or, Gaga Aghast and Agog
or, Go On World, Surprise Me
or, The Human Brain Is Built For Fascination
……
I remember the first time Peter walked out the band.
The Libertines only rehearsed a couple of times in the flat, because they were too noisy to play in our block, and i’m always edgy about pissing off neighbours. So they’re rehearsing somewhere up off the Holloway Road [i think] and i’m knocking about the place, writing, when Peter comes through the door, in ribbons, tearful about how he’d had a row with Carl and John, and quit.
I’d not seen him cry before, so i stopped what I was doing and Englishly made him a cup of tea, while telling him to maybe not be so rash. Yet I couldn’t find out exactly what the issue was…they thought he was too much the leader? and they should be more of a threesome? [I’m guessing, because i can’t remember].
John rang up and said they were still rehearsing, and Peter could come back if he wanted.
He was tearful a while, and i never knew how and why he changed his mind, but a few days later they were back rehearsing.
….
And then, Buzzcocks.
I’d started seeing Sara Sheridan, the novelist, and was soon to move to Scotland to live with the “Scottish Russian Jewish Diamond Heiress Novelist Mother”.
So i’m heading North for the weekend and, before I go, i give him the first album and say something like, “Peter, play this, it’s the shit”.
Except when i come back five days later, and Peter comes in, i point to the album and ask, “Yeah?” But he shakes his head and says “Nah”.
We could both be way too over-opinionated and dismissive. So i say, a tad exasperated, “Peter, you just didn’t play it bloody loud enough”.
And take out the disc, put Side Two on the turntable, and play it from FICTIONROMANCE onwards, extra loud. And he’s knocked sideways: half way through I NEED his head is lolling in shock, he’s staring at the rotating vinyl, and he’s saying “this is one of the best things i ever heard in my life.”
People talk about the Buzzcocks being one of his biggest influences. And that’s how he found them. Yet, as I said in the first instalment… I can’t tell you how impressed people aren’t if I tell them, “i turned Pete Doherty onto the Buzzcocks”.
At that stage he was talking about going into a studio [near Shoreditch?] [run by Julia Craik?] [or was that later?] and he very boldly says, if anyone let them in a studio they’d “make one of the best records ever made.”
I point at the Buzzcocks sleeve and scoff, “You will never make a record as good as that”.
But they did, didn’t they? Make one of the best records ever made. And it is as good, if not better, than the marvellous first Buzzcocks album. So i rather regret the scoffing.
Trouble was, i could only take Peter so seriously. There was a strong element of the poseur in him which, in retrospect, i judge i overthought.
Though there was definitely some poseuring. But it’s London: there’s poseurs coming out the walls.
Like… a few times i caught sight of him through the crack in the living room door, practising his louche swagger, his cool walk, up and down the room: and would have big trouble not laughing.
I’ve told the above story a bunch of times and you know what? No-one is surprised to learn Mr Pete Doherty used to spend hours practising his cool walk up and down the living room floor.
If you read Patti Smith’s JUST KIDS, she and Robert Mapplethorpe would do the same thing: practice their cool walks in their room.
Now, 2020 is an off-time to be questioning the beatitudes of the universally adored St Patti. Yet, has anyone else who’s read that book thought how ghastly some of it is? [It, not she]. The practised walks? And, particularly, that club backroom [CBGB’s?] where everyone studiedly tries to out-cool each, to prove their coolworthmettle. Every week for years. What a nightmare to think you have to put yourself through a mound of excrement on that scale.
Meself, have never trusted “cool.” And if “cool” could be defined as “relaxed confidence”, then i am incapable of being either for long. There are some cool people in this: Jabber, Francesca Beard, Salena, Peter, Mallissa Read, and more, but not me.
Also, does anyone else think PISS FACTORY is rather ruined by the fact she did “move to New York” and she did “become somebody”?
While the only time i met Peter during his fame, in Edinburgh at La Belle Angele, he had a very cool louche swagger. Of course.
