Horror-Day, The Baby Witch

Halloween is coming up- unavoidably, so I took a minute to research what the fuck it’s actually all about (and I still don’t really get it?). It got me thinking about Witches. It was also Coming Out Day in the US recently, so naturally I was thinking about my bisexual mother and grandmother (who, coincidentally claims that she is a White Witch). She reassured me that meant she was a ‘good witch’. According to wikipedia “white magic is used for selfless purposes… the benevolent counterpart of malicious black magic”. So, not like C.S Lewis’s White Witch, but maybe more like Baum’s Glinda The Good Witch from The Wizard of Oz, who was based on his real life mother-in-law -a local herbalist, ‘profound thinker and advanced scientist’. My grandmother too, is a philosopher and a healer (she works in remote communities, often with children in behavioural therapy. She’s a peacemaker, who disappeared to work in the middle east during the war).

My grandmother, the good witch, doing something supernatural.

As a child, I watched a lot of television. I spent many hours watching Sabrina The Teenage Witch, I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched (my mother’s favourite show - “In 1990, Bewitched returned to TV at 5am in the morning, after being off air for a few years, and I loved it so much that I set my alarm to get up and watch it most mornings. The same morning Samanatha went into labour with Tabitha on Bewitched, I went into labour with you! I was sure it was a really good sign”). Sabrina reminded me of me and my gay moms. It was the only example (aside from Absolutely Fabulous) I had on television of a family that looked like mine. Two powerful matriarchs -witty, sassy, wise and fabulous. They had a gothic looking boyfriend for a while with spiky black hair who was the Warlock or the cat, in my mind. Our household felt like a witch house. We had velvet and beaded curtains, coloured lamps and walls, lace shawls, a shrine with various trinkets, postcards of pin-ups, vintage prints in gold frames, animal prints, crumbling sandstone walls, mosaics. It felt like a vampire’s lair sometimes. My step-mother Monica, was American, and she made our house famous for the yearly Halloween Parties we threw. The three of us had Halloween names -mine was Horror-Day.

My Mothers on Halloween with My Godfather dressed as Fester (he hates the photo).

Sabrina The Teenage Witch

My Mothers & Me in Antwerp.

One of our houses was on the unfortunately-named ‘Raper St’. My mother, stepmother and I shared a big old terrace with two other single mothers and their kids -Persia and Phoenix (who were close to my age). Our mothers would go out singing in their band ‘White Trash Mamas’ on the weekends, wearing maids uniforms with their names embroidered on the front. We spent most of our time playing dress ups in the yard and trying to avoid ‘The Witch’ who lived upstairs -a grumpy old lady, that we truly were afraid of and believed was a witch. She would thump her broom on the floor-boards when we were being too noisy.

Pheonix dressed as the Wicked Witch (he loved to borrow my dresses, and unsurprisingly grew up to be a fashion designer). That’s me on the right!

Me, Persia and her mother. A house full of Witches.

Like most things in life, the notion of witches really comes down to power, or lack thereof, which I’d like to indulge myself in and explore here. The most vulnerable (though perhaps the most unwilling to take shit) people in society are elderly women. Throughout history, witches have been depicted as old and ‘ugly’ (which seems to be code for ‘old’ anyway -silver hair, bad teeth, moles, hair on their chins). They were often poor too. They were childless, widows or ‘old maids’ (* a single woman regarded as too old for marriage*). These are the worst, most dangerous and vulnerable qualities a woman can carry in a patriarchal society.

Witches are independent and seen to be ‘wise-women’ of ‘superior knowledge’ (read as: opinionated, smart, educated or experienced). According to the UN, “women make up more than two-thirds of the world's 796 million illiterate people and 132 million girls are out of school”. They say “every additional year of primary school increases girls' eventual wages by 10-20 percent. It also encourages them to marry later and have fewer children, and leaves them less vulnerable to violence”. In other words, education and knowledge gives women power.

Female political leaders are regularly referred to as witches - “Ditch the Witch” people said about Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Hilary Clinton is regularly depicted as the Wicked Witch, British Prime Minister Teresa May’s laugh was compared to a witches cackle, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Nancy Pelosi are depicted as witches too. When former British Prime Minister (the first female PM) Margaret Thatcher died, I was outside the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton. They changed their marquee to say “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead” while people chanted the song around fire pits in barrels. I understood the cultural significance for the people who had been so hurt by her policies, but the Witch reference confirms that we are repelled and threatened when real women have power, let alone when they use that power autonomously, even when it’s gained democratically. We especially have trouble accepting that real women could be callous and cruel, that real women could prioritise a cruel financial discipline over likeableness the way men can with ease and praise. We would prefer to think that kind of woman is a Witch and not of this world. The only feminine energy in this world who is allowed to have power is make-believe -A Witch.

Witches don’t care for the often repressive, laborious, and physically taxing reality of child bearing and rearing, or fitting into an expensive and ever shifting beauty standard for the benefit of the male gaze. In North America women spend nearly a quarter of a million dollars over their lifetimes on beauty products to stave off the supposedly ‘undesirable’ fate of being seen as an ‘old maid’ (Witch!). Tens of thousands are spent on IVF treatments and egg freezing and thawing, while there are 153 million orphans worldwide and women’s right to make decisions about their own bodies and pregnancies is continually scrutinised and under threat, if not non-existent. I’m not making a judgement on choices here, but outlining the financial and emotional weight and pressure of fertility issues on women. Barron women have historically been called Witches. Witches were often thought to eat children in Roman times, or despise them and wish to eradicate them (like Roald Dahl’s The Witches).

Women have the debatably good/bad fortune of outliving men, and are often left alone, in relative poverty at the end of their lives due to shorter time in the workforce (childbirth and rearing), wage inequality and/or a reliance on a male partner who once earned/managed(or mismanaged)/concealed household finances who is now gone. Less than 20 percent of the world's landholders are women, 60 percent of chronically hungry people are women and girls. Many women will fit the typical description of a “Witch” toward the end of their lives. Though they will be utterly powerless.

What a ‘Witch’ (a fictional figure) has that most women are depraved of and want -is power and control (over themselves, their fate, their bodies, their fortunes and those who seek to harm them).

Witch-hunts (arguably femicide -though men were killed too) killed over 40,000 of the 80,000 people in Europe tried for witchcraft. They were often strangled and burned alive at the stake (so there was no body to bury). UK Women, who made up 84% of the accused, were not permitted to give evidence at their own trials. It’s come to light that Catholic and Protestant churches were using this display of violence in competition for market share. An interesting take. Religions have always used women and queer people as pawns.

