Back.

Back, says he, and says himself there, and where were you?

Somewhere. Or nowhere. Or somewhere. Lost, bit, s’pose.

And alright?

Alright enough in myself, aye.

Hmm. Alright enough, so.

Five and three quarter hours later he’s stood in the hallway, barking and braying at his breath, singing then about this soldier that died, and the halo that hangs on your woman’s stairway yet.

Things The Revelator Did #3567

The moments tween waking and sleeping the Revelator pulls about his waist as he nears, and with all the static of the pre-dawn skyway hissin’ tween the cracks in his teeth.

Strange scenes sparkin’ in his pores, shootin’ up and off his body in arcs o’ black-light blazing - debris strewn about a hospital corridor, split strip-lights and discarded pills and the pages of old bibles and hymn-books… Job kneading the boils beneath his eyes with fingers all blackened and bent and broken… the message a friend o’ mine left for me at the bottom o’ thon stairway, the words all threaded mongst the pool o’ blood an' bile formed a halo ‘bout his head o’er pish-damp floorboards…

Settlin’ next me on the mattress, and the words droppin’ off his tongue like poisoned wasps, the Revelator says ‘There is somethin’ wrong with you’, and I’m noddin’, pattin’ at the cheek with the back of a hand. ‘There is somethin’ wrong with you.’

Through the gap in the curtains the first whispers of sunlight come wheezin’ in o’er the sill, glistenin’ some on the black o’ the rosary beads lain on the dresser there next the ashtray. ‘Fix me…’ I’m sayin’, and the winds atween my faces ragin’ and roarin’ and batt’rin incessant. ‘Please, mean. If you can…’

His eyes fallin’ on the curve o’ my neck like cinders, fixin’ on the bank of colour all sparkin’ about the bone - the memory o’ the kiss she gave me couple mornin’s past… a kiss, aye, and her fingers all threaded ‘tween mine an’ her smile all swellin’ in my chest…

‘I love her’ I’m tellin’ him. ‘Jesus knows I love her wi’ all that I am an’ all that I was an’ all that I might be in time, an’ all that’s mine, all of it, I want her to have. But what’s wrong wi’ me, sir, is part o’ me, and I don’t want her to have that for a second. Or, I mean… s’just…’ The words catchin’ in my throat, the ‘lectric lashin’ at the base o’ my spine, and the Revelator suckin’ on the bottom lip, thumb and forefinger pullin’ at the left earlobe. ‘Not for a second, sir…’

With a hand on my forehead he bids me lay back gainst the pillow. The edge o’ his blade all glistenin’ in the swiftly-swellin’ light, he says ‘We’ll cut it out you’.

His fingers all pawin’ at my thigh, thon article all prickin’ at my rib, and the Revelator sayin’ ‘We’ll cut it out so we will, that Wrong that’s in you there.’

‘Thank you…’ sayin’, and her hand in mine, and her voice sayin’ ‘S’alright, s’alright…’

Newcastle An' That

Driftin’ in and out a fitful kip on the bus from Newcastle to London, having spent the weekend chewing on the wild, Bohemian pule of the former, bounding from this radical cinema to that indiepop disco, from one winding, gothic enclave to the next, from this gig to the other, and all a sudden snared twixt the pegs of a vision rising up off the shoulders of the fella sleeping to my left:

A portly gent clad in bloodied night-gown waddles a descent ‘long a flight of stairs all garnished with glass and sand and peppers. Swigging now and then from a bottle of Pulmo Bailly cough suppressant, grimacing and sucking at the air and patting at the sweat-embossed brow with the back of a dusk-hued hand, he staggers against the banisters, curses the saints, laments lost love, and all the while with the rectum hung out his arse like a length of frayed tow-rope.

On his face he wears one of my faces, and says he to me “Take heed! Little shy of drowning will blunt the knives like this concoction, but amongst the luxuries a man must renege for the grace of a codeine slump is the ability to pass more than a farten whistle ‘thout havin’ to push hard enough to force the ribs to the curves o’ the shins, bejeesus, and the throat to the soles o’ the feet. Like a man attemptin’ to coax pennies out his elbow - such is the man attemptin’ to shit under influence of this article here. Many’s the arse has collapsed under weight of the strain.”

