JD On Coke
Part 3
ireallylovemusic’s John Doran submits another of his (occasional) rants about record shopping, alcoholism and fundamentally demented zoologists.
The JAMMS ‘1987 . . . What The Fuck Is Going On?’
Sly And The Family Stone ‘There’s A Riot Going On’
U-Roy ‘Dread Inna Babylon’
Happy Mondays ‘Pills, Thrills and Bellyaches’
I used to hate Manchester when I lived there. Well, that’s what I thought anyway, but thinking about it now, I just used to hate the fucking idiots that I lived with. The truth of the matter is that The Rainy City is one of the best on the face of the planet and the IRA did its inhabitants a favour by setting that bomb. (It’s only a shame they didn’t bring down the entire Arndale Centre; the city centre would probably look almost perfect now if they had.) So I leapt at the chance to go up and interview a band called My Chemical Romance recently when it was offered to me by the mighty Metal Hammer. During the interview the band, a bunch of personable and fresh faced New Jersey-ites warned me of all the places I should try and avoid if I ever visited their home city of Newark. Seeing as they were just about to go sight seeing, I decided to return the compliment. “Don’t”, I said as gravely as possible, “go to Longsight. Under any circumstances whatsoever.”
I lived there for four months and it was unbearable. After being burgled six times in six months in Burnage, I decided that enough was enough and it was time to up sticks and move into this flat I knew had recently become vacant on Dickinson Road; the same street that The Chemical Brothers used to live down. (They told me that they went out clubbing one weekend and when they got back someone had broken into their flat and stolen the floor.) Really, I should have held out for somewhere else because we kind of knew (bought drugs off) the guy who was moving out. My mates in the upstairs flat Big John, Jimmy Scouse, Gerald and Wayne had told me all about the unhinged drug dealer in the basement flat below them. A student at the Metropolitan University, Frank Sanderson had been kicked off his course for “irregularities”. Wayne found out that by “irregularities” the University authorities actually meant stealing a zebra’s legs from their labs. Jimmy confirmed this and said that one night he had gone down stairs to buy some hash from Frank who came to the door, naked apart from a blood spattered apron. When Jimmy asked him what he was doing he just gestured toward a black and white leg held in place by a clamp on a Black And Decker workmate bench and a stained tennon saw leaning against the lean to wall; illuminated by a bare light bulb in a wire mesh cage and said simply: “My experiments.”
Frank had a reprehensibly large collection of exotic insects which he kept in cages and glass tanks all over the basement flat. Mantids, tarantulas, beetles, locusts, African millipedes; he had the fucking lot. Each of these cages was complete with a microphone which was connected to his stereo. Frank would sit there, smoking weed, listening to his insects eating. Once he came up to Jimmy’s flat brandishing a tape and said: “Can I listen to my pets on your stereo? You’ve got a graphic equalizer and I can see what frequencies they eat at.” Anyway, Frank had a nervous breakdown and his wife left him taking their 18 month old baby with them. He moved away not long afterwards and no one ever heard from him again.
When we moved into the flat, it looked fairly normal apart from the actual basement. (It was brick-walled, had a single meat hook dangling from the ceiling and two large, framed oil paintings of Chairman Mao on the walls. Somebody had spray painted ‘Help Me’ on the wall, but I think that was Jimmy’s little joke.) At first we thought every trace of Frank had gone but after a few days we found a stack of PVC beer mats that he had obviously had printed as an alternative to business cards. They showed a grinning cartoon of a man stood above the legend ‘Frank Sanderson: Inventor and Children’s Magician’. The really bad thing about the flat however was that it was over run with cockroaches. The little bastards were everywhere. On the kitchen top, on the stairs, in the bath, on the ceiling. The little, impossible to kill, evil little bastards. No matter what poisons, unguents or napalm we spread liberally all over the house we woke every morning to find phalanxes of them all over the flat. (In the upstairs flat, Big John claimed that he woke up one morning to find one of them standing on one of his testicles; its antennae pointing inquisitively at him. He was so angry that he said he killed it over the period of half an hour using a Zippo, a can of hairspray and some nail clippers.)
We should have realised that Frank had left us a present. On one particularly drunken night in the flat fuelled by sherry, we were charging round having toy fights sat on each other’s shoulders. During this tomfoolery Jimmy’s head went straight through one of the polystyrene tiles that made up the false ceiling in the kitchen and immediately he started screaming. When we pulled the tile down literally hundreds of cockroaches fell to the floor. I wrapped a towel around my mouth and put my head into the hole and had a look. There was a suitcase in the foot high gap. We pulled it down and unzipped it. It was alive and broiling with roaches. The mad cunt had been breeding them behind the tiles.
If I was feeling melodramatic then I’d say that later that week I had a nervous breakdown myself; but I’m not so I’ll just call it a disturbing fortnight of mental confusion brought on by Frank’s gift, an almost pathological fear of insects and too much drink and drugs. I left Manchester two months later and swore I would never return.
Some twelve years later, on the night I get back from my umpteenth return to the city, I’m DJing in my east London local, The Northcote Arms. During the evening a nice guy called Dermot comes over and offers me a huge stack of vinyl for free. (There’s too many to list but the ones above will give you some idea.) He’s getting married and he’s only going to be using CDs from now on. I try and persuade him that he’s making a mistake but not too hard if you catch my drift. The poor bastard will only end up trying to replace all of them when the mid life crisis hits. Anyway, I said I’d DJ his wedding reception for free next year. Wine, cake and James Brown on vinyl; it really doesn’t get much better than that.