“Everyone” is an artist..”

 

I had just arrived back from

Porto

,

Portugal

. I had spent four days there with Selfish c***. Why had I gone along?? I was invited by a very dear friend who is involved with the guitarist. I suppose the only other thing I should make clear is that I  am very into the band. And the opportunity of going to a part of

europe

I havn’t seen and see them play a major festival was too great to pass up. But there is a clear cut hierarchy when it comes to bands. The band and lead singer come first, girlfriends/boyfriends of band members somewhere after, friends of  the band float somewhere after that, and then regular fans, and then random screaming girls/boys. As for my position in the hierarchy I floated somewhere between the random and friend of the band. I hadn’t met most of them before this trip, and suddenly we were spending all of our time together for these few days.

 

 The amazing thing about bands, actors, performers, indeed anyone who is used to touring, is they master the skill of impermanent intimacy. Everyone understands that for this short period time, you will interact mostly with those around you, therefore great effort is made to get along and make the most of this time and this interaction.  Being with the band I could never be anything other than an outsider, but it was exciting to be the outsider in close quarters. It was like my own observational documentary.  

 

The highlight of the trip was seeing the band play the after hours stage at the massive paredes de coura festival. For many of the men in the audience, seeing the band in dresses (in a very “genderf**k way right, there is nothing about those boys that could even vaguely be construed as gay or effeminate) coupled with the in your face sexual glam androgyny of lead singer Martin Tomlinson was a little to much for some of these portugese boys could handle. There were many in the front row who truly looked provoked, angry, shakingly angry. But if they were so fired up, why stand in the rain and watch the whole set? Was it because as much as they needed to seem  against what saw like they were captivated?

 I’ll never know..

I’ll aways wonder.

 

As two couples were in our krew, being away from the lady was more than a little difficult. I see myself as being deeply in love but also fiercely independent. I was never prepared to miss the girl quite as much as I did. By the time I got on the plane to come back I could hardly bare it.

  It didn’t help that I was in the heaviest, most painful phase of my period. Or that this was in the middle of failed terrorist attack, stansted security panic hell. All I could think about to get through the physical pain, the weakness, and all the waiting around customs, was the thought of seeing my girlfriend again.

 

And then, barely able to stand, I am amidst a massive throng of people waiting with surprising patience, for the baggage carousel numbers to be revealed (we have at this point  waited for at least an hour). I called my girlfriend. She was sneezing relentlessly and there were noises in the background I didn’t understand.  She was at a festival at wales and wouldn’t be back until the following day. And because my hormones were by now severely unbalanced, and I felt like my body weight in blood was leaving me, I did what any self respecting young woman would do when told that her girlfriend/boyfriend would not be home to greet her on her return.

 

I cried.

 

Not sobbing screaming, bawling crying. More like quiet, can barely talk, lump in throat crying. The kind of crying where you make no noise, but the downpour from your eye sockets is downright torrential. I somehow managed to communicate to her that I couldn’t communicate just then, and turned off the phone. Through the watery filter of my tears I saw the number of the carousel I needed and ambled over. As I stood looking at all the luggage pass me by, my tears continued.

 

Groups in public places get really really uncomfortable when someone is crying. Particularly someone by themselves. The crowd knows they can’t comfort, and they probably wouldn’t want to.  They want to give the person a little space, and dignity, by ignoring them, but if the crowd is really dense this can be difficult. I don’t think this is a British thing, I’m sure it’s the same in

America

. Or perhaps it’s a big city thing.

Does anyone know?

Does it even matter?

 

All I know is standing in a crowded place crying is far more subversive to the crowd around you then you would think. When you cry in this kind of situation it means that you are beyond being able to keep up any kind of semblance of “ok-ness” even in front of a group of complete strangers. And you are beyond caring.. one by one I saw people around me notice my tears and nervously look away, up down, and quickly. It was as if it was all fine as long as I didn’t notice them staring at me. Small children however had no qualms about staring, and cocked their heads and pointed. Tugging at their parents sleeves.

 

“mummy the lady there is crying…”

 

only to be hushed by their parents, who would do their best not to look at me.

 

Why is crying in public such a big deal? What was everyone so scared of?

 

At any rate I got my bag, but as I’d missed my train I waited for some time for a coach. The coach was perfectly empty and perfectly dark. My tears could reach their natural end in privacy. When finally I reached

Liverpool street

I could not face taking the bus. Somewhat guiltily I waited in the cab rank. I convinced myself that I could justify this indulgence for today. As I waited many men running mini cab services hassled me for a possible fare until I dropped the guise of not being interested in a cab and said bluntly

 

“look I want a black cab ok, that’s why I’m waiting at the cab rank, please leave me alone”

 

and they did.

