28-01-94

Brixton Academy
I check my pocket for the second time, the third time and I have the tickets. I’ve already spent the time from Beckenham Junction to Gypsy Hill unable to find them. Losing things is kinda my thing. But I’ve got them. It’s OK.

We get off the train at Brixton. We turn right, and right again. It’s dark, cold. Some men pogo out of the door of a pub as we walk past. We follow them. One has an Iron Maiden jacket on. We know we’re going in the right direction. We think. Matthew taps him on the elbow, that’s as far as he can reach. Hey you going to the gig? He is, yeah. We know where we’re going now. Matthew says I like your jacket and the guy says cheers, it fucken rocks, dun’it? And Matthew says something about Blaze Bayley or something and I zone out, I’m not metal, I’m indie, and I really don’t know what they’re talking about.

We walk down the road in Brixton, the main one, the high street or whatever, on our left we see the lights and the entrance of the Academy, skulking on a side road, and we cross and see Natalie and Jenny and Marie, who are in the year above us a school, and their already in the queue and we say hello, but then we realise that we’re not really being encouraged to jump the queue with them, so we skulk along the side of the building to the end and we wait for the queue to start moving.

Inside we get served, and get served again, and a grunge band play and we get served again, and we’re kinda tipsy, and we go and stand with Natalie and Jenny and Marie, and we stop being so shy, and Jenny starts getting off with some older guy near her, and we’re kinda jealous but we don’t say anything about it, and then another band come on, and they are PUNK and me and Matthew run down the front and jump up and down and up and down then they’re finished and it’s all too quick and sudden, and fuzzy, and we buy some more pints, and then we wait and wait and wait and the anticipation is turning into anxiety and impatience and someone says something about fucking Welsh wankers and too busy shagging sheep backstage and Matthew, who has been to some gigs before, he reckons they won’t be long ‘cos the roadies have sorted out the stage and it’s all ready and then, finally, 50 minutes, an hour, three pints of lager and lots of nervous jumping later they deign to walk onto the stage and we forgive them. We love them.

We push, spin, jump and shove: praise, incant, respond. We recite lyrics learnt by rote, by devotion. I hit the floor during Motorcycle Emptiness. I don’t think I care anymore.

Beckenham Library Gave Me Power

I grew up in the London Borough of Bromley. As a teenager, I don’t think that there could be a more dull place to exist.  Hanging out outside HMV in Bromley High Street and buying clothes in Cromwell’s Madhouse in The Glades shopping centre was as good as it got. I lived in Beckenham, where we had a swimming pool and a library. Lots of parks though, lots of parks. A townie nightclub in Beckenham which was raided for underage clientele with humorous coverage in the News Shopper, and an over-25’s night club (called ‘Jazz’) in Bromley. Slammin! I ended up escaping, at weekends and school holidays, to the exotic climes of New Cross and Camden, before moving away at n-n-n-n-nineteen.

Living there, I discovered politics. It was clear that we lived in a two-tier area, where social injustice rarely mattered to the Conservative MPs and Borough Council (I wrote to them from time to time), and there seemed to be an attempt to glorify in the ‘Victorian Family Values’ much-loved by the Tories at the time (Our local MP, Piers Merchant, he did his bit, and took a mistress, like all good Victorian gentlemen). Single-sex education was very popular there: I went to a ‘School for Boys’, a maroon-blazered comprehensive with delusions of grandeur. We played rugby and hockey. We wore suits to sixth-form.

And nothing ever happened. At all.

It just made me so angry. Like The Adverts’ Bored Teenagers we needed excitement and danger, and a reason to exist. I could’ve gone so many ways, I reckon. Ideally, I would have studied hard and all that stuff, but that was never for me. I discovered music, like The Clash and The Pistols and The Manics and The Levellers and Public Enemy and Credit To The Nation and Asian Dub Foundation and Blaggers ITA , and the NME and the Maker were full of politics and against the Criminal Justice Bill (later, Act, 1994). It was a time to get involved. I joined the Anti-Nazi League. I subscribed to private Eye and read The Guardian and The Independent every day. I went to loads of socialist festivals and drank lots and formed a band and skived off school to read books in the library and wrote polemic lyrics and bad poetry. I thought, maybe that I could change the world.

