Doctor Death (not his real name) was about as bad an advertisement for five years worth of medical training as you could possibly imagine. It wasn’t so much the fact that he was a bad doctor . Whilst he was definitely crap in his chosen field, that was beside the point. It is just that you’d expect some kind of reward for that much work, wouldn’t you? Five years worth of sleepless nights on duty in a public hospital? Years of treating the great unwashed and washed alike? That has to worth something. You’d at least expect a receptionist and a car with the vaguest hope of passing its next MOT.
I don’t know who he’d pissed off in this (or some previous) life to earn his current lot but it must have been some unbelievably evil bastard. The judge’s gavel had fallen hard with a sentence that included a fleet of trucks worth of bad karma. Shit, we’ve all been there, done that and visited the souvenir shop.
Condemned by the local Health Authority to work a dingy basement surgery on a Waterloo council estate, he sailed ever closer to the day of his inevitable striking from the Medical Register. He had little to look forward to. There was the bottle of Sainsbury’s scotch in his bottom desk drawer but that was more of an everyday thing than a treat. Retirement looked good if he lived that long. In the meantime, from dawn to dusk, he received a steady stream of punk rock zombies craving Valium and Mogodon. At least, despite appearances, they didn’t want to feast upon his living brains.
I was not really interested in his problems because I had enough of my own. It was a quarter past eleven on a Friday night and I was wondering whether I dared put my penis in Doctor Death’s hand. I’m sorry but I had to give you a little heads up about his medical standing and the dangers such an act might involve before I got on with the details. Standing over the toilet, inspecting the tell tale signs of newly discovered venereal disease, it was a decision that I, myself, was not taking lightly. There was the clap clinic at St Thomas’ of course but last time I went there, the blood test had revealed a large and diverse range of pharmaceuticals. So large and diverse in fact that the attending nurse had loudly introduced me to all and sundry as the walking chemist shop. Such familiarity is rather inappropriate in such settings but she was cute as far as nurses go. The cutest nurses always work the clap clinic. It is the one place no-one seriously tries to pick you up.
The doctor confirmed the nurse’s diagnosis and assured me such variety of substance abuse represented something of a record in his experience. Not realising this was a bad thing, I was quietly pleased at such recognition . Don’t tell that to anyone. A good drug fiend has a reputation to uphold but it should be spread in whispers.
My main problem with the staff of that venerated institution was that they liked sticking that horrible umbrella thing up the eye of your cock and giving it the kind of good hard scraping that is difficult to forget. A quarter century on and the wince is still there. I still clench my teeth at the memory. If you thought the burning sensation you experienced due to the disease was bad, here was a procedure that would have you contemplating celibacy as a serious life option for at least several days. You have to admit that several days is a long time to consider celibacy.
The other disadvantage with the clinic was that it wouldn’t be open until Monday. The sooner I got onto those antibiotics, the sooner I’d be able to fuck again. The way my dick looked, I didn’t even want to touch it myself so a wank was out of the question.
I knew that I had to deal with the problem and I had a fair idea that I could just demand penicillin from the Death dude and he would oblige. His bedside manner was generally restricted to the phrase “What do you want?” His pen would already be quivering atop the prescription pad in bored anticipation. He positively groaned when presented with an ailment that you didn’t know how to treat yourself.
The trouble would come if he suddenly decided to take his hypocritical oath seriously. (I’m sick of writing sic.) Alcoholics can be so damn unpredictable. Doctor Death could suddenly become overwhelmed with quiet sentimentality towards his patients. Paternally, he would turn to you and tell you that he wouldn’t feed his dog the crap that he was scripting out. I doubted he had a dog or at least not one that hadn’t died of neglect. I figured that he sometimes just liked the company. He had once decided to stare into my inner ear for a good twelve minutes for no apparent reason other than my request for sleeping pills. Maybe he was just checking if I had any brain left in there to damage.
What if he reached into that tattered plastic holdall he carried in lieu of a black leather bag? God only knows what he kept in there. What if he pulled out some rusty hooked device of his own design? I imagined the good doctor downing another healthy swig of whisky whilst trying to work out which one of my dicks he should plunge one of his bent coat hangers into. It was not a thought to inspire confidence.
My course of action was clear. Tomorrow, I had to see the doctor but remember to keep one eye on the door in case he asked me to take my pants off. In the meantime, I had to take lots of downers and try to remember not to fuck anyone. Normally, that would be easier said than done but there was the whole question of how I’d managed to get myself into this situation again. That had not raised my stakes in any of the major popularity contests. The queue to my bedroom door was noticeably thin. 
I had met Toni under rather unusual circumstances. Waking up on the toilet to find a strange girl pumping some unknown chemical into your blood stream cuts through all those usual social niceties one expects by way of introduction. Apparently, she thought I was cute but urgently needed some kind of a pick me up to awaken me from my drug induced stupor. A syringe full of what I can only assume was sulphate certainly caught my attention. My introduction to intravenous drug use thus came unexpectedly and unasked for. Don’t let me try and convince you that I was complaining. I was out of my fucking gourd. Besides, it was a good lesson about not falling asleep in the toilet with the door open. I mean to say… anything could happen and it probably did.
Things had taken a fairly predictable course from there. Within an hour, she had climbed over a fifth floor balcony and threatened to throw herself upon the cold hard courtyard below. In a voice that quivered with existential angst she proclaimed the world cruel and bemoaned the fact that nobody loved her. Well, that was a feeling I at least understood on some level and, not having had sex for a fortnight, my testicles felt swollen like watermelons with backed up sperm. It all made a quiet kind of sense at the time. Who says the age of romance is dead?
The next morning, she scarpered early because she thought her boyfriend would probably be worried, Toni, or Puke as she preferred to be known, strapped on her Docs and headed back to the wilds of Kennington. Unbeknownst to me, I had just secured another black mark against my name in the eyes of the Campbell Buildings sewing circle. It was bad enough that I had copulated outside of the group but no-one had pointed out to me that Toni was only fourteen.
