Emotionally... erect.

Great news everyone! I’ve worked out why we’re all so unhappy!

OK, not all of us. Not you there, stuffing your face with a sausage and egg sandwich. Not you, sir, striding purposefully down the street like Amelia Earhart on her way to the toy shop. And not you, madam, driving your BMW like all the other cars are butter and you are a big, expensive knife. Screw those other cars! They’re not as cool as you! You rule!

You lot aren’t even a bit unhappy. You’re made of joy and satisfaction. And, in the case of the BMW driver, a deep seated contempt for all humanity.

No. I mean the rest of us. Those of us who don’t have a lovely sandwich, or time to go to the toy shop, or can’t afford a massive shiny car to career around in, making other road users feel miserable like a giant ignorant penis. Our lives are stupid and made of nonsense.

I’m not talking about real misery, of course. Our lives may be stupid, but they’re far too pleasant for that. The fact that you’re looking at my nonsense words suggests that your days are relatively free of true distress. You have time to read, so you’re not working every hour god sends or walking five miles just to get water. You can afford electricity, so you’re not eating fluff to survive. Best of all, you have the freedom to look at my inconsequential witterings, so you probably don’t spend your days hiding in rubble, on the run from a terrifying militia of child soldiers.

This is a very specific kind of unhappiness and, annoyingly, it comes from being quite happy. It’s what some people would call first world problems, and that’s very hard to deny. This is a kind of unhappiness that can only exist in relation to comfort and joy. Let me try to explain.

One of my favourite films is LA Story. It’s not a great film and many people probably dislike it, but it has a special place in my heart and if it’s ever on TV I have to watch it. Oh, turns out I’m lying. I just looked on Rotten Tomatoes and it has a 94% approval. Turns out it is very popular. Dammit, I thought it was my special film. Turns out everyone likes it. I was going to recommend it, but now I realise you probably own it, and love it too.

See what I mean about my life being miserable?

LA Story. You should watch it.

Anyway. There’s a lovely line in the film spoken by Steve Martin’s character Harris Telemacher. Describing his life, he says,

“I was deeply unhappy, but I didn’t know it, because I was so happy all the time.”

It’s always struck me as a strange line. It’s meant as comedy, of course, and I generally took it as something that was just meant to be absurd. But as I’ve got older, I’ve kept coming back to that line and I think maybe it’s more meaningful. In fact a quick check online tells me that when Steve Martin made the film he was about 45. That’s very nearly my age now. Maybe that’s why it has started to make sense.

I am, for the most part, very happy indeed. I live in a lovely house that is often full of friends and wine. Said friends are an excellent bunch of people who make me laugh and – more importantly – laugh at my jokes. I have a job which pleases me and money to buy toys. In short, I rule.

And yet. Very occasionally, under the surface, there’s this weird sense of dislocation that’s never been there before. Something I don’t have a name for. A weird, unusual flavour of emotion that exists in direct relation to the pleasure and delight of life.

I don’t think it means that the real happiness is false. I just think that there’s a kind of unhappy that exists alongside it, rather than opposed to it. It might need a new name.

I have been unhappy, in the past. Properly, actually unhappy. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre I fell off a ladder and broke my shoulder. That sucked, because it hurt, and I was self-employed and had no money, and everyone seemed much more concerned with world events that with my constant moaning about how I couldn’t play guitar anymore. 

There was school. That sucked. Everyone was bigger than me and everyone was mean and boy did I look like a jerk. And I’m pretty sure it always rained.

And there was that time that my ex fiancée tried to steal several thousand pounds from me and told loads of lies about me and acted like the world’s biggest, greediest, most deceitful bitch. That was miserable too.

But that’s not what I feel now. Now I often stand in my lovely kitchen, drinking a glass of wine while dinner cooks, listening to music as sunlight pours through the window. Miles away from all that horrible rubbish and as happy as can be.

I think of Harris Telemacher’s words. Unhappy, but not realising it because of happiness. I don’t think it’s quite true, but there’s a something. A something that exists alongside the deep, genuine pleasure that life gives me.

Some happiness, yesterday.

