In the flat at 280 Alan has made a hubble bubble out of a screw-lid Maxwell House jar, the end of a biro, a Beatnik cigarette holder and Evostick. Works perfectly. Photographed by the police, when they raided in 1966. They said it was highly original. Returned it broken.
For the most part we waste our time. Lie about on the borrowed sofa, listening to Highway 61. Read H.P. Lovecraft, the Cthulhu Mythos and the Necronomicon. Eric Frank Wright. Ray Bradbury. Charles Eric Maine. Future. Fantasy. All the time trying to solve it. What the world was. How to live in it.
Dressed as Napoleon at a St Davids Day party, so plastered I could barely speak, someone pulling at the elastic of my trousers, then pulling hers down. Lost the hat. Blur and shout. Had to pay extra at the hire shop.
Brewed our own. Kits from Boots. Bottles exploding in the kitchen at night. Half sediment. Topped with surgical for punch.
Not much of this was influenced by creativity. I had the Oz poster on the wall. Big blue pink, full of peace and love and psychedelic swirl. So did a thousand others. Then the poems arrived.
Steve Morris who gave me my first public reading told me to stand next to a table so I could lean against it and stop the body shaking. How do you read in public? Breathe in then go, like Dylan. Which Dylan? I genuinely didn't know. Steve was dressed in white shirt, black waistcoat, dark curly hair, D H Lawrence. I wore green cord, hush puppies, mod. The poems were hopeless. Couldn't have worked. But no one complained.
When the book came out WANTED for Writing Poetry half by Stephen Morris, half by Peter Finch we gave a reading at the Moulders Arms, Union Street, back of where Boots is now, no, actually under it. Desperados, winos, drunks. You wrote this? This is dreadful. Sold three copies. Bookshops wouldn't take it. Woman with a bun at the University Bookshop said I was an amateur. I wasn't making any money. She was right.
Steve sold shedloads so we reprinted. I ran the innards, he did the covers. Sat around in the flat for hours stapling. Steve sold out again. Folded, gathered, pressed the stapler, stacked.
Alan only liked SF and couldnt cope with poetry. Even if Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man, often broke into verse. Poetry was outside what he did. Outside of what most people did. Still is.
Songs on the player:
Howlin Wolf Meet Me In the Bottom
John Lee Hooker Dont Turn Me from Your Door
Dion Love Came To Me
Bob Dylan Queen Jane Approximately
Beatles Twist and Shout
Well, shake it up, baby, now, (shake it up, baby), shake it up.
(The thing with Twist and Shout was that you liked it and you hated it simultaneously. Liked it because it was loud and rough and easy. And hated it for the same reasons. You could hear it coming out of the Royal Oak at chuck out, roaring up along Newport Road and over towards the Harlequins. C'mon, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon. A song you could always sing in Cardiff when you were drunk. Twist and Shout was an EP with its own picture cover and cost almost twice that of a single. Despite this had been up there, high in the charts. Came out in 1963, stayed for years. Only the Beatles could do that. Shake it, shake it. John Lennon rasping. You couldn't go to the concerts for all the screaming. What was the point when it was impossible to hear a thing? I had it explained to me following their 1964 show at the Cardiff Capitol . It's his legs, the way he moves them. Ah, sex. Should have known.)
In theory, listening to Twist and Shout should have sent us hunting for the deep soul of the original by the Isley Brothers, but it didn't. They'd done Shout before Lulu but that didn't matter. It took until the end of the 60s for This Old Heart of Mine and Behind a Painted Smile and I Guess I'll Always Love You to be re-issued in the UK and for the reformed Brothers to make it. Sort of make it. The good money by this time was on progressive rock. Unnaturally high voices. Endless guitar solos. Rick Wakeman. Deep Purple. Floyd.
Sludge of road dirt on the windows from passing artics. No television. Alan does bombers. I drink cider. Hold On, Im Comin - Sam and Dave. What Becomes Of the Broken Hearted Jimmy Ruffin. Land of a Thousand Dances - Wilson Pickett. Play those next.
From
Real Cardiff Two - Peter Finch's irreverent and alternative guide to the city.
