‘The present day composer refuses to die’.

Along with Pete Ham, Tom Evans, George Harrison and Bob Dylan you have to whack in Mr. Frank Zappa. In terms of jazz he was ruthless. If you have never listened to Zappa then you have left yourself out. He was beautiful with his long hair and his moustache and his imperial and he was filthy.

Frank Zappa was one of the best musicians of modern times. No question about it. He nearly killed Steve Vai with his criticism but he knew what he wanted and he made sure he got it.

I remember when he got stabbed up in Camden when I was listening to ‘Hot Rats’ and looking at ‘Weasel ate my flesh’ in record shops.

When Frank died of prostate cancer I was very sad. As I recall he spent a bit of time with some Tibetans and with Van Morrison but he was so ill he couldn’t even stand up.

When Frank died I think a little piece of me died too.

But there you go. Have a listen here and tune in to a musical genius with a kind and lovely voice. It will only take an hour of your time. Tune in here.

Here’s to JG and here’s to Dorrie.

This spell in my life has been quite bleak. The forests are dark but I still press on like a towel. I carry on and I won’t give up because I am so stubborn.

Your messages of support have really helped me.

‘Little drops of rain, crystal on the pane’.

I saw one of my Sri Lankan friends today and he told me what my hands together and nodding meant. ‘Are you born yet?’ is what the gesture means. You have to think about it for quite a while to understand it. The Buddhist greeting has the hands clasped on the forehead.

I don’t really care. I have cuts all over me from when I don’t remember. Two on my left little finger, two on my left forearm, one on my right elbow.

Be good.

Hands together and a nod in your direction.

Are you born yet?

I used to know this bloke. He was a brother of a friend of mine. I saw him in Berlin. And now he’s ill.

When I was a boy I used to muck about with the Berlin Phoenix which was a motorcycle gang. So I used to roadie for them and all that. Mark turned up.

He told me this amazing story about when he was out and got stopped by the provos. He had a gun in his shoulder holster. He poked the gun up through the top of his sleeve. Kiddie could see the gun, poking through his clothes.

Fucking nightmare.

Little bastard waved him through. He could see the gun and he knew that his head was going to get ripped off. What a shame.

I have done a lot of things and I have seen a lot of things that you don’t ever want to see or think about. I have been in the places that you will never be.

And now Mark is dying.

It’s such a fucking shame.

Mark, if you ever read this, I loved you. The Berlin Phoenix’s’ss’s were great and so were you. Take this to the end, my friend.

Quite a night.

When I awoke it was in the small hours. The sky so dark and nothing coming in to the carpet where I lay under the front door. It was everything and nothing.

I thought about Nick Drake.

Would you love me for my money
Would you love me for my head
Would you love me through the winter
Would you love me ’til I’m dead
Oh, if you would and you could
Come blow your horn on high.

This is the third verse of Northern Sky. I don’t actually care whether you find it upsetting or not. Nick Drake was a better man than you or I will ever be.

In the end of the world the carpet, the floor, will rise up to meet us.

Rise up, dear floor, and smother us.

I’m so ruddy cheesed off with this silly compluter that I have quite forgotten what I was going to say.
It was good anyway.

Staying up into the small hours and drinking a mixture of red wine and cider may seem like folly to you but not to me.

When my brain is free I fly. Back to Muswell Hill and the public bogs near the library. The graffiti - oh dear.

So here I sit.

Waiting for nothing except death. Waiting for the great invisible hand to clamp over my nose and mouth and choke me. Waiting for the tumours to burst so that I can drown in my own blood.

This is my reality - this is where I come from.

I am dark and I come from a dark land.

I heard this the other day and tracked it down like sniffer dog.

Everybody’s got to learn sometime.

Recent events made me think back to Kingston. I don’t know why.

When I was small I used to be taken to swim at the Coronation Baths. Looking out from the steamy window of the car I saw the Fascist lightning strike in a circle painted with a brush on the opposite wall. When I asked my mother what it was she seemed to ignore it and, so, I did too. Her family were immigrant stock and piled into the East End of London.

The wall has gone now. The baths have gone. In the baths were little pictures of a supposedly dead girl in a ruffled costume in the brave hands of a lifeguard. No petting or smoking or divebombing or running or….

That’s what the rules said. That’s where I learned to swim underwater. From the first horrible gasps I learned how to use water; I learned what it meant. Now it holds no fears for me because I know it through and through. I can go into the canal and right under a boat and still get myself back out.

In the baths at Kingston we used to have a glass of hot Ribena and a bun that had some horrible mock cream inside. It was lovely.

A few years later I went back there when the baths were boarded over and bands played. I saw Arthur Brown and when he was into his set some drugged-up something approached him and asked him to play his hit, ‘Fire’.

As far as I recall, Arthur put a shoe on his head and played the trombone.

Times have been hard.

Underneath the weather, rain on the windows and the balcony, illness and the non-stop medicine. Appointments and agoraphobia.

But, today, something really good happened.