Here’s what I think it is. That moment I just described – me in my kitchen with my wine and my music – is beautiful. But part of my brain knows that there is a way in which it could be more beautiful. No, not if Anna Kendrick was there too. Well, maybe a little, although she seems a bit high maintenance and would probably want to turn the music down or have some of my wine or something.

No. The way in which that moment will become more beautiful is when it is gone, and gone forever, and I can’t have it any more.

If it all goes wrong. If I wreck all my relationships. Lose my job. Get hurled out of my house and have to live in a skip, eating bees. If I wake up each morning to a grey damp world of loneliness and misery and my best friend is a sock called “Toothless Jim”. Just imagine the place my previous happiness will hold in my memories: The day I stood happily in that kitchen, enjoying that wine, loving that life – it’ll be more than good. It will seem like heaven itself.

I think about this sort of thing quite often and I’m starting to think it’s part of what being really happy is about. Everything I have gains value when I think about what it would be like to not have it anymore. My hands moving on this keyboard – imagine a time when these fingers are stiff with age and pain, and suddenly their fluid movement seems wonderful and insanely precious. Everything I see looks like art when I think that one day I might go blind. And when I let my mind wander and create a world where the people around me are gone forever, I think how much I’d long to have just five more minutes in their company.

If this sounds like a clichéd ‘be grateful for what you have’ kind of thing, that’s probably not far from the truth. I don’t pretend this is massively insightful. It’s just a way of helping me recognise the true beauty of what’s going on around me, all the time. I can sometimes sit and sulk about the things I don’t have, like a PlayStation 4 or a swimming pool or an Anna Kendrick or a bottle of wine that was just a little closer… But the more I recognise this feeling – this happiness that contains within it unhappiness – the more I’m grateful for the stuff I do have. Take these things away and I’d be very poor… so I must be rich.

So, where does that leave us? Well, I imagine you probably have the strong desire for a sausage and egg sandwich. And some wine. You might also have become involuntarily aroused by the thought of Anna Kendrick. And we have, of course, all learnt a valuable lesson about not taking things for granted.

Most of all, though, I imagine you probably think I’m just inventing a nonsensical new kind of ontological maths to justify my constant state of emotional confusion. And you’d probably be right. But look on the bright side. Eventually we’ll all be dead. And then we’ll really see what’s what.

Now go watch LA Story.

The Naked Now

I’m about to ruin the next five minutes of your day. Here goes.

You are blinking. Constantly. With your eyes. There you are. Blinking. Eyelids battering away at your face. How do you even see properly?

Oh! And swallow. You have to swallow too.

How often do you swallow? Well – you’re going to find out. Because now you’re acutely aware of it. And so, as I type, am I. And now it’s taking an effort to do it. What’s that about? How was I doing that a second ago without realising, and now it’s like heaving a great lug of muscle about inside my head. Help!

It’s OK – it’ll be gone in a little while. Soon you’ll be distracted by a kitten or a sandwich or a terrorist atrocity and the whole blinky-swallowy festival of noise and effort will recede into the background, managed by your body like Norton antivirus doing a check for porn. Which is good, because (gulp) it’s a horrible (blink) effort, isn’t it? Gulp. Blink. Let my body deal with it.

But it’s also kind of more scary, I think, that we do forget about it. It’s a weird reminder that our bodies get on with loads of this stuff all the time and don’t even ask us. My heart beats while I sleep, chugging happily away like a fat little monster. Wounds heal. Food digests. Blood wanders up and down my arms and legs, asking if everything is OK and if anyone needs anything from the shops.

People talk about ‘knowing themselves’, especially as they get older. I’ve done it. “The great thing about being in your forties is that you really start to know yourself.” But, like so much I say, it’s absolute nonsense. Imagine the horrible reality of actually knowing yourself. Becoming suddenly aware of every blink, every swallow and every beat of your heart. Feeling the blood charging up and down your veins. Realising the constant fizz of neurons firing, the constant chatter of your brain micromanaging every tiny operation that keeps your nervous system from collapsing like lazy spaghetti. And no respite. No letting it fade into the background. An eternal hell of being aware of yourself.

