Prince, O2 Arena Greenwich, 2007

cw: homophobic slurs


Fred joined our junior school halfway through year three. He had curly dark hair and was a short arse like me. ‘What’s on your Walkman?’ Prince. He also had StreetSounds Electro in his schoolbag. I liked Level 42 and Simple Minds but I thought ‘robotics’ looked cool. He wasn’t really called Fred but he preferred it to Francis. His surname started with an X and Miss Dunn did her best when it was time for register. 


Vitbe is sliced brown bread fortified with 33% of your recommended daily intake of vitamins and iron. My sandwiches were cheese and pickle in brown bread so there was no chance I could swap them. I’m not sure what Fred had in his lunchbox but it looked suspect, was it even food? I was going to go round to his house for tea and I was worried. He lived round the corner from the school with his nan in one of the council houses and he had a video.


Nan, about the same height as Fred with an olive complexion and abundant white hair, asked me if I wanted fish fingers or nuggets and Fred put a video on and dinner was ready and we sat at the oval dinner table covered with a lace-trimmed white tablecloth and watched through the double doors at Sylvester Stallone’s bloody face grimacing and filling gooks full of lead, transfixed but horrified as I shovelled chicken nuggets into my mouth. I’d never seen anything spicier than Knight Rider and we didn’t watch telly until after tea. I walked home or my dad gave me a lift. ‘What did you watch?’ James Bond. I knelt beside my bed and my mum helped me tighten up the straps to secure the metal exoskeleton that would hopefully stop me becoming a hunchback and that chafed like anything but it’s been six years and at least I don’t have to wear it in the daytime anymore and I dreamed about the bloodied and burned Vietnamese running through the trees screaming.


Fergus McNeil was a Marillion fan and wrote parody inline text adventures for the ZX Spectrum. I didn’t know him personally but I’d read about him in Your Sinclair and I enjoyed playing his ‘irreverent’ Tolkein parodies. When you get past the Balrog in ‘Bored of the Rings’ you get to a dark dungeon where you meet a tiny dark-skinned fellow called ‘Ponce’ who wiggles and yelps at you and if you stay more than two turns he bums you and twenty turns later you die of AIDS you gay bender.


Simon was tubby and his dad was a policeman. (Visualisation aid: he’s Ray Winstone’s character in Scum only played by Ralph Wiggum). He warned me that the NF stickers on the bus stop had razorblades behind them so don’t try it. He bragged that his cousin had this magazine called ‘Bulldog’ that was brilliant and funny and he was gonna borrow it and bring it in. The same tone of voice that some later acquaintances would reserve for telling me about their collections of Power Electronics LPs. For some reason I couldn’t work out Simon thought Fred was a bit iffy. All that breakdance shit was stupid and Prince was a gay bender. At playtime Simon asked Fred if he got his surname from being kicked down the stairs and then tried to pronounce it phonetically to comical effect. Fred didn’t see the funny side and boxed him on the ear hard enough to turn half his face red like a beetroot. The teacher clocked it all and it was clear that Fred was a troublemaker and he was duly reprimanded. I never went back to his nan’s for tea and he never came over to mine to play text adventures which I’m sure still troubles him greatly.


My brother bought ‘Sign O’ The Times’ when it came out and Q magazine agreed he was a proper artist now. He also had Wendy and Lisa’s album and had become a born again Christian. As in all things I followed suit, bow wow, and later so did Prince by becoming a Jehovah’s Witness. In the window of Our Price a while later or was it earlier they put up a massive display for Lovesexy and Prince’s body shone light and ecstasy and I had impure thoughts o Lord which of course I banished.


Fast forward eighteen years and I'm not sure if it was Chloe’s birthday or Mary's but we’re at The Spitz and Mary and I are more pissed than Chloe. She’s pissed off at once again being the target of Tommy Sunshine’s apparent misogyny and paranoia and this time she’s left the band. 


Tommy Sunshine, named after his twin loves Sky ‘Sunlight’ Saxon and Tommy Steele, was the charismatic frontman and aspiring cult leader behind the indie band ‘The People from Space, Did You See Them’. He had ambitious ideas and was undoubtedly funny and charismatic but at his worst his temperament was more Kurt Saxon than Sky. I’d quit the band a year or two earlier to nobody’s great loss after their drummer accidentally knocked my stylophone to the floor again after soundcheck in Bristol. Figuring my talents (which included looking pretty in white robes and playing ‘Smoke On The Water’ during the awkward silences between songs) were wasted on them and rehearsals were kind of a pain in the ass and playing lead Stylophone in a travelling cabaret space-disco band wasn't the prestige job it once was.