In a very odd way, a while ago, someone showed me a book and I knew who had written it. Someone who suffered the same school that I did and someone I wanted SO hard to be sucked into the contrails of their life. Popular, funny, clever, lots of friends, had a car and a little older than me.

I was in orbit around Rick for, I think, one summer and today I met him again for the first time in over thirty years.

There was a lot of fat got chewed. Thinking about it now there was a lot more I should have said and, of course, asked. I was too stunned that he had agreed to meet me. We have a fair few mutual acquaintances so that gave us some food for thought and then my memory kicked in and I think we were both surprised about how much I remembered from what was only really a flash in the century that we have built between us.

The Hautboy, Snitch, Bishop’s Tipple, Daisy, white Ford Escorts, camper vans, black coffee, the sandpit, the Stepping Stones, Dads and Mums and places where we used to live, the uncrowned kings of Cobham.

Tell you what, it may be thirty years and a bit but we fitted together like a spanner on a nut.

Call me the nut, I don’t care. Rick is a great bloke and I had a lovely time being, once again, in his company.

I was loafing about and having a free read in the mags section. There was a mag that promised an article about Nick Drake so I opened it up to have a look.

On the front, where the contents are listed, I saw an advert for the new Manic’s album.

The artwork made me want to do a handstand and start crying.

If I stayed up all night, scratching my head, for the next hundred years I will never be able to paint like this or even think of the thing to start with.

The ad. that I saw didn’t have the font screamed across it.

It is one of the most beautiful pictures that I have ever seen.

What a treat.

Dance around the room. Go on. Jig about.

Gary and Mo were well established. Top comedy duo. Every night there were fans outside the door wherever they played.

Mo turned the greasy brass handle to the dressing room and saw, immediately, that Gary had been there for a while.

For fuck’s sake.

Gary was lying on the floor and his trousers looked damp. He was breathing. He still had a pulse. There was a half hour before curtain-up.

“Don’t do this to me. Don’t do it.”

It wasn’t as if this was the first time and it probably wouldn’t be the last. The bastard. Mo knew what Gary had done, he’d been out on the streets again and then hit the bloody bottle because he couldn’t stand himself. Mo couldn’t stand him either. The act worked because it worked.

Imagine a tent. A wigwam or whatever. There is a pole that holds the whole thing up and there is a dressing that covers it. Without the pole the flysheet falls down and without the pole the covering just lies in the mud. Thus Gary and Mo. But the pole needs the cover to make a tent.

A knock at the door; ‘Twenty minutes’.

Mo trod carefully. Where the idea had come from he didn’t really know. How the hat pin had got into his hand he didn’t really know. It was from the costumes but he had a more urgent need than keeping his hair on. He kicked Gary over onto his back and tried to work out where his heart was. Bottom of the sternum and about seven fingers up. About one inch over from the cleft in the chin.

The pin went in so easily.

“I warned you.”

Mo finished dressing and stuck the pin into his wig. He was still in the wings when his sleeve was tugged but he didn’t know anything about it. Gary what?

In the face of the tragic event the show could not go on. The theatre manager had asked if there was a doctor in the house and Mo had busked a bit of comedy and played the fool before he broke down.

The policeman was an Inspector or something.

“I understand you were the last to see him”

“Well, dear. You’ll have to ask half of Old Compton Street before you ask me.”

Long, long time ago,
I can still remember how this used to make me cry (laughing),
And I knew if I had my chance,
That I could make the people laugh,
err.

Apologies to Don McLean but let’s give a big, warm, ‘Out of my head’ welcome to Mr Felix Dexter!

When Harry got to the station it was well after closing.

Out on the platform the wind whipped and Harry could feel the CCTV on him. This was no way to live.

He had the cardboard under his arm and the newspapers in his rucksack. He had no food, no money, nothing to drink. He had nothing.

At the end of the platform he took off the rucksack and squeezed through the gap between the concrete and the wire. It was easy for him; he only weighed nine stone. He pulled the rucksack through but the effort was too much and he fell. As he went down the embankment, in slow-motion, the concrete came up and he caught the edge of it with his face. One of his teeth came through one of his lips and the metal blood filled his mouth. He was sliding.

Sometime later he scrambled back and retrieved the rucksack. He had to reach the bridge.

Down on the lower line there was a bridge that had not been maintained. There were catacombs under there and, maybe, some peace and quiet.

Harry crawled through the Victorian brickwork dragging his pack behind him. Under a low arch he placed the cardboard as a mattress. He took the sleeping bag from the pack and covered it with newspapers. He was good at this.

Looking up, he could see sulphur, or something, seeping through and he could hear the trains rumbling overhead. He had been trained for the war and he lived on his training. Harry knew how to survive and how to kill. He knew how to die. He had seen it.

He got into the dirty sleeping-bag.

There was no need to take off any clothes or boots because tomorrow was another day and his training pushed him on.

Tomorrow he would eat.

Tomorrow he would do something.

As he died, Harry saw birds flying and he saw his mother and he saw…

He saw all the other things.