The 40 In 40 Days Project.
26. The Worst Thing I Ever Did To Anyone (1986)

Writing about my life for this length of time, and in this degree of detail, makes me keenly aware of the total control I am afforded here. In particular, control over the way I choose to present myself to my readers. There is therefore an obvious danger – of presenting a carefully screened image which shows me as wholly good, kind, wise, loving and true.

I am – naturally! – all of these things. But – and I realise this might come as a bit of shock – I too have my faults, just like you. My “something of the night”. My Dark Side. And so – in the interests of balance – I feel it is only right and proper that I share with you the details of The Worst Thing I Ever Did To Anyone.

Spring 1986. I am back in Berlin, spending a few days with Brad (not his real name), an expatriate flight attendant from New York. Brad and I went out together for a couple of months, a couple of years ago. Our relationship swiftly ran its natural course, and finished quite painlessly, thus freeing us up to become good buddies instead. Brad and I made far better buddies than we did lovers; so, not having seen him for a very long time indeed, there is a lot of catching up to do, and we are greatly enjoying each other’s company.

Brad arranges a large dinner party for the Saturday night, and spends hours preparing the food – in particular, a spectacular Beef Wellington which is to be the centrepiece of our meal. His culinary training in International First Class has not been in vain. Most of his guests also work for the airlines, and many have flown in specially to be here tonight. Including Brad’s most recent, but now former, boyfriend – a German flight attendant called…well, let’s call him Max.

I have already heard much about Brad’s tempestuous relationship with Max. Max treated Brad appallingly – deceit, manipulation and general mind games being his particular specialities. But Brad was besotted, and no matter how badly he was treated, kept coming back for more – until, eventually, something snapped. Brad came to his senses, and gave Max his marching orders. They have not seen each other since – until tonight. Max too has flown in specially from London to be here.

Two things quickly strike me about Max. Firstly, he is quite bowel-shakingly obnoxious, in a smugly insidious way. You have the constant feeling that he is playing games with everyone in the room, for his own private amusement. Secondly, he is quite jaw-droppingly sexy. Sexy in that arrogant, knowing kind of way which I would normally find deeply off-putting. But not in this case. I can scarcely take my eyes off him, and observe him throughout the evening with awed fascination.

Brad is not comfortable in Max’s presence. There is a nervous, under-confident edge to him tonight, which is quite uncharacteristic. At one point, in the crowded bar we have repaired to after the meal, he draws me aside and – rather drunk by now, as we all are - quietly offloads his anxieties. “That man possesses me!”, Brad hisses in my ear. I make sympathetic noises, flattered that Brad has chosen me to confide in. I have always been slightly in awe of Brad, with his impeccable New Yorker’s cool, his glamorous international lifestyle and his smart circle of friends.

At one point, Max thinks it would be great sport to reach over, in the middle of the bar, and unzip my jeans in front of the whole group. He does this while staring me straight in the eye, a fixed smile on his face. I stand there and let him do it, staring right back at him without blinking, playing along with his “Who can psych who out first” game. And feeling, despite myself, incredibly excited by this. “You see?” - Brad is hissing in my ear again – “You see what he’s like?”

Everyone says goodnight and we all go our separate ways. Max is staying at Brad’s flat tonight, so the three of us go back there together. Max starts quizzing me about my friendship with Brad – firing me questions in quick succession, and barely listening to the answers. So we were lovers, were we? How did it end? Why did it end? Was it upsetting? Who was most upset – him or me? Brad and I form a united front. No-one was upset, we explain - and it was really a blessing in disguise that we split up, because look, we are such good friends now, can’t you tell? No residual bad feelings at all. Isn’t it great when former lovers can behave in such a grown-up fashion with each other? The inference is clear. The implied criticism is perfectly well understood. We both sit there in front of him, slightly smug and slightly triumphant, and very, very drunk. I go to bed in one of the spare rooms, and fall into a deep sleep.

There is a dull thud, and in the darkness, I can feel a huge weight on top of me. Disorientated, I raise my head up and peer ahead. There is someone on top of the bedclothes, leaning over me and talking softly. “Hi there – how are you doing?” Oh my God. It’s Max. He’s stark naked, and he’s beautiful. And he’s reaching under the bedclothes and stroking me. Oh, Christ almighty. He wants me. And oh, do I ever want him. I cannot believe my luck. I smile, and start to reciprocate. Oh boy. Oh boy oh boy oh boy. This is going to be…so….good….

Max pauses, and takes my hand. Shall we go next door? The bed is bigger there. Sure, whatever. I stand up and he guides me by the hand, through the double doors, and into the adjacent bedroom. I look down at the mattress on the floor. There’s someone else there. It’s Brad.

Max leads me to the bed and guides me down. I am half-asleep, and still drunk, and very, very horny, and completely under his spell. I am quite powerless to resist. And so I lie down with Max, and we resume our canoodling. I am barely aware of Brad’s inert presence next to us.

Maybe thirty seconds later, Brad gets to his feet, and silently slips out of the room. I scarcely register this, or what it means, or what I am getting myself into. We continue canoodling…it feels great…nothing else matters to me now.

It is morning. Broad daylight outside. I am still on the mattress, wrapped around Max, and we appear to be canoodling again. Things gradually proceed to their natural conclusion. Firstly Max’s, and then, a couple of minutes later, my own.

The second – the very split second – that I reach my own conclusion, Max springs apart from me, and jumps out of bed. “Right!”, he commands, briskly. “Coffee!” And looks towards me. I meekly clean up as quickly as I can (so much for a tender post-coital moment, then), and trot off to Brad’s kitchen – piled high with last night’s dirty dishes. I switch the filter machine on, and wait.

