There is noise. White noise. Ride and My Bloody Valentine and The House of Love and Spaceman 3 and Spiritualized and Slowdive and Levitation. Noise like a non-stop InterCity train going through a station, at night – but instead of you watching it from the platform, skirts whipping, you climb onto the tracks, face-on, like Bobbie in The Railway Children – and you open your mouth wide, it drives right into your head and starts doing mad, fast, cold circuits round your veins.
You can’t argue with noise or reason with noise – noise cannot be right or wrong, it cannot fail and it cannot fall, and there has never been this noise before, so you cannot fault it or belittle it. I love this noise. If someone asked me ‘What are you thinking?’ I would point at the noise.
I am eating this noise like mouthfuls of freezing, glittering fog. I am filling with it. I am using it as energy. Because what you are, as a teenager, is a small, silver, empty rocket. And you use loud music as fuel, and then the information in books as maps and co-ordinates, to tell you where you’re going.
The second music, in 1992, is the music of working-class boys. Manchester. Madchester. The Mondays, and the Roses. I love the records. I love the swagger, the euphoria – the way Northern, working-class pride on E sounds like half the country finally standing on its feet again, after the eighties, and glorying in its power and inventiveness. But I fear the men. These are the same scally boys on my estate that I walk past with my head down, hoping they won’t shout at me: I could never be their friend.
Their eyes would immediately give away their brutal analysis of me: that, ultimately, they would not fuck me. I would, therefore, become instantly invisible again, in their presence. Girls like me are invisible to boys in bands like this. I am not in their songs. I am not Sally Cinnamon.
I am not Ian Brown’s spun sugar sister.
So my love – all my actual, fierce love – is for the third kind of music of 1992 – the stuff that’s noisy and itchy. The music where I do find myself in the songs, all written by sexy, clever, angry freaks.
1992 is full of them – it’s a rare high-tide for the vengeful, literate and odd. The Manic Street Preachers in wedding dresses with grenades in their mouths, singing about the First World destroying the Third. Suede in their jumble-sale blouses, singing about council houses, and insisting that everyone is bisexual after 11pm. Girly-men. Men in eyeliner, and glitter, like Marc Bolan and David Bowie laid a clutch of dragon eggs in 1973, and they’ve just begun to hatch.
And, most dazzlingly of all, the girly-girls themselves. Women.
For there’s a storm in America, and the rain has now blown in over here, just in time for me: Riot Grrrl. A bunch of women like some League of Extraordinary Gentlewomen – writing fanzines, putting on female-only gigs, hanging out with each other, trying to make a space – in the crowded, swampy jungle of rock – that is for women alone.
They are all warriors, dressed in petticoats and sturdy boots – Kathleen Hanna from Bikini Kill paid for her guitar by stripping; Courtney Love punches out people who abuse her.
Courtney Love punched Kathleen Hanna, too, but this is the way of the rock star – let us not forget Charlie Watts punching Mick Jagger after Jagger called him ‘My drummer’. ‘You’re my singer,’ Watts snarled, before adjusting his cuffs, and walking away. Sometimes, in the jungle, you fight each other. The jungle is hot, and you get angry.
The songs they write are like drunken conversations with friends, in pubs, at the point just before you start dancing on the tables. ‘Rebel Girl’ by Bikini Kill has Kathleen Hanna starting to describe a proud, odd woman as if she hates her, but then explains that this girl is her hero, and she wants to fuck her.
And when Courtney Love sings ‘Teenage Whore’ – part self-loathing, part-pride – I feel oddly calm, yet excited. Hearing women singing about themselves – rather than men singing about women – makes everything seem suddenly wonderfully clear, and possible.
All my life, I’ve thought that if I couldn’t say anything boys found interesting, I might as well shut up. But now I realise there was that whole other, invisible half of the world – girls – that I could speak to, instead. A whole other half equally silent and frustrated, and just waiting to be given the smallest starting-signal – the tiniest starter-culture – and they would explode into words, and song, and action, and relieved, euphoric cries of ‘Me too! I feel this too!’
The news has hit Britain: they’re making new kinds of girls in America. Girls who don’t give a fuck. Girls who dare. Girls who do it because other girls do it. Girls that would like a girl like you.