With such a large group of reprobates gathered in such close quarters and with so little to do between ponced cigarettes, gossip was the order of the day. Cliques, sub cliques and secret societies blossomed. An anthropologist would have had a field day.
The sewing circle was a loose collective well known for its member’s skill at needle work of one sort and another. They were the princesses of the block, the in-crowd, the squats’ equivalent of a cheerleading squad. They would squeal with delight if you liberated stock from the local off-licence or illegally rigged their electricity supply. But they were fickle in their favours. They had the skills to cut enemies to ribbons with the sharpest claws south of the river and they weren’t afraid to use them. What good is power if you never use it?
It was easy to fall from grace in a shifting moral landscape. I had initially fallen foul of the sewing circle because I snogged Evelyn under the kitchen table one night. Cold shoulders, tongue lashings and cries of “unclean” taught me that it was one thing to have Crass records and go to Rock against Racism gigs but that didn’t give you the automatic right to kiss women of colour.
Such concerns had not occurred to me. I just liked the way Evelyn hid the most beautiful pair of eyes behind the nastiest pair of granny glasses that the National Health could supply. In her green plastic sandals worn over pink florescent socks, she was strange and other worldly and thus reminded me of me.
I thought racism was the preserve of skinheads and the mentally sub normal. Swastika shirts were ironic rather than iconic. Skin colour had as much significance as eye colour in a world of rainbow hued hair dyes. Of course, I lived in a world where bald headed boys with home made British Movement tattoos listened exclusively to Jamaican records. The nation’s morality reeked of insanity. If any proof were needed, the recent election of Margaret Thatcher underlined it. If I couldn’t follow the rules it was simply because the rules made no sense.
Once again, the news was out all over town. I had been a very bad boy.
This moral outrage did not stop the sewing circle adopting an under aged runaway of their own. This sweet young thing clearly idolised the shop lifting pink Trojan mini-skirt lifestyle and all those who walked it in sharp stiletto heels. She would have crawled across hot coals in a bid to fit in so that is exactly what they made her do. They named her Tea, not through rhyming slang acknowledgment of criminal skill but because it became her duty to make that beverage on request. That along with any other household duties required, demanded or merely dreamt up in a fit of casual sadism. I first met her on her knees as she attempted to scrub a bathroom floor with a nail brush. I suggested she rebel against this task but she feared the consequences. They might not take her thieving later. Lincoln had freed the slaves but not in beautiful downtown Waterloo.
Campbell Buildings was a sprawling between-the-wars estate that Lambeth council wanted demolished to make way for a bus terminal. Quietly, it was probably policy to turn a blind eye to the hundred or so punks who had squatted in the interim. There were a lot of hard core lefties in the Lambeth administration who believed all the homeless should be housed and took this as an ideological stance. It was, however, the pragmatists in the regime who finally reigned. For them, we were a way to save money. It was good we made such appalling neighbours. The existing tenants who had previously held out for the better deal to which they were entitled were suddenly none too fussed about which new hovel they were transferred into.
There was also the advantage that it was cheaper to leave us where we were rather than build a brand new state-of-the-art prison facility. That could wait until the new Tory Government provided funding to open up the internment camps. In the meantime, we were free to make our own Abaddon which is exactly what myself and the others did.
Despite my unkind words, the sewing circle was not wrong all of the time. Sleeping with fourteen year olds is never clever especially when they are fourteen going on fifty. Listen boys, you don’t need a degree in psychology to guess at the traumas you’re complicating when you go there. That said, the squatters of Campbell Building were all fucked up one way or another; literally, figuratively and most often both. We sought comfort not just in the arms of strangers but with anyone who would have us.
The sewing circle was also right about not sleeping with people outside the immediate vicinity. My newly festering penis was ample testimony to that. 1980 was a different world of course. Condoms were the weapons of choice for disgusting old people raised before the contraceptive pill. AIDS was not even a blip on yonder horizon. Disease was defeated and we all lived better through illicit chemistry. We could be the generation who lived fast, stayed beautiful, never died and never grew old; a veritable army of Peter and Petra Pans. It was a grand scheme until its inherent follies were exposed.
Scarecrow had been the first to die. Loaded up on sleeping pills, he went up to the roof for reasons unknown. He might have been bored, depressed or just needed a minute to himself to watch the moon come up over the buildings. Who knows why any of us do anything? He either overdosed or fell asleep and froze. We never found out which. By accident or design, it was a sad and lonely passing. In the morning, the police played a game where they threw tiny stones at his open mouth to see who could score the first point. Grief spilled out onto the courtyard below but the authorities had marked out their patch with strips of Metropolitan Police tape, He belonged to them now.
From that moment on, death watched over us with an icy gaze. It was capricious but it would not be denied. Parents came to reclaim bodies, cut hair, choose suits and re-brand with long abandoned names. Their control, thought long lost, won out in the end. These prodigal sons and daughters found repose in the leafy suburbs and towns from whence they thought they had finally escaped. They had found their little piece of England whether they liked it or not.
The ghosts of those we knew and loved were never laid to rest. No graves marked the names we spoke. Their stories were wiped clean and altered as if Jesus was a real person and he himself had washed and forgiven them of their sins. History is always written by the victor and the battles we waged looked all but lost.
The world was dark and that darkness was rising up against us. It was chucking out time on Friday night at locals across the land; the most dangerous hour of them all. The blackest of hearts were granted courage through alcohol but now found themselves ripped from the nurture of the publican’s breast. Angered by these severed ties, the well worn path between boozer and council flat were littered with half eaten curries, bad intentions and the bodies of unwary travellers.
We were held up in a ground floor flat. The council had boarded up the windows and we left these four ply sheets in place not merely through laziness but also for defensive purposes. Even sunlight was our enemy now. The only access was through the front door and, even there, precautions had been taken. Bolts, locks and chains merely offer psychological defence for those who believe their safe European homes to be their castles. In reality, these devices fail all too readily at the first hint of serious attack.
In all the flats, we removed the kitchen doors and propped them up at forty-five degree angles against the front doorways. This was the kind of defensive installation that allowed you to catch several winks of wary half-sleep if you kept one eye open. Well, it did if it was used in conjunction with a bucket load of downers and a strategically placed blunt instrument left under the mattress. The claw hammer was the Teddy Bear of our new generation.