Oh dear; something is definitely not right here. The coffee is not pouring into the jug. Instead, it’s seeping over the top of the filter paper, and covering Brad’s work surface and kitchen floor with thick soggy granules. As one of nature’s great incompetents when it comes to anything involving electrical gadgets, I am quite helpless, and do nothing to stop the flow. Besides which, I am badly hungover and disorientated. I find the instant coffee instead, and take a couple of mugs back through to the bedroom, where Max is already fully dressed. His manner, so attentively flirtatious until a few minutes ago, is now one of brisk efficiency – and physical distance. I tell him what’s happened with the coffee machine. He is quite unconcerned (“Ach, who cares!”)

Somewhere at the back of my mind, a vague image of Brad leaving the room has appeared. I begin to feel mildly concerned, and attempt to voice these concerns to Max. You don’t think he might be a bit upset, do you?

“Ach, who cares? He deserves to be!”

I choose not to pursue this line of conversation. Max and I drink our coffee, slightly awkwardly now. My attempts to make further cheerful conversation are all stalled. Max gets up, says that he has to be on his way now (an early afternoon flight back to London), and leaves the flat. He will have been in Berlin for less than twenty-four hours – but his mission will have been fully accomplished, with commendable efficiency. Revenge, you see. With me as the all too willing fall guy.

I am just beginning to process these thoughts, when Brad appears, looking rough. Apparently, he has not slept a wink all night.

Oh, shit. Brad! What have I done? I’ve barged in on him, practically instigated a threesome with him and his ex-boyfriend - who he’s still crazy about - and then stolen his ex-boyfriend right from under his nose. And stayed the whole night with him. And, just to add insult to injury, I’ve even broken his bloody coffee machine! What sort of house guest from hell am I?

I start apologising. Brad is the very model of dignified courtesy. I am not to worry. Max is the one who created the situation. No, he’s fine about it really. No, really – these things happen, right? And I gratefully, guiltily choose to believe him.

Now, there is actually a point here where I could at least start to partially redeem myself. I could help Brad clear up all the mess from last night, couldn’t I? Well, isn’t that what any right thinking person would do right now?

In my case, actually not. Instead, feeling too mortified to stay in the flat a minute longer, I leave Brad to do all the cleaning up, and spend the rest of the day with other friends. In the evening, I return. A meal in a Vietnamese restaurant has been arranged by Brad’s friends, all of whom have been rallying round in my absence. The sole purpose of the evening is to make him feel better. The friends show up. I feel so ashamed of myself that all power of conversation thenceforth leaves me for the rest of the evening. Instead, I trail round with everybody else, maintaining a sullen, silent presence at the end of the table, being spoken to by nobody. Instead of helping to ease the situation, I allow my own self-obsessed feelings of guilt override my duties to a wounded friend. It’s not big, and it’s not clever.

An air of strained courtesy prevails over my last couple of days in Berlin. Brad maintains truly heroic levels of politeness and continued hospitality throughout. We take our leave of each other, fixed smiles upon both our faces. Neither one of us ever makes contact with the other again.

Brad, although you will never read this, may I take this opportunity to offer you my sincerest apologies. From the very bottom of my heart.

A phone call from my mother, who has just had a friend to stay. The friend has a son who moved to Nottingham not long ago; he works for my old employers, in fact. His name is X---- Y-----. Have I heard of him at all? He doesn’t know many people in Nottingham yet. He lives a few streets away from us. On his own. Aged 32. To his mother’s knowledge, he’s never had a girlfriend – says he’s “working on it”.

Mother asked her friend if she thought the son might be gay. The friend agreed that it might be possible, but nothing had ever been said. Pause. So, I’ve definitely never heard of him, then?

It does not take extraordinary powers of perception to sense where this conversation might be heading.

I introduce my mother to the concept of the “gaydar” – that special sixth sense that we’re all supposed to have. So, would she like us to train our gaydars on him, then? She laughs. Well, she suggests, I could always get his number from Directory Enquiries, then give him a ring. Introduce myself. Explain that my mother knows his mother. Maybe arrange to meet?

I can hear the conversation in my head.

“Hello, is that X----? You don’t know me, but your mother thinks you might be a poof. Okay if we come round and find out?”

Rattling round in my brain all this morning: Liza Minelli’s hysterically funny performance on last night’s “So Graham Norton”. Cannot remember the last time I laughed so much – in fact, some of it was so priceless that we had to rewind the video immediately afterwards.

“Two fake hips! NOT BAD!!!”

(to Helena Christensen) “You’re having a baby? FAB-ulous!”
HC: “Yes, it is fabulous.”
LM: “It REALLY IS fabulous!”

To say nothing of Mingus Weedus. Oh, you don’t know what you missed…

The 40 In 40 Days Project.
25. The Musical Epiphany (1976)

Ever since Middle Of The Road’s seminal “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” came along and rocked my world in the Summer of 1971, I had been an avid follower of pop music. I liked it because it was a cheerful, colourful, glamorous fantasy world, which was forever throwing up new variations and new surprises. Traumatised by my parents’ divorce in the Summer of 1973, I retreated further into this fantasy world; pop music became my escape, my comfort – my sanctuary. And I started to take it very seriously indeed.

This made me ideally suited as a consumer of progressive rock, which I discovered in the Summer of 1974 (first with Yes, then with Gong, followed by a whole host of others). This was music that took itself extremely seriously, with lavish artwork, impenetrably “deep” lyrics, and twenty-minute long quasi-symphonic pieces. Heady stuff indeed for an intellectually ambitious twelve year old. In fact, I proudly imagined myself to be the only twelve year old in the UK with such advanced, mature tastes for my age. In short, I really became quite the superior rock snob. I was soon devouring the “serious” weekly rock papers (NME, Sounds, Melody Maker), and gleefully colluding with the ever-shifting tastes of my favourite music journalists.

