twenty odd years now

I CAN’T TAKE IT NO MORE, I’M BUGGIN’ OUT.

I’m marching out of revolving glass doors on the ground floor of the building I work in. Worked in. It’s the sixth of July 2009 and I have just quit my job to go on tour with the Shitty Limits. In this weirdly unBritish helter-swelter, London feels like holiday. Stepping out onto Leicester sq I seem to have entered some kind of parallel world. Hordes of determined looking youth are jostling for space, crowding around the steps of my work. Getting closer I can see they’re school kids. All from different schools, seemingly? They’re shouting. I am disorientated and a bit disturbed, until it becomes obvious what’s going on. Leicester square is London’s crap version of Sunset Blvd, a ‘cinema quarter’, much less cultural than that sounds, and these are harry potter fans, hundreds of them. Dogged with a look of steely defiance mixed with exhaustion, they’re all Hogwarts colours, handmade everything and underdeveloped ribs pressed against the barriers, preemptively rolled out, as they do for every Tom , Dick and Jonas brother. Lightning bolts gouged into tweenage foreheads. Radcliffe and related cartel aren’t due for a good six hours. It’s fucking tribal. Three girls I lock eyes with are crying. Already. This is fandom. I get on my bike. We could really learn something.

I’m flummoxed, really. Everyone else may have Better records, bigger cities wilder times. I wish I could write like Brace but frankly I don’t have the liver for it. I tried to think about what I know about. After some serious brain defrag, it’s been decided: other than heavy interest in (not always backed up by knowledge of) my two specialist subjects: New York hardcore and Thomas Pynchon, all I’ve really learnt in the last two years is related to the job I have just quit. There’s a peculiar terror in that, but hey, a little background: Aged fifteen, yes I had a skateboard, but it was cheap, I was/am clumsy, the boys just thought I was stupid, so instead as a bored teenagers do these days, I got good at using the computer. somewhere between graduating a degree in English and Cultural Studies (the study of whatever you bloody well please) and the dole queue (they don’t even really make you queue) I got told there might be money in all that screen time. I sunk my freakishly small, blunt teeth into that, and to cut to the chase, spent eighteen months of my young adult life working in a public relations firm. This became reading and writing about ‘digital and social media engagement’ (amongst many other marginally less vacuous, more intensely technological things) for one of London’s top firms. I went to events, stood on the sidelines of this whole new weird subculture of blogger meetups (subcultural only in as much as ‘the wider populace would think you’re a fucking moron’) and smiled at the men and women there: mostly jolly, but deeply desperate, weirdly promiscuous functioning alcoholics comparing smartphones and revelling in a who’s who of status-update status-anxiety. There were moments when I started to believe it, present it, the bosses liked it. They viewed me as putting an amiable face to the blind panicked fear that these ‘new channels’ and represented to thousand greasy execs – turning bilious and pale as they realised this might be one hurdle too far. One week I trained fifty people how to use fucking fucking fucking twitter, saddened as they gripped hard at their employability in the face of not-so-empty threats from management about new requirements to be a ‘digital native’.

I started to reach capacity. resentment bubbled over as I heard my own mouth spout more and more convincingly about ‘viralising’ and ’seeding.’ It’s no accident that these terms bring to mind some kind of dribbling heinous future semen; dried up, impotent and full of dead ideas. Smeared it all over everything that is ostensibly useful about the internet, giving it that predictable echo chamber glisten. Everytime some ‘blogger’ typed, it was fodder for a brand awareness graph, algorithms to measure sentiment. Me. My mother, the woman who, some seven years ago, executed a military level u-turn on discovering pink hair dye in amongst her 16 year olds daughters purchases on the way home from the shops, now responds to my plaintive moans at being effectively trapped in a world of vacuous pricks, with her honeyed intones of ‘but Bryony, you’re a punk, you’re meant for better than all this.’ Head hits palm. did I hate every second? no, but I’m tormented by how lucky I am every day anyway (so should you be), so I’ll tick off the ability to piss bile about choices I made for myself as another middle class privilege. I guess. Time off to play shows and do other real things felt like lovely, monochrome relief from the 56 million colours bombarding information super duper next level two-dot-oh-god-please-no world of my work. I’d always tutted inwardly at the ‘9 to 5 admin hate my job’ overtones of the messageboard addicted mid 30s punks, I thought it was a clever ruse, that having a ‘real’ career to go with the label and the band and the shows would be a lucrative accoutrement, the punkest jugglers act, but only dropped balls ensued, and there are some things not up for sacrifice. I can still make things with codes but all that shit loses its lustre when you have to deliver fifty deck power point slides on what some dipshit blogger who can’t fucking spell said about adidas. or hamleys. or business process management software. I’m not kidding. I’m on the run. digitally. and I hate how that sounds too. knowing how SEO works (aka the ability to terminally scupper myself by having an unusual real life name) only makes me more determined. still, even under duress, you try saying the anonymous onandonandonanist. Viralise that, fuckheads.
Despite my nose-as-viewfinder talk here, to my employers, it seems I dipped out graciously with the promise of an MA (I got an unconditional offer but its still five thousand pounds I don’t have) and by the time this is published, I guess will be penniless and shaped like a human burrito after three weeks with Logic Problem and the Shitty Limits. Tell me you wouldn’t do the same. While the clear desk policy puts paid to grandiose ’shit on it and run’ notions, I’m working out my notice with clenched fists and resolutely leaving this particular breed of suckers in their rancid gold dust. Wilfully, then, this is the new poor. This is the new poor. And without a proper job I guess I’ll be sticking to tar babies mp3s, and patch up my self-worth, whichever way.

