Jackanol

"This fire was no accident... this fire started with a match."

I bought Short Sharp Shocked on CD. Hadn't heard it in, what, a decade. Not sure why - except I vaguely remember it being deleted when I tried to buy it in 2000/01. Anyway, a shiny new edition, a boxed set with demos and whatnot. Which I'd mostly heard, although I never owned it on vinyl or anything, but because Jane taped it all for me, back in the early '90s.

Why Michelle Shocked isn't hugely famous I don't know (well, actually, I suspect I do know, it'll be an 'attitude problem' and record company 'issues') because she has a lovely voice. And she's a great songwriter. Funny and wise, who could ask for more. I guess it's nostalgia but the emotional impact was quite painful. And all the words, there they are, waiting for the tune, and when you hear the tune, the words tumble out, although if you'd asked me to come up with lyrics to Anchorage the day before I expect I'd have been relatively stumped. The brain is a funny thing...

Like REM, she helped form my imagined America. Memories of East Texas and VFD in particular, and The L&N Don't Stop Here Anymore. I know that's a 'Trad. Arr.', 'cos Johnny Cash sings it too, (it's by Jean Ritchie, famous in the Appalacian bluegrass scene, so there) and I guess that's why it can bring a lump to my throat, such is the joy of country music.

I talked to Mark about her and he played it when we were in Wales, and sang along. You can always sing along at the Mansons. It made me very happy that it should have been important to him too, although we'd never discussed it before, too busy talking about Nick Cave and The Fall and Copey.

Circus

The circus is back. You can imagine how I feel about that.

The tent squats above us on the common and I definitely don't want to think of what that means in terms of Clown Proximity.

Fortunately, I found this at the end of the road:

 

The North-East

Drinking Bloody Marys in a bar off Grey Street, we marvel and ask ourselves why it's taken twelve years for us to all assemble, here in this place that was home to our younger selves. And there is no real answer.

I love Newcastle. It was hard at first to love somewhere so different, so urban and frankly scary on occasion, but it is the perfect size, and has a certain gritty charm... and I quickly grew to love it, to feel I was arriving home as I came across the bridge on the train, leaning to admire the Tyne and the fabulous buildings on the Quayside. And yet one day I left with most of my belongings and never returned. Of course it's changed, a lot in places, but at the same time it feels no different, just as we feel no different despite everything that's happened to each of us in the meantime. I hope it won't be twelve years before we are all together again.

Fenham by night could be the Fenham of our youth, the broken glass and shuttered shops, the width of the sky and the straight lines of the terraces, the improvised curtains and the limping dogs, the blue flash of an alarm, eating curry in the Komal.

Surely we could wander home afterwards, to Brighton Grove together, or our separate ways to Dilston and Croydon, to flats and houses which exist forever in our minds.

I could be 21, surely, nursing a broken heart and with essays to write, cigarettes to smoke and white sliced bread to eat, 17p a loaf from Netto, across the West Road where the barbed wire and the spikes and the burnt out cars reminded me of Beirut. I realise it doesn't sound romantic. And yet, with hindsight, all is romantic. Youth is romantic, after all, and I felt a true and certain pull of emotion, more than just nostalgia, a warmth and affection for this place where so much happened, where poverty now looks like freedom, and where learning was freely available but sadly not fuilly exploited. I can't think of anywhere I would rather have been for those four years than the sometimes bleak and windswept West End, despite the cold and the scary children.