e-angels

There's a new Facebook 'app' that seems every bit as pointless as Farmville, Mafia Wars and the rest. I've been sent an 'angel', I've been invited to look at it and I'm being prompted to send it back to a Facebook chum.

I'm not going to do this. Though I see the attraction.

For many years I was a bit of an angel freak. I bought and read just about every angel book you could imagine and a few that you really couldn't make up. 'Dolphins, ETs and Angels' was a particularly wild one. Back in those days, I was heavily boned up on the subject. There wasn't a lot I didn't know about angels. And I still remember a lot of it today.

It's a broad and complicated subject because the very essence of the word has been subverted through the ages. The Christians did a good job of rather unrighteously recruiting angels to their own cause, and Renaissance artists did an even better one of blowing the image up into the archetypal handsome white dude with wings.

The last time I saw one, in the flesh as it were, it was neither a religious event nor a winged deity. It was a rich, glowing orb of indeterminable size and density - and it identified itself by putting on a little show of aerobatics. In my lounge.

With the benefit of 15 or so years hindsight, I am finally beginning to appreciate how lucky I was to have been shown such a phenomenon. So many people have reaped benefit from angelic visitations or communications but, as I'm slowly realising, not many people get to actually see them. Angels dressed in human form are rare enough (seen one of those too), but I got to see the whole lightshow. Something I will never forget, obviously.

I will stop banging on about it now. I am grateful for the experience and I have no doubt it had a great effect on my life at the time. I'll be honest - I really don't remember much about the years that immediately followed that event. It was a strange time for me. But what that incident, and the years of reading books on the subject, hammered home for me is that angels (whatever they are) do like to show themselves in mysterious ways.

Rather than appear as obvious orbs or winged creatures or mysterious strangers who save people from runaway trains, they are much more inclined to make their presence known through metaphor, acts of synchronicity, music, geometric patterns, works of art and frequently very, very clever puns. That sounds like a cop-out but it's not - because they soar above the mundane. If an angel is involved in something you see, hear or feel... by crikey you'll know about it.

Whether they come from within or without and whatever their purpose (and I think the guardian angel concept is a bit old hat to be honest with you - I see them as more like a companion species to us earthly types), when they seek attention, they get it. And having got that attention, they'll have a point to make. And it will be a good one.

So the appearance of that Facebook app, as benign as it may seem, might be pointing towards something a little more special. Let's see.

This note's for you.

The Garage in Highbury used to be one of my favourite London venues. I've seen some amazing gigs there: 60ft Dolls whipping it up for Christmas, British Sea Power ringing handbells and singing 'In The Bleak Midwinter' for New Year's Eve, Rocket From The Crypt absolutely decimating my expectations of rock'n'roll, and Jesus Lizard - complete with David Yow walking on the ceiling. Yes. That's walking on the ceiling.

So when the place closed down with a leaky roof I was gutted. And when it reopened I was pleased. Until, that is, I saw its new name.

The Relentless Garage is not the same animal that it was, because - and only because - it has a new forename. It shouldn't make a difference. What's in a name, eh? But it does. It makes a hell of a difference because product sponsorship and endorsements do not belong in music. That should be rule one. The Hammersmith Odeon is a magical place but its sheen was tarnished by the addition of first Carling and then HMV to its monicker. And who was the bright spark who changed Odeon to Apollo? Bring me his head. Same goes for the O2 Islington Academy. OK, so it was pushing things a bit to call it The Marquee Club. But now it is a rough venue made rougher through sponsorship.

I have no colossal objection to product endorsement per se. I realise it's a necessary animal. But I am very uneasy about the motives of these corporations. Why would they want to buy into a place where people have a drink, have a dance and watch a band? What business is it of theirs? Is it true that Carling kicked Guinness out of the public bars at Reading and Leeds festivals? On what level do these characterless companies expect their sponsorship to work? I do not - and will not - drink Relentless. I will drink other energy drinks. I do not - and will not - use an O2 mobile 'phone. I will use another mobile provider. I do not - and will not - drink Carling. I will drink other lagers. I do not - and will not - shop in HMV. I will use other record shops.

