The Ned Wood Archive

I got me a complication

and its an only child

It’s in my reputation

as something more than wild

The Music Machine

Have you ever noticed how much the Stranglers sound like Sky Saxon and the Seeds?  I got back to my room after helping those peace freaks move and played me new Stranglers album.  And got a shock.  Can you love a band’s music and hate their lyrics?  Or do you have to hate everything about them if their lyrics stink?  Like, where do you stand on Wyndham Lewis?  Fascist or great artist?  The Stranglers’ album starts with a swirling seedy organ and pumping rhythmic guitar bass and drums and just when you think you’re hooked, the lyrics hit you beneath the belt with “Someday I’m gonna smack your face”.  And it goes on, sordid grinding bass, organ trips, and pure sexism.  ‘She’s a piece of meat.’  ‘I guess I shouldn’t have strangled her to death.’  

So I hid the album at the back of my collection, because I don’t want to let anyone know I’ve got it.  At least I didn’t want any of my female friends to see it.  Sonia, Jo, Helen, or Mary.  Jeez.  Mary would hate it.

Actually, I’m lying.  That’s what I think of it now, having listened to it twenty five years on.  Back then I thought it was excellent.  Cause, like they say, the devil has got all the best tunes.  ‘Hanging Around’ is an excellent four-piece groove.  ‘Princess of the Streets’ has a delicate organ and a well-crafted Verlaine-like guitar solo.  Grip is still the masterpiece it ever was.  Down in the Sewer is a superb riff with a killer hook, which, even though it starts to get bogged down in the middle, picks up the riff again and takes it higher in its inspired instrumental ending.  If only they’d stuck with instrumentals.  Greatest Crime you ever did Cornwell was not playing rocknroll, but opening your mouth.   

But I guess it was fortunate that Mary never came round.  Come to think about it she never came round even when I saw her a lot.

“Do you still see that Mary?”  Bernie asked me later that week before I went back home to fetch some more stuff.  “It seems like you’ve always got a regular crowd of admirers Riff my boy.”

He grinned at me across the room.  I know he doesn’t think this way either, but he was trying to tease me about having a regular supply of women, when the truth is that I’d gone through an entire lifetime of celibacy based on … based on … what?  Well, based on being too young to begin with or too shy.  Or based on my feeling that love is important, love is precious, love is delicate.  Or based on my renouncing of lust.  That and the fact that I hadn’t met the right woman yet or been able to convince the right woman yet.  

“What about you Bernie?”

“To abstain from unwholesome deeds and perform only wholesome ones is the sure way to purify the mind,” he said, somewhat tongue in cheek.  Mind, he was an ugly bugger, so perhaps his celibacy was out of necessity.  “No dishonest acts with people, property, or intoxicants,” he continued.  

That’s the difference between Dharma Bums and Dharma Punks.  They’re into sex and drugs and we’re into RocknRoll.

Bernie took the same over-righteous view of smoking that I did, so again, more or less through necessity, we abstained from the weed, which was the only form of substance abuse going at the time.  Weeks later Annie and her friend Viv would invite me and Bernie round for a party for which they planned to bake a weed-infested cake and get us all stoned, but they’d allowed themselves to get side-tracked and had eaten the lot themselves, so when we got there, the two of them were as high as Sputniks and in tune to a whole collection of hilarious jokes Bernie and I just couldn’t understand.

One pill makes you smaller and another makes you tall.  

Then there was the time Lew suggested to us, me and Chris that is, that we should take some acid before meditating.  He must have been reading some book about the Politics of Ecstasy or something.  Chris smiled like he always does in that condescending way he has that warns you he’s going to preach, but I decided I was going to say my piece first.  I guess I was wanting to impress Chris with my conversion to the cause.

I asked Lew if he’d ever been a runner.  He hadn’t of course, so I told him about an argument I’d had with some other guy on a similar subject.  This other guy was always asking me why I enjoyed running.  Actually, it wasn’t something I did a lot of, at least not since I’d left school, but I had been to the Universities Athletics Championships to do the mile the previous summer and he’d maybe seen me training.  Anyways, he’d got a boy racer car and was showing off, so I asked him how he felt when he put his foot down and overtook some other geezer.  He said ‘It feels good, that’s why you do it’, so I said, ‘Just imagine that the acceleration, the power, and the thrill of winning come from your own body not some chunk of metal.  Don’t you think that would be an even better feeling?  Because that’s what happens when I go past someone after 1400m.’  And after that I could tell that he always felt his Porsche was a poor substitute for a fit body.

So that was my argument.  I told Lew that he shouldn’t use something external when you can get a more vivid experience without.  Why use acid to take a trip when you can go somewhere just as cool without.

I looked at Chris for approval, but he just said: “There’s no difference.  It’s all the same world.”