Part Four

Throughout the latter part of 1995 and the early months of 1996, Steve and I continued to jam together, occasionally on songs that we’d written (there is a demo somewhere of me singing and playing a song of his called Burned In The Heat) but more often than not, it was Oasis and the Stones that we were playing. Lyrics from this period were scarce, but a rather good one called Better Days has survived, and although it reads more like a poem, it was definitely intended for song.

BETTER DAYS

"Dying yellow grass at the roadside

Leaves cast adrift from swaying trees

Shaken by the last of the summer breeze

The world changes with the season

Do you remember our better days

Of happiness created a thousand ways?

Lazy afternoons under quiet skies

We talked and laughed, made a million plans

Looking forward from the day it began

Red sunsets in the cool evening air

Then into the unknown; midnight driving

Too far, too fast, but always surviving

We woke up smiling at the end of the dream

Still drunk from yesterday’s last night

Memories captured in this morning’s light

The magic we evoked seemed endless

But did you think it would stay the same

That it wouldn’t drown as tears in the autumn rain?"

Things were changing again in the early months of 1996 – Steve and I were working for a communications company installing cabling and sockets for telephone and data lines. This took us to such exotic locations as Stockport, Worthing, Cardiff, and a highly swanky hospital in Great Portland Street, London which media followers will know as the place where Victoria Beckham gave birth to Brooklyn. Every time I’m in London, I have a look at it, as somehow it is a strange totem of those days which were curiously happy – the coming home after staying a week or more in a motel, or B&B, were always something to look forward to. Back on the home front, girlfriends came and went for both of us, and both of us suffered quite a bit of heartache, although there were still many occasions for good humour, most notoriously in Worthing where we constructed an enormous phallus made from many coloured wires, and were waving it around dementedly in the comms room of the Environment Agency building when our site manager walked in. It was a great moment, and the phallus remained a fixture on the mantelpiece in my room for months afterwards.

Around the same time, Steve and I hooked up with former Lolita Street guitarist Luke Hunt and we rehearsed a few songs, including Dodgy’s Staying Out For The Summer, the Manics’ La Tristesse Durera, and Some Might Say by Oasis, although it never really got further than a bit of musical fun. A few original tunes appeared at these sessions, but it was all rather half-hearted, and the lyrics were rather substandard and extremely bleak, particularly Recognise The Signs, Lame Animal, and These Silent Days. It was another unhappy period of my life, as Steve and I were drifting apart as friends, money was short, and life seemed to have arrived at a brick wall. I started working at a local hostelry, the Griffin, which had dominated our drinking days for several years, and found myself feeling almost ostracised from everyone in my house. Things were happening without me, and it was time to go. In the summer of 1996, I moved out, and back home to my parents’ house.

The quote that kept coming back to me was one uttered by Jim Morrison about how things had changed in such a short space of time for him - "The ‘love street’ days are gone". It somehow summed up how I felt about the end of the era.

The following year and a half were to be highly barren when it came to composition. I’ve found only two songs, Bruised, and Where Do You Go When The Wind Blows, which are, I believe, from the Autumn of 1996. Certainly the latter contains lines such as "Autumn has brought you closer, and I’m walking these same streets again" which point to that season. However, there is very little else, and the majority of 1997 was similarly bereft. I’d even stopped playing much guitar, which now seems like some terrible heresy. I can’t even really say what I was doing instead, except maybe working, drinking, and gambling - sometimes all three at once. However, at some point in the Autumn of that year, I started communicating with Keir Whittaker again, and we exchanged a few letters. Whether it was this that sparked my creativity I don’t know, but certainly by the time we met up again, in London in February of 1998, I had written at least three new songs: Ordinary Day, White Noise And Radio Silence, and The Streets Have Lost Their Names.

The latter, set to a minimal piano accompaniment, was one I was always very fond of, partly because it was brief yet succinct summing up of my relationship with Loughborough, my home town, and partly because it contained a very rude word in the first line.

THE STREETS HAVE LOST THEIR NAMES

"This is a fucked up place

A love and hate relationship

But I sometimes feel I know everywhere around here

All creosote fences, grass, and scratched house walls

Every streetlight a significance

Every pavement another drinking walk

Twenty years in this town can really drag you down

I remember

Darkened Tarmac parks

Pot holes and popping liquid gold

All the freedom is now gone

The alleys just dog shit and dog-eared

Only the doomed romance of a running street at night remains

The fields have been cleared for more houses

And the streets have lost their names"

Sadly, despite a pleasant couple of days spent in London with Keir, where he was now a student, I felt the old magic was no longer there, although Keir certainly seemed enthusiastic about the possibility of collaborating again. When I got on the train home, I felt utterly despondent as I knew in my heart that we’d never get together musically again. Six years later and we still haven’t. In fact, I think I’ve only seen him twice in that time, and even then in the briefest of passing moments. Although it wasn’t particularly good lyrically, among the many words I wrote in 1998 was a song about me and Keir, and our failure to rekindle this great musical team. The song was called The Soundtrack Of Those Days.

1998 wasn’t a particularly memorable year for me personally – my diary of the year which began on the day England were knocked out of the World Cup is full of the most wretchedly depressed outpourings I’ve ever seen. I can barely recall anything that is spoken of in the pages of it, but the unhappy theme is mirrored in the songs of the time, too. Nostalgia Kills, Vanity Fair, and Look At Me 23 are all painfully self-critical, particularly the former, which attacks my oft-mentioned habit of looking back to happier days:

"The more I look back

The more I lose track

Nostalgia kills all hope and the future

And nobody understands"

The notebook that contains the a lot of the songs from 1998 also contains a great deal of half-written phrases and verses that seems to indicate that although I was writing a lot, I was struggling to compose anything of decent length, or perhaps struggling to finish things that I’d started. One lyric, Rohypnol, a frankly dismal commentary on all sorts of terrible things going on in society, is clearly at least three of four unfinished lyrics joined together to make up a song of sorts. It now seems quite clear to me that my creativity was being channelled more into the work of that noted writer Jerrard Habris, whose discourses on Doctor Who, Blue Peter, swearing, and popular culture appear in various other parts of this website.

Satire had temporarily taken over from songwriting, but the following year was to see a swing back towards music, and ultimately, my final (to date) songwriting partnership.

To be continued...