How to Build a Girl
So I sit, reading. There’s so much to learn. Turns out, loads has happened since the Beatles split up. It’s not just Dire Straits and Tina Turner, after all. In a notebook, I write down what sound like the most amazing bands – The Smiths, My Bloody Valentine, Teenage Fanclub, Primal Scream, Pixies, Stone Roses, The Fall, Pavement.
All their names sound new, and bright: like places, rather than bands. Full of people who are alive, and still making music. There’s a record label called Creation, and everyone on it appears to be a garrulous, hell-raising Celt. There’s a pub called The Good Mixer in Camden, where everyone goes to drink. At the Astoria, there’s a place called The Keith Moon Bar, where aftershow parties go on until 1am. 1am!
I could just walk through the door in these places and talk to someone. I could be in this. I feel like Marco Polo, hearing about China. I know I need to go there. I know this will be my thing. I have found my destination. My people will be waiting for me there. These magazines are describing my future life.
I try to interest Krissi in my new-found obsession with music – these dispatches from my newfoundland. I come into his bedroom, and throw myself on his bed.
‘Oh my God, the new Sonic Youth single sounds amazing. Kim Gordon is pretending to be Karen Carpenter – but with fucked up scuzzy buzz-saw guitar all over it, like she’s foretelling her own doom.’
‘Who’s Karen Carpenter?’ Krissi asks.
‘No idea,’ I reply, happily.
‘And what’s “fucked up scuzzy buzz-saw guitar”?’ Krissi continues.
‘Nope. No idea,’ I admit. ‘But it sounds like it must be awesome.’
I will do soon, though. I will soon know what fucked up scuzzy buzz-saw guitars sound like – because I’ve ordered the album. Central Library allows you to order any album you like for 20p. Having rinsed Dadda’s pockets for loose change when I found him passed out, face-down, in the hallway, a couple of days ago, I’ve ordered ten – the bands that Disc & Music Echo recommend most highly.
‘It can take six to eight weeks for them to arrive,’ the librarian tells me, warningly, looking down at the cards that say un-libraryish things like ‘Jane’s Addiction: Nothing’s Shocking’, ‘Babes In Toyland: Spanking Machine’ and ‘Bongwater’ on them, in my round, childish hand.
‘Oh, that’s okay,’ I say. ‘Gives me time to imagine them.’
She stares at me.
This is my new thing – to imagine music from words. I lie on top of my duvet, imagining what these albums might sound like. It’s a process a little like magic, or second-hand thought-throwing. I make whole albums in my head, whilst I wait for the real ones to arrive. I look at the album covers, and infer melody from the colours – the sunset ice-cream swirl of the Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas or the red satanic appliqué of Jane’s Addiction’s Ritual de lo Habitual. Excited – inspired – I start to incorporate them, synaesthetically, into my sexual fantasies – coming in coppers, in paisleys, in the crimson bursts of Lush’s Scar.
As the autumn turns colder, and harder, in November, I am coming to a library of imaginary music – head full of colour, staring at the cold moon outside.
Trying not to wake Lupin up, beside me.
Of course, there’s only so long you can wank to a wholly imagined record collection before you become desperate to hear it, and take some form of action.
John Peel is mentioned in these magazines, over and over – John Peel’s legendary sessions on Radio 1, where all these bands play, at some point: a nightclub in the radio waves you can get into whatever your age, and whatever you’re wearing. Even a fourteen-year-old girl can enter wearing her long, Victorian-style nightie, long after everyone else in the house is asleep.
At midnight, plugging my dad’s huge headphones into the radio, I lie next to Lupin – sleeping – and try to find Radio 1, from the tuning information given in the Radio Times. Scrolling through the bandwidths, I hear familiar bursts of Kylie and Simply Red and Gladys Knight, but I keep going – these are not the droids I am looking for.
Finally, at 97.2FM, I find a Liverpudlian drawl, talking about his ‘not inconsiderable efforts to locate the tour dates for hotly tipped Ipswich trio Jacob’s Mouse’, and failing.
This is it! I’m in the door! This is Uncle Peel, of whom they all speak! I am, finally, going to hear the counter-culture of 1990 for the first time! This is where it hangs out!
