Read Will’s latest Psychogeography column here
10.05.08

To Broadstairs, not to bathe – it being April – but merely take the air. The Isle of Thanet has always been a little problematic for me; I can’t even say it without recalling Ian Dury’s lines: ‘I rendezvoused with Janet / Quite near the Isle of Thanet / She looked just like a gannet … ‘ &c. Somehow the great bard of the Kilburn High Road perfectly summed up this, the very coccyx of Britain, with its seafowl and its foul maidens.

Of course, seldom has anywhere more gentrified become more chavvy. Dickens, a habitué of the town, has one of his characters in The Pickwick Papers almost expire with relief once she reaches the haven of the Albion Hotel in Broadstairs, having had to endure the day-tripping of Margate en route. Dickens wrote to a friend of the town, that “[It] was and is, and to the best of my belief will always be, the chosen resort and retreat of jaded intellectuals and exhausted nature; being, as this Deponent further saith it is, far removed from the sights and noises of the busy world, and filled with the delicious murmur and repose of the broad ocean.”

He eventually bought the misnamed Bleak House, which still stands above the little horseshoe bay, looking not remotely grim, but more like a castellated Victorian fantasia on chivalric domesticity. What, I wonder, would he make of the town now, perfused as it is with tracksuited, gel-haired denizens of Margate and Ramsgate? Indeed, the whole of this coast feels like some suburb of outer East London, so full is it of the sights and noises of the busy world.

The sandy bay that is the town’s focus remains, girded by white cliffs of chalk and terraced houses, complete with micro-interwar pleasure gardens and a lift down to the beach that looks like an off-whitewashed crematorium chimney. There’s Morrelli’s, the beautifully preserved 1950s gelateria, where you can get Jammie Dodger sundaes, and glass mugs of vaguely caffeinated froth, then consume them under a bizarre oil painting of a flooded Venice – the water creeping up over St Mark’s. These are good things, and up the steep High Street there are chip shops and charity shops and Doyle’s Psychic Emporium (“Open Your Mind”), and a sweet shop selling orange crystals, spearmint pips and liquorice wheels. There’s even an optician’s trading under the name of See Well.

We hung out on the beach, fetching teas from the Chill Time café. One ageing hopeful came metal-detecting along the strand, Dr Who gadget held out in front of him, nuzzling the sand. Then another came up along, his gaze fixed on the gritty mother lode, his headphones clamped over his cartilaginous ears. Disaster! One metal detector detected the other, and one treasure seeker grabbed for the other’s wand. A vicious mêlée ensued as the two men fought for the right to possess these found objects. The kids and I sat in the beach hut and laughed like gannets.

A happy scene, but come nightfall and the profile tyres began to screech on the tarmac, and the darkness was full of harsher, more discordant cries. I took the dog for a walk in the local park. The blackout was complete, but I was aware of the presence of many others. In any large city these might have been furtive seekers after fleeting, anonymous congress, but here, in Broadstairs, they turned out to be enormous gaggles of teenagers, wheeling around on the mown grass, their mobile phones held under their chins so that the wan uplight weirdly illuminated their vestigial features. As I grew closer to one of these gaggles I became aware of an insistent and peculiar gobbling noise; the sound of many breaking voices intoning “Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off” over and over again.

I blame Hengist and Horsa for Broadstairs’ current fall from gentility. The two Danes – or, possibly, Germans – were invited by King Vortigern of Kent to come here in the fifth century: an early form of economic migration. Fifteen hundred years later, in 1949, the anniversary of their arrival was commemorated by some latter-day pseudo-Vikings: Danish oarsmen who completed the voyage in a replica boat. They landed on the sands below Dickens’ Bleak House, and the local municipality laid on a slap-up feed of hot soup, cold poultry, and potatoes with fresh salad in ample portions. Later there was heavy-footed dancing to the accompaniment of Joseph Muscant’s salon orchestra.

But, not content with such a welcome, the town councillors foolishly changed the name of Main Bay to Viking Bay. Doubtless they thought this would cement Anglo-Danish relations, but so far as I can see the main upshot has been that the town’s inhabitants go berserk from time to time. Waiting for the train back to London, I overheard two Thanet warriors discoursing on the platform: “‘E’s a cunt inne?” said one, “always bum-licking, but if you turns yer back on ‘im ‘e’ll give you a smack in the mouf.” They were drinking Stella Artois; if only it were reassuringly expensive.