In-between visitations from this raggle-holed phantom, I peruse the litany of scrawled asides and notes birthed throughout the course of the weekend:

“Gormley's blessed and Holy angel hauntin’ the landscape. Gormely - the patron saint of Singer-Songwriters, a man whose work stems from a fear that somewhere in the world exists a fella or a lass to whom the intricacies of his nudity are still a mystery…”

“Richard Dawson wringing from out his tongue all the devils and the demons and the hobgoblins in creation, the hoof-handed hoors scuttlin’ about atween his legs, skiting this way and that o’er the stage of the Star And Shadow…”

“Performing at the Head Of Steam. Taking a stagger backwards three songs in, near to fainting. Andrew Gardiner and Andy Warmington beating tambourines and tootlin’ trumpets respectively, Ryan H. Fleming blowing into a melodica - the three of them beside me, and the world dimmin’ for a time, the sharpness brought about by an attempted discontinuation of a particular mooder-upper nulled momentarily, and thinking aye, this’ll do… Two more copies of Yonder! Calliope? sold by night’s end. Fifteen quid shy of even, says Luke Page of Ex Libris Records. Relief…”

“A four-hour improvised folk ballad concocted in Andrew Gardiner’s kitchen, myself and Ryan H. tossing reels of filthiest, blasphemous rhyme from one end of the room to the other till well after 7 A.M, and These United States, Dischord recording artists and purveyors of the most sublime Americana / folk / electro a man might e’er stumble upon all sleeping far side of the door to my left. Thinking - pray God they heard none that verse about Oh perty Joan Of Arc c’mon on down from off that stake and make the sweetest love to me upside the face…”

“Two hours dissecting that Jeffrey Lewis song about maybe he met Will Oldham, maybe not, but whoever it was, he ended up shaftin’ him up the hole in a underground station… Playing Nuances by Madisson to Ryan H, saying what about that, sayin’ she’s gon’ play bass for me that lass, down South, speaks to me and everythin’, what about that?”

“Note regarding future performances - Myself, Ms M on bass, Sir Fleming (no relation to Ryan H) slatherin’ the stage in the thickest, murkiest of face-shreddin’ grinds, and someone, anyone, hitting kettles, Coke bottles and a snare drum alongside. Adverts on Gumtree - Person needed for to hit things roughly in time with what the rest of us are doing. Influences - Walter Benjamin, Whiskeytown, Jimmy Rodgers, Morbid Angel, Aphex Twin…”

“Beautiful souls - A punk with the head painted silver sat with eyes closed through a set by Chronicity… A man in direst need of the name of a musical instrument beginning with N - ‘Can’t think of any fucker of the kind for love nor money’… A woman at a filling-station singing Billie Piper songs to the A.M breeze…”

Flinging the notebook aside then, Sheffield nearing, and Townes Van Zandt perched upon the porch atween my ears singin’ of poor bedevilled Caroline, the daughter of a miner…

Further Thoughts RE: The Shaking Of Billy Bragg's Hand

Stood at the traffic lights halfways-down Kingsway of an afternoon, marvelling some at the lass to my right with the tendrils of sunlight all lolling about the frames of her glasses, noting also the headline on the Evening Standard held under the arm of a fella to my left (“London shook by quake!”, and me wondering how come I never felt anything? How good was that fucking flick, anyhow, that not even the ripplin’ of the very earth beneath me could slacken the grip those images held?), when all a damn sudden a thought regarding my recent encounter with Billy Bragg comes shootin’ up my spine, blustering along my neck, exploding at the base of my skull in a cacophonous squall of recollection and revelation.

