like Morrissey meant nothing to me other than a thing to be avoided. His music, like all that featured on the 'indie' rundown on The Chart Show, seemed either wet or poofy. Unlike metal, which was impenetrable, hard, masculine. There lay certainty and truth. But Neil loved all that indie stuff, which made me think that he might be bent, so I might not want him around so much. Especially as he seemed so desperate to hang out with me, which was beginning to strike me as a bit homo. Even though he had been my best friend for all those years, right then there were things about him that were making me uncomfortable.

'Yeah, it is,' said Neil. 'Apparently, "palare" is a secret language that gay people used to use, and that's what the song's about.'

God help me, I thought, it's definitely time for a new best friend. Still, Neil and I went way back. We were probably about six when we met. He was the new kid in school and the teacher gave me the job of looking after him and being his pretend friend while he was settling in and making proper friends for himself. But Neil never really did settle in and make proper friends. It was pretty much just me, and I guess I had that job for the next seven years, although I stopped thinking of it like that after a while. He never fitted in at school, or anywhere else, for that matter. It was as if he'd just beamed down from space, or something. Neil was plain at odds with the world. A tetrahedron in a round hole, was how he put it in one of his more reflective moments. People generally didn't like him, and he had a unique gift for getting on the wrong side of people without trying. But if you got to know him, then you'd realise he was the sweetest, most caring person you could ever meet, without a malicious bone in his body. He was just very, very odd and a bit annoying.

One time, for instance, we were in my garden, and my cousin Jo was there. It was the summer, and my mum had brought us out a jug of fizzy squash. Jo was a couple of years older than us, and mouthy, the way some girls are at that age. When Neil was in the toilet she told me that she was finding him a bit creepy, thinking that he fancied her and was trying to impress her with all the weird things he was saying. Neil was just being Neil, and at that age probably hadn't even started thinking about girls, but back then Jo thought that all boys were trying to get off with her. After he came back from the toilet, Neil said something really odd about the leaves on the trees being fish, and you could tell they were fish because you could see them wriggling about. In those days, Neil always went on about fish, thinking it was really surreal. And Jo just says, can she pour her glass of squash over Neil's head? And Neil says, sure, all right, he'd be delighted. So she picks up her glass and literally pours it all over his head. Then he's just sitting there with sticky orange squash in his hair for the rest of the afternoon, until my mum finds him and makes him wash under the tap before he goes home.

I could go on. Every so often, something that strange would happen, and half the stuff he said you could tell he thought was clever, but it was just rubbish. And it would wind you up and you'd want him to fuck off. But sometimes it would all click, and he would be really funny, and everything he said actually would be as clever as he thought it was. And that made it all worthwhile, because those moments were priceless, they really were. But right then, attending a boys' school and having your best friend get really excited about the next single by a gay pop star that was all about how gay people talked was not priceless. And to be honest, I just wasn't in the mood, and certainly didn't want a whole evening of it, especially not a Friday evening. At thirteen, I was just becoming aware of the specialness of that night, and the idea that it was meant to be spent in the pursuit of thrills of one form or another. Problem was none were currently on offer. At least not for me. As for Neil . . .

'Chris, I'm afraid I won't be able to hang out with you this evening.'

'No problem. Don't worry about it.' It was a problem, of course. If I didn't have anywhere better to be, then why should Neil, especially since the fact that I didn't was obviously his fault?

'Yeah, sorry. It's just that Scott and that lot have asked me to go round and play Dungeons and Dragons after tea.'

'Really? Didn't know you were into that sort of thing.'

'I'm not really, but I just wanted to check it out. 'Course, I know it's going to be wizards and elves and that, but I like the idea of having a game where you get to make things up. I just think it's a shame you can't have one where instead of fighting orcs and wizards, you go to the shops and get a part-time job in Sainsbury's and stuff.'

'I guess. Don't think it would catch on, though.'

'Well, it should. Then maybe people would learn to think a bit harder about the choices they make in life, that they don't have to go to work and just buy stuff all the time, that there are other things to do.'

'Everybody's got to go to work, Neil,' I said.

'Not if they're an artist or a musician or something – then their work is play.'

'Yeah, well, in the real world, not everyone gets to be one,' I snapped back. I was probably feeling a bit defensive because I still wasn't playing onstage with Joe Satriani.

'Everybody's an artist.'

'No, they're not!'

'They are, they just don't know it.'

Jesus, looking back on it, he was only thirteen and he was saying stuff like that! Incredible. Maybe he'd read it somewhere, or heard it on The Late Show or something – I don't know.

'Chris, I've just had a thought! Why don't you come and play Dungeons and Dragons tonight?'

'Oh, I can't. I've got things to do.'

'Oh, that's too bad. What are you up to?'

'Uhh . . . family meal.'

'Sounds like fun.'

'No, not really, but I've got to go.'

'Well, I'll give you a ring over the weekend sometime, yeah?'

'Yeah, sure.'