At boarding school, where in most respects I struggled to fit in with the other boys (too nervous, too vulnerable, too volatile, too wimpy, too dorky, too mixed-up basically), I found that my musical tastes, my abnormally large album collection, and my encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject, brought me some measure of respect and “cool”. I got to hang out with the senior boys, who would let me sit on bean bags in their studies with a cup of Nescafe, in return for a hearing of the new Genesis, Greenslade, Pink Floyd or Mike Oldfield.

And then, in the early Autumn of 1976, punk rock came along. Almost as soon as I started reading about it in the music press, I was fascinated and thrilled by the very idea of it. The punk philosophy was nothing short of revolutionary. It fundamentally questioned all of my received notions of what was good about music. It then summarily trashed everything which had gone before it (the long hair, the flares, the guitar solos, the concept albums, the huge concerts, the technical wizardry) and replaced it with what seemed like a radical new manifesto (in reality: short hair, drainpipes, no guitar solos, three minute singles, small gigs, technical incompetency). It was Year Zero – my very own Cultural Revolution – and so, with almost Maoist zeal, I jumped aboard the bandwagon.

Punk became my new obsession, and boy, could I obsess. I read every article I could find (carefully pasting them into my Punk Scrapbook), bought every single (New Rose, Anarchy In The UK, Spiral Scratch), every fanzine (Sniffin’ Glue, Ripped & Torn, 48 Thrills), taped every John Peel session…and alienated all my fellow public schoolboys, who greeted the movement with universal incomprehension, derision and outright hostility (“Nothing but a bunch of yobs who can’t even play their instruments”). My popularity, which had been shaky at the best of times, sank to new depths (“That weirdo Slater with his bloody awful music”). I cared about that – but then again, I didn’t. I knew that they were all wrong and I was right, you see.

I still have all the old singles – some of them collectors’ pieces now. I don’t play them often, but when I do, they still sound special. And Punk did me good, I think. It made me think about the world outside the confines of my privileged existence. It made me question the status quo. It showed me that it was OK not to conform to society’s norms. Hey - if you’re a screwed-up fourteen year old in search of a youth cult to provide meaning in his life – I can really think of nothing better.

An e-mail from my sister this morning. She has left Pakistan, where she has been working since last Autumn, and is now taking a two week holiday in Cambodia (anyone remember that Dead Kennedys song?). There’s now a distinct possibility that her next work assignment will be in, um, Kabul. She’s really excited by this prospect. Having been on the first airlift out of Sierra Leone last Spring, the world’s hotspots seemingly hold no fear for her now. Meanwhile, comfortably ensconced in my nice warm office in Nottingham, I can only marvel at the diametrically opposite lifestyles we are currently leading.

The first six words of this article in today's Guardian are amongst the truest ever spoken, I think...

A Song For Europe – finalists announced!

The four finalists for this year’s “A Song For Europe” were revealed this morning on Radio 2. They are as follows:

Never In A Million Years - Zee Asha (Mark Jiggens, Zee Asha)

Zee Asha was Helen Terry’s replacement in the late 90s reformed version of Culture Club, and has had a few minor dance hits (as Zee) on Paul Oakenfold’s Perfecto label. This song is apparently typical hi-energy pop, of the Nicki French ilk.

I Give In - Surf 'n' Turf (Jonathan & Peter Maitland, Jackie Collins)

This has had some publicity as it was actually written by a BBC investigative journalist with minimal musical experience, just to see what would happen. Seventies pub-rock, so I’m told.

DJ Romeo - Tricia Penrose (Bea Eden, Simon Stirling, James Gordon)

Formerly in Brookside, now a star of crap ITV drama “Heartbeat”, with at least one very minor hit to her credit before now. This sounds like the sort of thing you get at the end of “Eurotrash” each week. Very camp and very silly.

Come Back - Jessica Garlick (Martyn Baylay)

Jessica came ninth in the “Pop Idol” finals, and was actually my favourite of the girl finalists. This is a power ballad, sung rather well (says Chig).

You can download MP3s of all 4 tunes at Chris Melville’s Eurosong site. Or follow this direct link.

The 40 In 40 Days Project.
24. The “Tales of the City” House (1993)

Ah, the Jet Set Years. What fun they were…

For seven years (1989-1996), K worked as an international product manager for a Finnish biotechnology company. A major part of his role entailed creating and maintaining a global distribution network for his company’s products. Naturally, this meant a hefty amount of foreign travel. In fact, this meant a colossal amount of foreign travel. We calculated that over the seven years, on average, K was away from home for about one third of the time. Of course, this put a huge strain on him, and on us. It was a difficult and testing time, in many respects. However, it did give K the experience he needed to set up his own company, and to make it a success. And there were, of course, certain distinct benefits along the way.

Not least of those benefits – at least from my point of view, stuck back in Nottingham while K gadded about the globe – were the enormous number of Air Miles which K clocked up, and which we eagerly converted to free flights and posh hotel rooms. We would also tack our holidays onto the end of K’s business trips – that way, the company would pay for his flight and we could split the cost of my flight between us. As a result, we were averaging around four foreign jaunts a year.

One of the best of these jaunts came in Spring 1993. We started off in Banff, staying at the Banff Springs Hotel, where K was attending a conference. This place struck me as the real life equivalent of the hotel in The Shining - it was easy to picture Jack Nicholson stalking the empty corridors during the off-peak season. We then flew down to San Francisco, staying there for a week or so, with a night away at Yosemite. Then on to Boston, and a brief stop in Toronto before flying home.

So, there we were in San Francisco, on a beautifully warm and sunny afternoon, looking for the real life Barbary Lane (as featured in Armistead Maupin’s Tales Of The City series). Our Rough Guide told us that Barbary Lane was based on a street on Russian Hill called…well, I forget what it was called now, and in any case, it could probably do without any more publicity. This was a good year or so before the “Tales” TV series put the place firmly on the map.



We find the street sign without too much trouble. Look, those must be the famous wooden steps leading up to the lane! We clamber up the steps and into the narrow, quiet lane, with houses on either side. Wow – this looks just as we had always imagined it. Unreal.



As we approach one house on the right hand side, about halfway along, a smallish grey-haired lady is fussing about with the wisteria growing up on its frontage. “Oh dear,” she remarks to us as we draw level, “I just can’t seem to be able to tie this back properly – it looks so untidy.” We fall into conversation – the weather, where we’re from. She has a kindly, slightly scatty manner and a lively twinkle in her eye.

After a while, she asks us a question. “Would you like to come inside and see a dirty…”

She pauses. Comparing notes later, we discover that we both had the same thought: is she going to say “dirty movie”?

“…a dirty old typical American house? You’d be very welcome.”

Well, how could we refuse a visit inside a house on Barbary Lane? Besides which, this sweet little old lady does rather remind us of someone. So we step inside her house.

The house is larger than it looked from the outside. It has an eccentric layout, with odd corners, passageways and staircases here and there. It has a lovely, weathered, Bohemian charm to it. LOL tells us that she rents various rooms out to people. One of her lodgers, for instance, worked as a designer on Star Wars, and she shows us some of the original props. In her basement, she has set up a studio, where she does her paintings. There are quotes from Rilke poems pinned up on the walls, which her husband has supplied for inspiration. Upstairs, we stumble across a small enclosed outside area, tucked away and invisible from the street, where she is growing potted geraniums – apparently, it’s quite a sun trap. We climb up onto the flat roof, which boasts a perfect view out over the bay – there’s Alcatraz, there’s the Golden Gate bridge, there’s Sausalito over in the distance. We come back down and meet some of LOL’s family, who have come over for a visit – they are all bright, charming, welcoming people.



LOL asks us, with a vague tone in her voice, whether we’ve ever read any of the books that have been written about XYZ Lane. She hasn’t yet, but she really must get round to it. She only moved in last year. Before her, a gay couple had lived here for about 18 years. I’m calculating mentally – that would be 1974 to 1992, then. The first “Tales” book came out in 1976, and the final book in 1992. That fits rather neatly, doesn’t it? LOL then points out of the window, down the lane, towards a much smaller looking house with a clapboard frontage. Apparently, an elderly lady lives there, who was actually born a man – she had the operation many years ago. LOL has heard that she features quite a lot in the books – is that right? Oh yes, it most certainly is.

We eventually take our leave. But it’s a wrench. There’s something about this house which makes us feel like getting our things, bringing them over straight away, unpacking, and never leaving again. It’s that kind of house. And it’s just what we always thought Anna Madrigal’s house would look like. Our theory, for what it’s worth: Armistead Maupin took the Anna Madrigal character from down the lane, placed her in his friends’ house a few doors up, and spun his fiction from that starting point. We like this theory, as it would mean we had just – briefly – stepped out of reality and into one of our favourite works of fiction. And just how magical and wonderful is that?

OK then, art lovers! First, read the next post but one ("Which way is up?"). Then leave a comment telling me which of these two pictures (Jenny Pockley's Blind) is the right way up, and which is upside down. No peeking at other comments before you make your guess...

Image A


Image B

Tom at Plastic Bag, who was up for an award in this year's Bloggies, asked for comments from anyone who had objections to the whole Bloggies thing. This triggered off a major rant from little old me, and a very courteous and considered reply from Tom. I was going to post my rant here, but on reflection I think not. I’ll just paste in this one sentence instead:Since our correspondence, Tom has gone on to win the "Best European Weblog" category, for which many congratulations - the award was a deserved win for his excellent site (which was also prominently featured in today's Guardian Online supplement). And here's me, pissing on his parade (Jeez, talk about bad timing!) However, I do still think the Bloggies is a daft and dodgy concept. Hey, maybe they should televise it next year?

Which way is up?

Earlier in the month, K and I visited the huge Art 2002 fair in Islington. After three hours spent wading through the thousands of works on display, we ended up with a shortlist of five paintings which had made the strongest impact on us – the paintings which we truly adored (and could afford). From this list, we went ahead and bought three – the paintings which we simply couldn’t live without. One was portable enough to come back on the train with us, but the other two had to be delivered – and arrived on Monday.

Last night, we unwrapped and hung the largest of the three – Jenny Pockley’s Blind. This is a very loosely figurative work, taken from a video shot from a car window during a drive through snow covered Scottish countryside. There are blurred, predominately mauve markings indicating some sort of roadside fence, with most of the canvas being essentially white. It’s a really gorgeous piece.

However. When we unwrapped it, we made a major discovery. At Art 2002, the work had been hung upside down! When we looked at the work the right way up, it suddenly became a lot more figurative than we had realised. It made more literal sense.

