Bloody Gates

There are rumours that the immense private flat development, which has sprung up at the back of my Bloody Brighton paradise, is on course to become a “gated community”. Since it emerged, with its luxurious playground, the local council house kids have been keen to investigate, uprooting gardens  in their wake.  . One father surrendered his two under-fives in their pyjamas to the playground's warm embraces before scuttling off home, beer in hand.  Incidentally, there is a beautiful park 5 minutes walk away, but many parents won’t take their kids, nor let them wander too far where they might discover it.

 If I delved into the planning history, I would no doubt uncover the ways in which the developer managed to build higher, somehow noisier and far more intrusively than the locals might have been led to expect. It’s what developers usually do.

This is Brighton, where house prices are ridiculous. In the 12 years since the birth of my second son, developers have built modern flats on three huge chunks of vacant land on Pankhurst Avenue, thrust down amongst the pebble-dashed 30s public housing that often seems beyond makeover.  The estate lies at the edge of town by the racecourse, where it usually got forgotten when it came to building public facilities. The empty nurses home, a Victorian ruin rotting from the inside, once a dare for bored teenagers, was pulled down and the bulldozers took over.  

 The flats are the new reality. There is a rooftop terrace. The buzz of the city Brighton has become has suddenly taken root on the outskirts of town. Noisy parties and fences have cut off vital territory for the foxes, which once roamed across rolling hospital grounds. Places like our own ramshackle garden are one of the few respites. I can smell evidence that their frequency of visits has increased. I won’t be sealing off their entrances any time soon. This house is not a gated community. I often allowed large groups of kids to play in our unusually large back garden, although if left unsupervised, mayhem occasionally resulted. 

Incidentally, for reasons I won’t go into here, I am exiled from this Eden, except for a couple of days a week, when I stay here to spend time with my children. The garden gets ignored. Everything is overgrown, there are old sofas dumped, drumkits and daleks festering in a leaky shed. Then last night, wandering outside to stargaze and smoke a spliff I was struck by the massive human presence, now cackling and whooping high above us, and staring down at the gardens below. We must learn to be neighbours. If they don’t lock the gates first.

Things fall apart....

I am living in a Brighton flat that I cannot afford, with psychotic neighbours below me and a view of the new flats around the station from my window.

Here’s my status. I vacillated between two women until they both rejected me. I broke the life that didn’t quite seem right for one that is obviously wrong. Did I lack the will to turn back before it was too late? Did I plunge happily into this pit?

What else has gone wrong? I’m stuck between two careers that never seem to quite get off the ground. I have no regular income, no job security, no pension. As the debts of the 20^th century pile up around our ears, my own debts slowly wrap me in tight vines, paralysing my every twitch.

The mirror is cruel in an age of vanity and vajazzle. I am an overweight middle aged, balding man, a cigarette dangling from my lip. Sometimes I don’t smell too good.

How long have I dulled the knowledge of the pain of existence with marijuana and bonhomie? How many galleries of pretty women have I imagined making love to in empty rituals?

Slowly I insert more electrodes into the brain, until I too am immersed in the dream machines of the 21^st century. Slowly I become everything I despise.

But I can’t just be left to get on with that miserable decline. I have two sons to set an example to. Where is the hope in this nouveau city? A city that installs fairy lights in a railway tunnel that is shelter to homeless beggars in sleeping bags.The cliché about Brighton is “fur coat, no knickers”, but the truth is more trendy jacket, no heart beneath. Yes, I walk past those poor sods too, almost daily.

Religion kicked off this millennium with a timely reminder, a display of its capacity for barbarism, lest we had forgotten the crusades, the inquisition, all that history. Science gives me the awe of nature that has religious intensity, yet as a religion it fails. Yes, once it offered us redemption: The futurologists with their artists’ impressions of crystal planets carpeted with soft green and low-hanging fruits. But the future was different to that. The future arrived already plugged into the matrix, tangling up our memories and desires with saleable commodities, plundered in the summer riots and now sitting in their attic boxes till the police raids come no more.

Outside there is no reality except the reality we cannot bear to face, the crumbling glaciers and barren fields, just behind the news item on Westlife’s imminent split. I could never trust myself with politics because of the compromise, the brown-nosed careers to be made, the failure of principle. Now I am as powerless as the apolitical, as powerless as the political. Even the powerful seem to lack the commodity that defines them. No-one knows which way to turn. Is some great helmsman going to arrive to guide us as darkness falls, hacking aside millions of innocent lives in his wake?

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity. (W.B. Yeats)

The Onlookers

This is supposed to be about bloody Brighton, but I guess I’m allowed to write about what I bloody well like. This is about a band from around the town I grew up in, Windsor, in the early 80s. I was just getting old enough to go to gigs when they folded, so I never got to see them live, but their first and only single remains a treasured possession. Simple, plain, then glorious. Like the Stone Roses' All Across the Sands, but in tune.

