Looking through Gary Gilmour's ears

[hirez]

I think it's obvious to anyone with sense in their heads that my LJ title writing skills owe a great deal (about sixty quid, I should think) to the NME. Specifically the 80's version. Now, I knew about 'the hip-hop wars' (Rockists vs. a variety of Pauls, by and large) from reading the 40th birthday edition, but it was nice to have it all explained again the other week by the nice men and women from the television. There they were, banging on about how terrible and confusing it was for the poor readers not to have a consistent party line (Bloody middle-class SWP-think right there) and having to deal with the 'yoof suicide' issue (or the computer games or pirate radio ditto) and rambling articles about failing to interview Madonna...

... And I'm left thinking 'well actually chaps, I rather liked it like that.'

Of course it's never that simple. I recall being bloody infuriated by the idea that some fresh-up-to-London nonce was wasting time and print over Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Set the Tone and Blue Rondo a la Turk rather than The Luddites or Husker Du. However, those earnest attempts at idealogical soundness informed many odd corners of my record collection and saved me from being a monochrome bedroom g*th.

Mind you, it's probably more true to say that I was never in any real danger of that because of who I am and where I was. The NME, Peelie and Driftin' Records (and Badlands) were there for anyone who was interested.


Travelling forwards in time (can one travel 'forwards' in time, or are the directions better named 'scree', 'blart', 'ftumpsh' and 'piddle'?), I discovered this. Yes, that probably used to be a link into gopherspace. Anyway, I Was There. If I had any minor shred of rock&roll cred, I'd go on about some random free festival that I'd blagged into while in the back of Hawkwind's bus aged six and three quarters. (Though there was this thing at Clyro Court once, but apparently only half of Hawkwind turned up...) Since I haven't, though, what little I can remember of wandering a campsite in Lelystadt in 1993 and being shown The Internet by an anarchist hacking collective from Amsterdam will have to do. That weekend changed my life.

Comments

[quercus.livejournal.com]

I remember [...] being shown The Internet

I think what it comes down to is:

When you first said "FMR - hyperlinks! And they're not just on a CD, they go EVERYWHERE", were you looking at http:// or gopher://?

Kid Creole (or rather his Coconuts) made better magazine than pictures of Mark E. Surlybastard. That's why Smash Hits is still going, and the NME are either writing dodgy Grauniad columns or hoping to be Hollywood's next Nick Hornby.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Telnet, I think. Yes. There were just a bunch of dodgy PCs running pc-tn (or whatever) off floppy and one poor sod who'd sat in front of the old Sun that was the link to the outside world running nslookup for people who asked, since there was no DNS running on the site.

The first thing I did was telnet into Cix. I Knew Nothing. I didn't know that a thing called DNS existed that would have made life easier. It didn't cross my mind that telnet was cleartext and for all my making sure that no-one was shoulder-surfing, boyo on the Sun ought to have been running tcpdump if he was any use at all. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the PCs were all serialled into the Sun. Hypertext? Until a couple of years later, it was just a way of bothering SFC and Usenet without the inconvenience of paying my own phonebill.

[codepope.livejournal.com]

A small demon appears.... "Right, who invoked ftumpsch?"....

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Thinking about it, the correct name for the act of travelling sideways through time is going to be 'Hawkwind'.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Oddly though, I recall your "Silver Machine" as one of the few that didn't end up travelling sideways in a deprecated manner.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I think I'd calmed down by then.

Mind, there was silver machine I, which was a VW I lent to one of Small Brother's dodgy mates. He blew it up, got it 'fixed' by some bugger who was an expert with a hammer and Araldite, and from then on it produced slightly more smoke than a knackered MZ. And the bloody thing tried to run me over when the handbrake seized.

Silver machine III was a Renault 5 that became expectedly three-wheeled in a comedy manner (rusty torsion-bar mount. Poing!) when dole-scum Mark and dole-scum Will thieved it at Humblebee and tried jumping it over a hippy-confounding earth mound nearby. The first I knew about it was when I came back from work to discover them covered in cuts and bruises, complaining about my 'unsafe' car. I fear I laughed my stupid head off.

Why (and indeed when) in hell did you cruise Cheltenham, trying to see if I'd been arrested? For pointing-and-laughing practice?

[quercus.livejournal.com]

We'd lost you, your bruv had mislaid you, and there was a rumour (from chainsaw Ed?) of your involvement in some pub pagga.

I thought the R5 was white (and rust coloured). The SM I was thinking of was the little Polo - which I never heard run, just saw parked forlornly outside Marineville.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Oh. I have no recollection, which is a shame since it all sounds terribly interesting.

SM (i) was that Derby (Polo with a boot), which was lent to A Pillock when I was given...
SM (ii). A Carlton with funny plates, lots of miles and a Motorola phone. I had to give it back when I went off to be a stude, so SM (i) was retrieved and finally died properly when I left Marineville for Mustoe Mansions. I left it there for about six months when I scraped the cash up for SM(iii), the R5, which was held together by U-bolts and Isopon. Andy M. finally objected loudly enough that I took SM(i) to a scrappy. Of course, being an idiot, I didn't get scrap-bloke to sign the 'it's been scrapped honest guv' bit of the logbook in front of me, and the next thing I heard about it was the Polis ringing me up to say that the thing had been 'abandoned' in Charlton Kings and was it anything to do with me. IIRC, I offered to tow the thing away (with SB's V8 landie. Any excuse...) since no-one could object to me stealing my own car, but never heard any more. Meanwhile I'd bought the Alien Volvo and abandoned SM(iii) at Humblebee. I've a long history of keeping cars lying around, it seems.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

I've a long history of keeping cars lying around, it seems.

Amateur

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Well, obviously. I wouldn't even begin to consider competing in your league...

[quercus.livejournal.com]

A small daemon, surely? I imagine there's already an RFC somewhere on a tweaked-ftp called ftumpsch

[hirez.livejournal.com]

You know, if there isn't, there should be.

[perlmonger.livejournal.com]

Ghods... Free festivals... I went to some of those; I can't remember where or how many, just vague odd flashes of Here and Now and similar. There were at least three, because I remember having the 2CV at one, the moggie van at another and the CX Safari floorpan-deep in mud at a third, but those are just waypoints in a decade lost to oblivion.

*dredges*

There was Deeply Vale, somewhere near Bury IIRC, and I can actually remember that '82, or possibly '83, was the year I made it to Stonehenge. The rest is gone.