The end of work.

Trewin had a giant whiteboard on the floor in the middle of the room. He navigated it like a game of Twister. I was slouching on half a chair, drinking my fifth deep mug of coffee and shoving tobacco up my nostrils until it burst out of my ears. The sun shone outside and while a musical project was up and visible on the computer screen beside the window, the speakers sat undisturbed.

We were plotting, literally, for another project.

The technical term is avoidant. This is avoidant behaviour. I am very guilty of this sort of thing, and that’s why I know it when I see it, and, after years of battering my head against the tendency, wilfully indulge in it. It is the only way to find peace, and you cannot complete a work until you find peace within it—be it the peace of carelessness abandon or the peace of some kind of holistic achievement. A spell of avoidant behaviour is the ageing of the steak. It is the non-watching of the watched pot. It is the abandonment of all heretofore accepted responsibility justifiable only by arrogance and solipsism. No, wait...

Anyway we threw our arms up and down and touched our chins and held our fingers over our mouths and talked about character arcs and thematic development and held our heads. I span around a lot in the old wheelie chair, throwing up ideas about chase scenes and desolate locations while Trewin drew arrows in that whiteboard turquoise colour from person to trait to scene and gave up little chunks of propellant. And then this. And then that. All deeply interpersonal and with a possibility of gaining compulsory attention. Every idea brought forth ten new ones until we had to reign it back in again to keep the whole thing manageable. Never too much. Which trapdoors should we leap over, and which should we sidestep?

But we never lost enthusiasm, which was good. Tiredness came but it came after we'd worn good routes on the island in the middle of the floor. We smiled as we gave up but I looked out the window and said how I didn’t like the day. I’d left the house without a jacket for the first time in months.

Ed arrived and my brain was a broken cog, whirling to no effect, so I left. On the way home I was so cold I sang to myself to distract from it.

The next few weeks will bring a lot of work that we are in no way prepared for. Such is the method.

Buy and sell.

We had cancelled another meeting, and with the freshly neutered day I walked into Brighton to meet Woman from her dungeon of work.

The two of us were ten jovial minutes from home, and just walking into the gigantic Hove Tesco, when management called me on the phone.

“Pick up a basket now,” I told Woman.

Management laughed through the speaker.

We sauntered through the vegetable aisle as management talked about the release of the new album. Woman picked up a cauliflower and looked at me with her eyebrows raised. I nodded.

I jabbed an excited finger at the courgettes. Woman scrunched up her face. 
 

On the way here we had passed a man talking loudly on his phone.

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s a difficult one to challenge,” he said into his hand.

Woman and I walked a few steps in the night, then talked without looking at each other.

“It is,” she said.

“It’s a very difficult one to challenge,” I said.

“It’s true. It can’t be denied.”

“I know.”

And then there I was, not ten minutes later, hanging out beside the vine-ripened tomatoes and loudly talking lead times and effective project management and revenue streams into the ears of shelf-stackers and mothers wearing slip-on shoes.

I walked casually and mulled the Philadelphia while management chatted about things that would happen, and what my part to play would be and why they would be good. Since these things were first mentioned, maybe a week or two before, I’d discovered a little burst of enthusiasm in myself which was helping things fall out of me here and there that might be of use. I had, in fact, been working.

But now management talked of opportunities and of plans and of reality. And of history. And of potential. These are things that I have faced up to before and found no benefit in. Maybe they excite some people—but not me. The last time I started to touch on those things and what they might mean, I developed a chronic pain condition.

So the floodlights shone on the minced meat and I picked some up, as Woman and I had decided to have bun-less burgers for tea. I make very good burgers. It’s something I make well without really thinking about it. I felt good about making dinner.

I told management that I’d been working hard on creative stuff and that I would send her what I’d done.

I felt empty when I hung up. I figured that from here on in I would be forced to open up a little more than I’m comfortable with. Sometimes I get caught in strange little loops of solitary habit that only get shown as the waste-of-time/road-to-absolute-misery they are when somebody asks me about what I’ve been up to, and I have to turn up my palms and show them. Suddenly I’m going to have to open the box of mystery and show off what I’ve been hiding in there. And now that that’s about to happen, I don’t understand how I got here. I don’t understand why there’s a box. I don’t understand why I’m in this room. Stop looking at me like that. I don’t know why you’re treating me this way. It’s just a box. It’s just a few pieces of paper. I don’t know what they mean. Please don’t make me scream. Not here in the middle of Tesco. I just wanted the burgers. I just wanted to walk Woman home. She’s buying mayonnaise and rainbow peppercorns. How did things end up like this?

The reason the meeting was cancelled was sickness. That’s a good one. I'll have to use that.

Rosy.

Our manager was due to drive up from the South West, but she had to cancel due to the snow on the roads.