The Onlookers were the perfect mid-60s English combo with style, an abundance of talent and glorious harmony-dripping pop songs. But 15 years too late. Like The Prisoners soon after them, they were purists, staying ideal to that sound. They had a fanatical mod following, for a spell.  I was obsessed with watching The Prisoners live a few years later. I wasn't into the mod subculture, just the music.
The Onlookers were called mods, psychedelicists and various wavists in fanzines of the day.  They never made it through. Too nice for indie kids, not council estate enough, not led by a quotable egotist, perhaps, they were stuck on a retro thing in a futurist era. Somehow they could have been the Monkees, you almost see it when they played on a kids TV show House No. 73 with a young/old Sandi Toksveig. There’s the single You and I, an unreleased song, Chieftan, and a dreamy-psychedelic fragment in the bathroom, all on youtube.

All that remains otherwise is that rather splendid debut/farewell single, containing the wonderful Julia on the b-side, You and I, and Understand (which contains a steal from The Hollies' Bus Stop, but not on a Gallagher scale).  
The would-be follow up The Mystic Surrounds Me/Houseman made it onto a Slough bands compilation, Subway. There’s this stuff plus the band’s unreleased demos coming out on Detour Records, which may be a lost album. Some lost piece of genius like Subway Sect’s punk album, or The Ultimate Action or VU. 

The Onlookers were always described as a Slough band, probably because of the Slough compilation, though I suspect they have Windsor roots like me.  For a start, my old school mate Darren Daly told me this: Interesting fact No.47. Nicky Stone (lead singer) was the son of one of my mothers best friends. he was a few years older than me and when I was a kid he gave me all his old Action Men and accessories. I got the space capsule and a tank amongst other stuff.

Windsor has some claims to musical fame: St Etienne, Andy Weatherall, part of Republica.  The Onlookers stayed true to their name, then looked elsewhere in their lives.
Nick Stone has a unique voice, but it’s a sweet instrument, with only a touch of a Ray Davies twist. All of this is spun together with Dean Bruce’s harmonies and raga guitar solos, and unflashily brilliant bass playing from Mark Leech. Mark Bevis seems to find the perfect beat for things - just listen to the chorus of Julia. The songs are innocent and powerful, on the verge of experience. They still ring true.

Good archive of old cuttings at:

http://www.boredteenagers.co.uk/ONLOOKERS.htm

Good discussion at:

http://fireescapetalking.blogspot.com/2008/03/east-villages-inspiration-onlookers.html

Darren Daly’s review for Langley College paper

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=344252698518&set=a.344233593518.147178.717828518&type=1&theater

Save Our Starlings!

Flocking starlings are one of the most stunning sights in the natural world. And their free ariel display has been a feature of Brighton seafront for many years. 

But now their numbers are in decline and the spectacle around the shell of the West Pier is now smaller and less frequent than in years gone by.

While Brighton Bloody Council continues to entertain speculators’ dreams of observation towers, twisted skyscrapers and outsized ferris wheels along our seafront, they seem oblivious to the dwindling of a true natural wonder in our town.

My friend Lisa who runs a café in town suggested that we should do more to encourage them back. This could be done by replacing some of the wood that burnt down a decade ago in a mysterious fire on the West Pier. Once thousands of starlings roosted on the derelict pier’s wooden structures.  Now only a steel skeleton of the pier remains – hardly a comfortable perch.

Installing perching beams would entail work on a dangerous structure, but need not be prohibitively expensive. It would not need to be safe for human visitors.

The West Pier Trust, which owns the wrecked pier, has given up on redeveloping it. Lottery funds evaporated, developers went bust, etc… But it makes sense to leave it be.  We have one serviceable tourist pier already.  The end-of-the-pier shows it was once home to are ancient history.

Instead, the trust wants to build a 150-metre high observation tower at the pier’s entrance. It’s as if someone looked at Portsmouth’s Spinnaker Tower and said lazily, “me too”.

Observation towers presuppose there is something remarkable to observe.  In Portsmouth, it’s the ships.  Up a Brighton tower, tourists could look out to sea - and see the horizon a little lower down than before; alternatively, they could do a 180 and look at Brighton itself, although that’s better done from any of the South Downs behind the town. It’s a town surrounded by hills – you don’t need to climb a spire to see it.

You don’t need an observation tower to watch starlings paint the sky either, but at least it would give tourists something incredible to gaze at from their raised glass bubble.

What I propose is that we investigate making minimal alterations to the West Pier to encourage the starlings back.  This is going to be a tough sell in Brighton, which has never quite got over its reputation as a town that’s helping police with their enquiries in a kiss-me-quick hat.