He’d practiced.
For stardom.
It took effort and he put the effort in. And he got there.
The first time he got convicted, i remember reading from afar how the judge disparaged him before sentencing, saying he’d had it too easy.
Tosser.
Peter worked: and thought long and hard: and worked again.
Also, Peter was a fan of Sid Vicious. While I thought Sid Vicious a low-talent poseur. Dee Dee Ramone without the laughs. Yet parachuted into one of the very best bands ever, with the barnstorming singer and the killer guitar.
Correct me if i’m wrong.
So i put Peter’s keenness on Sid Vicious with the practising of the cool walk. And judged him.
Harshly. Dismissively.
As a poseur.
It’s a funny one judging friends. I don’t think i recommend it. What do you think?
Also, maybe if he did have something of the poseur about him, it simply means he hadn’t got it right yet, was still searching for that that thing he was after.
……
I liked him a lot yet, of course, never told him so. While there was a lot of crap in my life round then. Bigtime heart-break, succeeded by a stalker who had a long pernicious effect on my life.
There’s an ancient Chinese curse which goes: “may your stalker be more intelligent than you are”. O yes.
While simultaneously, there was mucho drab and diverse back-stabbering from clawingly-ambitious and/ or sour hearted poets. As Jabber a.k.a. Scott and a couple of others said to me, “stick your head above the parapet, people take potshots at you”.
While me, i was much more chaotic than Peter then. But not in a good way. More an aesthetically-driven caffeinated beer-monster updown-downdown kind of way. Collapsing forwards, perhaps.
So in that battered life of mine Peter, and his Italian actor girlfriend Francesca, back for a few weeks, gone for a few, were a distinctly good, positive, up, thing. If I met Francesca now I might thank her for being so nice to me at a shit time.
And like i say, he really did have something, Peter: some kind of nascent class. While on a few things he was, if not first, then early. Burberry, for instance. The rediscovery of Chas’n’Dave. A certain kind of bursting, messy guitar music. Etc.
And for many, he became the very epitome of a classically rebellious cool. Even while dismantling himself with white powders.
Plus, i could recognise the trajectory he was on. I’d got a Philosophy Degree from Bristol University, yet only after that did i start to educate or re-educate myself. So in my Twenties i kinda managed to throw off a lot of the bollocks-you-grow-up-with. You know, the English, Surrey, conservative, Empire bollocks: the prejudices, bigotry, stupidities and downright lies. And start again.
It’s not so easy reinventing your head. It takes a while. And i did it the hard way: by myself.
While Peter? He was in the very process of educating and inventing himself. Through books and movies, through cool, and through the people around him.
We were both pseudo-quasi-neo-wannabe-maybe anarchists. Rejecting all the rules of art and culture, knowledge and language.
ALL.
Darling.
Aren’t you?
So we had a lot to talk about and, for six months or so, we were good mates.
Plus, he was often broke, which meant he stayed in a bunch. More than once he said he’d been playing my vinyl while i was out. Which was, of course, exactly what I wanted to happen.
Wouldn’t you? if you’ve got some great vinyl and you’ve got a perfect young audience with eager hungry ears? And Peter, up and out for it, was certainly perfect audience.
He didn’t like it all, of course. And i had a fair amount of bargain bin dross. And i’d been cleaning up on cheap disco 45s. Yet I had a pretty good collection of Punk, New Wave and Indie from 1977–82: my student years. And lots more.
Including nearly all the first fifteen Creation singles. As i recall he liked UPSIDE DOWN, YOU TRIP ME UP and VELOCITY GIRL: and said he did not like the others, at all.
And i had…
IN LOVE by the Raincoats. Beautiful noise. Rough Trade classic.
“Gravest Hits” by the Cramps. SURFING BIRD, HUMAN FLY, LONESOME TOWN… Did Peter like it? Would Carl have?