Witchery has made a come back. This is affirmed by a slew of articles in The Guardian including ‘Coven ready: from Instagram to TV, why are witches so popular?’ to ‘Season of The Witch: Why Young Women are flocking to the ancient craft’. Tik Tok is full of young women and queer people ‘manifesting’ and casting spells. One states “Today’s teen witches are activists for not only feminism but for the ending of animal cruelty, racism, homelessness”. Author J.K Rowling’s TERF opinions are so especially shocking and heartbreaking because the world of magic (famously revived by the Harry Potter series) has always been a space for the weird, wonderful, vulnerable and persecuted to dwell in. Quoting Starhawk, from her 1979 book The Spiral Dance “To reclaim the word witch is to reclaim our right, as women, to be powerful”. An interview with a “witchcore” (I need to investigate this genre) punk musician called Suzy X gives us this hot take- “I think one of the biggest conspiracies of a male-dominated society is the suppression of feminine intuition, in that women have been conditioned to second-guess our own hunches, or second-guess our own abilities, all the time”. Here, I get to a term I just learned called ‘Heterofatalism’ from a Refinery 29 Article called ‘In 2021, How Are Women Supposed To Be With Men?**’. **I see obvious correlations with the rise of heterofatalism and witchery, with women being fed up with their feelings of powerlessness and disrespect.

My Mothers, being every day Witchy Vixens

The equivalent girl-bossification of Witches is the Vixen/Siren. An article written by Madeline Miller ‘Cursed: from Circe to Clinton why women are cast as witches’ says “a better parallel to “witch” is the word “whore””. She says “both are time-honoured tools for policing women, meant to shame them into socially prescribed behaviour. A whore transgresses norms of female sexuality; a witch transgresses norms of female power. Witches are often called unnatural because of their ability to threaten men”. The seductive witch, the evil stepmother or the Succubus is pervasive throughout history; the message being that the use of sexuality is perhaps one of Women’s only true powers, and that is always shameful and evil, full of deceit and trickery. The first dissection of a clitoris, it was referred to as “the shameful member”. I laugh at the overtly phallic image of a witch riding a broom, but revel in the bastardizing and sexualising of this symbol of domestic servitude. Apparently, the broom visual comes from a Pagan fertility ritual - “This “broomstick dance” she writes, became confused with common accounts of witches flying through the night on their way to orgies and other illicit meetings”. So much unravelling to do here, but the obvious take away -female sexuality and sexual autonomy is incredible threatening and powerful.

Additionally, I have noticed a resurgence in Women seeking to reference themselves as Gods or Godessess - figures more powerful than a Women and perhaps more attractive than witches (the Girl Boss is back). These things always play out in popular culture. We’ve gone from the 2nd Wave feminism era of Carole King’s **‘**You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman’ to Helen Reddy’s ‘I Am Woman (Hear Me Roar)’ to the 4th wave brand of Ariana Grande’s ‘God Is A Woman’ to Halsey’s ‘I am Not A Woman, I Am A God’. Being mere Woman has rarely been good enough for ourselves or anyone else, not even natural, and definitely not when we’re roaring. Shapeshifting is a well known witchy attribute, and gee I wonder why? We would love to be anything other than women. Our self-hatred and internalized misogyny and disempowerment is glaring at us in the mirror of all our fictional fantasies.

In the last decade, United Nations officials have reported a rise in women killed for witchcraft across the globe. In India the problem is particularly well-documented, with older women being targeted as scapegoats or as a pretext for seizing their lands and goods. In Saudi Arabia, women have been convicted of witchcraft in the courts, and in Ghana they have been exiled to so-called “witch camps”.

From ‘300 Years on, will thousands of women burned as witches finally get justice?’

It’s worth noting the prevalence of ethnic and racial discrimination in who gets called a Witch. Immigrant women who scratched out a living in the community with their experience as midwives, herbalists and hedge-doctors have historically been cast out as ‘Witches’. The witches cauldron was home-made medical care for the poor. The medical establishment has long overlooked and neglected female health and the health of anyone who isn’t white. . You can read more about the institutional neglect of female health in a daunting read called “Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias In A World Designed For Men”. Witches were often just women who tried create their own solutions to the problems and pains women, immigrants and the poor were facing.

During a tour of the UK, my friends Dan and Richard (from The Feeling -the band I was touring with) joined me on a boat tour down some canals where I noticed a large wooden structure with a seat. I asked what it was, and without a blink, the guide joyfully told me they would dunk women accused of being witches in the canal strapped in this levered wooden seat). If they survived (they were a witch and would be burned at the stake), if they died they were innocent (but were now dead). The absurd horror of it wounded me in a way that ruined my entire day. So, Happy Halloween mother-fuckers. Give a witch a chance. Give a woman everything she deserves and everything you can and may we embrace our earthly powers of being.

My best friend Pia and I, The Little Witches outside my childhood home. My father built a security gate out of nuts and bolts welded together in a heart shape.

My Mother and Grandmother on a normal day, Witchy as fuck.

My Mother, The Witch “I was obsessed with witches when I was little and wore my witch costume a lot (pointy high heel boots, black leotard, black cape) and read any book I could find about witches.  At my fifth birthday party all the little girls got scared of me because they decided I was actually a witch and they wouldn’t play with me.”

The first single from my debut album, ‘Casino’, was inspired by my experience at The Hippodrome Casino in Piccadilly Circus, London, but very much buoyed by a whacky film from 1963 entitled “It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world”, as well as the Sharon Stone classic ‘Casino’ and Louis Theroux’s ‘Gambling in Las Vegas’. I never like to leave a stone unturned, especially in dark places where the tragic and fabulous meet in some kind of meta cliché caricature that jumbles into a greater metaphor for life. I knew I’d get there one day and that I’d have to shoot the video there.

I spent my first few weeks in Los Angeles trying to convince anyone I met to drive me to The Grand Canyon and Las Vegas. No bites. Despite nobody seeming busy with anything at all except for flimsy commitments to ‘talk’ to strangers they met in bars and latte queues, they were (in fact) tethered to the anxious hopes, dreams and endless possibilities of another day where they might just meet the right person who opened the door to another door. LA FOMO is an infinity shaped conveyor belt. Some suitcases are Louis Vuitton, others are hard shell, some just boxes and laundry bags with packing tape, but they’re all piled on the same never-ending road to nowhere, waiting for their owners to come claim them, unpack them and take them some place else. 

A glimmer of hope twinkled when I stumbled upon my high school friend Alex Cameron, who was headed East with his “business partner” Roy Molloy. They were on tour, they were freewheelin’ and down to clown around and hit the GC with me on their way to Texas. They would be the Thelma and Louise to my Brad Pitt perhaps? Alas, the dates didn’t align, and they hit the road without me. I should preface this story with the context of my inability to drive a car and lack of a license, in case you’re curious why I couldn’t just fang down the highway on my own wheels and time, lone ranger style. Little did I know, that I’d reunite with these two highway men later down the line and that we would traverse the country several times over together.

I was out of options and my determination was as solid and vicious as a jackhammer these days; a mutate and survive adaptation from years of banging my head against brick walls and and getting stuck in the mud. Internet start-ups were blooming and booming and I embraced them wholeheartedly. In the early days of Uber, a driver picked me up in his banged up white panel van, dropped me at my home address and phoned me up to ask me out on a date (he got my number from the app). A director friend hot-tipped me on to a new gear sharing website for film makers, and after a little bit of uneducated research, I hired myself a Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera and the cheapest compatible lens I could find. I could only afford the day rate, and who am I kidding, I couldn’t even afford that -I borrowed a hundred bucks to cover it. 

