I close my eyes and this is yesterday.

[Not long ago, in conversation with S. , I mentioned that I had a semi-finished post I’d written maybe last year, I think, about the comic Phonogram, by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie. I’d re-read the first series in anticipation of the new one – The singles club – and after doing so, I wanted to write about it. In truth, whatever my initial ideas for it were, I had written little over a couple of paragraphs before I gave up on it. Whether I thought I would eventually return to it – or not – I no longer remember. So what I do now, is that the gist of what I think I wanted to write about, wrap it around a further re-reading of both series, add a dash of my own personal views on the ideas offered by the series, and write a small post about three of the things I love the most : me, music, and comics!]

I was told something once, long ago, which I didn’t believe way back then, and that took me a number of years to finally come to believe. And, to make it all worse, I was told this lie by someone whom I considered a good friend, someone whose word I trusted implicitly – a guy I used to know by the name of Nelson. Now, this guy and I met in really weird circumstances – he was, after all, the son of my dad’s then girlfriend, and how weird is that right there? Even typing it doesn’t make it any less strange that old people, way beyond their best by date, could still have girlfriends… anyway, after being absent from my family’s life for a couple of years, my dad waltzes along, determined to win us back, and dad just goes and tries to make up for all the crap he pulled. Oh, I knew what his game on, and since I never liked the sonofabitch anyway, I made the most of it. I never felt bad, not even for one second, when I knew I was mooching as much off of him as I could – dear old dad had lost the privilege of eliciting a valid emotional response from me years and years before. That’s what too many whippings and punches to your face will do to you. Be that as it may, in he comes all gallant like, and soon enough he takes us (me and the sister) to meet the old lady he’d hooked up with. Can’t remember her name, maybe something that begins with a G. Or with an M., I don’t know. I dimly recall not liking her very much, for no real reason. But I did really like her son, Nelson. He was maybe a couple of years older than me, and in a way, we liked pretty much the same stuff. We listened to the same kind of music, to an extent, we liked comics and books, and games and football, and everything else. It was music, though, that swiftly bonded us, for – and as I stated – we listened to pretty much the same music, there was a much more alternative bent to his taste than mine. Between us, we had a pretty nifty collection of tapes we’d borrow from off of each other, and a wealth of new sounds to be discovered. This was maybe, what?, ’92 or so, when we first met, and my tastes ran the general metal gamut. Back then, I still listened religiously to the riffs of Metallica and Megadeth, Testament and Kreator, Sepultura and Overkill. I was also beginning to feel much more pulled towards the more extreme disciplines metal had on offer – if I considered Slayer to be one of the most brutal things I had listened to up until then, though I never liked them, bands like Deicide, Death, Morbid Angel or Benediction were something else. Insofar as it was possible, I strove to listen to the noisiest, foulest, unholiest (which, or so my computer tells me, isn’t even a word…) sounds out there. That was my goal, then and there - to listen to the heaviest stuff possible. And this Nelson dude, well, he was just happy to listen to whatever I gave him. More often than not, it would turn out that whatever death-metal hymn I was addicted to was something that he didn’t really appreciate. Even then, he was the sort of guy who loved Entombed (another band whose allure always escaped me) more than Brutal Truth. And in turn, in turn I’d have to do the same. He’d give me some tapes, every week or so, with stuff that he’d recorded from off the radio, or whole albums that someone somewhere had recorded for him. In those tapes, I found many of the bands that went on to make a name for themselves a bit later, or were about to make it, bands that I could never really like no way, nohow. Among those - Pearl Jam! Nirvana! Temple of the dog! Sonic Youth!, as well as countless others. But also, and on the opposite spectrum, you could find bands such as : Sleater Kinney (though I haven’t listened to these girls in ages), The Tear Garden, Faith No More, and Manic Street Preachers.
And that’s the crux of all this, MSP. I guess I was aware of them early on in their career : I can recall, but only dimly, seeing a bit of the video to Motorcycle emptiness in my place years ago, on one of those Top 40 style shows, or whatever, and I liked the guitar solo quite a bit, but man, how could it compare to the hellish solos delivered by Hammett and Mustaine, Kisser and Murphy? No way in hell it could. It would be a few years more before that particular MSP song would come back to haunt me, and stay with me forever.