Hibernating – incubating – pupating in my bedroom – I feel I know these freaky bands – the boys and the girls – totally: they, too, have lain under their beds, knowing that they can’t be who they are any more, and that they need to build a bigger boat. They are all in the furious, messy, white-light act of self-creation, trying to invent a future they can be in.
I can imagine their bedrooms – lyrics scrawled on the walls in marker-pen, coats on the floor smelling mustily of jumble sales and thrift stores, carrier-bags full of battered, copied cassettes of Bowie, Stooges, Patti Smith and Guns N’ Roses, and all of us meeting, without knowing, in the middle of the night, at John Peel’s late-night lock-in – headphones on, trying not to wake the other people in our crowded houses. We’re all doing the same thing. We’re all just trying to get through these years to a better place, which we are going to have to make ourselves.
I know what I have to do: I have been put on Earth to get everyone in Wolverhampton into liking these bands. That is the purpose of my life.
From a practical point of view, I am ideally placed to do this, among all humanity – for the bus stop for the 512, over the road, is essentially a trap in which shoals of future fans are forced to wait for twenty minutes between buses – easily enough time for me to win them over to the cause, given enough volume.
I drag the stereo over to the window – a trailing life support of wires, black and red and yellow, across the room – and put it on the windowsill. I then climb up next to it, swing my legs out of the window and put the stereo on my lap.
‘I’m going to educate this town,’ I say to the dog. ‘I am going to make Wolverhampton as good as … Manchester. We’re upgrading.’
I put on ‘Double Dare Ya’ by Bikini Kill, as loud as I can.
‘Yes, peasants,’ my demeanour says. ‘I am blowing your mind. The day has come. No longer need you listen to Zucchero and Check 1-2 Featuring Craig McLachlan. I have brought you The Good Shit.’
Of course, the bus queue does what all British bus queues would do, in similar circumstances – they turn back, and ignore me … All save for one woman – in her fifties, maybe – who just stares at me.
At the time, I thought the expression on her face was one of disgust. Thinking about it now, however, I can see it’s one of terrible pity, instead. I’m a child in a nightie, sitting on a windowsill, holding a stereo on my lap, blasting music onto the street, trying to change a town with one record, in case I die.
An hour later, I’m still sitting in the window, writing ‘MANIC STREET PREACHERS’ on the stereo with Tippex and blasting out Hole when the Volkswagen pulls around the corner – clipping the kerb quite notably, and thudding back down on the tarmac so heavily you can hear all the pots and pans rattling inside, even from here.
The van comes to a halt outside the house, and then nothing happens for a good minute or so. I know, from experience, that this is because Dadda is drunk, and trying to focus enough to work out how to open the door.
When he does, he emerges, shitfaced, and initially confused by what is happening. He hears the music – Courtney Love screaming her head off – and then looks up and sees me, in the window, speaker on my lap.
‘Dadda!’ I say.
‘Kitten Cat!’ he replies.
It’s just like those ‘Papa!’ ‘Nicole!’ Renault adverts, but on a council estate.
I suddenly feel sorry for Dadd
a – coming home, and finding out that everything his generation had ever achieved has just been blown out of the water by mine. His wound will be sore. His heart will be heavy. His records will all die.
Dadda cocks his head, like a dog, and his expression changes. Something’s happening.
‘You know what you need to do?’ he says.
I can’t hear him properly, and cup my hand around my ear.
‘You need to PUSH THE MID-RANGE UP, AND KNOCK THE DOLBY OFF,’ he shouts up to me – giving a business-like nod.
He then tamps his fag out, and walks into the house. I hear him fall over, as usual, before he reaches the stairs.
So these are the reviews I have been sending – one a day – to D&ME. Ride, Manic Street Preachers, Jane’s Addiction, Belly, Suede, the Stone Roses, Aztec Camera, the Lilac Time and My Bloody Valentine.
And now the deputy editor has summoned me down to their offices. I get Mum to write a sick-note to school – ‘Please allow Johanna the day off, she has a terrible earache,’ she writes, adding, to me, ‘From listening to all that bloody wailing’ – and I am here, outside, waiting.
