Delma should have come clean and told us that she'd been pretending to sleep.
It was the morning after yet another party night at Patrick's house and Delma was lying on a beanbag. Patrick thought that she was sleeping and said as much in conversation. Howard pointed out that she was awake. So I asked her and then, with no response, she went from resting with closed eyes to pretending to sleep.
The three of us discussed what possible motivation she could have for pretending to sleep. Eventually she couldn't stand it any longer and performed a terrible act of someone awakening. "What, what, where am I?" she asked, blinking her eyes and looking around her, stretching, trying to fake a yawn. How we laughed! She was a bad actress, that's for sure but, when reminded of the episode in the future, she'd never admit that the act wasn't real. Oh Delma! You should have owned up.
Delma is now married to a US Marine and living on a military base somewhere in the Mid West in North America.
Showing posts with label Patrick. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Patrick. Show all posts
Thursday, 28 July 2011
Wednesday, 29 June 2011
LSD in McDonalds
When I was seventeen I took a job in McDonalds. I wish that I hadn’t, I am embarrassed to admit it, but I did. It was in Peterborough, a dull city a half hour train journey from my dull home town. I worked there for only a couple of weeks until they sacked me, during the time that I was taking lots of LSD at Patrick's house.
I made friends with a fellow crew member called Tejeb (This may be misspelled, pronounced 'tay-web,') who had mutual friends in my home town I think. I don't remember too much about him. He had long hair, dearly loved the band Felt and shared my enthusiasm for LSD. We were in a pub in the city centre in the late afternoon after I had finished work one day and he gave me a tab. I thought, since we had been talking about taking the drug together, that we were to do so then and there, but it turned out that he was about to start a shift and had only given it to me to try some other time. Unfortunately I discovered this just after I swallowed it. So the trick now was to get back to Patrick's house before I lost my marbles.
I remember, an hour later, sitting on the train and asking a woman, trying to sound as reasonable as possible, "Is the train moving? You see, I have the sensation that we have been travelling for a very long time but perhaps we are still at Peterborough Station? I have taken some LSD you see and it's bothering me a bit." The kind lady assured me that the train had not yet started moving, invited me to the other side of the carriage to join her if it made me feel more comfortable and shared an orange with me.
I can't remember arriving at Huntingdon Station. I would have been taking the short cut to the side of the town which leads to Patrick's village, Godmanchester, because I clearly recall many policeman waiting for me on the other side of the field, on the ring road. I pulled myself together and realised that there had been a traffic accident. Still, it wasn't a pleasant experience walking past them.
Half an hour later I arrived at Patrick's house and he gave me tea and reassured me. I did well to get back so quickly because it was then that the effects of the drug increased a great deal. No doubt, whatever I got up to fascinated me.
I think of myself as being quite fortunate to have taken so much LSD at this time, every few days over a couple of months, and not have badly affected my mind. It is thought to trigger schizophrenia in some. At one point I went complaining to Kevin, the young boy (younger than me at the time) who sold it to me that he had sold me duds. "But Graeme," he explained, "you've taken it every day for four days in a row, you've built up a resistance" so that evening I took two and a half.
I got lost in LSD thought. I recognised that there was a whole new way of thinking, and I felt inclined to return again and again. It was always present when I was sober but I couldn't quite place it and it took me a few years until I stopped being preoccupied with and comparing the two states of mind. During those years I felt quite sad and objects, especially curtains, patterns and plants, would undulate if I stared at them. But the price was a small one to pay, they were the most interesting experiences of my life. The morning after the second occasion that I had taken it was a huge revelation. I sat on a bench in a small, ugly park near the town centre and I felt overwhelmed. Every thing, life, that I had known since birth was suddenly so new, with so many hidden facets revealed. I saw people as they were but I also saw how they moved within the wider context of society. Habitual ways suddenly stood out. People not seeming to be fully aware what they were saying or who was saying it fascinated me. I felt that I began to see more clearly how many people have a lack of self awareness but it also made me empathise with people effortlessly.
The trouble with LSD though is that you just can't be sure of anything. I wrote a song about this for my band The Projects called Planets and I like the line 'you think you know things but you know you may be wrong and you'd like to do things but you cannot get things done.' Mira and I sing on it. Mira suggested that it might be fun if we take mushrooms together and it could be a lovely experience but I am concerned that I might find my having MS too unpleasant.
I think it worked out well. I am a creative person, I’m full of ideas, I write, I make music, I seem to get along with people, I'm self confident and I'm rational and I think that I have LSD to thank for these things in some small part. I would say that the doses that I took were too high. I think taking small doses, as Francis Crick did to ‘help him think,’ to help him envisage the DNA double helix, is not a bad idea but I am not sure that I will ever take it again in any dose.
But I can definitely thank LSD for my being sacked by McDonalds. It makes knowing that I allowed them to employ me a bit easier to deal with. One morning, late for work, I was still under the influence from the night before. I was marvelling at the patterns of the tiles as I walked through the shopping centre and, for a short time, I thought that I was actually in Brent Cross Shopping Centre in North London where my mother would take me as a child. I finally got to work. It was a very quiet midday morning and I was alone behind the till. Someone ordered a strawberry milkshake and so I turned the machine on and wondered off somewhere and became fascinated by something and before I knew it there was a disturbing sea of strawberry milkshake on the floor. A manageress came in from the back room, saw the mess and, quite rightly, sacked me then and there.