Have you ever seen the play Art? The play satirises the contemporary art world by centring round a character who has just bought an all-white canvas, at vast expense. While he is immensely proud of his purchase, his friends are equally as baffled by it, and much comedy is extracted from this situation ("Are you sure you've got it the right way up?" etc). Well, I now feel a little bit like this character. We fall in love with a painting – get it home – and discover it was hanging upside down all along.

Oh well. It still looks gorgeous.

This evening, I will load up two photos of the painting. One will be the right way up, and the other will be upside down. You can then have fun guessing which is which.

The 40 In 40 Days Project.
23. The Club Residencies (1987-1989)

My first regular DJ-ing gig was a monthly Monday night affair at the Garage club in Nottingham (now The Lizard Lounge). It was organised by the local gay youth group, who couldn’t afford a “proper” DJ, and so I was asked on the understanding that I would give my services for free. I jumped at the chance.

The first night, in Spring 1987, was an instant success, and the night ran for around five months before the Garage decided it wasn’t doing any more “special” nights, and pulled the plug. Unfortunately, no-one thought to tell me about this, so I spent about an hour outside the locked front door one evening, sitting on my record boxes, wondering what the hell was going on. Yes, I’m still pissed off about it. Can you tell?

In January 1988, my friend Mark and I decided to approach another club ourselves, with a view to hosting our own night. Mark would promote the night and would man the door, and I would DJ. We chose the Barracuda in Hurts Yard (now a salsa club), and started off on monthly Mondays once again. This time, we had to build our own crowd, and earn some money into the process (not least to fund my record collection, as I wasn’t on any record company mailing lists). This meant building some sort of identity for the night, which we named Get Happy. To help achieve this, we created huge banners with “smiley” faces painted on them, and festooned the club with them. We also got a batch of smiley badges made up, and gave them to everyone at the door on the way in. And all of this several months before the Acid House “Summer of Love” – what eerie prescience!

After a couple of months, we went from monthly to fortnightly Mondays, changing the name of the night to Fever in the process. And this, for me, was when the nights really started to come together with their own unique identity. We were promoting the nights as “for lesbians, gay men and their friends”, with a jokey strapline on the flyers proclaiming that we were “An Equal Opportunities Dancefloor”. The idea was to provide an alternative to the commercial gay scene, which was still churning out a diet of diabolically poor Hi-Energy. Our musical policy was therefore to play every other style of music apart from Hi-Energy. At the time, such ventures were completely unknown outside London, and were thin on the ground even in London, so we felt we were doing something groundbreaking and necessary.

The timing was just right. In the first half of 1988, the Stop Clause 28 campaign started up, grew massive, and (in my opinion) changed British gay society forever. Faced with a clearly defined threat, the lesbian and gay communities were forced to come together and show confidence and strength as a movement. Previously marginalised and woolly notions of gay “community” and gay “pride” became tangible and directly relevant. It was a worrying and yet exciting time to be “out and proud”. In Nottingham, activity around the Clause 28 campaign was also giving birth to a whole new extended social grouping of lesbians and gay men, who felt disenfranchised by the tiny and miserable “scene” that was on offer. So, (naturally!) they all flocked to Fever.



Looking out from behind my decks, I could see (formerly) separatist dykes in “ethnic” waistcoats grooving next to fashion bunnies in lycra cycling shorts. We had a “theatre crowd”, from whatever production was running at Nottingham Playhouse. We had a whole bunch of straight people, who felt just as much a part of the night as anyone else. An equal opportunities dancefloor indeed! I played music ranging from house to hip-hop to disco to funk to indie to Motown to pop to kitsch and even to bhangra, with a particular focus on newly emergent women rappers such as Roxanne Shanté, Salt ‘N Pepa and the Cookie Crew (whose “Females” was a particular favourite). Ee, it were bloody great.

The only frustration was that, having created my ideal club night, I was unable to take part in it myself, being stuck behind the decks, stone cold sober, concentrating on every detail of what was going on, trying to gauge the mood of the crowd, trading off big hits with retro classics and underground club tracks, identifying key dancers in the crowd and playing to them shamelessly, fending off requests for songs I didn’t want to play, and eagerly seizing requests for songs I did want to play. If the night went particularly well, I could be buzzing off it for the rest of the week, replaying the best moments in my head and thinking “We did that!”

The Barracuda was sold, and we transferred Fever to the newest, hippest club in town, Eden (later Kitsch, later the Double Bubble). The new residency was for alternate Thursdays, and not long afterwards, this became every Thursday. We stayed put while Eden’s hipness slowly faded around us (the Kool Kat had opened by then and was cleaning up), but Fever remained solid – by the very end, we were their most successful night. It’s funny though – Fever at Eden was certainly the bigger success, but it is actually Fever at the Barracuda which I look back on with the most fondness.



After Eden was sold, Mark decided he didn’t want to carry on promoting the night at a new venue. Mainly because he’d realised he was actually straight after all, and although his girlfriend was nothing but supportive, it was all getting a bit weird. I hooked up with Eden’s former manager, but nothing really gelled. In any case, I had taken DJ-ing as far as I wanted to take it by then. I had achieved all my objectives. The next step would have been to take it all much more seriously – buy some decks, learn to mix properly, start the hustling, self-promoting and bullshitting that would have been necessary. I always hated the promoting side of the operation, and have always felt deeply uncomfortable with the idea of “talking myself up”. Besides, I’d had it up to here with people who work in nightclubs. There was a particular blend of arrogance and incompetence about them which I was beginning to find insufferable. So, I hung up my slipmats, went into retirement, and waited for the next breed of ambitious club kids to replace me. I have only DJ-ed twice in the past ten years – often enough to remind me that, great as it was for a while, walking away from it was the right thing for me to do.

Okay, it's back to the Hot Pop Goss. Hurrah!

It's all gone Eurovision crazy at World Of Chig, including reviews of some of this year's contenders for A Song For Europe. Chig: inside Eurovision, so you don't have to be...

Meanwhile, forget the official Pop Idol site, and head instead to Ananova's dedicated Pop Idol newsfeed page. A much better source of info on vital issues of the day, such as The Will's Family Not Clapping Gareth Scandal.

The 40 In 40 Days Project.
22. The Pricking Of The Bubble (1973)

Up to the age of 11, my childhood has been a model of textbook perfection. Daddy, Mummy, my little sister and I, in our nice big house, with its nice big garden, in a nice little village. Middle class, well spoken, good schools, good manners, good health. Church of England, Conservative party, Daddy wears a suit, Mummy is a housewife. “Blue Peter”, encyclopedias, Enid Blyton, Clarks shoes, Marks and Sparks, Haliborange tablets in the winter, Dr. Spock on the bookshelf.

Verily, we are Janet and f***ing John.

One evening in July 1973, my father comes into my room. I am sitting up in bed, reading “Rogue Male” by Geoffrey Household, toys and comics all over the floor. He starts talking about how he and Mummy haven’t been getting along very well recently. I have noticed this, but then they have always had their rows from time to time. He’s talking very gently, in a different voice than normal, and he’s building up to something.

“And, well, there are such things as divorces…”

I can still hear my sudden, gasping intake of breath. After which I burst into tears, and so – unbelievably – does he. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen me cry before”, he says, and this is quite true, and quite strange. I am already going numb inside, and while part of me is still crying, another part of me is detaching itself, observing and analysing.

My father carries on talking in this gentle voice, and with the wisdom of hindsight, I can see now that he has prepared for this carefully, and is handling the situation with great finesse and delicacy. Looking at one of my comics down by his feet, he even manages a joke ("I feel like Shiver And Shake now!”)

Mummy is going to be leaving, and she’s going to be getting married to Mr. G, and they’re going to live in another village a few miles away. This is all going to happen quite soon. Mummy and Daddy have been keeping it all secret, ever since last September when Mummy told Daddy she was leaving him. They didn’t tell us what was going on because they didn’t want to upset us any further. So they’ve just been pretending that everything was still normal, until now.

So, for the past nine months we have only been pretending to be a happy family. It wasn’t real. It’s all been an act. And I didn’t see through it.

My father leaves and my Mother comes in, all smiles, painting an entirely cheerful picture of our future. He wants us to call him Joe. They will only be living a few miles away, and we’ll be going to visit them every so often. We won’t have to leave this house, because she knows we love it here, and because the new house will be quite small, and because Daddy can afford to look after us better. Maybe she’ll get us a little cat, because my sister has always wanted one. Wouldn’t that be fun? Wouldn’t she be pleased?

It’s strange. I smile back and give the appearance of cheering up, but I’m doing this more for her sake, and more to keep the peace. We have avoided talking about the difficult stuff – about how upset I must be feeling. I don’t want to spoil this illusion that everything is going to be super, and so I instantly collude with it. Thus in this one short conversation, a barrier goes up between us - of polite smiles, fixed jolliness, and emotional distance. It takes many, many years for this barrier to weaken.

However, I find that I am not angry with my mother for breaking up our happy family and leaving us behind, or anything like that. Not even for one second do I ever think that way. She doesn’t love Daddy any more, and she does love Mr. G – Joe. So, of course she must get married to him.

None the less, my view of divorce, from within my safe little well brought up bubble, is that it is an awful, horrible, shameful, tragic thing, which only happens to people who aren’t like us. And I strongly feel that I absolutely must not talk about it to anybody. Keen to avoid upsetting us further, neither of my parents talk about it after tonight, either. So, I bottle up my sadness and my shame, and carry it around inside me. In my head, all the happiness of my childhood has come to a sudden and complete end, and can never be regained. My life from now on will be forever tainted with this terrible sadness, hanging over me at all times, affecting everything I do. This is the way I see things, and there is nobody there to make me see them otherwise.

After my parents have left the room, I pick up a felt tip pen, open my copy of “Rogue Male” (which I never finish), and solemnly, with a dazed sense of calm purposefulness, write today’s date in the margin of the page I am reading. I then draw a neat line right across the page, dividing the last sentence of my old life, before my father came in my room and pricked my bubble, from the first sentence of my new, so much more real life.

The Troubled Diva Gay Guide To Newcastle (on a cold Monday night in January).

So, I’m just about to log off and get back to my Nick Hornby, when I discover that my hotel is but a stone’s throw from Newcastle’s gay village. Woo-hoo! It is time to go forth and be Amongst My People! Sod the book, and in with the contact lenses!

There are no less than six venues to choose from: The Dog, Heroes, Mims, Sugar, Twist and The Yard. I make straight for Sugar, which is the largest venue, and also the one with the late licence. There is a big queue outside. Oh joy!

I draw nearer. Hmmm – they do look awfully young. And, if I might say say so, awfully straight. I look at the sign on the door. “Every Monday at Sugar: Student Night!”

Bah. Never mind – the pub on the corner looked quite busy. I’ll go back there instead. This turns out to be The Dog. Not exactly an inspiring name, is it? I sit at the bar with my pint. As soon as I sit down, DJ Otzi’s “Hey Baby” comes on. Now, back in December, I wrote a fairly passionate defence of this track. Well, I was wrong. It’s a shit record. Oh, and it’s clearing the pub as well. Ten minutes later, and well over half the punters have vanished. I feel a tad conspicuous now. OK, I’m sitting in a shit pub on a Monday night drinking shit lager and listening to Geri Halliwell. Cut the losses, leave the pint and get the hell out.

