Margate October 2020.
For those of you arriving late to the party.
Simon Mason’s memoir, Too High Too Far Too Soon, was first published in 2013 (Mainstream) and concerns itself with the life and numerous, near- death experiences of its author.
From a tatty seaside town, childhood tragedy and sexual abuse, running away to London and then the crack-saturated streets of 80’s Los Angeles, Glastonbury festivals, touring with Oasis as they swaggered towards the era-defining concerts at Knebworth.
The drugs, the savage addiction, homelessness, overdoses, violence, and despair on the same industrial level as the substances.
‘A remarkable memoir’ Evening Standard
‘Nothing’s more boring than a drugs memoir. Not this one though…’ – Irvine Welsh
‘A touching and humorous book’ Russell Brand
‘Simon Mason was the rock ’n’ roll doctor — Alan McGee
‘Simon Mason may have been a crappy junkie, a drug-dealing chancer, but when his writing flows and you are honking out of pure revulsion, then you see he always had the talent he needed. He was just looking in the wrong place. Here is a born teller of tales, who in between the highs and lies, gets you in the gut, leaving you with belly laughs and hope’ — Suzanne Moore (Guardian)
Redemption, yes there is a happy ending and now at 14 years clean/sober there are more stories to tell, albeit with less blood, dirty needles, and puke. Perhaps it is the review by Suzanne Moore that inadvertently points at what was to come next, for throughout the authors life, before the drugs there was another constant, music.
As I sit here writing, at the start of another attempt to tell a story that may, or may not resonate beyond a handful of people close to me, those of us who have attempted to bring ‘art’ of one kind or another into the world are being told by the people in power, that due to the current global pandemic, ‘we’ may need to reconsider our ‘careers’. Retrain, find other ways to survive because what ‘we’ do is not important enough to those ‘we’ have elected to govern our lives, to warrant enough support to keep the ‘arts’ alive.
Music? It’s hardly a matter of life and death is it?
Chapter two.
90 MINUTES THAT SHOOK THE WORLD.
A tear falls from the pallid, distraught face of the boy, onto the badge of his school blazer.
‘Christus Regnet’ Let Christ reign.
No.
He stands in the deserted playground, seconds earlier having been deposited there by a friend of the family who’d kindly driven him back to the red-brick institution, haunted by the ghosts of the past and beasts of today. School, 130 miles from the safety of home, a home still echoing with the untrammeled sobbing of those who remained therein, a week after the sudden death of the hero of the house. A hero, not just to that house, but every house, for the pilots who flew to defend our island, had also saved the multitudes as well. He wasn’t just my hero; he was yours too. Those brave boys, who shared their finest hour while many were not very much older than that kid standing, abject and defeated in the playground.
He walked as bravely as his daddy would have wanted him to, bag slung over shoulder, head up, back straight and no longer trembling, you can’t show emotions here, the beasts will destroy you. Through the red door, it’s quiet aside from muffled noises in the kitchens, a radio is discernible, Dave Lee Travis, it’s time for ‘our song’. Except of course it isn’t, is it?
IT’S NOT MINE.
He wipes his face, DO NOT CRY, DO NOT CRY, DO NOT CRY.
An older boy, a prefect suddenly barrels round the corner and clatters into the kid,
“Oh, you’re back Mason, where have you been you skiving bastard?”
He slaps me hard, on the back of the head.
DON’T CRY, DON’T CRY, DON’T CRY.
BBC Radio 1 is broadcasting to the nation, trying to make them do exactly that with ‘our song’.
But it’s not mine is it? I’m 11, not old enough to have memories of a romance long gone and there is no song in existence that could adequately express the grief consuming me as I run away from the bully and up the stairs to the dormitory.
My bed is in the corner against a wall covered in pictures of Liverpool players, King Kenny, majestic, Souness, hard as nails, Hansen, Kennedy et al, all conquering, but suddenly, meaningless, and unable to help. We might beat Spurs 75-0 this Saturday, but it won’t matter now, nothing means anything anymore.
I unpack my bag, clothes, trainers, crisps and this week’s edition of Shoot are scattered onto my bed as I perch on the end without the slightest clue as to what to do now. Will any of the teachers know what I’m supposed to do now? I doubt it, they all seem to hate being here as much as I do and seem so angry and desperate to hit us for the slightest reason, well, most of them do.
So, I cry, there’s another 40 minutes before end of school and the rest of the boys come back to the dorm, that’s 38 minutes of crying and then 2 minutes to somehow try and look like you’ve not been doing so. My body stops shaking at 3.25, the rest of the occupants of room F16 enter a few minutes later.
“Hello, we’re really sorry about your dad.”
“Thanks.”
What else can five, uncomprehending 11-year-old boys say?
I cry myself to sleep as quietly as possible every night for the remainder of the week, re-reading the last letter my dad had written to me before he.
The weekend arrives, an abyss that cannot be avoided any more than the compulsory church service on Sunday where we will be reminded how ‘great’ god is.
Fuck god, I believe in King Kenny Dalglish, he’s got more to offer me right now.
Liverpool beat Spurs 2-0, it doesn’t seem to matter though, although I pretended to be happy as it seems to make the bullies less likely to want to hit me, I don’t know why, but it did. McDermott scored twice for the reds, I was slapped in the face twice by a sixth former, just another week really, normal service had been resumed if you don’t include my daddy dying.
I needed Liverpool to win; there was nothing else on the horizon to look forward to each week.
