Tongue Tied in Stan Drew's: (His Shining Hour)
(StAnza Poetry Festival 2000) |
| Because I was always
reading as a child, my grandfather would say, 'Grand
laddie that, pity he cannae speak.' It would have been
comics, Lewis Carroll, books about dinosaurs, Greek and
Norse myths, perhaps my first Science Fiction. When I was
about ten a bunch of us would go round to an older boy's
house where he read us out horror stories by Lovecraft
and Ashton Smith. When other kids had their first
glimpses of pornography, I was getting off on multi-limbed
gods who like to recite poetry and suck the brains out of
drugged-up explorers. When I read with Mark E. Smith at StAnza, I was reduced to a similar stunned silence by an experience as complex as these initial encounters with the wonderful and frightening world of writing. I'd just delivered a talk on Robert Fergusson to massed dignitaries, then read onstage with some very famous poets (including Les Murray). But I'd scarcely noticed because I'd been praying that MES would a) turn up for this gig, and b) not punch me. Because I have been listening to The Fall since 'Bingo Master's Breakout' - which is as long as I've been reading what other people call literature, or writing what I call poetry. Smith to me is The Northern Voice that poets can only approximate to - Barry MacSweeney coming closest. He takes English to pieces and puts it back together in excoriating combinations no-one else has thought of. It's distorted yet direct, brilliant and hilarious. If only poetry could be this good. When he turned up he was quiet, friendly, but clearly in his own orbit. I felt what people too close to their idols always feel: what was he doing offstage? And protectively placed that imaginary barrier back between us. His reading was a two-miked affair with soundtrack provided by Julia Nagle. The voice, distinctive as Burroughs, like some Salfordian lizard reared exclusively on Dark Meat, sidled and faded between mikes as he moved from identifiable lyric to unidentified, half cut-up, half-cut combinations of all our demotics - debased jargons and post-nearly nightmares, full of flashbulbs of wit and sudden blackouts of bluntness. In comparison I read some poems with sweary words in. He made my day (possibly my decade) by inviting me to encore with him on 'Life Just Bounces', drily commenting 'Really?' when I said the line about 'Dr Hibbert' telling him he's ill.* I stopped short before the word 'fall' just to hear him say it. A kind of collaboration. Afterwards he stood at my shoulder, grinned, and said nothing, as if daring me to come up with something intelligible if not intelligent. The only phrases in my head were jumbled absurdities about him being The Man - which, since we weren't on US TV, hardly seemed appropriate. It was like I'm a Mummy! in which he mock-complains, 'I wish there was someone somewhere that wasn't scared of me.' But I couldn't make the transition from hero-worship to hello: there was either too much to say or nothing at all. I've always been reluctant to meet people whose work I respect: the work is the thing I have the relationship with, they are a subsequent and more difficult proposition. Much later, still jangled with adrenalin, I wandered into the bar of what turned out to be his hotel. He tried to buy me a drink but the barman had decided against such foolhardiness. 'I'm only sixteen!' I announced, which is how old I had been feeling all night. 'I'm half Catholic!' Mark shouted in my face, possibly by way of reply. So am I. *Or 'Doctor Boring' as the Lyrics Parade has it -- though I was looking at the MES MS, he said boringly. (A version of this first appeared in The Red Wheelbarrow. Thanks to Lil Fraser.) |
| By the time you've got down to here,
the last straw should have downloaded: Herbert's child,
indoctrinated from an early age, poor thing, giving a
short rendition of an MES opening line.
Disgustipated at such psychoinfancy? Return to Obsessions |