And then my cab driver arrived. At

3 am

he couldn’t have been more chirpy. He was the most well read cabbie I’d ever had in my life He started talking about Langston Hughes, somehow segue-wayed to Chekhov, and before I knew it we were bonding over the fact we both had the same favourite Orwell book (Down and out in Paris in London if you’re interested…)

 

this meandered into a topic much worked over by hackney dwellers, the development of the area. As he lambasted the ruining of his area by those urban professionals buying out loft conversions at he-could-never-afford prices. I kept quiet. He ranted until we reached the doorstep of my newish-build warehouse conversion and there was a lull between us. I got out of the cab and paid my fare.

 

You should really read this he said , pulling out a tattered copy of the book he was reading “memoirs of a nobody” an 1800’s comic novel. I told him I would and opened the front door. He smiled and waved as he drove off.

 

Empty flat or not, I was so glad to be back in

London

….

 

over a year ago, when i was living in brick lane and spending all of my time between spitalfields and shoreditch I had a few strange encounters i couldn’t quite understand. The first happened when i was passing a horrific little stripclub dive called rainbow sports bar. The bouncer smiled at me as i came closer, and as i walked past him towards my destination I heard him call out after me. Weeks later it happened to me again passing another shoreditach strip pub, the white horse, and then again on the corner of another such establisment, the infamous browns (and here let me please note that it is the nature of the neighborhood that these places are dotted around everywhere, not that i intentionally spend my time loitering out strip clubs, true there was a point that I spent a fair ammount of spare time in these places but that was a long time ago, and not in shoreditch….)

and then it moved on from bouncers, every so often the odd guy on the street would give me a lascivious gaze that seemed that little bit more familiar than the usual cruising that a girl faces walking down the street. it was as if all these men knew me… intimately. and i’m not the kind of girl who gets so drunk she racks up sexual encounters with strangers… particularly not men. what was going on? it all crystalized the day i went to my local video store. much to its own hipster street cred, half of the pair who ran this independant dvd/video rental was a canadian ex stripper. I had met her before, as I had taken her pole dancing class as part of the london international workshop festival. it was by far the least sexy and least co-ordinated i have ever ever felt (the breakdancing class i once took part in being a close close second). when i walked in her shop and saw her i wanted to make a swift exit, but she came towards me..

hey are you… i’ve met you right? (visions of me failing to scale the pole in my yellow stilletoes flashed before me)

uh no, i don’t think we’ve me

you look real-ly familiar.

I smiled weakly

do you have a sister called Tamara?

releieved that she hadn’t remembered me from her class, i loosened up.

no.

oh right, its just you look so much like a friend of mine. she’s a stripper who works in the area.

aaaaaah.

no, no sisters, i’m an only child.

right, its funny though you really look like her… see you next time.

as i walked home i thought, out of all the people I really didn’t want to resemble in shoreditch, a stripper was pretty up there. not that i have any issues with the trade (any friend of mine will tell you that) its just that one gets enough hassle from random guys without resemblling someone they’ve paid to see naked gyrating on a pole.
completely incidentally, I soon moved from the area.

fast forward to saturday. a close friend of mine was having her hen night… or i should say “hen day” as the festvities began at 2 pm. Episode one in our celebration of her impending marriage was a private striptease class arranged for the 7 of us. I wasn’t terrribly excited about the idea, but i love my friend and i wanted to take part in whatever she was up for. I didn’t know what to expect, but was pleasantly suprised when a petite curvy mixed race girl showed up and called us upstairs with her heavy london accent. she had introduced herself, but when the class began it was clear we had all forgot her name. so she tested us.

“so whats my name ladies”

and one of the other “hens” (we ourselves had met for the first time today) called out

“Sara!”

our teacher shook her head, and just as she opened her mouth to reveal her name, i found myself mouthing it in revelation

“Tamara”

of course it was… this was the mixed race shoreditch stripper who i had been mistaken as. Right away then i have to make it clear we looked NOTHING alike. she was a beautiful girl so it was no dis to be mixed up with her. but everything from our body types to our walk to our bone structure was different. i think we shared the same skin tone and hairstyle, what is it with some white people that anyone who is black or mixed race suddenly looks similar???

that mystery solved, it was time for the class. this was one of the strangest experiences i’ve had in recent history. basically this girl who was without a doubt warm, engaging, flirtaceous and flexible talked us through movements that I will organically fall into in any night club playing r&b, reggae, dirty electro or funk carioca. I’m no professional, but i have started a disproportionate number of relationships and affairs on the dancefloor. its one of the few arena’s where i feel really confident and sexy, its all about the music and the crowd.

