Outsiders

Life has been interesting as an 'outsider'. The thing about being an outsider is that one invariably finds only 'other outsiders' to socialise or fornicate with. Only other 'outsiders' will have anything, of this nature, to do with you. This makes for some interesting matchings, If I can put it like that?

Take 'Big Ginny'. She rode a red moped and wore a bright yellow skid-lid. I would ride pillion. Obviously she wouldn't talk much while driving the moped but, even when she wasn’t; it was hard to get three words out of her. She only really liked riding her moped.

Which made me wonder why she had bothered to place an ad in the lonely hearts column in the first place. Or, why didn’t she put on it ‘Only really like riding moped. Seeking same’. But, there you go! I ended up ‘going out with her’ or, more specifically, riding pillion on her moped or sitting silently in a pub somewhere nursing our halves of shandy.

Not even fornication!

My pals tend to be a bit odd too. Take Bryant. Now, he’s a bright bloke but very flawed and damaged. He’s Scottish and tends to drink to the point of serious self-harm when he’s down about something. Doesn’t need to be very much, he’ll just do it if he’s fed-up or something. From the outside it looks like a very slow suicide attempt. A very slow, Scottish style suicide attempt. Sometimes, if I ever think of Scotland in this light, usually if Bryant is either doing this or trying to recover from it, it looks as if rather a lot of Scottish people are in the process of killing themselves slowly. Mind you, we have our drinkers, even here in Essex.

Bryant plays guitar very impressively I think, but he doesn’t think he does. This is typical of how Bryant will down-grade himself. It is quite frustrating when he does this. But, there’s no telling him. He tells me there’s a Scots word ‘thrawn’ that sums this attitude up nicely. It seems to mean stubborn and against your best interests. If this is right then it doesn’t seem right to me. Why would you deliberately go against your own best interests?

Vic, he’s another friend of mine. Another northern loner. There’s definitely a difference between north and south in the UK. We don’t think the same. Take me. I’ll always have an eye out for my own safety; my own interests. Only in a small sense, you understand. I’m not some big businessman seizing the main chance. Far from it. I just mean, I’ll try to keep things tight and secure. I won’t spend what I can’t afford. I won’t drink to excess. I won’t put myself in danger. Northerners seem to do all these things and more. They have self-destruct in their mentality. Their temperaments are volatile. It’s pure chance and the fact that we are all outsiders that we know each other at all. Vic and Bryant and me are all in the same band. I’m the singer, Bryant and Vic play guitars, Glenn from Wales (another emotionally unstable bloke) plays bass and the drummer is an exotically handsome chap called Mervyn who is from New Zealand.

Neither Mervyn nor the rest of us is quite sure what he’s doing with this band of losers.

Bryant writes the songs and I write some of the lyrics. My favourite is ‘D’Arblay Streetwalker’ which is about a prostitute I used to visit in Soho.

I’m really quite sex mad. I even changed my religion for a girl who said she wouldn’t sleep with anyone outside of her religion. For this reason, I was Jewish but I am now, in the eyes of God, a Catholic.

She still didn’t sleep with me.

I’ve been an outsider for as long as I can remember. This state of affairs has only gotten worse as the years have gone on.

My mother, I think, is mentally ill, and my father pretends he’s deaf. The latter, I believe, is a consequence of the former. My father is an architect. He helps design some of the most boring buildings it is possible for the human mind to imagine. Office blocks; civic centres; maybe even public conveniences. Functional, concrete and unimaginative.

I don’t know who he is, but there’s long been word in the air that he has affairs. I, for one, hope that he does.

My mother is a scrawny, bitter woman. She gets tiddly on cider and pills and tells everyone she’s ‘on good terms’ with the esteemed actor, Derek Jacobi.

I am her greatest disappointment.

I amble down to the corner café on Newbury Park Road and have a mixed grill for my breakfast. I’ve lived nearly all of my life here in Gants Hill. It’s where Jews who do quite well aspire to. When I was a young boy we lived in Clapton, east London. My mother has always said that I’d never be the man my father was (is) and she’s been proved right so far. I am not my father. I am nothing.

Or, maybe I’m a poet.

Bryant says I live in a time capsule which is trapped in a cosmic vortex sometime in the year nineteen seventy two. This is because he thinks that most of the bands I like are from around that period. He calls me ‘Mister Prog-Rock’. He gets annoyed when I sing entire King Crimson songs on the tube. We get the tube to go busking in town, but I’ve got a bit of a mad streak (psychologically and in terms of my sense of fun). Sometimes, I’ll just get up and sing and dance. This tends to happen on tube trains.

People tend not to like me doing this. Sometimes Bryant laughs uproariously, other times he moves to another carriage.

I know the lyrics to every King Crimson song that contains lyrics (there are many instrumentals in their impressive canon). The vast, vast majority of people don’t know the lyrics to even one. Atomic Rooster, Babe Ruth, East of Eden, Stackridge are all bands I like. But, King Crimson are tops for me. I’ve spoken to Robert Fripp on many occasions and I believe he now recognises me.

I tend to go to see the same bands over and over again. It’s ritualistic really.

Bryant says that singing along with songs on LPs is ‘highly irritating’ as it means he can’t hear the singer on the record. ‘If you think you can sing better than Paul Rogers then all well and good’ he says ‘but, it’s Paul that’s on the album, not you’.

A lot of things about me seem to annoy Bryant.