I step out of the front door onto Endell Street and look up; the sky is the colour of old off-white underpants and the trees, which have shed all but a few yellow leaves are festooned with their curious carob-like pods. A white van driver fails to slow down in time and there is a bang and a loud scraping sound as his sump hits the speed ramp. I turn left and left again onto Short’s Gardens.

Outside Scoop, the fancy ice cream parlour, two neatly dressed compact men are walking down the middle of the road. The older of the two says, “What they’re not taking into account, what they don’t realise is that they’ve got a problem there. That woman is actually mentally ill. I mean she’s clinically insane…”

Across Neal Street towards Seven Dials. A lumpy, young blonde woman, dressed as if she is trying hard to be someone else is pacing up and down, speaking loudly into her phone. “Yeah well, I’m glad he told me he’s gay. So, at least I’m not wasting my time. You know what I mean?”

Around the Seven Dials Monument and right into Earlham Street. Leaning against the windowsill of another fly-be-night fashion retailer a couple of trendily coiffured shop assistants are smoking cigarettes. As I approach, the boy turns to the girl and says, “Ooh, I can’t wait to get my hair cut later. How different do you think I should have it?”

Nipping down Tower Street past the Ivy, with its liveried lackey, and around the tourists milling idiotically outside St Martin’s Theatre, I emerge onto Monmouth Street. Two young women are coming out of Poste Mistress, the destination shoe shop. One is well turned out, her brown wavy hair cascading onto her furry coat collar. The other is dressed in sportswear and has a Croydon facelift. The first says to the second, “Well, why don’t we just ask someone?” The second replies, “No! I never ask anyone directions anywhere, ever.”
Heading South down Wellington Street, my fast London pace is hampered by a pair of slow-moving pensioners. I immediately go into my standard internal diatribe, ‘Out of my way you fuckin’ bozo provincial hicks. You don’t own the place…some of us pay Council Tax to live round here, you know. Come on, come on…’ Angel Dave taps me on the shoulder, “Easy mate, be patient. They’re probably a sweet old couple in town for the day, enjoying the sights. They don’t need you vibing them out.” As I squeeze past them, the man raises his arm and points to the sign hanging from the wall of The Lyceum and in a Gumby voice, utters “Lion King.”

Where the Strand meets the Aldwych, centre of ancient Londonwic, I cross the road to Waterloo Bridge. The sort of black woman one is accustomed to seeing dancing with a copper at Carnival is shouting into her mobile, “I tell you, you haff to work ‘im.” A rangy posh guy passes me and bends down to whisper something in his little boy’s ear. The boy pipes up, “What are poor people?”

I get to Barry’s on Coin Street. He suffers from MS. He used to be a member of the Bushwackers, the Millwall firm. I tell him that I DJ country music now and then. He says, “Oh country, I can’t fuckin’ stand country. Every Sunday me old man would play ‘She wears my ring’ over and over whilst he got pissed. Then he’d beat up me mum.”

I ascend the steps to the Southbank complex, the giant bust of Nelson Mandella to my right and a canopy of multi-coloured Christmas lights shines above my head. I keep pace with a man in a business suit in order to earwig him as he chats on his mobile. He speaks in an affected middle-class accent. “Hello mate…ha ha ha ha ha…yeah, life and soul of the party, eh…how was the shooting?”

On the other side of Hungerford Bridge in the crappy market, just before you enter Charing Cross Station, two middle-aged homeless guys lurk in a dark recess that hangs suspended above Villiers Street. They are both wearing woolly bobble hats and have grubby sleeping bags thrown over their shoulders. I hear Big Ben chime the quarter hour as one says plaintively to the other, “I used to do boxing.”

Waiting at the pedestrian crossing to get to the other side of the Strand once again, I get a whiff of the crooked, burly blonde chap to my right. I’m getting strong bass notes of ‘sleeps in his clothes and subtle, tantalising top notes of wee’. He turns to stab at the WAIT button and says, “Yeaiowl.” I turn to look at him. His left eye is staring at where a parrot would be, had one been perched on my right shoulder and his right eye is glaring at my left foot. “What?’ says his mate.
“Yeaiowl.”
“What?”
“Fuckin’ traffic.”

Up Adelaide Street past Maggi Hambling’s ‘A Conversation with Oscar Wilde’ and there is indeed a street drinker sitting on the civic monument having a mumbled chat with the old wit. One gay guy cajoles another at the pop-up urinal, “Let me see it.” All around people mill about waiting to get into The Connection – the homeless centre at St Martin’s-in-the-Fields. A woman there says to a small crowd, “…if I don’t I’ll get evicted and I’m not sleeping down the passage again.”