however in a bright wood floored microscopic function room above a bar in clapham, sans music, darkness and close friends, being told again and again to

“think about your man”

“think johnny dep”

“be sexy, be the sexiest woman you know”

“pretend your man is watching”

I-felt-anything-but-sexy

and i desperately wanted just to go with it. to forget that it was all so contrived, but all i could be was super aware of myself. suddenly i had no rhythm, no sex appeal, no confidence.

i was just a girl in a strip tease class who had no desire to be there and felt really really stupid.

meanwhile the bride to be was loving it, as was her best mate who co-ordinated it, two other friends, extremely tall and much more laddish than i could ever be were struggling as much as i was. amusingly the last girl, a tall vivacious married woman was well into it. and in that strange way that so many straight woman seem to be imminently flexibile about their sexuality, in fact are even ENCOURAGED by popular culture to embrace their bi-curiousity and still remainsly safely straight, our straight teacher flirted most with the married woman (illustrating private dances over her for example, and as i watched the reaction of this straight girl all i thought was

she coudl turn at any second. j

afterwards our teacher sat with us for drinks, next to me and said straight girl. our teacher invited us all to see her perform. the girl she had flirted with turned to me and said

“lets go, i’d really like to go,”

I smiled (yeah i bet you do)

” don’t you think it would be fun”

I nodded. i couldn’t help thinking that this woman had subconciously become far more “malleable” than she was ever aware of. it wasn’t going to happen with our teacher though, it was clear she was just a flirt. and then our teacher left and the main topic of conversation was her sex appeal and her body. i was the only gay girl, and i contributed the least to the conversation. but i wasn’t out to these ladies yet, so i thought it safer to hold my tounge.

the day after, most of what she attempted to teach is lost on me, but what i won’t forget was her main mantra/ her advice as to what to do when midst striptease and unsure what move to move on to next.

“ladies… when in doubt wiggle”

Sometime at the end of the 80’s I was visiting my cousins in

Germany

. They lived in small town outside of

Frankfurt

and were both devoted fans of American hard rock. I couldn’t have been older than ten or 11 but I had somehow heard of a form of electronic music called techno. That is to say I had heard of it, but I hadn’t actually heard it. I pressed my cousin about it and she rolled her eyes and told me it was dreadful, she had a friend in her class who was obsessed with it though, and maybe she could get him to make me a tape. I was thrilled. Meanwhile her guy friend given the task to represent his music and his scene to a potential techno protégé was elated.

This Teutonic teenage stranger made me a 90 minute tape of bleeped out psycho sampled German techno with a hand drawn fluoro cover with the word techno scrawled over it millions of times in blocky robotic letters. My cousin the rock fan couldn’t make it past the first five minutes. For me it was the new gospel, I took it back to my junior high suburban American life and played it to any of my friends who would listen. Any I did manage to play it for were confused I could be so excited about this Noise. The next summer I was London and devoured ever dance music mag I could get my hands on from the bigger ones like Muzik and mixmag right down to now nonexistent rave magazines I can’t even remember the name of. I also went to a club for the first time, It was a club in Mayfair called Legend that mainly played house music (note at this point I was twelve…) and in the middle of the night the dj played music I had never heard of before. It sounded like reggae with the beats on crack. No one around me really seemed sure how to dance to it. This I was told was called Jungle.

Two years later, back in

America

I discovered that the east coast had its own nascent rave scene and

Baltimore

was where it was all happening. I was desperate to check it out, but I was underage and without a drivers license. I didn’t care about the drugs I just wanted to be in one of these mad warehouses with all these day glow people dancing. An under 18 club opened in the area, one of the dj’s started a night of then called “rave music” and just to make sure no one missed the point he called his night “rave up” I dragged my driving and non driving friends keen not always necessarily on the music but on the prospect to hook up with people outside of our high school. And while all that hooking up was happening I focused on the DJ. He was going to be my ticket out of this under 18 silliness into the real rave scene. I was focused with deadly precision. One month and several mix tapes later I was dancing by the decks and he asked me if I wanted to check out a REAL party.

