5th Aug – Hurry on sundown, see what tomorrow brings.

Do you know the story of King Canute? Hardly anyone does. It goes a bit like this: Canute, so frustrated by the sycophants and pygmies in his court –who claimed divine powers on his behalf- tried to persuade them otherwise. To make his point, he had them take his throne to the seaside, so that he could prove that he was as incapable as the next person to assert dominion over nature, and to, for example, as it happened, instruct the tide not to come in.

Now then, now then, now then, guys and gals, it is history what does write him up as the idiot. How’s about that then?

I am like that. I am king of the canutes. Well, I have become that. Instead of leaving imbeciles to fester in their inanity, he, I, people like us, reach out to the ignorant, attempt to explain to them why they’re wrong, educate them, and try to have them change their minds. Many of those feted as successful leaders on the other hand, are sufficiently callous to leave their uncomprehending followers trailing in their wake, unconcerned as to whether they know what’s going on, or not. In fact, preferring it that way. It is not just because we are boring and preachy that we are rejected; it is that by putting up the issue to be analysed from all angles, makes those who we seek to protect, feel less safe, because we appear less sure.

I wonder about this. Is the human race on a doomed path of incremental decline? Were the great orators and leaders of our species in the ancient civilisations, our high point, from which we have fallen ever since? That can’t be true, can it? As the world’s population has generally become more educated, you would think that society’s leaders would have to work harder to convince those that are to be led of their case. It doesn’t feel like it, does it? I suppose one explanation is to say that in olden times followers were compelled as owned chattels, without choice, and their leaders had no convincing to do, their task was merely one of instruction – whilst Socrates and his school, chirped from the sidelines. And now, after a transitory period of reason and persuasion, we have reverted to type, and the masses, enslaved now by the liberating enfranchisement of social media, and their rejection of traditional education, have become prey to any old snake oil salesman that seeks to entrap them with his pitch. We can only wonder what AI will do with this rhetorical trick once it has mastered it.

It takes us to a place where our new leaders are more ignorant than their followers, and so, they don’t seek to persuade them of anything, because they haven’t got anything to persuade them of. Instead, they inspire loyalty by implying that they are privy to some important secret information that has been kept from their adherents, and inviting them to be curious about it. You know, the technique used by ten-year-old bullies, who seek to maintain order within their gang.

It’s this approach to leadership that allows them, for example, to appeal to a Christo-nationalist base by adopting Pro-Life as a policy choice, then making the exposure of a cabal of child-abusers a central plank of their campaign.  The beauty of trading on ignorance for them being that they can execute it despite having raped teenage girls, their sole act of solace having been to throw a bundle of cash at them as their victims lay weeping, fearing pregnancy to add to the abuse they’ve already suffered, and telling them to go and get an abortion, if they want to put their minds at rest.

There was a different attitude to paedophiles back in the day… I was telling you about my first trip to London with Neil, wasn’t I?

There was a haulage company in our town, and we did as many had done before us, and hitched a lift with them. We were assigned Nobby Clarke on that dark Friday night, when the sleet fell at forty-five degrees from when we left college, as we’d now learned to call it, ‘til we got on board at about nine-thirty. Nobby looked like Lemmy from Hawkwind, and he did nothing to make us feel welcome, as we went to sit in the double passenger seat up front with him. In fact, he spent the first hour or so of the journey speaking only to fellow truckers on his CB radio, mainly exchanging fictitious accounts of the undercover set-ups laid by the police, for people like him and his driving community friends. Eventually, once established on the steady rhythm of the empty M6 journey south, he hung up his CB handset, and said, “They don’t like to see you on the rig, the pigs.”

We nodded, sympathetically we thought, course they wouldn’t, they’re pigs, right?

              “Mind you,” he said, “I don’t have no trouble of anyone,” and he pulled back a blanket in the well where the handbrake sat, to reveal a sawn-off shotgun. He laughed when he saw our reaction. “Like that lads?” he asked. “Don’t worry, no one will mess with us.”

We stopped at a truckers-only somewhere in the midlands at about one o’clock in the morning. It no longer sleeted, but it was bitterly cold for us in our thin collarless shirts, and denim jackets. I didn’t know the reference at the time, but later, when I did, that scene, as we descended the cab to make for the tumbledown café-clubhouse thing evoked Altamont to me – dark, misty, wet, uncertain, with an unmistakable whiff of something sinister in the air; not a single person on our side, as we made our way across the unmade gravel and hard core, wary of the sense of purpose in the menacing ghouls who shuffled to and fro with their shadowy efficiency in the wretched place.

We’d be warned off any sort of collaboration with the police, but when they came round on a routine check about an hour or so later, they made straight for us. We thought we’d made a decent job of melting into the background, but time has made that seem as preposterous as it obviously was to them at the time. They wanted to know where we were going, and who we were with; and they asked a couple of questions that were designed to check if we were there under coercion. Cool as we imagined ourselves to be, we knew at the time, that we’d made a pig’s ear of the response. They told us to be careful, and left.

We were to be passed on to another driver for the second leg of the journey, and Nobby came to let us know, “What did they want?”  We told him that they were just checking that we were OK, and he replied, “You didn’t tell them owt, right?” And I remember thinking, “Yeah, we told them that we were OK, as you required us to,” but I just said no, because it seemed like the right thing to say. He said, “Ring the office if you want bringing back,” then left. That didn’t mean anything to us. We didn’t know what office to ring, or how, and if we were to acquire that information, who or what to ask once we got through. So, we knew then, that we were making our own way back. We looked up as he left, and the place had gone from a maelstrom of men and noise and steam, and cooking smells, into a shell, empty of everything.

