26 October 2016 - revisited : Thurston Moore with Charles Hayward at The Social

 I drove through Camden to Regent's Park, windows open to catch the peat and leaf - the zoo dark and quiet, the white iced cakes of posh houses sitting on the sideboard with resident parking only outside. Down Great Portland Street past the line of taxis waiting for the workers from the BBC, the BBC glowing blue like TVs in sitting rooms do, to tiny Little Portland Street, parked on Margaret Street round the corner and outside the old Speakeasy near a blood donor store. 

The Social is one of two shops that are open in a street that feels late night, even though it's just gone 7:30pm. There is a late-night burger bar next door to this thin door that opens into a corridor where you might take a P45. 

The club is in the basement. I passed a familiar face coming up the stairs. He went outside and smoked a cigarette and looked back at me. It was Charles Hayward. When you pass your past like that - and I hadn't seen him since last century - the feeling was that I was almost in two places at once. I walked down the stairs and came to a wooden door and thought it might be a stock room and I'd made a mistake.

But you open the door and wha-la, a warm, fancy railway carriage. You jostle back to the bar and jostle forward to the stage. And then you settle and wait. And while you're waiting there's warm sound from Rough Trade DJ James Endeacott stoking the fire with a bit of this, a bit of that... and you don't need to shout over it. Cool. 

So I'm there chatting to a nice chap in a Sonic Youth t-shirt, young guy from Italy. He's moaning, "If only my mother had given birth to me 10 years earlier, I would have been able to see..." and his list went through some pre-tty dire bands if you ask me.  I caught sight of the merchandise. After a few sentences of chatting with the American guy that was the merchandise man, I realise this is Thurston, someone you don't recognise easily when he's sitting down. 

So yes, he stands up. He takes the stage in front of a drum kit that is as wide as he is tall. There's the sound of fairy-dust like you've gone through the curtain into another dimension, and this is when time left town.  Charles Hayward  well, we could call it drumming if we were standing on the street outside but down here he was tunnelling in to his inner core and I don't know what happened but it drove Thurston to ... well... I can't say what it was like really... if I was driving we'd be off a cliff.  Maybe he was in an alleyway where he was pacing, smoking, kicking a trash can. Maybe arguments raged in a loft above, books swooshed from bookshelves sailing to the floorboards, pages of art and architecture flew out the window, etchings and ink splash drawings on a carpet, frames falling, glass breaking but the glass magically time-warps back in slow-motion to fit back together and back on the wall with one shard now in hand a perfect plectrum. Whatever this was, was coming from this deep lava-like place. 

There were two sets. In between Hayward said, "We're going to slow the pace down now so you boys and girls can meet each other." And Thurston said, "Well, let's not be gender specific..." and we went somewhere else again.

 It could've been starry if we were outside, the zoo could be brought to life... people in the posh houses could be discussing complicated investments or operating table techniques with an electrician working on the security accidentially lighting up every window. The air was electric. My hair was standing up.  Just amazing from that black night in the ICA in the late seventies, last century, (This Heat), now playing with our new arrival from the USA having split from his Sonic Youth. 

You'll see the soundguy's head bobbing and I'm sorry that it doesnt last longer. Thing is I couldnt stand still anymore.