You’d go mad. A great deal of what we do relies upon a cheerful ignorance of how any of our actions actually happen. How am I standing up? I mean, I know it’s theoretically about balance and positioning and stuff but that’s just what I’d write if I suddenly had to show my working in an exam. In reality, I just kind of… do it. I tell my body to stand, and somewhere a team of brain cells get it together to carry out what I can only assume is a terrifically complicated set of sums. And even that’s a lie. I don’t tell my body to stand at all. I just assume it will know what I want and let it get on with it.

I guess what I’m saying is, thank goodness for a certain level of ignorance. And I guess I’m saying it because recently I’ve had a number of really weird moments  - moments where I felt like I lost that ignorance. Moments where I became suddenly, horribly aware that I was existing in the present tense. And I’ll tell you what – it freaked the hell out of me.

Most of the time I’m not really in the present. I’m sort of vaguely aware of what’s happening, but it’s all perceived through this weird mist. At any one time I’m remembering some events, looking forward to others and imagining alternatives where things are different and I have a cowboy hat or a flat in Cardiff Bay. The present is buffered by expectations, memories and daydreams and rarely has the chance to impact meaningfully upon my psyche.

Then, occasionally, for whatever reason, the real, actual moment scrapes through. Dreams and memories melt away. I look around and I think, “This is happening now. These people are talking to me in real time. Shit! What do I do?”

I have little information on this aspect of life. It’s not some future event that I’m imagining happening, like my wedding day or what I’ll say if I ever meet Tom Baker – things I’ve considered in great detail. The first involves smashing through a window like Billy Idol, landing on a motorbike and riding up the aisle, playing electric guitar. The second features me crying like a child and saying thank you until he goes away.

And it’s not a thing that happened in the past, like that time I tried to explain widescreen aspect ratios to Andrew Brown and wanted to weep with frustration at his lack of comprehension. “Why are there black bars at the top and bottom of the TV?” he kept saying. “Why don’t they fill those bits in?” Because that’s the shape of a cinema screen you cretin! "But why don't they just make it the same shape?" How would they do that? Where would that extra visual information come from? Aaaaarrrrgg!

Idiot. Where was I?

Oh yes. It’s really weird looking at someone talking to you and becoming aware that the conversation is actually happening in the present. My subconscious is so used to my complete lack of interest in things that it usually takes care of it all for me. I just hear words tumbling out of my mouth and kind of casually observe the process as if I’m watching TV. “Hmm,” I think, “That was surprisingly sexist. Ooh, listen, I’m claiming to like jazz.”

On the rare occasions that I am slammed without warning into the unvarnished present, I have no idea what to do. I panic. For a start, I’m never 100% sure that I’m not just remembering this in super high definition detail. Then I feel utterly terrified at the responsibility of being present, in time. Who’s allowing this? I could do anything. What if I punch the person I’m talking to? What if they tell me something sad and I just laugh and say “I’m glad that happened to you - I hope it happens again.”? What if I stand up in church and shout “You’re all a bunch of bastards”?

I’m not even exaggerating. The power of realisation is blistering. If this is ‘now’, then nothing is set. I can disrupt all of this so easily. Without the comforting numbness of temporal dislocation I have no framework, no reference. There’s a reason why memory and fantasy combine to couch the present in cotton wool. I need to be kept confused and slightly out of synch.

And then there’s eternity.

Once in a while I will lie in bed and remember that I exist in time. And that either I will die and be dead forever or the afterlife exists and I will live forever. And that both are impossible to fit into my tiny mind. A terrifying chasm of existential fear opens up around me and I freak out completely. How can I not-exist forever? How can I not not-exist? How is anything meaningful unless it ends? And what happens after it ends?

And then, salvation. Sleep claims me. My thoughts drift and now I’m in a hotel and Tom Baker is eating cheese at the next table. Andrew Brown’s wife is stroking my face and I feel both guilty and delighted. I try to tell her about his inability to understand aspect ratios but my voice comes out like birdsong. And now I’m due on stage, and have to play saxophone… I can’t play saxophone…

I dream. Or some of me does. Elsewhere, the rest of me keeps it all running. Heart beating, blood moving, swallowing.


Goodnight. If you can.

How to Disappear Completely

It’s not easy having a face.

I know, I know. You think having a face is easy. You think it’s no big deal, and this is just another one of my paranoid rants, like that time I decided Christopher Walken was talking to me through the television. But that’s just another reason why I don’t truly understand you and never invite you to my sex parties.

