The one of us called Leather was formed in the Potteries; in Stoke, or Newcastle – the other one, the wrong one. Yet, although his feet be clay, his Kohl eyes remained bright. Through the wide-angle lens of his disdain, he saw them massing, necks like luncheon meat, streaming up the hill from Hanley. Hot-wiring his dad’s 2CV, he swung the Les Paul onto the back seat and was rattling down the M6 in seconds. Suspended in the air behind, an animated amoeba; a raised middle finger.
Meanwhile, in suburbia, he who responds to Cola dreamed in bursts. A Memorex archive of Casio melody, verse churned out for chocolate; the evidence massing in the absence of the tangible. Coming of age, becoming nomadic, he circled the city, sponging it all up. With the shakiest of grasps of the relevant software, he curated a collection without form – green lasers and the stench of poppers, blackberry stains, low winter sun in the bakery window, the half-remembered faces of the desired.
Electrons collided, as they will, in a Camden bar. Before long, we were shooting glittered arrows in the faces of the curious, the intoxicated and the bemused. Beneath the strutting rock’n’roll veneer lurked an audiovisual salad of subtle complexity – found sound and constructed harmony, Genet’s sailors floating off in a cosmic void, Stars In Their Eyes and the creature in the basement. Our long-suffering cohorts indulged us – this wasn’t strictly what they signed up for – yet even they had their limit. The band disbanded. The moment arrived: to hell with practicality, it was time to make a goddamn movie.
And thus you find us, free of the tedium of financial backing or technical knowledge, between city and coast, pillar and post, repeatedly shimmying over garden walls for the juiciest apples. The worm abides; we never learn.