At the end of the street, past a patch of concrete and a metal fence, is the motorway. You wouldn’t know, if you were in my house, or in any of the other pretty Victorian houses in the terrace, how close you were to the sloping slip road, the tunnel, the three lanes all the way to Stansted Airport. Even at the end of the road, where you can see through the fence, it doesn’t seem likely that those three lanes will continue like that for so many miles, and that you are standing on a corner of London, slipping off the edge. You have no way of checking, as a pedestrian, how far it all goes, because there are two fences to stop you trying to walk close to the traffic. No pedestrians, cyclists or animals, says the sign.

I found this out yesterday, when I wanted to walk along the motorway for a bit. I found out that it was pretty much impossible to even get far down the slip road. The fence was low enough for me to climb, and there was a pavement of sorts by the side of the traffic, but a mixture of fear and apathy stoppped me. No, that’s not true, I wasn’t fearful. More, I was tired, and I didn’t want to deal with the consequences of doing something illegal on a Tuesday afternoon. I hung around by the sign for a while, and watched the cars.

I remembered there was a park. I should go to the park, not try to walk along a motorway. It was more OK to go to a park. I turned off the sliproad and past a patch of bushes and scrubby grass where people throw rubbish out of their cars. A hawthorn tree was growing between the rubbish; it had white. fluffy blossom and black thorns. The other trees were starting to show catkins and buds. The rubbish seemed mainly blue: that mid-blue of carrier bags and packaging.

Crossing to the road to the park, I crossed paths with the Wick Road Pants Man. I saw him the other day; Nite and I almost ran him over with the van. He was walking down the three lanes of traffic, in the middle between the cars, with his hands in his pants, smiling. He wore all black, except for cheap brown boots. Black baggy jumper and black baggy tracksuit bottoms and his hands in his pants and a huge, sky-directed smile. I told Nite to be careful, mind the Pants Man, and he didn’t even see him. I wondered if the Pants Man was a ghost that only I could see. Now, here he was again, and we crossed paths. He lolloped across the road, grinning. I looked at his feet. He was coming out of the park and I was going in.

It was time of day at which people went jogging right after work. Joggers jolted past me. I pulled up my hood, which looks like a balaclava or a cowl or something not quite right, and turned off the path and onto the grass. I counted around three different birdsongs and then a strange, rhythmic rustle. I wondered what manner of bird could do this, in this country, and I scanned the trees, my eyes screwed up against the spring-white sky. The sky made my nose hurt. The trees were still black-branched; only a few showed slight green mists. I found my rustling bird. It was a carrier bag snagged in a tall chestnut tree.

Walking on the grass felt like wading. No one else was doing it unless they had a dog to follow. I stopped and sat at the foot of the tree. It was only just warm and dry enough to sit on grass; still not really warm or dry at all. I leaned against the tree and watched a squat, fluffy white-gold dog in a red collar trotting past me. It was a strange kind of dog, like a labrador but with truncated terrier legs. It rolled on its back, kicked its silly little legs out, rubbed the back of its head into the grass. Got up and trotted some more, following loops of scent in the grass. I looked down and to the right, and saw my first ladybird of the year. Two-spotted, lumbering over blades of grass. I extended a finger for it to climb on and let it wander my hand for a while. I liked the way its feet felt on my skin and that it was red on a grey day.

When I felt guilty for tormenting it, I let it go back to the grass. I looked for more insects to confuse, but there were none, so I crossed my legs and rolled a cigarette and stared at Canary Wharf silver in the slight mist and thought for a while. I stared at at as if it was going to give me answers to a question. I tried asking a question to the whole park, but the answer was a heavy, damp, spring afternoon silence. People passed by far away. Suddenly I could hear the motorway. Once I started hearing it, it wouldn’t go away, but I didn’t mind. It was like hearing the sea maybe. I thought until my face got cold and the thoughts started going back in on themselves and chewing their own tails. The chewing hurt. I got up and plodded slowing round the segment of park I was in. I liked that you could do that, that it seemed to be in segments so that you could have a very particular walk and not mind that you’d neglected the rest.

