Part Five

As 1999 dawned, things seemed to be generally more pleasant than they had been for the latter part of the previous year. I was seeing a girl called Claere from Atlanta, Georgia, and the new chef at work, Trevor Swindlehurst, had expressed an interest in forming a band, as he was a guitarist.

Claere and I didn’t last, unfortunately; however, my musical partnership with Trev seemed to have a more solid foundation, and we hooked up several times to play songs and to natter. In February of 1999, I started seeing a girl from the pub called Lucy, who inspired me to pen several songs, which after something of a barren period over Christmas, was a pleasant thing. Unfortunately, in retrospect the quality of Be The Difference, Faraway Skyline and All The Truth There Is was pretty poor, although the latter had quite an honest feel to it.

"Here we are

Drunk and dismayed

I don’t want to lose you this or any way"

Sure enough, things with Lucy were doomed to failure, but the songs were starting to flow again, and the lyrics were getting back to a high level again. Trev and I were jamming at work most days, in quiet afternoon periods where the level of customers in the pub was at a minimum, we’d have the guitars in the kitchen. From somewhere in the ensuing months, a set of quality songs began to emerge, mainly written by myself – Let’s Surf This Beach, Dedicated, Long Sleeves In August, Not Burned Out, 4.48am, Thoughtless, It’s Been Too Long, and another song with the title Better Days.

BETTER DAYS (II)

"Let’s pretend that I’ve been feeling okay

Or let’s pretend that I’ve been living away

Because our old haunts don’t have the resonances they used to

All they seem to do now is bring me down

I used to belong here

Now I don’t and I want to be somewhere

Who wants to die with just memories and regrets?

So let’s sing in praise
Of our better days

But let’s not pretend they were any better than now

And do you remember

Because I’ve been trying to forget

But the past just seems to stick inside my head

Lucid dreams and rational ideals

Now my thoughts are all chaotic and frayed

Just want to run, or sleep, and not feel

But don’t ever worry, I will always take care of you

I used to take comfort here

Draw strength from the power of nostalgia

Now I just feel sick, and tired, and alone

So let’s sing in praise

Of our better days

And let’s not pretend they were any better than now

Do you remember

Because I’ve been trying to forget

But the past just seems to live inside my head"

A particular favourite of the pub’s assistant manager Dave Price, this was one that occasionally got wheeled out after work, when the staff were sitting down for a drink, along with a batch of Oasis and Crowded House songs, and occasionally some of the others from this era. I was proud that I’d written the words and the majority of the music, which seemed to indicate that I was at least competent enough to call myself a songwriter at last.

More songs followed as the millennium turned; Hard Light, Sick Of The Whole Mess Now, and Bridges, Viaducts and Canyons, but nothing really progressed from my musical partnership with Trev, and we drifted back into being merely colleagues and drinking buddies, even though he had moved house and lived just two minutes walk away. I can’t remember where it went wrong, but it didn’t seem to matter in the way that previous musical relationships had – perhaps a certain apathy had crept into my thinking. Certainly, the year 2000 saw a lot of solitary drinking, and miserable writings of prose and poetry in my latest notebook, which also was a sort of collage of favourite quotes, poems, and writings by other people. I was in something of a Richey Manic phase, and not for the first time.

Some of the poems, I see, are quite good – Blaket Avenue, What Has Become Of The Winter and a little piece called Another Rock And Roll Myth all have an enduring quality – but there’s a lot of drunken meanderings, lots of bleak waffle about self-mutilation, despair, and God knows what else. From somewhere amid all the crap, however, came one poem that I feel I can share without too much embarrassment, which seems to somehow be a distant relation of the long poem that appeared earlier in this series, born five years on and with none of the optimism or uplifting spirit of the former. It, like the earlier one, has no name.

"My sleep is being destroyed, and the reason is so simple:

The dead times do not rest easy

The bittersweet ghosts of memory and nostalgia are with me every night,

Every stitch of my bedclothes permeates with sadness and lapsed regret

And the phrase ‘it’s too late’ is tattooed on the inside of my eyelids

Yet I can’t let go of trying to remember

I can only try because the memories have faded like newsprint on old paper

Warped passages that only tell half the original story

You see, I can look at photographs, or videos, or listen to cassettes,

And I can remember the physical dimensions of my old friends and enemies,

Their faces, their eyes, their hair, their clothes

And how they spoke, how they laughed,

But never how they were, how it felt to be close to them, to be touched by them,

To belong to them as they belonged to me

And that terrible sadness has laid bare my inner delights

And cast a concrete shell around my heart

Some days, and too often now these days come,

I feel the past as I walk around this town,

Where my history is intertwined with its streets like a random patchwork quilt

Glory days sitting with misery, happiness a square away from suicide

These feelings come particularly in the autumn – the beginning of a new year

(The first of January was never New Year’s Day

That always seemed to lie on a day at the end of August,

The first day of a brand new term

Beginnings, new horizons, dreams)

In these windswept days, as the rain erodes the leaves from the trees

And the nights draw in like closing dark velvet curtains at the end of a play

I feel those ghosts walking with me,

Silently, unforgivingly,

I plead for a chance to recreate the past, to somehow become absorbed by it,

As if by some impossible miracle I can relive any and every part of my formative years

And cast away the sinking drunken wreck of a man that I have become

But the ghosts never answer,

And despite the feeling that they are near, I never catch one glimpse of them

They are always one step ahead, around the next corner, beyond the next tree,

Up on the hills, out of sight, standing under the one streetlight that has no bulb,

Hiding behind cars, under hedges, behind darkened windows and under my skin

Pulsating, beating a rhythm in time with my palpitous heart

I did not create these ghosts – they have always existed,

My mistake was to encourage them, nurture them,

Help them grow and make them strong

Yet all I have achieved

Is that the revival of the dead times that I demand seems further away than ever

The still and emptiness down the railway line from a bleak station

When the most distant sound seems like an approaching train

But cannot be, as nothing ever arrives at the platform

And even as I wait, long into the night,

When the lights are on and the silence is overwhelming, there is still nothing there

There is never anything there

Just my decaying memories and the wind outside,

Which could be the shrikes of laughter from some better day

Or the unending scream of ghosts that will not share their secrets,

And instead just dance and laugh and remain forever out of reach."

Despite the bleakness of what you’ve just read, and looking at it, it is a bit morbid, Autumn 2000 was to slowly become a great time, and as 2001 turned, things were to get better, and more songs, more upbeat songs, were thankfully on their way.

To be concluded...