After hauling my ass across the pedestrian nightmare of greater LA to random film nerds’s share houses, grabbing a sparkly noughties dress from a Hollywood costume hire (famous for their Santa Claus provisions) that was located above a furniture store and a few hours sleep on a cot bed… I hopped on the Grey Hound bus at 4am from Union Station. It was still dark. Junkies and vagrants were aggressively pacing the median strip where we (myself and a series of bizarre characters) waited for the bus to pull up. I sat near the front of the top deck, where I still had a view of some fellow passengers. There were a group of ladies in Hawaiian Shirts and bucket hats grasping at penis straws,  some sketchy dudes in bedraggled oversized suits and some faces so unique they’d sit comfortably in The Mos Eisley cantina from Star Wars. After a 6hr ride, we rolled into the strip and would be lying if I said I wasn’t completely buzzing, eyes wide open. 

Everyone was seemingly grey and crinkled with sky high 100 ounce plastic coloured cocktails. There was an air of wet beds and beer drenched carpets sticky with desperation that lingered once you passed through the lounges to the glossy gaudy hallways of marble and gold. My room at The Flamingo was pretty fancy for a tenner, so I figured they must make up the difference in guest’s gambling losses. It feels deflating saying that the first time I saw a real life Flamingo was in the enclosure out the back of the hotel. I waded in the pool alone, watching fake tanned drunken people who had planned their vacations milk the most out of it. I wandered the streets, dining halls and casinos with this camera until the early hours of the morning, agitated by a niggling feeling in the pit of my stomach and a flutter in my chest. An epiphany hit me in the grand entrance lobby of The Venetian like the final scene of Clueless. I wasn’t in love with my boyfriend back in London anymore, and I had fallen deeply, inescapably in love with someone, well something else… and her name was America. She was everything I ever dreamed of -big, bold, wild, ugly and beautiful, full of veneers and polarities. The best and worst. Everything changed for me that night and my new life began. 

I once fell for a Mormon in Vegas who had a wife, unfortunately for me (and her… and I guess them). I won’t go in to the details here, but amidst the drama (of which there was plenty, including being walked in on wearing only a thong, convinced I was about to be shot) I met a pocket rocket called Lil D*b D*b who lived in a trailer park. She was throwing wads of cash at me after a show, tucking it in to my cleavage gallantly, and besides that, she was extremely charming; a blonde doll; a Marilyn; drunken and vivacious. She noticed I was selling my packaged worn panties and asked about my production methods. She offered to wear them for me at the gym, to carry some of the load for me, and sell them on a legitimate panty-selling site that she made good bank from. She was a pro in the art of seduction. I didn’t take her up on it, stupidly. Anyhow, she had a friend, a “boyfriend” - who I have in my phone as “T*ddy Las Vegas” who was also a “man of the night” and clearly a wild child, something kind of sinister about him. Like I said, Vegas is everything it claims to be. After some delirious time in the back seat of my lover’s parked car, going for a slow drive around the streets as the sun started to rise, past the Elvis wedding chapels and puking women in pig trotter stilettos, a blur, a blur, I’m back on the bus right out of there, through the blankets of desert that surround it. What happens in Vegas stay in Vegas.

Next thing I know, I’ve booked a fancy Air BnB in Joshua Tree, with my guitarist Lucy, a solid couple I know from the music biz, and a new friend who happens to secretly be an ‘escort’ with her long-term boyfriend (who knows). I’m at the end of a tour where everything bad happened, every muscle is hurting and there’s a hot tub outside that I’ve been dying to dip my lifeless body into. It’s early morning and I slip in the tub, in haste, to find this new friend and her dude giggling shamelessly and obliviously to me about what they’ve been up to in there… with a fucking butt-plug floating around the top of the tub on its way to me. I’m genuinely grossed out, about 10 levels harder than the way I get when a one night stand wants to use my toothbrush, and I am well and truly over it. Life, I mean.

One of my oldest friends (let’s call him Keith) is set to stay with us after the show tonight and I’m looking forward to hanging out -he makes me feel like I’m home. He turns up to the show with a fake machine gun as a fashion accessory (great idea) and has some trouble with security. Lo and behold, Lil D*b D*b and T*ddy rock up from Vegas and pull my friend in to their lair for the night. His phone is dead and I can’t find him in the morning. It worries me -for some reason I just feel ill at ease like something really bad might’ve happened. I get a text from T*ddy at midday saying “Keith” is with them and they had a great night *winky face*. He shows up in a bit of shell-shock. He had spent intimate time with D*b while T*d was asleep and is unsure of the dynamic between them all. The tension is palpable and bizarre as we share a meal at a long table in a steakhouse. We say our goodbyes to them and ride home together by the light of a rainbow and some scattered rain, where he divulges the night’s details to us. He receives a text from T*d saying “I can taste you on Lil D*b D*b’s P*ssy” with a winky face and none of us know if we want to laugh or vomit.

This is the last time I remember setting foot in Las Vegas. My bandmate’s girlfriend had been sulking and generally being a pain in the ass for most of the drive from Colorado, so we stopped in Vegas for a meal in the hopes of cheering her up. Wholefoods. A scammy supermarket that is actually worthy of Las Vegas behind its hippy green washing and cult covered capitalism. She hops in the van looking happy with herself (in a Veruca Salt way), revealing she stole the food in her lap (despite not needing to). I see a staff member point to our van as we drive out of the parking lot straight on the freeway anticipating a highway chase and losing my beloved American Visa by association…

There’s people who visit Vegas, and then there’s people who live in and breathe Vegas. Shit gets twisted either way in Sin City and you bring it back out into the real world with you like a cat dragging a dead mouse. All I can say is, the only aspiration I ever harboured with any seriousness was to be Liberace, and I can say that dream has well and truly gone with the wind.

*huge swathes of information redacted for legal purposes*

A whole new world of sound exposed itself to me in the dusty backroom of a thrift store. A Yahama Electone home organ with a $150 sticker on it. An array of primary red, yellow and green buttons on an ugly shade of brown (that really is uniquely reserved for 1970’s catalogues). The appeal, for me, lay somewhere between the awe of a spaceship and the playful joy of a colourful children’s toy- but I knew it contained within it the depth and breadth of possibilities my heart desired in a musical companion. The foot pedals are big and weighty and the in-built amplifier sent out a cocoon of sound that wrapped my body up in a warm 360 degree embrace that could lift and protect my spirits from the pains of being and elevate me from the little goings on of us ants on an ant hill in the shape of a globe.

I sat down at the organ everyday to write songs -most of which are now lost in the abyss of time, myspace and dead hard drives. Song titles like ‘Magnetic Arrest’ and ‘Speaking To Soft Toys’ speak volumes about my state of mind. In peak madness and mental isolation I delved inside this body of sound and came bubbling back out of it like a hot spring. I dumped my guitars like I never even knew them, and never looked back. I had no theoretical knowledge, so the one-finger preset chords made finding what I was looking for easy. I could twinkle a melody with the right hand, play some bass notes with the tip of my heel (I wore exceedingly uncomfortable 1950’s Saks Fifth Avenue court heels with a suede-fringed tongue and a gold bar). I began collecting exotica and easy listening records, immersing myself in the relief of music devoid of a singular personality or ego. I discovered Cherry Wainer and Ethel Smith. I dreamed of getting real good, just like them.

