THE BOY FROM MOLINEAUX:

The boy who got crushed at Molineux had a milk round
& a Saturday job in the local iron mongers. They providing him
with unimaginable resources to buy albums in quantities that
left the rest of us open mouthed. He was generous though, a good
friend who always invited his mates round for a listen. It was
mostly rock, stuff I often struggled to get into, but it was
turned up loud & nobody complained. He lived in a smart detached
bungalow in the posh part of our estate & if his folks were
out we got to use his dad’s ‘stereo’, which never sounded
as good as the little mono deck in his bedroom, when we turned up
loud till it distorted.
Leaning the bikes against an outside wall we would ring a door
bell that sounded both affluent & cosmopolitan, to be greeted by
the familiar long suffering tone of a parent.
“Hello boys, he’s in his room”. Shuffle in, mumbling
‘thank you’, adding our signatures to the rich smell of ‘boy’.
“Here, take it home & listen to it” the boy from Molinuex would
say if we showed particular interest in a record & though
we always had to be hassled to return it he never stopped
offering.
I was in a band by this time of course, working the clubs
& village halls making good money every weekend that somehow never
found it’s way into my pocket – everything went on petrol & band
gear. From the pocket money my parents gave me though I was able
to save enough to buy an album a month. It was a big event, catching
the bus into town, slipping in between the ‘Heads’ leafing through
their Prog & Cosmic Rock, the heavy smell of vinyl mingling with
the cloying bight of petunia oil & weed. Eventually, I landed a
Sunday morning paper round, ‘the big one’, loaded with colour
supplements & paying as much in one day as the other rounds made
in a week. It started around 6:30am so as I’d only got in at 1:00am
after unloading the van I’d be riding my bike like a hung-over drunk,
straining under the weight of all that paper, the fresh ink & lack
of sleep making me nauseous, but it was worth it to be able to buy
more albums.
Two a month, was still nowhere near what the boy from Molineux brought
home every week. The job at the iron mongers gave him considerable
buying power which meant he could consider doing something so
extraordinary it was unthinkable, beyond our wildest dreams.
He could buy an album just because he liked the cover…

(K)

RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW:

Saw the ride between the fields this morning through
holiday eyes, living in the moment, experiencing Essex
as if we were on holiday. Far from phones & tech-speak,
we go, “Wow! how beautiful”, allow our surrounding
soak in deep. Head pressure drops, eyes light up & the
imagination ignites.

(K)

THE ART OF FINE DINING:

I remember Graham Wood was there & some Tomatoes, but
I don’t remember why or where. Four shots & two beers
seems like a tepid night out, I’m guessing we must have
been tired at the end of a long day – an exhibition or
a seminar? There’s something coming back to me about
Graham that night, something not quite his usual self,
or maybe I just had the ‘dark head’ on. He’d left the
Bear costume, the Drum & the Nightie back in Blitey.
My recollection was of us transitioning into a ‘less fun’
phase, like a heavily laden truck dropping into a low gear
for an infinite incline. The cuisine would have been
‘expensive’, that’s for sure, it was the 90’s, we were
surfing a wave, fuelled on still growing global popularity
& a fragmentary knowledge of fine dining which resulted in
obscenely large dining bills. These I look back on now as
documents of a performance art satirising the excesses of
minor celebrity & the first whiff of distance between us
& the dole.
Leafing through a photograph album of legendary nights
on the lash I’m shocked to note we look twenty years
older than we do now. Glad I’ve still got them all as
friends, still working together, still got that fire in
the eye – congratulations to all who sailed on that ship
& survived.

(K)

IT’S YOUR BIRTHDAY!:

Rose early from a late night lap top,
eyes marinaded in glass, tight as piano wires.
Disturbed by dreams of people I love alone in
the dark with a pack of salivating wolves.
Caught the eye of a builder coming home from
the city of dreams in a Wolves t-shirt as I
caught the Essex train, chewing on something
delicately seasoned. The shirt was blue, it
should have been rich yellow, memories of 1960s
Molineux, Man U v Wolves. Dougan, Best, Charlton.
The crowd surges, squeezing the breath out of a
boy my age who gets carried away by the St John’s
& misses the game. Two years later he walks into
my class at school, introduces me to Iggy, Ziggy,
Zeppelin, Fairies, Hawkwind & we’re friends to this
day.
Back on the train, the builder looks at me with the s
ame eyes as the wolf on his chest. Are you stalking me
for a moonlit transformation?

(K)

IF HERE WAS SOMEWHERE ELSE:

Will it be the hot train? Will it be the cold train?
Will it be John Coltrane muttering ‘A Love Supreme’?
As we ride into the sweat box of the city of dreams.
Remember to sit on the side away from the sun, plug in
your ears & disconnect or open up & let it in. The day,
the light, the perfumed cacophony, the carnival clattering
of conversation poetry, the life eternal, the story passed
from mouth to mouth & ear & hand, the dance, the romance
of all this if only it was any other country?
Last night, we sat out under the stars watching winking lights
cross the sky, imagining we were somewhere else & this was
someone else’s home we’d rented for a week.
“How amazing it would be”, we’d say,
“if only we could stay here forever!”

(K)

ALIEN INVASION:

Sleepless nights filled with vivid dreams of crazy
relationships I thought were real – woke to
fiction relief. Take out the bins, watch corn dance
in the breeze, connect to it’s tousled groove.
I want to break language, not tell stories for a while,
make noises, only fragmentary words, mouth sounds filtered
by specific emotions. Standing in crop dust grass at the
edge of a field, thick cloud between us & the sun, I’m
grateful for a day’s relief from the heat & still recovering
from a night of vivid dreams of you.

(K)

ICE CREAM FOR CROW:

In the queue for Kazimir Malevich the man selling tickets
smiles,
“Really enjoying ‘Someday World'”.
Heat, heat & more heat. A young guitarist plays with his
guitar flat-lap style, hammering on, pulling off, slapping
& banging like a drum-piano, grinning a skinny grin to himself
as if there was no one else was around & if I could see his
eyes I could tell you more. What I sure of is his fingers know
where they’re going, dancing cool as we wilt in the heat.

(K)

COOKING WITH ELECTRIC:

A snapshot of the night erupts in rolling thunder,
electric pink & yellow, rain as cruel as laughter.
Basted in sweat, wrapped in linen, cover our eyes,
the heat of the sun pours from our skin, sleep
disturbed by a chill wind through flung windows.
The night smells scientific, the morning, green &
open. The pressure dropped, the dance returned,
an invitation to lucid thought.

(K)

THE SNAKE MAN:

Between early fields I met a bronzed & muscular man,
walking a small ginger dog. In his hand a sturdy
walking stick, raised to the sky, on which he’d drawn
a crude circle.
“Look, a flattened snake!” he smiled, swinging it
in my direction as the small ginger dog sniffed
excitedly in the grass at the edge of the road.
“Nice” I smiled back, noticing he was dressed in
black & braces, head a perfect dome, uncovered in
the sun & when I looked, I saw, though he was old,
his eyes were young.

(K)

NEW MARKS:

Mirror of the sun on your face, Rhythm of your fast thumbs
dancing, transmitting. Where you are, where you’re going,
‘Big Red’, your stolen identity in black & white.

Turned on to Sam Francis for the first time.

(K)