But let’s be optimistic. The property bubble is well and truly over, so all those extra luxury flats aren’t going to happen now.

We have elected the country’s first Green MP, Caroline Lucas.  It’s time we lived up to our new image by doing something for wildlife.

Incidentally, some fascinating research on birds’ flocking behaviour can be found here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3323488/Study-of-starling-formations-points-way-for-swarming-robots.html

Vandals

It looks like a dinosaur devouring a building. The hydraulic crane’s steel jaws are pecking away at the vast former nurses’ residence in the hospital behind our road. Its sharp, angular outline has dominated the view up the hill for decades; soon there will be a toothy gap between the houses.  Since the plan was announced a few years back, I have imagined a wrecking ball or dynamite. This slow grazing by steel diplodocus has me baffled.  My neighbour, whose father used to be a demolition man, says she used to help him salvage bricks as buildings were slowly dismantled. Are bricks now so cheap that we don’t recycle them?

The site will become a car park. The planned development of blocks of flats has been put on ice as the property mania subsides, and housing association grants are slashed.

Still the destruction goes ahead. My neighbour has a theory as to why. Some of the local kids have been breaking into this semi-derelict ex-warehouse of angels. Letting fireworks off, that sort of thing. It is so labyrinthine that the police can never find the culprits when they arrive. The graffiti they have left on the walls of a fifth floor flat is now visible as the building’s secret insides are laid bare. I never knew this world existed until now.

They won’t touch the main hospital because it is listed. A former workhouse, it was also a hospital for  Indian soldiers who fought for the British in the fields of France during WW1. At least, they sent the lower castes to the workhouse. The wounded officers were billeted in the Pavilion. It has the same angles as the nurses block, but they will never mechanically devour a building with a clock tower.

I will miss the Victorian monstrosity that was the nurses’ home, however. If you looked towards moonrise and Jupiter, it had a ghostly presence in the east. I always thought I saw lights on, human life, but these were tricks, echoes.

It was part of that feeling that you were on the edge of civilisation – where the rows of houses suddenly ended with fields that just go on. I’m romanticising a little here. Brighton racecourse buffers the countryside. But the badgers and the foxes don’t seem to mind that too much. I hope they aren’t spooked by the prehistoric roar of modernity, modernising.

24 Our Party People

Of course it’s all coloured by the fact that I am falling hopelessly in love with someone, but last night’s reggae party at my neighbour’s house was the best yet for me. Proper sound systems, decks, curry and homemade cocktails in the kitchen….

So this is a few words in praise of my Bloody Brighton, the one with its roots in the anarchist bookshops and cafes of the 80s, the hippy diaspora and the working class local politics of the estates.

“You actually know all your neighbours!” one girl exclaims to me. Most of my neighbours are with me on the dance floor, along with many others drawn in through friendships and the new social media networks.

 This is Emma’s house. The other side is Amy, who also hosts great parties, American Amy, who lives in a caravan in the first Amy’s drive and Tallulah from the same end of the close. Its crammed with writers, thinkers, community activists, and the kind of party lovers I used to know from the Section 47 raves in London. My kind of people.

“I live in Notting Hill,” the girl continues. “No-one knows anyone. At night it’s dead – all private clubs.”

A few years ago, some Sunday filth-sheet did an expose of this estate, trying desperately to make it sound like a cross between Beruit and LA Watts. “Yeh, you gotta carry a blade round here for protection,” some hoody sniffs to the encouraging scratch of the journalist’s pen. Total bullshit of course. We had a few problems with bored youf a few years back. People here got organised and something got done. We have a community centre and youth activities now.  The rather aggressive lad with learning difficulties who used to kick a ball up and down the street all day now has a job on the bins. He looks proper made up, I’m told.

In Notting Hill the solution would be to lock them out.

Actually, that’s unfair. This kind of community spirit, part bohemian, part working class self help, exists in abundance across London. I saw it in Camden when I used to write about that area. Follow the basslines into the house parties, the dimly lit community halls, the surreal protests and the sheer joy of being alive and not thinking that life is happening elsewhere, behind a locked gate.

Once a piece of city has become a place of commerce, that use will continue forever, the interest being sold from one corporation to another. Children won’t play there again.

Take Lewes Road community garden – oh, someone just did. They think we need another one of these:

When next door we have these

And down the road is a massive

Brighton Bloody Council seem to think its OK for the supermarkets to play Death Match by Discounts there because it was once a petrol station. In the meantime, a weed thrust itself up through the cement for a bit.

There’s nothing we superannuated hippies love more than a derelict square of concrete upon which to sit with our buggies among the flowerpots and people in ridiculous trousers.

Give it back to the people and I might even wander in one day.