No, what happened was that a few of the songs that I listened to from them in those old tapes were just good enough for me to register their name, to make a mental note of it, a thumbs up of a sort. In my teenaged mind, I was okaying these guys, admitting that their death-metal grunt-free music was listenable enough, and boy, did that make a difference. Had it been, say, a year earlier or so, and I would not have even entertained the notion of listening to anything other than metal. Well, that is, something other than that which I knew, that which I listened to before I really came into metal…
And so, on and off for some two years, but much rarer as time moved on, Nelson and I had our music exchange program going in full swing. I can’t tell you what happened – either I no longer remember it, or maybe it was for one of those silly reasons, but eventually, gradually, we drifted apart, stopped talking to each other. Maybe it was because dad and his mom split up, but I don’t know. Whatever the cause, we stopped talking, I didn’t even call him on his home phone, nor he called me. This was on the day before cell phones were common, or cheap enough for everyone to have three, before text messages and all these new technologies. But the last time I saw him, if I recall correctly, was when pagers became really popular among the young folk, and as chance would have it, I met him in a bus I was catching on my way home. We didn’t spend that much time together, my stop was a few minutes away from where I had originally got in, but he did give me his pager number, something with maybe some twelve to fifteen digits, and he also told me that thing I mentioned earlier. And what he told me was that he’d just listened to one of the heaviest things he’d ever listened to. I could barely imagine what exactly it was he was talking about - this was during the summer of ’94, late summer, and there was so much stuff going around, music-wise, that could fit that description, that my mind raced at the thought. Could it be that he’d learned of Tiamat? But then, heavy though they were, I’d hardly call them the heaviest. Samael? Maybe… Samael circa Blood Ritual was heavy as all get out, but even so? Nah, not them. And certainly not the likes of Moonspell. Ah, then it could only be Cradle of Filth. They were, back then, the epitome of what extreme metal could be, at least for me. I smiled knowingly, waiting for him to tell me what it was. And then he said, ‘The Holy Bible, by the Manic Street Preachers’.
What the fucking fuck? Huh? Come again? Certainly, my disbelief at such a claim was so apparent that he reiterated his statement. The Holy fucking Bible by the Manic fucking Street Preachers. I checked my data banks for info I might have stored regarding them, and what my mind came up with sure as hell didn’t match with what I was being told just then. How exactly do you mean, ‘heaviest’? is it the sound? What?
And so he told me thus – or something along the lines of : it’s the sound, it’ the words, it’s everything. You gotta listen to it. You’ll be sorry if you don’t. Take my word on it. It’s gonna fucking floor you.
Admittedly, I didn’t rush out and listened to it. I sure as hell wouldn’t spend money I didn’t have on it, and I knew not of anyone else - save for Nelson – who had it, so it took a while before I got a hold of a copy of the record. I guess it must have been closer to the end of the year, I had put in my papers to enlist in the Air Force, I had dropped out of school, and my final year of English had ended at the same time. Looking back on it? Jesus, if I was American I would be white trash… anyway, moving on, I did still keep in touch with some of the people from English class, and there was a guy from my First Certificate year called Antonio (I think…), the only person I knew back then that wore more black than I did, and who was a self-avowed nihilist of the Nietszchean school of thought that, only too naturally, had his own copy of ‘The Holy Bible’. On a whim, I borrowed it from him, and it wasn’t long in the returning; maybe a few days later only I was giving it back to him. Maybe he asked me what I thought of it. Maybe not. He wasn’t the sort of guy to make pointless questions. Nothing was really that important to him, vital though they were, in part, to his very existence.
