The night we didn’t...

I found this in an empty folder on my computer, don't know if it's unfinished or perfectly formed.

You lured me out late

From that drunken hole

I had dug pretty deep

On the docile settee.

You said it was a night for danger,

So I changed my pants and travelled

Through the night on a train:

A pioneer with a can of cider for courage.

That night we didn’t know if the future

Was a minor chord floating on

A wisp of drunkenness...

Music in shops

The slack faced, nodding bodies move between the shelves with their lips muttering banalities of no great consequence.  Their fingers twitch as they reach for items waiting on shelves, they look vacantly at the vital information contained on bottles and cartons before either putting them back haphazardly or placing them in baskets or bags at their side. Occasionally there are kids running around and couples plodding around beside each other.  Sometimes friends are giggling and suited people, or some other arrangement of triviality, are sauntering around speaking on phones discussing some trite object or another. People are queuing, paying, beeping, talking of plans: picking up kids, a call centre argument, an errant colleague; hackneyed oblivious ego maintaining detritus.

What do we hear on the outskirts of the hubbub, providing an absurd gift wrap to this whole scene? A lone voice, a tender melody, the sounds of a soul reaching for that great void of love.  A song – music pumped in from a carefully selected selection, agreed on by official looking drones sat around big round conference tables. I’m sure I am not alone in experiencing that uncanny moment in a shop when you suddenly become conscious of the music and actually start listening to a song coming through the speakers that tackles subjects that seem like the most unorthodox of choices considering the current scene and the present context (see above).  

She sits on the corner of her bed; there was no need to turn on the lights, the faint seepage from the street is all she needs and the dull fug seems more relevant. She pushes back the hair form her face, it’s clumped and stringy from tears, her phone sit on her fingers like a dead fish, she looks at the words on the screen, she looks again, then it slips from her hand onto the floor and there it is, the hole, the truth, the utter impotence of her existence; the guttural place of pure indifference. She takes the pad from the drawer and falls backwards onto the bed and lets it fall out, things that shouldn’t exist burst into the world, a moment of purity and impossibility. The Real.

Is there a relationship between the two situations(the moment of creation and the moment of consumption)? Should there be? I realise that context is all in the infinite play of meaning and there is no right and wrong and all contexts potentially have the same value and can create new and unusual combinations.  However here’s my argument (my blatant logocentrism), I am privileging certain contexts (a lone listener sitting in a quiet room, the collective sway of the Dionysian concert goer) over others (the shuffle of the retail emporium). I’m not saying that there is something more present in the former, but just that it feels to me that some songs seem richer and more resonant  in certain environments, just as people are individuals that have strengths and weakness in different situations so does music. The shop atmosphere kills anything that is challenging, new and unusual about the music it plays and I know having to spend many hours a week creeping in between the thud and the whine of the shop stereo; or as those in-the-know call it the Mood Music. It’s a situation that hollows out meaning, seals everyone in an apathetic darkness; it’s a passive hand on the shoulder, a thought numbing distraction machine.  The economy can’t run on silence.

Some songs, however, are so trite and emotionally lethargic that providing a backing track to banality seems like the perfect fit – I’m thinking here of a lot of pop music that is lyrically lacklustre and Pavlovian in melody (Girls aloud – Sound of the Underground, Crazy in Love  -Beyonce), there’s no story-telling involved, it’s mainly repetition of a hackneyed vaguely optimistic axiom set to a catchy melody. Christmas songs are the shop song par excellence and they work to perfection, there’s no need to listen to the lyrics, there’s no thought involved, you can’t dance to it, it’s made to hum along to mindlessly, which it what I do sometimes and yes it’s fun.

Nonetheless, some of the songs that get played in shops surprises me, I often hear some of the more tender songs by Adele or Roxanne by The Police played, now the later is a song about a prostitute, and the lyrics clearly state: ‘You don't have to wear that dress tonight walk the streets for money’, but yet this is clearly suitable for all members of the family, except it’s not and in any other context it may be seen as a bit unsavoury and let us not mention The Thong Song or My Humps. The retail setting (and the prefix ‘pop’ in general) slaughters all meaning, it’s a vacuum where all is permitted, yet all is meaningless and tired; it empties out any significance and trounces on certain songs lessening their impact in other contexts. You could write a song about a pervert serial killer (probably called something like Bang Bang Stab Stab) and play it in the middle of the day in Top Shop over and over and I doubt you would get even a mild reaction form the 'audience'. Music overplayed in shops or on the radio is dulled and its mark rubbed away or, as Daniel Kitson might say, the overexposure has ‘put the poo on it’.  All must be laborious and inoffensive, it all just becomes blah blah blah and try fitting that slop into that special place of your memory where all is truth and joy.