Things were running fairly smoothly, she told us, but sometimes she likes to come up and check we’re all OK and tell us what plans she’s made, what people she’s been talking to, what our aims need to be for the next few months—things like that. These meetings have a reputation as ending up a bit boozy, but that’s slowed down a little, of late.

One thing that has perhaps contributed to this has been a change of location. It’s been about a year now since we moved operations out of the shared house and into our palatial studio. The thing is, though… I liked that lampshade. Well, it wasn’t a lampshade as such. It was a shirt. It was a perpetually damp shirt, draped around a lightbulb.

Our manager is happy we’ve moved on. She would often stay over in the house, and I have no doubt that her drive home the next day would necessarily include a stop at a pharmacy for some kind of cream or other.

“You’re manager of Phoria, right?” The pharmacist would ask.

“Yes.”

“That place on the hill?” 

“Yes.”

A pitiful shake of the head.

“...this one’s on me.”

And our manager would limp to her car with a crooked back, smothering herself in ointment with both hands.

But I liked the place. We could kick the floor, there. Things peeled and fell apart. The house stank with the effort of slight improvement, but we were never able to lift ourselves out of the swamp. The doors all sat uneasy on their hinges—especially the ones removed from their frames and stacked against the wall, blocking the hallway. Vacuum cleaners ran, but they rumbled like 4x4s over the black encrusted lumps of chewing gum that enhanced the carpet. Tables looked like bits of trees that had rotted into shape after being thrown into the room. Cushions burst unevenly with makeshift stuffing and dusty display cases creaked every now and then, holding unread books and unused old toys found and brought in from the street for no other reason than that they needed a home.

The front garden had boat engines and a moss covered sofa with springs sticking out of it, and you had to walk through overflowing rubbish to get to the front door, which you had to break in to, because nobody had a key.

When it rained, and you were in the house, you had to put a jacket on.

We used to sit in the lounge and treat it like a railway waiting room. Any ghosts in the house no doubt looked on and grew fearful of us all. We were often disturbing and rarely sober, passing sheets with figures on showing how we were doing, discussing release strategies and whatnot before folding the pages into ashtrays and later on mopping up beer with them. Everybody smiling, sitting on the floor, laying across each other and listening to music and talking about where we were heading.

Now we do things in a chandelier strewn cathedral. The walls are pure white. There’s a picture rail. The windows are large and look out onto trees. The place is filled with antique furniture that’s comfortable. The carpet is actually fitted.

I can’t pretend it’s not nice. And I also can’t pretend there aren’t little islands of squalor that speak of who we are—but they’re islands on a calm sea. The old place was one single tempestuous bog. I loved watching the bubbles rise out of the swamp and burst. That doesn’t happen any more.

(I also love the chandeliers and the ability to breathe and the relative fearlessness with which I now enter the studio, but that’s beside the point.)

So instead of driving up, our manager booked us in for a conference call, and I joined in from home—a damp, bug infested hole in the ground near Hove seafront. Home. I drank coffee brewed in a stained espresso maker on a crooked oven that snaps the electric if you turn it up too high, and sat in unwashed clothes on a paint-stained chair while we talked about everything we were going to achieve. I cooked bacon and sniffed richly at abandoned glassware while she talked. My eyes were dry. It was cold, because of the drafts, but I wore layers and spoke calmly.

Tim

Slow-forward.

The cold bit me hard on my way to the studio.

There was plenty of work to do, but what needed doing was known, so it was very easy to put it off. It needed to be put off, in fact. We’d been slapping our foreheads against a government authorised plastic wall for months. The coffee was already brewing as I entered. The kitchen was thick with steam and bandmates.

We moved into the recording room and Ed and Trewin drank their coffee and chatted about bikes, I think. Maybe engines or something. I don’t entirely remember. I don’t altogether care about engines. I’m not one of the engine people. I can’t stand over an engine and enjoy it. I mean, not really enjoy it, like engine people do. Sometimes I think I’d like to, but then I remember that I don’t care at all. Is that clear? I don’t like engines. Am I getting through? Hello?

Seryn and I sat in silence until I put forward the idea, for no reason other than fun, of watching something I’d found the night before. I could feel the conversation winding down (like an engine), and felt very much that this slow (like an engine (which I don’t like)) start (like an engine) to the day should be maintained (like a loving relationship). 

"Do you want to see something awesome?" I said.

"Sure," they said

So, with the chilling wind howling outside, we sipped on steaming coffee in our grey, unlit recording room, and watched this video together in a singular, comfortable silence: 

That’s the voice of HAL, there. And a clear influence on many of our favourite things. It’s a cool little nugget, no? Very few engines—that’s what I like best about it.

