I suppose this is an escape of
sorts. I’m not really sure what I’m escaping from.
I’m not running, I’m just taking
some time.
Time is a good thing. Everyone
needs time.
Time to think.
Time to do.
Time to be.
I’ve been in a solid routine for
almost two years now.
I’m lucky. I’ve got a job I like.
I’ve got a home. I’m not broke all of the time, and any time I am, it’s because
money is evil and I’m bad at managing it. Or not spending it.
A while ago my girlfriend ditched
me and it fucked me up for ages. I occasionally still spit at the whole
situation, but that’s talk for dark nights with wine.
Reading this back to myself, I’m
already making out I’m disappearing on some lengthy adventure to the darkest
depths of the unexplored world. I’m not.
If that leaves you void of hope,
burn this paper now.
If you’re the slightest bit
interested in a short jaunt with a punk band, read on amigo.
14/12/12. Rendsburg.
My good friend, Jamie asked me to
disappear to Germany, one rainy, last-minute Sunday night to go and sell merch
for our mutual fiends, Bangers.
It clicked and before the rain
had chance to ease off, I was crashed out alone in the nook of a van, drunk on
wine on some lonely street in Folkestone.
The other four had two rooms in a
small B&B somewhere on the street. I figured I turned up with the short
straw on this one, and besides, cheap booze normally does the trick in these
situations.
Uneventful time passed, staring
from the van windows, drinking too much coffee and occasionally sleeping on the
fourteen hour drive to cold, snowy Rendsburg.
The venue, T-Stube, sat looking
brutal and unwelcoming in the middle of a white park. Hamish had previously
told me that Rendsburg was, “the most punk place in Germany”. Fuck. Just as
he’d painted, skinheads and crusty looking bastards stood around an old oil
drum, half-heartedly blowing up little flames and spitting sparks to the
snow-laden clouds.
It didn’t look like it had snowed
that day, and much of what covered the ground was well trodden and deadly,
threatening twisted ankles and broken necks.
T-Stube is a small venue.
Intimate is not the correct word. I didn’t fancy getting intimate with any of
these bastards. The beer was free and the food was tasty, but I made the
mistake of smoking a joint I’d brought with me, with Jamie and spent most of
the night spinning out and feeling paranoid about one thing or another.
This was heightened when a burly
skinhead walked over to the merch stand and told me my moustache made me look
‘gay’, and made a fucking motion into his beer. Nice.
I drank more free beer and slowly
levelled my head out.
It turned out the amorous
skinhead was the guitarist in the first support band, Spuckschluck. They were
shit, so fuck him and his clean-shaven baby face.
Too often do you come across
these local bastards with boots and leather jackets and their anti-border
patches, who more often than not make you feel really unwelcome.
Their territorial pissing reek
worse than their dreads. What ever happened to unity? Anarchy and peace, eh?
Yeah, I’m an outsider, but I’m at a fucking punk rock show, you idiots.
When the skinhead came back and
told me he wanted to fuck me, I knew it was time to bust.
We were guided through the snow
to a strange building situated at the base of an aquaduct, by a young lad
called Julian. He was a big bastard with a bullring through his septum. He
bought us a crate of local beer and laughed at strange, inopportune moments.
He led us up too many flights of
stairs to the top floor, to squalor. The flat belonged to his friend, Chris who
we’d left with a young girl back at the venue. The two of them reappeared later
that night. Chris sat on the greasy sofa with Julian passing a filthy bong
between them huffing only tobacco.
Chris passed out face down on the
sofa around 5am, to be replaced by Rat King and his very fat friend whose name
I didn’t catch.
Julian explained that Rat King
was, “cool and crazy”, because he drank beer in school. I could just about raise
my eyebrows and flash my teeth.
I used to drink whisky in college
and nobody thought I was cool. They just thought I was a sad dick with a bad
haircut.
We sat in the dank,
shit-encrusted attic space until 6am until Julian decided it was time to crash.
As the lights finally dropped, I
found a spot on the bare floor covered in shit and food, next to Hamish who
slept beneath the table.
15/12/12. Hamburg.
I awoke to the gurgling of bongs
and some shit music, Kitty maybe, coming through the stereo. I think the other
kids had left but my head was off kilter and I wasn’t seeing straight.
I was the last one on the floor,
keeping the world from going about its usual fucked up business. I gathered my
rubbish and ate bread, cheese and bad pate with the others while Chris slurped
down more bad bongs. Good luck mate.
We left for Hamburg sharpish, via
T-Stube.
Those other rats took some
photographs and I checked out some yarn-bombing.
Heaped snow fell from the pitched
roof of the town-hall and the strange matt-white light shone off the ice in an
almost soothing fashion. Only the wind was cold. The light, the waving branches
and the glistening cobbles had a weird warming quality about them.
It was time to go. I’m imagining
things.
It’s fucking freezing and I need
coffee and sleep.
The road to Hamburg was bleak.
Snow normally has an exciting quality to it. It brings a feeling of excitement
and lust. Lust? Yeah, lust.
When snow falls, in England at
least, it holds a cold breath of the unknown, a faint thought that something
special could happen. I fell in love in the snow once. It was good. Then the
snow melted.
The snow doesn’t melt here. It
stays cold and it stays bleak and retains the look of a post disaster
wonderland, only the rats fled long ago and they look the wonderment with them.
They left only dark houses in dark woods and deer scratching away at the frozen
ground. They’ll eat their own before long.
