OK, I’m going to condense lots of thoughts into a small
space. This is about 2005, not really 'Mr Brightside' specifically.
Why 'Mr Brightside', then? Two reasons 1) I remember Gregor
McNie driving us back through Spain from Benicassim to Barcelona after we’d
been to the festival in early August – he was trying to get us to remember a
song, he said it went “destiny, destiny” or something. We finally worked out it
was 'Mr Brightside'. That’s not overly interesting but it’s a memory. I think the scenery was lovely, and Gregor's not a good singer, and we finally got there, it was a release of tension! 2) 'Mr
Brightside' is still in the charts. Not much connects 2005 and 2020, apart from 'Mr Brightside', a song from 2003, still hanging around the lower reaches of the
charts.
'Mr Brightside' by The Killers is not one of my favourite
songs in the world. 'Bryte Side' by The Pernice Brothers is. That was never in
the charts. That was my sound of 2001, another London Ashes summer. I could
write plenty about that summer too.
2005 is the last summer of the previous age. Something like
that. Do you know that? Do you feel that? It’s a personal thing, I know,
because it was my last summer off, my last summer before I had this job.
It was my last summer of feeling like a kid who’d failed. I
had failed. I’d messed up my PGCE and felt like hiding from the world.
Thanks to London, Benicassim and cricket, I didn’t.
Although I lived in London for 27 years before that and
another 7 years afterwards, it may be in the summer of 2005, as I grow older,
that I’ll remember London most vividly.
The summer of the Olympic announcement on the 6th July.
The summer of bombs. 2005 was the last year before this one
that it felt like everything had and would change forever. I mean, there’s been
so much change in between, but I’m really talking about the physical day-to-day.
The bombs on 7/7, followed by the attempted bombs on 21/7, it briefly felt like
this was it, this was life now, a city relentlessly targeted.
The locations for the bombs, both the ones that detonated
and the ones that didn’t, were so real, so very much the places we all went
through every week.
I really think, though I’d loved London before, I really
felt it deeply that summer. We carried on and embraced the city and it felt like
something to do so then.
Right now, I haven’t been to London for 5 months. That’s the
second longest period in my life, but it’s weird to be only 50 miles away. I
could almost see it from a high hill.
It was the last summer of the real routemasters.
I used to run for the 137, a routemaster which went past my
top floor flat on King’s Avenue near the junction with Acre Lane. We were 10
minutes walk from both Clapham Common and Clapham North, 15 from Brixton,
sometimes I’d walk the 20 minutes to Stockwell to avoid the terrifyingly tight
and busy platforms of the Clapham stations. Stockwell where Jean Charles de Menezes happened to go one day.
I could get the 137 to Queenstown Road/Kings Road/Oxford
Circus, the 35 to Clapham Junction and Brixton, the 37 to Brixton and Peckham
one way, Clapham Junction and Putney the other way. I think the 417 went to the
Junction as well, or maybe just to Clapham High Street.
If you got the 37 from Putney to Peckham then, you saw a lot
of the different aspects of South London. Some places were born fancy, some
were post-gentrification, some were mid-gentrification, some were barely
gentrified at all.
Kings Avenue was amidst all that – on the border of Clapham
and Brixton, estates in a couple of directions, a prison across the way, the
extremely fancy Abbeville Road (Abbevillage) just behind, general young
upstarting Londoners nearby.
Clapham could be fine, but the high street gave it a reputation. There were some great pubs down streets, the common was great. I
didn’t love that flat, I had a tiny room with a hole in the window, it was full
of the 1000-odd CDs I was still listening to, there was so much dust.
We’d watch, on freeview, Sky Sports News, pop videos,
Scrubs, Moonlighting, the OC etc. No constant Sky sports yet. We’d watch the
cricket on Channel 4.
I had my first mobile phone, a Nokia brick, not a smartphone
which didn’t exist yet, I didn’t have broadband, facebook, even an ipod, not
any of that stuff. I had one talk21 e-mail account. That was it. I still have that.