Into Soho, where I find myself outside the French House drinking a glass of Meteor. I try to ponce a roll up off of Pete but he hasn’t got any. The one in his mouth is made from dog-ends. The two girls behind me are young, short, plump and dressed in leather. I like them. They have pronounced make-up and hair-dos (one black, one peroxide blonde) and both speak with soft Leeds accents. “…He used to eat women, animals and children, apparently…I love going out for a drink with my old man, stupid git. He always has his own table and he’ll be sitting there and then he falls over”

Three women in their late twenties approach the pub from the north end of Dean Street. They wear long, navy, winter coats and have thick scarves bundled around their necks. They stop for a minute, standing in the gutter and give the French the once over. One says, “Shall we go in?”
Another giggles.
The third says, “(Giggles) No.”
They walk away, they come back and then they go in.

I’ve been thrown out of a lot of parties during my career in the entertainment industry.

I’ve been ejected from Beck’s aftershow party for asking him to breakdance in an impudent way.
I’ve been frozen out by pagan industrialists Coil for not being gay enough.
And I was thrown out of post-punk Diva Danielle Dax’s house twice, once for raiding her bedroom closet and dancing around in one of her designer dresses, and again two years later for attempting sex with her hoover.

But my most historically significant exclusion occurred at Reading Festival in 1998.

This was the occasion on which I was ejected from Alex James’s hotel room for being racist.

It was during the bewildering couple of weeks in which the Alabama 3 were intensely fashionable. A review in the Face at the time signed off with the words ‘They are Gods’. A month later, NME described us as ‘A Monumental Waste of Time’ .

‘Vindaloo’ by Fat Les had just muscled its way into the charts, a hysterically moronic football anthem masterminded by the unholy trinity of Mr James, Keith Allen and Damien Hirst, on the occasion of the World Cup. Fat Les were booked to play after us, but the schedule ran over and the noise pollution Nazis pulled the plug, cutting off the lights and the P.A. To abuse from the crowd, Keith Allen defiantly strutted up and down in darkness for the next half hour, screaming obscenities like Max Wall at an EDF rally.

The Alabama 3 bonded with Fat Les during this debacle, partly because we were the new bad boys on the block, but mostly because we were, collectively, in possession of a massive amount of cocaine.

I was on a bit of a downer that night because I had failed to get off with a future radio1breakfasttime DJ. A brassy northern blonde had skipped up to me and asked me if I was going to a party in a hotel nearby. She was so brassy and blonde and lovely and northern that I got shy and found myself muttering like an autistic schoolgirl. She looked at me like I was a Spaz and skipped off. It was only as I saw her heart-shaped arse fade into the darkness that I realised it was Sarah Cox, Potty-Mouthed Bombshell from the Girly Show, about 24 at the time and hot as hell.

Keith Allen put a brotherly arm round my shoulder. ‘You didn’t wanna knob that anyway mate, I’ve heard it’s like throwing a chipolata down a mineshaft. Come on, let’s go to Alex’s hotel room and give him a hard time.”

‘Who’s Alex?’

‘Alex James. That cunt who pretends to play the bass in Blur’

As if by magic, a black cab
appeared, in the middle of the field. What the fuck?

‘Come on Pocket’s, you arse bandit, get in the back of the van!’

A bespectacled man of about forty in a white jumpsuit staggered over and we piled into the back of the cab. Pockets is court jester to the Strummerville crowd, an annual convention of B-list rock’n'roll miscreants who gather round a huge bonfire at Glastonbury and get fucked up on sofas. Members at the time included Bez from Happy Mondays, Designer Pam Hogg. about 15 Mancunian drug dealers and the Glorious Leader himself, the late Joe Strummer. Pockets has the wit of Joe Orton and the look of Harry Potter’s dubious uncle.

Asleep in the front of the black cab was a large, feral bloke in a cowboy hat.

“Wake up you smelly cunt and take us to the fucking hotel!”

The Man jolted into action and as the black cab slalomed along the dark country roads, Keith explained that our driver was a tramp he’d hired as his personal chauffeur for the weekend, having won the vehicle in a game of poker. I struggled to hold on to the sense of his explanation; Keith Allen’s body seems to house several people simultaneously. At any one second you might be talking to a smacked-Up East End gangster, a jaded nonce in the twilight of a glittering West-End career, or most disturbingly, a serious-minded intellectual.

Arriving at the hotel, I soon found myself shooting up to the penthouse suite of a chi chi hotel with Pockets and Keith, who by now had flecks of white foam coagulating at the corners of his mouth, holding forth on what a cunt Alex James was, and how we were going to “fuck him up”.

Part 2

Keith exploded into the room and started prancing around like Mussolini. I shuffled in in my filthy pinstripe, festival straw and cowshit in my badly bleached hair. Pockets was last, giggling like a loon.

A group of beautifully groomed young people spun round like a brace of startled fawns. Alex James stood bolt upright, a glass of newly poured champagne in his frozen fingers.