Johnny Clarke, YOU NEVER GET A NIPPLE IN THE DAILY EXPRESS. Plus AT A LATER DATE by Joy Division. Off the same ten-inch: “Live At The Electric Circus”.
DREAMS NEVER END by New Order. The consummating opening…
I LOVE YOU, YOU BIG DUMMY, Magazine.
O you beauties.
I told him about my Scouse mate Andy Cooke, who spent his teenage years at Eric’s, the utterly legendary Liverpool punk/ new wave club. Which made so Andy’s teenage years so very fabulous it took adult Andy literally decades to recover from its disappearance.
I’d’ve played him SISTER by Sonic Youth, especially the first track, SCHIZOPHRENIA. While did Peter and Carl know Television? I reckon so. It sounds like it, doesn’t it? Yet it certainly wasn’t me, i only truly found them last year, though i did have VENUS.
He had a couple of poppy albums by the French 60s chanteuse Françoise Hardy. And would play the vinyl of TOUS LES FILLES ET TOUS LES GARÇONS. Thinking about it now, i can kind of “hear” that music in the Libertines’ slower numbers.
While he was big on Tony Hancock, the exceedingly English radio and TV giant from the 50s and early 60s. The star, addict, disaster, tragedy.
The Libertines had a song called LADY DON’T FALL BACKWARDS, after a classic “HANCOCK HALF HOUR” TV episode. There’s a film on YouTube of the band doing it at the 12 Bar Club in 2001, looking more together as a band than i remember from over a year before that, when i still knew them.
I’d once heard, while driving across Kansas, that YEAR OF THE CAT by Al Stewart is about Tony Hancock. So we played it and both listened: I remember Peter being disappointed he couldn’t find any of Tony Hancock in it. I liked it: Peter didn’t.
He had a big long and pretty great hardback biography of that self-destructive life disastered by drink, which i quite possibly nicked off him, though i’ve no idea where it is. If i did, whoops, sorry.
Peter thought Salvador Dali was a surrealist. I exasperatedly explained Dali was the anti-surrealist, the cop-out, the bloody sellout. Billy bloody Idol with better sales. The one who abandoned their principles in a dash for cash with his cute repeating motifs, etc etc. I told Peter Andre Breton’s anagram of Salvador Dali, “Avida Dollars”: he liked it.
Plus, i must have given him Breton’s NADIA to read: great and original book, hard to get back then: Iain Sinclair sixty years before Iain Sinclair.
…..
With the London performance poets, there was a mass of bullshit. Fakery, self delusion and pseudo-alpha male jostling for space.
While Peter, he had a pretty good bullshit detector. Though i couldn’t call it entirely functional at that stage. But then, who’s is? Mine certainly has off, errr, years.
We’d talk about the poets, sifting through who was faking. And who was for-real.
I’d always say of an act, a performance poet, “which is the good bit?” Do they have anything original? Is there anything fun or interesting in the language. Do they have energy?
While one yes out of these three could make a performance poet. And three yeses meant you probably were one. No yeses meant i wasn’t going to bother talking to you. While the best acts, Twigg, Control, Jabber, Turnbull, had else something as well, something ineffable, and could overwhelm the room.
Peter was three yeses. Yet read from his notebook, which meant i was never going to get too excited by him as a poet.
I had a piece HOW TO RULE THE WORLD IN TEN EASY LESSONS, which is a Chomsky/ Machiavelli guide to just that. Full of years of learning made simple. Back in the flat after a show of mine, Peter tried picking the piece apart, but he didn’t know enough to see where the flaws were. Yet.
He also said he had another band, Babyshambles, who are, of course, the band he formed when The Libertines dissolved in drug-swamped disaster after their two great albums. Yet i have no idea to what extent Babyshambles properly existed back in ‘99ish: or if they were just a dreamy twinkle in Peter’s eye.
He also talked vaguely of some notion of a mythic utopian England called Albion, yet i never manage to tweak out of him quite what he meant. Merrie England? Arthurian England? Dunno.