'OK, seeya!' And with that, he sprinted across the road, closer to the oncoming traffic than was sensible, and off in the direction of his house. I looked around for someone else to walk with, but there was no one I knew, just anonymous older boys in the white shirts and black jumpers of our school uniform. So I walked home alone.

The sun was low in the sky on the late January afternoon as I followed the soft bends of the suburban streets of Sholeham. Quireley, that's the suburb where I lived. Can you think of a softer, less threatening name for a place? Quireley. Quire-t-ley. Not posh or anything, lower middle class. But safe. Very, very safe, or at least that's how it felt. I'd been allowed to walk to school by myself since I was eight, my childhood pretty much free of any fear of paedophiles snatching me away into the woods, pre-teen drug addiction or drive-by shootings. A couple of videos in school about staying away from men in Ford Escorts who wanted me to eat their sweets and see their puppies, and that was it. Maybe we were the last generation whose parents weren't scared into locking us up in our homes for our entire childhoods to be dulled into obesity by PlayStation. Well, I suppose there was the Commodore 64.

I remember the sky as blue blending to gold as the sun went down. No doubt I could see my breath in front of me on that winter day as I made my way through the various Cresstons that made up much of Quireley. Cresston Road, Cresston Gardens, Cresston Crescent, where I lived. The safest, most suburban of all the streets in Sholeham, and therefore the world, or so it seemed.

You know, the funny thing about Sholeham is – well, there's nothing funny or even unusual about it, that's the thing. It's a relatively large place that isn't particularly notable in any way, even though it dates back to Roman times or something. I mean, name three famous people who come from Sholeham. Or one big rock band that started here. A famous landmark. Anything at all. The football team does all right, second division, but that's it. Well, you see my point, don't you? For a town of this size, it's remarkable in that it's spawned virtually nothing of note, nobody who's achieved anything at all in any field. Not even a decent serial killer.

So I suppose it's only fitting that all this stuff with me and Neil and music and the band started here in Sholeham, exactly because it could have happened anywhere in England. Anywhere that's nowhere, that is. And Sholeham is the capital of nowhere. Most of this country is made up of nowhere, or nowheres. What I mean is have you ever been on a slow train, on a journey that seemed to go on for ever, and watched all the stops go by, towns you've never heard of, and wondered about them? Well, from my ex?perience, for what it is, whenever I've had to step off the train into one of these places, I've found they're all the same. They have a small, pedestrianised shopping centre, where there's a Woolworths, and that's where everybody buys their music, or at least the music that Woolworths lets you buy. There's a nightclub that everyone goes to, even though it's shit. And there are houses, lots of houses, that young couples move into, then breed, and grow families, and the children of these families grow into teenagers, and a proportion of these teenagers one day decide that they want to make music just like the music they bought in Woolworths, and so they learn instruments, and form bands, and get ideas, and have their hearts broken. Sholeham's just like all these places, except it's bigger: there's an HMV, which has a wider selection than Woolworths, and an Our Price, though that's gone now, of course, and there's a range of shit nightclubs you can choose from. Other than that, it's really just the same.

Now, running my fingers through my knot of memories, looking for more threads, I find myself coming home to an empty house. Empty other than our old beagle, Bess, who gets off the chair she's sneaked onto long enough to wag her tail 'hello' before skulking off again for more illicit furniture squatting. Named after a dog in a book, I think. Now that my sister's going to sixth-form college, that's the way it usually is after school. Mum won't be home until half five, Dad not until half six. What do I do between coming home and tea? I don't know, probably watch some kids' TV that I'm beginning to feel too old for and eat crisps. What am I watching? I can't remember; what was on back then? Masters of the Universe? No, I think that was earlier. Grange Hill, no doubt. That's always on.

Shit, I don't know what I was watching, and of course it doesn't matter, but the point is that with a lot of this stuff, I'll say it happened in such and such a month and one event followed another, but I'm going to get a lot of it wrong, I expect. Things I say happened on the same day probably didn't at all. Maybe I'm even getting my years mixed up on some things. Some places probably aren't quite the way I remember them. But I'm pretty sure I'll get the gist of it all, I mean the spirit in which things were done, or at least how I perceived them at the time. Or maybe I'll get a whole load of stuff wrong, maybe nothing I have to say really means anything or is any use to me or anybody else. But this knotted bundle that clogs up my head is driving me crazy. I've got to sort it out. Separate all the threads. Find the ones I need. Throw the rest away.

I pick up the thread I'm following. It vibrates with the sound of footsteps on the path. Soon my sister will open the door, not eat her tea, get changed and go out clubbing, to my mum and dad's dismay. But they can't do anything about it really; she has a part-time job, it's her money she's spending. And they secretly both understand it's all part of growing up, it's inevitable; she's got her head on straight, and deep down they know nothing bad is going to happen to her. It's all going to be OK. But they wouldn't be good parents if they didn't pretend it wasn't and worry that she was wrecking her life in some vague, unspecified way. And me, I'll sit on my own, playing my records, dreaming of Joe Satriani and missing Neil a little bit. Wishing it was Thursday, Scouts on Thursday.

