Adverb Blues

Sealing the romantic view of youth is a function of desire and slack magic. Looking back I sometimes wonder how we managed to cobble together a whole song. We were trying to be romantic poets without the access to opium and all I can remember is tramping the moors in daylight and lying around on sofas with the legs cut off at night. I suppose sometimes we must have picked up the instruments and managed to get them all to play the same rhythm and melody at the same time but none of that comes back in any clear sense. Don't ask me to tell you how any of our songs were constructed because they weren't - they seemed to arrive complete and without provenance as a sort of telepathic agreement between friends. We were slack and magic - it was a magical time without having any specific event that any of us could point at and say "that is what started it for us". We just came together and that I imagine, is the best ay that these things happen.

Of course these days, with babies and second-wives, writing songs is difficult - a solo process with solo ideas and arguments all leading to the "not as good as they used to be" lines that haunt us and turn us to prescription drugs for anxiety and depression. Not that we really need them because we could all live six lives each on the money we made from those fuzzy days but like in everything there is pressure to be good and better. We are pretentious and pompous, just like any band of our age should be. That is why we have agreed, maybe telepathically, maybe in some hazy band meeting, that we should split. None of us have any ideas of what to do next and none of us have anything other than a few laptop sequences to put towards future projects. I realise that the last picture of all of us together at some poorly-attended press-conference will be how we are remembered - sucking in our cheeks and stomachs, wondering what's for lunch and whether this is big news or just us living on past glories. Or maybe one of us will not turn up, claiming a hangover when really it is purely "new baby" lack of sleep.

And through this, Mary will walk like she is on wheels, looking the same as she did when we first got together, on a damp day, with rain and low sun, shining it's storm-filtered light through the windows into her eyes, sending the coolest shadow of her against the wall. Mary with that Epiphone semi-acoustic three sizes too big, liberated from her famous dad, and because of him the only one of us actually able to play an instrument. Here is me, plucking away at four different bass notes, not caring whether I match the key exactly as long as I hit the four beats that come from the rickety drums behind me. Over this some thin and reedy programmed organ that we like to think gives us a bluesy edge but in fact just makes us sound like kids messing about. Which is what we were. We had nothing to write about, no experiences - maybe a few hangovers or anxiety about school. And that way lies pretension, rubbish songs about how the world is a mess or how everybody hates us (when really no one cares). We might as well have sung about split-infinitives or acne and so we did. And it seemed wonderful at the time.

We did not want anything different because we did it for fun. We did not ask for bad things to happen - they just did. And from these came our best songs. I do not exaggerate that the subject of some of them could really have changed the world. It made us targets for shady branches of government - it sent Mary's mother mad and bad, raging against us and anyone else into a storm of paranoia so bad that it nearly killed her. It left me home alone, under the radar of social workers, and drove us all into bad crowds, the people who our parents warned us about, with real drugs and parties attracting the low-life and scum of the entire county. It is a tale of physics and chemistry, of glittering prizes turned down and of men with guns who were really not pretending when they threatened us. And yet for most of this we lived low and happy.

......
.
.