I remember Krissi’s last bit of advice, as I left the house – so early – to catch the bus, to catch the train, to come down to London. I was applying eyeliner in the mirror, and singing.
‘Whatever you do,’ Krissi said, looking up from his George Orwell, ‘just … don’t be yourself. That never works.’
I look at my watch. It’s 1pm. Time to go in for the meeting. I stand up.
‘Good luck, kidder,’ Dad says.
Oh yeah. Because I’ve had to bring my dad with me. He’s going to sit on this wall outside D&ME and wait for me. He’s got new shoes on.
‘I’m not letting you go down to London on your own,’ he said, flatly, when I said I’d been asked to go for a meeting. ‘I know what a cunt I was when I was a teenage boy – and I’m not having you mix with cunts like me in the big city. This cunt is keeping those cunts away.’
Obviously, I’d pleaded for several hours to be allowed to go on my own – but he’d been absolutely adamant.
‘Besides,’ he said, in the third hour, ‘I quite fancy checking out the Old Smoke. See my old stomping grounds.’
‘Well, why don’t we just bring Lupin down, too, and the twins,’ I say sarcastically, crying. ‘Why don’t we make my new job a huge family outing?’
‘London? YES PLEASE YES YES!’ Lupin shouts, jumping up and down on the sofa.
‘Don’t be a prat, Lupin,’ I say, pushing him onto the cushions, quite softly. He starts crying – then leaps onto me, and we wrestle on the floor. I like wrestling Lupin. I find it very relaxing. When I finally pin him to the floor, I do this thing where I pretend to give him heart-compressions, which I have learned off Casualty.
‘BREATHE Lupin, BREATHE! Stay with us! One-one thousand, two-two thousand!’
If you do this to someone, they can’t breathe, and they also laugh hysterically.
I keep doing it until Mum tells me to get off, and make the tea.
D&ME is on the twenty-ninth floor, the receptionist tells me. She has to check my name is on a list – ‘We get … bands … turning up,’ she says, with a look of disgust – before letting me through the security gate.
I’ve never gone up twenty-nine floors before – this is the highest I’ve ever been. In the lift, I entertain the notion that this might be the day that I discover I’m scared of heights, and that I might step out of the lift, look out of a window, scream and faint – but as I get out of the lift, I am pleased to report back to me that I’m fine.
D&ME is to the left of the lifts – its doors are covered in stickers, broken records Blu-tacked on, and a letter from a PR company that begins, ‘Dear TOTAL cunts. FUCK YOU.’
Inside is a room that, in its man-ness, makes the Record Locker look like the communal ladies’ changing rooms at Dorothy Perkins.
This office is essentially built out of trousers, confidence and testicles. There are piles of back issues everywhere – yellowing, fraying. Desks piled high with records and CDs.
Around one desk are some men – I’m too panicked to count how many – gathered around another man who is sitting on a chair, with a dirty bandage around his head, smoking a fag, and coming to the end of a very long anecdote.
‘…so I wake up under the table, yeah, and he’s gone – the whole band are gone – and there’s a bill for £300, and an actual human shit in the ashtray. Well, I think it’s a shit. I’m standing up and freaking out – totally freaking out – and shouting “THIS IS A SHIT! THIS IS AN ACTUAL HUMAN SHIT!” when the club-owner comes over and points out that it’s a cigar. And that I’d already tried to light it.’
‘Yes – but the bandage, Rob,’ the editor says, as everyone laughs. ‘You still haven’t explained how you came back from Amsterdam looking like you’d got confused at Dover and went to Vietnam, instead. I’m presuming the drummer punched you. That’s why you have drummers. To punch journalists.’
‘I think he tried to pull Marianne, and she dropped a chair on his head,’ another man offers.
‘Nah. I fell over in Duty Free on the ferry on the way back, buying 200 Marlboro,’ Rob says, shrugging – gesturing with the fag in his hand. ‘The on-board nurse was laaaaahvely. I gave her the advance tape of the band’s album, and she showed me the cupboard where they keep all the pills.’ He pats his pockets, contentedly.