And thus began a ritual of late night Thursday trips to

Baltimore

with the odd Sunday thrown in for good measure. He would pick me up in this massive brown 70’s van that was decorated within an inch of its life. He would have one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the volume control of his stereo, tweaking the sounds of his mixed tapes to the beats. He must have been about twenty four? He had been on the scene by that point for a few years. Within a year him and those I met through him were tired of the scene, it had changed, or maybe they had, everyone had gotten younger (or maybe they had gotten older???) I didn’t care, by this point I had my own krew of my own age. We were part of this scene. We started off as “candy ravers” (far too much candy, stickers and massages going around) some of us became “junglists” and then just “party kids”. I watched my tops and backpacks get smaller and smaller, my shoulder (courier) bags and jeans get bigger and bigger. The key thing with wearing wide leg jeans was to make your feet disappear. I wore more glitter than a

Las Vegas

stripper. And this was all a good thing.. I can’t remember why, but then I was always on playing around a lot more with pharmaceuticals than my straight edge friends were led to believe. And I still maintain that it was a community and it wasn’t about the drugs, but in dance music culture the role of substances is as powerful as the role of audio technology to completely change a scene. In my rave days it was all about acid and ecstasy. Everyone was “rolling” sometimes off in a corner sucking a pacifier or a lollipop sometimes in massage chains, sometimes going liquid with glowsticks for hours. The smiles may have been somewhat chemically enhanced, but they were everywhere.

When I moved to

London

I missed my scene desperately. I caught up as much as I could when I visited home. But my krew now had an extended group of friends I wasn’t connected to. I felt less a part of it. Weirdly what did make me feel connected were random run ins with American and Canadian raver tourists in

London

. We all seemed to dance a particular way. I would know someone from the scene the minute they started moving. I could go up to them without a word and start a “conversation” by dancing. it was very cool.

The last time I went to rave party in DC the scene was seriously waning. There had been a lot of parties shut down due to a government led investigation into service man who where partying too hard with the party kids, namely taking drugs. But that wasn’t the only thing that devastated the scene. The last party I went to had none of the euphoria I remembered from back in the day. Not a lot of people talked to each other very few danced together. And there was a dark zoned out gaze I wasn’t used to seeing. I saw a girl I used to know from the old skool parties. After embracing and general catch up chit chat I asked her what was up with the vibe. It was kinda low, bordering on serious even. She looked at me and shook her head.

“one word girl.. ketamine”

now I’ll be honest I’ve never taken ketamine, but from being around other people on it, it is not a drug that makes you want to talk for ages to the stranger next to you, or have dance battles in the centre of a circle, or make out, or smile or laugh. I think I preferred it when my scene was on pills. But hey, by then I realised it wasn’t even “my” scene anymore.

Now I live in

London

and spend most of my time between

Soho

and Shoreditch. In the last two years this new rave / 90’s revival thing has been daring to creep out of the closet. It has particularly built up momentum in past year. I’m hearing more and more "ironic"  early 90’s dj sets. More and more I’ve been hearing this term “new rave” and seeing hipsters parading around in day glow clothes with too many necklaces. And now I’m hearing things like the band the rapture being "godfathers of the new rave scene"

I’m more than a little confused. I love the rapture, but I can’t really make a connection between them and the early 90’s music scene, they aren’t’ that electronic, and they aren’t’ fronting the "mad-chester" happy Mondays sound soooo what makes them new rave again??? And I can’t even write it off as another media created catch phrase, there is a scene brewing , right now its small, but just wait until enough of these articles are out. I also predict that this is a scene with potential for serious longevity as it has the key ingredients of: nostalgia for those who have lived it, idealized aspiration from those who haven’t, a serious fashion component, a music culture, and catch phrases, but the thing that for me is really key, is that London has needed something to move on to after and over extended 80’s arrival

I’m afraid the 90’s are up next. especially as most who will champion the scene will have had not a clue about it the first time it happened. Want a little history? Check here…now I’m going to head over to my parents attic and dig out my false lashes, glitter and glowsticks…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rave

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0823047512/104-9763141-4939107?v=glance&n=283155           (rave flyers)

This morning on the bus I vaguely remembered the following…

1. Being “mock” (!!!)  strangled by a very drunk doctor

2. Telling the guy who used to be the bartender at my local, that he was my favourite bartender. EVER! 

3. Shortly after the statement above, a hug and  some very Strictly ballroom-esque dancing on stage with said  bar tender

4      

4. related to #3, much careless spinning

5.      

5. Stranger’s response when I asked “why the kilt?”

“Um I’m Scottish… I guess its…. Traditional “

6. A magical bottomless glass of bourbon and soda

7. Lighting, smoking and stubbing  out several packets of smokes.

8.

Losing much faith in DJ as he segue-wayed into the “disco” phase of his set..

9. The phrase “No really that jacket is so 9 and a half weeks!!!”

10.The phrase  “ Please let me go get some money”

11.  The FINAL/END OF/ Lights on, Will you finish your drinks up please track…

And yet despite not tucking into bed until half  four this morning, I am at my desk and relatively lucid.  If anyone reading this saw me last night and remembers something properly embarrassing  that I havn’t mentioned…… I’m sure you’re confusing me with someone else…

Now, can someone please make me a pint of espresso so I can make it past

midday

?

<head falls forward on to desk>

ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz