Part 30: (1984)
January was cold and dark and it snowed and thawed and snowed again. I felt restless and discontent. The view from my window and the big silence of the winter afternoons became oppressive.
Sometimes a neighbour called Arthur would take some hay from the Dutch barn behind the pond and give it to a couple of cows or heifers he was keeping in Bone orchard. He was a tall, wiry, old farm labourer who dressed in hobnail boots, baggy trousers, jacket and tweed cap. While the cattle ate he’d stop and smoke a cigarette and watch them eat.
His nephew and niece lived in the house between us and in the years just after we moved to Morton-under-Hill, my sister and I would go out for walks over the fields with them when the weather allowed it. We’d just walk and talk and lark around because there wasn’t a hell of a lot else to do, boys doing stupid or daring things, trying to make the girls laugh because we thought that was the way to their hearts. One evening his niece, who was my age, came out for a walk wearing green hot-pants and silver sandals and if I wasn’t infatuated with her before that I certainly was after.
I desperately wanted her to be my girlfriend but her mother wouldn’t allow it because I was “from the big house”. Most of our friends at that time were the sons and daughters of farmers and farm labourers. Justin and I must have seemed exotic to them with our long, flowing hair and talking all proper, but we were just kids, together, and not so easily infected by the prejudices of adults and we all got along just fine. The fields and farmyards were our playground, our hide-outs and we had a lot of fun. But now it felt as if that view was looking back at me and asking - “what the hell are you doing sitting at that window? - why are you still here?”.
So I moved from my small bedroom with its overflowing ashtrays and the faint smell of pigs from my morning job, down into the room we called The Flat. The ancient, beamed room… cobwebs and the sound of scuttling mice and the bookcase full of unexplored books. It was freezing cold so I wheeled in a gas heater and around a big desk that had apparently once belonged to George Cadbury, I hung some old white bed sheets, creating a kind of tent.
And I lit a couple of candles and sat there in their soft light with draughts occasionally passing through gaps in the beams, stirring the flames and swaying the sheets. The sound of a door shutting somewhere in the house, a tractor passing, my fathers voice below in the yard and then nothing for a long time. Just the afternoon.
I sat in this tent for hours at a time, often just looking at the sheet in front of me and trying to stay calm. Sometimes I’d hear the rest of the band working on new material across the yard in The Dairy. As an experiment, I tried the ‘cut up’ method I’d heard David Bowie explaining in an interview with cuttings from my diaries and random books and magazines and occasionally interesting and unexpected connections appeared. Other words came too, out of a state that I suppose must have been close to meditation.
When the lyrics to a song we would call ‘Maps in her wrists and arms’ came together, I again found it almost impossible to believe I’d written them myself as it felt as though they had come from somewhere else, like automatic writing. It was very exciting… not so much because I thought they were particularly great lyrics but because I knew they were good enough.
Meanwhile there was life outside my bedroom and the tent. ‘A room lives in Lucy’ was released on January 11th and entered the Melody Maker Indie Charts at number 15, which was a moment for celebration. Justin and I did an interview in London, I think for the same paper, after which the journalist took us to Highgate cemetery for a photo session. Despite it being the resting place for some celebrated and famous people the cemetery had been left unattended for many years and was fascinatingly overgrown with plants and trees winding around, and in places breaking or dislodging, the grave stones and tombs.
This was before the ‘Gothic’ movement had come to light in the world of Rock music, so being photographed in a cemetery seemed like a novel idea. The way we were dressed might have influenced the photographer too.
After habitually searching through heaps of clothes at jumble sales and in Oxfam shops I’d ended up with a wardrobe that started to make me look like a cross between someone from a Thomas Hardy era period drama and a dude in a Spaghetti Western. Then I came across a turn of the century frock coat on the verge of disintegration and this is what I wore on the day we went to London for that interview. Justin had recently dyed his hair jet black and had become annoyingly handsome. At least one reviewer referred to us as ’The young Dickensian’s’ and as far as we were aware, no one else looked like us.
Back at home in the Midlands the talk was all about writing a second album and where we would record it. Reflex records were now taking a much needed, less ambitious and more realistic approach with their expectations and recording budgets, so we arranged to record the album with a young sound engineer who lived, and had a kind of recording studio, about three miles away. HIs name was Richard Waghorn. Richard was a gentle giant, arms as thick as my legs and a mass of curly dark hair. He was at least part hippy, but he absolutely got our music and humour and over the coming years he would become as much an actual member of the band as anyone, not actually on stage with us, could be.
So with the snow turning to slush and then freezing again we went to Manor Farm to start recording a few songs for our next album. HIs mix-down room was in a converted pig sty, but we recorded in a room in the house itself, which was a big, red brick Georgian building surrounded by outhouses and barns. Nick set up his drum kit in the pantry with cans of pineapple and beans and packets of flour and rice packed closely around him. We actually only had one finished song to record - ‘Maps in her wrists and arms’. All the others were works in progress and as usual I had no finished lyrics.
One night I had a particularly lucid dream. I was in an industrial town or city and it was night. I’m not sure where the town was, somewhere in the North but not Britain. At first I was outside on a rooftop and a very light rain was falling. I was aware of the space all around me and the city stretching out silently into the darkness to the horizon. Light and heavy industry and rows and rows of houses. Sometimes there was a far off thudding sound like explosions or thunder.
As I walked towards a stairwell or escalator I became aware that I was in a dream and was fascinated by the incredible detail of the scene in front of me. I moved my face close to an iron door and saw scratched initials and random graffiti, the subtle grades of dull colour, bubbles of rust and the flaking layers of paint in minute detail. And I looked out again at the vast, urban expanse that lay there below.
Then I was inside a room in the same building and someone was with me. The only light was from a coal fire burning in the grate and occasionally, through the window, I saw the sky glowing with amber light in the distance.
(SHJ)