What occurs to me is that, by shaking Billy Bragg’s hand, I was in some way wrenching him from out the firmament, shearing him - albeit only for a fraction of a second - of those wings that over the years I’ve been drawing out the skin of his back, an inch further with every fresh encounter with that flugelhorn in The Saturday Boy or that line in St Swithin’s Day about “With my own hand / when I make love to your memory”, or those harmonies in You Woke Up My Neighbourhood or that stunning bluegrass rendition of There Is Power In A Union on the second disc of the re-mastered Internationale or those thunder and lightening clangs and crashes in the middle of The World Turned Upside Down or the Hammond organ tremors in A Lover Sings or the line in that self same song about “Sittin’ in the park / kissing on the carpet / and your tights around your ankles…”… Those wings, yes, festooned with sapphire and ruby and emerald - in the shaking of Billy Bragg’s hand I was momentarily plucking those wings from off of him anew, and so he stood there as a man, and I also, at least officially, stood as a man alongside.

What it amounts to, I get to thinking, is an attempt to bring the Ideal onto my turf in the hopes of being someway carried onto his turf in return.

Maybe more - Maybe in bringing Billy Bragg down from the heavens for a moment what a fella is doing is hoping that, in some way, at some level, an allegiance has been formed. The Songwriter takes hold the extended hand of the writer of songs and thereby forges a connection - yes, a bind, by Christ, a union, and there is power in a union, remember.

Shaking Billy Bragg’s hand is reminding a fella that Billy Bragg is as the fella himself when it comes down to it. If an ant or a sparrow or a tiger were to gaze upon the scene, what they would see would be two humans, one of whom has great hair and is impeccably dressed whilst the other looks like he’s been shafted in the gums by an antelope and obviously fell asleep whilst trying to bleach his head, but two humans, nonetheless. One is as the other, so far as they’re concerned.

Shaking Billy Bragg’s hand a fella is vicariously charged with a sense of Braggness. Shaking Billy Bragg’s hand becomes as the act of reading Proust in public, the idea being that folks will obviously equate reader with text, and from a distance might not even be able to tell the difference.

Shaking Billy Bragg’s hand, the writer of The Myth Of Trust and A New England shaking the paw of the fella who wrote some songs you never heard of about a lass you never knew - what it represents is the attempt of the latter to assimilate the former, to bring Billy Bragg into his realm at the same time as he slides the heel of a boot into Billy Bragg’s.

These things thus thought, I waited for the green man to appear and footered for a time with the hood of my coat, caught as it was round the strap of my bag, thinking also of a song I heard a lass sing a few 9 P.M’s ago, song about a fella with ale on his breath that she didn’t much feel like kissing.

Thank You Billy Bragg

In the alleyway round back the HMV on Oxford Street I’m stood, fingers trembling and ears blazing with the cold, the glare of the fella to my right carving trenches up my jaw, the banter of the half-dozen security guards across the way bopping and jostling in the air afore me.

Gaze fixed on the doors of the Visitors & Staff Entrance, and the mind untethered for a time, free for to traipse and bound through the reams of recollection swaddling the brain, for to inspect the images and the sounds jutting up out the wrinkles in the pink like bust springs…

...16 years old and perched on the edge of the mattress, hands folded in the lap, head tilted towards the speakers, and Billy Bragg singing about sometimes it takes a grown man a long time to learn just what it would take a child a night to learn…

...Hobbling up and down the corridors of Ballymoney technical college a couple days hitherto, the gash on the shin weeping through the fabric of the jeans, and a holy and blessed man by the name of Paul McKeegan saying “The blazes happened to you?”

“Aw for fucks sakes” says I, wincing. “I was wanderin’ about Megaw Park of an afternoon in the company of a fella from the psychiatric ward across the road, blethering some about a pornographic magazine he’d picked up in Costcutters and how he felt like goin’ back and throwin’ it at them, for when he got it out the plastic hadn’t it turned out to be one of your Mature Women carry-ons and much as he respects the right of a fifty-five-year-old hoo-hah to be spread and to be photographed as much as the next man, still and for all it’d be a better one than him, he says, could work themselves into much of a fluster over the head of it. Five quid and forty-nine pence it stung him, and in the end he had to stick the forefinger up the arse anyway to get anythin’ approachin’ a rooter, so he says.”