I plastered this organ all over my band’s first album and was faced with the pressing question of how to play the damn thing live and tour with it. I did my research and weighed up my options, landing on a cheap portable Yamaha keyboard called a PS-20. It was a creamy Ivory colour and came with an elegant silver screw-in stand. It was my own unique sound because no one but me would want this keyboard, or so I thought… until Beach House came out with a record completely defined by those same presets I’d fallen in love with on that exact keyboard. This was confirmation to me of just how exciting, beautiful and -uniquely feminine (?) this particular keyboard was. We didn’t want to drag it to the UK on tour, so I found the exact model again, on Ebay for £15 in Liverpool somewhere, picking up right where I left off, across the pond. It’s been sitting in Belle & Sebastian’s keyboardist’s studio (They call him “Beans”) in Glasgow ever since.

Years later in London, I’m still obsessing over the beauty of organs, spending my spare time trawling home made web pages of nerds documenting every organ that ever lived. Hours on Ebay leads me to a crazy looking organ for $3k that I post on my FB Page with the comment “If anyone would like to buy me this, free shows, eternal gratitude” or something equally impetuous. To my utter shock and amusement, I received a message from a man called Shane who said his “boss” would like to purchase me an organ, with a link to a rare Hammond C3 they had sourced in South London.

His Boss emailed me: “When I saw your request - I thought it was totally outrageous and deeply sincere all at once - it cried out to be fulfilled… happy music making and wishing you enlightened travels”. I pretty much thought gold dust had been sprinkled over my head and I might start levitating and turn into Tinker-bell.

I took a jazz musician called Artie (who knew his way around a Hammond) way down south with me for a discerning eye… and to be perfectly honest, a bit of security (in case it was some kind of axe murderer looking for a victim). We turned up on this church pastor’s door and he gave us a little show in his lounge room. I’m not religious, but I had been attending organ recitals in churches across London and… started praying a little bit. I’m not sure to who exactly, and for nothing specific, more like giving thanks to the universe for the people I love being kept healthy and any good things coming my way. I asked for protection and support in my endeavours. I thought this mystery fan, the organ and the church pastor was a sign that maybe a god did exist and had been hearing little old me out and sending me very strong signals to go forth. It thrilled and affirmed me in the way a gambler might get convinced of their luck by a big hit on a slot machine.

The tremolo and swells of that organ when the pastor played it moved me in ways nothing ever will. He informed me that we would be entering a bidding war with a Kenyan church over it. Though I’m not certain he wasn’t beefing that up for the hustle. I attended one of his weekend sermons as a thank you and out of sheer curiosity after we nabbed it, hoping there would be some real deal gospel music. It was a small congregation of about 30 people in an empty strip mall. It was an intense “lion of god”, militant type of christianity that kind of freaked me out, though I enjoyed the part where I got to play a tambourine that lay under my seat at the end. I couldn’t help but feel it was just a lil itsy bitsy bit scammy, and then guilt for having had that feeling. I don’t think it’s far-fetched to question the motives of anyone forcefully impressing extreme beliefs upon others with a collection plate.

I don’t think it’s a mistake that the Vatican brought organs in to churches from the 7th century. It possesses an intense emotional power that bolsters and supports voices like none other. Creating a sense of awe, mystery and emotion is a critical component of religion. When you see the enormous wealth of artworks and artefacts in catholic churches it inspires you to believe in some kind of greatness. My hindu boyfriend (who was proudly brandished with an OM tattoo on his arm) left the Vatican half-joking “woah, I think I might become a catholic after seeing all that gold!”.

Music, wealth, power and art has always been used to inspire and evoke this sense of awe, emotion, connection and aspirational belief. It’s not without an element of intentional manipulation. The Wizard of Oz. In fact, the Organ’s second major appearance was in theatres and then cinemas -accompanying silent films. An organ had the power of an entire orchestra within it -as well as horns, doorbells and bird whistles. The ultimate performer. A god of sound, in fact, housed within itself.

The first organ was invented by Ctesibius of Alexandria - a Greek mathematician and inventor in ptolemaic Egypt. His specialty was the science of compressed air in pumps; the pushing around of air. The first pipe organ he invented -Hydraulis, was a water based organ, used during races and games in ancient Rome and Greece.  Again, the ultimate performer; the somehow transcendent sound made from pushing around the very earthly elements of air and water, that in turn, became the bedrock and underlying arouser of human performance -in church, film and sport.

“I was hooked; the sound coming through the Leslie speaker”

Booker T Jones on the first time he played a Hammond. (I spoke about the time I met Booker and talked Hammonds in a previous post -another sign for me, that I was on the right track).

So, the Hammond was mine. I couldn’t believe it really. I couldn’t even fit it in my house, had to hire removalists to bring it to and from a show once, and bargained a place for it in my friend’s recording studio (where it still sits, and receives a lot of love and use). I exchanged a few emails thanking this dreamy mystery fan, but didn’t learn much about them or their origin story, though I know his mother country is Italy. Which makes more sense than almost anything else to me.

He replied “your sound is an eternal gift…”

And no person of sound mind couldn’t not feel romantic feelings about humanity and life in the face of such overwhelming generosity.

Playing Elliot Smith songs on my friend’s guitar, 14 years old

The first guitar I owned was a black and blue zebra print acoustic from the pawn store one block down from my high school gates. My grandfather took me there and bought it for $50 so he could teach me the Holly Golightly version of ‘Moon River’ from Breakfast at Tiffany’s and some neat jazz chords for ‘At Last’ by Etta James. The strings were steely and grubby and the action (the height of the strings above the fretboard) made it harder to play, so that by the end of the week I had my first calluses -something young guitarists like to brag about as a measure of how much and how hard they’ve played. Calluses were a matter of pride. If you bled, even better.

I wanted to be better than all the boys I knew. I wanted to shred. My uncle (who is still a full time guitarist specialising in disco and funk) taught me Jimi Hendrix “Foxy Lady” and The Beatles “Blackbird” to start off -because they were ‘tricky’ and got you props. I played them over and over and over in my bedroom, hours upon hours, staring at the white porridge concrete ceiling in my basement bedroom, dreaming away of the life I dreamt of having on stage. It was a portal to another world. My mother taught me 3 chords to get started songwriting -“three chords is all anyone ever needed”, left me alone for an hour and I had already written a song by the time she came back. That was it for me. The guitar became my best friend, confidante and consumer of every glorious waking hour of time.

My mother playing guitar

I never learned how to read music or the cycle of fourths or anything like that, so the guitar was this beautiful body of endless possibilities of sound. Every combination I could dream up was new and exciting to me. I didn’t know that I was playing a G Major 7th in a 2nd inversion, I just found notes in a combination that sounded beautiful to me or had the right sound to fit the melody I was singing. I learned to play visually using shapes and by ear, no theory. Eventually I learned some songs with tabs (dots and numbers on lines that correspond to the strings and frets of the guitar) and was particularly interested in finding complicated finger-picking patterns to learn. My best friend Pia played Spanish and classical pieces on a nylon string and my other friend Daisy played indie-folk music which was always heavy on that technique. She played violin as well, so she could really do the finger work with ease. The three of us bonded over Cat Power and Elliot Smith records. I found that power chords and rhythmic strumming was my forte and ended up being the rhythm guitarist in our band, you know- holding down the fort. 