I walked back by the hawthorn bush and laboriously bent and pulled some of the smaller branches until they came off. I gathered enough to look like a twisty, angular bouqet and gingerly continued home. A thorn prickled my thumb and clouds of the white blossom scattered in the wind and into my face. By the time I rounded the corner of the street I live in, I was covered in petals. The Wick Road Pants Man was standing in front of the Indian takeaway, hands in pants, smiling. I walked past, balaclava-hooded, petal-showered, cluctching a piece of hawthorn tree. Young girls with tightly pulled back hair and school uniforms brushed past, first staring at and then ostentatiously avoiding both of us. Fucking nutters, this borough’s full of them.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Thursday, March 24th, 2005
(3 Comments)

Posted by Sarah Bowles on Wednesday, March 23rd, 2005
(1 Comment)

Rather surreally, Mike from 60ft Dolls phoned me up a couple of evenings ago to complain at an article I wrote in 1996. He seemed somewhat inebriated, and refused to tell me precisely who he was for at least 15 minutes - I gathered he was Welsh, drunk and almost certainly a former musician with cause to dislike me, but I was thinking, “Eh? Stereophonics? How the hell did THEY get my number”. He wasn’t making much sense, to tell the truth: he was complaining in a very genial way, too. It was kind of sweet. The article in question I wrote the day after a friend killed himself, and no I wasn’t best proud of it - it portrayed three likeable Welsh lads, who played a form of rock music I was very fond of, in a very bad light indeed: boorish, laddish, over-the-top almost thuggish… But I wasn’t really in a fit state to write, and was like, “Oh, so all these rock bands think they’re so punk, do they? I can fucking out-punk them…” There was a rumour the resulting article was investigated by the Obscene Publications Squad. I know I did wrong, but was 10 bloody years ago, Mike! It’s kind of sad it took him so long to phone. I liked that band. Sorry mate. Sorry for fucking up your life. It wasn’t deliberate.

Haven’t been out. Missed Le Tigre with Gravy Train!!! and Miss Pain last night because I’m not in the mood to drink right now, and you kinda need to drink to witness Gravy Train!!! live. Missed Josephine Foster because I was DJ-ing at my mate Jamie’s 40th birthday party - and that was fun. Everyone stood round and clapped at the end of my set, which is a first for me. Cheers, Jamie.

Here’s my set, much as I remember it:
Dexys Midnight Runners - Jackie Wilson Said (I’m In Heaven When You Smile)
The Tams - Be Young, Be Foolish, Be Happy
The Nightingales - Idiot Strength (Jamie had a fanzine in the early Eighties named after this song)
Laughing Clowns - Theme From ‘Mad Flies, Mad Flies’
The Saints - This Perfect Day
Sparks - This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us
Buzzcocks - Love You More
Frank Sidebottom - Anarchy In The UK
Ian Dury And The Blockheads - What A Waste
Otis Redding And Carla Thomas - Lovey Dovey
Irma Thomas - Wish Someone Would Care
Nina Simone - Trouble In Mind
Husker Du - Eight Miles High
Sonic Youth - Youth Against Fascism
Eddie & The Hot Rods - Do Anything You Wanna Do
Blondie - Dreaming
Shop Assistants - All That Ever Mattered
The Specials - Ghost Town
The Beat - Tears Of A Clown
T.Rex - 20th Century Boy
The Undertones - My Perfect Cousin
The Jam - Beat Surrender
Buzzcocks - Everybody’s Happy Nowadays
The Specials - Too Much Too Young (live)
Johnny & The Hurricanes - Red River Rock
Dexys Midnight Runners - Show Me
Jonathan Richman And The Modern Lovers - The Morning Of Our Lives

Been contacted by Courtney Love’s manager a couple of times, briefly - re: Nirvana book.

Posted by Everett True on Tuesday, March 22nd, 2005
(5 Comments)

Too many loops, lulling. Too many tap-tap-taps of delay and plucked string, and too many safe echoes, as if each note isn’t proud enough to stand alone. This is ‘The Golden Morning Breaks’, and I like it, but it’s all safety nets so far. Last night I went to see The Arcade Fire’s first UK gig. There were no safety nets, or restraint, or quiet bits. It was kind of refreshing.

We met in what we thought would be plenty of time, in an old pub. I downed whisky for my cold and you said I looked like an evacuee. I was wearing what I thought of in private as my land-girl dress, and the correlation between my chronological placing of said dress (a home-made affair, origin unknown, probably made in 1974, but 1940s in style) and yours was pleasing. You were rocking this kind of been-at-home-all-day, ruffled, studious beauty that made me smile. I told you a story about a gig I went to when I was 15, that I shouldn’t have gone to on account of being feverish with tonsillitis, but I went anyway and smoked Russian cigarettes and fucked my throat up so bad I had to take the rest of the week off school and I did think, kind of, at that point, that maybe I was a bit too into music. It was a good story, because I really did feel 15 right then; 15 and with a horrible cold but drinking whisky because I had a special band to go and see and wasn’t it exciting.

We were late. We dashed upstairs, We arrived at the wrong floor. In desperation I asked a white-shirted posh boy where the band were. Which band, he said. This is a student union bar, we don’t have bands on here. Yes you do, I cried, in disbelief. The Arcade Fire! They are playing here. He was like, who? He said, maybe try the next floor up. But I don’t think there are bands here. Throughout this exchange, I could hear a bass and drum thunk coming through the ceiling. There was a band here, whatever this boy said. He looked a little foolish and spoke like he ran the country. If this was King’s College, I thought, I’m glad I went to an ex-polytechnic.