It seemed an idealistic or utopian left-wing notion, rather than right-wing Nationalist. I don’t remember him having any right wing impulses at all, yet a fair few from the left.
I think the Libertines did some left-wing benefits, as did i, but i couldn’t tell you where, for what, and through who.
He had the George Woodcock book ANARCHISM, the one lots of students have. I told him that great story of Herzen and the anarchist Bakunin journeying by coach across Germany in a time of revolution [1848?]. When they pass a castle besiged hopelessly by disorganised peasants. So Bakunin stops the coach, mentions he’s a trained artillery officer, takes a serious look at the castle and offers himself as leader to the peasants.
Two hours later, the castle is on fire, the nobles are dead, the peasants are victorious, and Bakunin and a rather amazed Herzen are getting back on the coach to ride off into the distance.
We both thought this would be a great plot for a Marx-meets-Shane style Western.
The left, by the way, never recovered from Karl Marx’ rhetorical and organisational trouncing of Bakunin.
While if Peter had any anarchistic impulses, they would be anarchistic in the Oscar Wilde sense: more literary than political, more rebellious than revolutionary. And more from the left than the right.
But then right-wing anarchists, or Libertarians, aren’t anarchists at all: they submit to power, to whoever has more power than them. And there’s always someone with more power than you.
For me, an anarchist is against power, all power. While it’s easier to be anarchic when, like me, establishments and institutions make you feel distinctly tongue scrapey and edgily itchy.
…..
One time Peter, Carl and maybe John xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. That was headachey grief i did not need, and i got them to xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.
He’d xxxxxxxxxxx going north, maybe to see his parents, who i never knew anything about, sitting xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx the journey, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
And for a while after he left, there’d be xxxxxx from xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, to a xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, or a xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Ahem.
……
The band got a regular gig at Sarah’s Bar on Stoke Newington High Street. Where I’d be the support and maybe some mates of their’s would do some songs.
One time Carl introduced me to his then girlfriend, Lauren, who’d been in the band Kenicke, and who turned out later to be Lauren Laverne, the BBC TV cultural journalist. She was upfront and direct, and more curious about EVERYBODY than anyone else i then knew. I thought right off she was a great human being: and never met her again.
Peter, like me and a bunch of others, thought MC Jabber was a genius, so when he was down from Huddersfield, Peter tried to get him on stage at Sarah’s but, for some reason, Scott wriggled out of it.
These were good nights, yet their later mashups at Filthy’s and The Foundry were better.
I do remember watching the three guys, John Carl Peter, playing pool in Sarah’s: and consciously envying their camaraderie. They were a gang: tight yet easy.
The poets were generally too self-seeking for camaraderie. And i never found a proper gang till my Forties, with the clowns actors dancers puppeteers monologists and more on the Canadian Tour. The bestest gang I ever had, by miles. Top people: fun, talented, original, supportive, committed, independent, tough, and great fun again. And still my gang.
While back then, i’d started to meet the poetry establishment types and they were a horror story of cluelessness and complacency.
I went to some nightmare National Live Word poetry conference in Manchester [in ’97 or ‘98], talked to dozens of Arts Professionals, and came back to have the aesthetic equivalent of a nervous breakdown. After which leaving London became a thinkable idea, for the first time.
On the upside i came up with the line “The poetry bourgeoisie hold their men in common.”
And the line “Does poetry actually exist? No-one actually sells anything. If poetry was a dog you’d put it down, if it was a horse you’d take it out and shoot it.”
And that was it for upsides.
As you might have gathered, i had yet to grow out of the punkrock-ish Stalinism and fixed-minded attitude problems of my late adolescence. Still haven’t.
On the downside the parade of self-seeking sundries in Manchester got me massively depressed and made me want to quit this world entirely. Those people didn’t know: and most of them didn’t care that they didn’t know. They were being paid establishment money yet they seemed to not know what was around, to have not seen the best acts, and to not know what great possibilities there were for the many different styles of the performance of poetry.