Though we took many chances, in this we took few. Attacks were common and we didn’t take any chances by offending any deities. Charms and amulets began to proliferate along with spells, talismen and hexes. We weren’t fussy about Pantheons. We made a new voodoo from our superstitions. Certain pavement cracks were avoided whilst walking, matches were always snapped after third light and hats were kept far from beds. Various items of clothing were deemed to be lucky and were thus worn until they rotted from our skin. The line between mental illness and religion is a thin one. Once you convince another of the truth of your lunacy then all doubts are cast aside. Convince a few more and you can start picking up tax deductable donations.
It was a boy’s night in and pickings were scarce. We collected our dole on Thursday and the cash had gone the way of dreams. It had vanished with the dawning. We spent the night with prescription drugs, talking and smoking Benson and Hedges cigarettes. The floor was a gold field of abandoned packets.
There was Cory Spondendce and Quick Phil, Two Tone Steve and me. Fat Phil was off sulking in the kitchen or some other dank corner. He had been pretending he was in a time warp for the last few days and this attention seeking had become rather tiresome. Cory had suggested he go and fuck himself – but not anywhere that we could see him doing it. There were certain things you had to specify in Campbell Buildings. Self help books addressing boundary issues were at least a decade off.
Others came and went over the course of the evening. Ruthless and Jessica asked if we wanted to go to the Marquee and see Cowboys International. As if. There was a group who played no part in anybody’s top ten thousand must-see bands list. Pinki and Blowjob made a visit to inform us they were up to no good somewhere. It involved a group of the local estate lads and we thought it better not to know any more before the event. We’d certainly hear all about it in explicit detail later. That went without saying.
A portable record player spun an endlessly repeating loop of Siouxse and the Banshees singles. After they left the charts, top forty records tended to end up in the local newsagency at forty nine pence a pop. That put them within our price range unless, of course, the sales assistant wasn’t paying too much attention. The discount then grew to be five fingered.
I had been in better moods. Frequently. Life was going the way life tends to go the minute some fool claims that things couldn’t get any worse. Some people have so little imagination that it is scary.
I had only just got up to take a leak when I discovered my symptoms. You don’t need to know the foul details but, suffice to say, if you’re one of these people who believe in divine retribution then I had proof positive that yours is a vengeful God. If I needed any more proof then it came in the form of the commotion at the door. The alarm was raised. The Scousers were coming.
Hang on a second. Who the fuck were the Scousers? Much like primitives who choose to live under the shadows of volcanos, we had set up home at the nexus point between a Mod pub, a Rockabilly pub and a Greaser’s pub. In all fairness, the Greasers just sat around listening to Deep Purple albums but anyone who could do that had to be twisted in some kind of sick and evil way. One had to always quietly suspect the worst. To top that off, skinheads were free ranging ubiquitous troublemakers and Mad Dog’s Faginesque punk troop could also be counted upon to make unwanted intrusions. We couldn’t have planned it better if we tried.
Who were the Scousers? Even if you religiously read NME, in tribal London there were hip fashion trends that could rise and fall in an afternoon. A vague image formed of cleaver wielding Liverpuddlian mop tops serenading us with such ditties as “I want to hold your hand” whilst hacking away at various parts of our anatomy. Stranger things have happened in the big town.
Of course, it could have been a glue sniffing flashback too. Stranger things than that have also been known to happen.
There are a whole lot of theories about why people watch horror films. Some will tell you that horror films desensitise the viewer so that they may overcome their fears and learn to face the horrors life will inevitably throw their way. Others claim this desensitisation leads to sociopathic behaviour and the breakdown of society as we know it. Thus, these latter critics claim, that horror films should be banned accordingly. I think that is all a crock of shit. I repeatedly went to screening of George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” because it provided me with a range of educational insights into the kind of situation I had just found myself in.
The main thing you learn from a horror film is that when you do something stupid then you tend to die fairly early on in the piece. If you do something unbelievably stupid you will be lucky just to see out the opening scene. As is so often the case, fact proceeded to follow fiction instinctively. Emerging from the toilet, I discovered that the front door was wide open and everyone was running to the back of the flat. The fact that there was nowhere to go back there didn’t seem to be occurring to anyone at the time. The messenger had been let through the barricades only to see them abandoned in the ensuing panic. This was turning into a frigging bloodbath without even trying.
I focussed my fear on the problem at hand. I was not in the mood for bashings, beatings murder or rape. These things would not bring a perfect end to a perfect evening. I got the door down just in time to hear the first bangs of fists on the wood outside. Sam Raimi couldn’t have timed it better even if he tried. Actually, he did try in the first Evil Dead film but he couldn’t cut his timing any closer to what I’d just pulled off. Now all we needed was a soundtrack by Goblin and we’d have something that would put bums on cinema seats.
An undecipherable blur of drunken accents began to howl something that probably amounted to assorted threats and abuse. Scousers my arse. Drunken Irish builder’s labourers more like with enough Poteen in their bellies to present a fire hazard. They lived over in the next block but I had no idea what their beef was. In life threatening situations, it is often better not to know as there is little time to ponder life’s little absurdities.
“Little pigs! Little Pigs! Let us come in!”
“Not by the hairs on our chinny chin chins.”
That’s about as good a translation as I can really give you. The words were all different but I think I captured the spirit of the piece. The huffing and puffing that followed seemed a little more forceful than simple exhalation. These guys were putting their shoulders into their work big time. I was putting all my weight down on the buttress and still I bounced up with every heave ho. I looked around for the nearest large heavy object.
“Phil! Get your fucking fat arse over here!” I demanded with the kind of voice Marine Drill Sergeants use in the movies.
Fat Phil preferred to be called Phil Free for obvious reasons. However, no-one really wanted to take him up on that particular implied offer. Being told to feel free does not, by definition, demand obligation.
