Graveyards, Cemeteries, Sausages And Smurfs


Hey! What are you doing this glorious Bank Holiday May Day thingy? I’m shut up in the office room at home but the windows are wide open (it’s like the Summer of ’76 here) and right now I’m groovin’ along to Sharon Redd’s masterpiece Can You Handle It (1981/ Volume 3/ March/ Epic/ #31). Or rather I was because dear oh dear here comes Kool & the Gang’s divorce-themed weepie Jones Vs. Jones (1981/ Volume 3/ March De-Lite/ #11). Do you think James "J T", Robert Bell and co., sorry, Gang, got the idea from the film Kramer Vs/ Kramer? I do. And I am unanimous in that, Captain Peacock.

I’ve been out and about, though. Whirlwind, whistle-stop trip to Brighton last night for my old school friend Becky’s 40th birthday bash. In a pub up near the station so I didn’t see much of the fair city – no sea, no pier, no Julie B, just the pub, the station, the late night fag shop and Becky’s miniscule doll’s house of a house secreted down a tiny lane. I got there later than planned (9-ish bloody Bank-Holiday-third-world-train-service) and was desperate for a pee having decided to knock back two and a half cans of lager on the train down. Really, there were so many groups of pissed “youths” on the trains and all over London Bridge and East Croydon making a bloody row that I reasoned to myself if you can’t beat ‘em you might as well join ‘em. Anyway, this pee: the Gents was at the top of the pub some distance from the function room which was in the basement and through the beer garden. Even so, above the noise of the cisterns and my own delicate tinkling all I could hear up there was the sound of my sister talking and laughing her head off. Holding court. She most certainly has a voice that could be said to “carry”.

Many dear friends from Brighton (headlines: Chris is about to take his Law Finals, Sally has left the Labour Party, Avy fell off the settee and boo-hoo’d) and from our teenage years in Woking. Ah, but inevitably the latter camp fell to reminiscing about the days when we were free, the time of hitching to parties, doing your hair for hours, mucking about and getting into scrapes. Do you know that B-52’s song, The Deadbeat Club? We were very much like that. After all these years, Dale and I couldn’t actually believe Mark Wealthy let us drive his vintage, newly-restored 1920’s Austin 7 round Brookwood Cemetery at dusk for a “driving lesson”, while we were all on barley wine and magic mushrooms.

1985. It felt like we were absolutely tearing through the woody undergrowth of the cemetery but we somehow ended up back on the main road and the vehicle, which couldn’t really go any speed at all, was instantly hit from the rear. We all shot forward. Fortunately it was an Egyptian bloke with no insurance so he sped off fairly soon after he’d clocked we were certainly more in the wrong than he was. We all piled back in. I remember intently studying some wilting bluebells I’d picked which looked very, ahem, psychedelic. We moved off and more or less immediately crashed it again, this time into a tree at the side of the road, all laughing hysterically. To this day I’ve never told my mum and dad.

And the time Sheena pushed Dale into an open manhole after a Marc Almond concert in Brixton and he disappeared up to his head and cracked all his ribs. And when the very same Sheena, 16 years old, got drunk in the park and went with Terence Morris to the squaddies tattoo parlour in Aldershot and got a tattoo which she regretted even as the man was doing it. She's getting it laser-removed at the moemnt and was last night sporting a plaster over the damaged bit of her arm. Haha. We were wicked children. Woking might not have been much of a place but I was blessed to grow up around that lot. When I was seventeen, thirty of us went to stay in Becky’s Uncle’s modest two-up two-down holiday home in Bideford, Devon. She told him it would be her and a couple of friends. For that one week all you could smell for miles around was hairspray and burning hair on heated crimpers.

Ooh and there’s a ghost story, too. When Sue and my sister parked up before the party in Brighton yesterday afternoon, she wound down the window and the car was filled instantly with the most revolting stench. Lou said, ”Oh my God, it smells like Pepys’s London!” and Sue said, ”Ugh that’s the smell of Death!” and my niece Remi and her mate Craig, sitting in the back, were actually retching. But when they opened the car door the smell was nowhere, gone, and they couldn’t work out at where on earth it had come from. When they told me this later on I joked, ”It was probably a poltergeist came in through the window”. But when we returned to the car this morning it was apparent in the light of the day that they'd parked right next to a graveyard! Whoooooooh.

Einstein A Go Go (1981/ Volume 3/ March/ RCA/ #5) now and it’s irritating me. It has not aged well but I remember loving it at the time stupid spoddy teenager.

Had an amazing sausage and mash dinner round Jock’s on Friday evening. Just the four of us and some red wine. I can still taste the sausages now which Jock, being Jock, had spent a fortune on – Old Spot pigs or something (Gold Spot? Cold Spot?) Totally yumbolina anyway.

You know I can’t for the life of me get hold of the bloody Smurf Song anywhere. I make it my business to keep a copy of all these rotten novelty records and it was my intention to hide this track away as a sort of joke at the end of the set for 1978. I mean, it’s hideous and annoying and Lou won’t really care one way or t'other but it was undeniably one of the sounds of that year. I turned the house upside down trying to find it. Nothing. Probably used my old copy for target practice or turned into an ahtray or soemthing. And there's nothing on i-Tunes either. How can something which sold a gazillion copies at the time just disappear like that? I gave up in the end after wasting hours. Pah. So let the legend on my gravestone read - ”Defeated By A Smurf".