It's a Man Ray kind of sky
No Feast, them bones, the turntable is turning, the golden sunlight of you
Dinner has been the same for the last three nights.
Everyone else in the house running the range of the fridge, sprinting up and down from shelf to shelf. They can gleefully empty the entire spice rack over anything they fancy. Technicolor. Ultra flava.
Me? I’m sat on my own with half a bowl of M&S ready salted combo crisps (you know the ones, a bunch of mad shapes stuffed into oversized bag - Wagon Wheels, Shreddies, Cocks and Arseholes* as they were memorably known in happier times) and a spoonful of hummus. Taste wise, you can probably guess how this goes. A blip of salt, a tang of sesame that’s been dampened down for the supermarket fridge section and not much else at all. A decent amount of crunch in a mouthful, maybe enough to raise the blood pressure a smidgen. Nothing else though. There’s nothing else at all.
I am currently so paranoid about chemotherapy that my diet has reverted to a brutalist super minimalism. The last two sessions underlined the dictionary definition of ‘zero fun’ in neon ink, then added their own grim caveats for any unwise sidesteps taken. I stupidly tested the boundaries the first time (cheese) and didn’t even see the boundaries the second (a glass of lemonade). This time, it’s all about trying to survive ten days of poison drugs with utter simplicity in the kitchen. Nothing to scare the horses. Nothing to make you sick without a solid warning beforehand.
It’s not just trying to avoid food. It’s trying to avoid any representations of food that might make the stomach churn. TV programmes, magazine articles. As Saturday’s copy of The Guardian arrives, all plump and perfect to waste an hour or two on the sofa with, traditional me would alight at the Feast section first. There, a bright and light advert for a world that I would like to live in is presented and the gruesome abyss of the main news section can be ignored for a few minutes. Feast presents cuisine as pure escapism, like Trailfinders brochures flicked through then left to pick up dust. It offers food at unachievable God tier level.
But.
Day four on the pills and Feast is very much the enemy. Right now, that distant shining city on the hill is stuck behind an insurmountable glass wall. Picking up the magazine feels like glumly looking through the windows of Waitrose a single minute after they shut the doors for the day and the last few customers inside straggle towards the tills at whatever pace they fancy. It’s just a bloody curse printed in sumptuous matt ink. Rustic to the touch, Feast is somewhere where glistening lumps of Guinness cake wink at Grace Dent and cocktails can be ‘inspired by the arboreal tree snake’.
And now, wrapped up in the sports section, Feast is lining the bottom of our recycling box.
Combo crisps and hummus again for tea tonight then.
Dose three and I’ve become a measurement. I am the ticking second hand on a watch plodding slowly between the stops. The start and the end of it all are now almost at equal distances. Their horizons are blank in both directions. Ticking along, ticking along, I am so far from the operation and yet here I am, stuck in a recovery loop without a clear picture of what’s coming at the end. Just a sequence of time and your place in it right now.
Ticking, ticking.
It’s easy to end up a little adrift thanks to these drugs I’m on (no comments needed here, thank you). Just four big pills a day, enough to leave you in a turbo spin as if weathering a sea storm even though you know you’re stood on dry land. Another time loop where nausea kicks in at a certain time each day. A repeat of the same boredom and queasiness as the day before and the day after.
You wake up feeling average-to-OK, then you sit back and wait for things to get progressively worse as the hours tick along. Once the pills are in, there’s a wooziness that comes along that’s similar to being utterly panelled but without any of the fun part of elevating yourself to a higher plane. Legs weaken like you’re on the deck of a ship that’s unexpectedly hit a typhoon and you’re regretting that third coffee you gunned five minutes ago. Brain is two steps behind the head, trying to catch up without much luck. Skin feels like it’s dripping off your body in chunks, unable to make the right shapes around bones that just won’t fit.
Duck your way through the remaining hours of the day and mull over an acceptable bedtime that doesn’t make you look too pathetic to your teenage kids (9pm has met a grudging approval most nights). And then just hope the drugs don’t throw you too far off course, back into the typhoon again.
This part of the process repeats for ten days, six times, over a seven month period, bloods willing. I am not complaining here, as there is no point. It’s a process I agreed to. There was a get out option offered between surgery and the start of radiotherapy and I chose this (I’m not sure what the reaction would have been in the doctor’s office had I started mulling the exit option over).