A man called Haydn Johnston, who worked as a tour, event and production manager at all the big music festivals must have seen I had a little fire inside of me he wanted to fan the flames of, and made sure I got into every notable festival and show that swept through town- backstage, side of stage. I watched so many shows I can barely remember them all. I was addicted. White Stripes, The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeah’s -all side of stage- even Kings of Leon to a crowd of about 100 before they became mainstream. I felt like I was a student of live performance. Every time I watched someone on stage (and still to this day) all I could think about was how badly I wanted it to be me, how I could do it better and what I could learn from them. I was taking in all the most electric elements, crowd manipulation tricks through musical drops, dance moves. I was soaking it up like a sponge. 

Haydn heard I had started to write my own songs and one day dropped off a brand spanking new Rickenbacker 330 electric guitar in Fireglo for me to ‘borrow’ as long as I wanted. He explained that the Beatles played these and it went perfectly with a Vox AC30 amp if I could get my hands on one. We didn’t have the money for that but luckily I learned most venues had amplifiers you could use for shows, or the main band would let the support band use theirs if they could mark their settings. My mother had a vintage Music Man valve amp at her house I’d borrow sometimes and then I found a $100 amp at a supermarket in Bali I brought back to have at my dads house, but mostly I played this tequila sunrise looking thing acoustically. I slept with that guitar in all her voluptuousness. I fell asleep playing it, riffing on the same three notes until I got into a trance and woke up in the morning with it still curled up in my arms.

15 years old, playing the Rickenbacker at Candy’s Apartment, Kings Cross.

One sunny morning, I got a phone call from a producer called Chris Townsend (who owned the studios we had been recording at) saying he had a 60s Japanese supermarket guitar that quite literally had my name written on it and he thought I ought to have it. It was short, black, with just two basic cream TV knobs (tone and volume), a red burst in the centre, with my name hand painted in white paint on the headstock. It had an old wooden floating bridge that would drive my band mates insane because once we got off flights it was always out of tune and a total bitch to fix (wait no, that was the next guitars). I actually still have nightmares about not being able to get my guitar in tune for a show and my band mates yelling at me. I sacrificed reliability for the unmistakable rounded warm tone that it gave.I even found a small ‘Holiday’ amplifier on eBay that I had sitting in Los Angeles for ten years (until we used it in the Tra$h Can Luv music video.

16 years old, playing the Japanese ‘Holiday’ guitar at ATP Festival Mnt. Buller.

I don’t remember what year it is, but I find myself at Zeppelin Guitars in Highland Park (when it was still a scrappy suburb of Los Angeles). The guitars have layers of dust on them, but I am thrilled because they have all the dodgy supermarket guitars that I love -Sears brands, Supros and so on, and they are cheap as dirt! To get these type of guitars on ebay and shipped to Australia cost a fortune and made them rarities. They were kind of just seen as junk here. I bought a Burgundy Danelectro and a sparkly black Silvertone with a matching case (that had an inbuilt amplifier!!). The Silvertone had lipstick tube pick ups and chevy dashboard on the edges. The case was lined with a thin red felt. The label had hired this same guitar from a local dealer for $2k when we were tracking our album. I considered starting a guitar imports business. 

The Echo, Los Angeles

A hundred shows later, we find ourselves in New York perousing a vintage guitar store down the road from The Bowery Ballroom (where we are billed to play a show supporting a band called Autolux that night). Im dragging my fingers along a string of boring guitars when another ‘Holiday” guitar appears in front of me like an angel, backlit by the sun setting in the centre of the window. I can barely contain my excitement. It’s $800, which is pretty cheap for a guitar. I have to have it. I have to play it at my first show ever in New York Fucking City. The store owner tells me that someone famous owned it before me but made them promise not to reveal their name until after the purchase. We didn’t mobile phones and I asked the store if I could phone my dad long distance and see if he would pay for it with his credit card over the phone. This was an extreme measure, I never had and never have since taken. 

“Dad. It has my name on it. I’m about to play my first show in New York City! It’s a sign!!”

“Mmm…. Only if you promise to sell the Danelectro when you get home”

“Consider it done!” (The Danelectro was the most practical, but my least favourite guitar). 

A rare vision. My father playing guitar!

The store owner told me that a local artist called St Vincent had owned the guitar before me. I wasn’t that familiar with her work then, but I was pretty thrilled it belonged to a female artist and I knew it had some magic in it. That night, the stage manager said to me before I got on- “Just remember that Metallica played on this stage”. It made me laugh. A few years ago at Osheaga Festival in Canada, our bass player Maddie was playing a game of basketball with Annie Clarke (St Vincent) backstage and introduced us. I told her “this is really left of field, but I own your old Holiday guitar” and recounted the story. Her eyes nearly popped out of her head “holy shit! I got a lot of songs out of that guitar. Did you?”. Yes. Knowing that a guitar has passed through hands of songwriters and bore them songs that then passed through the ear canals of however many places all over the world is a trip. A guitar is almost like it’s own person. Another band member. Not just any instrument, but some instruments in particular carry a spirit in them, that you are immediately aware of, imbued with the blessings of the owners before you and the original creator. 

Bowery Ballroom, NYC with St Vincent’s ‘Holiday’ guitar

Around the time I found Annie’s guitar, Haydn told me he was getting married and needed to sell the Rickenbacker. I couldn’t afford it. I knew this time would come, but it still hurt just a teensy weeny bit to be separated. I couldn’t tell if I was happier or slightly bitter that he sold it to my friend Paddy (who was my friend and some time crush, but the lead guitarist in the teenage boy rival equivalent of my band). I saw her many times again in his hands at shows we were both billed on and I occasionally check in with him on her. I love that she’s with him still, and I’ll be honest- she suited him better. He was all over that The Beatles, Oasis, Brit-pop-invasion vibe that fit her so well. I was in deep with my dusty and warm little supermarket guitars with my name tattooed on their asses. 

Looking back, I can safely say I have been blessed by so many people along the way, saying without words, but in kindness, clues and generosity- “go forth, my friend, this is what you were meant to do, we believe in you”. There is a man called Kenny Gormly who played guitar in The Cruel Sea (a band my father slammed through the stereo 24/7). The lead singer, Tex Perkins (and his family), was about as close a family to mine as you can get -his daughter, who is my age, was named Tuesday. Anyway, I can’t say I even knew Kenny all that well at the time, but he had a myriad of guitars that he would trade sometimes and phoned me up to say he had found a Holiday guitar and immediately knew I had to have it. He was breathless with excitement. He didn’t even know I was collecting them! This guitar was the natural progression for me. It looked like a Jag (complete with tortoiseshell plate), but it was lighter and smaller, perfectly fitting her curves on mine. She was sexy as hell, and mirrored my coming of age to a time where *I *felt sexy as hell. I wore her up high, but a little lower than my previous guitars. Men tend to sling their guitars around their hips (dicks) and play them like they are literally wanking (rocking back and forth). * Cue Ween’s ‘For A While I Couldn’t Play My Guitar Like A Man’*. Me and my girls wore them so they fit just under the cup of our breast or above the top of our hip line, letting our fingers do the talking, maybe a little sway to left and right. It’s trite, but making music can really be like making love. There is a pleasure spot when you are one with your instrument, and beyond that, sometimes whatever sound you are making together locks in with the other musician and their instrument in such harmony and bondage that the hair stands up on the back of your arms, and there is nothing you can compare that joy and pleasure to than love making. I mean, it’s actually better. It’s just so rare and transcendent.

