Chapter VII

Beyond Japan (via Essex)

When my fresh-faced housemate from the Northern-most Japanese island told me to inform his English teacher he would be out, I should of thought more of it. Nakamura (as we shall call him) in his youthful way was annoyingly eclectic in his tastes. Even the location of our shared student house in a secluded Essex village turned out to have a clairvoyantly Japanese resonance. Wivenhoe was the epicentre of a massive earthquake (by British standards) that had pitched the village’s quaint harbour front into the river and laid waste an entire county. Admittedly this had been in 1884 and not a great deal had happened since, but it exemplified Nakamura’s spooky prescience.

Only Naka could have visited all of the key historical sites of Manchester, but done so utilizing ones itemized by Morrissey (Salford Lads Club etc). For his birthday I gave him my unused Smiths ticket for the BBC event that ended up with loads of kids jumping around on the stage. Bizarrely the only reason I couldn’t be there was because I was up at an Oxford entrance interview at Mansfield College.

Nakamura seemed to have conducted a regular solitary seance as to who was actually at the centre of the cultural zeitgeist. This week it was The Smiths, last week it was Lacan, next week it was looking like Baudrillard. It was as if each were an epiphany, a revelation from which there was no going back. Needless to say, the following week he would excoriate his former muse, denounce his idol as if suddenly the pristine icon had been discovered dipped in shit.

So when I answered the front door I should not have been surprised. His English teacher was typically an archetype – tall and lanky, with chiselled features, leather jacket and a mass of black hair.

‘Bloody hell’ I said, ‘Bloody hell. You’re John Cooper Clarke! What on earth are you doing here?

Compassionately, he looked unsurprised at being recognised, as if it nothing could be more natural, even in this quiet rural idyll. In his broad, Mancunian accent (and I had to commend Nakamura’s considered  rejection of Standard English) he patiently asked did I know, if Naka wasn’t in, when he’d be back.

The next day was my absolutely crucial Japanese exam before heading Nippon-bound. If anything I resolutely needed a quiet night of final revision, contemplation and sleep. The idea that it would be spent carousing with Mr Clarke in the Indian curry house of the village followed by JCC attending an impromptu acoustic concert of traditional Japanese music in our front living room is hard to fathom even now.

In many ways, this corner of Essex would prove to be more exotic than Japan ever could be. Even walking back to my lodgings in the warm neon night of Osaka, past a ghostly dissonance of enka music wafting from hidden karaoke bars, along streets stencilled with miniature pictures of Shinto torrii archways (put there in the mistaken belief it would stop suitably reverential drunks pissing up the wall – it didn’t), even spying a line of full-body tattooed Yakuza gangsters through the window of my neighbourhood bath-house, it was the mystery of Essex I harkened for. I couldn’t help but think back wistfully to our first university ‘get to know you’ weekend spent with fellow neophyte students in a musty caravan frying bacon and eggs at an out of season Essex holiday camp, disconcertedly watching Chris Marker’s iconoclastic homage to Japan, Sans Soleil, interspaced with bracing walks by the sea across the water from the nuclear power plant.  And of course JCC.

He regaled us in the curry house with his time in Brixton, living in a squat in Salford with Nico of the Velvet Underground and the myriad junk dawns of that period. Brixton was a place I knew well having spent my gap year thereafter leaving school from a provincial English seaside town.

I told him my last nights in Brixton before the start of Uni coincided with the 1985 disturbances; buildings on fire, cars careening disconcertingly along pavements, arcs of stones in the air, the desperate cacophony of feet scattering before the riot police, and the wail of sirens.

JCC and I lived there roughly around the same époque take or add a year. We reminisced of the constant bemusement that Brixton at that time presented. Even wandering round the corner to get a pint of milk in the late morning could be an adventure. I remember sleepy-eyed walking round to my neighbourhood supermarket only to be preceded by two continental figures furiously chasing each other. As I edged closer they re- emerged from the shop – except missing the front door they exited via its front window. Sitting momentarily on the pavement amidst the glass, they looked at each other as if suddenly conscious of each others’ presence for the first time. And then as someone gave a warning shout that the police were on their way, they got up and ran off in opposite directions.

Nowadays Brixton is part of my DNA and I wouldn’t miss it for the world – even in its bleached gentrification. Then, it had a humid washed out feel that anything could, and probably was, about to happen. I was a naïve white punk high on hope and still in his teens  growing up in an amazing, sometimes ruthlessly unforgiving, place – speeding too fast to linger on those who fell painfully to the wayside, gravel and dirt metaphorically seeping beneath their skin.

A few years later I would be in Osaka studying homeless day labourers (as you do). For research, I visited the local social security office only to realise that with people drunk, incoherently rambling in corridors or slumped at thick reinforced-glass interview windows with the curtain down at the other side, that I had travelled 10,000 miles only to fall down a wormhole in space and time and end up at the Personal Issue counter of the Elephant and Castle dole office.

Later that evening, John and his girlfriend would very sportingly accompany us home and politely witness an impromptu concert by our flatmates on acoustic keyboard of a medley of Japanese songs.

But all this time, in the Indian, someone had been watching us and catching snatches of conversation- patiently waiting. Huddled round the table, he could see our pious deferment to John and our momentary glee to have met someone so famous. Somewhat sheepishly the observer came over.

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The Bard of Salford looked up magnanimously from behind his shades, accepting wordlessly  the fate of the famous.

“Are you …” the lad began, and instantly we all knew what was coming – John’s history trailed him like barnacles. We all braced ourselves for the inevitable. After all this was a man so unique, so inimitable that he would later play himself in the bio-pic of Ian Curtis of Joy Division’s life.

“Are you …” and the words came out less haltingly this time, more assured. This was one of those singularities for which the words would underline forever a special, delicious moment.

“Are you Lou Reed ?”

Mudefort memories

The death of Lou Reed

I can’t say I have some great affinity with the man other than his Velvets contribution was rather  splendid but his death provoked unexpected consequences …

I was lying on my bed listening to the radio and picked up my mobile and glasses ready to put them on and swing into my wheelchair. Needless to say the somewhat shocking news came at completely the wrong instant. The result was that my glasses and mobile went one way as I arced through the air in a slow, deperate but head first fall. The result was that my feet remained on the bed but the rest of my body ended up traped under the heavy clothes rail. The more I tried to move the more I got traped and the more likely it looked the clothes rail was likely to fall down on top of me, burying me beneath a pile of clothes.

Copyright Tim Kalvis 2013-2014 All rights reserved.