Last night (fresh wounds fyi) I put a hardcore punk gig on in an arch under London Bridge station. I called it Big Takeover. It was a mixed bill (Logic Problem, Shitty limits, Mob Rules, Black Time, Ironclad and Nowhere Fast ) I made it all ages, bring your own booze, and 200 people showed up. There are reasons why all of this is unusual, much of which I think I covered in that scene report, but that’s all by the by. What was, to attendees, by all accounts, a night to rejuvenate something that’s been lacking here for a long time, was, for me, the promoter, irrevocably marred by constant harrasement from the venue owner, who seemed like a ‘regular’ guy (who responded to london’s version of craigslist with news of an empty space that may be ’suitable for my event’) but revealed himself that night to be nothing short of an absolute wanker. I’ve dipped toes into the stagnant water that is putting on gigs over the last five years, but nothing to compare to this in terms of scale. I was excited, energised. I put up a 500 pound (what, like 850 dollars?) damage deposit. I was an idiot.

So now, this venue guy is sending threatening emails, wanting to withhold my damage deposit plus bill me thousands. We stayed ’til three am cleaning and that place was spotless. There’s no more than 100 worth of ‘damage’ – including labour. I hate him, I hate him. I hate that he treated me so differently to my taller, maler friends who reasoned with him so easily. I hate that I let myself feel threatened. That I started to feel like this was too much for one person. I hate that I couldn’t see any of the bands because he was shouting in my ear the whole night, that I couldn’t catch up with the people who’d travelled. That people got turned away. That I was still trying to be pleasant to him as he snakes an arm around my waist and thanks me for doing his washing up with a weird snarl. I made one thousand two hundred pounds and gave every penny to the bands because that’s the way I wanted to do things, only to be told that I should have kept it, to deal with this eventuality. That a man who runs a space banging on about health and safety, shouting in my face, should think that a rusty screw for the main door handle is acceptable. One of my sillier friends, wasted and backed up with the ultimate ‘its a punk rock show’ illegitimate defense, threw a cymbal stand at head height into the crowd. I was distraught as we bundled the guy (he was from France and it was his first show in London, great time) into a cubicle. Venue guy barged in, threw a first aid kit (complete with scissors) at my face and stormed out. so he’s screaming in my face as the injured party pisses blood up the toilet wall, staring me down and blocking my path and I am a five foot five twenty three year old woman that has given him half her monthly salary, and he is a sociopathic, dishonest, powertripping, cringy, fucking, bastard. Oh and a secret christian, I found a ringbound notebook on a desk in his office, with a crucifix daubed on the front in tippex (maybe you call it whiteout) the book was full of prayers scrawled in a disjointed cursive he’s all ‘dear god, i won’t enjoy tonight, but don’t let me fuck it up’ – I clench weaker fists at 2am whilst my best friends clean his floor and he shouts at them about the best way to wield a mop, then thinks he’s being funny asking my friend Keg if he’s ‘the token asian?’ He’s claiming I’m in breach of a contract I never signed, that too many people were there, that I’m responsible for the guys that pissed in the street. For the ‘nuisance’ caused to neighbours who were hanging out with my friends outside. My friend Jen is a doctor, and even he knew better than her, because calling the ambulance when the French guy started to pass out was ‘putting his business in jeopardy’. GAH. Still, I went to a show the next night and there were kids there who’d never been before, who’d picked up flyers at Big Takeover, who were kinda wide eyed and wanted to say hi. Maybe it’s trite to say so, and I’m no martyr, but if it made anyone at all feel like there’s something left of punk in this city more than brand-backed indie, free-association fuzz hipsters and the odd irono-DJ, it might all end up being worth it. For now i’ll stay incandescent and penniless.

A word in your shell-like (some UK-OK recommendations): Read Futility Exercise #1 and crank proudly, listen to Black Mamba Beat and burn your boat shoes, get the Kingdom of fear 7” compilation and basically just slamdance, watch Phoenix Nights with some garlic bread, listen to Sex Dungeon and do the Fritzl stomp. I’m going to America tomorrow, when this is in print (scary) I’ll be back, so I hope you said hello. http://onandonandonanist.blogspot.com/ bryony.beynon@gmail.com