There was, however, a duty to differentiate between him and Quick Phil. We called him Fat Phil because Slow Phil would have been even more insulting than our eventual choice. Besides, he was not merely big boned. He had, despite the most meagre of rations, still retained sufficient padding so as to cover up the fact he was big boned. In addition, he wore the kind of coat that Uncle Fester would only wear in the depths of a Siberian winter. With his thick black eye make-up he looked like a vaguely satanic panda. Satanic Panda Phil would have made an ideal rechristening if not for the fact that it was too much of a mouthful.
“No,” he replied. “I’m scared. They’ll hurt me.”
I felt like slapping him around myself at that moment. My fear had bought out a cruel streak from deep inside. I went with the feeling even though he was a friend who was already close to tears. I could tell you that I spoke for the good of the group but part of me meant every word that I said.
“Listen to me, you fat pile of shit. If you don’t get you’re arse over here right now, you won’t have to worry about them because I will personally come over there and beat you to death myself.”
I must have been fairly loud and fairly scary because even the banging on the front door stopped. The room took on a deathly silence as Phil assumed the position. I glared around the room.
“Now, will one of you useless fucks get me a bloody hammer so I can nail the first cunt who comes through the door.”
Outside, there was a half hearted volley of abuse and a few random kicks to the door. It was all over bar this shouting. What was planned as a simple massacre was turning into something more difficult. Someone other than us might end up getting hurt. The assaulting force vanished back into the night as if they never were there at all. The silence just swallowed them.
The next morning, when the buttress was raised, the front door was shattered and torn from its hinges. Locks and bolts hung off of bent and mangled screws but most of the damage was invisible. It lay deep within us in a place where no investigative surgery, electron microscope or endoscopy probe could find it. It was the kind of damage we all take on one hurt at a time. It’s just that some of us take it harder than others.
There are many who will tell you that the rock and roll dream is all about fast cars, loose women, money and the kind of shit that money buys. In Campbell Buildings, we lived a dream all right – but it was nothing like the one advertised on the box. One can only wonder at how much worse the straight world must have been for us to not just choose the life we did but also to revel in it. Is it better to rule in hell than serve in heaven? To us it seemed better to just live in hell.
Original mugshots from Waterloo station photo-booth courtesy of Leah D…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bob Short claims he has not only heard the chimes at midnight, he has stayed up past dawn to hear them again the next time around. Before being old enough to drink, he haunted Sydney’s beer barns with proto punk band Filth. Later on, he gained some notoriety in the UK with the band Blood and Roses when he was described as everything from a “shambolic messiah” to a “long, tall streak of piss”. He has been a DJ and worked in a sex shop, the civil service and as Musical Director for a theatre company. He claims the only thing ever to surprise him was seeing his thirtieth birthday. Currently, he lives in exile in the penal colonies of New South Wales with his son, Billy. There he has makes low-budget films such as Makers of the Dead, Kings’ Cross Vampires, Lone Gunman Theory and Bad Animals. He is also working on a novel entitled “Red”.
Available from http://www.lulu.com/content/956220
Penguin
April 13, 2010 at 5:30 pmHi Martin, please do not think the ‘imposter’ tag was aimed in any way towards you! It was me that made the mistake after seeing the photo and the text below on the website.
http://seagullscreamingkillherkillher.blogspot.com/2009/09/book-review-inhalants-by-mark-pownall.html
Assumed it was CB myself as the text seemed to state was directly under the photograph.
Us THFC supporters need a hug right now. Big hug?
Martin C
April 13, 2010 at 6:04 pmGawd, tell me about it…made worse by the fact I know a Pompey fan who’s incapable of shutting his trap about, “Ooh, you’re only doing well cos you nicked Twitchy and all our best players”. Still, there’s always tomorrow night…
Chris – I had a browse around for the others after finding ‘Inhalants’ in a charity shop. Problem is few of the online copies have accompanying jacket scans, so it’s hard to tell which subculture they’re featuring! They probably just regurgitated the exact same text, only sourcing stock pics of ravers in the ’90s editions, or hoodies last decade…
Cue snapshot of sweaty-faced punters, gurning at Megatripolis. Caption: “Solvents can lead to disturbing and frightening hallucinations”
Chris Low
April 13, 2010 at 7:00 pmIf they were at ‘megatripolis’ they were probably grasping at anything inhalable to attain a state of auditory hallucination and thus escape.
Martin C
April 13, 2010 at 8:15 pmArf arf!
baronvonzubb
April 14, 2010 at 2:28 pmpat dasso was as far as i know anglo indian. last time i saw him he was doing good, working in the green grocers in west end lane 81/82 then heard he was in and out of friern barnet (local mental hosp) then heard he was deceased. but my memories hazy 25 yrs ago. if folk have got more up to date info then maybe they are right. my first memories of him was when he lived in a shed on fortune green. in that part of west hampstead there were only 2 boneheads. him and terry madden. mr madden went to join the provisionals in n ireland. last seen in west end lane older, fatter and bedecked with gold jewelery 10/15 years ago, but still with a reasonably decent sarcastic wit. he was a self proclaimed NF member, myself an ‘anarchist’ we got on well despite that. I mention terry madden because he was ‘suggs’ mentor, yes that suggs who went on to be mr madness & tv personailty.
baronvonzubb
April 14, 2010 at 2:55 pmand how did this this thread get onto pat dasso. I cant find any pics of him. and i cant remember him having any facial tatoos either. he gets a mention after a pic of some other guy. or am i being, as per normal, a doh??
luggy
April 14, 2010 at 5:09 pmRemember seeing Madness at the Rock Garden, wasn’t impressed with the amount of sieg-heiling going on between Chas Smash on stage and the audience.
Sam
April 14, 2010 at 6:11 pmI’d forgotten about Terry Madden Jake. Another local football hooligan was Mick Mahoney who went on to be a playwright.
Kerr Ray Z. Fokker
April 14, 2010 at 7:52 pmThe guy, in the youtube vid which sparked the bizarrely obsessive ‘Where is Pat Dasso?’ meme is Kev McG******k, who is now apparently dead. He had a shorter stouter brother called John who also had spider tatts and later became a punk. They were part of the Carnaby/Dilly/Square postcard skins who were basically despised by the wider bonehead community. Surprisingly, a high percentage of the face tatt crowd survived, although laser surgery was later made mandatory by the probation service, I believe.
