122 Hours of Fear / Out on an Island
My piece in Layla's new zine about the show-going experience
Today I’m sharing a pErSoNaL eSsaY written for the stunning jumbo publication recently produced by one of my favourite writers, pre-eminent enquiring mind, dear old friend, undoubtedly the biggest enabler and influence on my own writing, the uniquely great person Layla Gibbon.
This is 122 Hours of Fear - A Zine about the Show Going Experience.
The universal punk stoppage of March 2020 hit those of us who’d been reflexively marking the passing of our lives against what gigs we saw or played that year with a certain specific mental whiplash. What did it all add up to, in the end? The idea for the zine was born in defiance of the ephemeral nature of the flood of instastory nostalgiaposting we all indulged in to dull (or indulge?) this ache. I was lucky enough to be privy to the progress of Layla’s meticulous and sprawling project as it unfolded over more than year, and the result is nothing less than what you would expect: A masterpiece.
122HOF is a beautiful, dense and consuming tome and still a zine not a book, poser. Our dear editor has connected with all the most interesting prolific psycho mafia of the last thirty years of the international do-it-yourself underground and most of them are in here. There are extended screeds, text screenshots, literal back of envelope stories, and many special and previously unpublished gig photos. It’s a wild honour to be among them.
For sheer narrative perfection, my personal favourites include Sam Ryser’s account of playing a Slovenian jungle bunker with Dawn of Humans and Jolie’s story of seeing Daddy Yankee at Coney Island while tripping on acid (which made me cry) but I also loved the ones about hiding in a bin to sneak into a Rolling Stones show in Chile and finding a wristband in NYC to a Prince private gig, and every coming of age story where the author lovingly blushes at their teen trespasses, an impulse the same whether the writer was a teen in 1983 or 2013.
My piece is less funny than most, but I spent a long time trying to capture the emotional headiness of our tentative return to Big Shows, of seeing Nekra play at Damage is Done Festival, of dipping back into a scene I’ve always had complicated feelings about my place in, and my eternal love for the broken city I’d flounced out of in total spiritual defeat almost a year prior, alone and afraid. In the end, that night felt like redemption.
The second press of the zine is already out and you must buy immediately (not sure about EU/UK stockists yet) My piece was untitled at the time but given the perfect title by LG - Out On An Island. Here it is with some random photos from my ‘chive.
Hardcore Girl Summer is Forever,
BB XO
Out on an Island
Nekra, Damage is Done Festival, November 2021
We’ve all been away, I tell myself outside this cursed pub, but I’ve been real gone. Capital A-away. A tourist in my old city tonight, I’m anxious to present the wabi-sabi self I’ve rebuilt painstakingly as living testament to ….something? The spoils of exile? Mastering mental illness? Being Fine Now? I’d spent the day floating between Peckham and New Cross in a fit of sensory re-experiencing, getting bright pink nails on Rye Lane (acetone and fried plantain) and meeting everyone in Wetherspoons (disinfectant, dads and fags, even though you’ve not been allowed to smoke in there since 2007.) Crumpled in-house magazines on each table spout the corporate line about the trading benefits of Brexit. I’m back in cartoon country, ready to submit to ecstatic nostalgia for the most punishing experiences in the only way I really know how. Saturday Night. Hardcore.
Big crowds always align to test me like a bad joke so of course crossing the threshold the very first person I see is my ex. The end of our shared life and the onset of a global pandemic came six weeks apart and our decade of worldbuilding feels like a biblical parable now. (As in: probably did happen but not like it gets remembered, final judgements, avoidable suffering, could divine some timeless moral lesson from it all if I really concentrated &c.) I’m tickled to be reunited here in this pub we both deeply hated, but cracking open the dusty vault of shared preferences to make a joke of that feels unimaginably gauche. Don’t speak the old language. As I opt instead to hug out his panicked expression and mouth “cool hair!” into this crop of strange ringlets, I’m hit with an exact fifty-fifty mix of warped pride and familiar irritation that he’s the only person in this room of several hundred who is wearing a face mask. He says from behind it “Nobody recognises me!” and I volley back “Me neither!” which is not true. We’re so cute competing to be the most changed. This five-word poem has no time to be sullied by any further small talk before freed into a merciful hail of feedback as the Annihilated take the stage.