My sister pops her head round the door. 'All right,' she says, without affection. 'Mum not back yet?'

'No, not yet.' It'll be several years before I think of her as a person, with a name, Nicki, instead of just as this vague blur of bleached-blonde hair and make-up called my sister.

'I'll be wanting to watch Neighbours in a minute,' she says.

'All right,' I mumble, as all teenage boys should.

Neighbours. Now who was in it back then? Scott and Charlene would have left. Dorothy Burke. No, before her, surely? Bouncer.

Forget it. That thread ends there.


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Currently listening : Bona Drag By Morrissey Release date: 1990-12-08

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Flying Saucer Rock & Roll (Chapter One)
Category: Writing and Poetry

I heard a song on the radio the other day. I don't listen to the radio very often, but right then I wanted a bit of company, or at least the sound of another voice. I'd just had something weird turn up on my doorstep and it was freaking me out a bit. Anyway, this song, about seven minutes long it was, or seemed like it, kept on changing all the way through, like it would start out as a slushy ballad, and then it would be rocky, then all classical, then it would do another thing, like go funky or something. The song hardly had any words, though. It just went, 'Music was my first love, and it will be my last. Music of the future, and music of the past.' And that was pretty much it.

It's a silly song. This guy says he loves the music of the future as well as the past, but how does he know what the music of the future's going to sound like, let alone that he's going to love it? I mean, that song was probably written in the mid-seventies or something. What music of the future was he expecting to love? Rap? Industrial? Gabba? I don't think so, somehow.

But anyway, there I was, sorting through this weird shit inside the big fuck-off box that the Parcelforce man had woken me up to sign for at eight o'clock in the morning, and which was so heavy it had taken both of us to carry it into the flat, when that song came on the radio. And the strange thing was, even though I'd never heard it before, and it's crap and everything, it got about halfway through and I thought I was going to cry. I really did, until the weather report came on and snapped me out of it. I don't need to think that hard about why. It's obvious, to me anyway. The reason is that, and I suppose this will make me look pretty fucking stupid, I can kind of identify with that song. Not that music was my first love, because that would probably be Star Wars or trains, but it was a major part of my life for about ten years, and it affected nearly every single thing I did back then in some way. So yeah, I can understand where he's coming from. I loved it once too, so much. And then gradually, without really noticing, I stopped. It was a golden age, back when I loved music, and music, I thought, loved me. I remember how it began. But when and why did it end? Maybe it's time to find out.

I suppose hearing that song the other day must have started the train of thought that led me to want to do this, to – I nearly said make my confession. But that's not quite it, or not all of it. I do want to tell my story, though; not just to make sense of it all for myself, but also because I think people should know what happened. Maybe it might even help a few people to not make the same mistakes that I did. Fuck, who am I kidding? You can only really learn from the ones you make yourself. What happened to me will happen to somebody else tomorrow. In fact it's probably happening to hundreds, no, thousands of people, right now, up and down the country. Then a hundred times more around the world. A hundred thousand dreams, all smashed.

But I can't pretend that I don't feel a bit guilty about how some of it turned out. Mostly, I feel bad about Neil. There's so much of that shit still floating about in my head, every day, however much I try to ignore it. Now's the time to face up to it, I guess, try and make sense of it properly once and for all, get out of this rut I've ended up in. Typical Neil: you're getting along, doing your own thing, and he comes and screws your head up just by sending you something through the post. Even now, after all this time. It's a skill he has, I suppose.

So here I go. Back to the golden age.

Where did it all start for me? Music, I mean. In the womb probably, because they've proved you can hear music there, and seeing as I was born in 1976 that means I was most likely hearing Abba and Wings and Brotherhood of Man. But the first music I remember listening to, other than nursery rhymes and the theme tune to Trumpton and stuff, was 'Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head'. I had a Fisher-Price music box made to look like a radio that used to play it. You'd turn the dial to make it work, and it had the words written on the back – although I couldn't really read them, I was too young – along with a picture of two seventies kids with umbrellas splashing about in puddles. My mum used to sing it to me as it played. Burt Bacharach. What do they call music like that? Loungecore. I was into loungecore long before everyone else.

But other than that, I didn't listen to music much as a little kid. Actually, I tell a lie. I really liked John Williams. Not the classical guitarist; I mean the guy who wrote the theme tunes for Star Wars and Jaws, Indiana Jones and ET and stuff. Top tunes. If you asked me to hum any of them I could, right on the spot, as well as all the love themes and villains' tunes or whatever. Someone told me once he nicked all his ideas from classical composers like Stravinsky, and played me some to prove it. I could see what he was saying, but you can't hum Stravinsky five minutes after hearing it. John Williams, on the other hand, you can hum a good twenty years later.