Laneway Festival, with the new jag-style ‘Holiday’ guitar

“When you find that you don't love her, when all the glitter rubs off of her, I'll be waitin' just a smile away.” Nancy Sinatra, Good Time Girl.

Like most lovers, at some point when you figure out the mystery of them, when you know their body like it’s your own, the music of their talk is like the morning birds you don’t notice so much with the morning coffee -at some point, they lose their newness, wonder and excitement. Maybe they lose their possibilities. Only in your mind, of course. My guitars weren’t singing to me anymore. They didn’t make my fingers tingle to look at like they used to -like a chest full of treasure awaited for me to sift my hands through and get their glittering gold dripping all over me.

In a last ditch attempt to fall back in love with this instrument, I bought a 1930s Australian Parlour guitar with built in pick up, from Katy Fox (who used to manage Alex Cameron’s band ‘Seekae’). It was $1000 I barely had, but I knew it had to be special, it had to be the key. It was a sign to return to the soft acoustic moments, the Bob-Dylan-before-he-went-electric era. I should’ve known you can never go back really. The guitar had that warmth of sound I always sought out like the heat seeking missile I am, but the action was impossible and hard to play, like my first guitar. It was a dark wood, cracks and sun bleaching in the lacquer like it had lived on the porch of an outback sheep farmer who played in the evenings with a cold beer and a wife in white cotton frills fresh off the clothes line. This guitar blocked me though. She didn’t want me to play her, she just wanted to sit pretty on the wall. 

So I found a new musical partner in crime who’s story I’ll chronicle next, “While my guitar gently weeps” (The Beatles).

*BTW all the Holiday guitars have been lost or stolen, so if anyone sees them let me know!!

Playa Del Carmen, Mexico, 2019

It has occurred to me that I have an unusually strong desire, and in fact - a need, for being massaged, that could perhaps be loosely described as an addiction. Being of the age where you start to question the deeper meaning behind everything said, done and felt, I’m making some inquiries about my relationship to massage through memory -publicly- because this is what I do now. Feel free to psychoanalyse and judge me from your armchair. 

My family is “touchy-feely” as they say. When my father or stepmother would embrace me in long loving meandering hugs (as hippies are wont to do) they would rub into the tight muscle of my shoulder with their chin and dig their fingers under my shoulder bones to rub out the nuggets there. I gave my stepmother foot rubs on the couch while we watched tv or read scripts at night and would walk on my mother’s back to crack it when she came home from long days lugging plants into truck-beds or standing at the CD Warehouse. This is my origin story. 

When I was 8 years old, I lived in Malaysia for a little while (where my father was working as a construction manager on a film called Anna and The King). We stayed in a resort on a beautiful island called Langkawi one weekend, and my parents booked me a Reflexology massage as a novelty and a treat. I was nervous and anxious about it, but also excited -butterflies-in-the-tummy -because I knew it was a luxury. I was also curious about these “pressure points” and thought some magic might happen to me. I’m laying on a hotel bed, with my head propped up by a pillow, and I’m holding my legs out straight in front of me like a pin with what I remembered to be a tense look on my face (but is clearly not! *see below*) while a man is kneeled at the end of the bed hitting all the pressure points in my feet. This photo my stepmother took of the moment made her laugh out loud every time she saw it. She texted it to me yesterday with the caption: You asked “how long was our flight to Langkawai?” “20 mins” “this massage feels longer than the flight!”. There is something innately ridiculous and cringe-worthy about this image to me. I’ve come to conclude that the discomfort extends from the obvious (white and socio-economic) privilege and servitude that set up begets, coupled with the foreign, vulnerable and beautiful intimacy of being touched in a caring way by a stranger, as a child, knowing that money has been exchanged for this act of kindness, and that it is a somewhat low-paying, yet labor intensive job. This is something I will dive into a little more, later. The look of bliss on my face is undeniable though, like an alcoholic after their first sip of booze.

Langkawi, Malaysia, 1998

When I was 14 in Bali at the height of puberty, raging mood swings - a man called Wayan (a name all first born children receive) came to our villa to give me a private massage (another gift from my parents). I remember feeling slightly shocked (but equally thrilled) at being left alone with a grown man who was touching me, while I was basically nude, in this somewhat intimate way. I remember the nervousness and pleasure when his thumb moved up and around my ass cheek (which is totally normal and effective in a Thai/Balinese style massage- that area holds a lot of tension) and wondering if he was being inappropriate or not. He was just doing his job but I fell totally in love with him. 

A year later, in a slow motion rollerskating accident at the Moonlight Rollerway, set to the tune of Anita Bell’s Ring My Bell, I compressed two vertebrae in my thoracic spine. I couldn’t feel my legs and saw my life flash before my eyes (an image of myself under a stage spotlight in a wheelchair- the way I had seen Karen O do at a festival that year). The floor cleared, the music stopped and and the staff came running toward me screaming “YOU CAN”T SUE US! YOU SIGNED A WAIVER!”. I didn’t have travel insurance, couldn’t walk for a couple days, and jumped straight on a plane back to Australia out of sheer fear of exorbitant hospital fees. After X-rays and so on, it was recommended that I see an Osteopath to help with the pain and healing. I couldn’t walk very far without getting back pain. Every week we could afford to, I strolled my-teenage-self into this man -Anthony’s 3 story terrace listening to Wilco in my tiny school skirt, face down, while he softly massaged me and talked about country music, Rickenbacker guitars and Vox amplifiers. He was just doing his job but I fell totally in love with him.

It’s 2012 and the handsome personal trainer getting me ready for a music video shoot in London reveals to me that he is also a sports massage therapist while rubbing deep into my shoulders after a session. Lo and behold, he was just doing his job but I immediately fell totally in love with him, staying with him romantically for most of my early 20s, reaping the incredible rewards of massages every night and every morning. I’m thinking of that Seinfeld episode -”The Masseuse” suddenly. These deep tissue massages really did something to me. I started having extreme dreams and confronting memories and realisations. It felt like a dam had broken, the flood gates to my tears and emotions flung wide open and I became a hot inconsolable mess. 

“I got massaged into madness... I was having about 30 massages a day… I couldn’t stop crying for three weeks!” Hugh Grant

I saw Hugh Grant tell this story on a late night show, about having a complete life-crisis, a 6 month depressive meltdown, triggered by a holiday in the Maldives where he was massaged excessively. There’s something so outrageous about the contrast of luxury, privilege, relaxation and neurosis there, but I obviously related to the part about being “massaged into madness”. I believe massage is so powerful it can both cause and relieve madness.

