Gateway
My first stop in a new city
is a big, bright house.
It’s filthy, full of characters,
front door always slamming,
the kitchen bin constantly
bursting its banks.
Two landlords on the premises,
unpredictable, over-sexual.
One drinks Thunderbird for show,
tries to scare me with bare pubs
on the other side of town.
He’s quite the arsehole.
A’s a long-term attic dweller,
glam rook in thick plaster,
rattling in the rafters,
like a lone goth memory.
She exists on instant coffee,
adoration, Marlboro Lights.
Her neighbours - two grads,
suits to work, healthy types.
This is not the place for them
so their stays are short-term.
They pack up their futures,
jog off while they can.
A young Sicilian turns up,
dropped here by his family.
The landlords mash his head,
leave him looped and alone
with the only video in the house:
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.
In the middle of all this
I am in a wrong job
and a small plain room.
I buy a green venetian blind,
make pirate radio my friend.
And I descend.
RF 2021
Video/audio for this one here.
My first full-time job post-uni was a trainee post at an advertising agency in Leeds and once I got the job in summer of 1989 I had to find somewhere to live pretty quickly (I was 22). I looked at two rooms in shared houses in the city and one had lots of Garfield/cuddly toy stickers on the fridge and so, dear reader, I picked the other one. The other one was a big end-terraced house (2 landlords living in and about 5 tenants) in an area called Hyde Park (lots of students, lots of hippies, lots of noise). I had a small room, a shared bathroom with the people on my floor, some use of the small downstairs kitchen (though I don’t think I ever cooked there). It could be a sociable house but it wasn’t exactly a healthy environment, in many ways. Garfield and friends might have been the safer choice for my lifelong mental health but at this point I’ll never know.
I lived in this shared house for about 6 months and during this time I learned to really devote myself to nightclubbing. I’d always been a fan, since I was about 14, but for the first time (a) I had a fairly decent disposable income, (b) I was living in a place where there were loads of different places to go and (c) Leeds was great for raving and all that went with it (the much repeated ‘joke’ about LSD and 2 Es, though funny because it was accurate, omitted to mention the shedloads of speed around too – as a former goth capital amphetamines were a local delicacy very much still on a lot of menus in the ’90s). Leeds and the rest of Yorkshire was producing some great music too (Nightmares on Wax, Ital Rockers, LFO) so the clubs had a feel of their own (I went out in London a lot too around this time and did enjoy it but the local West Yorkshire scene was quite unique ... 3)**. Very early on I bumped into someone from uni who was in a similar boat to me (living in a new place, not knowing a soul, having a little money to spend) and the two of us took advantage of cheap weekday meal offers, cheap weekday drinks offers, cheap drugs, cheap clubs (this was long before ’90s designer clubbing). I had a pair of bounce-til-you-drop Nike Airs and an assortment of cheap and cheerful raving clothing (flowery knee-length dungarees, cheap t shirts, jeans). I had not been a fan of the general horsiness of university balls in Cambridge (I only went to one as staff, drank more than I served, deserted my post and took the first pumpkin home) but here the music was brilliant and no one was trying to get you to eat ‘hog roast’ or wear a frou-frou gown. Finally, I had a ball.
The job was what we would now call meh. Graduate trainees were expected to go into the business side of advertising (think Peter Campbell in Mad Men and about as charming) when I had been hoping for the creative (and an eventual transition into successful novel writing – after all that had worked for Salman Rushdie and Fay Weldon*, hadn’t it?). However, the creative department was the preserve of art college graduates, certainly at our place, so I didn’t get much of a look in (I could have tried harder, I suppose, but I soon learned that I deeply disliked quite a lot about the world of advertising so trying at work was low on my list of activities). I was very ill-suited (in every sense) for business dealings (and still am) but the agency, quite a pretentious place run by more than a couple of A Team tossers, didn’t want to lose their ‘Oxbridge’ graduate, so I ended up in Research and Planning. I got a company car, spent some Saturdays organising market research days in city centres, spent a fair amount of time on data input and reports. But I didn’t care because house music was my life, I had the key to the wiggly worm, and at this point work was just a means to the weekend (and the rest).
After a few months I got sick of some of the men in this house and as two of them literally owned the place it was a power balance I didn’t enjoy. I guess the only other female inhabitant (A in the poem) felt much the same because we decided to get our own place. And that will be tomorrow’s venue so see you there…
*All the rage in the 1980s, I assure you.
**Sorry, there was also a West Yorkshire techno band called Unique 3.
This poem is part of the annual Fun A Day Dundee project where participants try to do something creative every day for the month of January. You don't have to be in Dundee to take part and there are other Fun A Day projects around the world. People post as much of their work online as they want to (largely on Instagram but it can be elsewhere too). This year I am posting a whole poem a day (one poem for each of the 31 addresses I have lived at, covering the period 1967-2021). Videos/photos of the poems show the places remembered in the poems but were mostly taken from recent Google Street View. The videos are on my Instagram, maybe elsewhere too. Use the hashtag #fadd2021 on social media to see other people's online contributions.
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