Imagine wearing a replica Newton Heath shirt and a fez, riding a giant tortoise along the top of an Inter-City 125 speeding across a gigantic suspension bridge over the English Channel, which has been polluted and is pure fire, and all this was contained inside a little mechanical peep-show, in an arcade at Liverpool’s Pier Head, itself part of a model village in a future controlled by robots, described in an old sci-fi book on a table beside a young lad’s hammock on a sailing ship, and the whole thing was just a graphic in the sidebar of an EBay page displayed on a laptop, where Lou Reed’s Adidas cock ring, the one he wore when he bummed Bowie, is being bid for £246 from a not-at-all-gay football casual hard man such as yerself – hang on, is this getting on your tits? I’ll stop, then.
I know what you’re thinking; why doesn’t that cunt fuck off with his shit accounts of soiled sex toys and Scousers? Well, I’ll tell you why – because you’re an ignorant twat who needs some intellectual nutrition in his or her life, that’s why. Otherwise you’d exist on a diet of Windbag Manifesto and House of fucking Style, and you know how I feel about that, here in my tracky bottoms.
Fashion and danger are what it’s all about. Why are young people drawn so strongly to such things? I don’t know about you but my journey has meshed inextricably with childish fads, gang violence and substance abuse that very nearly killed me on several occasions. I’ve died in ambulances, been saved from a vomit-choked death in a midnight doorway by a barking dog. Infected by fish that saw me delirious in filthy alleyways and frontier hospitals. Bowling ball blisters shuddering on my leg, loaded with dead cells. Mind it doesn’t burst and ruin yer Diadora sandals, eh?
The allure of childish fads began when the dress code was murky and undefined. We kids taking over stolen cars abandoned by older thieves. Driving in mad circles on Drinkwater Park footy pitches. Launching them off the cliff into the Irwell, diving out at the last second. Full-on replications of the latest blazing American blockbuster. It was a magic time. Even ice-lollies had their place in the scheme of things; the Big Two were Lord Toffingham and Fab. I know you’re gonna say, “what about Milk Maid and Funny Feet?” and you know what, you’re dead right, but Funny Feet were like Stan Smith and Toffingham were pure Korsika. But Fab, well, Fab is probably a Twinkletoe Pixie Dust Skecher. Back then, sew-on patches on khaki bush-hats were considered cool and bottle-green bags and feather cuts. Behind it all lurked the air-wear boot and there was only one choice: Dr. Klaus Märtens’ “bouncing soles”, the German cushioned heel that stomped on Major Domo’s, Sergeant Peppers and other snides. I never owned a pair of Docs. I made do with Peppers after mournfully patrolling Salford Precinct. Dad attempting repeatedly to palm shite boots off on me in shoe shops. I endeavoured to look my best, my scarves tied round my wrists and dangling from my belt-loops. Little plastic fool.
United scarves had a hierarchy all their own in the 70s. There was the basic red and white and then there were the three combinations. The “mostly red”, the red and white with a thin black stripe down the middle of the white one. Two variants of that existed, mostly black and mostly white. Then there were the ones with shit tassels whose stripes ran lengthways, or that one with the big round plastic United badge on. Or the silk scarves, many of which were tartan. How passionate were we back then, over a team that was basically shite?
Enter the 80s; habitual use of the class A’s, when the sulphate was very good. I remember being utterly twatted after an all-nighter. Lying before the gas fire having been awake well over 24 hours. Bloke knocked on the door and mumbled something about loft insulation. I left him to it. Next thing, my mother is kicking me awake, saying, “what the bleedin’ ‘ell are all these fellers doin’ sprayin’ stuff into the loft through tubes?!” Fortunately me ol’ man menaced them into giving us a massive discount. The same old man that administered CPR to me after I’d collapsed from alcoholic poisoning three years earlier, New Year’s Day, 1982. The same one who’d scraped me off the pavement after ingesting psychotropic compounds or pumped my chest and inserted airways down my throat on more than one occasion. And he wasn’t the only one. I’ve been a bad son in a bad world.