To view Ralph Steadman’s artwork, visit here

26.04.08

For those of you frustrated by the absence of Ralph Steadman’s artwork when we publish Will’s Psychogeography columns from the Independent, here at last is an archive of them.

Lowland Scotland is networked with motorways – many of them astonishingly empty. Where my mother-in-law lives, in Motherwell, you can get in the jamjar, and within an hour be in Stirling Castle, or Edinburgh Castle, or clambering up the natural fortification of Ben Lomond. So, you can be forgiven for thinking of the entire statelet as a series of arbitrarily interchangeable visitor attractions. We were zooming up to Stirling when I saw the sign for the Falkirk Wheel. We’d been meaning to go on the Wheel for yonks, but somehow hadn’t got round to it. Boom-boom. Now seemed like the right time: the day was as bright as a political theorist who’s just solved the West Lothian question, and the views – I felt confident – would be superb. I diverted on to another empty motorway and drove straight into a filthy fogbank. Still, even if the prospects had dimmed there was still the miracle of engineering itself for us to admire.

The Wheel comes complete with its own tourist infrastructure: glass-roofed cafe-cum-infopoint, mandatory gift shop. Even in the thick mist the 15-metre long arms, shaped like double-headed axes, which bracket the Wheel looked impressive. Why wouldn’t they? The Falkirk Wheel is almost unique: a rotating boat lift that links the restored Forth and Clyde Canal with the Union Canal. It lifts canal boats up to the height of an eight-storey building in two enormous caissons full of water, that are so finely balanced the whole thingamajig uses only as much electricity as boiling eight kettles of water – if, that is, you were minded to boil eight kettles of water.

The boys weren’t wound up by the Wheel, but I thought it a finely balanced madness to be in a boat, in a lift, going up to an artificial river, that was itself on a bridge. Frankly, you can’t get a more psychotic geography than that! I happily coughed up £21.50 for our family ticket, and we boarded the Archimedes, together with a handful of other wheelies: ginger boys and old girls with skin like foundation. Our guide for this memorable voyage was a jolly soul who looked a little like Hagrid’s younger sister. As the Archimedes ground into its caisson she gave us the spiel: the Wheel was, she trumpeted, a triumph of Scottish engineering. An assertion that was somewhat undermined by her next statement: it was designed and built by a Derbyshire firm, Butterley’s. Then she continued, explaining the “Celtic” inspiration of double-headed battleaxe template, and the nuts and bolts of the operation.

I confess, I couldn’t concentrate on this deluge of information I was far more taken by the jerky – and yet oddly fluid – sensation of being on a boat in a lift. The visitor centre fell away below us, while beyond it the mist moiled over the pennants of corporate hospitality marquees – Bosch, I think, or possibly tosh. With a bump and a grind our caisson married with the aqueduct, and then we were off along it heading for the Rough Castle Tunnel, which took us below the main Edinburgh-Glasgow rail line and the remains of the Antonine Wall.

In fairness, you couldn’t get a denser layering of the ways: I half expected to see the lost eagle of the Ninth Legion being carried out of a hospitality marquee by James Watt. So, why did I have to be so churlish as to enquire of our guide: “How many canal boats, exactly, have used this since it was all opened in 2002?” She had the figure at her tongue-tip: 4,000. I went on with my churlishness, venturing that this seemed like an awful lot of expenditure to make a couple of thousand Scots retirees happy. (Being the man I am, when I got home I checked the figures: it cost £85m for the Wheel, the aqueduct and the tunnel, making it over £20,000 for each trip.) Oh no, she said, that wasn’t the way to look at it all – besides, the Wheel was already paid for by European Union and Lottery Fund money. With logic as inertial as the Wheel itself I kept on: that means we paid for it. Ah, but you don’t understand, she persisted, the Wheel has brought myriads of tourists and millions of pounds of inward investment to the Falkirk area. Aha! Investment – I maintained – that could just as easily have been boosted if you’d built a giant tomato, or a 35 metre-high Tunnock’s Tea Cake.