*
The Pub Gig is that most traditionally English grudge amphitheatre, so losing access to the who’s-who shit talk frequencies in here feels like losing one of your senses. Or being on tour. I survey this new social orbit thronging with kids I’ve never met or seen before plus a smattering of old heads. My mind has kindly redacted who hated me and why, the smoke of aged beef fading into history. It’s a message board Bayeux tapestry. At ease in this rushy novelty of rocker communion that we once feared lost, most trespasses can be forgiven if not forgotten. The unforgiveable can stay memory-holed if I hug my long-losts tight enough. I clench as I pass the guy who I know did that thing I will never tell of because she asked me not to, or another wrote that song with the line about how I needed a firework shoved up my cunt. It strikes me that times have indeed changed for a second, then I spy another couple ‘never tells’ and can only zone them out with a little prayer to my insides that they know better now and that if not, girls talk.
Observing the garish pit fits tonight, selective gaussian blurred gen-Z remixes from the long 90s they were born in, I remember how fraught the show outfit selection felt when I was fresh and young. The nagging notion that your choice of shirt had to say it all just to justify your presence was both internal and imprinted. I’ve chosen to wear a see-through dress and running shoes to this gig, a semi-sheer ruched situation printed with a purple oil spill pattern, and realise that going anywhere wearing this would have been the stuff of anxiety nightmares not so long ago. In a flood I recall how sixteen years ago friend gave me sartorial advice as we walked to some emo violence event in Brighton. This was around the time you could start getting skinny jeans in normal shops, except if you were fat (which I am) so I sewed the bootcut bit in on itself which gave my calves my appearance of a person suffering from the advanced stages of gout. She said, with genuine care, that if you’re going to wear a skirt to the gig it’s best to balance it out with a badge to demonstrate that you do actually know about music. Hers said DS-13. Flash forward to the Camden Underworld, and that XgothX with the sleek bob who was really good at windmilling. She’s floating her totally serious concept in development that, as a band shirt definitely wasn’t enough to prove it, a card at the door of the gig which girls could flash to prove they weren’t there to suck dick should be implemented. Holding me up against the toilet door at the 12Bar a girl who was herself habitually slut-shamed into spiritual oblivion spat at me “you’re a dyke with a dyke’s haircut!” The terror of policing each other like this leaves a mark in our hearts and we should not lie about how much of it we learnt it from each other. Still, I was sixteen when a much older man who loved Bane saw my homemade badge and barked at me in contempt “Name Five Black Flag Songs.” My first interrogation dance. Hardcore girls over thirty have access to the nuclear codes a.k.a our memories, and we cannot so easily cleanse these vignettes or what they add up to, much less the deeper cruelties and betrayals that took on a life of their own. There may be no Nuremberg for Bridge9 &c. but the sheer moral whiplash of these times against those surely justifies an occasional “remember when.” I forgive the once-and-forever teen girl in my head, who buzzing with spite, went home and, with some difficulty, found the track list for Family Man on Ask Jeeves.
As a fog of well-dressed angels scurry up towards the stage while Nekra sets up, I wonder about their fears, the shape of the mind cops infecting their spirits today. Overstating progress helps no bitch. They are all beaming with taut skin and tomorrow energy and as the maelstrom begins, I realise something has profoundly shifted. It’s not just the hard fact of girls pitting at such scale which is so novel and unprecedented here, although that’s part of it. A single organism writhing. Chaos unity. The pit, after all, is a spiral. I came here to swim in the thick juice of my old days but I’m guzzling on the newness letting my eyes fill with tears. I’m trying to transmit the message to every beloved in the room who went through what I did and more just to be like are you seeing this but there’s no need. I watch them watching. Crying too. Spooky speaks slowly and deliberately now, focusing our rage-reverie with words to the effect of, yes, this is progress, but we are still the only band that’s all women on the line-up for this whole festival, and we still don’t feel safe walking down the street. A nod to the murders of this year comes. Alex executes a juddering breakdown with her nails, as always, sharpen to a perfect point. The refrain is She was quiet but that’s still violence. It was silent but that’s still violence.
I was last here back in March moving the last of my possessions out of the country. That week all the lampposts crinkled with the same A4 sheet. Officers are investigating a disappearance. The night they found her body I sat in my car scrolling for a long time. What caught in my throat was the predictable loop of disclosure, the inevitability of the expressions of daily fear and its impact, how we became so stuck in the debasing logic that if we put enough of our pain on the public scale each time this happens it this will somehow force a rebalancing. I cursed both this cycle of mandatory social media vulnerability and the dark root of my powerful desire to join in on it. I was trying to pinpoint how long into working with and against violence I had come to question what I once believed about the power of story-telling. I heaved dry tearless sobs and felt the emptiest I had felt in a long time. I knew that woman would be dead, of course. What I did not know just yet, because it took a day or so to leak, was that a serving police officer had used lockdown measures as a precursor to get her into his car before raping and strangling her. The vigil for her had been subject to a high court injunction ruling it illegal during lockdown. There was no question of staying home. And so I was there when the flowers went flying. The cops stormed the bandstand. Hot red candle wax spat across their boots. There were hundreds of us gathered under an unusually deep March sunset. It faded to black at the precise second they trampled lines of bouquets, pulling mourners to the earth. Hardcore is the only sound to give appropriate form to the level of disgust I felt that day. Sometimes you forget what you need to hear and then you remember. We come alive again.
