Unanswerable Lust

 For a story I'm writing I decide to listen to Luxuria's album Unanswerable Lust which I haven't heard since 1988. There is a very specific memory attached to it as I played it on repeat (and on cassette) in my parent's cellar while I was painting paintings for my Sixth Form art class. I don't remember why I chose to paint in the cellar but I was going through a sepia and raw umber period and everything I painted was shit smeared and piss stained. The jumble, the mustiness, the rising smell of that cellar all fed into the experience. The Brother's Quay were a big influence, the comic art of Dave McKean, Vaughan Oliver's covers for 4AD's albums. It was dark and cold down there and so were the paintings and so was the music. 

Luxuria was very me. Howard Devoto spat out his lyrics with a sneer and his persona was that of a bookish cornered rat. His songs were full of unrequited love, smoking and coffee, and were obviously "clever". The music was clammy and intense, full of lurching, industrial bass and swollen guitar lines. They were itchy and frenetic, scratchy and sharp, but were still recognisably kinds of pop songs. It was an approach to pop that had soured and curdled but the basic shape was still intact. The the engine of popular song wearing the chassis of something nastier and narkier. I was nothing like that, of course. I was dreamy and useless and needy, so I clad myself in this spiky armour, as though I were about to take on the Lambton worm.  

This music was all mine. Anyone could like The Smiths and Echo and the Bunnymen, and The Fall was shared out amongst my friends, but no one listened to Luxuria. They were not popular. I can see why. There are choruses but they're not the big choruses that Magazine used to have. The songs feel cramped and congested. There's too much going on and subsequently nothing sticks. These songs are catchy as leprosy. But they were mine and stuck in my cellar, listening to the tinny tape-recorder, fingers dull from cold and smearing brown across the canvas, I felt real. Seventeen, dressed in black, and painting in my basement real. 

I assume the title was either ironic or horribly on the nose. 

I still enjoyed painting at this point. I hadn't realised how limited I was. My colour sense was always poor and my eye for design and composition was underdeveloped. But I could always draw and I was beginning to discover early "modern art": Picasso and Braque, the Surrealists, the Vienna Secession. In the end I didn't get much further: I still paint like an Expressionist who can't afford to slap the paint on. I was to enjoy painting for precisely two more years. 

These days I do a painting a year and it usually has a practical purpose, its for something. One day I hope to enjoy it again, as a relaxing hobby. Writing has long taken over as the fury I'm driven by and in that too I am an Expressionist with a limited pallet.