The sun doesn’t seem to rise
above the trees here. There’s nothing to bring a little warmth to the earth. Just
a faint orange glow that’s always just over the horizon. Just that little bit
further away.
We’ll catch that fucker one day.
We arrived in Hamburg at 4pm and
set sights for the promoter’s flat.
Dennis is a cool dude with a
thick silver streak of hair that runs off-centre from his chin, half way down
his neck.
His partner, Anna is a very
hospitable, house-proud woman who fed us all too well and catered for our every
need. She met us at the flat with homemade pizza and beer.
Dennis showed up an hour or so
later and swiftly led us down to The Reeperbahn.
This seedy, sticky-floored part
of Hamburg is the largest red-light district in the world. Various purveyors of
sex and cheap tat adorn the streets, heckling passers-by.
The six of us wandered for a while
through the packed streets, gawping like giddy kids at sex hotels and bad
circus style paintings of scantily clad women on shop fronts.
Dennis eventually led us to the
Herbertstrasse, a narrow street lit with red lamps and blocked from view at
either end by big steel barriers. Large signs warn no admittance to women or
children. A strange world sat behind.
A hundred or so large windows
lined either side of the street, prepared for the lurking prostitute, beckoning
in drunk or lonely men.
We had showed up early and the
street was tame. I was met with only a few blown kisses and curling fingers.
Straight out the other side.
We continued to walk for a while
and eventually ended up at the venue. Druke, stands in the centre of the most
affluent part of Hamburg. Shiny, glitzy boutiques glitter away along every
street, broken only by this enormous squat, adorned in graffiti with a hidden
door and a strange, muddy bar at the back with pulsating orange lights and
weird creatures made from old logs.
By 10pm the small venue was
packed and I’d drank too much.
All of the support bands sucked
so it seemed I had no option but to continue to drink, attempt to sell records
and grin wildly at girls with dreadlocks.
The night carried on well and I
continued with my strange business.
We drank the bar dry and
eventually made our way back to the flat. All dropped but Hamish, Jamie and
myself, who remained awake and weird, concocting lies about the origins or
goats’ cheese and other such bullshit.
And I’m certain Aphrodite had dreads.
16/12/12. Hannover.
I awoke around noon, face down on
the giant purple sofa. Dennis and Anna were already awake and preparing the
table for breakfast. We sat and ate and took long showers, watching the dirt
flow away down to the Hamburg sewers.
Soon enough we were back on the
bleak, grey road, noses pointed for Hannover.
I drifted in and out of sleep
over the two or so hour drive. I awoke as we rumbled down a cobbled side street
running alongside an enormous complex with barred windows. Every square foot
had been spray-painted with slogans, weird creatures and colourful murals.
We stopped in a large, dark
courtyard between two statues covered in paint and a sketchy half-pipe. The
flat-bottom was carpeted in broken glass, sawdust and shit, and the tombstones
had slogans sprayed in silver.
No one seemed to be around. Faint
voices and struck notes echoed from badly lit doorways, but otherwise, all was
dark and quiet.
Eventually the promoter showed
his face. A short bearded man called Glen with a fat face. Word was that he had
fucked over The Arteries with a couple of shows a while back, so the initial
taste was sour upon meeting.
The show took place in a small
underground studio. A labyrinth of concrete corridors led here and there and
finally to the small room. Inverted crosses were painted on most of the walls
and posters for old gigs were plastered in between.
The show was supposedly a secret,
seeing as Glen didn’t want to pay some sort of fee one has to, to put on
legitimate gigs in Germany. Due to this, and maybe due to it being a Sunday, no
more than twenty people turned up.
Bangers were the only band to
play and were finished, two encores and all, by 8pm.
I set up my little shop outside
the studio door in a little cul-de-sac corridor and managed to sell a shit
load.
Maybe each purchase was a
slightly sympathetic gesture. The punters didn’t want to step through the door,
passing my stall without perusing my wares, and once I’d engaged them in
conversation they felt too guilty to just leave. Poor fuckers.
By 9pm we were back at Glen’s
flat; a high ceilinged two bedroom space, overlooking a main road with tall
green trams running constantly.
It was Sunday night and the
streets were quiet. Lights shone from kiosks and kebab houses, but otherwise
all was dead.
We sat around on carpeted floors
drinking beer and watching a crap Chevy Chase film on a flickering TV.
Everyone crashed by midnight save
Jamie and myself who sat alone in the dirty kitchen. He painted while I
scratched out this nonsensical drivel. We listened to punk rock through tinny
speakers until 3am and retired ourselves, wide awake and hungry for excitement.
17.12.12. Mainz.
It was Monday morning and
everyone awoke late. We pottered around the quiet flat on empty stomachs. I was
itching for coffee and fresh air.
Glen awoke only to bid us
farewell and shoo us through the door, out onto the wet street.
We dumped our bags in the van and
wandered aimlessly along the pavements, pausing briefly to flit in and out of
shops and buy food and coffee.
I slept most of the way to Mainz,
drifting in and out of strange trippy dreams. The Black Rider makes for a
strange bed fellow.
*
Unfortunately, this
is as far as I got with my scrawlings. Looking back over my papers, the vast
majority is illegible, written inebriated in the back of a van on bumpy roads,
with no tangible form whatsoever. I found this half diary nearing the end of
June, 2015, and reading it for the first time since writing it I felt the need
to share it with anyone who may care. Next time I’ll finish what I start.
JRH.
29th June,
’15, Lower Market Street.
*