But by now the other passengers on the Archimedes were rallying to her defence. There was talk of the greening of Scotland, the restoration of canals, the dawn of a new and gentler age – I was hounded off to the car park along with the hell spawn. As we drove on to Stirling, I ruminated: certainly, we might be headed back to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, but if society underwent that kind of reversal the only double-headed battle axe that would be required was one actual size.

15.03.08

I’m seriously considering making a late bid for rock stardom and reforming my student band, The Abusers. We split sometime in 1981 – or possibly 82 – over differences concerning nomenclature. I favoured changing the band’s name to Will Self and the Abusers, but understandably the others were against it. Pete Miller, the bassist, and a black kid called Chris, who played the drums and came from the Rosehill estate outside Oxford, split to form their own, more reggae-centric outfit dubbed Dub Vendor (like the celebrated platter shack in Notting Hill). Apart from me, they were the best musicians, and without them the Abusers were the empty chassis of a car with its rhythmic engine torn out.

Not that we’d ever been the tightest band around. Tight, mmm… as I recall this was always the purest approbation: standing in the sweaty, beery, fag-saturated crowds at the Marquee, the Electric Ballroom and the Roundhouse, watching bands with names such as the Pink Fairies, and Alien Sex Fiend, nodding sagely, then turning to your companion and uttering the shibboleth: “They’re really tight, man.” The Abusers, by contrast, were really loose – baggy, even.

Sometimes as many as 12 of us would mount the stage and crash into our legendary 25-minute cover of The Crystals’ “Da Do Ron Ron”. The line-up included: a 6ft 6in Rastafarian poet called Rocky, who spouted performance poetry, a lesbian-separatist guitarist with an extra-long lead on her double-headed axe so that she didn’t have to associate with the rest of us and, in the early stages at least, Geoff Mulgan who went on to head Demos, and then the Policy Unit at No 10. It was said of Robert Johnson, the legendary “King of the Delta Blues singers”, that he sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for the ability to play anything he wanted on the guitar. This took place at midnight, sometime in the 1920s, at a crossroads near Dockery’s plantation in the rural fastness of Mississippi. Johnson is credited with being the father of rock’n’roll, and indeed his hard-driving, percussive style of guitar-playing, and his ability to belt out misery with such cogency, had an immeasurable influence on generations of middle-class English white boys.

In the States, where the blues and country music are twined together into the DNA of an authentic tradition – a true folk music – movement has always been key. The experience of black sharecroppers, pushed off the land during the Depression, and forced into the northern urban ghettos, contains within it all the propulsion that has kept American rock’n’roll continuously evolving. The US is also a huge country, one in which the mythopoeic road, married to the insistent rhythm of the four-stroke internal combustion engine, has generated a thousand thousand songs.

Of course, in this tea-towel-sized island, the idea of a “road song” is just as much of a solecism as a “road movie”. English rock music has, instead, always had a distinctly performative feel to it – music hall rather than Motown. The quintessential songs of place are concerned with creating proscenium arches, then populating the stage with characters. From “Waterloo Sunset” to “White Man in Hammersmith Palais” to “Parklife”, these are static-romantic contrivances. Not that they should be condemned for it, there is the continuation of a tradition here, but it ain’t rock n’ roll so far as I’m concerned. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I? There wasn’t much comparison between Oxfordshire in the early 1980s and Mississippi in the 1920s, but the Mephistophelean remained surprisingly constant. Despite being entirely self-taught, I was by the age of 19 undoubtedly the finest rock’n’roll guitarist in England. My lightning riffs, ceaseless invention, and note-perfect picking were the envy of such giants as Eric “Slow Hand” Clapton, and Keith Richards. The latter often used to run little errands for me – such as popping up to the corner shop to get a pint of milk – so in awe of my playing was he. Then, one night, coming back from a gig, I met the Devil at the crossroads of Carfax and the High Street. He appeared to me in the guise of a Human Resources manager for ICI, and offered me a decent career in industry with job security. Instead of dieing an early death, I would live long enough to raise a family, receive a decent pension, and become a Tory councillor. In sum: I would receive the very soul of Englishness in exchange for my ability to play the guitar.

How could I refuse? With Pete and Chris already gone from the Abusers the band was limping along, and besides, I already intuitively grasped the limits of Anglo rock, and foresaw the arid classicism that would lead to Coldplay. I signed the contract in blood and never regretted it. Until now, after all, rock’n’roll will never die – and besides, my pension is woefully underperforming.