Having a face is bonkers. My face is massive, and everyone looks at it, all the time, like it’s who I actually am. But your face isn’t who you are. It’s just some flesh arranged in a weird shape with holes in it that go inside you. Inside you!!!  How are you so fine with this? And your brain sends it signals, like “Look pleased that you’ve been given the biscuit,” and your face responds by contorting itself up and down for a bit, hoping that will do the trick. But just as often the person giving you the biscuit will look at you as if you have just signalled hatred, or lust, or total apathy. Although, of course, you’ve no idea if that’s what they’re really thinking. Because their face is probably making it up too.

And people say things like “You look tired,” or “What’s so funny?” or “Why are you so clearly aroused when I start talking about Avengers: Age of Ultron?” Or they say that someone ‘looks kind’ or has ‘cold, evil eyes, like a sex nonce’. All rubbish. You don’t know me. You have just been fooled by this shell, this fleshy ambassador to the world. And let me tell you – he’s an idiot. My face. An idiot. He tries to tell you what I’m thinking and feeling, but most of the time he just grimaces ineffectually, trying to communicate complex emotions and attitudes through a few stretched muscles and the odd raised eyebrow.

Every now and then I catch sight of myself in a reflection, like a shop window or the forehead of a particularly shiny butcher’s assistant. And I’ll tell you what, I look furious. Every time. I can be in the best of moods, my soul singing a little song as I rejoice in the many benefits of being me. And there’s my face, growling at the world as if to say “My mind is full of spiders and hatred! Fuck you all!” No wonder everyone refuses when I invite them to my sex parties.

I have, however, found a way to defeat my face. I have hidden him away from the world, where no-one can see him. Yes, I have grown a fine and mighty beard. This has proved a brilliant idea and I recommend it to everyone.

 

I started growing it last Summer and it has proved a pleasing and delightful experience. For a start, there is the great ease with which it happens. The beard literally grows itself while you are doing other things. You can spend all day filing your Doctor Who magazines into chronological order, breaking only occasionally for a cup of tea and a bit of a dance, and your beard will wander slowly across your face without you paying it the slightest heed.

There’s also the fact that people find beards inordinately fascinating. It’s now the first thing people mention upon meeting me. “Ooh,” they say, “You have a beard.” As if we were on Radio 4 and everything needed pointing out to the listeners. It is, in fact, a thing mentioned by people who I don’t even know. Perfect strangers observe and comment, as if it were a beard composed not of hair, but of miracles and adventure. It’s kind of fun, and does give me a sort of instant identity. This must be what it is like to be tall, or a well-known serial killer.

Then, of course, there are its face-obscuring qualities. People no longer judge you by what you are thinking, because they have, quite frankly, no idea. Where once you had a vulnerable, quivering mass of lips, cheekbones and jawline – open to interpretation by whomsoever gazed upon your naked face – now you have a tangled mess of terrifying hair. Inscrutable, beautiful and rampantly heroic.

 

“What am I thinking?” the beard asks. “That, my friend, is for you to find out. I am a mystery to you. No more assumptions based on the haphazard arrangement of my features. Now you have to talk to me, to get to know me properly.”

All well and good. Crisis averted through the medium of hair.

Except.

Except another, more existential crisis arose in its place.

I couldn’t help noticing that I was not the only person with a beard. In fact, they’re bloody everywhere. Men roam the streets, hirsute and    raggedy of jawline, beaming at me in fuzzy faced solidarity. People I’ve known for ages are suddenly experimenting with beards of their own. Every famous person on TV seems similarly decorated. It’s a world of hair.

 There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s nice, actually. There is a real sense of being part of something. But that’s kind of the problem.

I was having my beard trimmed when it occurred to me. That’s right, trimmed. I go to see a man, in a special shop, who applies all manner of lotions and oils to my follicular majesty. He trims and grooms and teases while I sip a beer and consider how I’d look with a monocle.

On this particular occasion I am gazing around at the tiny bottles of beard oil and tubs of wax that lined the walls of his excellent shop. I enquire as to how long he has been open. Less than a year, it transpires. Oh, I think. That’s handy, because that fits really well with when I decided to grow my beard.