To myself, I kept the knowledge that I had listened to the entirety of the thing all of one time, and I considered it to be an hour ill wasted. I couldn’t, for the life of me, begin to fathom how the guy had the gall to call this – not a piece of shit, I knew this much even then – tame and somewhat subdued record one of the heaviest things that he’d ever listened to. One listen was more than enough for me to make my mind up. Nothing I heard there was heavy in the least : not the songs, (the ‘heaviest’ being maybe ‘Faster’), and though here and there I heard words that recalled what seemed to me as violence and bloodshed, shit, I was weaned on the writings of Carcass and Cannibal Corpse, how could that compare?
And right here is where I ask that you forgive me. Yes, I was only seventeen, but I don’t hide behind that excuse. The fault was entirely another. You see, I was still too romantic in my thoughts, too connected to more chivalrous writings on one hand, and too in love with the darkest of possibilities whispered in those anthems of metal. My mind was as that of a child helplessly in love with his favourite cartoons, when something else comes along to challenge that love – and even if you can see some quality there – your true love speaks louder, and blinds you. Moreover, it deafens you. All this said, I can also admit that in my (assumed) seventeen years of sage wisdom, I was stupid as hell. Goddamn, if I could go back in time, I’d kick the shit out of myself. I did, and said, and presumed, and took to thinking, some pretty stupid shit way back then. And it does infuriate me, more’n just a tad, to realize how much I lost by being that way, for not knowing better. For thinking that I knew better, when all along all I knew was chicken shit.
But eventually, change came to me… slowly, very slowly at first, but I changed over time. And a huge catalyst for that change was my ex Dora. I guess I wrote a lot, probably much more than they ever deserved, about some of the girls I used to go out with, and then again I may have never wrote a line, or scarcely more than that, about Dora.
There are things in her, about her, that I have never seen in anyone else. She has the strength of a thousand men, and nothing can keep her down for too long. If anything, faced with difficulties she will only strengthen her resolve and find a way. She is someone – and this I greatly admire in everyone who possesses this quality – incapable of doing nothing, of just lounging around, lazing by, procrastinating. She’s always doing something, she is. But this is my vision of the girl with whom I spent eight long years of my life, or near enough as makes no difference. We split up a long time ago, and I’d like to think that she’s still like this, but then I no longer know her that well anymore. But what she also was when we lived together was someone who was capable of sudden mood swings, that went from the high – wherein she could wax lyrical about Agatha Christie, Queensryche, or Brazilian comics – to the low – where, sometimes, we’d be talking about something, anything, and suddenly she’d fall silent, and look at me, her eyes big and on the verge of tears, asking me questions that I couldn’t possibly answer, her despair deepening at my own silence, and I felt helpless beyond any and all hope : however much I wanted to help her, I couldn’t, I didn’t know how to. And just like that, snap! , it was back to normal all over again. But being with her, living with her, staying with her… it took me in unexpected directions, some bad, most of them good. A while ago, a thought crossed my mind that I never really had those small things you end up dreaming of, like spending lazy summer afternoons in the sun, letting them drift on to the evening, and watching the sun set with your loved one nearby, or coming home on one of those very summer afternoons after a day’s work, to find a fresh pitcher of lemonade in the fridge, waiting for you. This is – as usual – a typically selfish thought of mine. Of course I had all this; moreover, I had the chance to savour all this, and let it pass me by, time and time again.
But going back to the matter at hand, these years that we spent together – or some of them, at least – marked a period of definite growth in me. I realized that within a year or so of going out with her, my horizons had broadened considerably. Now and again, we’d spend a few hours sitting down somewhere discussing Hegel (of whom I knew little about) or spending equal amounts of time listening to the likes of Amorphis and Maiden, or L7 and The Black Crows. For every The Gathering, there was a Mr. Big, for every LaVey, there was a Poirot mystery to be solved. These things – small though they may seem – paved the way for my second attempt at ‘The Holy Bible’.