Mick M. was indeed a well-known face who used to hang about with a bunch of Millwall hard cases in the Coleherne, of all places, from time to time. I was quite tight, briefly, with one of the younger brothers who comprised that firm. Most of them were from around the Aylesbury estate in Sarf London. (Wasn’t Mick originally from Islington?)
Now, talking of old faces, does anyone remember a legless black tuinal dealer on a skateboard that used to hang around the Dilly in the late 70s/early 80s and batter the living shit out of skins, propelling himself out of the crowds at high velocity with these huge gloves on his hands? It was arguably the bizarrest thing I have ever witnessed in our capital. Weirdly, like pilot fish and dangerous sharks, he developed a bizarre symbiosis with the local bonehead regulars, who used him as a tactical ploy to weed out hangers-on. But the sound of that skateboard still haunts me on certain nights. I am convinced however that he is one of the elect and will someday reside at the Demiurge’s right hand.
Penguin
April 14, 2010 at 8:25 pmAhhh, lovely. Welcome back Kerr, it’s been too long. Virtual handshake sent to you.
Sam
April 15, 2010 at 12:09 amHe may have been from Islington Kerr but I went to primary school with him and his brothers. My claim to fame is that Mick destroyed this steamship I’d made out of corn flake boxes and toilet rolls outside my infant school when I was waiting for my mum. It was my pride and joy and stuffed full of tiny bits of shiny wrapping paper as treasure. The fucker saw me with it, kicked it from underneath and it broke into several bits, showering its booty all over me. Then he stomped off and I cried all the way home. My other Mahoney memory was either him or his older brother scoring this fantastic header in the school playground. I can see him still – 1971, shock of red hair, four feet off the ground, legs tucked underneath his body, wicked crack of the head…back of the net. Why this image has stayed with me I don’t know. I remember his family as huge so it may not have been him. Didn’t know he was Millwall. Most kids round our way supported Chelsea, Arsenal or QPR.
The Dilly was a strange, lawless, subterranean world, though I never had too much to do with it. My mate Mad dog used to do something called ‘The Grand National’ down the escalator there. It was one of the longest escalators in London, still wooden at that time and he’d slide all the way down the central partition, leaping all the ‘Please keep hands clear of the escalator’ signs on the way down, of which there were about twenty. I’d always end up in a heap pissing myself laughing watching this.
Kerr Ray Z. Fokker
April 15, 2010 at 10:12 am@Penguin….
Good to be back, mate. I’ve got a couple of Sid Vicious memorial photos for you that I’ll put up on here later. Loads of odd-looking punks and punkettes in their prime. And some charging skins too.
@Sam….
The fact that he was Millwall is why I remember him so well. As you say, a trifle unusual for that neck of the woods. Of course, it’s not entirely improbable he followed a few teams in his youth. People, so inclined, tended to go where the ultra-violence beckoned in those days.
As for your steamship, I think there is the possibility of a lawsuit there. If that isn’t severe and enduring emotional trauma, then I don’t know what is!
Yep, the Dilly was a place for the crazy-brave and the irrevocably twisted. My only problem is that it seemed to be twinned with sinister political goings on at Dolphin Court involving grooming of teenage runaways and predatory bumboy depravity. Maybe it was the bad speed but I am sometimes convinced it was all part of some vast MI5 psyops where the rats had been temporarily allowed to take control of the maze. (Actually that reminds me that there was a reasonably articulate yet massively incoherent onetime Dilly transient with a hair bear bunch afro who told stories of gurkhas riding in baker’s vans through darkened London streets ready to assassinate enemies of the status quo at the drop of a kukri. I still pass baker’s vans today with an heir of trepidation. lol.)
Martin C
April 15, 2010 at 12:38 pmHas anyone noticed that when this thread veers back onto boneheads, Tottenham doing well? We should keep this subject running til Saturday morning, and bring up Nicky Crane on the 23rd April.
“Trash Can” – the book that keeps giving.
baronvonzubb
April 15, 2010 at 1:46 pmsue him sam. i’ll bear witness that the truamatised young mohican that i knew was directly linked to that steam ship destruction day..
Sam
April 15, 2010 at 3:42 pmWhat a great slo-mo movie shot it’d be though. Big, purple painted boat disected by platform shoe.
…’predatory bumboy depravity’. Indeed. Robbo told of some fat, aging queen down there who worked for weeks to seduce some innocent minor. Apparently when Robbo enquired of the victim one day the queen in question replied with the classic line; “Fuck it I thought….and fuck it I did”.
Sam
April 15, 2010 at 4:59 pmWas just reminded of the great Pogues song ‘Hot Dogs with Everything’ which is about Soho and the Dilly;
“Hung around with some slags I know,
Down St Martin’s school of Art,
Took an amp and a couple of blues,
That nearly blew my head apart,
I was down in the ground in a stinking bog,
Giving head to a fat old slob,
Throwing up with his cock in my gob,
Bleeeeuuurrccchhhh!! Hot dogs with everything.”
danmac
April 17, 2010 at 9:31 pmlegless black tuinal dealer battering skinheads – this has to be the imaginatively nicknamed ‘space invader’ or possibly george, stories about him haunted my early secondary school days. black – check, beats up skinheads – check (dropping off walls onto em like the legendary australian drop bear), and he can run faster on his hands than you ever will be able to on your feet. i never laid eyes on him, but one day came across a police van with constables flying out of the back outside our school and allegedly an irate space invader inside…
Chris L
April 17, 2010 at 9:49 pm<<>>
Classic!! 🙂
Kerr Ray Z. Fokker
April 18, 2010 at 9:56 am“Dropping off walls”? Holy cow, it was worse than I thought! Yeah, that’s him, the ‘space invader’, although he was more like a fucking tarantula when I think about it. In fact, it was the vid of Spider Kev that tripped the old memory switch. Funny you should mention a police van incident involving him, as this stall-holder I knew down the ‘bello also saw the ‘space invader’ get loaded into the back of a police van onetime. “It was rocking so much, I thought Elvis Presley was in the back!” he said afterwards. lol.
