CHAPTER 72

 

 

#29: THE ALL SEEING I featuring TONY CHRISTIE

“Walk Like A Panther”

Single released: January 1999

 

 

You look at the world as it is and realise that it’s moved on without you and left you behind. As far as your life is concerned that could be its entire story. You always get left behind. At school they hung out and excluded you. At university they barely tolerated you and included you out. In your own homes everybody else in them moved on and left you feeling like the only one out of step. The Fridge in Brixton on 23 December 2001. A Christmas outing with old work colleagues. There were eight freebie tickets for staff and you were the ninth person there. No one was going to pay the nine pounds needed to admit you, least of all you. You solitarily crept home, slept for two hours then travelled to Scotland for a not very merry season. But in Oxford, nearly four months earlier, the family drove home by themselves on the night it happened and left you on your own. “Let us know when you’re moving out so we can take the coffee table.” You NEVER forgot that.

 

On the message board, both online and in life, they wanted you gone. You started a music blog and that was fine for about eighteen months then the moneyed scavengers swept in and ensured you were written out of all histories of music blogging. You tried to become a published music writer and realised fairly quickly that the shop was firmly closed. One book was written for purposes of vanity publishing, and then only as a substitute for somebody else who had turned them down. At work they just considered you weird, if peerlessly efficient. Visitors to the office acted like you were invisible.

 

The world moved on without you because it was built to do that and you weren’t. Any natural self-confidence you may once have possessed was physically knocked out of you at an early age. You closed up, shut your eyes and sealed your mouth because you didn’t wish to run the risk of being beaten up again. You have avoided almost all non-official photographs being taken of yourself since the age of fifteen because somebody made fun of your looks and you retreated into self-containment.

 

The world elected to do without you because of this ball and chain of a condition with which you were born and which has violently stopped you from achieving most of the things your peers managed. But were your peers really your peers? What part does arrogance, or what is perceived as arrogance (but is actually chronic shyness), portray in any of this?

 

Sometimes the rejected person has to stand in the middle of Castle Market and argue the case for themselves. You idly heard the song on your radio Walkman while heading home on foot from Denmark Hill to Victoria, and thence onto a coach to Oxford, a few months before it came out. Before that other thing happened, and you didn’t really know what planet you were on but it sounded like a remix of something old and obscure. Hadn’t you heard that voice before somewhere? The voice sounded magisterially angry, tired of bullshit, sick of this sickening new world that he and seemingly only he recognised as fake, ready to fight back against morons half his age but twice his size, cities being ground into opulent dust, the stupidity of refracted tomorrows. Then you realised that this voice came from the world of your mother, and those Bush radiograms. He was telling you that actually you had been doing the right thing all along. I eventually made it. Bollocks to “the world.”