I went to Swansea University, to study politics. I was quite firebrand, very vocal about my hatred for the Conservatives and the Telegraph and The Times and The Sun, and was probably very rude to anyone who suggested otherwise. And then, on that glorious day in May 1997, towards the end of my first year, we got them out. We got them out! My first vote in a general election, and we’d got rid of the Tories. And then we all got complacent, didn’t we...

So, some fifteen years later, here we are with a Conservative-led government again. And it’s all going badly wrong again. Cuts in all the wrong places. Sleaze. Big businesses with sweetheart deals to save them billions in tax, while people at the other end of the social-scale are arguing with the government over pounds and pence. Disability benefits and social housing and education and the NHS are being cut and yet the money could be there, if there was even a tiniest swing from have to have-not. That Vodafone cash would go a long, long way to safe-guarding more public services than closing a bunch of libraries ever will...

I went to a comedy thing the other day. Are they called gigs? Or is it show? Oh, anyway, it was brilliant. And proof things haven’t changed. The opening act was a singer / poet / crazy lady with glitter in her hair called Brigitte Aphrodite. She performed a song about how growing up in Bromley is the most boring thing ever. My life flashed before my eyes. I bought her single. It is good.

Brigitte is touring with Orpington’s finest, Josie Long. Josie has over the years made a transition from comedian to political comedian, involving herself with campaigns such as UK Uncut, a pro-tax protest group who have sadly been given an undeserved reputation as anarchists, and now her own Arts Emergency organisation, fighting against cuts in Arts Education.

Josie was brilliant, and inspirational, and I left the show feeling so utterly invigorated. I can make changes. I can do things. I can change opinions. I can no longer afford to be complacent. I’ve never known any public figure to share all my political viewpoints, from the militancy brought on by the Royal Wedding to the love of Nye Bevan.

Socialism, as a pure form, is essentially being nice to other people, and sharing what you have. I encourage my two-year-old kid to do these things all the time. I hope he never forgets.

Bands I Love: #2 Art Brut

Art Brut are a ramshackle bunch of chancers who met in dives and bus-stops and Deptford pubs and at school and formed a band (at which point in any Art Brut article it is vital for the writer to insert the lyric ‘THEY FORMED A BAND’ in brackets to show you’re down with the kids. But I’m not, so I won’t).

They have recently been locked in recording studio by Frank Black/Black Francis/That Fella from The Pixies for a fortnight, and have just come out clutching the master-tapes for an album that is dirty and happy and melancholy and fighty and funny and reflective. And rocks.

It’s called BRILLIANT! TRAGIC! and as a title, it’s fairly accurate. It is also a landmark in indie-rock circles – it features vocalist Eddie Argos’ singing debut. After three albums of talk-singing (his natural singing voice – it’s not irony), he sings all pretty and reverbed and sensitively. It’s kinda cute.

What do you mean you have no idea who Eddie Argos is? He’s like seven-foot tall, but not in a stringy, bandy-legged Joey Ramone way, but in a man-giant way. He’s a comic-book geek, and yet a Jägermeister and red wine fuelled rock’n’roll party animal.

‘Girls don’t like him, Boys wanna fight him’ he claimed on the song These Animal Menswe@r, but a: have you seen his rather beautiful girlfriend, b: only that guy from Bloc Party wanted to fight him, and c: seriously, his girlfriend is very lovely. Christ, this guy had a proper spiv moustache and pork-pie hat phase, yet still is clearly cool.

He’s the lead singer in about a million side-projects and spin-off bands including Everybody Was In The French Resistance... Now!, Art Goblins, Spoiler Alert!, and Glam Chops, despite his previous lack of actually singing. He does it on charisma, and stage presence, and generally having lyrics that are witty, punning, realist, funny, heartbreaking, familiar and tragic. And often brilliant. He’s equally foppish and foolish, lithe and lumbering, rock star and humble indie-kid.