Penguin
April 18, 2010 at 10:07 amTemplate for contacting MP’s and other officials or media re Gary Critchley.
Gary Critchley dedicated post is here for up to date news via the comments:
https://www.killyourpetpuppy.co.uk/news/?p=3160
Please cut and paste the document below onto a word document and print it out to send by post or fax.
Dear …………………,
I am contacting you regarding Gary Critchley, prisoner no B39969 (A1473AK), convicted of murder in 1981.
The Judge at the time recommended he serve no more than 9/10 years.
This is now his 30th year of incarceration. The conviction is unsafe and according to his solicitor one of the worst miscarriages of justice Britain has ever seen (http://www.b39969.org.uk/pdf/private_eye_24July2009.pdf)
Briefly the case is as follows, however please read the above article for full details.
Gary allegedly killed a man in 1980. During this murder he sustained frontal lobe damage to his brain, by being hit with a hammer. He also broke his back, ankle and wrist and was found in the street covered in blood.
The victim sustained more than 20 blows with a hammer.
The blood on Gary was found to be from his injuries and there was not one speck of the victim’s blood on him.
The victim was discovered in a room on the upper floor in the building, Gary was found outside on the pavement.
The only evidence to link Gary to the crime was a trainer, two or three sizes too small for him, on his left foot. On his right foot was his own boot which fitted him.
Gary apparently killed the victim, avoiding any blood, changed one shoe, hit himself on the head with the hammer, and then jumped out of the window.
The truth indicates that both Gary and the victim were attacked by a third party, who remains at liberty.
I feel that this really is a grave miscarriage of justice.
Unfortunately, this is not a high profile case, merely the case of an ordinary citizen who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. A person who nearly lost his life, but who ended up in prison himself, for something the forensic evidence suggests that he didn’t commit.
I am asking you to look into this, because I know if you do, you will want to take it further.
……………………………………………… Signature.
Taf
April 18, 2010 at 7:58 pmRe the West Hampstead comments..
Re 80 – 82, I used to work at the Nat West Branch of West Hampstead (102 West End Lane) – I was away from home for the first time (18 and living in Kings Cross) and being a bit homesick, used to have a chat with the Evening Standard Seller who was based near the tube station and the small shop. He was a top guy, intelligent and very kind to me – he also knew some of the skinheads in the area who treated him with nothing other than courtesy. (He died not long after which was a real shame)
The whole point of this was that one of them had a spiders web on his face, the first time I’d ever seen such a thing – he went by the name of, unusually enough, “Spider” (I think)
One evening, the bank manager was taking the staff out for a drink and coming towards us in West End Lane was a bunch of skins – the manager told us to cross the road and avoid any eye contact ” from that rable – look at them , they’ve even got their faces covered, they must be insane”. As they approached us, the skins recognised me and as they passed, Spider et al greeted me with a cheery ” Hiya Taf, how are you!!!” The look on the managers face was sublime….
I’m sure I met his dad in the Railway pub – a down to earth Irish guy…. but my memory could be playing tricks.
Martin C
April 19, 2010 at 10:46 pmSpooky stuff from Ray. When my much older brother (he was ’62, compared to my ’76) used to drink in the Assembly Rooms in Kentish Town during the early ’80s, he had all these anecdotes about some narky legless black bloke they all called ‘Mudhopper’, who used to come in, get blind drunk, and attack drinkers by scooting over and zoning in on their bollocks.
I went there a fair bit between ’95-’96, mostly as a warm-up for gigs, and, one night, an elderly, legless black guy trundled in, stinking of piss and looking like he’d come out of a council skip (only he was in a wheelchair, not on a skateboard). He started screaming abuse and picking on people and got (violently) wheeled out by the bar staff. Same night we saw The Fall at the Forum, on the Light User Syndrome tour (me and my mate Nick met MES afterwards, and he was pissed off his nut but extremely friendly). No clue whether they’re all the same bloke, or if there were 3 separate legless black geezers doing the rounds.
Also, regarding Gurkhas in bread vans – even as a little brat, I remember so many urban myths circulating North London at the time. Pre-internet boredom? But it was amazing the way they circulated. One was about the SAS running half the milk floats, apparently they were building up detailed profiles of citizens based on their rounds and orders…it wasn’t just drugged-up hippies saying this, lots of kids at school and older siblings used to joke about it…does anyone remember alligators in the Hampstead-Belsize Park sewers?…another one was that you shouldn’t ever touch an NF poster or sticker because, allegedly, they put rusty razor blades behind each one, to cut and infect anyone who dared scratch them down. By around ’83/’84, the ‘razor blades’ had changed to ‘AIDS-infected hypo tips’. Well, it scared me anyway…
…until the late ’90s. when I was at a party and somebody told me the exact same story, only the context had switched from NF stickers to prostitute cards in phone booths. Who generated all these urban myths? And how did they spread so quickly?
(PS- sorry, know this has little to do with KYPP or punk)
alistairliv
April 20, 2010 at 6:38 amI don’t know Martin – we [KYPP the zine] used to recommend the Illuminatus trilogy as essential reading and it is a compendium of paranoid/OTT urban mythology and conspiracy theories.
And – if I was a dabbler in post-postmodern socio-media studies theory- I could easily prove that punk was itself the hyper-fetishised concretisation/ totalisation of urbanised myth (AKA mythical urbanism). Was punk itself not an absence, a social void which had only the appearance of actuality, an appearance which was generated by the projection of assumed individuality through the reflection in the mass media of the media lens when focussed on the blank generation?
That punk (as such) did not exist, it was an urban myth summoned into existence when, rather than responding with shock and horror to the media myth of ‘punk’, a generation of alienated youth redefined their separation from such media narratives by becoming the ‘horror’, the other, the alligator in the sewer, the SAS milkmen and women… thus realising the urban myth by becoming it.