These paycheques inhabited a select and highly enclosed Elysian Fields of festivals and institutions, and more than one told me they didn’t feel they needed to know about anything else. Which, back then, made me bloody angry.
What was that poetry establishment for? Like all establishments: for the benefit of the people in it.
Me, i was down at the coalface getting grimy and sweaty. They, those establishment types, were much too good for that kind of thing. I thought they should be arrested for fraud for daring to pick up their wages.
I first did the Edinburgh Fringe in ’96, a three-act poetry cabaret run by me, the first poetry cabaret there in decades [?]. It was a supremely tough month of blagging, homelessness, laughs, blagging, shows shows and more shows, and a bunch more blagging again. Yet we did it, survived, even thrived, and didn’t lose money. The next years we actually did pretty well.
No-one else could do a poetry cabaret up there then. One bunch of well-funded hopeless soon went up and lost ten grand; of other people’s money.
While I thought what we did in Edinburgh was a great vindication for performance poetry. So i was under the highly erroneous impression that being the only one able to run a successful poetry cabaret there would mean something. I was wrong, very wrong, Had made the fundamental error of not knowing I was a worthless schmuck.
Cos me? i know extremely well what nostrils look like from below. In Camberley, i come from the wrong side of the A-30; and i went to a posh university where i was a comprehensive peasant. So, yeah, i do know very well indeed what a pair of self-elevating nostrils look like from below.
While it’s no good showing something can be done, if people don’t want to know it can be done, don’t think it matters it can be done, and can they please get on with their own nice untroubled world.
Poetry was like a music world where Elvis had never happened and they were all still being tame and Frank. There was a line around ‘96ish, “poetry is the new rock’n’roll”. Which sadly wasn’t true: particularly sadly for me because, as a poet, much of my inspiration and energy did come out of rock’n’roll.
However, if poetry is not the new rock’n’roll, rock’n’roll’n’rap might well be the new oral tradition.
One of the most clueless I met in Manchester ended up running the Literature stuff on some big arts institution South of the river. Of course.
So me, busting-a-gut just to keep busting-a-gut, just to keep existing, i was desperate-desperate on the hamster wheel going round and round to nowhere.
……
Meanwhile …who fell over waste bins while looking at rooftops? Who tripped on fire hydrants as they watched the horizon? Who lost their bearings while poring over the patterns in the brickwork? And who fell into the sky while following the gutter?
Both of us?
And me?… still looking out through eyes, from a head, at a big mess I do not understand. Yes still looking out, from inside this perforated box of bone and flesh, at a big mess i do not comprehend… And Peter?… What sense did he make of it all?
And me?… I used to be a wally, but i’m not a wally now… Well actually i am still a wally, but i’m not such a wally as i used to be… Well actually, i’m as big a wally as ever i was, but I am planning on not being such a bigtime wally sometime soon… While Peter? Never a wally. Never close.
……
While them booky fuckers? They don’t think they’re better than you: they know they are.
Good at loving themselves. Good at cerebral air. Good at selling nothing. Good at filling the world, or rather the forgotten corners of a certain kind of bookshop, with flat oblongs which really didn’t look like they were going anywhere any time soon. At all.
So i rejected books, paper, the page, merchandise, entirely. Performance is gorgeous, humanly immediate. So why failingly try to faintly etch yourself on all eternity, when you can stamp yourself right through the right now? Which i did, often, for years, with huge glee.
If a poem can flash brilliant for one fast second, why bother with next best, the page. It’s not as if its going to last forever.
So why bother with books? Which i didn’t. And still haven’t.
Perhaps real performance poetry shouldn’t translate to the page. Maybe the page can only ever be a weak facsimile of what a performance poem is.
For a performance poet can do so very much with their voice, their face, their body, the space, that there is no system of notation which can adequately convey the wealth of what happens.
