1991 - Light My Fire

In 1991, school broke up on the 28^th of June for a typically teenage summer of love and heartbreak, music and movies, cigarettes and cricket.

Cricket? Surely some mistake.

But before all that, flash rewind three months to the previous Easter, and I’m sat on a train heading towards Long Marton in what used to be Westmorland, Iistening to Carter USM’s 30 Something album and reading Select magazine. Towards the end of the issue, I happen upon a huge, multi-page feature about a band called The Doors. It is, I learn, twenty years since the death of their lead singer Jim Morrison, and more excitingly, a Hollywood biopic of the band starring Val Kilmer is about to arrive in UK cinemas. As I read the article, something unprecedented and exciting starts either in my brain or somewhere more visceral, and although I have never heard a note of the Doors’ music in my life, I know for a fact that when I do, I will love them more dearly than anything else I’ve ever heard before.

It sounds like bollocks, I know – and pretentious bollocks at that. But I promise you something quite inexplicable happened when I read that article – it’s happened again since, but never quite like that first time. I really, really knew I would love the Doors before hearing them.

If we rush forward a few weeks, we find myself, Henry Overton, possibly Beth McNeil, and probably Tim Sismey sat in Loughborough’s dusty Curzon cinema, watching Oliver Stone’s film The Doors. Maybe it’s the excessive nudity, bare flesh, and general "sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll" on display, but I am utterly captivated, and the soundtrack absolutely kills me. I have found my first great teenage obsession, and suddenly everything is different.

By the time we catch up with date we started at, I have bought four Doors albums, got falling down drunk for the first time, and discovered the throes of adolescent love, or whatever they call it. I’ve also sworn on live school radio, sworn to form a band with my best friend Luke, and am starring in a youth theatre version of Sophocles’ Antigone, as translated by Bertold Brecht.

Something in the story of Jim Morrison had affected me a little, I think.

The object of my adolescent love was a girl called Louise Blakemore. Maybe it was because her hair was as red as Jim Morrison’s eternal beau Pamela Courson, but I had it bad for her – I loved her so much that I bought her the CD single of the re-issue of Light My Fire for her fifteenth birthday, which as I was perpetually skint, was a small fortune beyond what I could afford. She was as pleased as somebody who doesn’t own a compact disc player can be with her gift. Oops.

Still, the thought was a good one, it helped Light My Fire up the charts again, and there was a major stumbling block to anything ever happening between Louise and I anyway - She was, as the song has it, my best friend’s girl.

Now if you’re expecting me to steal her away from him like in every teenage trash novel you’ve ever read, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed. They did split up shortly before the summer term ended, but not down to me – Luke blamed friends of hers for an act of vandalism on his bike, and he was a temperamental guy back in those heady days. She was hardly a shrinking violet herself, and they had a screaming argument. Result: end of romance, with Dave slap-bang in the middle of Luke and Louise, trying to remain friends with both sides, something I could do pretty well back then, although I’ve lost the knack somewhere down the line. Shame really – I’ve lost a lot from back in those days. Sigh.

And term ended.

The family summer holiday was to a self-catering cottage near the village of Bethel, on the isle of Anglesey, North Wales. We’d been there the previous year, and the whole family had loved it – the house was nice, but the garden was enormous, two massive expanses of grass split by a dry stone wall, surrounded by farm fields on two sides and a second cottage, owned by an old couple called Cleverly, on the third. Behind another dry stone wall on the fourth side of the garden was a bank of trees and forbidding greenery that stretched away into the near distance before reaching a hill and suddenly coming to a close. The brambles, nettles, trees and frankly peculiarly alien looking foliage was to stop people reaching the sloping cutting that lay beyond, in which lay the North Wales coast main railway line. That first year, my brother and I had wasted no time in breaking a path through for ourselves to get down to the track to look at the eerie mouth of a vast tunnel that took the line under the hills.

At the time, I loved travelling by train. Some childish remnants of visits to railway stations and transport museums lingered, and there was something wonderful about rushing through the English countryside at speed, with music playing on your personal stereo and something new and exciting awaiting at the end of the journey. For the last year, any holiday we had been on, I’d insisted on going by train while the rest of the family went by car. Somehow, my parents had agreed, probably because the car really wasn’t big enough to take them, the luggage, the pet cat, and three growing children, two of them teenagers. It certainly made sense this time, as Bodorgan railway station was less than half a mile from the cottage we were staying in.

As I mentioned previously, listening to music on any train journey is an important aid to enjoying the travelling, but on this particular journey, in this particular year of musical discovery and general, it seemed imperative – the idea of a serene family holiday in the wilds of Britain seemed a bit out-of-kilter with the Jim Morrison teenage craziness I was trying to cultivate. I had to have music on this trip, because I had to have music everywhere. And in the summer of 1991, the music that followed me from the Midlands to the Irish Sea was somehow utterly perfect, and I’ve been trying to remember the exact details of it ever since.

I think I listened to:

The Doors – The Doors (four songs thereof)

The Stone Roses – The Stone Roses

Carter USM – 101 Damnations

Inspiral Carpets – The Beast Inside

The Stone Roses – One Love (single)

There’s probably at least one more album I can’t remember now that thirteen years have slipped past, and the list probably doesn’t look very impressive. But at the time, these songs somehow captured the essence of still being young enough to enjoy going on a train to spend two weeks in a small cottage in Wales with your family. Even if that holiday was to be spent entirely within the confines of said cottage and garden, listening to Doors albums and playing football and tennis with my brother.

Which it almost exclusively was, except for a trip to Llangefni, a nearby town wherein I bought an edition of Record Collector with the Doors on the cover, a fancy new blue denim shirt, and three postcards. One was for my friend Luke, one was for Tim, who was never really a friend, but a very persistent acquaintance, and a third, predictably, for Louise. I can’t really remember what I wrote in any of them now, although I do remember it was one of the few grey days of the holiday that I wrote it, looking out of a window onto piss wet trees. Hopefully, the weather didn’t lend misery to the messages on the cards. I don’t think they did.

It may sound like something of a dull holiday, but somehow it was enjoyable... the experience of being somewhere familiar but new was always fun as a kid, and the feeling still permeated these last years of being young. Plus, there was the Doors, which I wouldn’t even think of getting bored of until at least the following year. Even now, every time I hear Not To Touch The Earth, I can see the view onto the hills, and the houses thereon, from my bedroom window. Admittedly, every other Doors song has a different and probably more appropriate memory attached to it, but when Jim sings "House upon the hill...", I know what I see in my mind’s eye.

Two weeks was the traditional length of the Lewis summer holiday, but this year, I was returning to Loughborough early, as a friend of mine was appearing in a play – a real, proper play at the Haymarket Theatre in Leicester, and a group of us had tickets to go. What I knew at the time was I was looking forward to seeing my friends again, and going out in Leicester. What I didn’t know was that this one trip was to set a pattern of going out as a gang, and ultimately, to achieving that summer’s greatest single desire.

But that’s for another time.

TO BE CONTINUED.

I saw Louise quite out-of-the-blue last month, which must have been the first time in at least eight years. She’s currently living in Brighton with her sister and is very happy, she told me. Luke, I haven’t heard from in many a long year, although last I heard he’d won a national award for theatre design and was working in the West End of London. I’d like to think he’s happy too.

The house and garden at Bethel are still there. Last summer, on a whim of some bittersweet nostalgia in a period of unhappiness, I took the train to North Wales to see if there was any lingering resonances of happier days. There was something peaceful about the village, but I couldn’t get close to the house, and in any case the feelings were as sad as they were happy – whatever I was expecting had gone forever.