Music is best when it's spontaneous, dangerous and irreverent. When you allow outside forces in, it goes wrong - it opens a door that should remain shut. The bitter comes out better on a stolen guitar.

You know that TV ad where the kid uses 'unlimited texts' on his large corporate mobile 'phone provider to get his band together? Have you seen the follow-up ad where he smarmily hooks up with acoustic guitar-toting strangers with NUS cards sticking out of their back pockets - on Myspace? That's what you get when you allow business into music. You get people who shouldn't make music, making music. Aided by people who should leave music well alone. Because they don't understand it. It dilutes the pool.

Relentless. Indeed.

Future Preface

When my publisher, Beckhurst and Ward, asked me to get my teeth into an anthology of my early and unpublished work, I was retiscent to say the very least.

I've worked my way through a good number of this kind of collection before and, to a man, they've always been a bit on the disappointing side. Publisher and reader alike harbour the same impossible dream: a deeper insight into their author's psyche through the examination of his/her obscurer bits and pieces. But it doesn't often work like that. (Oh, of course the publishers also want to make a few quid* on the side.)

For one thing, my earlier stuff really isn't all that good - as you're about to find out. Sorry! Included in this collection are a number of blogs written for my "Letters from Claptonia" project, back in the good old days of the Internet. Sometimes I miss the separation of being able to sit down at a computer and write these things. But times change. Certain essays, such as the eulogies to my father, are worth keeping, for sure. But my clumsy attempts at fiction seem listless and pale compared to later efforts.

At least, looking back through these things (the whole collection is available to view at OLMIS - the Old London Museum of Internet Studies - by the way), it is clear that I did have a grip on what lay around the corner for us humans in terms of mind-melds. I was picking symbolism, synchronicity and metaphor apart for a bloody past-time. And this, dear friends, was pre-2012.

I am indebted to Simon Badgee and Phil Tayling of the Bardboys i-group for their contribution of old print journalism that I had mercifully forgotten about. Where these two herberts found this stuff, I hate to think. I long since gave up hoarding my clippings. Some of these are too terrible to share, but I still stand by my review of the dreadful Huggy Bear and my lambasting of some of the lamer music acts of the late 1990s. The news journalism, from my very early days as a scribbler, is not up to much at all. Though from a historical perspective my coverage of the Newport Siege is maybe worth dipping into at least once.

Towards the end of this anthology is a short story entitled 'Flappy' which might ring some bells with readers already familiar with my best-known novels, 'I Saw A Bird' and 'Pie-Eater' (published 2042 and 2043 respectively). To call 'Flappy' a prototype is perhaps over-stretching things, but I certainly kept some of the themes and characters explored in that original story. Though the name and description of the news editor character in 'I Saw A Bird' is rather different to "Waldo" in 'Flappy', it's not that difficult to see that both are based on the same seedy culprit.

I suppose this collection has one or two alright-ish bits. It has a fair sprinkling of stinkers and a few unforgivable warts but way back then - like everybody - I wasn't expecting to live forever.

This is not a summing up, by the way. It's not a curtain call. A new novel is under construction and according to my i-physician I have a good few years in me yet.

This book is dedicated, as usual, to all of the cats in the old place.

Enjoy. And thanks for all the cheese.

Andrew J Barding, New Chicago April 2056.

* Quid. Slang for £s. The currency of the former United Kingdom.

Relics

My friend Neil took me to the pictures on Saturday afternoon. The main feature was less than three minutes long and in 'a seriously poor condition', according to the British Film Institute fact sheet. Tempting?

Cued up for the silver screen was a missing (presumed wiped) clip from a July 1967 "Top of the Pops" show. The BBC had long since junked this programme - along with many others from its archive - but this off-air recording had festered for nearly 43 years in the collection of an unspecified 'eminent rock musician'.

The clip was on one-inch video tape, an abandoned format, and in a deeply sorry state. Technicians at the BFI's lab in Berkhamstead struggled to transfer what footage they could as the fragile reel shedded its dusty oxide with each rotation. Their painstaking project was archaeology in action.