Peel finishes his morose, Eeyore-like rant about the tour dates, and introduces the next record.
‘There’s no nicety of something as bourgeois as an introduction here, I warn you,’ he says, laconically, before cueing the song in.
The sudden noise, through the headphones, is disconcerting – a massive, evil-sounding slab of guitar, seemingly played with the sole intention of terrifying anyone who hasn’t yet lived through a roughly equivalent sonic experience, such as riding their tricycle under a malfunctioning cement-mixer full of dying children.
Then the vocal starts – a man who sounds utterly possessed, screaming out an urgent warning: ‘He’s outside your house! He’s outside your house!’
I have never been more terrified in my life. This is most assuredly not ‘Steamy Windows’ by Tina Turner. This ‘John Peel show’ is, clearly, some manner of CB radio, by which demons communicate with each other, as they scheme to consume the Earth. And still the warning goes on: ‘He’s outside your house! He’s outside your house!’
I turn the radio off, and take the headphones off, trembling. Jesus Christ. I need water. I get out of bed, and go to get some, from the desk. As I pass the window, I look out, and there is – a man; and he’s outside my house.
A man, just standing under the streetlight opposite. With all the impossible menace that a man, alone, has. Why would he be here? Why? WHY? There’s never anyone around on our estate. Oh, this is pure diabolism.
Seeing a movement at my window, he looks up. His face is pale. He looks right at me. In my horror, his face appears to melt a little – turning into Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’, which I have seen in The Key to Modern Art of the Early Twentieth Century (Lourdes Cirlot, Bateman, 1990).
Stifling a scream, I get back into bed, and put the radio under a pile of clothes, on the floor – burying it, lest it now be radioactive with fiendishness.
I hug the sleeping Lupin to me – a cross between a comfort and something I am absolutely prepared to offer up to the man, as a sacrifice, should he suddenly, with his evil logic, appear in my doorway.
I am too young for the counter-culture, I think. I just can’t handle it. If I get through this night without dying of pure terror – which I currently greatly doubt – I am going straight back to the Beatles tomorrow. Lovely Beatles, with your harmonies about love being old and love being new! I should have stuck with you! I am never, ever trying to listen to John Peel again. There’s no way I can be a music journalist if you have to listen to stuff like this.
Years later, of course, I realised that there were no demons – that this was merely some fairly anodyne speed-metal, and that the man outside was just a man, standing at the bus stop, waiting for the 512.
But I’ve started to make my stand, now, as a nascent teenager, and it will be difficult to back down. My recent make-over – as a goth rejected by other goths – has not gone unnoticed within the family.
‘You’ve changed. Wearing black all the time. It’s like having a big fat crow trapped in the house,’ Mum says, one day, as I come down the stairs. ‘A big fat crow, flapping at the windows. It’s depressing. Can’t you wear a nice dress?’
‘Black is how I am inside. Because there’s no lighting inside the human body,’ I tell her.
She just looks at me blankly, and shrugs.
She never gets these kinds of jokes – where I try to subvert classic teenage cliché. I’ve tried explaining them to her before, and she just emits a little, blank, dismissive ‘Oh’ – rather like the Queen would if someone said, bullishly, ‘Check my fucking wedge – I’ve got twenty qu
id.’
‘Oh.’
She doesn’t like the make-up, either.
‘I once nearly blinded myself with a mascara brush,’ she says, looking querulously at my eyeliner.
I don’t want to point out that that says far more about her than it does about me. She might as well be telling me a story of how she once confused ‘Push’ for ‘Pull’ on a door, then banning me from using doors again – ‘Lest you also be betrayed by doors.’
And there’s a whole series of ‘You’ve changed’ conversations – like we’re trying to collect some kind of set.
‘You’ve changed,’ she says, as I come downstairs wearing a small black lace wedding veil.
‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it, Mother. Otherwise I’d still be excreting via your umbilical cord.’
‘You’ve changed’ – as I watch the Happy Mondays on Top of The Pops, and practise my Madchester dancing.
‘Well, that is the nature of the passing of time.’
‘You’ve changed’ – as I bleach my moustache in the bathroom.