And then I can't remember what music I liked after that. I was aware there was this thing called pop music, and some of it certainly had a catchy tune, but I couldn't really say I liked it. I was much more interested in my Commodore 64. Most of it I just thought was stupid, or at least I did when Neil made me laugh about it. 'Doctor, doctor, can't you see I'm burning, burning?' I mean, what's wrong with this doctor – is he blind? I remember Neil saying that. He was as sharp as fuck when he wanted to be, even though he was away with the fairies. Aside from that, I got a few albums on cassette as Christmas presents, like Now That's What I Call Music and UB40 and things, though I can't say I was particularly into them. But sometime around the age of twelve, that was when I began to get it. It all started then really, with Christian heavy metal.

Now, don't get me wrong, I was never a Bible-basher, but hearing Stryper for the first time, it was the door to something. 'To Hell With the Devil'! 'Come to the Everlife!' 'Rock the Hell Out of You'! Those were some of their song titles. I got into them through Barry. He was my older sister's boyfriend back then. I liked him, he was a good bloke. I thought so at the time, anyway. He was quite shy and quiet, but nice to be around. He looked pretty weedy, wore big glasses with thick blue frames, like you used to get in the eighties, though they didn't really go with the heavy metal gear he wore, with the logos of his favourite Christian bands sewn onto everything and drawn on the back of his fake leather jacket. Barry had a mullet, a classic one, but he usually tied it back into a ponytail. He was interested in computers, I mean knowing how to program them and stuff. And he was a God-botherer, obviously. Anyway, one time he was round and he played me his Christian heavy metal, and I just went mad over it. He lent me a load of his records – Petra, Sacred Reign and Stryper, of course, and others – but made me promise not to tape them, because that was stealing and stealing was a sin. I taped them anyway. He told me that he used to be into normal heavy metal before he became a Christian, but then God told him that it was the Devil's music, so he didn't listen to it any more. He still had all his old records, though, for some reason. I begged him to let me hear some, but he wouldn't for ages.

Then one day he finally said yes, because he'd decided I ought to know what to guard myself against in the future. He played me Metallica, . . . And Justice For All, and oh my fucking god. I mean, it was just fucking unbelievable. This was music with the power of John Williams's Darth Vader theme, but with guitars. Really fucking loud fucking amazing guitars. And they looked like gods. Screaming, hairy gods, their thick muscular arms pounding down on their instruments in the photos from the magazines Barry showed me, which he'd guiltily stashed in a drawer like they were pornography. Christ, they made Stryper look stupid all of a sudden, with their matching yellow and black uniforms like fucking Christian metal-playing bees. All the while, Barry was telling me how the music glorified Satan, and how I should keep this in mind if I ever heard it again, but his argument didn't make sense and anyway I couldn't care less. I remember him saying that even bands like Fleetwood Mac were glorifying Satan in their music, I think because they wrote a song about a witch or something.

Next time I saw Barry, he said it had been wrong of him to play me that kind of music, that he was very sorry, and God had told him to go into the garage and smash up all his old records with a sledgehammer. He started getting a bit weird round about then and my sister broke up with him. I bumped into him in the street a few times, then I never saw him again. My sister heard that he'd ended up losing his faith and having a mental breakdown. Sad really.

Anyway, after hearing that Metallica album I got myself a paper round, so I had money to buy my own copy, plus a lot of their back catalogue. I listened to my records every day after school and drew the Metallica logo on my pencil case and all my folders. Pretty soon, kids would just come up to me and sort of say, 'Oi, mush. Didn't know you were into Metallica.' Then they'd say, 'Have you heard such and such?' and I'd say no, and they'd say they'd do me a tape. It was like a secret society, and you'd never know for sure who was a member because school rules meant you couldn't grow your hair over the collar. But every so often you'd see a kid pass round a copy of Kerrang! and then you'd know they were one of 'us' too. Soon I was being lent loads of stuff. The softer bands like Poison, Queensrÿche and Bon Jovi reminded me of Stryper, but with decent non-religious lyrics, and I liked that, but it was really the harder stuff that I got into. Iron Maiden, Megadeth, Anthrax, Slayer. Thrash metal, mostly. Then one day this kid, John, told me I had to listen to someone called Joe Satriani. He said that he was a great guitar player and he'd do me a tape. He'd want it back at the end of the week, though.

I hung on to that tape all through the Christmas holiday, and by the end of it Joe Satriani was even more exciting for me than Metallica. It was all instrumental. Hard-rock guitar solos played very fast. It all sounded complex and very, very hard. I was obsessed with the music and, I suppose, the man. When I wasn't listening to him, I was thinking about him, fantasising about what Joe Satriani was like, and how it would feel to be able to play guitar that well, what it would be like, in fact, to be him. And while I was listening to that album, over and over again in my bedroom until my sister burst in to tell me to stop bloody playing it, I realised I had to learn to play guitar, and get really, really good. Then maybe, one day, I might even be good enough for Joe to want to jam with me. And then maybe he'd want us to form a band together, him and me both taking solos. Why not? If I could play as well as he could, then it would be only right, he'd have to let me, wouldn't he? And we'd be mates, and hang out together all the time, playing pool and discussing technique, and maybe even snogging ladies occasionally, although that was something I hadn't begun to get my head round yet. It was all just a silly little boy's daydream, but it wouldn't leave my mind. Not only that, it had a power most things that pass through a kid's head don't have. The power to actually make me get off my Commodore 64-playing arse and do something about it.