Pints in hand, Neil and I settled in our plush black cinema seats and waited. Our fact sheets warned: "The picture quality is poor and sometimes non-existent. The picture rolls and sometimes disappears altogether, the sound fades in and out and rolls when the picture does. Virtually not one single minute was unscathed and yet... and yet...."

The BFI's Dick Fiddy was similarly pragmatic as he took the stage for his introduction. "The best way to watch this," he suggested, "is to imagine that we've discovered an amazing machine that gives us a tiny peephole through time."

We leaned forward as the lights dimmed. At once, a beaming Alan Freeman filled the screen, beseeching pop pickers to welcome that week's number three hit parade disc - from Pink Floyd.

The picture flickered, the sound dropped out, then Syd Barrett's face broke suddenly through a digital dropout to sing the opening line to 'See Emily Play'. After a few seconds, the music stopped. It rolled monstrously to a slowed-down growl, like a terrible death machine going into spasm. There was another flash of rolling picture, a drumkit, a flash of guitar, then a small explosive pop followed by a monochrome snowscreen. A flatline hiss roared through the speakers and we stared through the dots on the blank screen, willing the image to return. Another 30 seconds of black and white clarity followed and we once more saw Syd, resplendent in a tailored psychedelic jacket, sweating from the cheeks downwards: his chin glistening across a 20-foot screen. His eyes seemed full of excitement, nerves and worry. He looked, to borrow a 1990s vernacular, 4REAL. The BBC cameras turned to Roger Waters, his hair cropped savagely short, like a pageboy in blue velvet at a David Lynch wedding. He looked sinister and distant; uncomfortably numb.

By pop TV standards, this had to be special. These creatures were surely sent from space. Unlike the (actually very good) Turtles clip that followed it, this was more than kitsch 1960s nostalgia. Pink Floyd had re-emerged through this digital blackout like resurrected monsters from a different time and planet. They had come back for us. It was like that scene in Quatermass and the Pit, when the scientists in the Hobbs End tube station get their first view of the locusts from Mars...

It was a thrilling, voyeuristic, exhilirating experience, and Neil and I went off to drink wine and talk about it. Did the tape damage add to the experience? Did it make this clip more of a relic than it was? Is it just funny old telly? Or were Pink Floyd in 1967 really something to get excited about?

Perhaps a little of all these things. We had born witness to an extraordinary performance. And as we battled through the ice and arctic winds that whipped through the South Bank, we agreed that the archiving of pop culture by the BFI had to be a good thing. Pop culture has finally become more culture than pop.

The Michael Collins Syndrome

You don't have to fly especially high to become detached from humanity. Try climbing a tall building and looking down. A couple floors up, the once easily discernable facial features of your fellow humans will begin to blur. Their faces might turn into indiscriminate blobs. Climb the equivalent of another storey or two and you will no longer be able to hear their voices. From a very tall building, you might not pick out individual cars. The hum of the city might start to drift away.

When taking off in an airliner, the process is speeded up. Within seconds, the world will have fallen away to such a degree that you might have a job to identify even major landmarks and cityscapes. It will seem like you have entered another world - even though you know it is the same place.

From his capsule, Michael Collins would have been able to watch the lunar module descend to the surface of the moon. But Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin might just as easily have been a whole galaxy away. Similarly, the shimmering blue planet Earth must have borne scant relevance to the voices on the radio from Houston.

And the same must go for time. A distance of a few years might not make a whole load of difference to your worldview, but look back over a decade and see what happens. Consider a lifetime before your own and you're suddenly staring into an abyss - a great unknown, full of mystery and educated guesswork.

It would be wonderful to see through time. And, just as telescopes and microscopes allow us a peek into different spatial dimensions, maybe one day we will be able to do just that. In the meantime, all we can do is follow the vague treasure map that history has left us.

Knee jerk

I have a terrible affliction. Sometimes my legs simply cease to function. When in the throes of an attack, the muscles may still be tensed but the limbs themselves are immovable dead weight. With superhuman effort, I can occasionally latch the palms of my hands onto the top of a knee, give it a good tug, and somehow swivel my body forward a foot or so. But apart from that, I am completely paralysed. I find myself welded to the spot, knees bent like an athlete at the starting blocks, unable to beat the gravity that ties me to my place. Try as I might, I cannot push forward.

