i am forty today

miracle baby sez pay up

In 1986 when I am born they put me in the newspaper. Mother was already 37 and had only recently recovered from a rare neurological condition known as Guillaume Barré Syndrome which causes sudden paralysis, and conceiving let alone giving birth afterwards was pretty rare. As I grow up she will often tell me I came out with ‘black hair all down my back’ which for a long time I imagine to mean I was hirsuite like a monkey. The South Wales Evening Post headline says ‘Miracle Baby.’ During her hospitalisation with the disease, fellow sufferer Tony Benn wrote my Mum a letter of solidarity which she still has.

In 1996 the record Fuzzy Logic by the Super Furry Animals comes out, and Charles and Diana get divorced. By negotiation, the title Her Royal Highness The Princess of Wales is restyled to simply Diana, Princess of Wales. I am Welsh but the words get stuck in my mouth when I try to reply to my father and Mamgu in the language they speak to me. I wear a scratchy grey blazer at a new school and unlike everyone elses parents who are doctors mine don’t pay because I did okay in an exam and on parents evenings Mum parks down the bottom of the hill and makes me walk so noone can see what our car looks like. I don’t know about being a punk yet, and pull out all my eyelashes instead.

In 2006 I make my first band with Maya-Victoria, Christina and Miso and we play our second real gig with Wolf Eyes and Whitehouse at the Old Blue Last. the first one’s in a barn and we can’t agree on whether you start again when you make a mistake up or not. i’m still not sure. i have a hardcore boyfriend who says people only like us because we’re girls. i’m still not sure. i live by the sea and the mosaic on the social centre wall spells out ‘mutual aid and cooperation.’ my first heartache heals within a few weeks and I take my first ecstasy pill, publish my first fanzine and call it Modern Hate Vibe. the response of outrage shocks and deeply pleases me, like I’ve discovered the secret to being percieved on my own terms. Mamgu dies.

In 2016 I turn thirty in Joshua Tree and cry with happiness about the sky. I am in love. I am part of something bigger than me in london we sort of build a sound together even thought we don’t realise it. we build our own venue and definitely realise it. my name’s on the lease. I want all girls to be free so I work at the rape crisis centre. I tour in bands and release my own and many other people’s music, put on many gigs and am never tired. I have been writing for Maximum Rocknoll for seven years and still get the nice buzz when people get annoyed with my often annoying opinions.

Later that year I will move to Australia, and spend a season working on farms for a visa. I learn to remove weeds from around bulbs of garlic on my hands and knees with a steak knife, and to pull oranges destined for cordial from trees planted in concrete. I ride on the back of a quad bike laden with king proteas behind a man blasting InfoWars from his phone he says he’d like to kill hillary clinton and thinks donald trump will be president. we move to Sydney and i keep making music just there instead. people are very generous with me while i learn things, am humbled, start to be a touch less precocious, writing gets better.

In 2026 I am forty on a Tuesday morning in Eastern Europe where I live now. I am not in love with anybody. I can deadlift my body weight. Most of my friends I make because of being in the street against the state. I write about the way that the world keeps ending to help me imagine it otherwise. we’re all from everywhere, here: it’s a bubble or a blimp, depending on the day. learning the language slowly and out of spite, even when it gets stuck in my mouth. I try staying sharp and useful, to my friends and the world. radio is my instrument. still working, still want the girls to be free. I finish seven years of regular therapy, got quite good at describing and understanding the underneath. I start playing music again after the longest gap since 2006. I realise I have ten years of writing on a hard drive, much of which was photocoped or printed but never put online.

I decide maybe some of you would like to read some of it.

Postscript.

as you may have figured, encouraged and inspired by friends of talent it’s been suggested I make some of this newsletter something people can support, a sort of club spiral if you will…

i’ll continue sharing things to all regularly regardless, including tracklists and show notes for my monthly radio programme on Refuge Worldwide (exhibit a.) the full archive of four years of shows is available here, something for everyone.

subs will get:

• extra regular longer-form bits, including some of the essays, columns, and interviews I wrote for MRR that aren’t available anywhere else

• new ideas, WIP, stories that should remain ungoogleable

• prompts from the archive and my photographs

• a monthly critical media and recommendations round-up

• &&&&&

i’d usually find this sort of thing unbearably gauche, the vast majority of the useful things i do are not remunerated etc butttt only if you’re inclined, you could think of a subscription here as a small, recurring birthday gift! :’’’)

anyway, growing older is the deepest gift. thank you to those of you who have been riding with me so long. let’s see what the next forty bring.

love u bb