Illusions

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Emma Goldman

The Only Ones - The Big Sleep

It's A Gas, Gas, Gas

Although I’d spent my childhood in the Seventies, my teenage years in the Eighties and entered adulthood at the beginning of the Nineties, my soul remained firmly planted in the beats of the Sixties. The Beatles, The Who, The Kinks and The Stones will forever be within me, and I’d never be without Zeppelin or Hendrix. Music was a passion, the radio or record player was always on at home - childhood was, to all intents and purposes, good – I even enjoyed going to school.

By the middle-to-end of the desperately unsatisfying, greedy, fascist Eighties the radio never seemed to be on quite as much and school was hateful. I was mortified at the distinct lack of creativity in mainstream pop music... Bros, for fucks sake! How had we managed to go from the Fingers demanding an Alternative Ulster, the Pistols proclaiming Anarchy In The UK and The Clash telling us about Spanish Bombs to being force fed that kind of crap?

I swapped my prized FS1E moped for a battered nylon stringed classical guitar and dog-eared book of chords at the age of seventeen. Musical ability never really came into the equation - there really was none. Noise and performance, I figured, was a preferred expression, and I dutifully set about learning the absolute basics.

It wasn't long after that I fell in with a few like-minded individuals and - after begging, borrowing and stealing equipment - we formed a band. As I was a fucking hopeless guitar player I took over the bass from an equally inept "musician" who, in turn, grabbed the vacant mic. Fortunately the drummer could drum and the now guitarist could, well, guitar. Half of us could kind of play, the other half joined in, and what a fine, radio unfriendly racket we made.

Although, over the years, I've played in other bands my fondness and high regard for the three teenagers, that I spent only a short period of time with, has never diminished. We played three gigs, made an unnerving, feedback-drenched, god awful sound and bowed out, unknown.

When Will I Be Famous - my arse!

Hubble Bubble

Bright lights, white noise, black knights and corduroys. Visionaries cloud the mind while Johnny Cash walks the line. Starfish turn against the tide - though ‘time may change you can’t change time’. Polkas, waltzes, sambas, jives, a quickstep leads to a rollercoaster ride. Joy’s divisible by the honest and the criminal; actors fake their lives - it’s unequivocal. Teddy Boys, Rude Boys, Punks and mimickers, Salinger is visible when listeners miss the interval.   

Medicine, Man!

She said, "I'll meet you when the moon is fat and the sun's at its zenith at the Crooked Crow crossroads by Starfish Meadow. I'll sit beneath the Gallows Tree, beside the unmarked graves of Little Man Big and the Bluegrass Fellow.

"Bring Stagger Lee," she said, "with his bottleneck slide - and stout Joe Sharpe with his country harp - as I'll have my fiddle and we'll play like the devil to summon up sweet Mary Jane and that charlatan, Fool Grenville."

We'd dance, then, like dervishes in the tall lush grass, singing of the traitorous that had once been among us - though, by now, had long since vanished - and we'd all take a sip from the initiates chalice. A bitter-sweet linctus of a blood-like tincture, brought to us by the Medicine Man, full of the hermit's solace.

The Black Keys "Just Got To Be"

Mojo Rising

The vacuum filled with expectant faces: students, straights and old-age pensioners; bluesmen, mods and timeless drop-outs; rockers and romantics; the sane, the insane and the mildly-traumatised. Critics whet their lips and sharpened their pencils. Static crackled and lights bedazzled. Cigarettes blazed and lager-washed lovers embraced. The heat, taste and stench of sweat-soaked bodies assaulted the senses. Lights faded, pulses quickened, blackness enveloped the writhing masses. A delicious excitement grew as a deafening cacophony rose up from the believers.

In a blinding flash they appeared. He was a snake in humanskin boots. His tongue slipped and slurred, promising to deliver the profound, as he raked an ivory Telecaster. A pause, time enough to suck in a long, deep breath; then all hell let loose... the pounding thud, rhythmic clatter and thunderous clash of drum and cymbal, the stomach-assaulting, ground-quaking rumble of eternally heavy bass and the ethereal sigh and soaring scream of two guitars in combat will forever stand testament to their mojo.

I remained as exhausted disciples flocked towards green men on illuminated exit signs, spilling out into the depths of the night. With ears still ringing I raised my all-seeing eyes, for one last time, to rest upon the high altar. Unmanned, those vessels of magic stood like statues - silent and unmoving, forever a tribute to the fevered imaginations and powerful energies of Albert Della Porta, George Smith, Clarence Leonadis Fender, Lester William Polsfuss, Jim Marshall, Lyndon Laney and Peter Traynor. The story belongs to them and to them alone; no artifice, sleight-of-hand or human devilry will ever change that.

Notes and Voices.

That sort of thing never really affected me; it needed angles. It needed to shock me, kick me in the teeth, throttle the lethargy from my body, awaken my senses and question my questions. I never had a methodology, a schematic or predetermined model – abstraction and chaos was the closest I ever wanted to come to having any sense of formula. Success and failure; love and hate; war and peace; they all have inbetweens, grey areas and confusions. There’s never just one point of view and there’s never one single ideological redemption.

The pompous, the self-righteous, the meek and the humble? They are all friends and enemies of mine, sometimes at the same time – I wouldn’t have it any other way; otherwise my perception of existence would become a futile journey across an infinitely barren and disengaging wasteland... and that is a truly lonely voyage.