Kerr Ray Z. Fokker
April 20, 2010 at 8:47 amAgreed, it’s all theatre. Masses of narcotized suburban accountants desperately seeking oblivion and the temporary suspension of fear through the act of becoming Jack Pudding for a day. If it ever made any sense, that is to say if we ever stripped it of fairytales and cosy narratives, then we’d probably all go mad anyway staring at the endless pointless repetition and hard-coded futility of it all. Furthermore, I blame Thomas Aquinas for identifying truth (the act of act conformity between object and statement, statement and idea) with moral rightness and God’s will, instead of, as the pre-Socratic Greeks would have said, with the disclosure or revelation of the thing’s essence itself. A biased and fundamentally flawed epistemology like that just leads to an absurd paradigm based on perpetual truth as correspondence rather than revelation. Apophenia and mass delusion is but a heartbeat away. The whole world therefore vanishes in a Dionysian blur of myth, counter-myth and continual obfuscation.
Having said all that, if we were the ‘blank generation’ then what does that make the current facebook generation. I heard a bizarre piece of urban Beckett on a 44 bus last year involving two bro’speak yoof engaging in a mobile phone conversation without mobile phones. They were discussing a label on a tin. It went…..
“Says 28 days, bro’. How many weeks is dat?
“Dunno. I think it’s about three weeks and a bit.”
“Okay. But how long is da bit?”
“Dunno.”
“Yeah, but you mentioned the bit, bro’. How long is it?”
“Dunno, not sure. It’s just a bit, innit?”
“Bro’! You said 3 weeks and a bit, how long is da bit?”
“I dunno!”
“Bro’! Not being funny, I’ll go dark on you! How long is da bit?”
“Bro’, I dunno!”
“But YOU said 3 weeks and a bit!”…………
Ad infinitum. For about 20 minutes. Top theatre. I nearly gave them a round of applause for their efforts. But then ‘the bit’ began to worry me. It didn’t help either that both the young fellows had SOUTH THAMES COLLEGE i.d tags suspended from their necks. Who knows, perhaps they were tutors? My overall conclusion is that either London youth are now firmly ensconced in the joys of permanent and irreparable infantile idiocy or I merely had the misfortune to witness a wildly esoteric cryptographic exchange between two elite corps centipedes from the Crab Nebula; disguised as ‘raggas’ to avoid unwanted attention obviously.
Deconstruct that!
Penguin
April 20, 2010 at 8:57 amOh Kerr, you’ve got to write that book you mentioned. You have a certain style of prose which excites me somewhat and the way you describe things generally cracks me up. Glory Glory THFC etc etc.
Kerr Ray Z. Fokker
April 20, 2010 at 9:21 amIt’s just SE London hyperbole really. There are hundreds of fellas like me walking the streets of Millwall land. I was just well-tutored in the arts of terrace banter; a mere midget perched on the shoulders of giants as they say.
Besides, I think the book is here on KYPP, isn’t it? Far prefer the contributions and interjections of others, as it keeps me honest. And amused too. Also, my orbit is so elliptical at times that I fear that the cloistered writing life would send me off into spheres best kept hidden and unnamed; places where Martin C’s SAS milk floats make regular deliveries and legless black men drop down from roofs to tell tales of weekend skinhead bashings. Such a disturbing oasis would have little trouble in convincing me to become a permanent resident I fear.
Martin C
April 20, 2010 at 9:49 amThe funny thing is there’s probably a group of bored kids in Kuala Lumpar right now, swearing blind that durian cart vendors are secretly working for Malaysian intelligence…though I think the quality of these myths went way downhill in the 2000s. If the best we can come up with is the “Pussycat Dolls are men” meme, we’re in serious trouble as a species. But the rat’s head in the KFC box, that was real, it happened to my brother-in-law’s sister in Cricklewood.
Al, I keep meaning to check out the Illuminatus books, but am slightly worried I’ll end up with a third eye biro’d on my forehead and cornering people in supermarkets. But, next time I see them going cheap on Amazon, I’ll bite the bullet and give ’em a go. I think you should write that thesis, though, sounds interesting. Plus it’ll annoy some of the individuals who believe in ‘REAL PUNK’ and who get so vexed whenever Avril Lavigne appears on TV.
Martin C
April 20, 2010 at 9:59 amBy the way, there was definitely a Committee of Sick Jokes operative in the 1980s. Haven’t a clue where they ended up – or how, 24 hours after the Challenger disaster, everyone in the UK had heard “What does NASA stand for? Need Another Seven Astronauts”. That one spread like a bush fire…
Kerr Ray Z. Fokker
April 20, 2010 at 10:27 amThe real vexing question is what happened to all the street nutters? Where did all those weatherbeaten disseminators of unwholesome truths and disturbing epiphanies disappear to? Every area of London had about a dozen or so of ‘the crew that never sleeps’ at any given time. And they definitely helped reinforce the idea of difference. And that recognition of difference is but a small step to believing that baker’s vans are indeed teeming with Gurkhas.
I remember we had one local headcase who either scrawled, with a handy lump of chalk, curses in ancient greek on pavements or wrote them on pieces of paper and stuck them up in trees. He used to beat the bounds of the neighbournood with a large stick during thunderstorms whilst wearing an oversized London transport inspector’s hat on his head that had the words CONDUCTOR emblazoned upon it. The strange thing was that when he vanished all the yuppies moved into the area. I sometimes wish he would return, pied piper like, and lead them all away again! The other strange thing about him was that he actually sparked his own urban myth factory care of a local Greek barber who would tell tales of an alleged illustrious pedigree and disordered nights in Amsterdam taking LSD with pigeons.
The sheer inventiveness and surreal gimmicks of these latter-day shamen stunned me into a reverent silence even back then. But like white dogshite, they were consigned to oblivion in the 90s through either obscure council ordinances or hideous EU diktats. Why?
alistairliv
April 20, 2010 at 11:02 amHow many weeks in 28 days?
3 and a bit.
How long is a bit?
Good question. Easy for us of the analog generation, but these kids have been digitised. Look at it from a binary pespectve. They are trying to get from 11(3 in binary) to 100 (4 in binary) by adding one bit at at time.