“Er Hi Keith, how’s it going?” goes Alex James out of Blur

“I’m off my fucking tits you ponce! Why aren’t you at the festival? Afraid to get shit on your trainers?”

A plangent trip-hop record slowly revolved on a Bang and Olufsen turntable. I believe it was Portishead, and I’m not sure my memory is reliable on this point, but I think I saw a fondue set.

Feeling dizzy, I planted myself next to a pretty, glossy-brown haired girl in a pencil skirt. She looked cross.

“Who are you?” she interrogated.

“Er, I’m Orlando, hello…”

‘How do you know Keith?’

“Um, I just met him…my band played on the NME stage earlier today.”

“Oh really. Should I have heard of you?”

Alex James stood in the middle of the room looking awkward and angry. The only other place to sit was next to me, because I had gazumped the space next to his exquisite and increasingly hostile girlfriend.

“Er…we’re called the Alabama 3.”

“Why are you called that? You’re not American.”

I falteringly explained that our band used the semiotics of American popular culture as a means of critiquing the covert ideology within it. I told her that the name Alabama 3 was a reference to a famous civil rights case in which 3 black men, falsely accused of the rape of a white woman, were lynched by the Klu Klux Klan.

A look of appalled horror flitted across her lovely face.

“So you’re racists then?”

Jesus Christ. Is this a wind up? Could anyone be that stupid? Did she just ask me if the Alabama 3 were a racist pop band?

I look up at Alex James, who has an expression on his face like he’s just eaten a trowel. I look at Pockets who looks at me, tittering, egging me on.

“Yeah,” I say, “Thats right. We’re the racist pop band. It’s the new thing. You know, we’ve tried egalitarian politics in music, now it’s time to try something new. Yeah, that’s right darling, racist pop, it’s the way forward. It’s the natural progression from Britpop.’

I can’t actually remember what happened next. I think it was so humiliating I’ve blanked it out. But an hour later, after a two mile walk from the hotel I found myself standing alone outside the festival staring pensively into the lights of a children’s carousel. At this point Keith Allen pulled up in his vagrant-powered taxi.

“Fuck those cunts. Come on mate, lets drive back to London and score some more coke.”

“Er, no thanks Keith. I think I’m going to go back to the bus. See you next year.”

Keith gave me a pitying look and took off into his trampmobile.

Back in the Pram, as I lay in my bunk and attempted to masturbate to the eidetic image of Sarah Cox’s receding arse, I understood very clearly that my role in the history of popular music was destined to be a minor one.

That may be so, but I feel at least partially vindicated by a picture I saw in the Daily Mail about two months ago. It’s of Alex James at his own gourmet food based festival, or ‘Feastival’. Wearing a tweed Jacket, flanked by David Cameron and Jeremy Clarkson. So maybe I planted a seed that night. Alex has recently announced in the press that he’s “working on a New Mozerella.” This is surely a secret signal to the inner circle, to the cognoscenti that change is coming.

A seed. A small seed, but one that nevertheless will one day grow into a mighty oak. A mighty oak that one day might be felled by the glittering axe of history, grasped by the sturdy hand of Jamie Oliver and converted into a massive fondue set, an earthly chalice full to the brim with rancid, cheesy, spunk.

I live in fear of houses
Pupating, overcrowded
Alchemy of imploding stars
Drying shadows into drowning mirrors
Butterflies into caterpillars

Reducing walls – circles from squares
Magnify, intensify the sun
Rendering down deserts of murdered children
My prisons are gardens
My equality in Eden

Not enough, too trapped or arrogant
to contemplate the sky
I face the ground
achieve invisibility.
I like the view
I have of my shoes.

But this is how the beginning of the end is begun
But for this, this would be a love poem.
Planet flickers red to blue
Come to me, I cant come to you

I think the sky is fallin in
Kids like blood get stuck so fast.
Puddles reflect the stars
Kids like blood get stuck so fast.
Skies of white
Arrive from the past
through the hole in the sky where the sky should be
but the firmament wont part for me

This has been; already made.
Sorry fate.
I wish I may; I wish I might.
Do you understand?
The ends of dreams cast inside this past -
augured bones that fail to land -
have the wish I wish tonight.

May all that has ever come true for me
Thricefold come true for you.

2.
The White Queen will come.

I know this isn’t technically correct
I have actually researched this project
I know my science is flawed
and this is just allegory
I know
Their universe is expanding.
But mine isn’t.

3.
Men! Don dresses and rise! and rise!
In the depths of our galaxies is our capital.
Fight while I swim down to escape the lies
The last that ever passed into the silence.
Flutter on sixes and sevens

and disappear in shadows and tens.
The you’s and me’s -
We never get to Kether.
Uprooted trees
Such as these
Grow downwards.