And then I think – that is quite the coincidence. And then I think of all those others I know who also decided to abandon the razor in that same time period.

I’m forced to conclude that the decision to grow a beard might not have been, in any real sense, a choice that I actually made. The more beards I see, and the more I realise that they’ve all sprung forth in the last twelve months or so, the more I realise that I’m part of a trend. A cultural movement, invisible to me in its happening.

Me and all these other men with their fine, luxurious expanses of prickly faced joy. We didn’t just all, coincidentally decide, one day, to be done with shaving. Even though to all of us that’s probably exactly what we thought we were doing. We somehow, subtly, noticed that having a beard was a ‘thing’.  A host of cultural influences crept into our collective consciousness and worked away at our decision making process. Grow a beard. You’d look excellent with a beard.

So I start by worrying that my face doesn’t really communicate who I am, being open to the inference of other people. And I end up realising that even my choices are subject to the whims of others. My decisions creep up on me, preformed by the world. My sense of who I am exists somewhere else, conjured, maybe, in some boardroom where a well groomed dominatrix in horned rimmed glasses unveiled her latest scheme – “Fostering the Illusion of Personal Freedom through the Encouragement of Beards”. A swish presentation, featuring pictures of hipsters laughing in trendy bars and charts articulating a rise in sales of beard oil.

One day, when the zeitgeist demands it, I will be filled with the compulsion to shave away my beard. I won’t know why. I’ll just feel that I have decided. And as I scrape away the shaving foam, a terrible sight will meet me in the mirror. No flesh beneath. No cheekbones, lips or chin. For everything will have gone away. I will remain a blank space, unformed without anyone to tell me who I really am.

But I won’t mind. It will seem cool. And you won’t mind, because you’ll think so too.

This might be a parable.

Or it might be just that my beard itches.

I wonder what it would look like with just a moustache?

The Making of "Wilderness" - an album by The Housekeeping Society.

Avant Garde popsters "The Housekeeping Society" have a new album out. There's a link to it, right below this introduction. Rob Reed writes about the making of the album.




Ric Neale is sitting across the kitchen table, his hands around a cup of tea. I mentally scan him for signs of ageing. Receding hairline, maybe. Expanded stomach, crows feet, anything.

Nothing. What is he, some kind of bloody android? Why won't he age? Does he have a fountain of youth? A Dorian Grey-style portrait? Is that why no-one is allowed up into his attic? I bet it is.

I'm prevaricating because he's asked me how the 'Wilderness' blog is going and I'm wondering what to say. "I pretty much forgot all about it and haven't done anything," sounds kind of... lazy and unprofessional. Best lie.

"It is brilliant," I say. "Probably the best account of the making of an album anyone has ever written."

His perfect eyes widen in surprise. Damn it. I've gone too far. If anyone else has ever written about the making of an album - and I suspect this is a strong possibility - then my claim might unreasonably raise his expectations.

"That's very exciting." He says. "Could you put the blog up on the day the album is released?"

I can easily knock something up in a couple of weeks, I think. When is the album coming out?

October 6th. Monday. Two days time.

Oh dear.

I have two days to write twelve months worth of notes on the making of an album.

It can be done. As long as no-one else involved in making the album can remember what happened, I can pretty much just say what I like. Right?

AUGUST 2013

Ric Neale is sitting across the kitchen table. Perfect hair, flat stomach, eyes like the ocean etc. He has a proposition for me.

Would I like to collaborate on the new Housekeeping Society album?

This comes as something of a surprise. Although Ric and I have done lots of musical bits together over the years, there has always been a palpable difference between our levels of musicality. You know how sometimes there'll be a news reporter trying to do a live broadcast from a murder scene, and some random guy decides to enliven it by doing a dance in the background? Well, that's basically the relationship. My guitar playing is the dancing guy, in this instance. The look of pained tolerance on the reporter's face... well, you get the idea.

I made my own album, ten years ago. It's called Intoxicated and I have literally hundreds of copies in the cellar if anyone wants one. At the time Ric listened to the finished product carefully, and said it was 'good', but pronounced with a silent 'for you'.

So you can imagine my surprise and delight at being asked to be involved. The plan, Ric says, is to develop the more experimental sound they'd worked on with their Orange Dog album.