I made friends with a fellow crew member called Tejeb (This may be misspelled, pronounced 'tay-web,') who had mutual friends in my home town I think. I don't remember too much about him. He had long hair, dearly loved the band Felt and shared my enthusiasm for LSD. We were in a pub in the city centre in the late afternoon after I had finished work one day and he gave me a tab. I thought, since we had been talking about taking the drug together, that we were to do so then and there, but it turned out that he was about to start a shift and had only given it to me to try some other time. Unfortunately I discovered this just after I swallowed it. So the trick now was to get back to Patrick's house before I lost my marbles.
I remember, an hour later, sitting on the train and asking a woman, trying to sound as reasonable as possible, "Is the train moving? You see, I have the sensation that we have been travelling for a very long time but perhaps we are still at Peterborough Station? I have taken some LSD you see and it's bothering me a bit." The kind lady assured me that the train had not yet started moving, invited me to the other side of the carriage to join her if it made me feel more comfortable and shared an orange with me.
I can't remember arriving at Huntingdon Station. I would have been taking the short cut to the side of the town which leads to Patrick's village, Godmanchester, because I clearly recall many policeman waiting for me on the other side of the field, on the ring road. I pulled myself together and realised that there had been a traffic accident. Still, it wasn't a pleasant experience walking past them.
Half an hour later I arrived at Patrick's house and he gave me tea and reassured me. I did well to get back so quickly because it was then that the effects of the drug increased a great deal. No doubt, whatever I got up to fascinated me.
I think of myself as being quite fortunate to have taken so much LSD at this time, every few days over a couple of months, and not have badly affected my mind. It is thought to trigger schizophrenia in some. At one point I went complaining to Kevin, the young boy (younger than me at the time) who sold it to me that he had sold me duds. "But Graeme," he explained, "you've taken it every day for four days in a row, you've built up a resistance" so that evening I took two and a half.
I got lost in LSD thought. I recognised that there was a whole new way of thinking, and I felt inclined to return again and again. It was always present when I was sober but I couldn't quite place it and it took me a few years until I stopped being preoccupied with and comparing the two states of mind. During those years I felt quite sad and objects, especially curtains, patterns and plants, would undulate if I stared at them. But the price was a small one to pay, they were the most interesting experiences of my life. The morning after the second occasion that I had taken it was a huge revelation. I sat on a bench in a small, ugly park near the town centre and I felt overwhelmed. Every thing, life, that I had known since birth was suddenly so new, with so many hidden facets revealed. I saw people as they were but I also saw how they moved within the wider context of society. Habitual ways suddenly stood out. People not seeming to be fully aware what they were saying or who was saying it fascinated me. I felt that I began to see more clearly how many people have a lack of self awareness but it also made me empathise with people effortlessly.
The trouble with LSD though is that you just can't be sure of anything. I wrote a song about this for my band The Projects called Planets and I like the line 'you think you know things but you know you may be wrong and you'd like to do things but you cannot get things done.' Mira and I sing on it. Mira suggested that it might be fun if we take mushrooms together and it could be a lovely experience but I am concerned that I might find my having MS too unpleasant.
I think it worked out well. I am a creative person, I’m full of ideas, I write, I make music, I seem to get along with people, I'm self confident and I'm rational and I think that I have LSD to thank for these things in some small part. I would say that the doses that I took were too high. I think taking small doses, as Francis Crick did to ‘help him think,’ to help him envisage the DNA double helix, is not a bad idea but I am not sure that I will ever take it again in any dose.
But I can definitely thank LSD for my being sacked by McDonalds. It makes knowing that I allowed them to employ me a bit easier to deal with. One morning, late for work, I was still under the influence from the night before. I was marvelling at the patterns of the tiles as I walked through the shopping centre and, for a short time, I thought that I was actually in Brent Cross Shopping Centre in North London where my mother would take me as a child. I finally got to work. It was a very quiet midday morning and I was alone behind the till. Someone ordered a strawberry milkshake and so I turned the machine on and wondered off somewhere and became fascinated by something and before I knew it there was a disturbing sea of strawberry milkshake on the floor. A manageress came in from the back room, saw the mess and, quite rightly, sacked me then and there.
Wednesday, 8 June 2011
Scary Spice
I quite liked working at the Bricklayer's Arms pub in Shoreditch, back when Shoreditch was a nice place. One quiet week day afternoon Patrick, who was a recording engineer at the Strongroom Studios round the corner down the road, arrived with some girls who, he said, were destined to be famous.
The one who approached the bar refused to sign a beer mat but gave me a kiss on the cheek instead. I found out months later that Scary Spice had kissed me. I’m still not sure which one is which. They did that song ‘Spice Up Your Life,’ didn’t they? I like that song and sometimes I sing it to my cat, although I have to make up some the words.
The one who approached the bar refused to sign a beer mat but gave me a kiss on the cheek instead. I found out months later that Scary Spice had kissed me. I’m still not sure which one is which. They did that song ‘Spice Up Your Life,’ didn’t they? I like that song and sometimes I sing it to my cat, although I have to make up some the words.
Tuesday, 31 May 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, 17 May 2011
Driving Instructor
When I was seventeen I stayed at my friend Patrick’s house over one summer while his mother was away. There we led a very care free existence and I took LSD a few times each week. I also decided to learn how to drive. I had a driving instructor who kept staring at my crotch on the occasions when we sat stationary in the car in order to discuss the highway code. It was a bit unnerving. He was a little creepy, although he was very good humoured, and I did like his company. My close friend Howard, coincidentally, had been instructed by the same man in the past and had experienced the same problem with the crotch staring. It was unclear whether or not the instructor knew that his pupil would be aware of it, or whether, in fact, he himself was not aware of it. He told me that at times, especially when we were on the dual carriageway, my driving frightened him a little.
A short, pleasant lady conducted the test when my time came and I passed.
A short, pleasant lady conducted the test when my time came and I passed.
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