Part One

People infrequently ask me, "What do you do?"

I tell them that I’m a DJ in a pub – it’s a factual answer, this is indeed what I do to earn a living - but it’s only partially the truth. I’m frequently tempted to say that what I do is write songs, and although it’s perhaps true only in the barest sense these days, song writing has been the one single thread of continuity in my life since I was fourteen, the thing that I’ve had with me since before I learned how to live my life the way I have over the years. So, to quote Morrissey as I frequently do, "If you have five seconds to spare, I’ll tell you the story of my life…"

I can actually remember the first two songs that I ever wrote. It was back in 1990, both of them were (I think) about the same girl, and both of them were written to the melodies of songs from the Charlatans’ debut album. Age Of Miracles was simply written to the tune of Believe You Me, while By Your Side actually incorporated some of the lyrics of Sonic, as well as the entire tune. A budding Noel Gallagher in the making, perhaps, but it was my first attempt at creating something lyrical, and there was much more still to come.

The following year I discovered girls, cigarettes, booze, and poetry, although possibly not in that order. Most of my writing over this period, the period of my GCSEs, was poetry rather than songs, although a couple of lyrics crept through. The vast majority of it is, rather unhappily to me, a load of utterly pretentious teenage wangst. I’d love to pretend I was a young Betjeman or Larkin or Sylvia Plath, but I fear I was not. Instead, I was like pretty much every other black clad teenager who though they were Jim Morrison and got pissed to prove it – I could live the life but couldn’t write for fucking toffee.

In the early months of 1992, my first band were tentatively convened. Basically, it was just me on vocals, with my friend Luke on guitar, a rocker called James on drums, and a ceaseless rotation of female bassists. The only song we could play was Smells Like Teen Spirit (although we had a fair old bash at Welcome Home Sanatorium and Enter Sandman by Metallica too) and our career was confined to drinking Diamond White in a rehearsal room made infamous by Chris Needham in his BBC Teenage Video Diary a few months later. Unsurprisingly, this collaboration between Pixies-obsessed guitarist, Doors-wannabe singer, and thrash metal-devoted drummer was doomed to an early grave. However, the thirst for rock and roll stardom was well and truly sown within yours truly, and combined with my discovering the Smiths and Joy Division, it led to a gradual influx of lyrics into my writing, as well as poetry. Although the quality was little better than before, a certain black humour was creeping in. A jauntily bitter little song called My Suicide – sample lyric: "I don’t really want to die but I really must escape her, so I’m getting back at her on a tattered bit of paper" – survives this period. Others are utterly, utterly unquotable due to extremely low quality.

When we’d finished our GCSEs, Luke and I went to the Glastonbury Festival, and were wowed by the sheer number of bands and the excitement of outdoor gigs, and vowed to form a new band in the Sixth Form, which, within a few weeks of our return to school, we had. Later named Lolita Street by our rhythm section, bassist Ian Harmer and drummer Matt Ball, this was my first ‘proper’ band, and contained my first ‘proper’ songs too. As well as some obligatory cover versions, including the predictable Purple Haze and one each from myself (the Smiths’ Cemetry Gates), Luke (The Pixies’ Debaser) and Ian (The Cure’s Killing An Arab), after a couple of months of rehearsals, we had a set of original songs ready to play.

Well, vaguely ready to play, anyway. My singing was pretty ropey at the time, which I tended to over compensate for by swearing and doing fey Brett Anderson-isms. The lyrics were of a variable quality as before, but for the first time there were a couple of gems, including the desperately melancholy View From The Bridge (nothing to do with either Arthur Miller or Kim Wilde) and Overslept - "I wish I’d overslept my whole life… I woke up this morning in pieces". Others, such as Truth and Quite A Surprise were dreadful travesties, belying the quality of the music written by Luke and Ian. Still, from somewhere we mustered the confidence to play a few gigs in 1993, including one semi-legendary one at the Royal Mail pub in Leicester, where we were bottom of a bill containing Cinnamun whom we knew from school, Diversion, and the Beautiful Losers. This was rock and roll, maaan. Or something.

However, Lolita Street’s days were numbered. Ian was older than us, and was going to University. Interest in the band waned, and song writing became arduous rather than enjoyable, perhaps because for a while, all my lyrics were about the same old thing – lost love and unhappiness.

After a tumultuous final gig at a local college, where we got a bit drunk, the sound system blew up, and I got into a scuffle with the soundman (a tosswit called Richard Knowles – probably works in sound production now, I shouldn’t wonder), Lolita Street was finally over.

Fortunately, there was much more, and much better to come. The best songs of my life were yet to be written, but they were on the way – to make a subtle reference that won’t make sense until you read my next column, they were just over the horizon…