In the mania of spring cleaning my hard drives last week I came across a file titled “Disappearing Youth.wav”
Playing through this perfect clatter I’d forgotten existed I was transported back to a community centre in Brixton and the group who made it: The Sound it Out band. This group of local teens (and an 8 year old child prodigy who used to interrupt Good Throb practices to come squat the drumkit in our garage) existed for one week and a three minute set in Summer 2014 as part of a community music project.
It was a funny, green time for me. Earlier that year, I’d begun work as a Sex and Relationships facilitator in schools across South London and was still freshly obsessed with the chaotic alchemy of working with young people. I had managed to pull off the first First Timers in 2013 and wanted to do something with kids in my neighbourhood that didn’t involve teachers or trauma. We got a little bit of cash from the charity that ran our local park to do a gig there, and some workshops in the shadow of the famous Nuclear Dawn mural, in a so-called ‘meanwhile’ space on land laying fallow for the inevitable rapacious gentrification project that would soon engulf Somerleyton Road.
Sound it Out was the catalyst for so much that came later, and a steep learning curve steadied in collaboration with actual music facilitators, my neighbours Will and Zoe Konez, and Richard Phoenix, who wove some magic to make this song happen:
I really just wanted an excuse to post this song online then remembered I wrote about this project in my Maximum Rocknroll column at the time (Issue 317, Sept 2014) , alongside some other teenage thoughts about teen girl supremacy, real and fictional, which for an 8 year old text still holds mostly true.
Here it is, condensed for (something like) clarity:
“Adolescence is a new birth” – Granville Stanley Hall, 60
“It’s funny that we’re supposed to be writing this song about being a youth... with adults” – Molly, 15.
This past month I ran a series of music workshops for teenagers to make a band and them perform at a live gig in the local park, inhaled Clothes Clothes Clothes Music Music Music Boys Boys Boys, the new autobiography by Viv Albertine and re-watched the my favourite film, the classic teen girl runaway punk movite Out of the Blue, with Linda Manz and Dennis Hopper. Suffice to say, I have been thinking a lot about the kids.
Teenage Kicks, Teenage Head, Teen Age Riot, Bored Teenagers, Teenage Lobotomy, Teenage Depression. Punk has always made a fetish of youth. It’s no surprise considering the venn: Rebellion, doing whatever you want, bypassing, ignoring, or chastising authority figures, not having a job and not needing to, hanging out doing nothing, singlemindedness, tendency towards obsession, a world animated by unquenchable desire that comes before you know responsibility, incapable of experiencing a hangover, spiritually untouchable.
The world of the adolescent as imagined by adults is where we go when we want to imagine ourselves invincible, like a brand-new rubber band, because teens still have all the stretch left, capable of appearing to ping back from anything. Thing is, this is some wrinkly Peter Pan bullshit and I’m as much of a culprit as you. I mean, have you spoken to any teenagers recently? Real life human teen reality of 2014 is bleak, difficult, strange and overwhelming. This week working so closely with young people was a revelation that shook me from a lot of the romanticised ideas of what it was to be young myself. How we edit our own misery. They held up a mirror, confounded expectation and freaked me out a bunch (that moment when you realise the ‘adult’ they are referring to is you.)
Viv Albertine’s autobiography is honest, raw and captivating, with just the right number of jaunts down the King’s Road with a bloody tampon worn as an accessory. She paints London swarming with teenage and teen-adjacent runaways that was both an amoral landscape of senseless violence and slow dull grind where young punks living in remote outposts of the Metropolitan line made a whole world out of going to each others houses, all that slow ambling through suburban streets, the cold concrete of doorsteps beneath bored bums, waiting for friends to return, waiting for something to happen. Milk bottles and grey skies. Viv writes with arresting clarity about that desperate glue of women’s friendship. Sticky, intoxicating, addictive. When the Slits toured with the Clash they were so badly behaved they were routinely banned from venues and hotels for being, in every sense, completely punk and uncontrollably female. Her recollections from late ‘70s squat land wields a matter-of-fact pickaxe into the hearts of her conquests with a notable absence of reverence for whether they happened to be in Subway Sect or the Clash. Her unglamorised asides about average fucks are the ultimate salve for the burnt-out hero worship usually so embedded in remembrances of that era. The only mention of Johnny Rotten is an aborted blowjob.
The tagline for cult classic Out of the Blue is “She’s fifteen years old. The only adult she admires is Johnny Rotten.” Linda Manz’ character CeBe Barnes is one of the cult classic teen girl punk archetype in film, perhaps only matched by Corinne ‘third degree’ Burns of Ladies and Gentlemen the Fabulous Stains. Linda’s attitude leaves her at once untouchable and vulnerable. She’s deeply, unfathomably cool, a hardened survivor surrounded by vulture-adults ready to pounce, a cold blooded wunder-teen full of red hot tears and rage. She is obsessed with Elvis. Linda never goes on tour like Corinne, but she does run away to the city and play drums for the Pointed Sticks at one point. Her moment behind the kit resurfaced in my mind this past week as I cajoled a teen girl to project her voice and please stop hitting the cymbal while others are talking…
Sound it Out is a project I started to make some music with teenagers in South London. I flyered big houses and blocks of flats so the participants reflected the stratified strangeness of Lambeth. One boy goes to an exclusive fee-paying boys' school. One girl is staying on the estate over the road with her aunty and chain smokes compulsively. Her name is Molly and she makes a game of asking him to repeat words and giggling with glee as he repeats her slanged out inflections in his plummier tones. “Man, you’re posh!” He says with the equanimity of a kid highly aware of his place atop the class hierarchy of Lambeth but also gracefully electing not to be a dick about it “Yes, by comparison I am posh, but there people who are much posher than me at my school.” Then there’s a debate worthy of Engels as to whether it’s possible to be posh and have no money. “Gangsters got loads of money and they definitely ain’t posh!”
