CHAPTER 86

 

#15: ASSOCIATES

“partyfearstwo”

Single released: February 1982

 

 

It isn’t a good idea to be (not “become” – you can’t learn it) an artist, let alone a visionary, in an outwardly socialist community, particularly not in Scotland. Oh, the people in it will look after you, make sure you don’t hit the concrete when you fall, but then they give you a row if you aspire towards at least touching the ceiling, and thereafter they look upon you with new suspicion, knowing that you’re no longer one of them, if you ever had been. You’re all supposed to be the same; dare not to be a mirror or mimeograph and they will benignly ostracise you.

 

Eventually you realise that this photocopy of living is going to suffocate you and plot your escape. Woe betide if you hasten southwards, to the lair of the Auld Enemy. There was fuck all for me in early eighties Scotland – my school “friends” having enigmatically vapourised - and everybody I knew or wanted to know was down here.

 

Some attempt the balancing act – home and away - and perhaps an isolated handful manage it successfully. Those who don’t or won’t get sent tumbling, one way or the other. I remember venturing to Dundee on the 95 bus from St Andrews, running through Tayport with the great city running parallel on the other side of the river, and then – oh! – the dramatically abrupt turn onto the bridge itself and towards the city, as though eager to kiss it. All that time spent browsing at Chalmers and Joy and he was most likely working in the clothes shop right across the road.

 

The music he and his colleague made was as subtly unreal as the Tayport bus route. It was as if I had dreamed the music and not dislodged it from the underlying unreality. Pellucid, dreamed music. The one about the kitchen person which resembled a gunfight between Barry Ryan and Michael Mantler’s Jazz Composer’s Orchestra. That one about the white car in Germany – so close to the breakthrough, so heartrendingly hopeful, and the dream fading into preserved memories before, whoa, it briefly begins again and then shuts off.

 

Perhaps the purpose of my whole life was delineated by their most famous song, which they began to compose in 1978 but then was not its puckish punky time – or so they thought; how revelatory would this have come across if it had got to number two behind “Wuthering Heights”? Four years on, though, and it was all our time, theirs and mine.

 

I remember buying the turquoise type-on-white (car in Germany) twelve-inch single and listening to it over and over in almond swirls of staggered disbelief. Fucking hell, I thought to myself, they’re going to have a hit. People will suddenly become aware of their existence. It impertinently suggested that pop was not enough for a lot of things, yet in some important senses also more than enough.

 

The song itself is directly comparable to that earlier manifestation of pop what-the-fuckery “A Whiter Shade Of Pale.” Its main “chorus” comprises a keyboard riff. Its lyrics are deliberately evasive but both songs seem to be about the same subject, i.e. drunk at a party spectacularly fails to chat up anybody, and ends up not terribly sure about themselves. “Pale” might have sounded like Percy Sledge and Bach with a dash of cheery Dylan obfuscation, but what ABBA song does “partyfearstwo” resemble (none, not really)?

 

In the end the song becomes a hymn to everything and fuck chart positions, it affected the lives of EVERYBODY who crossed its path. I don’t know that they could have done bigger. It altered my DNA as radically and profoundly as “O Superman” or “Ghosts,” neither of which appears in this book because so much of the greatest music does not get listened to all of the time.

 

If you need to learn what became of its lyricist and singer, I would direct you to Tom Doyle’s biography The Glamour Chase, in which a fellow Dundonian who had been a little too young to get their peak at the time talks with family, friends, fellow musicians and virtually everybody who ever came into his way. It isn’t a pretty story and its sordid coda reflects the impossibility in some souls to escape the matrix into which they were born as a component. But I eventually managed it. “partyfearstwo” was the unwitting catalyst which sparked the relationship of Lena and myself. Seemingly a lifetime later – too late for his life, alas – the same song had come back to save me, or point towards my salvation. We were married on the dancefloor in Toronto on 24 November 1997 and of course we danced to this, a dance to the music of all useful and glorious times.