It is early hours. I like to take care when i write but fuck it, i am drunk and it seems it doesn’t take much. Still, I suppose a blog should be about your head space. So be it. I am not too gone so as not to use a full stop…or to remember how many ‘o’s there are in which ‘to/too’.
I have just got home. Shocking I say. I am a lady of the suburbs who likes to do her Guardian Kuruko (sp?) before bed and tends to wake up oft these days at 4 am with too much on her mind.
I went out at 11pm. Bonkers.
World Aids Day today…. yesterday…I have not yet slept.
I remember Phil McCavity. His face round, as though he stands here by me now. I see him opposite me on the train. We are singing Xray Spex and The Damned. He hams …stormy sea!…and he looks like a bank clerk but for his fluorescent socks and tonight he will wear his mohair jumper and dance like a bastard. He was my friend and I think his dad scared him and i never knew him long enough, not beyond our partying teens, not long enough to get beyond a wrap of speed or our record collection to ask him. We were Gang. The last time I saw him he was standing outside Laindon station, he had discovered the new romantics. His shirt was frothy and I was still a punk and he told me I looked a state. I didn’t mind that he wore his brave new skin like a weapon. I still loved him for who he had been to me. That is how it is with me.
When I was sick with neurosis, Depeche threw a party in the bowling alley. I should have gone. I found another reason not to. Phil was there so I was later told….in a wheel chair. Four years earlier I hadn’t known he had had sex. He wasn’t out. Then he was dead and I never got to tell him how his was a face that stuck around for me. I had wanted to find him for a long time after chance collected me and sent me skating, but i lost him to london and then to Aids, by which time he would have no idea that I laid claim to him at all.
I sang at G.A.Y tonight.
Someone poured me a slug of cognac that was many times greater than my choice of shot size. I drank it nonetheless…like a cup of tea that ceases to steam, and I changed into a mouth that works and eyes and legs that do not. I sang in some form. Who knows if it sounded right. I do not. My monitors seemed not too be working. I wasn’t too bothered. The crowd was dense…were they with me? I don’t know. I wasn’t too bothered. I smiled into the cloud of smoke and I sang hearing only the room and I felt well enough at home.
I sang Don’t Go…to a Yazoo backing track. I have not done that since last i was with Vince. It was faster than I remembered..my voice seems to have dropped lower than an old man’s naggers…this track was pitched for a girl. Was I ever a girl?
I was on and then i was off and i don’t know where the time passed.
I met some very nice people today. Briefly in that way you do when your paths cross fleetingly and you imagine they are not likely to again. Lovely people with faces as familiar as family members. Ordinary, warm, famous people wanting to connect for a short while..to dance and to sing and then to fuck off home. I wonder why they ever intimidated me. Age is a great thing…or is that cognac?
It will be light soon. I think I shall sleep tonight
I hope you were spared a hangover today.
…you see I somehow knew that early on you had made a connection with people ‘like me’…not like me as in gay, like me as in riddled. Lol! I can laugh now because I am well and I am happy. But there have been times when I have been wired up to this-and-that-monitor on the brink of falling from the precipice of the edge of this world that we know…in some state where my body hasn’t been able to fight the fight that everyone else’s body might. There is something in you Alison that draws ‘us’ to you like some kind of warm sunshine on the horizon after a cold cold night. Maybe it’s because you can reach down (and up!) into a soul that feels like nothing will ever stir there, maybe it’s because you can step into the mind of another and write from his perspective of the wrenched or wondrous world about him. Whatever it is. You do it. And I sit here now with these tears wondering why I have them, it’s not because I feel sorry for myself, I don’t…I am a very (lol) positive person and always try to look forward to the next beautiful day. Days that at times I thought I would never see, but each one now, I greet with glee. I have always felt an association with you beyond your music because I have understood your fear and you are right about age being a great thing. I am not intimidated now by what hurt me in the past it’s all about the future. What is that fear all about? For me I think it’s about judgement. People who think they know all about me, how I deserve this killer in me as punishment for my crime. And what crime is that? I have asked (mentally). I have felt love for another human and trusted him. We were monogamous, weren’t we? I was. So how dare you push me into my grave? You without sin? I have come through and lifted my face to the sun.
I want to thank you Alison for being part of the light in each new day, and these tears of joy. And thank you also for feeling it in your own world, it’s good to see the confident you. What can they do to us? Lol. xx
thank you for your kind, poetic words. here’s to implimenting them…..now that’s the hard part.
i’m sure you’ll cringe, but someone posted a video of your performance of “don’t go” from G-A-Y last saturday. here’s a link:
i think you look like you’re enjoying yourself. maybe it’s the cognac, maybe not…………..
What’s to cringe about? If I had half a chance of sounding that good (with or without cognac) I’d be a happy man. Come to think of it, half a bottle of cognac and I think I do sound that good…
Is it overly-personal, Alison, to say “nice rack!”. The good (and bad) boys of G-A-Y were really treated. You looked magnificent. I trust this will become standard attire for the forthcoming tour?
If you’re in need of a cognac for the Colston Hall gig, give me a shout
Glen.