This is the hand...the hand that takes...

 Want to feel old? Eventually you'll have no choice, of course. The dry rot creeping through your bones. The gradual atrophying of your wet bits, and your dry parts deliquescing, turning to mush. A shadow over the moon, the dark smudge on the light-box screen. Happy New Year, here's another year, and you'll only waste it, spoil it, like all the others: a dirty protest in a pristine cell. Nothing gets shit out of the grouting. 

I was just watching the 2002 Michael Winterbottom film, "24 Hour Party People". It's like Anthony H Wilson's home movies, with him doing ironic inter titles, and reminding everyone he went to Cambridge. Steve Coogan nails the voice in the first scene, but ultimately plays himself, in a bouffant wig and Commes des Garcon suit. Simon Pegg does a cameo as a pseudo Paul Morley - surely the only kind of Paul Morley - and he's wearing the same coat I bought last November.* My look is coded 80's music journalist. I'm sure 80's me would approve - before being offended by the general puffy sagginess. 

Two Foxes. 

The film is now twenty years old, and looks back twenty years beyond that. It's steeped in the mythology of the Manchester music scene, and the mythology of the city. It charts the rise and fall of Tony Wilson as though he were the city. It comes from the post-industrial murk and grime of Victorian Manchester, and ends with Factory Records' 20 grand designer table, suspended from the exposed beams like Ian Curtis from a light-fitting. With Factory Records' success we see the pop heroes change from beautiful - and Ian Curtis was very beautiful - tragic, alienated poets in big coats to, well, Happy Mondays, who are not that. They may be the opposite of that, no matter what you think about Shaun Ryder's lyrics. 

I've never lived in Manchester, but I'm still there, in bedsit land. Lonely, misunderstood and looking like Caspar David Friedrich did my album covers. That's my mental landscape, gouged twenty years into the poisonous hell of the last century. They'll bury me in a great-coat, stinking of Falcon hairspray. As Steve Coogan says on the DVD commentary - and I'm paraphrasing, as I can't be arsed to go back and get a direct quote: "Music journalists then were like they had an over active thyroid - everything always had to mean something, it always had to be a clue to something. New Order were secret Nazi's because of the trail of breadcrumbs buried in their lyrics etc". See, I told you I was paraphrasing - no one actually says "etc". But I still think that's right. I still think that's the way to do it. I like putting in clues, little threads to pull. It's how we learned then, in the past, where I'm from. 

I got into the paintings of the Vienna Secession from reading a Jesus and Mary Chain interview. Similarly, I read "The Outsider" and "The Savage God" because of Aztec Camera and Blur interviews, respectively. I'm certain I read Kaja Silverman's "The Acoustic Mirror" for much the same reasons. There was no Wikipedia then - we had scraps from the tables of pretentious pop stars, so we became pretentious in turn which, for me, is the highest state of being. I can still remember a director attempting to prune the whinnets of whimsy from one of my plays. "No one in the audience will get that reference, John."  "Two people might. That's for them. The EVERYTHING ELSE is for everyone else." Of course, it may well be that I've constructed plays entirely out of the stuff that is not for 98% of the audience - that's why I'm such a force to be reckoned with in the local theatrical world. But you can only write what you write. Or, at least, only I can. 

I felt staggeringly ancient watching "24 Hour Party People", as the culture it celebrated, my formative years, is so far from the culture we live in now. As nostalgic as it made me feel for the unlovely past, that time is long gone. Even the film recording this story was made a generation ago, and Tony Wilson, whom I had forgotten was in it, has been dead for fifteen years. Ian Curtis for forty two. I still listen to a lot of music featured in the film. I still have a quiff, a big coat and National Health specs. I'm a dusty, stuffy relic of the past. I'm listening to Heart's "Barracuda" as I type this, which I could never have done then: rock was a different tribe. I remember feeling slightly sick when I heard a guitar solo. A blizzard of white noise was fine, but "technical prowess"? Fuck off. Take it outside and take your stink of patchouli with you. 

Music's not like that now. You can like everything. Its staggering to think that I ever thought there was a problem with a song as wonderful as "Barracuda". Music wasn't better then. It was just yours. It wasn't immediately available, so it had rarity value. It came with a sense of achievement, like collecting a shit ton of Pokemon. It was mysterious because we didn't necessarily know what had come before - how was I supposed to know that "Bandwagonesque" sounded like Big Star? Until everyone started going on about Big Star and I had to buy Big Star records. I traveled from Basingstoke to Camden to buy it on vinyl, which I could only play on my sister's record player because I didn't have one. Did that make it a valuable commodity? Did that make me have to like it because it represented a staggering financial outlay? Of course it did, I was hugely invested. There was no listening to the first five seconds and skipping on to the next track. I knew every note, every breath, every scratch and bump. That still doesn't mean music is worse today. You can quite happily listen to 6 Music all day every day, and find music that has been fondly curated to your exact tastes. It's made like that - pleasant indie music you will like, target audience. The algorithms have spoken. You'll say "John, you're being too even-handed and fair - the charts, at least, are at least total shit now. You must admit that." It's true, I've never knowingly heard an Adele song - except that Bond theme, possibly, but I can only remember the chorus - and the Ed Sheeran I have heard is bafflingly mediocre**, but viewers of the Top of the Pops repeats from the early 90's would have to admit 'twas ever thus. Fucking Wet Wet Wet, man. 

Twas ever thus. I'm aging myself, here. 

What's the point of all this, John? As ever you tell us a lot of seemingly unrelated half-baked thoughts, but now we need you to tie them up in a neat little bow and present them to us. What are you talking about? You sounded really depressed at the start. 

Well, I was depressed. One of the reasons I write is to work through the misery of having a brain clogged with dull thoughts and barely expressed ideas. Typing is therapy. And there's little pressure - no one reads this, certainly not the long ones. It might as well be a diary with a little key. But as theatres start their open submission seasons again, and I face the very real possibility of pitching ideas to film producers, and starting a search for some sort of representative agency, I have to consider two things, that are really one thing. I'm an old man with one foot in another century. I feel like I have things to say or, at the very least, stories to tell about people I've invented. I try to make those stories interesting, thoughtful and funny, and the people in them complex, flawed, layered. Do people want stories like this any more? And will I even get a chance to pitch them, once my white hair and tramp's teeth appear in the Zoom meeting. Isn't that the guy from "Up"? Then why is he such a downer? Agents might well be wondering "What's he been doing for the past fifty years? Apart from aging." How can I represent someone so deserted by youth? He looks like he's been vaccinated against it. 

Should an old man create art? If I were a proper outsider artist I might be on to something. But I'm only half feral - I'm house-trained. You can leave me alone in your house and I won't raid your fridge or soil your soft furnishings. The question remains: is there a point? I'll always write - I can't help it now. But trying to meet the expectations of other people's agendas, financial or otherwise, seems pointless. This is not the void you are looking for. 

I recorded a song today. Imagine what that's like!

*No "off-the-Pegg" jokes here. It's not that sort of blog post. Christ, I can't believe I still write a blog. 

** I like that one Years and Years song I've heard. Oh yeah. I'm down. I think I heard it first on "Strictly".