Now wouldn't you know it, I found out from another metaller kid that you could take guitar lessons at school, beginning straight after the Christmas holidays, and they'd even lend you an instrument to practise on. The lifelong comradeship of Joe Satriani was surely within my grasp. I don't think anybody's been as excited about their first music lesson with a peripatetic teacher as I was that Tuesday, and not just because it got me out of German with the terrifying Miss Rand, who stank of cigarettes and could make the hardest lads break down into an uncontrollable stutter just by looking at them.

I had imagined rows of metaller kids, hunched over their guitars as a cool long-haired guy in leather took them through 'Master of Puppets'. It didn't turn out like that. Firstly, we all had to play on folk guitars with nylon strings wound so tightly you couldn't bend them even if you had a crowbar. Also, we were learning from a book called The Complete Guitar Player, by some bloke called Russ something-or-other. There weren't any Metallica songs in that book, just songs by people my mum liked, like Cat Stevens and John Denver. The guitar teacher was called Mr McDiarmid, and was from Yorkshire or the West Country or somewhere. He had bales of hay for sideburns, and used to go on about how 'Streets of London' was a really great song that we just had to learn so we could entertain our friends at parties and impress the girls, who he called 'lasses', that were all waiting just round the corner for us when we started 'wooing' in a few years. We couldn't get him to realise we wouldn't have any friends, let alone 'lasses', if we played that old crap.

There were four of us in the class to start with, and by the second week there were two. Me and a lanky boy called Ben, who had sandy hair and a centre parting, metaller-style. He used to walk in, slouch down and put his feet up on another chair and stretch out, sighing at the effort of it all. Then he'd yawn constantly, until his guitar distracted him and he came to life. He was good. Better than the rest of us. He could play stuff he'd worked out for himself and everything. He wasn't exactly communicative, but by the third week, we were just about on speaking terms. I think it's fair to say that Ben was one of those people who just have something about them, and you know that they're special in some way, despite the fact that, guitar-playing aside, he was obviously very lazy. I realise now that Neil had that too, in some weird way.

Anyway, after three weeks of these bloody guitar lessons, I was almost ready to go back to Miss Rand and take my chances. Already, our spirits were nearly broken and dreams shattered by the constant down-strumming on nylon strings without even a plectrum for protection. I mean, it was almost like we were in a folk-guitar concentration camp. We had to find an escape route.

Well, we found one. Ben told me his older brother could play rock guitar, and he knew about something called a power chord. Instead of having to learn all the different shapes for the different chords, you just learned one, and ran your hand up and down the fretboard to get all the different chords. He said that his brother would be willing to show us both how it was done. If I went round his house on Saturday afternoon, he said, his brother would be there then. 'OK,' I said, and we went to tell Mr McDiarmid we wouldn't be coming to guitar lessons any more.

'Oh well,' he sighed, 'that'll be another thirty quid a month sup money I'll be doing wi'out.' He said we had to give the guitars back to the school, but we never did, and no one ever asked for them again.

So that's how it began, the golden age. With Christian heavy metal, a borrowed tape of Joe Satriani and nylon guitar strings. If only I'd realised, I would have treasured every second, bottled the air. But the best times rarely announce themselves as such, and it's rarer still for them to let you know that they're over.

A beginning. Now I must pick through all the threads of my memory, all the paths through the knotted jumble of thoughts and sensations that make up my life, and find those that might lead me through. Out of all of them, it is the path marked 'Neil' that beckons.

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Currently listening : To Hell with the Devil By Stryper Release date: 1991-07-16

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Website update
Category: Writing and Poetry

I've updated my website at richardblandford.com. There you'll find details of my books, links to interviews and articles PLUS The Shuffle, something so radical and innovative that in years to come people will be lying about using it even when they didn't, like they do about attending that Sex Pistols gig at Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976; the deception towards their friends, family and loved ones eating away at their souls, draining all life of its colour and meaning. Don't let this happen to you! Go to richardblandford.com and enter... The Shuffle.

Currently listening : Tour de France Soundtracks By Kraftwerk Release date: 2003-08-19

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Devil in the Rafters (a short story)
Category: Writing and Poetry

DEVIL IN THE RAFTERS

Hazel led Alice to the cupboard under the stairs.

'Come on,' said Hazel, 'Mum says we have to stay in here for a bit.'