Backstage in a safari park somewhere in Holland, I’m suffering one of the more devastating break ups of my life. The artists are offered complimentary massages and you know I walked my broken shell straight to the empty shipping container where this woman had set up shop. We didn’t speak, but after two minutes of placing her hands on my back, she says “you poor thing, what* did he do* to you?”. I suppose she she knew what my muscles had to say; she spoke their language. I burst into tears and told her everything. She fixed me. The daze you enter after a massage, is like a calm after the storm. Disorienting, yet still. You feel light and soft but with an impenetrable forcefield around you. The hard shell around your soft crab-like insides. 

Cut to turning up to my husband’s house after a long haul flight and him asking how much money I had left - “Um, $15”. How? “Well, I got a massage during the layover in Abu Dhabi”. “The layover was only 1.5 hours!” he said incredulously “Are you* really* one of those people?”. The people who get massages during layovers is a thing apparently, something worthy of judgement and in fact, I am one of those people. I get anticipatory stress of how I will turn up on the other side of a long haul flight -how the time zone, lack of sleep and so on will make me turn bat-shit crazy and that is so terrifying that I do everything in my power to even the playing field. I hydrate like the deserts miss the rain, I dutifully sleep when they suggestively turn the lights down in the cabin and wake when they turn them back up. I get a massage in the layover, even if it’s the last money I have, even if it’s only a ten minute scalp rub. It’s as compulsion. I convince myself that I deserve it. Especially in the middle of a long tour, especially when I have no money left and it’s especially absurd to do so.

One of these lay-over massages was in a dodgy room in Singapore airport in the early hours of the morning when most of the shops were eerily shut. The male masseuse’s thumb slipped up, my, um, you know. I say “slipped”, because I do believe it was a mistake -there was oil and momentum involved. I kind of just shrugged it off, but my male friends laughed so hard when I told them, saying there was no way that was even possible, let alone a mistake. I disagree, but maybe I’m naive. He was just doing his job, I think, and saved us both the embarrassment of addressing the slip-up, so to speak. 

My breasts are huge. They were double D in high school, and a G in late 2019 -sizing is alphabetical, so you do the math. They are heavy too (full of fatty deposits as opposed to breast tissue according to the doctor who was scanning for tumors and just found gravity clumping fat). It’s impossible to find bras for them because the circumference of my back is tiny. I wish I could cut off a pair of men’s hands as cups and just wear those all day -“here, carry my weight, for a change”. So anyway, I get bad back and shoulder pain. I dreamed about getting a reduction in high school, mostly because I didn’t enjoy the attention they afforded me and the personality type I was slapped with as a result of my body instantly becoming sexualised by their size. Look at me, trying to find legitimate excuses for these excess of massages, like a true addict.

I really love the idea of a couples massage; holding hands across the aisle of beds -a frangipani or rose petal placed on a pink towel, the sound of a waterfall. I’m a romantic, in an obvious, stock photo hotel leaflet, cliché way. I love clichés. I love living them. So my Bollywood baby and I went for weekends in Italy sometimes. We worked really hard and saved up. The first time, we’re staying at a Wes-Anderson-worthy - Grand Hotel Savoia in Genova. It’s pink, big and old -belle epoch. We turn up to the designated massage room on the 3rd floor for a couples massage. A handsome Italian man goes to massage my beau and a portly woman (who I anticipate has strong hands) comes to massage me. My beau is horrified, I think mostly because he has some suppressed homosexuality that presents itself this way, but maybe because he had been excited by the idea of a woman massaging him. I don’t know, but he’s not happy about it and apparently the masseuse made him feel uncomfortable -spending a very long time on his ass (which to be fair, was very tight). He looks truly defeated afterwards and the masseuse is seemingly laughing at him. It was kind of an odd vibe in there. I doubt the veracity of his suspicions, but nevertheless the massage was pretty bad, not least because of Enya’s Sail Away and Ride of The Valkyries playing in the background. Kind of anxiety inducing.

The second time we try (after my pleading and prodding) is only a few hours before our flight home from Palermo, Sicily. The only place that will accept a booking so last minute is very expensive, displaying silver silhouetted naked ladies (like you’d see on a truck’s mudflap) decal stickered above the door. The steep price does not match the shabby interior and I immediately feel uneasy. It takes 20 minutes for two giggling blonde twins (who look underage) with matching floral leggings to meet us and lead us to a room with futons on the floor covered in semi-damp, discoloured towels. Being a seasoned massage client, something feels very wrong to me here. They ask us to strip naked. My beau obliges happily and I ask to keep my thong on. The girls keep giggling and start to kind of caress my back with a light flimsy touch that suggests to me they are not masseuses and starts to make me feel eerie and like I’m being assaulted. They quickly realise we are not there for Happy Endings and try to pretend that they can massage. It’s awkward. One girl tries to pull and crack my neck at which point I flew into a panic, thinking they were trying to murder us. The language barrier made it impossible to communicate. As we leave, having paid all my savings on the massage, I start to sob and feel extremely vulnerable and weird all the way to the airport and the whole flight home. 

The mafia is still a big deal in Palermo. A man was shot in the head in the market we walked through the day before in a feud between the Cosa Nostra and the new African migrant gangs. Helicopters and sirens rang through the air in irony as we visit Teatro Massimo from The Godfather. A police helicopter with a search light came down upon the crystalline Mondello beach as we were sun baking for a good 30 minutes. These headlines - “Behind Illicit Massage Parlors Lie a Vast Crime Network and Modern Indentured Servitude” (NY Times) and “Inside The $4.5 Billion Erotic Massage Parlor Economy” (Forbes) paint a clear picture. Recently in Thailand I wandered into a parlour to find two painted women sleeping, drool pooling from their beautiful crimson mouths, beads of sweat on their peony pink cheeks. Startled at my appearance, the younger woman gets up, discombobulated, palms facing up and says “no, no -not normal massage”, starts shaking her head and laughing at me, smiles and shoos me out the door, directing me elsewhere. Perhaps the discomfort around massage for some is around the hairline difference between a “normal massage” and prostitution. Perhaps it is to do with the racial and socio economic elements undoubtedly tied to the profession, so brutally on display in the Atlanta spa shootings this year.

I often pause to consider why I want and need massages so much, aside from the obvious physical benefits. Just 20 seconds of being touched increases Oxytocin (the love/bonding hormone) and decreases Cortisol (the stress hormone). Touch is essential for healthy brain development. You can go down a wormhole on CT fibres, Microneurography and epigenetics that will illuminate the absolute seriousness of touch; the difference between fast touch and slower tactile touch. Humans are designed to touch and be touched. It is imperative to our survival and community. Touch is communication more vastly intricate, universal and intuitive than language. Maybe we are in a society so disconnected from one another that touch had to become commodified and systematic. I dream of a world where we reassure and connect in safe, requited, mutual, caring touch. That’s how it was meant to be.

