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This piece is transitional. Duggie has decided to let you into a secret part of his head…this is his recurring dream. After this we’ll get back into the story…the story we left so many of your human months ago.
Duggie: So, in my dream, I wake up and Fish from Marillion is standing over me. His tangly-rat-tail-like hair framing a welder’s face is making me scrunch up my nose. Twitching it to remove an invisible itch. [“Get to the point Dug…” No! It’s my dream, I’ll go where I wanna! “…ok, ok…cool it.” (Don’t forget, he’s a big lad is Duggie, I’m no messing with him, Steve.)]
Where was I? Oh, yeah, the invisble itch…and so I say: “Oi wot’s your game, pal…hey your Fish, aren’t you?”
Fish: Yeah, yeah, man. My friends call me Del [his real name is Derek Dick]
Duggie: What are you doing in my bedroom?
Fish: I’m not here…this is a dream….my dream!
Duggie: No way – this is my dream.
Fish: If that’s the case, where am I?
Duggie: Dunno, pal. None of my footin’ business! I’m the one asleep here.
Fish: Like hell you are! I’m on tour. I crashed out in a dunken stupor [hey Fish, this is fictional, don’t complain, I don’t mean it…Steve]
Duggie: I thought I could smell ale on yer breath. Look, what are we going to do now, I mean your hair is tickling my snozzle..and you’re hanging around in my bed.
Fish: I don’t know, I’ve never met a fellow dreamer in a dream. What can we do?
Duggie: I’ll count to 5 and we’ll both wake up.
(so Duggie counts to 5 and…)
The lights come up, it’s a full stage show. Maillion, 1984: Fugazi and Script for a Jester’s Tear. They’re also testing out the fledgling Kayleigh…
Duggie: This is awesome!
Fish winks from the stage: “never could resist the count…”
(just then a tall figure wearing black robes appears, as if from a bat…”No one can resist The Count)
[…and there we leave Duggie. He usually wakes up at this point. Screaming.]
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Friday, 10 December 2010
Wednesday, 8 December 2010
Duggie’s mate: Tribute to Lennon…08/12/80
I remember sitting at me Nan’s house in the late 1970s watching telly. She made me a cuppa and handed me a copy of the Daily Mail, pointing at the picture of a tramp-like figure, seemingly staggering down a city street somewhere.
I read the caption, it went something like: “Lost Lennon, a has-been in New York.” He was wearing a floppy hat, a long ragged trench coat, baggy trousers and a long, ‘Dr Who’ scarf.
At the time, my only images of the Beatles had been gathered from the front cover of ‘Please, Please, Me’: four young men gazing from an office-block staircase and ‘Help’ with four men dressed in blue skiing outfits making funny shapes to camera.
I’d also seen ‘Hard Days Night’, a black and white flick based on a train and hanging around a posh hotel room.
So the tramp picture didn’t really link up in my mind with The Beatles. It was just the picture of an old geezer (to a 10 year old boy) in a newspaper.
Then one day, a couple of years later, a kid from school that I didn’t know too well cycled past me while I was waiting for the bus home.
“Oi, mate. John Lennon’s been shot!” he said.
I don’t remember responding to him. He was a bit of a dick. But that photo from the paper came back to me and for some reason the fact that he was from The Beatles. It all seemed to tie up together in my mind. From that moment on I was a Beatles fanatic. It made sense.
Thinking back, it’s like John was always alive when I discovered how great The Beatles were. That they weren’t just some old group that me mum put on the record player while she was hovering on a Saturday. But he was dead and it was a long time ago. Doesn’t seem like it, but it was.
Then every morning, our local radio station would play 'Borrowed Time' from the posthumously cobbled together 'Milk and Honey' album. And so, in 1984, Lennon was kind of alive again...in a kind of sub-standard way.
At least we still had The Beatles.
Favourite Beatles song: (changes lots, but at the moment it’s a tie between ‘Flying’ from ‘Magical Mystery Tour’, ‘Good Morning’ from ‘Sgt Peppers’ and ‘Strawberry fields Forever’.
Favourite Lennon song: ‘Mind Games’ (this also regularly changes)
I read the caption, it went something like: “Lost Lennon, a has-been in New York.” He was wearing a floppy hat, a long ragged trench coat, baggy trousers and a long, ‘Dr Who’ scarf.