Leafless screeching dendrites
Broken images where the sun beats
Flowers kill the dinosaurs
again and again
Our past and our present mediate repetition.

4.
I am King Ludd, the white of resistance
Yemaya Okoto as she turns back the tide
I am Rebecca, possess the gates of those which hate them
the consent that they’re seeking is your occupation
The stars that you’re seeing are suicide lights.

5.
Being careful wont save you

There is no end to words of farewell
just cos you continue doesn’t make it worthwhile.
New dawn clangs off as I exhale.

And you’re just a fly.
You’ll find your way out of this room, or die.
And I. And I. And I.

Isn’t life torture?
Let me not seem to have lived in vain.
He said I had too many wormholes now to be trained.

It is, as if,
on my grave, no music plays.
Just early spring.
And nightingales.

He’s late in,
But no one’s up waiting.
He lives alone now
So being late in
Loses meaning.

He flicks the kettle on,
Pale automaton,
Checks the post and puts
The heating on full
To warm the space up.

Tonight he can do what he wants.
He’s grown up and he can walk
Straight back out of that front door
Find a bar and order drinks
Order more than he can afford.
No one will stop him.
Pour, pour, pour.

He could do that.
If he wanted.
He’s grown up and he’s allowed,
Alone, unknown, unbound.
But he won’t.

After all, it’s Sunday night.
The long week already yawns:
Heavy, tired and full of cares.
Plus, the place is getting warm.
The kettle’s bubbling noise
Into the mainly silent void
And there’s the iron on its board
And all the grown up things
It seems this stage of life is for.

A Masterclass in Job Avoidance.

A sceptic take on the septic tanks.

Unhappy Clappy, Llangeler Sunday, French Exchange, Martha, Lot’s Wife.

Stitch that, La.

An excerpt from Caposcripti – Winner of the 2012 Kidwelly eBook Award.

With time the Photographer has been able to refine his methods, so that the ceremony allows him to distil a much purer language from the subject than was previously possible, thus increasing the power that he gained from the ritualistic tattooing, subsequent decapitation and final reduction of the subject’s head.

The reasons behind this ceremony and the preceeding isolation of the subject were complicated, and entangled within the private philosophy the Photographer had constructed for himself. From the story of Babel the Photographer had surmised that we had not lost our capacity for natural language – it had merely been confused. The ceremonies and methods he had developed were drawn from the old man’s journals, and then refined by the research that the Photographer himself had carried out. That this original language had given extraordinary powers to its speakers, the Photographer did not doubt for a moment. The secrets of the philosopher’s stone, of the animation of golems and of zombies, the building of great edifices and the control of minds were all bound up with natural language: a cipher that he intended to unlock.
Over the years the procedure has been refined and he no longer uses a razor to remove the hair, the eyebrows and lashes. Depilatory creams make the process far less messy, and there’s no chance of damage to the skin.
Through a method of trial and error he has found a cream that doesn’t affect the action of the chemicals that he uses for the rest of the process. It claims to be 100% natural and Ayurvedic and is neither cheap, nor easy to get hold of – supplied only erratically by a mail-order company in New Delhi. He sometimes thinks it’s ironic that in death their skins are softened and pampered so much more than when they were alive, and at such expense.
Next he prepares the tattoo needles – black India rubber ink because it is traditional and will not fade with the heat or humidity. He lays them out in a prescribed order – by size and so that they will come easily to hand when he needs them. He does not use a tattoo gun – the process must be entirely manual.
Through all this the subject’s expression is totally blank. All lines have been smoothed, and all emotion erased before rigor mortis set in. The eyes have been closed, giving the face a peaceful look.
In the beginning he had stolen some of the heads from mortuaries – or bribed hospital attendants to let him have them – whichever was easier. However he’s found that some parts of the process work better if the subject is alive – so he’s taken to obtaining fresher specimens.
He has laid out about him his notes, transcriptions from
the tapes, and one of the journals. Scattered in among the old man’s notes on life with the Tribe, and their customs and language, are his thoughts on a variety of other topics
– ranging through developments in nineteenth-century medicine and other branches of learning – mathematics, the natural sciences, physiognomy, phrenology. Much of the thinking seemed dated compared to the advances that had been made in the last hundred and fifty years, especially in the areas of neurology and linguistics, but the notes about the Caposcripti provided a framework for the inscriptions that form the next part of the process.

The smooth and expressionless head is now ready for his ministrations. Sometimes he photographs it at this stage – a side shot perhaps, an art shot, the light angled to create a false profile. These seductive and vulnerable portraits adorn his darkroom – colour and shadows bleached in the red light, as he sits with templed fingers, contemplating their anonymity.
This could go on for days.

Buy the book at http://www.caposcripti.com

Would you like a sweetie, sir?