My version of going to college was dishevelled and desperate. Days spent prowling the shelves of Prestwich library, scouring the catalogue for scant information on shamanism, mysticism, LSD and UFOs; fantasising about winning the pools. Spending my days scuba diving off the Bahamas, investigating the source of Atlantean myths. It never occured to me that I didn’t do the pools and scuba diving required lessons of a quite disciplined nature. The few tomes I gleaned from library and shops amounted to fuck all in the mid-80s. A Carlos Castaneda here, a Timothy Leary there…whipped under my snorkel and home for a gander. Sad Times at Radgepot High. I had more books than Sherrat and Hughes until my dad made me build a bonfire in the Clough and burn the fucking lot. I’d been keeping the flame alive with those natty library books but I never saw Rave coming and didn’t see much United, either. I was too busy tripping when a team from Székesfehérvár booted us out of the UEFA Cup. Time wore on, the bad drug daze left far behind, or so I thought…
Somewhere between the hangover of the early eighties and the plastication of Madchester we revisited and revived the psychedelic ski-jump. At first acid was as hard to find as hippie books, but soon anyone with half an inkling had shelves packed with Amazonian witch-doctorism and New Age CDs…..Mancunians inexorably shunting towards the euphoric descent into Rave, like a gaggle of poignant hooligans boarding Belle Vue Bobs. KLF began pumping through the Precinct pubs, tower-blocks blazing all around in a grey Salford soup. One dark Saturday thumbing some magazine a kid had left…I recognised the language…tons of DJs, with unexpectedly clever names, shamanistic-mystic…why the fuck didn’t we think of this…..I’m looking round at the heads, thinking, deary, deary me…..Bruiser’s there, rolling cigs from his Blackpool tin…supping that bitter that I shan’t describe….the world was changing…what did the KLF know of the Cloughward bonfire, the wilful destruction of British government property..? The Time Lords got to burn one million quid long after I’d done in my pile of books…but which was the greater crime?…they were an infinitesimal group of young people emerging at the fountainhead of a new thing.
Remember the rush, the barmy push for substance, mush? The owl-faced need for speed and sound, when acid house was underground, when Ecstasy was little known it was Sputnik or it was home-grown. Jog yer swede indeed and heed the embryonic seed, don’t plead or expect my heart to bleed for them what never rode the steed. That’s right it’s shite and I am tight, no sympathy for someone’s plight when past encounters they’d delight in taking flight when out of sight, leaving early on Saturday nights so long ago but now they know to act like they are one top pro. You were either there or not when molecules went through your snot to enter deep and creep up high and send you loping through the sky to spires distant full of ghouls in glow-stick tents with dancing fools who water-drank from poison pools and thought that strobe-lit rain was jewels. Did you follow pilot cars along the motorway from bars and did they guide you into dust upon which theatres full of lust enacted play an easy lay and ecstasy it lit the way? The winding roads of blinding wits the spotlight studded skies and pits with DJs puttin’ on the Ritz or – hang on, is this getting on your tits?
The afterbirth of Rave and its fluorescent shower of amniotic fluid settled on Madchester 20 years ago – spawning a can-do-it-yourself attitude in the city. United We Stand’s 20th Anniversary last month reminded me of where I was when the mag first came out. Usually in a drunken stupor, risking arrest for various stupidities, regardless of the day. But stupidities are allowed when you’re young and on a mission from Lucifer. A mission to spawn a goat culture that danced on bent furry legs. That tapped its hooves against the shield on United’s crest like a fallen angel flying on MDMA.
Drug society is really social Darwinism gone awry. Instead of those who best manipulate an environment it centres on those best suited to escape it through the administration of chemicals. Did you ever stop to think about those who embarked on careers, who went to work every day? Those who looked down on you for the drug-addled freak you possibly were? Sensible people, wholesome people. People with a five-year plan? Fuck them; people like that want slapping to death, really they do. Imagine that, slapping someone to death? It’s funny, really, once you find yourself pondering it. Slapping some cunt to death. It’s poetic, with a hint of, well, slapstick, about it. I mean, it’d take ages, which might be fun, depending on who you were slapping. But it could be messy. Not the kind of job people’d want to take on. You’d have to make it look desirable. Like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence. Slapping someone to death could be hilarious, but it could also be very grim.
And there it is again; the violence. Part of the puzzle. The equation of love and fear that triangulates over working-class enclaves together with humour. That separates us poor demented folk from those with discipline, with structure; scuba divers and the career-driven. Professional shamen who made millions while the rest of us just got twatted on acid. Oh well…