As I’ve said before, I’m lucky.
Lucky that my brain cancer was found at a point where it could be operated on (picked up from an editorial in yesterday’s Observer: “just 65% of brain tumours are caught in time for surgery or chemotherapy”).
Lucky to still be here and lucky that one day, all those Feast magazines might just find their way back out of the recycling box, with all the winking Guinness cakes and tree snake cocktails in the world on display, creating a glorious God tier vision of pure escapism for me to dive right into and never, ever leave.
Lucky. Ticking along.
Last week, we lost a friend.
Stuart Boreman was a truly exceptional bloke (def the right noun used there). I knew him from working with Earl Brutus on and off during the ’90s. Stuart had originally been in band then became something more like a guru to them (if guru means mate in the pub constantly getting the beers in). Before we met, I was lucky enough to see Earl Brutus’ first ever gig at an acid house night at the Cafe de Paris. The band were dressed in matching tan safari gear, as if they were taking Carry On Up The Khyber far too seriously. They played just one song - Life’s Too Long - which cut through the club’s 120bpm Balearic sheen with the kind of noise you hope you’d make if you and your friends formed a fantasy band in the pub - a roar of ur-glam rock guitars, some brilliant gibberish lyrics and a pulsing, handclap rhythm that’s addictive to all ages (listen here). Anyway, during the show Stuart physically froze and had to be carried off stage at the end by the rest of the band. I’ve seen a lot of mad things at gigs, that’s by far the most nuts. Laughing now just thinking about it.
James Fry from Earl Brutus wrote beautifully about Stuart for the Heavenly Recordings website: read the piece here. Raise a glass if you get the chance, he was a hero.
A few things that have helped move time along this week.
After leaving the Feast section behind, I loved Elizabeth Gilbert’s incredible piece in the Guardian’s Saturday section about a drug fuelled love affair with a terminally ill partner (where chemotherapy gets a kicking as a “dark and powerful sorcerer - effective but vengeful. It was brutal.”) Was genuinely not what I was looking for with the first metallic tasting coffee of the day, very glad I found it.
Realise I’m like a stuck record when nodding at exceptional Underworld gigs… and here we go again. This Boiler Room show is pretty much a template for how electronic bands should act in similar situations. The whole gig is a masterclass, but if you need a quick example of how it all works, jump to 17 mins 45 seconds for a version of Cowgirl that sounds like it’s been fully reinforced in gleaming titanium.
Enjoying all the space that’s been left there on Blood Orange’s album Essex Honey, which is pretty much the opposite of the above. There’s an intimacy and a closeness to sounds that makes it feel like they’re happening right next to your head. Tracks are sketch like, less overwrought introspections and more like motions of instruments that just happen to be in the same place at the same time. Made to send you to a peaceful place.
Heavy recommendation for Ewan Pearson’s incredible Soundcloud mix for Tropical Traffic (really nothing more summery and seasonal than Tropical Traffic is there - sorry to have missed summer by just 24 hours). Called Spirit of Eden, Ewan’s mix occupies the glorious space between ambient sound and that slow motion Weatherall/Boy’s Own-friendly Balearic music - the music Andrew so memorably christened ‘drug chug’ - that’s become a huge part of the sunrise hour at places like Team Love’s Love International shindig in Croatia. Ewan - as always - delivers perfection.
Knowing the chemotherapy was about to start banging loudly at the door, I decided to go to a gig the night before that dread hospital visit. The actor Michael Shannon (you know - bad guy in The Shape of Water, actual General Zod in terrible Superman movie from a few years back) and guitarist Jason Narducy were in town playing Fables of the Reconstruction by R.E.M., alongside a bunch more of the band’s tracks. Word from recent London shows was great, so why not.
R.E.M. remain one of the bands that built me. They arrived in the back half of the 1980s (Lifes Rich Pageant is my jumping in point) and helped shape things until acid house happened and (temporarily) wiped everything else away. History has been kind to their back catalogue, a point that Shannon, Narducy and their brilliant band seemed eager to prove with a twenty five song set (they even ended the proper set with a ‘let’s fucking have it’ version of Cuyahoga). Guaranteed, the show’s not for everyone… knowing what was coming down the line in the next 24 hours, it very much hit the right nerve for me.
*Massive thanks to Sali for helping give my memory a push on important crisp details.