At the time, my only images of the Beatles had been gathered from the front cover of ‘Please, Please, Me’: four young men gazing from an office-block staircase and ‘Help’ with four men dressed in blue skiing outfits making funny shapes to camera.
I’d also seen ‘Hard Days Night’, a black and white flick based on a train and hanging around a posh hotel room.
So the tramp picture didn’t really link up in my mind with The Beatles. It was just the picture of an old geezer (to a 10 year old boy) in a newspaper.
Then one day, a couple of years later, a kid from school that I didn’t know too well cycled past me while I was waiting for the bus home.
“Oi, mate. John Lennon’s been shot!” he said.
I don’t remember responding to him. He was a bit of a dick. But that photo from the paper came back to me and for some reason the fact that he was from The Beatles. It all seemed to tie up together in my mind. From that moment on I was a Beatles fanatic. It made sense.
Thinking back, it’s like John was always alive when I discovered how great The Beatles were. That they weren’t just some old group that me mum put on the record player while she was hovering on a Saturday. But he was dead and it was a long time ago. Doesn’t seem like it, but it was.
Then every morning, our local radio station would play 'Borrowed Time' from the posthumously cobbled together 'Milk and Honey' album. And so, in 1984, Lennon was kind of alive again...in a kind of sub-standard way.
At least we still had The Beatles.
Favourite Beatles song: (changes lots, but at the moment it’s a tie between ‘Flying’ from ‘Magical Mystery Tour’, ‘Good Morning’ from ‘Sgt Peppers’ and ‘Strawberry fields Forever’.
Favourite Lennon song: ‘Mind Games’ (this also regularly changes)
Monday, 6 December 2010
Donovan? or was it a dream?
“Sod Latvian heavy metal!” said this guy. He was standing on top a piano beneath the stairs at this stinking city-centre club in Riga.
Why stinking? For some reason there was a girl – fit, blonde, bit zitty – frying up a huge basket of chips right next to the stage.
Every now and then a cloud of fat-drenched steam engulfed the lead singer, making him shake his head wildly - a disharmonious Paul ‘Macca’ McCartney. He was a shouter, screaming in front of his incongruous Crass-inspired band of hippified long-hairs [purple prose alert, Duggie!]
“It’s the punk rooo-awk what we love!” continued the piano man. He actually said rock like that: rooo-awk, punching the air in time with his words.
“You’re not getting me alive!” blurted the lead singer for no apparent reason: “Punk is f**cked!” [come on! Gotta ‘bleep’ it - kids read this!] They launched into a rendition of ‘Punk is Dead’ from The Feeding of the Five Thousand [that’s the first Crass album from 1978 – true anarchy in the UK, not a fashion statement…]
The Latvians were confusing punk with heavy metal – or vice versa. I was just confused.
Behind the stage-side chip stall, sat a guy selling candy floss. Big pink whirls of spun sugar on a stick. Hmmm, could do with some of that. Need the energy.
Put me in mind of the jazzers of the past: kept playing all night drinking sugared water to keep going. Knackered their teeth, but at least their vibe was intact.
I gestured to the candy floss man and I thought, just for that moment: “I love everything in this god-almighty world, God knows I do!” Then I realised I was only quoting Donovan’s ‘Candy Man’.
I remember meeting Donovan [note to Donovan’s lawyers: this is a work of fiction…will that get me off the hook?] at a festival back in he ‘80s. Seemed like his career looked like it was on the skids. Maybe he was just past it. But I was a total fan.
Managed to catch the great man, stage side. He was wearing an ‘ethnic’ knitted hat and a hand made waistcoat [what? Nothing else, Duggie? – no, Steve, he had other stuff on, I was just trying to keep the prose clean and unclogged… ok, Dug, get on with it!]
“What are you doing in Hounslow?” I asked him.
“Being. Just being. How about you?” said Donovan.
“Being?” I said.
“Oh! You too! Good.” He said, and strummed a pure fresh chord on his really cool resonator guitar.
“No, I meant to ask the question. Being?” I said, realising that I wasn’t making myself clear.
“That’s a question. Being? Like ‘To be or not to be.’ It’s very deep.” Said Donovan. He really is pretty cool.
“Gets to the heart. Of where we. Are.” continued Donovan, looking at a passing aeroplane, way up above us, “He’s not going to Heathrow. Being. Somewhere else? Or here.” [this part used his spoken punctuation – not my fault…]
At this point I picked up a large T-shirt on Don’s merchandise stall. “How much?”
