Reclusiveness

I have mentioned reclusiveness and MS a couple of times in previous entries. I have put off writing this but I suppose that I better just get it over with and explain myself. I wouldn't be at all upset if you just stopped reading this entry here and now, in fact, I'd prefer it if you did.

* I realised that I had MS in 2003 after reading an article in the Observer magazine by a newly diagnosed journalist. She felt very sorry for herself but, after the shock, I wasn't too bothered.

* I was officially diagnosed a year later.

* I was convinced, right up until 2006 when I could barely walk a step, that I'd beat it through an incredibly restrictive diet called The Best Bet Diet.

* I was treated for MS related CCSVI, a new and controversial treatment, in Alexandria, Egypt in December 2010. It helped me enormously and lots of symptoms disappeared. Today I can't use my legs much, but apart from that there aren't many things wrong. Sitting opposite me at a table, you'd never guess that I was ill. It feels like the CCSVI treatment has stopped any activity of the illness and this spring was the first for seven years where I have not had a seasonal MS relapse. I don't expect to get any worse any more. I went to Dr Tariq in Alexandria, although I could have chosen to travel to Brussels, Frankfurt or Glasgow, because he is innovative and seems the best choice of practitioners. My brother Adrian, my father Brian and Consuelo, who very kindly took time off from her school in Spain, accompanied me and we had a lovely time. I have never met a nicer people than the Egyptian people, everybody was exceptionally good natured and kind.

* I became a recluse because I was prescribed a pill called Tizanidine. The dose was titrated up for three months so I didn't think it to blame for the awful side effects. I put the psychosis that I suffered down to my being better informed about my illness. I began to take it on Adelaide's birthday in the summer of 2009 and began to lose my mind in winter. I decided that, being now realistically aware of the unlikelihood of a cure (whereas I had always been very optimistic in the past) resulted in an understandable depression and frustration. I would regularly complain of a sensation of having been buried alive, I became agoraphobic, I would obsess over the things that I could no longer do as a consequence of my illness and I would list the things in life that I considered to 'be nothing' which was an endless list. I really had lost my mind. Consuelo thought that it must be a symptom of the MS. She tried so hard to be cheerful and to help me but, after six months of dark gloom she just couldn't take it any more. It had all made her depressed, and, understandably, she escaped back to Spain. It did give me some great, intricate, fascinating hallucinations, as I lay in bed at night though. Another side effect was terrible, although infrequent, eye pains. In April this year, just in case although I thought it unlikely, I stopped taking the pills in order to see whether it would affect the eye problem.

The next day a miraculous change occurred within me and I realised that I was balanced and cheerful again. I can leave the house, I am always happy and I don't care about any illness.

Living City Plan

The first experience that I had of playing in a band was when Patrick, who was working as an engineer at The Strongroom Studio on Curtain Road, offered me an afternoon recording there in his free time before the pop group Spiritualised came in for the night. They had taken weeks, and would take weeks more, finishing an LP there. Lisa and I had worked out a few songs which we rehearsed a couple of times with Nick, Howard and Dino and then persuaded Joe to come along and play drums with us.

Recording was new to everyone except Joe who had seen it all before and who sat on his drum stool in between takes reading the paper. The results from The Strongroom weren’t that great. We didn't really know what we were doing after all.

Not long after came our first gig. It was downstairs at the Hope and Anchor in Highbury. The guitarist from Blur came but was turned away at the door since it was sold out. Is that note worthy? Probably not and it didn't seem so at the time either.

I made the mistake of taking some cocaine that Howard passed around. Aside from the fact that I don't like cocaine and I don't like people on cocaine and I don't like myself on cocaine and generally hate drugs, it proved to be a bad idea because it amplified my nervousness to the extent that I literally could not speak. My brother Adrian tried to make conversation and I had to run away, Lisa introduced her father, who was on holiday in London, but I couldn't reply to him.

After playing half a dozen shows I had no pre-performance nerves whatsoever, providing that I stayed away from Howard whose stage anxiety was so overwhelming it was contagious. It took me a while to realise this but, before I did, we'd always go to a pub together after the sound check. I'd enter feeling clear headed and leave, destined for the stage, a nervous wreck.

So, by the time we went to the newly opened Milo's studio on Hoxton Square (Howard knew someone who worked there perhaps) we had a name, Miss Mend, had rehearsed and had played a few shows. We hadn’t realised that we ought to have booked an engineer, it was a Saturday and for a while it looked as though we wouldn’t be able to get hold of anyone at the last minute. When we finally did get going it went smoothly. Listening to the record it seems like the studio must have had a great set up. At the time I really wasn't interested in the process of recording and just wanted to finish up and get to the pub but I’d love to know now what desk they used, what equalisers and compressors, which reverb unit.

Mixing the record was a pain. First of all we tried some people who had a studio set up below Proud Gallery (when it was located just off Villiers Street.) It was hot, cramped, humid and dusty in the cellar there, the environment was unbearable and the results were dreadful. In the end Clive Painter, who had recorded with the band Tram with whom we played many shows (we were label mates) mixed it at his home studio (where we would subsequently record our second single.)

Lisa sings the excellent A side, Living City Plan, and I one of the two songs on the B side. It really pains me that I sing with a slight inflection to some of the words like I’m pretending to be Stephen Pastel. Which, I am so sorry to say and it pains me on so many different levels to admit it, I probably was.

We were awarded 'Single Of The Week' by the New Musical Express but assumed this to be a fairly normal event for a new band, or I did at any rate, and so when the label Independiente summoned us for an interview at their Baron's Court office none of us put in any effort to impress them at all.

Myself and Lisa visited my parents house shortly after it was released and my parents' friend Cliff was also at the house as a guest for dinner. He'd played drums in jazz bands throughout his life. He asked to hear the record, I had given a copy to my mum and dad and so I put it on the turntable. It upset him, he didn't think that it qualified as a real song he said, he said that it was not music. He got quite agitated so I changed the subject.