On the way back to the hotel, I notice the following. Mims looks dead. Twist is actually shut. The outside of Heroes looks like a public lavatory. I couldn’t be arsed to go looking for The Yard.

Here endeth the gay guide to Newcastle, brackets Mondays brackets.

One day, maybe, I'll get all haughty and superior and "A-list" (dang, swore I'd never use that stupid word again), and I'll consider myself "above" linking to other blogs which have linked to me first.

But not when they're as fresh and engaging as this one. Cheers for that, Laurel!

So, here I am stuck up here in Newcastle, all on my own in a miserable hotel room, having been up since 5.30 this morning in order to get here and spend the whole day in a sodding Portakabin in the middle of a car park, being buffeted by 90 miles per hour gale force winds, so that the walls of the Portakabin were buckling and the computer screens were wobbling, and when I went outside I had trouble even standing up, and now I’m sitting here after a miserable meal on my own, missing K, with just his poxy laptop for company (with one of those miserable little keyboards that I hate, and I’m constantly mistyping and having to backspace), which I’ve only borrowed because I made this stupid pledge to write something every day for 40 days without fail, and now I’ve got to compose this light, witty, gently self-deprecatory piece for my sodding weblog which only a few dozen people will ever read anyway, and I’d much rather be reading my Nick Hornby book, and, and, BAH! You see? You see how I bleed for you?

Actually, the room is perfectly pleasant, and I managed to find possibly the nicest Pizza Express I’ve ever seen (the building conversion won awards, you know), and I actually spent a perfectly pleasant hour or so there enjoying my Nick Hornby between mouthfuls, but still, anyway….YOU SEE HOW I BLEED FOR YOU?

The 40 In 40 Days Project.
21. The Incompetencies (1962-2002)

There is something very important which you need to understand about me. In a large number of life’s most basic practical skills, I am quite staggeringly, hopelessly incompetent. My relationship with the physical word is…well, “troubled” is a good word for it. Let’s examine the evidence, shall we?

The Swimming.

My father was a keen boatman, and so a large proportion of our weekends and holidays were spent afloat – first on a succession of cabin cruisers, then on the family narrow boat, and eventually on a small sea-going vessel. You might think, therefore, that ensuring his two children could swim at the earliest age possible would have been one of his top priorities.

Well, no. And this despite his son’s unnerving propensity for falling in the canal at regular intervals – most spectacularly at a boat rally, in front of a crowd of hundreds. My father had to jump in to save me. “Solicitor saves drowning son” ran the headline in the local paper.

After the boat rally incident, you would think that the case for swimming lessons had become unarguable. Well, no again. My parents instead hit upon the curious solution of first placing me in my lifejacket, and then tying me to the roof of the boat with ropes. If I needed the loo, I had to shout for someone to come and untie me. The rope solution was eventually dropped – after which, I fell in the canal yet again. Each incident was progressively scarier than the last. A phobia was developing.

Eventually, aged eight years old, swimming lessons started at school. I wasn’t the only non-swimmer in our class, of course. Four years later though, and I was the only one still thrashing around in the shallow end, terrified of getting his head underwater. The humiliation of not being able to swim was bad, of course – but the terror of taking my feet off the bottom was far, far worse.

Swimming teachers came and went. At the start of term, they would be all hearty, strapping confidence (“We’ll have you swimming by the end of term laddie, or my name’s not…”) - I broke then all. By the end of term, they would be burnt out, gibbering wrecks, who had resorted to desperate tricks such as trying to bribe me with Mars bars.

In four years, there was just the one breakthrough: the cork mat. If I held onto a cork mat, I could – after a fashion – just about manage to propel myself along, legs kicking wildly, water splashing all over the place. But progress was slow (a width of the pool could take several minutes), and I didn’t like to move too far away from the end wall of the pool, just in case I felt like grabbing the handrail at any time.

One morning, my swimming teacher (actually a rather bored history master who’d been drafted in to help out), who had been watching me doggedly ploughing along in this manner, unexpectedly creased up with helpless laughter. I clocked his reaction and looked up quizzically, thinking I’d actually been doing rather well that morning. He leaned over the side of the pool, and beckoned me over. Apparently I had suddenly reminded him of a paddle steamer - and a rather clapped-out one, at that. “There are two old ladies on your starboard side who want their money back”, he joshed. “They haven’t had a view yet!”

Harumph.

I still can’t swim. The idea terrifies me as much as it ever did, if not more so. As for the smell of chlorinated water, it chills my blood to the bone. The flashbacks! Oh God, the flashbacks!

The Driving.

I was bad enough on a bike, not having cycled on the open road since one disastrous trip in Summer 1975 when I nearly caused three road accidents in the space of twenty minutes. And behind the wheel of a car, I was not much better.

On my first ever lesson (1985), having been driving for less than two minutes in my entire life, I attempted my first gear change. Only I got the pedals mixed up and braked instead. Causing the car behind to smash into the back of me. The next ten minutes of my first driving lesson consisted of swapping names and addresses. This wasn’t what you might call a confidence booster. To put it mildly.

I changed instructors soon afterwards. The second instructor quickly realised what a nice little earner he had found, and let me drive around for week after week, making all my decisions for me, with copious use of the dual controls (“Don’t worry – I’ve got it for you!”). One week, months later, he didn’t show up. I changed instructors again.