It becomes particularly tough when I try to run. All the energy I expend in trying to make that first step seems to anchor me to the ground with even more force. My body is tensed and going nowhere. It's a nasty, debilitating condition that has afflicted me for years. And there is no cure.

It would be hugely depressing, except none of the above is true. Or to be more precise, none of this affects my waking life. But it happens a lot in my dreams - and has done over many years. It became so realistic that for a long time I was actually convinced that I had such a condition in my waking life. Rather than just being the stuff of dreams, I would go about my daily business convinced that at any random moment I could be stricken once more.

Last night I had another dream in which my legs refused to work. This time, however, I came prepared with the subconscious wisdom that this kind of thing only happens to me when I dream. A man came to my assistance as I lay immobile on soft, black tarmac near a junction, unable to walk to the pavement next to me. I was almost there - but needed his help to make that last physical step.

I said to my dream rescuer: "I used to think this kind of thing happened in real life, you know. Then I came to realise that it only happened in my dreams."

He looked at me quizzically and I thought about it a little more. "But now I can see that it DOES happen in real life too, right?"

He nodded his agreement and helped me limp to the path. Some time after that, I woke up. Confused.

Iggy's Bogies

I've always loved Iggy Pop. I don't think I could ever really trust anybody who doesn't. So when an opportunity rose to meet the man himself some 18 or 19 years ago, I took it.

Iggy was charming and warm. A little fella with a big heart. And though my meeting with him was brief, it was sweet and memorable. I had my photograph taken with him and I got him to sign my copy of his then-current LP, "Brick By Brick".

The picture from that meeting remains a great personal favourite. My friends Pete and Alison are in the snap, and Iggy has his arms draped over our shoulders. He is half scowling, half beaming in a fashion that is entirely his. He looks so cool - and we don't look too bad either. My LP cover was signed 'To Andy, Iggy Pop x' and featured a little drawing of a face and curly bogies drooping from each of Iggy's nostrils on the back cover photograph. An Osterberg embellishment in dazzling blue ink.

It looked cool enough to hang, so shortly after I got it home I put it in a frame and stuck it on a wall close to the large bay window in my lounge. Pride of place.

The summer of 1991 came and went, and all the while my treasured Iggy autograph shone proudly from my wall. A friend came to visit one day and sauntered over for a look. "Hey, why have you got this Iggy Pop LP in a frame on your wall?" he asked.

"Oh, that's been signed by Iggy. Check out the bogies! He added them himself."

"What bogies? What autograph?"

I raced to Iggy's wall. My friend was right. This was an Iggy Pop LP sleeve with nothing special on it. At all. All trace of signature and hand-daubed bogie squiggle had vanished. The sunlight had bleached the watery ink into a big pile of nothingness. Not a trace of Iggy's customisation remained.

Sadly, I took the frame from the wall and removed the Iggy sleeve. I put it back in the record rack where it now belonged - it was just another LP cover once more. I found something else to hang on the wall in its place. Something less special.

Fast forward a few years to the 'American Caesar' album. Not a bad record at all. 'Wild America', a mid-90s blues/punk rant against the red, white an' blue is an Iggy classic for sure. I got it on release day and devoured the copious sleeve notes as I played it. On the first page was the facsimile of a hand-written note from Iggy himself. It said something like: "I am not a rock star, I am a human being like you. If you want to write to me, feel free. Here is my address. If you write to me, I will reply."

So I put my little story down on paper. I kept it respectfully brief, but told Iggy how I once had his autograph, how it was blasted into a vacuum by sunlight, how I hoped to meet him again one day. I wished him well for the future and thanked him for the music, I put the envelope in the post to the States and forgot all about it.

A good few years later, an A4 card-backed envelope dropped onto my doormat. It had a New York City postmark. So much time had passed, but when I opened the flap and pulled out the 8x10" black and white promo photo of Iggy Pop I knew instantly what it was about. Iggy had signed it "To Andy, Iggy Pop x" and had drawn a little face. And from each nostril drooped a curly hand-drawn bogie... in permanent black ink.