01.03.08

Feeling like the protagonist of Kafka’s fragment Before the Law, I cycled across town on a windy February evening to the Royal Courts of Justice. They’re Gothic, certainly, but the Gothic is so entrenched in British architecture – as style, recursive style, fakery and mockery – that to call the Courts this is a mere allusion. They are bulbous stupid Gothic, Gothic as an elaboration on High Victorian delusions of mightiness and rightiness, with finials of lumpy complacency buttressed by hefty hypocrisy. It’s no surprise to discover that George Edward Street, the criminal architect responsible for designing them, originally qualified as a solicitor.

Who but a solicitor would conceive of decorating the gates of the Law with the carved heads of celebrated judges and lawyers? Who but a solicitor would have the plodding nerve to surmount them with Jesus, Moses and Solomon, while the poor litigants are immortalised as a fighting dog and cat. And who but the Ministry of Justice – crazy Kafkaesque name, crazy Kafkaesque institution – would dream of hiring out the Great Hall by the hour, so that City types can trough down in splendour, and applaud their own huge feats of avarice, and tiny ones of beneficence.

I was here almost a year ago, called upon by a charity called War Child. Having been offered the opportunity to fundraise at a bond traders’ dinner, they were desperate for a speaker and asked me to step into the breech. On that occasion, things went reasonably well – if begging is ever OK. I doffed my rhetorical cap, and the rich guys listened respectfully to my spiel, before tossing a 10p coin into it. In fact, they divvied up a couple of hundred grand, but proportionally – given there were trillions in the Great Hall – I was a Big Issue seller in a suit.

This year, War Child came knocking again, and I didn’t have the gall to give them knock-back. True, I do believe in the work they’re doing – helping kids in war zones, feeding them, clothing them, building them schools – it’s just I’m not sure it’s them that should be doing it. Charities and other NGOs follow in the wake of our Government’s foreign adventuring like vultures with sociology degrees, feeding off the carrion left behind on the battlefield. They alight for a few months or years, putting out celebrity-endorsed pop CDs back home to fund their endeavours, and then flap away again to feed on more Humanism.

Still, any good is better than no good, and so it was that I found myself, within the gates of the law, watching the black ties getting spattered with red wine, and admiring the multicoloured up lights playing upon the pillars of the great hall. It transpired that this lot were different: not as grand as last year’s mob who were mostly CEOs, these poor cousins were responsible for leveraged finance and syndicated loans. Hmm, and the dread credit crunch was squeezing them until the Faberge pips popped out. Why, some of them would only be getting six-figure bonuses this year. Nevertheless, the dinner was an opportunity for these nabobs of debt creation to give themselves glitzy awards with snappy names like Best Arranger of Project Finance Loans and Best Arranger of Turkish Loans.

Now, I like to come into an environment and try to understand it, even one as bizarrely unwholesome as this. So, I dutifully asked the studious young man seated next to me what exactly a “mezzanine loan” was, and he explained that it was a loan where the borrowers’ failure to repay would result in the loaners acquiring equity in their business. Simple, really: banking as a kind of invasion of the body snatchers.

On they went, to the grossly amplified strains of pop hits, sashaying up to the lectern and booming out such rousing speeches as “We did the Imperial Tobacco loan!” It felt like aeons – yet it was only an hour or so. Finally, it was my turn to approach the gatekeeper of the Law. I spoke for 20 minutes or so, giving a run-down on War Child’s work, exhorting the assembled extremely wealthy people to divvy up for building toilets and schools in Iraq, and retraining traumatised child soldiers in the Congo, before ending up with a description of one case history: a 12-year-old Afghani girl raped by her uncle and then imprisoned for – you guessed it – adultery.

It was then that I began to hear a distinct susurration spreading through the Great Hall and lapping against the pretentious pillars: they were talking. And not just one or two of them, exchanging the odd remark – but entire tables chatting away while they slugged back the Rioja. I stopped, and boomed at them over the PA: “I’m wondering what exactly it is that you’re discussing that can possibly be more important than a child being raped?” But it was a stupid question, because I knew already: it was money – and there was certain justice in that, oh yes.

23.02.08