Sulphated Dreams (eBook)

Chapter Two.

The tape of course was not helping.

It had been a curious gift if that was the word. It had arrived in the first post after Christmas along with some late cards, a returned subscription copy of the magazine and the usual bills, circulars and dross associated with the first day back at work.

Waiting for the kettle to boil he surveyed the padded brown envelope. Bands would usually send in a demo tape, sometimes deliver it themselves, but not in this type of envelope. Usually it was a plain brown envelope with the address biro-ed on and stamps. This was different a padded envelope with a typed sticker giving the address. And it was franked.

The letter inside explained all.

“Dear Mick,” - it read “Even by my standards of punctuality this is a shocker. (Don’t agree or else that pint I owe you will never happen.)

“It was a real pleasure to have you on the programme and talk about some of the songs that made Manchester what it was. And is.

“This is a copy of both shows and on the B-side I put some tracks about Brighton which is where I am going next. If ever you come down please look me up it would be good to catch up and have that beer I promised you.

“Yours ever,

Alan.”

Alan had been a producer at one of the local radio stations a large, outgoing, permanently nice man. Mocked because of it and a show that veered to the mainstream he had won Mick’s sympathy easily. Sometimes trendies believed too much in themselves and their own rather exclusive tastes. Sometimes they were just cruel.

Alan’s programme was a music one where people were invited in to talk about the music that was important to them. Mick had been on twice during July and August to talk about the Festival of the Tenth Summer both ahead and after it.

He wished he hadn’t. The Festival of the Tenth Summer had timing which had complicated things no end with Lisa to the point where the already-booked trip to Turkey became the disaster it did, so much so he had been tempted to call Sophie, gone then, but still in some ways with him. It had been either cowardice or an acknowledgement it was really over, despite what he would have liked to think, not to call her.

Talking about the Festival of the Tenth Summer in the run up to it had been easy. Extra advertising for Scene magazine meant more stories were needed so he had to write, and so pay himself, more. Other papers were also interested in stories on and about the Festival so more work, enough in fact to pay for the still not mentionable trip to Turkey with the still estranged Lisa, and it was exciting to be part of a much bigger thing than the city usually provided in July.

It did though raise the question why can’t we do more here? The problem had been afterwards when that question lay over the city and you realised what you were missing most of the rest of the time.

The Festival had been to commemorate ten years since the Sex Pistols had first played the Lesser Free Trade Hall and to showcase the bands it had triggered in a city not Punk’s hometown, essentially The Smiths, New Order and The Fall. Mick could see it but things, dark things, dogged him.

Firstly it reminded him of his mother’s death an event he still periodically remembered and regretted. But more so, much more so it was the music itself. The Smiths were not punks, too delicate and fey, New Order were dance music now, no great statements there and The Fall, well they would always be a law on to themselves. But Mancunian more than punk which Mick still tended to see as a London thing.

That was an intellectualised view though the sort of thing he thought about when he listened to music. But being reminded of it all had brought back memories of the kind he would rather forget, of incidents he had long stepped away from and a friend to whom there was no going back. Not when you’ve been questioned by the police about him.

But still Mick had played the tape although not on that cold January morning, it was after all the start of a new year’s work with a magazine, fewer pages than usual to be got out in less than three weeks. Instead some weeks later on a Sunday night in February when the winter seemed never ending, sprawled on his bed, which he suspected he would never share again, he decided to relieve the day with the tape and a slug or two of Southern Comfort and for the first time since a Christmas party, a cigarette.

Up till then it had been a usual Sunday evening. Alone, he had lain on his bed watching and feeling the day crumble into dusk and then into night. As he listened to the tape he knew he would wake up sick of cigarettes and vaguely hung over but for the meantime mentally he watched the grey of the cigarette smoke curl into the darkness of the evening as it moved across the ceiling.

He shut his eyes and imagined the tape’s music as waves of sound moving around the bed. Like a dark reassuring liquid that matched the increasing confidence of the night. Lullabies of sound, of memory, that blanked out tomorrow and its details. Similarly it was nice to lie there and let the memory recreate the emotions that each song had for him.

He propped himself on one elbow to pour another drink. Another bad pleasure he knew. Somehow he smiled and sank back into the pillow. I am nearly 30 years old, he thought. I don’t need to worry or to be scared by the fact I fancy another measure of Southern Comfort.

Stretching back into the comfort of darkness he realised how alert he actually was and how much irritation that caused. I want to be at peace without these troubling thoughts; alone to remember.

So what was the memory? He was twenty. It was a Rock Against Racism Concert. One of the early ones. He remembered that sense of joyous expectation, of overabundance. It was a park in the city. He had like so many loyalists before him ‘Done His Bit’, though he grimaced in the darkness at the thought of it being with capitals. He had leafleted and put posters up in the Polytechnic with Graham a thankless task that they had both enjoyed. Working their way through the deserted building on a Saturday afternoon and early evening and yes they had got the relevant permission. He smiled barely noticing it those years later.

Yes they had been let into the hallowed halls of learning to walk around with a roll of posters and handbills between them. Fervent believers in a quiet world. As they worked they flipped between the specific detail and the broad generalities. `Would this poster look better here or round the stairwell?’

`Round the stairwell’ Graham had argued as it could be glanced by those departing the seminar rooms on the right. After a trial run Mick had conceded that it did look better there. Up went two posters and in the search for the next prime site they closed the world off and discussed something else. But it mattered he thought those years later, it mattered.

Then the concert. It was a brilliant spring day the park flooded with warming sunshine. On a stage a band (Did they become famous? Did it matter? No, not in those days. Then it was different.) Then, that moment he was elated. They had asked for hundreds of people expected at most a thousand, well maybe in their wildest dreams, the dreams that they never spoke to each other about, one thousand five hundred people.

Now the park was filled. The police if you could trust them and yes you did on this occasion were saying several thousand people. The hotdog men were blowing an acrid greasy smoke over the crowd. So what? Yes that day. Well yes that day. He smiled as warmly as he had on the pictures. Only then he had believed it. Not the message no still he believed that. No, at that moment, he came to hearing the final passionate chords of the track, another beautiful thought lost for posterity.

Another track another memory. Another frown as the idea of another world went through his skull.

A cold winter evening. A gig, the second or third of Graham’s band Third Light. Passion and energy beyond belief.

Graham was that night a storm breaking on stage. He paused, rifled his vocabulary and realised that now these years later he could still not find the word he wanted or better still needed to describe those moments. For over an hour Graham was. Was what? was a trivialising question. He just was.

Mick remembered waiting, drinking, smoking, a handful of sulphate and then, after a short while the pressure against his heart. Another cigarette, another drink but it was still there a sense of something pushing gently yet fiercely upwards as if it was trying to stop his heart beating. And then Graham on stage.

Mick lay on the bed his pain breaking around him but not within him as he tried to cling to that time.

He traced the songs words with his mind. Yes they did speak of something, a long time ago. Maybe it was adolescent but in the enclosing darkness it was more than teenage angst, behind it was something huge. A sort of truth that had beauty attached to it.

Another song. One that he could do without. Sharp short stabs of chord and then the writhing contempt of Graham’s vocals. Where had he first heard that song? He paused and frowned. Then he remembered.

‘Oh I don’t believe this’ he was saying and then looking out of the window. It was raining; a grey personality-less rain. After all it was still Manchester. It was house the band had shared in Didsbury although Graham didn’t live there. They were in the kitchen talking.

“Why?” it was Graham’s voice with that tone he had...