Not every performance piece has to use the whole arsenal, or even any more than one lone tool, the voice, but i was certainly much more interested in the people who didn’t “just stand there and do it” the whole set through. I wanted people who went for it. Who had dynamism: like Jabber, Pink Sly, Asher Hoyles and more. And/ or electricity: like Francesca Beard, Control, Joe and more.
And performance poetry was a world to go for, full of fascinations still only groped at.
I have often told people short and very memorable poems by Paul Birtill, Joe Cairo, Nick Eisen.
And lines by Francesca, Mr Social Control, Rob Gee, Jabber, Mark Gwynne-Jones, Sandie Craigie.
And, repeatedly, completely failed to convey in words the brilliance of Christopher Twigg and his beautiful yet killingly funny winsomeness.
And have had great fun explaining, possibly successfully, my own version of ideas/ poems/ performances by Stacy Makishi, Pink Sly, Lucy English, JC 001, Mallissa Read, Akure Wall.
And i’ve quoted Joe Cairo’s I FOUND MYSELF [probably not the title] to dozens of people from a dozen countries, who’ve loved it. I wish i could quote it here.
Performance poetry, by the way, is a term already heading into obsolescence, desuetude, and has been replaced by the bland Americanism Spoken Word.
And yet all this energy, creativity and fun is forgotten. Has disappeared, pretty much unrecorded, into the past. Rob Gee, Lucy English, Salena Godden and more got careers in the Arts yet, in terms of huge success, there is only one real survivor from that time: Peter. Who went somewhere else entirely.
Did he expect to be famous? You know what? maybe he did. That famous? i dunno.
I never expected to be famous, i just wanted to get away with whatever aesthetic extremes i could, while not being stoniest broke.
I was actually famous for a couple of years in Scotland. In that, everywhere i went, someone knew who i was. Minor minor famous. It doesn’t mean anything.
While i am legendary on the Canadian Fringe tour, which is very much it’s own bubble and aesthetic eco-system. Where it’s pronounced “leg-endary”, with a hard “g”.
Question is, which end of the leg: heel or testicle?
Yet Peter he ended up proper famous. Big.
If i’d known he was going to get there, would i have acted any different? Probably.
….
We were both on the dole, i think. I can’t remember when i finally came off the dole. Round that time, probably.
Whatever, i was living on peanuts. And Peter was living on peanut. With occasional Italian sausage and mustard.
Every time i go past where our old Job Centre used to be, on the Kingsland Road [a right epicentre of pure shite], i think, “i lasted longer than you, saw you off, you bastard horrors.”
My spiritual home for a while. Lahdedon’t.
I’ve never had a proper job. My first proper job interview was at 52, an audition for Cirque de Soleil, in Downtown Vancouver. It was me and a dozen supernimble twenty-five year olds, so I looked like a cuckoo in the wrong nest.
It is one of the best days of my life. While the woman running the audition [Sara Davison?] is one of the classiest people i’ve ever encountered.
I never improvise, so for my Englishless improvisation i suddenly decided to become a nonsense-speaking Frenchman who gets eaten by a komodo dragon [I’d just been to Komodo Island]. I bet you no-one ever, EVER, used their Cirque De Soleil audition to take the piss out the French. I still have the scars on my elbows from dragging myself across the theatre floor.
Of course i did not actually want to get through the audition. Six months in Vegas? six months in prison. Though i remember being mighty pleased i lasted till 4.30 in the afternoon and was last to get thrown out.
Two days later, after the thorough physical workout, my whole body hurt like hell. Yet there can’t be many better ways to not get a job.
While even Peter got a proper job. Ish. Filthy’s.
And now, i wonder, was that the lip of the downslope?
……
Next post inside seven days.
Thanks for reading, i hope you enjoyed
You’ll have noticed some words have been blacked out. Like so: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
This is because of the impossibility of, at this late stage, substantiating my version of certain events.
……
Buzzcocks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK9YtcSA1Rs
Louis Jordan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkmJGApt3sc
Françoise Hardy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fywooUlcXXc