I can’t imagine that when a would be artist envisions their song, that piece of themselves achieved with so much grit and determination, played to the masses, he sees a scruffy middle age man singing idly along,  scratching his nads while sorting through a crate for the best bunch of bananas at the same time as thinking of tits.  Although when trying to explicate this idea to my colleague at work, he simply said: ‘Bet they don’t care when they get the royalty cheque.’ I guess I never considered this, I presume this isn’t what the girl in the above scene was crying about – she’d just received a text with her royalty payment then set out to write a complaint to her agent. It just seems a tragic outcome, the transition from the intensity of the girl in her room to the obliviousness of the aforementioned nad scratcher. It doesn’t seem right, it shouldn't be about control and money but freedom and engagement.

For most songs let them play, but some should be kept out of the grubby hands of those Mood Music technicians. They want to control our moods for maximum profit and that is what it is all about, tilting our unconscious forces into a most conducive angle for the perpetual sliding of capital into the big pot. It all comes down to the tension between art and money, but some songs need to be protected or else listened to and taken in, a whole shop full of weeping eyes, or aisles full of jumping, dancing legs. That’s what I want to see.  

Without music life would be a mistake.

Without music shops would be a mistake.

Without shops music would be a mistake.

Without economic gain music would be a mistake.

A View From The Monatgue Pike (random thoughts while waiting for Ian).

Blackwell's Books and Rush Hair
Drip drip of people passing
Bus, bus and a glimpse into the bright back window.
The West-End is always a drunkeness.
A guy sits opposite fingering a menu, trying to decide which steak to order.
Academic books and hairdressing, is there a juxtaposition there?
Is there a kind of link to be made?
The guy has been joined by a friend, he says to him:
'What if it was doubles, he'd be fucked...
'...And that's what I was waiting for: cake, not gang am style.'
They laugh, I wonder at the complex meanings they espouse
And where I should choose to place my opinion.
Idiots ripe for a slicing of my acerbic wit
Or a tragic form of human being valid in their immanent perception
Of this ridiculous existential morass we endure?
I'm superior surely? No, that is a convenient hidey hole in a perpetual desert
We are the same in our lolling pop of existence.
There is no 'better' just different stratergies
And by the looks of it, theirs is working better than mine.
But we both use Mr Al Cohol for company so what does that say?
A group of old people just came in, a whole brigade
They are chuckling and giggling and that is
Perhaps the best advice I have seen today.

An Unfortunate Mishearing.

A girl of about 10 approaches the till; she has a girlish freckled face and is wearing a baggy light blue hoody:

‘Excuse me; have you seen my mum leave the shop?’

As someone who works in a busy train station shop this does seem like an absurd question, considering the constant flow of bodies in and out of the two big doors, let’s just say it was like looking for a long metal pricky thing in a pile of yellow poky sticky things; it would have been wholly unlikely. However, anyone that has ever worked in a shop, or with the general public, will know absurdity, idiocy or even insanity becomes so frequent and tedious that it no longer has the same meaning; it’s merely banal, so I didn’t dismiss her with the flip of a hand but said:

 ‘Erm, well I’m not sure, what does she look like?’

‘Oh, she has long curly hair...’, she mimes the long curly hair, wiggling her fingers and lowering them down beside her face, ‘...and she’s blacked up’.

OK... now, yes she did just say ‘...and she’s blacked up’ and I have to admit my previous statement on my inability to be shocked by the public somewhat melted along with my jaw to congregate on the shop-soiled floor. The image in my head at this point rather defies explanation and certainly starts to attack that staunch bourgeois myrmidon that is stuck somewhere in my being like a stubborn stain. I guess it did make her initial question seem slightly less bizarre, I mean who wouldn’t notice ‘that sort of thing’. 

‘What!...she’s blacked up?’ I found myself doing a weird mime of someone rubbing boot polish on their face, performing a circular hand motion just above my cheeks. In all fairness to me, technically, this awkward and vaguely inappropriate gesture was her fault for starting the whole physical byplay thing with the curly hair.

There was a beat where her eyes looked off to the right and her facial expression initiated a subtle change and twisted a little.

‘Errr yeah, she’s wearing a black top’.

Right, so now I felt a little silly, I’m pretty sure she had no concept of what blacking up was, anyone who has freckles is universally sweet and innocent and unable to tolerate such vulgar, racist notions. I may well have said ‘there’s a goat on the toilet’ and wow who knows what was going on in my unconscious to hear/mishear such a thing?

 ‘Oooooh’, I rear back and subject her to my overly maniacal laugh. ‘Err no sorry I haven’t seen her’.

She thanks me and leaves the shop still looking back and forth for her lost mother as she goes. I stand and watch her exist simultaneously contemplating a situation where the elusive Mother is found and the girl asks her ‘Mummy, what is blacking up’. She replies, ‘Where did you hear that?’ ‘The man in the bookshop said it’. 

An unfortunate statement inevitably leading to a scene where the mother comes back in the shop for a confrontation ending either with us all laughing as the credits roll or with me homeless and depressed begging on the street contemplating the big D as we fade to black.

