CHAPTER 69

 

#32: UNDERWORLD

“Born Slippy .NUXX”

Single B-side

Released: May 1995

 

 

The initial thought was: is that Prefab Sprout? What part of Jordan: The Comeback sounds like that? Something noble and eternal about that circle of changes, akin to an untouchable monument. But then the Vorticist voice stumbles into the square by accident and presents us with semi-dissolute sound poetry – is this Bob Cobbing? – as if about to micturate upon the monument (but he can’t control himself!).

 

The tone is alcoholic and the words were written and performed by a then still recovering alcoholic. But you can magnify the confusion and hue of mental dislocation to encompass the portrait of somebody who has loved London not wisely but too well; everything blurs into a relentless, ceaseless crusade of transient relief – the record shops, the streets, the headaches, Tottenham Court Road vertigo, going back to Romford, never going back to Romford if I, if anybody can help it.

 

For me at a dangerous point in the second half of the nineties, Oxford was my “Romford”…

 

Karl Hyde has frequently mentioned the pain he feels when (largely drunk) audiences shout multiple “LAGER”S at him – it ISN’T a celebration, you conical clots, but a plea for help and deliverance. The repeat “LAGER”s only happened because Hyde lost his place with the words (the vocal was recorded in one primal take). If you can transpose London to Glasgow, think of the closing section of James Kelman’s A Disaffection, where schoolteacher Patrick Doyle has reduced himself to the level of a shambling sham of a drunk, running across the road in Cowcaddens and trying to get himself killed, to end the pain.

 

You see everything yet also nothing when you are experiencing a mental breakdown. Everything explodes but nobody notices except you. After the thud everybody recognises, the drunk boards the train and it takes off, sometimes throbbing as it pulses through tunnels, before coming to an uncertain yet unavoidably terminal halt. As beautifully streamlined and “modern” as anything the early eighties Simple Minds would have envisaged, is this, but Hyde is less interested in any notion of “great cities” and would much rather yell “DO YOU WANT ANYTHING OUT OF THE VAN?” (which was the original working title for “Theme For Great Cities”; the ice cream van would chime its way outside Mick MacNeil’s council house living room).

 

Perhaps, for me, 12:30 p.m. on Saturday 24 October 1998, at the junction of Trevor Place and Knightsbridge, was the outcome that had always been waiting, been invited, to happen.