A thought suddenly occurs to him. ‘Here,’ he says, a look of worry spreading over his face, ‘I hope she doesn’t have any snide brothers. Otherwise, there’s going to be copies of it all over Camden Market by Monday, and Ed Edwards is going to go completely brain donor.’
During this anecdote, I have been putting myself in the most obvious place I can, so I can be noticed. It is, clearly, time I announced myself. As the anecdote finally finishes, and the men laugh again, I take a step forward.
For one awful moment, I know, utterly and absolutely, that I – a fat teenage girl from a council house, in a top hat – will not be able to cope with this situation. I do not know what to say to these rangy rock ’n’ roll men.
And then I have what I still, even now, consider to be my single greatest moment of genius: I will just pretend to be someone who does. That’s all I have to do. Ever. Pretend to be the right person for this weird situation. Fake it ’til you make it.
‘Hello!’ I say, brightly. ‘I’m Dolly Wilde! I’ve come to London, to be a music journalist!’
All the men turn and look at me. Their expression is a bit like one I saw in a documentary, where someone once put a single flamingo in a zoo-enclosure full of camels, for reasons I can’t recall. All the camels stared. The flamingo stared back. Everyone seemed fatally confused.
In this confused silence, one man silently reaches into his jeans, and hands another man a fiver. The man nearest me nods to them.
‘There was a bet in the office. A couple of people were convinced you were a forty-five-year-old bloke from The Wirral, on a wind-up.’
‘Not yet!’ I say, cheerfully. ‘But who knows where the coming years will take me! Life is like a river!’
‘I’m Kenny,’ a man says, standing up. He’s a very big, very bald, very gay man in a pair of astonishingly bold cut-off shorts. He has the air of a queeny galleon about him. He has six laminated passes hanging around his neck, like a Hawaiian lei garland, and clearly, at no point, has ever given a fuck about what people think about him. In later years, I asked him how a gay man mainly into prog-rock ended up working for a magazine dedicated to incredibly straight, borderline unlistenable indie – all of which he hated. ‘I never mix work with pleasure,’ he replied, wryly.
But, now: ‘You’ve been speaking to me, on the phone,’ Kenny says.
‘You’re the Deputy Editor!’ I say. I am getting this question right.
‘Yes,’ he says. There’s a pause. ‘So –’ he spreads his hands ‘– want a job?’
‘Yes please!’ is what I should say. I’ve
been offered a job less than a minute after walking through the doors. I’m winning.
But, at the time, all the films I have watched, and books that I have read, have led me to believe that, whenever you can, you shouldn’t say the politest thing, or the rightest thing – but the most legendary thing, instead.
On the way down, on the train, I have planned what the most legendary response to a job offer would be, and it’s what I say now:
‘Work for you?’ I say. ‘I would love to! I would really, really love to!’
I pick up a paper napkin on the desk, dip it into a glass of water, and then make as if to go and wash the walls.
‘First I’ll do the walls,’ I say, to Kenny, ‘and then the floors – that way, if I drip …’
This is dialogue from Annie – the scene where Daddy Warbucks asks Annie to live with him for a month, and she initially misunderstands, and thinks he wants her to be his maid, instead.
When I imagined delivering this line, I imagined everyone at D&ME laughing.
‘We offered her a job on the most left-field music newspaper in the country – but she parodied both her working-class background and obsession with musicals by pretending that we’d offered her a job as an office-cleaner, instead! Legendary!’
There is no way everyone in this office won’t have seen Annie. This line is going to be a killer.
Everyone in this room has not seen Annie. There is an awkward silence.
‘It’s from Annie,’ I offer. ‘The musical?’
More silence.
‘No big musicals fans at D&ME?’
‘Musicals are strictly for homosexuals and womenfolk,’ Kenny says, drily, in a way that’s so post-post-post ironic it actually stops being communication, and simply becomes confusing, and unhelpful.
‘I quite like The King & I,’ says the man with the bandage.
‘You’ve had a recent blow to the head,’ Kenny replies.
These are all jokes! This is a jokey office! Obviously I feel bad about my joke not working, but not too bad – only about six Dyings, out of ten. It’s no ‘Scooby Doo on live TV’.