So then we were ready to drop back into work. Sit, listen. Suggest. Maybe this here, maybe this there. Entire songs needed reworking, but nobody was rushing. There was rushing that had been done, and rushing that were yet do, but for some reason on this particular day nothing was urgent, nothing needed to be done in a panic, and the time in which to get everything worked out was plenty. Our transport was casual—unmotorised. This suited me, you could guess. Oh yes. Everything was soft. We rode the waves between projects. One beat didn’t work. We took a note. Some harmonies were too complex; too much for a person to do. Retract. Redact. Unwind the twisted thing. Slow it all down. No need to grind uphill, dear friends. No need for horsepower. Surf gravity. Make your mode of transport a stolen ASDA trolley.

This splendid day inspired a small offering, which I hope tells a story:

Nothing there was crisis,

and nothing there was war.

A deadline is a noble aim,

but ever nothing more.

Tim

No.

He still didn’t look right.

When I got in, Ed and Trewin were bickering over the implementation of our new inter-band messaging system. The system came along with a whole bunch of news email addresses, apps, and all the elements of integration that make the modern world such a great place to hang out.

To recount that actual conversation would be nothing more than the kind of tennis match you’ve heard a thousand times. Was it a tennis match, or was it an endless relay race? More like getting drunk and lost at a party. There we have it—the goings on in this band either scale the heights of an ornate skill set or devolve into the most granite-brained stupidity. And it is never possible to know which one it is at any given point in time. All we know is we breath, and we’re ugly, and there’s always something to do for somebody, somewhere. Our crunched-up and stepped-on shells have pierced our soft insides.

So Trewin was crumbling under the pressure of a new app. He was lost in the wilderness of words on a screen. I couldn’t blame him—he had been staring at the same computer screen, sat in the same chair, sleepless, dreamless, and with only a limited depth of tenderness for about seven weeks straight. What I thought was dust on the piano keyboard was actually dirt from unwashed fingers.

Ed, Seryn, and I showed him how you can share music instantly on the new system; how quick, easy, and beneficial it was once you looked at the screen and took in the words rather than tried to make them bend to your will. I wouldn’t put it past the man to call up the particular multi-national company that makes this system and—after much talking, holding, and department hopping—convince them what to change and what to scrap. I’m sure I once caught him on the phone to Heinz whining about the inevitable regression of society when the logo of a basic foodstuff impresses a childish nostalgia on an entire public. Or maybe it was him catching me.

I want to forget what I know and learn to hate what I love.

Beans.

So we settled the issue of the system. He would...basically do what he always did, and not talk to anybody anyway. Meanwhile, the file sharing system was good. He could work it. We rearranged things better to his liking while he showed us why it was pointless, terrible, and an interruption to his day.

He rolled and lit a cigarette, grimacing and hissing as he inhaled, but brightening immediately.

His eyes were bulbous, his skin grey, and his voice was that of a sad dog.

We listened to a track that needed work. We thought it was finished months ago, but on this listen something seemed a little off. Could it be that as the other tracks have been polished and buffed and improved, this one had fallen a little behind the curve? But we thought we’d finished it! This was the one about which there were no doubts! We all loved it before! What’s it doing now, tormenting us like this!?

All of our phones beeped with a new incoming message. New James had sent a message concerning Trewin’s problems with the system.

Stop being an idiot. It’s easy freaky lemon squeaky.

The track continued to play, and the meandering structure caused a loss of interest.

Trewin folded his arms on the table, smacked his head on them, and moaned.

“Oh God,” he said, “kill me now.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, “just work on it and send it over.”

Tim

Yes.

When I walked in the door, he span around and eyed me gleefully.

‘I’ve had no sleep,’ he said.

‘I bought biscuits.’

‘Nice.’

I laid them on the desk among the cigarette butts stuffed straight into the table and coffee cups with whole gardens growing out of them. I sat on the piano stool, removing from it a pair of suspicious underwear.

Ed pointed at the chandeliers. He’d replaced a couple of the two-hundred light bulbs that had nearly all blown.

‘Nice one,’ I said. ‘The place looks better.’

Ed smiled as he reclined on the antique sofa. He’d hired the Rug Doctor a week before and was riding the crest of a foaming wave.

‘I’ve had no sleep. I need a cup of tea,’ said Trewin as he span around in his terrifically engineered chair. It was the kind of chair that an Italian technology-fantastist might baulk at for being too gaudy. Visibly, it was a locomotive.

Seryn walked in, handing Ed and Trewin two dirty pint glasses in which puddles of creamish liquid sloshed about.

Trewin took a glug.

‘Cold,’ he said, looking blankly at Seryn.

‘Yeah, I know,’ he said, ‘That's because I left them on the side for about fifteen minutes.’

‘The biscuits are nice,’ said Ed.