Yeah, I’m a glory-hunter and you can fuck off now if you got a problem with that, I NEEDED something to look forward to each week.
Those 90 minutes on a Saturday when the red machine almost guaranteed me something to be happy about as we congregated in the common room to watch final score.
90 minutes that meant nothing and everything, it was only the result that mattered to me because I wasn’t able to watch it happen, as it happened? My daddy had promised to take me one day but now?
90 minutes?
An abstract event that occurred somewhere in England every Saturday afternoon while I was pretending to be ok at boarding school. Tosh supported Liverpool too, nobody took the piss out of him though ‘cos he was from there and he’d been to see them play. Tosh and his mate, Adams were my heroes, they didn’t know it, but they were. They were in the 6th form and I looked up to them because they were nice to me and didn’t bully me or the other kids like many did. Like the people in charge of the school did.
Double-math’s lasted 90 minutes, as did the after-school study period. 90 minutes where nothing happened, nothing I was interested in. I sat at the back of the classroom for my entire education; I’d lost interest in anything the teachers had to say after being regularly sexually abused by the headmaster. The rest of ‘them’ all knew, they did nothing,
Cunts, the lot of them.
A few months after my dad died, Tosh gave me something that would change my life, I’d go as far as to say, possibly saved my life. A cassette, a TDK C90 cassette with the word ‘compilation’ written down the side.
90 minutes? A lot can happen in 90 minutes!
The Jam, The Clash, Joy Division, The Who, Buzzcocks, Echo and The Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes, The Specials, The Ruts and The Sex Pistols.
All taped off the radio no less!
I now know, after many years of trying to, that you can’t ‘fill’ that (w)hole in the soul.
A second-rate, shabby, brutal education was never going to help me in the slightest. That cassette, that 90 minutes of glorious revelation, put out into the world by the late John Peel, eagerly recorded by kids like Tosh each night, went some way to soothing my shattered existence. When I had no words to express my feelings, I had that cassette, then I had 7” singles and LP’s and when I was almost 13, I had The Jam, live in concert at Stafford Bingley Hall. I had posters to cover the institutional drabness of my room at school, I was inspired to read books they never told me about at school; I got an education, I had something that made sense.
My mum’s cousin took me to watch the reds for the first time a few months after my dad died, we lost 1-0 to Coventry City, it didn’t seem to matter, I’d found my tribe and the soundtrack to accompany me on that journey.
“We had dreams and songs to sing”
We most certainly did, often somebody else’s songs, but also, for those of us who dreamt certain dreams, we might one day, also have our own.
Glastonbury 1995.
Jarvis Cocker pulls a piece of paper from his pocket, his band Pulp have one more song to play as they come to the end of their headline set in front of the multitudes.
They shouldn’t really be here for several reasons, firstly because the intended headline act that night was supposed to be The Stone Roses who if truth be told probably didn’t want to be there given the internal issues within the band, clouding the long awaited and ‘definitely not as good as their first album’ The Second Coming, which had taken a critical kicking from even the most dewy eyed music journalists at the time. John Harris’s NME review went in feet first with his review at the time leading with ‘Are you ready to be heartbroken?’ before going on to say.
“Anything other than a stone-cold classic that sounded like it had been beamed in from another plane was going to be a jarring anti-climax. ‘Second Coming’ is exactly that.”
So yeah, the fact that ‘Roses Guitarist John Squire broke his collarbone thus preventing him and the rest of his band performing Breaking into Heaven and the rest of the songs from their new album, ironically gave “A lanky ‘git” from Sheffield and his own band of mis-shapes and outsiders the opportunity to break themselves into the big time in front of 100,000 people on Glastonbury’s main stage.
Jarvis reads from his crumpled piece of paper, his thoughts being, that the reason he and his band are currently where they are is due to the fact that they wanted it to happen.
“So if you want something to happen enough, then it actually will happen and I believe that, in fact that’s why we’re stood on this stage after 15 years, because we wanted it to happen, know what I mean? So, if a ‘lanky git like me and us lot can do it, so can you, this is our last song, Common People”
I don’t know about you, but I consider that moment to be the real highwater mark of the ‘thing’ called Britpop. Yes the two nights at Knebworth that Oasis did may have broken more records in terms of ticket demand and numbers, but surely, the fact that perennial outsiders, Pulp, who on paper really had no ‘right’ to be headlining Glastonbury, was actually a more fitting moment to celebrate the idea that British music was deserving of the plaudits being thrown around in similar numbers to the drinks being drunk, the powders being sniffed and the pills being popped by so many people at that time.
Talking of which.
I was of course, side of stage to witness Pulp and the 100,000 (common) people sing along with them as they closed the show that night.
Did Jarvis’s words make any sense to me, did his unbridled and passionate belief that ‘believing’ was enough to make remarkable things happen, stir me into also believing in something of real meaning?
Not a bit of it.
I was out of my tiny mind on booze, powders (light and dark) and a handful of pills, dribbling into the cleavage of the manager of indie-could have been’s Tiny Monroe, more concerned with where I might be able to inject some heroin in preparation for a big night out (of my mind) and whether or not, the Manchester City Frisbee team were going to pay me for all the bits and pieces I’d laid onto them earlier.
And anyway, who the fuck would persevere with a musical dream for more than a few years if everything you’d recorded was pretty much ignored by the entire world.
You’d have to be mental to bother with all that right?
I slid off the (not very tiny at all) chest of my manger friend and went and had a hit.
I never saw the ‘frisbee team again either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwrXAxcy1X0
Simon Mason 