Upstairs, the noise got louder and we saw people pressed into and out of a room, and we saw The Arcade Fire on the stage. We had missed half the set, crashing in on an audience wound up to a sweet frenzy, and a band shiny with sweat, yelling and playing for their fucking lives and yes, we missed the buildup to this, we just waltzed in on the peak of the high. And it felt good, although I couldn’t quite share it, not right away. Within minutes I’d fallen for the girl on violin. She sang too, but not into a mic, just because she liked to sing. Win and Regine already looked iconic; there was something in their faces, like a responsibility. Man, they were made for it, though. They played and sang way too hard and way too loud, like they didn’t care if they trashed their voices or shoulders or fingers. The audience breathed in the fervour generated on the stage, and the boys next to me gave back their own fervour, which consisted of singing along to the calls and responses in the songs, braying out woaahs and ahhs in ‘Rebellion’. It was an unfair exchange, I felt, but well-meant.

Maybe I was one step removed from it all, even there, pressed up against all these eager people and you next to me smoking and dancing and closing your eyes in happiness every now and then, and being way too smart to get caught up in the critical angst that I seem unable to avoid. The music was really only one of the things laid out for us. There was also the idea of the music, the idea of The Arcade Fire, the volume and exuberance of The Arcade Fire, the anticipation of finally seeing them, my nervousness that, live, they wouldn’t create the world that their record did.

In the end they created something better: a place that was populated by real, messy, funny, beautiful people who somehow channelled a series of amazing songs. Shorn of the pretty production, the songs from Funeral were the desperate pop missives I kind of wanted them to be; the glowing embers that you had to rake into flames with your imagination. Live, they sounded necessary; every note.

And we really did hang on to those notes; even me, cynical and old and mean and whose own experience of playing in a ‘euphoric’ pop band has kind of tainted it a little. And the band, I think, knew that we were hanging onto every note; the bass player with a bead of sweat on his chin, and the slightly ungainly frontman with his polarising holler and the little woman with the 80s mitts doing a sort of Kate Bush mime in the encore and belting out notes that broke my heart in three places. They knew - it must have gradually dawned on them - what people were doing with and doing to and feeling about their music. They knew it, but, crucially, were still figuring out what to do with that knowledge, and in the meantime just gave us more and more and more and more.

At one point I wanted to tell them not to, to look after themselves a bit, that we didn’t need everything they had. They could keep some back, it was OK.

But they were making such a big, beautiful noise they’d never have heard.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Thursday, March 10th, 2005
(2 Comments)

No one seems to have advice on what to do when your diary tails off and the novelty wears off and, strangely, shyness, shame and restraint kick in. The last post I wrote, I erased within hours. It all just seemed very, very wrong. And that was weeks ago.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Wednesday, March 9th, 2005
(3 Comments)

I have a new record out, my first seven-inch in over a decade (since the ill-fated and much quoted ‘Do Nuts’, in fact). It’s very exciting: CDs are fine and all, but nothing beats the thrill of slowing sliding the vinyl out of the cardboard sleeve, feeling the paper crinkle and snap back into shape, static playing on your fingers…and then lifting the stylus onto the record for the first time. The record is two cover versions of songs made unpopular by Mr Daniel Treacy (TV Personalities), ‘If I Could Write Poetry’ and ‘Sense Of Belonging’, recorded live, first time out the traps, one rehearsal, at the Albert a while ago. If you do care to purchase a copy, you should go to here at Tangents, which is also a very fine site. obviously.

Or you could write direct to me, where you can also obtain the aforementioned ‘Do Nuts’ single - it’s a part of grunge history, you know! - and several other old seven-inchers if you so desire. Just thought I’d mention it.

Posted by Everett True on Friday, March 4th, 2005
(8 Comments)

It feels like the fucking underground around here sometimes, I can tell you…
No one fucking bothered telling me Brooklyn’s Coachwhips were playing at the Free Butt a few nights ago: a turbulent, fiery, convulsive, frantic mess of abrasion and discarded Billy Childish riffs. They’d have warmed these cold winter nights up, venue steamed and choking. As a poster to the Plan B message board has it, “Like The Monks fronted by some deranged Fifties TV newscaster and had the energy of Jon Spencer at least eight years ago.” Apparently, there had been announcements made here on site, but I’m too myopic to spot it. Jesus, but I’m a wanker sometimes.

I wrote the above as part of my regular column, but I got an email back saying the editor had cut it, explaining that Coachwhips are Californian rich kid tossers and should be starved of the oxygen of publicity. I’m not passing judgement. Just throwing the two viewpoints up side by side.

Posted by Everett True on Friday, March 4th, 2005
(No Comments)