Seryn and Ed went to Seryn’s room to set up a new synthesiser while Trewin and I sat and chatted about very little of note. When is the album coming out? How are we? That sort of thing. Predictable. Unimaginative. Of little or no note. Trewin played the same fourteen seconds of music over and over again for the longest time, tinkering with a graphic equaliser which sat in a little box inside a little window inside a project in another window which filled a screen packed with squares and other oblongs and infinite simulated knobs drawn on to all colours of pixelated pretend equipment. The bass elements of a distant whining sound phased in and out, ever-so slightly.

The music stopped.

‘I don’t know what I’m doing any more,’ he said.

He leaped out of the chair and went to microwave his tea as an atonal trumpet sound blasted at concert volume from Seryn’s open door.

Tim

Hurdles and hoops and living.

The album is pink and fleshy and tender.

We are dusty old husks; skeletons with decomposed muscle and skin. If we move, everything cracks around us and crumbles away.

I suppose it coincides with the new year. As I have said to trusted company many times before only slightly differently, I can feel a big shift coming on. A big, thoroughly gratifying shift.

The sky is still pale but there is less flourescence in it. The coloured fairy lights in the room have flicked on. It’s my favourite time of day.

We have just come away from a meeting discussing the album and the way ahead. I have in my possession a clumsily executed photograph of the final tracklist, along with marks next to the ones that ‘still need a bit of work’.

Take-offs and landings are the most dangerous part of flying. We have been here a few times now—with previous projects—and there is no telling what might crop up over the next few weeks.

Trewin could get stuck under a manhole cover after flushing a valuable penny down the poo box and then going into the sewer to fish it out.

Ed could choke on some gratin made with cheese of questionable organic certification leading to what’s known as ‘Brighton flu’, which will necessitate a long spell on his back on a mattress delivered by a funky online start-up (i.e. a mattress retailer) being fed curly kale and wearing some of those leopard print MC Hammer pants that girls wear.

New James could take a corner so fast in his new car that his sunglasses will fly off and land perfectly on a baby, who will proceed to do a double thumbs up and say something like ‘That’s what’s happenin’ in a really low voice before some disco music kicks in. That’s New James done for a few weeks. That party’s not stopping any time soon.

Seryn could accidentally cook himself and starve to death as he waits for himself to arrive to eat his meal.

Each of these would be tragic and each of them is as likely as the next, and all as likely as everything getting finished without a hitch.

It’s not cohesive, but it’s about time we stuck things together a little less and just looked at what we’ve got. If you’re in pieces, you’re in pieces. Just be that way.

The album will come together when it’s ready to do so. It’s ripe and it’s there on the bough. It’s pink and fleshy and tender.

It’s midweek. We hope your hump-day was survivable. Sorry if it wasn’t. If there was something wrong that is within your control: make it better. There’s no point in putting it off. (Unless dinner’s ready. We’ll allow you dinner.)

Be fresh and have fun with it all,

Tim

Parks and decoration.

Brighton is cold tonight.

Happy New Year.

And we hope you had a fine Christmas.

Christmas is a time for reminiscence (and meat) (dead animals that is) (a dead thing in every house, plonked proudly on a table made from another dead thing, only for things that will eventually die to shovel it into themselves because I need it in order to live what a boring excuse that’s become for everything it’s an excuse for), but we didn’t do any of that (as I recall).

New years is a time for resolution, and new beginnings, but we’re on the tail end of finishing the album – by the time we’re ready for new beginnings it’ll be springtime, and what is there to celebrate about spring? Flowers? Literally who hasn’t seen a flower by now? Why do we lower our standards so? Flowers grow in Chernobyl.

I’ve just come back from a band session and the rather pleasant feeling is: more of the same with a bit more. We’ve hit a few periods of momentum over the past year – it’ll be nice to hit one of those again. We’ve all got it in us, we just need to keep the temperature down and see what happens. It’s true we’ve got to up our game in many ways – but it’s always been like that. More of the same with a bit more. We’ve got to get better. We’ve got to learn. We’ve got to be open.

This isn’t anything new. This is just moving forward. Doing this is about standing and waiting to jump on a moving roundabout. There’s nothing more to add.

So if I’ve understood everybody correctly, I’m going to spend the next few days down the park (it’s cold, so I’ll wear my mac), trying to hop on the roundabout. I’ll also try out the swings as a metaphor for the ups/downs (forwards?) of career/life, and probably end my day early by going down the slide.

Don’t worry if you don’t read this – I won’t use this opportunity to make you feel guilty – but if you’re here then hello. I don’t know what this is but it’s going to get better.

It’s an odd ride, isn’t it?

So have fun, and stop being so careful. Quit your job (if you're looking for a sign - this is it) and go back to school or go travelling or whatever and just do it. Live in one room for a while, if you have to. It’ll be fun. What do you think you’ll be missing? There’s literally nothing here.

Tim