As wikipedia sez : A bit is the basic unit of information in computing and telecommunications; it is the amount of information that can be stored by a digital device or other physical system that can normally exist in only two distinct states.
In computing, a bit can also be defined as a variable or computed quantity that can have only two possible values. These two values are often interpreted as binary digits and are usually denoted by the Arabic numerical digits 0 and 1. Indeed, the term “bit” is a contraction of binary digit.
So how many binary digits are there in a week of seven days?
Dunno (= does not compute). The two lads were caught up in what Hegel called a ‘bad infinity’ – adding one bit at at time to 3 to give 3.1, 3.11, 3.111, 3.1111- trapped in Zeno’s paradoxical reality.
The gulf or abyss between analog and digital generations has been rendered musically and visually by BBE as ” 7 days and one week”
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpkLcfbOra4
Note the + sign on the young woman’s underwear and the distortions of reality as her positive or true (digital) self progresses unseen and unknown through the false ( signed by -) analog city.
Did either of the young men on the 44 bus reveal any similar markings on their (no doubt) visible underwear?
Martin C
April 20, 2010 at 11:48 amThere were some lone nutters still flying the flag in the ’90s, like the White Woman of Camberwell, a black woman who used to wear white bandages, painted her skin completely white and had a Tiny Tears (painted white) strapped to her chest. She also popped up at the ’95 Notting Hill Carnival. Single-handedly responsible for hundreds of speculative urban myths (one was that she was a prostitute who lost her baby and never got over it, I can’t remember the rest but they were inevitably whatever sounded good at the time). Apparently she was called ‘Angel’, but who really knows?
I also remember a woman who used to hang around the Waterloo station bus lanes, who had a classroom globe with a crucifix glued on the top, a toy snake around her neck and loads of anti-Vatican slogans scribbled down the back of her frock.
Maybe she was the one who scrawled “SPIDERS EAT CHILD MOLESTERS IN HELL – 666 – SATAN IS A WOMAN” on a Northern Line carriage. I never got my head round that graffito.
slyme68
April 20, 2010 at 1:54 pmin the graveyard at hackney central there’s a cast metal sign, quite old, on the railings which says;
“Herabouts for many years was seen BLIND FRED. A sunny soul” and repeats it in braille underneath. i love that sign.
there should be a blue plaque scheme for street nutters.
Kerr Ray Z. Fokker
April 20, 2010 at 2:31 pm@Alistair………….NO!!!!!!!!!
I have made a conscious effort these past few years to escape from the horrors of variable length subnet masking and now you have brought it all back in a wave of Hegelian ‘bad infinity’.
Just read some earlier parts of this thread that I missed….
@ Baron VonZubb Re: Bonehead to Convoy Hippy (think we referred to them as ‘brigands’ at the time)
I think that damascene journey was purely down to pure escapism and ultimate necessity for the most part. There was always going to be a tipping point where the endless allure of violence, probable, if not habitual, incarceration and endemic solvent abuse would lead to a need for physical relocation and some degree of psychological metamorphosis. The basic will to survive, I suppose. What better than the promise of country lanes, fresh air and even whackier and stranger narcotics to facilitate the process? Fashions come and they go too. The London skinhead scene was dead as a dodo by about ’83/’84. Most just became soul boys and/or soccer casuals. The face tatt and west end begging crowd didn’t even have that avenue of escape. Chronic unemployment for most and mental instability for some barred them from football and soul/funk clubs. The politics had changed too. Right wing extremism was slowly being replaced by self-help and loadsamoney. Where could a poor bonehead go but back to the land? Better ask Dave though, he went from white power and glue to hunt sabbing and road protests. Maybe he just stuck out his thumb and a gaily-coloured van pulled up and took him to the promised land in a haze of joss sticks and nepalese temple ball? Actually stuff like that seemed to happen a lot back then. (The hitch-hiking stories I could tell…The best lifts were American airmen – presumably the nuclear tactical wing variety – all slavering drug fiends in full James Dean mode… )
I suddenly realised, didn’t Nicky Crane do security at Glasto for a few years? Bet he was a lot more touchy-feely than the fascistic cunts who do it now. Not that I’d be seen dead there since the Mutoids and Kings X bus garage lot packed it in. Now those guys knew how to party. Haven’t been since late 80s. But close mate of mine still does all the festivals regular as clockwork. You can only get charlie now apparently from the onsite dealers, mexican mushrooms got taken off the menu years ago. Crying shame. I’d make datura root compulsory for all entrants and build redbeard sensi obelisks that could be seen from the moon. If something’s gotta be done, it should be done properly.
Talking of insane drug fests and hippies…. I once worked with an ex-pal of Syd Barrett’s. A straggly-bearded geordie who lived in a greenhouse. (Never believed his Syd Barrett claim until I saw a photo of him next to the aforesaid crazy diamond on a BBC doc years later. He was a lovely bloke as he gave me two out of print Kenneth Grant books for free. But I digress…) He used to live at 144 Piccadilly in the glory days of King Mob and before that in Notting Hill with Mr Moorcock and the Hawkwind lot. Coupled with his days panhandling outside the UFO club, he pretty much did the psychedelic rounds. Now his best mate in those days was Twink, of the Pink Fairiers, and he told me that Twink used to carry a bottle of pure liquid LSD-25 and take swigs out of it from time to time. I once calculated that each swig was equal to about 50,000 trips or thereabouts. Apparently there was no noticeable long term ill effects either. Which is more than can be said for my workmate who had a long period in a mental institution, coupled with Electro-shock therapy, which eradicated large parts of his memory circuits. This however he put down to the fact that he had gone all Jimmy Page at some point and tried to summon Choronzon and not to the pitfalls of better living thru chemistry. (Choronzon didn’t appear btw. Or so he thought.) Now I always wondered what 50,000 trips would feel or, more properly, think like, in a swirling mass of music colours type way. Would the effects be partially nullified due to saturation, or would the effects be exponential? If so, remind me never to talk to engage Twink (if he is still alive) on the subject of God. Or even the shopping channel for that matter.