Wednesday, 3 November 2010, 11:31
We met accidentally in the street as I was walking to the club. We said hello and then Peter rooted in the back of the car for a bottle of Jameson’s and some merchandise. He then said, ‘it would be great if you could get me some weed’. I said I’d do my best.
De Grey Street’s houses are big. They have imposing front windows and short stubby gardens that have been left to become nothing. Most front walls have fallen and the grasses concreted. Wheelie bins are parked where flowers should be. Some living rooms had groups of people sat around a TV or a coffee table. The lights from the houses were bright, exposing, easily against the weak streetlights, the inhabitants like fish in a restaurant. Upstairs rooms had clothes horses with garments hung haphazardly on them. This is how poor people live. 6 to a house. They have no regard for their environment. Each house leaves a footprint and, so, it’s not hard to see how a city leaves one, too.
I lived, 14 years earlier, at number 8 De Grey Street, in such an upstairs room with such a clothes horse, with no food in the downstairs cupboards but an expensive sound system next to the bed. There may have been some amphetamines lying around, maybe some weed, the music would have been Cast, Pulp, Oasis, and old Jimi Hendrix rerecordings. My lover was a woman only legally, a girl in every other sense. She was superficial, of course, as was the house and the street, to what was happening; my life was turning regardless. If my childhood in Hull had been the thesis, then what started at number 8 was the anti-thesis; the beginning of a second act of a drama whose finale would play out in Amsterdam. And yet, here we were, back down De Grey Street.
We arrived at the club and couldn’t get in. Peter held a plastic cup with a shot of whiskey in it. There was a middle aged lady with a t-shirt on, ‘this is ull’, it said. Peter hammered on the door. ‘What the fuck. What the fuck.’ He repeated. Exasperated momentarily, ‘what the fuck?’ He moved frantically between the front and back doors banging as he went. ‘What the fuck.’ Someone came to the door, we were in, Signe was on stage sound-checking. Around the room people – journalists, photographers, a bar man, a bar woman, a door man, a sound man – milled around trying to look busy. They mainly looked arty. The sound guy was wrapped in a bubble jacket, he was negotiating with Signe. A young man who looked like Eddie Munster with an afro floated in the vicinity. He was the support act. To be different, even in a crowd of different people, is to invite mockery. The young man had makeup on and Peter said he wanted to punch him in the nose. When he performed, he gurned like he had dropped some e and coke and was trying to follow Brian Blessed’s lead in ‘Flash Gordon’. He vacillated between slow and spasmodic, too, like I imagine a court jester would have done. His hat fell off. People smiled. Some – my younger brother and I – suppressed laughter. He could have been written as is into a TV show. Shame on us. He won the crowd over. He had a joint with Peter later, who must have forgiven the makeup. His name was Adam Donen. Watch out for him.
Peter took the stage with Signe and Steph, both of whom had changed into little black dresses and cowboy boots. Peter’s lyrics are angry and bitter and necessary. The purpose of art cannot be didactic, nor can it take a moral high ground, it cannot even bring to people’s attention the futility of man – can Peter’s ‘Jihad’ make us go home and go, yeah, that’s fucked up, let’s stop killing people? No. There’s always been music and not one ounce of it has stopped a war. No. Angry or bitter music does only one thing, it makes you think you are not alone. It modulates what your instincts tell you – to hurt – and what you actually should, or should not, do. When Peter sings, ‘You’re always surprising you’re uncompromising, you never know when to stop/You’re the atomic bomb that I’d like to drop’, he is, at least to me – who else is he speaking to? – playing with fatal attractions and love’s destructive nature. It’s a song that will remind you not to mind yourself. It’s an 8 De Grey Street song.
There was a natural progression last night; the room seemed to respond to Signe, seemed to know she was going to take it home. That’s exactly what she did. Her lyrics are interesting, are deep, and touch on all the things that cut us up – ‘my old man cries different tears from mine/his wounds are old and deep/as he lies awake at night/I want to hold him and sing him to sleep’. But Signe’s real talent seems to be in using her huge voice to manipulate the amplitude of a room. She did this, creating a turning point, kicking of the third act, with a harrowing rendition of Jackson’s ‘Dirty Diana’. Her talent in this – and she seemed to be conspiring with Peter, Adam, and the audience – was sublime, seamless.
For an hour or two last night, everything was up in the air. We’d been pulled up high by the weight of our Jameson’s, by our histories, by the dark night around us, and just briefly, Peter and Signe held us all up there. They phased in and out of each other’s acts easily, complimentary… And as quickly as the focus was held, it was gone, the crowd’s structure collapsing into the night, into itself.
What happened to us next, well, that’s a story for later.