‘Yes. I’ve decided the “Indie Hitler” look wasn’t going to work for me, after all.’
The kids like my new look, anyway.
‘You look like an evil princess,’ Lupin says, admiringly, playing with my black veil.
Evil princess. I’ll take that. It’s better than what I had before, anyway – ‘Pudding-like outcast.’
I could probably work with ‘Evil princess’.
The next night I listen to John Peel again, like an evil princess would. It doesn’t seem so terrifying, the second time around. Like stormy weather, all you have to do is wait, and it will clear. Yes, there’s lots of dance music – Peel loves Acid House, which I have decided, definitively, is not for me: I don’t have the right clothes for it; nor do I know anyone with a car who can take me to a rave, and so, for this reason, I am out. I am like those uptight teenagers in 1963, hearing the Beatles, and saying, sniffily, ‘What a racket! I prefer the honest joys of skiffle!’
But sometimes, and suddenly, these barrages of me-excluding noise part to reveal things I find astonishingly beautiful, and useful to me and my heart, in their current position. I lean over and press ‘record’, in order to keep them forever – minus their first seven seconds.
I keep these tapes for years. Mazzy Star. The Sugarcubes. Loads of African hi-life guitars – which I patronisingly think are almost as good as the stuff on Paul Simon’s Graceland, and record in the pious interest of ‘having broad tastes’, even though, if I’m being honest, I subsequently always fast-forward through them.
But it’s all there, on a cassette, if I want and need it – and I want and need it: I want and need all these new colours and ideas and voices, on little grey cassettes I can keep in my pocket, like charms. Like books before them, I know each of these songs could, in the end, prove to be the thing I need: a way out. A place to go.
John Peel is my World Service – my club-house in the sky, where I meet with all the other kids like me, also clutching empty cassettes, who want to hear the latest headlines: someone has written a brilliant song in Boston! In Tokyo! In Perth!
For this is the thrill of Peel – finding out there’s a world six inches under the pavements. The counter-culture. The underground. It’s always been there – like the buried rivers that run under London. And when the time comes that you cannot stand your surface-level any more, and you feel there is nowhere left to walk laterally, you can stop right where you stand, take a hammer from your pocket, and smash between your feet, and go down. Go deeper.
Drop, like Alice, into a bright new world of Mad Hatters, imperious Queens and riddling Dormice, and wars that have raged endlessly, since time immemorial. Punks hate hippies and mods hate rockers and ravers hate indie-kids. Patti Smith coldly rages against Jesus, Primal Scream are higher than the sun, and Ivor Cutler stands on a stony beach with an accordion, singing surreal Hebridean stories about girls who squeeze bees for honey.
And sometimes – as if it’s a festal occasion – Peel plays the hits. The first time I hear The Stone Roses’ ‘I Am The Resurrection’, I dance in my bed, lying down, with the headphones on – arms cast out wide, feeling excited, for the first time, to come from a battered industrial town. Things happen in these kinds of towns that could never happen anywhere else – proud, poor kids make things happen with more heat, and intensity, and attack, than could ever be managed somewhere with pleasant villages, or well-tended gardens.
I finally understand what my father says when he says, ‘I am the bastard son of Brendan Behan – and you will bow down to me.’ The working classes do things differently. I can hear it. I can see we are not wrong. We are not just poor people who have not yet evolved into something else – ie: people with money. We are something else – just as we are. The working classes do it differently. We are the next thing. We power popular culture – just as, before, we powered the Industrial Revolution. The past is theirs, but the future’s mine. They’re all out of time.
‘JOHANNA!’ Krissi hisses. I take my headphones off. He has apparently been calling my name for some time, from his bunk bed.
‘If you’re having a fit, I’m very happy to push a wooden spoon into your mouth,’ he says. ‘Stop wriggling.’
‘This is not wriggling,’ I say, putting the headphones back on. ‘This is dancing. I am dancing, Krissi.’
EIGHT
I’m over at Uncle Jim’s house. The place is rammed. It’s 28th November 1990, and Margaret Thatcher has just resigned as prime minister, after an internal party coup that has made the Nine O’Clock News impossibly exciting for the last week.