London Park

I sit in the park

Because I know you

Can’t see me here

I left you with the

Dirty plates and spent wrappers

The people here are mere

Actors in my game

Waddling around the park

Unaware of their destiny

Illegal in Leicester Square

The darkness sloshed up and down in our heads as the night sky rose before us over the newly refurbished Leicester Square - all the metal struts and luminous men had been cleared away leaving a great expanse that hadn't been glimpsed in quite some time. ALD and I stood on the kerb-like plinth that now bordered the main tumult of people that spurted incongruently from Piccadilly and Covent Garden; the marching bodies all met in the middle like some kind of disorganised, half-hearted, mediocre consumer battle. We watched and spoke our soaked words into each others faces, fresh from the pub we had decided on a tour of London's most obvious facial features and hence here we stood in the square, cans of cider in hand, swaying to the movement of the liquid playing sweet cacophonies inside our craniums. We turned to look into the area of grass at the centre, now locked up. We discussed how the fence keeping people out was pathetically short, about a meter high, we followed that with a short confab about how high we would each be able to urinate over the said fence. We turned back to facing the hoi polloi, just as two rather fresh-faced Community Support Officers were walking past, scanning with their hairless chins and bulbous eyes intent on ruining someone's fun; spotting us they looked at each other and with a nod of the head sashayed towards us.

'Did you know sir, that it is illegal to have an open container of alcohol in the borough of Westminster?'

'No', I replied, 'I didn't know that'.

'I'm afraid you are going to have to dispose of your drinks.' He wasn't afraid, but I was, the can was over half full, I searched for the magic words that would make the horrible men disappear - all I could hear was Westminster, Westminster, what if you leave Westminster as soon as possible. It seemed plausible. I would utter the words with a cheeky grin and Mr Officer would tut and raise his eyes and say, 'oh OK then, but be quick', at which point we would thank him and scuttle off into the crowd, safe to sup on our newly radicalised beverages and laugh at the stupidity of the repressive state apparatus.

Only something different happened, by the time the words had made their way to my lips, they weren't the gems I had initially found, but a rather offensive looking piece of coal.

'Yeah, but what if we run away.' The officer looked back with a seriousness I couldn't quite comprehend.

'Well, we'll chase you.' there was no smile no laughter, just a sombre stare. I tried again, I just didn't say it right, I held up my hands.

'No, No , No, I meant really quickly.' The coal had turned to shit, as if running away from the Officers really quickly would make them change their mind. I was trying to say one thing, but really saying quite another, I had to now give up didn't I? Yes, yes I did. ALD intervened and encouraged me to stop talking at which point we reluctantly tipped that most noble of liquids down into London's bowels through its grated eye ball; I guess London deserved it, putting up with all these people all day and their impossible dreams and dirty rubber soles. We put our empty cans in the bins and moved off into the crowd, liquor-less and chasing that subtle divergence in our splattered consciousness - I think it was annoyance.

London had won and I didn't begrudge it, the pavements seemed to smile that sloppy drunken grin and somehow I was pleased we had shared a drink - London was our melancholy comrade rolling and rising with the tides of our happily addled heads.

One drink for you, one for London, those are the new rules.

MG

Ego Destroyed

I went away on a human holiday, distant from London's broken smiling slabs. The shore I washed up on was a different world, a silent, night time place, uncluttered, unfiltered.
The place I went has a name but this label chokes in my throat, hardly a representation of the rich picturesque void that now exists in my mind; I shall rename it the blissoramic expanse; a parallel world hidden from the London consciousness, not good/ bad, urban/rural, profit/loss; but a different way of seeing, a suit of different colours, shades and style.
I shrank in its bosom and found myself covered in folds of a gentle unknown skin; the night joined me and my companions down a shadowy road as we walked to a pub 2 miles in the distance. The Drunken Duck Inn has a name and story only real life can create; later that night on the return journey I found myself shouting at the gloom: ‘Who shaved me? Why am I wearing a cardigan?’ in tribute to those legendary ducks.  London was long gone, the darkness the expanse and the audible characters from behind the hedge were all.
As I walked along the empty road I remembered, not an event or a place but a feeling, a solitary fullness, I looked up into dusky sky and it was there, like a warm fleece enfolding. The hills and the trees huddled round and joined my conspiracy. The thrill of being a lone figure in the night, a silhouette, no people for miles around, technology seeming like a strange dream, invisible.
The cool air at my face created energy for the nothingness. The absence of people, judging things, pressuring things, gave everything more life. I saw images in the gloom, shadows come to life, traders, highway men, families heading for the Inn; a timeless invisible history coming from the hedgerows. Everything was smooth and mysterious.
I became childlike, full of inspiration and hope. It wasn’t an epiphany; there weren’t any ecstatic moments, just a long drawn out feeling; no threatening presence, just the wilderness and its dark beyond.
This is the point, as always, that words fail and I have no reason to care, for they are part of the problem. I sank into the rustling, groaning, singing void of the no-thing.
I laughed and slipped between my companions, but, with London, they were long gone, whether they had joined me I’ll never know, but I will follow that path to the pub to the end of the sunset. Ego Destroyed.