“Ten quid, man” said this long-bearded man, sitting to the side of mine and Don’s conversation. He was reading a thick paperback and smoking a pipe.
Donovan smiled and walked onto the stage. The sun shone.
So, that was the ‘80s, Hounslow free-festival.
“Just a single stick? Hey!” a sweet-smelling hand was waving up and down in front of my face… “Hmmm? No, yes, I’m a large,” In my mind I was still ordering a Donovan t-shirt from that hippy.
“A large what?” said the candy-floss man.
“Oh, ah. Yes. Sorry.” I said, “just the one.”
And I disappeared behind that pink cloud of sugar and sat down, while the band started to thrash out another late ‘70s punk cover and the guy on the piano did a handstand.
[Hmmm. Sweet! love Steve.]
Why stinking? For some reason there was a girl – fit, blonde, bit zitty – frying up a huge basket of chips right next to the stage.
Every now and then a cloud of fat-drenched steam engulfed the lead singer, making him shake his head wildly - a disharmonious Paul ‘Macca’ McCartney. He was a shouter, screaming in front of his incongruous Crass-inspired band of hippified long-hairs [purple prose alert, Duggie!]
“It’s the punk rooo-awk what we love!” continued the piano man. He actually said rock like that: rooo-awk, punching the air in time with his words.
“You’re not getting me alive!” blurted the lead singer for no apparent reason: “Punk is f**cked!” [come on! Gotta ‘bleep’ it - kids read this!] They launched into a rendition of ‘Punk is Dead’ from The Feeding of the Five Thousand [that’s the first Crass album from 1978 – true anarchy in the UK, not a fashion statement…]
The Latvians were confusing punk with heavy metal – or vice versa. I was just confused.
Behind the stage-side chip stall, sat a guy selling candy floss. Big pink whirls of spun sugar on a stick. Hmmm, could do with some of that. Need the energy.
Put me in mind of the jazzers of the past: kept playing all night drinking sugared water to keep going. Knackered their teeth, but at least their vibe was intact.
I gestured to the candy floss man and I thought, just for that moment: “I love everything in this god-almighty world, God knows I do!” Then I realised I was only quoting Donovan’s ‘Candy Man’.
I remember meeting Donovan [note to Donovan’s lawyers: this is a work of fiction…will that get me off the hook?] at a festival back in he ‘80s. Seemed like his career looked like it was on the skids. Maybe he was just past it. But I was a total fan.
Managed to catch the great man, stage side. He was wearing an ‘ethnic’ knitted hat and a hand made waistcoat [what? Nothing else, Duggie? – no, Steve, he had other stuff on, I was just trying to keep the prose clean and unclogged… ok, Dug, get on with it!]
“What are you doing in Hounslow?” I asked him.
“Being. Just being. How about you?” said Donovan.
“Being?” I said.
“Oh! You too! Good.” He said, and strummed a pure fresh chord on his really cool resonator guitar.
“No, I meant to ask the question. Being?” I said, realising that I wasn’t making myself clear.
“That’s a question. Being? Like ‘To be or not to be.’ It’s very deep.” Said Donovan. He really is pretty cool.
“Gets to the heart. Of where we. Are.” continued Donovan, looking at a passing aeroplane, way up above us, “He’s not going to Heathrow. Being. Somewhere else? Or here.” [this part used his spoken punctuation – not my fault…]
At this point I picked up a large T-shirt on Don’s merchandise stall. “How much?”
“Ten quid, man” said this long-bearded man, sitting to the side of mine and Don’s conversation. He was reading a thick paperback and smoking a pipe.
Donovan smiled and walked onto the stage. The sun shone.
So, that was the ‘80s, Hounslow free-festival.
“Just a single stick? Hey!” a sweet-smelling hand was waving up and down in front of my face… “Hmmm? No, yes, I’m a large,” In my mind I was still ordering a Donovan t-shirt from that hippy.
“A large what?” said the candy-floss man.
“Oh, ah. Yes. Sorry.” I said, “just the one.”
And I disappeared behind that pink cloud of sugar and sat down, while the band started to thrash out another late ‘70s punk cover and the guy on the piano did a handstand.
[Hmmm. Sweet! love Steve.]
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