I remember the news talking about people's online responses, on blogs, social media, whatever, and it seemed like a dim and distant world.
Look, here's a poem I wrote in in the immediate aftermath, I think I wrote it the week after De Menezes was killed. It's pretty crass.
IN A SEQUENCE OF REACTIONS
wrapped up again in the language of death
choosing to run with "defiance" or "resilience",
I've slipped to the heart of my city of chaos
where the cunts have got the cops killing brazilians.
my city on standby merits solemn laments
not rolling hysteria and fatuous weblogs.
my lines are long down, though, my rhymes so crass -
stung by this simply dismantled deadlock.
what knows he of London, whom London knows
to be taped up and tucked in and listlessly trapped? -
my city of safe self -mythologising
still seeking an epithet ample and apt.
wrapped up in my own lazy language of death -
romance via Klute and Zhivago and Vegas -
my white life, my light life - my fight might return
in a bang and a flash if I'd duelled with these dangers
but Stockwell's not a quick walk down the road,
it's a Hollywood film set, a shallow black comedy
and 'I'M NOT AFRAID' of a thing but myself
and the myriad ways I find to dishonour me.
It was the last summer Labour won an election. But the Tories
were coming back. Justine Greening won Putney. Cameron won their leadership
election.
But it was still Blair in the UK, Livingstone in London.
All over London, always with on an eye on the cricket, the
greatest test cricket series of all time. When I got to Benicassim, my phone ran
out of battery within a day, I lost my wallet, I was completely cut off from
reality most of the time. But I still queued up in the internet tent to check on the cricket.
Funnily, looking back at the line-up, there wasn’t that much
music I enjoyed that year. I somehow managed not to see LCD Soundsystem and
Doves, who I loved, and definitely didn’t watch Kasabian and Keane, who I didn’t.
I think I liked the Polyphonic Spree, Devendra Banhart,
Richard Hawley, Kaiser Chiefs, Maximo Park. Very 2005.
To keep a bit of money ticking over, I did various bits of
tutoring, mainly in the fancy parts of south and west London. It at least told
me that whether it was one attentive posh kid for an hour or 30 poor kids, half
of them with SEN, in Peckham, I was the problem and teaching was 100% not for me.
At the end of the summer, I think literally the Monday after
the Ashes finished, I went to the Fox in Putney to do a pub quiz with a few
guys from school. Winning the jackpot regularly was another little bit of cash.
And so it went from there.
On the bryte side.
I also wrote a poem about it this week:
THE LAST EXPLOSIONS
I ran to catch the late routemaster poised
on Acre Lane that ashen summer free
from trying to mould this world or any world,
to disappear in garden afternoons
with Camel Lights and one of two cask ales,
redeemed by failure and the city’s blaze
of love and fear and hope and broken glass.
On Baker Street, I shuddered for a lift
to green and clean elasticated hills,
another wedding song, a hiding place
pretending separation from the flow
and grind, the dust and freeze of youth
contained –
a hog roast, conversation barely born.
this idyll isn’t anyone’s, we know
but it’s a breath, a catch, a gratitude
long after all the details are just smoke.
How London wouldn’t let me hide too long
that July, how it found a path for me
through swamps and snakes to waltzing wild at
dawn.
How sorry London’s not recovered since.
Rewrite your evidence-free histories
to pay due heed to each fresh faultline in
that liminal ground of epiphany
and prejudice reborn before its time.
It’s rolling news, it’s rolling news, it rolls
and rises sneering its explosions at
your innocence, terrestrial impotence.
For long enough, the city let you leap
for gaping hope in managed danger games,
a stumble and a shy bravado sprung
in constant sounds, I am the man, the man
upon the Clapham Omnibus alone
who never thought that it would happen, but
it looks like anything can happen here
if everything stays pretty much the same.
I watched the city’s epoch switch as stone
cold towers swayed to western terror chords
in error - forces jumping barriers where
We walked, we packed, we breathed still free and
fair.
We watched the city rise and fall so fast.
That was the summer when everything changed,
one of those summers when everything changed.