With each development, my father has been on the edge of the sofa, like he usually only is for a cup final featuring Liverpool, shouting ‘Go on! Stuff it up the cow! Fucking have her!’
When Mrs Thatcher suddenly, dramatically, appears behind BBC reporter John Sergeant after the first vote, and Sergeant looks visibly startled, Dad shouts, ‘She’s behind you! Fucking hell – she just pops up like the fucking skeleton army in Jason and the Argonauts, don’t she? Tebbit’s been sowing his fucking teeth. Medusa, innit? With snakes in her hair. Look at the fucking snakes in her hair, kids.’
We look, and feel that we can see the snakes.
And now, she’s gone.
‘Resigned? Booted out, more like. Got the sack. See how you like it up you! She doesn’t like it up her!’ my dad is crowing, opening a can of Guinness. Everyone raises their can in the air, and toasts: ‘She doesn’t like it up her!’
The kitchen is full of uncles and aunts, smoking and drinking. All the uncles and aunts are here – it’s a proper tribal meeting. Even the Welsh ones, and the ones from Liverpool – they were born across the country, by Fat Nanna and Evil Granddad, as they were repeatedly bombed, then moved, then bombed again, during the war, and then looking for work, in the years that followed.
The mining uncles from Wales have always scared me – pictures of them in the photo albums showed them black, teeth gleaming. As a child, I always confused them with the Black and White Minstrels, and worried they might be racist. I have imagined their house, in the mines – a hollowed-out cave off a main shaft, with the aunties desperately trying to keep the doilies and the tablecloths clean, in the dark, lit by a lamp.
When I finally visited Uncle Jareth’s house, in Swansea, I was amazed to see it was a normal council house, with walls, and roof, and a garden, and felt uneasy – until they showed me the coal-hole. I presumed Uncle Jareth slept there, on the coal, like a dragon on its hoard, and felt satisfied. I resumed playing ‘It’ with the Welsh cousins, who were unexpectedly blond and golden, like they stole all the sunlight Uncle Jareth should have had, during the day. Miners’ children are always very clean. I have noticed this.
‘This lot’ll be out on their arses by New Year,’ my dad continues, reviewing the remaining Tory cabinet. ‘Poxy bunch of suits compared to her. They’re nothing now their mummy’s gone. They’ve gassed the hive! Th
e Queen is dead! The Tories will be hanging from the lamp-posts by Valentine’s Day!’
All the uncles cheer. All the aunts look disapproving, and continue removing clingfilm from plates of sandwiches.
The uncles move outside, into the back passage, and continue talking about politics. They can only talk about politics because no one can ever ask, ‘How’s work going?’
With the exception of Uncle Jim – whom we refer to as ‘The Rich Uncle’, because he’s the union rep at a car plant – none of the other uncles have work, now. Dockyard workers, car-plant workers, miners – big men sitting restlessly on tiny sofas in tiny houses, on the dole.
Some of them have ‘sidelines’ – Uncle Stu once turned up at our house selling household cleaning products, from a tray. Dad bought some bleach off him, and then they sat in the front room, getting drunk. Later, I heard Mum saying that she’d seen Uncle Stu crying.
Uncle Chris’s three sons have all joined the Army: ‘Fighting for the country that fucked them,’ Dad says, bitterly – but he doesn’t say it to their faces. They’ve all been trained how to use deadly weaponry. My dad, although ostensibly reckless, picks his fights very carefully.
With the men gone, the women can discuss other topics. Women always have other topics – because they can talk about their families, and their wombs, and how giving birth to various members of their family damaged their wombs. Aunty Viv has a story about once being in the kitchen, and coughing out her uterus into her knickers. Whenever she tells it, all the other women light fags and go, ‘Tell me about it!’ It’s completely terrifying.
‘So – I see your Johanna’s become a Child of the Night,’ Aunty Viv says, to my mum, nodding her head at me. I am, as always now, completely in black, and semi-blind with eyeliner.
‘I’m actually protesting the Biafran War. Also, against “Cold Turkey” slipping down the charts,’ I say, arranging sausage rolls on a plate.