'But I don't want to!' said Alice, tugging her sister's skirt away from the cupboard door. 'It's dark in there and I'll get scared!'

'We have to!' said Hazel, grabbing Alice and pulling her in after, flicking the switch that lit up the bare bulb, illuminating the old boxes, the carpet sweeper and the dust. 'Look, it's not dark, there's a light.'

'But why do we have to stay in here?' cried Alice. Hazel backed herself into the tiny space, placing her sister on her lap.

'I can't tell you, it's a secret. Look, I don't want to be in here either. I was watching Kojak before all this happened.'

'I want to get out!' Alice started to scream and reached for the door.

Hazel shushed her and held her back. Alice screamed and struggled all the more.

'All right, Alice, I'll tell you, I'll tell you!' said Hazel. 'Be quiet now! I can't tell you if you're screaming. Stop it, it's cheeky.'

Alice quieted down.

'What does cheeky mean?' she asked.

'It means… being naughty but not so naughty you're bad.'

'I was asleep in my bed. You woke me up, that was cheeky.'

'No, it wasn't. Now do you want to know why we're in here or not?'

'Yes, I think so.'

'It's the prowler,' Hazel said in a near whisper, 'he's in the loft.'

'What's a prowler?' asked Alice.

'He's the man who frightened Auntie Julie the other day. You know, he went tap, tap, tap on her window.'

'Oh, him. What's he up in our loft for?'

'I don't know,' said Hazel.

'Do you think he wants some tea?' said Alice.

'He doesn't deserve any tea, breaking into people's lofts like that!'

'I think he'd like some tea.'

'He's not having tea, because he's a naughty man!'

'He's not a naughty man. He's a cheeky man,' said Alice to herself. 'Who's that cheeky man? Cheeky, cheeky, cheeky man.'

'Stop saying that,' said Hazel. 'It's annoying.'

'You said it first.'

'Yes, but it's annoying when you say it.'

Alice started to push the carpet sweeper back and forth with her foot. Hazel slapped her leg.

'Don't!' said Hazel. 'He'll hear!'

'Who will?'

'The prowler, then he'll come and get us.'

Alice looked thoughtful.

'How do Mum and Dad know he's up there?' she said.

'Have you ever been in the loft, Alice?' said Hazel.

Alice shook her head.

'Well, because our house is old –'

'How old is it?'

'A hundred years old!'

'That's very, very old isn't it?'

'Yes, it is. And our type of house is called a terraced, which means they're all joined together. We learned that in school, and that means –'

'Will I learn it in school too?'

'When you go to big school. But I'm trying to tell you something, so stop interrupting. Now, because all the houses in our road are from olden times, they don't have a loft all to themselves like new houses.'

'Susan lives in a new house.'

'Bully for her. So anyway, there's just one big loft, and you can get to it from all the houses. That's why they want us all to move out, I guess, to knock them all down and put up something more modern. So everybody who lives here all have to agree not to mess about above someone else's house. Now, Mum said some of the folks from a few doors down, the Doyle's and the Warner's, heard someone up in the loft above their houses, running about and laughing. So they went up, and there he was - the prowler. They tried to catch him, but he was too fast. Then Mrs Doyle went down the Anchor and got everybody. Now they're all up there, even Dad. They've been up there for such a long time, and they still haven't got him, listen!'

Alice listened. The sound of thundering feet filtered through the barrier of the staircase. Then there was an awful loud boom, followed by deep male voices calling a name.

'Oh my,' said Hazel, 'I think Mr Doyle's falling through our ceiling!'

'Cheeky Mr Doyle,' said Alice.


'Cheeky skip! Skipping cheeky!'

Alice was playing in the patio garden, jumping a skipping rope. Every so often, as well as exploring the possibilities of her new word, she would let out a little girl laugh, amused by something evident to her alone. The little space had no greenery, other than a row of plants in pots lined up against the back fence where the sun could catch them, the ground covered by eight paving stones. Alice would stand on one, then another, and skip a certain number of times, following patterns and rules she never shared with anybody, until each stone had been incorporated into her ritual. She had begun it that summer, and had carried it on into autumn. Most days, it would take less than quarter of an hour to perform, but that morning, she had been out for much longer, the ritual more elaborate, and seemingly more pleasurable to her than usual.
Hazel appeared in the doorway eating an apple, shifting her weight impatiently from one leg to another.

'Guess what I've been doing?'

Alice did not have time to answer.

'I've been listening to Dad and Mr Warner talking while they were repairing the hole in the bathroom ceiling that Mr Doyle made when he fell through the roof. They didn't know I was there, but guess what they said? They said, the prowler, well he ain't no normal prowler. He ain't normal at all. I mean, it's unbelievable. Amazing! If one of the boys at school had said it I'd say they were divvy but Dad and Mr Warner said it to so it must be true. You see, the thing is, when they were chasing him, he could move faster than anyone, I mean, faster than the fastest runner at the Olympics. And he can jump too. He can jump right over people's heads and halfway down the loft. That's why they couldn't catch him last night. And not only that, he don't weigh anything. When Mr Doyle accidentally slipped off a beam in the loft and landed on the insulation, he fell right through. He's going to have his foot in plaster for weeks. But the prowler, he was running anywhere and everywhere, and he didn't fall. All the time he was laughing. But the really weird thing was, once he'd run around the lofts all evening, he just disappeared into thin air! One minute he was there, the next minute – poof - gone! Everybody saw him just go.