Really? The one that utterly bewildered me and - on some tracks - made me physically shake with fear? That's the direction? Why? Why would anyone make more of that?

"That is my favourite of your albums," I say.

SEPTEMBER 2013

I sit in my study, surrounded by leads and guitar pedals. Ric has lent me these accessories with the strict instructions to create a totally new sound that no-one has ever made before.

I plug everything together. I succeed in making a sound that no-one has ever made before. It is a horrible sound, and this is why no-one has ever made it. If I play it any longer, the Cenobites from Hellraiser will arrive and pull me into hell.

I abandon art and just spend the rest of the day playing along to Marillion songs as loudly as I can. Maybe I can just persuade the others that the new sound they want is basically Marillion? That would be good.

OCTOBER 2013

Ric and I drive to Bradford to literally the coldest building in the world. There we meet Ivan Mack - the other member of the Housekeepers who looks like either a romantic hero from a French New Wave film, or the villain from a 90s video game. He is in charge of percussion and loops and things. I think.

We set up our stuff. Ric had a variety of keyboards, one of which looks like something David Cronenberg would reject as 'too weird'. Ivan has some drums and a computer thing and ten thousand wires. I have my guitar and some pedals that I don't know how to use.

We noodle about with some ideas. I make a weird warping sound, by accident, that delights them. I stare at the pedals. What did I do? Why was it good?

Ivan and Ric talk to each other in a kind of musical shorthand that I pretend to understand. I occasionally try to contribute, in the same way that a dog might try to contribute to an episode of Question Time by barking at the television.

By the end of the session, we have got the rough shape of a few songs. One of them will resolve quite easily into "Is This a Place", the opening track on 'Wilderness'. We also create embryonic versions of 'Gone Too Far' and 'Rainclocks'. I try to sneak some Marillion-esque moments into 'Gone Too Far'. Ric and Ivan look at me with pity in their eyes. I pretend I was being ironic.

They know I wasn't being ironic.

NOVEMBER 2013

Another couple of sessions in the terrifyingly cold theatre in Bradford. Outside, people lark about doing live action roleplaying. Inside we create a surprising amount of music.

Some of these things will never make it to the album. For Ric and Ivan, with their brains that constantly generate amazing melodies and rhythms, this is par for the course. For me, any musical idea that gets past my fumbling fingers and into the world is a surprising creature of beauty and should be shown to everyone. In this respect I am like those annoying parents who clutter social media with thousands of pictures of their child, no matter how ugly the thing is.

A lot of stuff is, however, taking shape. Weightlessness is developing into something pleasingly loud, though it is not yet the all-out freak show that will charge excitedly onto the album. The song that will become Ticket - still called Belearic at this point - is developing in a way that is utterly incomprehensible to me. I have, however, found an exciting shimmery sound to play over it, which pleases me.

We also come up with the initial idea for Way back to the Sun. This is special for me because at least the first three chords are my idea. That's right. My idea.

I'd better get my bloody photo on the sleeve now.

DECEMBER 2013

There is not going to be a photo of me on the album sleeve.

The disappointment of this is mitigated by me coming up with a couple of pieces of music on my own, in my house, where it is warm so I can concentrate rather than just wondering if I am going to die of hypothermia. I have finally started to sort of understand how to use the guitar pedals and I come up with a couple of musical sketches which Ric and Ivan are very excited about.

The first one is a kind of rising, throbbing pulse. I call this 'Romero' - after George Romero, director of many zombie films - because I am a bit scared of it. Ric and Ivan love this and talk about all the exciting things they are going to do with it, before binning it to spite me because they hate me.

The other piece fares better. It is a spiky, brittle melody that I call 'Happy Nowhere'. Ivan disappears with this for quite some time. When he comes back with the finished result, it is... very different. It is the track that currently sits in the middle of the album called 'Frost'. It is mental.

I'm not sure what Ivan does when he takes tracks away to play with, but I can only imagine it is something like this:

A darkened room. Ivan sits in the exact centre, in ceremonial robes, eyes closed. He raises his hands. A deep, pulsing beat rises up out of the darkness. Gently, so gently, he waves his fingers, playing with the air. Fragments of sound collide, snatched from the ether by his fingertips. They swirl around the room, building, breaking and mutating.