Chloe was now concentrating her energy on playing both Manzanera and Eno in the Roxy Music tribute band she’d formed with Harold from London’s best record shop and I’m still aggrieved I never made it to see them; she is one person I can think of uniquely capable to fill those roles. She had tickets for Prince at the O2. Actually, several. The best nights were going to be where he did an informal after-party set at the nightclub venue adjacent the arena but I wasn’t sure if there was some method to acquiring those tickets, if it was a privilege gifted to VIPs or if it was just luck.


We didn’t figure we’d need a reservation for Las Iguanas but Mary did a Karen on the hapless waitress, stopping short of demanding to see her manager and so we sank a few Margaritas before the show. Our seats were in the front row which meant, as we discovered when we reached the arena, that if we’d been fifteen feet tall we’d have had a perfect view. Prince’s presence, though invisible except for on the video screen, still filled the arena with excitement, sex, God and musicianly chops even as the sound echoed disorientingly around the ceiling. Even an encore of a Vegas medley of Purple Rain, Diamonds and Pearls, When Doves Cry and Sexy MF with very special guest Chris Martin couldn’t tarnish his legacy. We loitered in the departure lounge of the O2 hoping that someone might slip us a free ticket to the nightclub afterparty, yeah right.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

We Don't Expect Outcomes / Why I Stopped Being A Sound Artist (Kent, 2014)

This is a project space, not a gallery. We don't expect outcomes, just for you to use our space discursively in a spirit of creative enquiry. I was on a decommissioned light ship moored in the Medway, about to embark on a two week artists' residency. I had no idea what I was doing.  As the spare half of a one-person art collective I felt bewildered at being granted the autonomy to actually make art. At once excited at this *enviable opportunity* and astonished that happenstance had allowed this, I clutched my laptop, my Zoom HD recorder and microphones and climbed the ladder to the lookout quarters and cried.  At the inaugral meeting we discussed community engagement and creative collaboration while the familiar mantras of inadequacy circled in my brain and my eyes glazed over. They didn't seem to notice. Perhaps dissociation is a common survival mechanism for other community artists too, lost in the voices chastising themselves for reifying a neoliberal idea of community, ...
Read more

Some memories from memory (July 1997)

I think it was the week before Diana died. I was kind of an amateur drinker and stuck to drinking gin and tonics. I was accustomed to the gassiness of beer letting me know when to stop. Walking home I confided to Sarah, giddy and nauseous, that I was never drinking again.  I can picture her vividly but don't remember her name. She was tall and clearly anorexic and I looked like a child. We gravitated to the same table and talked about art, film, fashion. It felt like having a co-conspirator in outsiderdom, as it does when you're 22. We exchanged numbers and she called me a few days later and we met in some woods. She had friends in London, she wanted to make it in fashion design. She made wry jokes about her self evident anorexia, I was absolutely overawed by her humility, the kind that only gets cultivated by pain.  We didn't have a second date and we never spoke again. Two years later I would move into London, empowered by an inheritance of five grand which I quickly piss...
Read more

Some album reviews from memory: ELO ‘Greatest Hits’ (Jet Records, Cassette, UK 1979)

  cw: mental anguish, dementia, suicidal ideation   The last time I saw my dad alive he was begging me, my mum and his social worker to be allowed home. His room overlooked a walled garden, the window directly facing a shed containing bright coloured plastic furniture. He sat there pleading, confused and contrite over what he’d done. He’d done nothing really other than be the unfortunate recipient of dementia. He had the air of a chastised child as he cried, pleading that he’d behave himself from now on. I put my arm around him to comfort him even while I was his prosecuting witness. The following week the care homes went into lockdown ensuring that the only people allowed in were nursing staff and untested outpatients from hospitals already buckling under pressure from Covid. I think you can guess where this is going. Evil Woman was a minor hit for ELO in the late 1970s. I was never too fussed by the song that reminded me of the Bee-Gees, although I preferred it to ‘R...
Read more