'Supernatural, Dad called it, which I think means like a ghost, or a goblin! But a real one, not like a fairy story, probably an alien. And he looks really strange too, they were saying. He's all long and thin, every bit of him. Even his chin is long and pointy! And he was wearing a cape, like in olden times. And his eyes are big and red and glow in the dark! Even when you can't see him, you can always see his eyes.

'Then Mr Warner said it's not the first time this has happened, that his granddad who's dead now remembered him from when he was a boy. He's been around these parts for years, up north too as well, and not just for tens of years, but hundreds! He's got a name, 'Spring-Heeled Jack', because he can jump about so much, like he's got springs in his shoes. But Mr Warner reckons… he reckons he's the Devil!'

Alice stopped skipping. 'He's not the Devil,' she said.

'Why not?' said Hazel.

'Because the Devil does naughty things,' said Alice, 'and the man in the loft wasn't doing naughty things, just cheeky ones.'

'He was too! He was where he shouldn't have been, and made Mr Doyle fall through the roof!'

'Well, you are naughty. You listened to Dad and Mr Warner talking. I'm telling on you.'

'That's not naughty,' said Hazel. 'It's just… well, you know. Anyway, Mr Doyle reckons he has cloven hooves instead of feet, and that's what the Devil has! They found his footprints on some rafters, like he'd run on them upside down. Burnt on to them, they were!'

Alice picked up her rope and began to skip again.

'And guess what else?' said Hazel.

Alice said nothing.

'It's not just Aunt Julie's window he's been tapping on. He's been tapping on other people's too. But get this. On their bedroom windows! And they've been seeing him jump about on the rooftops, going from one side of the road to the other! You know, I bet you a million pounds he is the Devil.'

Alice skipped several more times, before coming to a rest.

'I don't think he is the Devil, you know,' she said. 'He's just a bit cheeky.'

'And how would you know?' snapped Hazel.

Alice said nothing.

'You shouldn't say anything at all if you don't know what you're talking about,' said Hazel, throwing her apple-core onto the ground and stomping back inside. Alice stared at the apple core, then walked towards it.

'Cheeky Hazel. Cheeky apple. Who's that cheeky? I'm not cheeky. You are cheeky! Everybody's cheeky. Cheeky. Cheeky. Cheeky man.'

She babbled as she picked up the core and threw it in a plant pot, before returning to her skipping, laughing again at something in the barren garden that amused her.


'They're definitely going to catch him,' said Hazel, as she and Alice walked home from school, the grey sky darkening as autumn slipped into winter. 'Everybody's looking for him, even the police, though they have to keep quiet about it so people don't get too scared, but haven't you noticed there's been a copper round here everyday this week?'

'They're not going to catch him,' said Alice, her voice a playful singsong.

'Of course they will,' said Hazel. 'They'll shoot him down with guns and helicopters and aeroplanes, kaboom! before he can disappear. They're going to catch the Devil, right here in our street.'

'Naughty planes. Won't catch cheeky man!' said Alice, shaking her head and smiling to herself.


Alice was standing by her bedroom window, looking out on the tiny patio divided into squares of stone, itself one of many little squares stretching out to the left and right, sandwiched between the back of one row of terraced houses and another. If observed, she would have appeared once again lost in her own little girl world, talking to herself, giggling at nothing. 'Cheeky gardens and cheeky houses with naughty people all inside. Who's that cheeky? Cheeky man.' She did not seem to hear her sister as Hazel flung open the front door and ran up the stairs calling her name.

'Alice,' she cried, running into the bedroom. 'Mrs Warner's just ran down the road saying they've got him! They've caught Spring-Heeled Jack!'

'No they haven't,' said Alice.

'They have!' said Hazel. 'They've cornered him in the tyre place next to the petrol station. He was on a roof and someone saw him and so the coppers and everyone from the street chased him, and he ran off, and down the side of a building! Loads of people saw it! Then he jumped over some walls and ran into the tyre place and into the workshop. And that's where he is now, in a corner behind a big pile of truck tyres. He can't get out. Everybody's there, come on!'

Alice just carried on looking out the window.

'He's not there,' she said.

'He is!' said Hazel. 'Mrs Warner says he looks frightened, like he wants to disappear but he can't. They're really going to catch him!'

'No, he's not there.'