Our next driver arrived about half an hour later. If Nobby looked a bit like Lemmy, he was a carbon copy of Bob Hoskins. He had a denim shirt with the top three buttons undone to reveal a pair of intertwined gold medallions set on a bed of coarse black hair. But the thing that made him, him, and stays with me to this day, was his aroma. He smelled of violets. I have only encountered it once again since, but it became the smell of London to me. The scent, I imagined, of Turner’s house in Powys Square, Notting Hill, that we’d so fallen for in Performance. Bob, I can’t remember his real name, was the very essence of London too. It was in the days before the tidal wave of mortgages released by the canutes who came to work in investment banks, had ruined the place, and turned it into a monied person’s identikit film set – when normal people lived all over the place in London, and only a small enclave of Chelsea was the preserve of the abnormally wealthy.

He’d lived his young life in Battersea, he told us, which he said was, “Alright ‘til the fucking Rolling Stones moved in to a flat next door.” Then he “went over to Pimlico,” where he’d stayed ever since.

We went straight to Notting Hill when we arrived, because we knew that the flat fronted, white painted Georgian houses, that contained all manner of shabby chic behind their enormous front doors, were found there. They were found in other nearby London boroughs too, and this fact, with Bob’s anecdotes, went to create this immediate impression for us, that all the best parts of London were all a short walk from each other. To us, who had walked, cycled, and yomped miles in our short lives already in search of beer, and grown-up pursuits, nowhere was far away. We made a promise to each other that we’d bring our bikes next time. And then, the whole world would be ours.

As soon as night came the next day, we hailed a cab, and asked our driver to take us to the nearest jazz club, because that was us then, two seventeen-year-old hard-core jazzers. He could have taken us anywhere I suppose, especially to those tourist bullshit venues in Soho, but, good on him, he took us to this place down the bottom of Lots Road in Chelsea, where you had to knock on the door to get in. “Get one of the local boys to take you home lads. Us black cabs don’t normally come down here,” he said. Then he wished us luck on our adventure, and left us to the night.

We went there a lot over the years, and it became our go-to for late nights, after the pubs had shut. And only the next day would we realise, that rather than winding down the few hours that were left in the day at the 365, it been the place where our adventures began. And so, it would be on this, our debut.

Until then, we knew only the dusty upstairs rooms in the pubs of our town, and the seldom used back rooms of remote country pubs in the Lake District. Then we came here. A club devoted to jazz! Low ceilings and black painted walls behind a barrier of sweat, smoke and heat, that met you as soon as you got to the end of the short corridor into the club proper. A bar to the right ran the length of the room, and though you could buy a drink there, waiters and waitresses served the hundred or so little round tables that went in a great arc from the bar, skirting the little undefined dancefloor, round to the left of the stage where most of the tables were found. We did as we usually did in such places and headed straight for the deepest, darkest corner. And, yes, it had a stage! Not just a space cleared at the front.

Back at home, we had to enjoy whatever was served up. Sometimes that was a bunch of old men playing what is called trad jazz, in bowler hats. The next week, you’d get something that looked similar, but came from 1920s swinging, jazz age, and was a world apart. Then every now and again, between that, and hairy young men playing progressive jazz, you’d get something that blended the best of all it – a real blues rooted swinging band like Art Blakey’s or Lee Morgan’s. We went through the flapping rubber-fringed doors just as the cymbal crashed into the intro on Moanin’ and, as it did, we both looked at each other with our mouths wide open in awe. We had finally discovered real life. And we were allowed in!

The band played a set, then for about an hour, someone DJ’d the coolest jazz dance classics. That’s where we first heard the Sidewinder. God, I wish I could live that moment again. People got up and danced, and as they did, it all seemed to switch down a gear. It went darker, got busier, and we experienced again that sense that we were the only strangers in the place. The band came back and played their second set, then, just as we were getting ready to be chucked out, another band came on, and played a Sidney Bechet set until about three in the morning. There was this sense that no matter how intensely hedonistically devouring it had all been until then, this was the bit that everyone came for, and we looked on, witnessing our first diseased heroin dream of an endless night, where no one had to get home ‘til they wanted to.

We rolled out into the dark streets of Chelsea Wharf before the sun came up, and had no idea what to do. The people that came out roughly at the same time as us, just disappeared into the night. We turned right, and when we didn’t find a main road, came back, and went in the other direction.

Out of the shadows, an old man approached us, and said, “What are you looking for, boys?”

Innocents that we were, we told him that we wanted a cab back to our hotel in Notting Hill. He hadn’t heard of it, but to be truthful, it was only a guest house, and they were all called something mad and unmemorable.

He was a private mini-cab driver, and he said, “Jump in. I’ll go nice and slow for you.”

We knew we shouldn’t, but it was so cold, and he had this avuncular way about him and laughed constantly as he spoke. “Get in each side,” he said, pointing with both hands to indicate the back doors. He didn’t speak again until he dropped us off, when he said, “Aw, just give us a fiver each, boys.” A fiver for a cab ride was a lot of money in them days. And he did go slow, especially on the first part of the journey when he drove down to the bottom of the street in the direction we’d first gone, and took an absolute age to make an elongated U-turn round some abandoned industrial looking space on the actual wharf, next to the river.

After the car had gone about fifty yards or so, the blanket between us began to move, and a woman came from under it. She yawned and said, “Oh two lovely boys. How lucky am I?”

When we got back to The Astoria Rooms, it was us who felt we’d been lucky. Though for several years after that encounter, we were convinced that women over the age of thirty had a thing about teenage boys, which did set us back a bit at times. Nevertheless, we took such an enormous leap forward that night, that it would be a while before the tide went out again.