Sometime in 1997, I had started to listen to The Smiths, Depeche Mode and the likes again, after a few years away from them. It was a much needed fresh of breath air from the heavier sounds I’d been listening for the better part of a decade, and around that time – perhaps a bit earlier, I can’t say for sure – the radios and the TV were being invaded by the new wave of British pop music. To be sure, everywhere you went it was hard not to hear a song by Oasis or Blur. Some Suede and Pulp, even, or Shed 7 or Elastica. While I acknowledged this new sound that permeated the airwaves, it still didn’t mean that much to me. Not until a few months later, in the summer of ’98. It was the summer of the expo here in Lisbon, and my days couldn’t be more different than my nights, whether on a music or on a personal basis. I think I spent much of that summer in a constant state of inebriation, countless days I’d sleep maybe two, three hours before going to work only to do the same all over again. The nights, I’d spend with Tiago, nights spent in Alfama or Cais do Sodre, drinking as much as we could for no reason other than the hell of it, sometimes with Dora tagging along. Those nights, those legendary nights, were nights played to the soundtrack of Helloween (I can), Angra (Lisbon), Blind Guardian (Mirror Mirror), Hammerfall (Glory to the brave), and so many others… but the days, and especially the day when I worked with my supervisor Hugo – those were days filled with all the best that Britain had to give us. And sure, there were all those bands I mentioned above, but more as well. Healthy doses of Blondie, Madness, and Dexy’s Midnight Runners abounded. Quite likely, there was some Lush as well. Kenickie, for sure. I would never have enjoyed Kenickie quite as much – and this became eerily and quickly apparent soon thereafter – had I never been with Dora and listened to Bricks are heavy. And that’s when ‘The Holy Bible’ comes into my life again, when Hugo one day pops in the tape into the recorder, and ‘Yes’ comes along. Truth be told, it was kind of hard to pay attention – at least the attention it merited – whilst working, so all I did was give it a perfunctory listen, and I didn’t leave work that day without it inside my walkman. Oh yeah, baby. One of those big, clunky ones, when if you wanted to save precious battery, you’d stick a pen on one of the holes in the tape and wind it to your heart’s content, and your hand’s complaint.
In the days that followed, and whenever I was by myself, I listened to it intently, and only after a few listens I understood it, I understood what my stupid seventeen year old self could not have possibly grasped. But mostly, I saw how easy it actually is to misunderstand it. It’s all too easy to fall prey to the beauty of the songs, because it’s there, and it’s not ashamed to be there. But it takes a keen listening to realize that it’s an ugly beauty, harsh and raspy at the edges, and it threatened to consume and overcome you. It’s the beauty in the words of a man profoundly sad with the world we live in, with our fellow man, with the shallow values of modern life and society. It’s a beauty that you can only fully understand, and be aware of, after you experience heartache and loss and you finally come to see the world as it is, rather than what’s spoon fed to you by those who decide if we live or die. It’s the beauty in the duality of being something, only to be labeled wholly different thing (see, for example, the lyrics to ‘Faster’). It’s the beauty of words put into chords by hands that seem to foretell of the coming tragedy that would afflict the band. It’s the beauty of being uncompromising, standing up for what you believe in, even if you must etch into your own flesh, carving the very words of that belief. It’s all this, and so much more. And then, maybe it’s nothing like this at all. This is what is to me, to someone else, I don’t know. Maybe it’s something completely different to someone else.