Eddie Argos is not his real name. His real name is Edwin Argos. He prefers the more informal ‘Eddie’. The rest of the band have suitable made-up names, too:

* There’s Freddy Feedback on bass (a girl called Freddy!), the German bassplayer, who sings along microphone-less all show long.

* Ian Catskilkin (a made-up name and he chooses ‘Ian’! Hilarious!) is the guitarist, a man who has been hit with a widdle stick, and yet knows when to rein in his rocking for some nice little melodies.

*Jasper Future (real name Jeff Fulcherington-Smyth) holds the rhythm guitar, upon which he often plays the right chords, inbetween doing backing vocals and precision pointing, in the air and at the crowd. He also does a really good ‘wait for it’ in the quiet bits of songs.

*Mikey Breyer (real name Mike Breyer – the ‘y’ is far more rock) is a stand-up drummer. Not in a comedic way, but in a standing up to play drums way. Also German.

From a post-modernist point of view, Eddie’s self-referential lyrics are not a vain or desperate attempt at meta, but are clever and genuinely warming. As he ages through the albums we leave the teenage boy still in love with Emily Kane; to a young man to idealistic to settle down – ‘People in love lie around and get fat/ I don’t want us to end up like that’; to a singer on a rock’n’roll cliché mission ‘Parents/ Please/ Lock up your daughters’; and finally get to meet the grown-up-ish Argos who now lives in Berlin with his partner ‘People in love lie around and get fat/ I think I’m OK with that’.

Did I do the ‘formed a band’ (they formed a band) bit yet? Oh. Well, the thing is, every time I hear them I’m glad they did. An energetic and explosive live band who love nothing more than to talk about mixtapes with the kids in the audience after the show; a band who combine humour and sincerity like only the very best writers; an enjoyable stomping guitar noise, jangly and angular, melodic and rocking.

If Art Brut didn’t exist, only Eddie Argos could invent them. And I love him for it.

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www.artbrut.org.uk

http://the-eddie-argos-resource.blogspot.com/

Art Brut's BRILLIANT! TRAGIC! can be bought in all good record shops. Including this one. And iTunes and whatever the kids use for their Mp3pod things.

The Comic Book to accompany this LP, featuring work by Bryan Lee 'Scott Pilgrim' O'Malley, Akira the Don, and Jamie 'Phonogram and Suburban Glamour' McKelvie, amongst others, can be bought from here.

1977

As The Clash once sang: 'No Elvis, Beatles, or Rolling Stones / In 1977'.

Sadly I'm writing this at a time:

• Where the latter band have just had a spangly reissue of their 1972 LP Exile on Main Street enter the UK album chart at number 1.

• Where Paul 'Macca' McCartney is off on a stadium tour. I mean, he was the fricking bass-player. That's barely one step up from drummer...

• Where despite dying on the shitter, in 1977 no less, Elvis Presley is still being spotted alive, buying a fish supper in Kirsty McCall's old local chippy, no doubt.

It's as if we've learned NOTHING AT ALL from history - instead we just regurgitate it and re-enact it. I mean Christ, somehow in the UK we've managed to get a Conservative-led government in a country that hates bankers and corporate fat-cats.

Why do I care?

'Cos I was born in 1977, a year of PUNKROCK and Star Wars and the Pompidou Centre and the Commodore PET and Apple II.

A year of digital advances, musical sledgehammers, God Save The Queen (we mean it man).

And now, thirty-three years on, we're just rehashing the same old past, remaking the same movies, the same TV shows.

We're using new technology for old purposes.

We need revolution, REVOLUTION, REVOLUTION!

The Windsors, Jagger, Richards, McCartney, Ringo (no autographs peace'n'love) Starr, Cameron, Clegg, Osbourne, The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, the media companies repackaging and re-promoting tired old product just because they have decided the public will think the whole thing is a wheeze and is what we wanted.

All of you. Up against the wall. Single file now, into the safe house. Now stay there. Don't leave. Don't make contact with the outside world. Let us get on with things for ourselves.

I was born in 1977 - I don't live there.