The first time out with instructor #3, we got onto a dual carriageway. “Look in the mirror, and pull into the right hand lane when you’re ready.” Look into the mirror? Huh? I’d never had to do that before. In fact, I’d always wondered what it was there for – rather an overrated instrument, in my opinion. Useful for checking your hairdo every now and again, (well, there had never been much else to do), but not for anything else, surely? Well, I looked. And could make no sense whatsoever of what I saw. How was I supposed to know when to change lane? Help!

Instructor #3 was a competent and patient soul who had Seen It All Before, and I made enough progress to be put in for the test. Thirty seconds into the test, we arrived at a roundabout. I did not give way. I drove straight on. There was a car going round the inside lane. I was heading straight for it. “WATCH OUT THERE’S A CAR IN THE WAY!” shouted my examiner, and slammed his brakes on. We came to a halt just inches away. The rest of the test was something of an irrelevance.

However, I passed on the second attempt. Thank God for that, I thought, now perhaps everyone will get off my back – and promptly gave up driving altogether for another eight years. However, in the Spring of 1995, I decided to give things another shot – after all, it hardly seemed fair to K that I should be chauffeured everywhere I went. So we went out for a few spins together – and actually, I wasn’t too bad. Until, once again, at a large and busy roundabout, I showed no intention of giving way. “FOR GOD’S SAKE HIT YOUR BRAKES NOW!”, K shouted – and just in the nick of time, I did. But it was too much for him, and for me. We never went out in the car together again.

Bloody horrible things anyway. Just ugly lumps of metal, basically. And so terrible for the environment, of course. Well, one tries to do one’s bit for society, whatever the sacrifices…

The Cooking.

You would not believe my cooking. Honestly, it’s pathetic. I can boil an egg, and I can do toast on the Aga. And I’m a dab hand – nay, a maestro - at following the instructions on the back of ready meals. But that’s basically it.

An early indicator of this came in Autumn 1981 – my first term in a shared student house. It was early days, and we were still attempting to cook for each other. This was my second attempt (my first being a ludicrously ambitious home made quiche, whose pastry had crumbled away in the oven, allowing the yellow gloopy stuff to leak out all over the kitchen floor). This time, I was attempting spaghetti with cheese sauce.

I went into the larder and grapped the pack of spaghetti. Unfortunately, it was already open, and I’d grabbed it by the closed end of the packet. Result: the spaghetti tipped out, and all over the larder floor. Which was, of course (this being a student house) absolutely filthy. So I decided to wash the dirt off the spaghetti before boiling it. Under the hot tap. Meaning that the strands all melded together into a large lump of solid pasta. Which I then proceeded to boil.

Meanwhile, I had decided to make the cheese sauce out of Cheshire cheese – thereby ruling out the possibility of it having any flavour at all. I took the recipe from something I had copied down in an exercise book. Unfortunately, I had mis-transcribed the amount of flour required for the sauce. By a factor of four. Meaning that I ended up with a flavourless mixture of flour and water, with a hint of Cheshire cheese. Glue, in other words.

Which I then proceeded to spoon over the solid pasta lumps, and serve to my incredulous housemates. Who, one by one, abandoned their meals and went down the chip shop instead. Leaving me sitting there, angrily insisting that there was nothing wrong with the meal that a few dollops of tomato ketchup wouldn’t put right, and that they were wasting perfectly good food, and mmm, I was really enjoying this, OK?

The communal cooking rota fell apart forthwith, and I was never, ever allowed to live the incident down by my housemates, who took great delight in reciting it to everyone who came round for the rest of the year.

K does the cooking in our household. He’s bloody brilliant at it, as well (everybody says so). Good job, under the circumstances.

The Football.

Team spirit. That’s what they said football was supposed to teach you at school. Well, phooey to that. In my experience, “team spirit” meant ten other people (all of whom had been picked before you) groaning “Oh no, we’ve got Atkinson again.”

In my entire school footballing career, I scored a grand total of two goals. The first was an own goal (cue more massed groaning). The second was essentially a fluke – my foot was in the wrong place at the wrong time (I usually went to great lengths to keep well out of the way), and the ball simply ricocheted off it, and into the goal. I was ecstatic. Finally, I had done something useful! I ran back across the floor of the school gymnasium, to get in position for the next kick-off.

And tripped, and fell, and fractured my wrist.

Just. My. Luck.

I took this as a sign from the Almighty that I had no business trying to be good at games – and promptly went back to being crap again.

The Cricket.

The highlight of my school cricketing career: finding a four-leafed clover while fielding. Which, I think, tells you all you need to know.

Can I go back to my Nick Hornby book now?

I'm away in Newcastle for the next couple of days, so - aside from the usual "40 Days" entries - there won't be many updates on this site until Wednesday.

The 40 In 40 Days Project.
20. The 10th Anniversary Party (1995)

K and I celebrated 10 lovely years together as a lovely couple in Spring 1995. A fortnight later, the lovely man who introduced us to each other also celebrated 10 years with his equally lovely partner. To mark the occasion, the four of us threw a lovely party, on the nearest available bank holiday Sunday, for all our lovely friends.

The invites said "dress memorably". This was interpreted in many different ways - from suits to fancy dress, or in my case, head to toe Moschino (yeah, well). We started at Broadway cinema, where we had arranged a special screening of Breakfast At Tiffany’s. Then down the road to the Barrio tapas bar, with the Hippo club (now The Bomb) in the basement below. Food upstairs, dancing downstairs, with an outside courtyard as well. The whole party lasted around 12 hours.

It was like a cast party for our adult lives, and was an utter joy from beginning to end. Which does unfortunately mean that there's not an awful lot more that one can say about it. We had a great time, so did all our friends - end of story, basically. So, rather than trying to describe the event in any further detail, let me illustrate it instead...