All I know is that whatever it means, The Holy Bible, Richey, Britpop, the dirty and the dandy, the music and the words of those times… well, it marked a generation. Possibly not mine, though surely a number of my peers, but certainly the following. And all this is wonderfully told in words and pictures in the comic book series ‘Phonogram’. Comprising of two separate series, two different tales, but with the same backdrop and intent, Phonogram is not unlike a love letter to music in general (overall) but to britpop and the indie/alternative scene in particular – especially in the first volume, called ‘Rue Britannia’. The premise behind this? A quite simple one : that music is magic. But more than in the metaphoric sense here. In the world of Gillen and McKelvie, music is magic in a very real way – particularly for those who can really get in touch with it, and that, in turn can lead to spectacular or disastrous results. These music magic adepts call themselves ‘Phonomancers’, men and women with the power to make music come alive, to make music burst into light, or to curse the fools that cross them with a non-stop constant rendition of the whole of M People’s third album. In the first arc, we see the story through the vantage point of a phonomancer by the name of David Kohl, he of the midnight black attire, neat haircut and ‘existentialist poet’ glasses. His world is that of the ironically glitzy indie crowd, of the beautiful ones, of sex and drugs and cigarettes and alcohol. He makes his way amongst droves of black-clad men and women who live in nightclubs, shaking their bits to the hits. In his very own, and in a way I found somewhat detached, he does live a happy life. He knows his music, and what’s worse, the music – indeed, its spirit – knows him, and that’s where his troubles – his, hah, curse – truly begin. The first volume offers a thorough analysis on what it meant to be touched by the hand of their chosen deity – Pop Music. In the second volume, Kohl takes a backseat to the main event, and while he is an integral part of the story, it’s actually the story itself, and the storytelling invested in it, that outshine the very characters in it. The format is hardly original (sorry, Gillen and McKelvie!), and it reminded me of the format used by The League of Gentlemen in the third and final season of the show : one main story, with a number of ancillary, concurrent events all leading up to the inevitable climax. Art-wise, I liked the second series quite a bit more than the first. Initially, I thought that it was because the second series was actually in colour, but upon reading if a second time, I saw that there was a real evolution in McKelvie’s line. Originally, I found it oddly reminiscent of Jacen Burrow’s art, which is always good, but I also felt the potential for something more, and that’s just what the second series delivers. Pretty soon I’ll have to check out his Suburban Glamour, I think. And Kieron Gillen is fast becoming one of those writers that I’ll follow anywhere. Besides these two series, his Marvel work has been highly enjoyable too. His S.W.O.R.D. series was fun, but short-lived, and I’m really liking his Thor run. No mean feat, replacing JMS, and making the book your own straight away. But here, though, in these two series, it’s absolutely uncanny how much of what he writes and holds as true actually mirror my own thoughts. There are a number of threads used in ‘Phonogram’ that are akin to many that have been circling inside my head for well over ten years now, things that I intended to use in ‘One Nation’, but I am happy to see them used in a much better – and frankly, in a way that makes much more sense – than I’d have used them. I guess that the character of David Kohl must, partially at least, reflective of Gillen himself, and in both the writing and in Kohl, I see a lot of myself, and the life I used to lead a few years ago. There’s a scene in the first series where Kohl goes back to one of his abandoned, and previously regular, haunts that is very similar to something I went through myself, a few years ago. But not only that – there were times, always on the dance floor, where I felt, truly felt, that the music I was listening to was really magical. Maybe it was because of the ritual involved – the dancing, the moving, the shuffling of bodies and feet, the adrenalin, the energy, the sweat, the pent-up rage, the sex, the will to power inherent in all that… sometimes I saw lights that weren’t there, halos and wings of angels in the person who was dancing with me. Was that, as Queen would have us believe, a kind of magic? Oh yes, yes it was.

[So, there : in this wee post I managed to write about all that I set out to – comics, myself, and music. And therein lies the rub, you see? For what I am about to impart to you, my audience, my two faithful readers – you know who you are – is that for a long time now I have been feeling myself drifting away from the words… but not in their written form, no. Rather, with every passing day I feel myself wanting to speak less and less… and I fear that, given enough time, I’ll give up on speaking for good. But speaking… that’s only part of the problem, see? The long and short of it is that these past few years that part of me that once – so long ago, but it seems like it was only yesterday – was capable of the most loquacious of discourses and capable of such eloquent speeches as to raise the dead from their very graves has been slowly dying… Ok, yeah, I exaggerated a bit there, but I know that I was far more communicative and commander of a wider range of conversation-worthy subjects… I’m sure you’ll have noticed how withdrawn I have become, how strangely difficult it has becomes to wring a word out of me. Looking back at this neat little piece, it’s over four thousand five hundred words, right here. When was the last time I spoke more than a few words that were not about trivial things? Not much can be done, at least not for the moment, I’m afraid. I myself have been pondering a great deal about this, but oddly… I am not overly worried about this : for as long as I can write, then I can still say what I feel]