“Wanderin’ about as I say with this class of conversation twined about us, when by Jais’ there comes careering out the speakers of a nearby portable cassette-player a song the likes of which I never heard in all my puff, hurtlin’ across the gravel right for me, and here it’s shootin’ at my leg there, near splinters the bloody bone in the ankle.”

“What song was it?” he asks.

“Damned if I know, but I’ll tell you this - I’ve thought about nothing else since. It was a fella and an electric guitar - all razor-blade chords chiming and clashing with the reverb clinging to them like randy badgers to the moss on the oak, and the voice - fuck me… This astounding punk-rock holler all terrace-chant inflection, singin’ about Our fathers were all soldiers and something to do with Fightin’ and fallin’ or….”

“That’s Billy Bragg” Paul McKeegan says with a shrug. “That’s what that is, is Like Soldiers Do by Billy Bragg.”

Billy Bragg… I’d heard the name a thousand times. I’d heard Rancid singing about him, I’d seen him pictured in this or that article in Vox or Q…

“Billy Bragg! Well by God, where can a man get hold of these records?”

“I’ve got a couple you can borrow if you want. I don’t have that particular tune, but there’s plenty more tunes of equal or maybe even greater standard to be gettin’ on with.”

Talking With The Taxman About Poetry and The Internationale handed me the following day, both on cassette, both with Pay No More Than 3.99 written on the inlay…

Things I Would Say To Billy Bragg #365 - “Talking With The Taxman About Poetry changed my life, Billy Bragg…”

Things I Would Say To Billy Bragg #387 - “…and Workers Playtime fucking well destroyed it.”

The former is probably my favourite Billy Bragg album, the one that had me leavin’ the band I was playin’ bass in at the time, the one that convinced me how it didn’t matter a fuck whether a fella could hit this note or the other or none note at all, for singin’ songs is about riddin’ oneself of those torments and those hopes and those dreams and those frustrations lie like white-hot coals on the tongue, and if not one of those coals fall anywhere near what might be considered The Tune, fuck the matter it makes.

The latter, mind you, is the one that I listen to most, probably because, when it comes down to it, and much as I might pretend otherwise, I’m the sort of cunt spends far more time fretting over the lassies than fretting over Thatcher.

Workers Playtime is one of the all-time great break-up records, up there with Blood On The Tracks, with The Libertines, with World Without Tears, with Heartbreaker… It’s a record has a fella racing out to sabotage every damn thing he can find, everything most precious and pure and special, just so as he might for ten minutes feel the kind of thing Billy Bragg felt when he wrote The Short Answer or The Price I Pay or Must I Paint You A Picture, just so as he might stand a chance of writing something might be fit to lick the sweat out the arse-crack of Life With The Lions or The Only One or She’s Got A New Spell or Little Time Bomb…

Aye, Workers Playtime. Ruined my fuckin’ life that record, swear to God.

A copy of it, ensconced in the front-pocket of a laptop-bag sans-laptop, hangs at my side here and now, and a copy of Talking With The Taxman… alongside, both of them the cardboard-sleeve special editions included in those two gorgeous box sets put out last year, owing to how - “They’re easier to write on.”

“Ah aye… aye, yeah, that’s the, mean, beautiful. So.”

Billy Bragg stood beside me with my copy of Workers Playtime in his hand, Taxman… still in the bag, me chickening out at the last minute, figuring one signature was as much as a man could ask of Billy Bragg, figuring I was pushing it as it was…

“I have a biro or… a pen or… here. In here. Somewhere.”

From his own pocket, Billy Bragg produces a black marker, gives me a wink, says “Even better.”

All the things I said to Billy Bragg in my head over the years, all the conversations about Thomas Payne and Gerrard Winstanley, about Red Wedge, about what I thought of The Progressive Patriot, all the stuff about he introduced me to Woody Guthrie and for that I am forever grateful, all the blathering about how I think I might steal his idea of pretending to be a band next time I approach the promoters and what not, for they’re very reluctant to fling a fella with a geeeetar onto the same stage as folks with drums and bass and drum n’ bass laptop accompaniment and what not and also-

But no. Stood at the back of the HMV with Billy Bragg beside me, I end up stammerin’ and stutterin’ and feelin’ that same mesh o’ terror and euphoria I felt when I walked out front Amanda Forrest in first year and asked if maybe she’d go out with me?

