April 2012
51 posts
31. The Drink Ticket
The entrance into The Shunt Lounge was an unmarked door in London Bridge station. A passer-by might wonder why, at certain times of the week, there was a queue of hundreds wrapping around the station hall and into Tooley Street; maybe they didn’t realise that behind that door lay one of London’s hidden treasures.
What was on the other side changed from visit to visit. The first...
March 2012
31 posts
30. The Latvian Coins
These coins came into my possession at 55,000 feet, somewhere above an ocean I can’t name, en route to Tallinn via a very short change in Riga. My credit card was in the overhead compartment and someone was soundly asleep in the chair next to me, so I paid for a cup of tea with a fiver and got Latvian change. I’ll only be on Latvian soil for half an hour en route to Tallinn, so these...
29. The Wristband Tree
I write these entries on the tube to work every morning on my Blackberry, and often on the way home too. It fills the hole left in my time left by Tracey Emin’s “My Life In A Column”. After finishing it, I couldn’t read anything else for a while because other authors’ voices didn’t seem true or real by comparison, and I could barely look at the mindless...
28. The Kusama Postcards
I hadn’t heard of Yayoi Kusama before her current retrospective at Tate Modern, but it didn’t take long to realise she’s a very special artist. I whipped through the gallery on my first visit with only forty minutes till closing. Her later work hit me hardest - the searing colours of her recent paintings provoked a physical as well as intellectual reaction - a strong rush of...
27. The Paper Parrot
Some things just arrive in your life without fanfare. I don’t remember clearly where this paper parrot came from, but it’s possible it was found in a kitchen drawer in my old flat by Alice, my ex of a few years ago. I seem to remember her first hanging it up. My first flatmate in London, Gemma, was a buyer for Woolworths, so our place was often home to samples of potential stock...
26. The Oyster Wallet
These wallets come free with an Oyster travelcard for the London Underground. I have never really used a proper wallet - they’re always too bulky, or too flashy, or too rubbish in some other way. So, I accidentally started using these plastic wallets the way people tend to use something much nicer. My friend Gudjon laughed when he saw mine, and said “I’ve never seen so much...
25. The DTB Mask
Five or six years ago I was a pretty prolific poster on the Drowned In Sound message board. There was a big gang of regular “DiSers” who would often show up en masse at shows. A few times, I ended up with a post-gig houseful of them at my old flat in Dalston. One of those mornings-after, Cat Gilbert and her boyfriend James had stayed over, and were chatting about a Leeds-based singer...
24. The Headphones
I burn through pairs of headphones ridiculously quickly. They seem to disintegrate almost as soon as they come into my possession. Dodgy connections mean the wires need wiggling to get both channels, or the cone gets a knock and starts making a fizzy vibration, or, as with this current pair, the mini-jack gets bent in my bag and I have to rotate it in the socket to get sound. It’s a...
23. The Hair Band
I met a Finn girl at a party last summer. I was with a lot of friends, she arrived with just one, stopping on the way home for a nightcap. It was quite a raucous drunken moment - I seem to remember one friend jamming fairy lights under his eyelids - and they ended up on our table. She was very pretty, with big blue eyes and a bigger laugh, a flashing white smile, a trace of a Finn accent and a...
22. The Neulander CD
I have been pretty ill at various times: asthma, a blood disorder and a serious back issue have all seen me laid up for weeks or even months at a time. So the emergence of the internet was a blessing; it became possible to meet people and conduct some semblance of a social life from bed, and to self publish music writing, drawings, or whatever I felt like putting into words.
I started a...
21. The Grime Beer
Michael Grime was a degree student at UCE in Birmingham at the time I was on the MA. He was part of a little gang of enfant terrible types who blocked off an area of the Margaret Street studios into a collective working space, and made a steady stream of mischievous happenings, playful videos and confrontational performances. For his degree show, Michael built a pub from brown cardboard, with...
20. The Moomin Postcard
This card was picked up at the Moomin museum in Tampere, Finland. Me and various other English & European music writers, managers, label people and agents were invited out for the annual Musex conference and Lost In Music festival, to meet people and to see what the scene is like out there. Tampere is an industrial city, a couple of hours drive from Helsinki. It has been called “the...
19. The Postmodern Watch
Everyone likes an unexpected gift.
This is a seemingly simple watch that’s actually anything but, having been bought for me by Amy from an exhibition at the V&A that tried to nail down the slippery, many-faceted concept of postmodernism. “Po Mo” (I know, I know) was the bane of our lives on my MA. Each lecturer seemed to have a different idea about what the term means:...
18. The Rock Pile
I have been picking up little pieces of nature on my travels for a long time now. The first in this series started off describing the magpie instinct that means an unexpected bright blip on a long gray beach always seems to end of in my hand, pocket, case, and then back home in this pile. At first it was quite small and I could remember each one, but it’s grown into a decorative heap, so...
17. The Flower Puppy
It took me a long time to get serious about making art. I was a nervous, apathetic student with little confidence, less talent, and a keen understanding of how the stars have to align to make something like an ‘art career’ happen. I was steadfastly convinced that great things happened elsewhere to other, better people. But I have enjoyed ‘making’ from an early age. I...
16. The Plastic Shard
This is a memento from one of the best gigs I ever saw. Gay Against You was a band from Glasgow made up of Joe (Germlin) and Lachlan (Yoko Oh No), who played some kind of completely brain-melting hi-speed electronic pop that was as intense as breakcore or speed metal, but made without aggression - in a spirit of openness and optimism. They had a moment of popularity in London’s...
15. The Cupcake Money Box
This quite silly money box is a recent charity shop acquisition. An equally silly ceramic duck/goose ornament had caught my eye the week before, and this seemed like a fitting companion - another shiny mass-produced ‘pop’ object, like a three dimensional cartoon.
There was something about the glossy glaze I liked, the red cherry perched on top of a mountain of white icing in the...
14. The Library Badge
When I was a kid we took weekly trips to the library, and got a badge on every trip. From the small and limited shelf of children’s literature, me and my younger brother Pete explored outwards slowly.
There was a section for romance novels, inhabited by my mum on our trips. She’d venture over to another section to find naval novels for my dad. There were aisles of biographies and...
13. The Rose Photo
One day last summer this incredible rose opened in the little patch of park opposite my house. I took to photographing it whenever I walked past, at different times of the day or night.
This picture was taken at dawn after one of many long summer nights out. The early-morning light caught the rose a certain way and it seemed to take on this sublime luminous glow. I didn’t use any after...
12. Beyond Price
This was a special edition of i-D magazine that came out in 1999, when I was an art student in Wolverhampton. Within it’s 270-odd pages, artists, fashion world notables, and lots unfamiliar names, are asked to simply respond to the phrase “beyond price”. There are lots of photographs, many of the respondant’s children, partners or family; lots of repeated answers about...