His eyes snap open. Mad, staring eyes, lit with golden fire. The darkness shivers. Ghostly forms materialise, music made manifest in corporeal form. The very fabric of the universe is torn apart as noise itself is redefined as matter.

He stands. Spider webs shoot out of his fingers, each strand an impossible sliver of sound. The ghosts scream, supernatural howls that entwine in harmonies both beautiful and monstrous.

Ivan smiles. This is good. He raises his hands before him and claps them together. Everything falls away into silence. Satisfied, he turns and walks out of the room. Time for a sandwich.




THERE IS NO OTHER WAY HE COULD HAVE MADE THESE SOUNDS.

JANUARY 2014

At some point along the way a man called Simon has been asked to play bass on the album. This instantly irritates me. I thought I was special. Apparently they've even been rehearsing the songs with this bastard, behind my back, like whores. To make matters worse, he's tall, good looking and really nice. Like it wasn't enough having one Ric in the band, now we have two. Great.

We rehearse together as a four piece. Simon plays double bass, because apparently being tall and sexy and interesting wasn't quite cool enough for him. I resolve to a) learn bass and b) kill him.

The album is more or less ready. There is a lovely new song called 'Yours Sincerely' which just seems to kind of fall out of space fully formed. Ric plays it, I accidentally improvise a really good little motif over it and there it is - pretty much done.

A studio is booked. I practise loads - especially a very complicated one that Ric calls 'Romp' but I keep calling 'Goldfrapp'. He very pointedly tells me that it is not called Goldfrapp. I acquiesce, then, when he is gone, call it Goldfrapp anyway. To myself.

It will transpire that it doesn't make it onto the album either, because it is simply too insane. If you have listened to the album, you will know just how truly bonkers that makes it.

FEBRUARY 2014

It is the coldest day in the history of the world. We spend all day in a recording studio. I have never been in a recording studio. I am thus childishly excited all day and keep jumping up and down and laughing. Everyone else has been in recording studios loads and it is quickly apparent that they find my noisy excitement tedious.

We record most of the album in the course of the day. Only 'Frost' and 'Moment of Clarity' are made elsewhere. Ric has prepared a guide vocal which I can hear through my headphones as I play. This is surprisingly soothing. 'Chorus coming up', he intones, like a musically inclined satnav. We stand in separate rooms, divided by thick glass, giving final form to the songs we've lived with for months.

It is a long day and strange. Music is art, but it is also maths. I have to be fluid and responsive, but also precise and accurate. This is the new bit for me. 'Way back to the sun' is particularly hard, rough and jangly as it is. Half the time I am too forced and measured, the other half I'm all over the place and sloppy. Neither is what the song needs, and it takes a while to get this right. My appreciation for my fellow musicians grows as I see how well they navigate this.

The vocals are not done today. Ric will do them later. All of them. Sometimes he will do many layers of vocals, as if there are dozens of him. Which is, I imagine, his secret dream. A world where there are just loads of Rics, all playing together in massive, perfect bands. But who would they play to? Eh? In a world entirely composed of Rics, no-one is going to want to stand in the audience.  Plus everyone would want to be in charge, so civil war would break out pretty quickly. He just hasn't thought it through.

I wonder about asking if we are all going to contribute to the vocals. But then I have a very clear mental picture of him looking at me, like I was his one year old son suggesting that maybe he could drive the car this time. I decide not to ask.

At the end of the day we congratulate ourselves and take a group photo. I decide to do 'happy smile', then change my mind and decide to do 'serious musician'. To my delight the camera catches the exact half point between these two states and I look like a simpleton.

OCTOBER 2014

Ric Neale sits across the kitchen table. We listen to the finished album. It has taken him ages to finish because he is very lazy.

The album is called Wilderness. It is peculiar and fascinating. I have no idea if it is any good. Mostly, I hear a process. In each song I hear the ghosts of other versions. I hear choices, paths taken and not taken, places where what I thought I was doing turned into something else entirely. Songs like Yours Sincerely and Rainclocks are as beautiful as I expected. Weightlessness and Is This a Place, on the other hand, are so transformed as to be new.