Despite all this, they’re easily unified by a constant throb of embarrassment that informs their every move. I immediately remember this paralysis, a proverbial burning barricade ahead on the road to self-acceptance, only inflamed the more my parents, siblings or teachers tried to reach out. I will not find myself through you. I thrashed around, resisting it, brooding. Even your gaze is burning me, reducing me. Slowly the group bonds through their mercilessly roasting of us, the adults in the room. I see myself new. Old. I’m enchanted by their easy conversation, the way they work together as one in defiance of their instructors, (the natural enemy) how quickly we lose this ability as adults, how the bad world of the alienated workplace is built on the hope that we never get it back.
Molly, the chain-smoking girl is the hardest to “engage”, to use the annoying language of youth work. She is mostly disruptive through her Justin Beiber-related non-sequitors and extended monologues about the circumstances of Tupac’s death, but also can’t help herself but be excited by the beatboxing workshop and how when she hits the drums no one else can speak. Every half hour or so I see her face begin glaze over followed by a sudden ‘I wanna go home’ or ‘I’m not doing this.’ This would be one thing if she was in any way required to be here, but she sought out the project, signed up to attend and is totally free to leave. Knowing that her comments are a cry for reinforcement or validation doesn’t make them any less demoralising to me, then I realise my obsession with getting her to engage is about my own validation. We’re stuck in a loop. She’s Cebe Barnes but so am I. Bieber is Elvis. Our week becomes a cat and mouse game where I buzz hard off getting her involved and enjoying the instruments without the veil of cynicism and she quickly catches and corrects herself back into a disinterested slouch herself every time she gets into it. She knows I know. I see a crystal clear vision of my fleshy teenage self in her impulses, the fear of being seen to be excited or happy or wanting… but she’s mostly inscrutable in terms of what she thinks of me. She is still steadfast in her refusal to perform at the end of the week, but I choose not to listen as she races to be the first behind the kit.
The walk from Molly auntie’s block on Somerleyton Road to the leafier bit of Camberwell where the park is a ten minute walk. It’s also a whole other jurisdiction in ends topography. SW2 to SE5. Oof. We agree to rendevous at a corner shop. My heart is in my mouth. The last thing she said to me leaving on the Friday with an acidic jab was ‘I might not even come.’ I know she knows I’m desperate. I can’t stop myself from squealing with joy when she appears around the corner, fully made-up with new inch long pink acrylic nails and a new hairdo. She rolls her eyes again. I walk with her by my side and try to think of things to say when a cop van passes. “The police can get away with anything they like. I saw some driving with their van door wide open the other day… plus they’ve still got my brother’s iPhone and he’s been in prison for a year.”
Then it happens. I’m harassed while walking with her. This is so much a rhythm of these streets that it barely registered but I swallow my kneejerk response to a daytime heckle because something in me doesn’t want Molly to see me angry. I want to show calm authority and that she is safe on the street with me. I’m also aware that I could put her at risk by shouting at him. I calmly but firmly cut into the man’s appraisal of my “hips..thighs..mmm…” with a long, low “Shut. Up.” I’m shocked that she’s shocked – “Rah man, as if he just said that!” – then remember that as much as she has a thousand times more street smarts than me she is also still a child. As we round the corner into the park where the band will play on the bandstand, we talk about men and assertiveness and how to ‘deal’ with them. I am as uncertain as ever as to whether I’ve said the right thing.
In the park, she is still uncommitted and wavering. She didn’t even want to sing (the recording has another boy on the mic who couldn’t make the gig) she wanted to hit the drums. Hard. I feel for the others who have diligently practised the song and are ready to go. I ache for Molly, tied up in her own conception of herself, because I am still her. I lose myself and all my neuroses in the course of trying to get her to hold the mic properly and sing into it. We go to the bushes while the PA is being set up. I lose all decorum and scream out a Rihanna hook I know she loves out across the park to demonstrate voice projection. To show her it is possible.
Finally it’s their time perform. Molly holds her hair over her mouth singing in a half-whisper the words the group wrote together. Stood a little behind her I yell them out because I know she is hiding under my noise, that as much as she feigns not giving a fuck and this whole charade being beneath her, if I fall quiet so does she. My voice is a safety blanket, the louder I go, the louder she goes. Stuck in our loop. I am staring at her now to maintain eye contact to stop her panicking about the crowd looking at her. She settles into maintaining eye contact for longer than normal and I can’t help but smile a big gummy open mouth smile. She rolls her eyes at me and fiddles with her acrylics. I am paralysed with pride as her mumbles crackle the through the PA, our voices becoming one, a dissonant out-of-key sprawl of loud-quiet fat girl emotion. As we finish, Molly squirms and bellows directly into the mic ‘oh my god that was rubbish, that sounded so bad.’ And then grins the biggest grin.
I don’t wanna be a youth
I want them to see the truth
I don’t wanna get arrested
For what I didn’t do
I wanna be heard
I wanna be something
I wanna inspire
I want it more than anything
Disappearing youth on the street
Disappearing youth feeling the heat
After the gig, Molly insists I introduce her to the 20-year old rapper who we booked to perform as part of the gig because he is ‘well peng.’ She holds her own in conversation for a few seconds then falters. As we are packing up she hugs me tightly and says she’ll miss me then is gone before I can open my mouth to respond.
I never saw Molly again, but she’d be 24 now. I hope she plays the drums.