“I went with her for a fortnight, Billy Bragg, and I didn’t speak a fuckin’ word to her the whole time. It was a great relief when it was over and I was fit for to joke and to jest with her again without the flesh of the cheeks and philtrum scalding the very bone from out my skull with embarrassment.”

Couple hours ago K.T Tunstall, with whom Lord Bragg had been performing a half-hour set at the retail establishment in question, came wandering out those self-same doors, and the fella who’d been gawking at me racing with limbs flailing and shoulders bopping, yelping “K.T!” and realising then, that’s why he was sneering so, he thought I was intending for to cut into his K.T time.

I encroach none. K.T Tunstall is this man’s Billy Bragg. I’ll stand back here and content myself with thinking about the many marriages myself and Ms Tunstall will enjoy in my head, about how lovely she is altogether, about how the version of The Drugs Don’t Work she and Billy performed in there was truly fucking astounding, about how I very much hope they’ll record that one day.

For the next two hours I stand there, scared for to light a cigarette even for it’d mean I’d have to look away for a second and might miss him…

Sometime around 4 Billy Bragg steps out those very doors, flanked by a couple fellas carrying guitars and cases of some sort, and me near to collapsing.

“Ah… Mr… Mr Bragg!” says I. “Could I… could I maybe please, mean…”

Billy Bragg shakes my hand and says “Thanks for being patient.”

Ganshing and blootering. “Could… um… please, could you… maybe could you please sign my Workers Playtime please?”

“Sure, mate” says he. “Course.”

Thinking… I can’t do it. What I had intended to do in the foolhardy throes of the pre-dawn, no.

I do it. I say “Um, could maybe I give you a…”

“Of course you can.”

He knows. Happens all the time to Billy Bragg. Crag-tooth backroom troubadours with terrible complexions and stupid half-bleached hair and the hood of the coat shoved halfways up the side of the face owing to the weight of the bag on one shoulder, and all of them with this or that record or minidisc or cassette tape thrust towards him, all of them saying “Billy Bragg, you are the very reason these tracks on here exist and maybe you could give them a listen one day?”

A copy of Yonder! Calliope? by Aaron McMullan handed to Billy Bragg.

“I’ll give it a listen, thank you very much.”

It was a while before I realised he left, stood there as I was with the yap hung agape and the hand still outstretched and thinking “Billy Bragg has a copy of Yonder! Calliope? in his possession…” Thinking about how it didn’t matter if he binned it half-ways up the street, thinking about how what mattered was that he took it, thinking about how those folks who say “You should never meet your heroes” probably are the sorts of folks who just happen to have a shower of cunts for heroes, thinking about the times I’ll listen to those songs now, wondering all the while - “Will Billy Bragg like that bit? Will he notice what I did there? Will he skip that one - aw balls, it has the best line, that one. He’ll never know. I imagine Billy Bragg will find all that right there a bit excessive. I imagine he’ll say ‘I don’t deserve to speak her name’ is a terrible, terrible lyric and she deserved far, far better, that muse of yours.”

I know Billy Bragg, I know.

I’ll tell him I know one time. And also about how Talking With The Taxman About Poetry changed my life and Workers Playtime destroyed it and here’s what I thought after reading The Progressive Patriot and by the way, thank you for introducing me to Woody Guthrie, dunno how I’ll ever repay you for that, and also…

Travels In Scientology - Part Two

And the conclusion, again penned by myself and the marvelous Sir Fleming. Click the link for to read it and what not on Blogcritics.org

Travels In Scientology Part Two

Travels In Scientology - Part One

Of Wednesday past, myself and Sir Fleming took a dander to the Church of Scientology on Tottenham Court Road for to see and to hear and to wonder. An account of such, co-written with the brilliant Sir Fleming himself, has since appeared on blogcritics.org. Part two, the concluding part, will appear this Wednesday.

Click For To Read Travels In Scientology - Part One