It is a strange, adventurous piece of work. I am very proud to be part of it. I didn't get my picture on the cover, but then neither did anyone else.

And I did get to sneak a bit of Marillion into Gone Too Far.

Remember the Alamo. 4 reasons I loved Rik Mayall.

Rik Mayall died today. Which is ridiculous because he's brilliant and unkillable. A mad lion with a soft voice and crazy eyes. He simply can't be dead, because it is stupid and wrong.

I knew about it for an hour or so, and I thought, "Oh, that's sad - I liked him," and went for a walk and thought about other things. Then I got back in and it was on the news and there he was, in clips, still alive. Wonky moustached Flash-Heart. Shouting, bug eyed Richie. Self important people's poet Rik in the Young Ones. And I cried like I knew him.

It is no exaggeration to say that a huge part of who I am is down to Rik Mayall and the characters he played. Played? That doesn't seem enough of a word. The characters he was. Leering out of the cathode ray tube at my young, impressionable face, shaping my mind and my behaviours. Forming my growing, adolescent self in his image.

Certain things stand out.


1.

Seeing 'Bambi' for the first time, 13 years old. Astonished at what television could be. I watched forwards into series two of the Young Ones and backwards into repeats of series one, amazed at this weird, spotty young man. Rik, with a silent P. So awkward and so insignificant, yet so utterly possessed of his own worth.

I don't know if I thought, "That's me!", but I should have.

2.

Reciting Rik's monologue about killing himself, sitting on a wall with Lisa Rhodes at the skate park, hoping that if I was funny enough she would go out with me. "And punks and skins and rastas will gather round and all hold their hands in sorrow for their fallen leader!" She laughed. I was delighted. I didn't know what punks, or skins, or rastas were. But man, I was selling this. I did the whole speech again. She laughed again, but with less certainty.

She never went out with me.



3.

Performing the entire episode of 'Nasty' on the last day of Middle School. I played Ric. I wore my Harrington jacket, covered in badges, big anarchy sign chalked on the back. Stupid cap, spotty face. It was uncanny. It was quite the performance. One of the proudest achievement of my life is the wall we built. In the episode, Vyvyan can't get the plug for the video to reach the socket. So he goes outside, braces himself against the wall and pushed the entire side of the house towards the VCR. A lesser 13 year old would have thought, "That's probably one of those things you can only do on TV, and not on the stage of a Bradford Middle School." That man would have been a faint hearted loser. Using every piece of wood in Mr. Leech's craft room, I constructed the greatest wall in the history of amateur schoolchild anarchic theatrical comedy  adaptation.

On the night, the wall fell apart, no-one remembered their lines (except me - I was word perfect) and none of the audience seemed to really understand what was going on. We left the stage - and indeed the school - in something of a mess and ran off into the last Summer of childhood. It was one of the best days of my life.

4.

Lord Flash-Heart. It was only when re-watching Blackadder a number of years ago that I realised how much of my personality was owed to Rik's astonishing performance in 'Bells'. Bursting through the ceiling, staring straight into the camera and announcing, "It's me!" Like Rik the people's poet before him, Flash became the default setting for a certain part of my persona. We all like to think we break the rules. Generally, we don't. But there's a little bit of Flash-Heart in me that I enjoy. Disrupting what's going on, loudly proclaiming his own importance over everyone else's, breaking even the rules of the story he is in with his salute to the camera - he's the reason I occasionally burst into a room, shout my own name and try to steal somebody's wife.

There have been many other things that Rik Mayall did that brought me pleasure. His one off TV plays were beautiful. Alan B'Stard MP was fun. But it is Rik, the spotty, self important poet from The Young Ones, who matters most.

Lost, afraid and sensitive, Rik was a child who wasn't ready to be a man. Desperate to appear worldy wise and cynical - "Thatcher's bloody Britain!" -  yet overcome with innocence and childlike glee - "It's a telescope! WITH A MOUSE INSIDE!" Rik was reassurance to a boy on the verge of terrifying adolescence. Never cool, always cowardly. Unable to dress right, always on the outside of the joke. Yet brimming with unshakeable confidence that his was the voice that would be remembered.

Without him - without the brilliant comedian who made him - I would not be who I am.

You may thank or blame him for this.

I thank him.