Well, some of us do.
When it’s done, Kai packs away her bass saying quietly ‘yeah, yeah. Wow, that was ...special.’ I’m overcome with love for the dancers and the bands they will make. No more grief. Gaggles of my gen surround me grinning wordless as we disperse, some with tears, I know I know I know babe. We’re floppy seals desperate to bottle it all and bask in each other. Tonight my regular rhetorical for these moments on what our horizon might have looked like with this model to follow generates only collective possibility. I see the girl who was going completely nuts in a faded DNA shirt and ask her if she is in a band. She looks at me with her head cocked to one side, just as one might when confronted by an ancient alien, and says ‘Oh, I make noise music.’
Old wounds are soothed by one hundred daquiris. I pirouette through time, obliterated and warm. I restrain my loose-lipped urged to tell many a former straight edge soldier how fun it is to buy them pints. Demob happy. I’m a perfect crystal statuette full of pink crushed ice. I’m the most beautiful woman to ever poo here. Accepting that I’m a visitor to this satellite of planet mosh, where progress may be glacial but the tipping icebergs are at least ours, it feels like walking past a house I used to live in and being invited in for a cuppa. You still love the old corners but no need to empty the bins anymore. Soothed by a truth: You don’t leave hardcore until it leaves you.
Later we’re accosted by a pissed-up local geezer who, having (not that inaccurately) read the room, wants to talk to us about Cocksparrer. He confirms he’s very much Millwall which increases by a small but not insignificant amount the possibility of hearing some …unsavoury views. The Special Branch banner Eddie and Andy painted and brought with them from Dublin says “No Amnesty for Bloodthirsty Squaddies” so he christens our mate The Squaddie, but not to his face just to hedge his bets. Squaddie’s eyes widen in confusion at this bird in the purple dress crooning ‘Out on An Island’ who’s being like mate mate mate do you like Blitz do you like Blitz do you like Blitz do you like Blitz—suddenly I’m the one doing the interrogation. Only semi-aware I’m already on thin punisher ice I reel out my monologue about the transcendental beauty of New Age, reliably my favourite song (by men.) The Squaddie becomes emotionally present for a second then he disappears, bobbing away on the soft sea of joy-joy and lime juice we’re all dunked in, just for as long as we can forget we shouldn’t even be here, breathing on each other.
I wake up in my clothes on the wrong side of the river in a ex-Council flat I don’t recognise and leave before I can find out where I am. I proffer an old canula to the city’s clogged arteries and let it run through me, watching myself in surprise as mental maps long folded come out, so much useless data on bus connections. The quickest route through this station still lives in my legs even as they buckle a bit from curdled rum. London knowledge.
How long do you keep score? I read a developer’s name on a hoarding and it takes me back to a portfolio of lost fights and homes blown to smithereens. I notice they’ve even begun to demolish the buildings that they demolished so many of our squats to build. Ghosts of ghosts point at each other. Lost in the layers, I grimace against the weak sun and the bleak familiarity in pointing my hatred at the skyline, surprised again as my brain spits out the names of the local councillors that voted in the wrecking ball, which of them took consulting jobs at the same developers. To live in London is to love something that is dead, and comes with all the fiercely defensive dedication that the grieving have when they speak of the one who is gone. I live six hundred miles away now on streets not quite yet legible to me in the same way. But I also know that an Amazon tower—especially the one that rises up over Warschauer Brücke fast enough to seem at war with the sun itself—means the same thing in every city on earth.
I realise that I’m still very drunk and start fumbling to put out various small shame fires by texting to confirm all the ways I hope I wasn’t... Validating pings pour in. An age-old practice much less charming when you’re nearing forty, it’s the social equivalent of putting a pair of multipack knickers back in their plastic wrap in the shop after you’ve stretched them out for size. Not soiled, just a little worn-seeming. What is friendship if not gently reassuring each other even when we don’t deserve it? I tuck my edges back in and return myself; almost unnoticed.
*