Song 90: Mr Brightside

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.