Hazel grabbed Alice by the shoulders. 'Come on, Mum said I can't leave you –'
She did not finish her sentence. For she found herself looking into a pair of red eyes, as a slender finger emerged from out of the folds of a black cape and tap, tap, tapped at the window pane, while another finger went to meet a pair of shushing lips, that broke into a hideous grin as a long, pointed chin rocked back and forth with laughter.

Hazel screamed and fainted, crumpling on the floor of the bedroom. Alice watched her fall, then turned back to the window, and waved. 'Bye bye, cheeky man!' she said. He was already away, jumping over the roofs of houses many streets in the distance and over the horizon, his laughter lingering behind him, until it too was gone.

Alice turned to the heap of her sister by her feet.

'See,' she said, 'I told you they wouldn't catch him.'

Then she picked up her skipping rope, and went to play in the little grey square of the garden, a pair of cloven hooves scorched in a merry skipping motion on each and every paving stone.

© Copyright Richard Blandford 2008

Currently watching : Amazing Journey: The Story of the Who Release date: 2007-11-06

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Chance Meeting (a short story)
Category: Writing and Poetry

CHANCE MEETING

He saw him down at the sea front on a bench, looking out on the ocean, wrapped up against the cold.

'Is it really you?' he said.

'Yes,' said the other, 'it's really me.'

'How many years has it been?' he said, lowering himself down onto the bench beside him.

'Fifteen? Twenty?' said the other. 'Does it matter?'

'I guess not,' said the first. 'So how've you been?'

'I expect you want me to say that I've been ok,' said the other, 'but if I did I'd be lying. The fact is, soon after I left school, I started hearing a nagging, persistent voice in my head, winding me up, sending me crazy, constantly criticising everything I did; calling me weak, pathetic, a passive little queer who'll always let himself be fucked. I lived with it for years, until it crossed over from being merely an inner voice, clearly part of my thoughts, to being a full auditory hallucination, something as real to me as the sound of your voice now. I finally went on medication, and though it dulled it, it could not shut the voice up completely. While the drugs enabled me to function, when I was on them, I barely felt alive. Then I heard about a radical new therapeutic approach to my condition, involving no medication, which encourages the sufferer to actually listen to what the voice is saying. It should be thought of as having a purpose, we are told, of it being there for a reason. Most importantly, as part of this treatment, we try to identify the voice, and work out if there was anybody that once said these things to us that are being played in our head, over and over again. And I realised, as I underwent this therapy, that the voice was you. Or at least, it was your voice. These were the things you said to me, the names you called me, just after we made love.'

The first was silent, his head in his hands.

'I'm so sorry,' he said, finally. 'I only said those things because I was disgusted with myself. They were never anything to do with you.'

'I know that,' said the other, 'but they stayed with me all those years, tearing at me, undermining me, haunting my life. It's only when I realised their source did they finally go away. You have no idea what it was like.'

'Actually that's not quite true,' he said. 'I too have heard a voice constantly these years past. My voice calls me names like 'hypocrite', 'liar' and 'coward.' It kept on shouting at me to 'come out of the closet like a man', even after I finally did. I too spent years on medication, feeling dazed and stupid, before I signed up to the same radical therapy as you. There I discovered the origin of my voice. It was you. These were the things you said to me, responding to what I'd said to you, all those years ago, when I felt disgusted, after we'd made love.'

The other laughed.

'What's so funny?' said the first.

'We haven't seen each other for all these years,' said the other, 'but it turns out we were never really apart!'

He laid his hand softly over that of the other, and together they sat, their eyes closed, listening to the waves.

© Copyright Richard Blandford 2008

Currently reading : The Sound and the Fury By William Faulkner

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Fabrication no. 4 (Joke) (a short story)
Category: Writing and Poetry

FABRICATION NO.4 (JOKE)

Bloke gets invited to a fancy dress party on the theme of cartoon characters. Says to the host, 'I'd like to come, but I've no idea what go as.' Host says, 'Tell you what, why not come as the Pink Panther, that'll go down well.' 'Right you are, then,' says the bloke, 'I'll do that.' Night of the party, it's in full swing, knock on the door. Host goes to open it, and standing there is this bloke, stark bollock naked. 'What the fuck are you playing at?' says the host, 'I told you to come as the Pink Panther.' 'I did,' says the bloke, 'Pink Panther don't wear no fucking clothes.'

© Copyright Richard Blandford 2008

Currently listening : Archaeology By The Rutles Release date: 1996-10-29

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Shut the Fuck Up (a love story) (a short story)
Category: Writing and Poetry

SHUT THE FUCK UP (A LOVE STORY)


Honey, I love you, but shut the fuck up. Not just now, but yes, now would be good too, but generally. You see, the thing is, I don't think you realise just how boring you are. Like last night for instance. You totally hogged the conversation, going on and on about your bike engine, then the problems with the car, and then the bloody mortgage. Nobody there wanted to hear all that! I mean, they're our friends and everything, but there are limits. Yes they were listening, but they were pretending to be interested out of politeness, and towards the end it was obvious they were finding it a strain. Some of them even