Echo Park, Los Angeles, 2019 after a bad break-up, by Fabianne Therese Gstöttenmayer (@fabi_film_diary on IG)

Many of my friends will attest that I have taken them to get a massage together in the same spirit as a casual dinner date. Like a true addict, I so want them to experience the same elation and relief I do. I was almost offended when my friend Jeremy hated the massages I insisted we get at my favourite parlour. How is that even possible? I think of sitting in a taxi having just left my cousin with a dodgy drug dealer from Chicago at the Sunset Marquis with the fatefully whispered “do you have mace? Are you sure you don’t want to come with us?”, sitting next to my girlfriend Fabi, who starts massaging my hand with her royal-like elegant fingers of perfection and I somehow forget how worried I am for my cousin’s safety, and I barely even catch the ride-share passenger in the front seat touching the Uber driver’s dick. Just another night in LA.

I think back to that first reflexology massage, and skip fast forward to being pregnant on tour in Philadelphia when the pedicurist says she can’t massage my feet because the pressure points in my foot might cause me to miscarry (which I do). A Thai woman in Los Feliz smiles at me after my 5th deep tissue (trying to cure the debilitatingly stiff hip I have from 13 hour van rides) and says “I love your generation! Young people these days understand that massage is as powerful as therapy but so much cheaper!” And cackles like a witch that knows the depth of universal secrets none of us will ever touch the surface of. All I know is that there are angels out there, and many of them are massage therapists. Tip generously.

“The Handshake of Commitment to Jazz”. Me, Dorian and Jack (a fellow jazz addict) at Bar Italia, 2013.

You may recall I ended up in Edgeware Road (which is the side of town no one young or interesting lives in). It’s mostly Persian carpets, cream cake and hookah shops. At night, I go into Soho and walk around looking for something- anything, to tickle m…

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Our last drive to the airport.

Except I did cry, very very much, over him. Painful, sleepless, breathless, hot tears. I cried like someone who had given more than they’d usually be prepared to give only to have it thrown like pie all over their sad clown face, someone who’d chosen a high road at the fork, with trepidation, and on tippy toes, just to feel it fall beneath their feet after the first step. 

The quote is from a poem called ‘Thoughts of a Young Girl’. He sent it to me the day after we met. I wondered if he bestowed this collection of words upon every young girl he fell for, like an abstract legal disclaimer, so he could say under his breath “but I told you! Did you read the poem?”. I can hear him saying that to me, though he didn’t and probably saw no such meaning in it. He said nothing at all actually. Radio silence. Enough silence to project a universe of meaning on a void of reason. No lines to read between even, just a blank page I wanted to crumple in one hand like an investment banker who just realised he’s lost everything he ever earned and so much more. I was in deficit. He was in debt. Only to each other and ourselves. Only in love. 

A few weeks earlier, a group of us sat around a pool in the summer sun. Someone with long hair talks of radical ‘woke’ college students in Olympia paying emotional reparations to exes; Millennials paying for each other’s therapy to deal with the traumatic aftermath and vanquish them of the baggage they’d carry into the next liaison. I say I love the idea- cough it up assholes, that’s evolved! It seems I’m the only one who doesn’t find it laughably absurd. 

The day before I left, the day before he left, we commit to the Keto diet after watching that Netflix documentary that makes it seem like the ultimate cure all; the remedy to all the pains of being. The same allure as the Egyptian Magic moisturiser and clay face masks he ritualised in sobriety. It’s a deluded unspoken belief of ours that this Keto diet will fix him and save us from us, from him.You cling to hope in strange corners when you’re desperate for a life raft. We decide to commit to it for the next two weeks while I’m away. He says he’ll give me $2k “CASH”, “straight from the ATM”, if -I pass the Keytone pee test by the time I’m back in LA. Do you know how impossible it is to be Keto in Europe?* ON TOUR*? In Winter? and I’m fucking doing it. I’m eating sun-dried tomatoes and cashews from corner stores, thinking somehow it will heal him from afar. Then he dumps me after Day 1, out of thin air. AWOL. Adding insult to injury, salt on a wound, lemon juice in a paper cut. Bizarrely, this Keto detail kills me the most, it makes me feel especially pathetic and incensed about the whole thing. I could’ve been downing cinnamon buns. I could’ve left him when I found out he was using and run for the hills. I could’ve not gone on tour and stayed with him until he was better. I couldn’t’ve done anything different actually and I curl up in my keyboard case and sleep through our first day of rehearsals in Berlin.

I first really saw him (for what he was to become to me) side of stage at a Pond show, *Paint Me Silver *swirling in the air. He’s noticeably, effortlessly cool. Wayfarers on, fucked up jeans falling off, 36” leg, and a disintegrating t-shirt. Everything is stained and worn out (unpretentiously -it’s too sincere to be contrived). Messy hair, hunched over shoulders, lanky, tall, insatiably handsome. Jawline -yeah, jawline. Cheekbones too. Big Hands; man-sized hands. Shoe laces undone. VERY well endowed (everyone knows this apparently, which partly mortifies, partly boosts him). Something kind of Jewish and New York about his whole thing. Quiet and assured, secretive for sure. I watch him from the other side of the stage (the band are but a moving blur between us; I can only see a vignette of him in sharp focus at this moment). I watch him laugh, so cheeky, like he felt guilty to let it out. He whispers in someone’s ear, hand over mouth, before giggling some more… and I guess I die a little. That laugh could shatter my heart into a thousand pieces. I wanted him SO BAD RIGHT NOW and I visualise our entire relationship almost exactly as it happened right there and then. 

I clock him at the After Party sitting at one of those large round tables you only see in Chinese restaurants, weddings and corporate events. He was alone, of course, fiddling with something, tapping his leg, looking unbearably cool in a pained-to-be-cool way. I pull up a chair next to him to strike up conversation. Who am I kidding here? I pull up a chair next to him to flirt and win his absolute adoration and affection. Mid way through my first sentence, unceremoniously, he offers me some Valium and upon my baffled, polite decline, proceeds to dose himself generously. I took offence at the suggestion, thinking he thought I was nervous and needed it or maybe he wanted to shut me up. A negative spiral of assumptions. In fact he was nervous and what I know now (that I didn’t know then) is that people who love drugs think its the nicest thing to do- an olive-branch to eternal friendship. He was a bit of a Dick and a no-hoper I concluded, clearly not fussed over me (how dare he not be fussed over me!). I lost interest in a fluster with a shrug of the shoulders, stood up, walked into the night and not minutes after, end up in a slow-jam make-out on the dance floor with the exquisiteness that is Moses Sumney. Never kiss and tell I told myself for these memoirs, but I don’t think he’ll begrudge me for it. Mac said he was jealous. Of me, not Moses. There’s not a soul in this dimension or the next that wouldn’t want to kiss that man. His lips are like satin pillows on a baby-pink cloud in the heaven of all heavens. He is not of this earth. Larger-than-life; mystical. A Prince; a God. He knows this of course. It’s all mapped out in his asymmetrical black threads.

Wiped and sluggardised, I dutifully saunter off to the elevators to go to bed. My single ‘Tra$h Can Luv’ has just been released and I have a couple of phone interviews in the morning. Anderson Paak and his posse are loudly exiting the building, ghetto blaster on his shoulder -where it has been glued (along with a grin that tells me trouble) for the entire tour. The elevator doors open and there he is again, this time looking like a frightened rabbit in headlights, eyes wide, face pale as a ghost. I ask if he is ok, because he doesn’t look it. He acquiesces, so I offer to sit with him for a while in his hotel room and chat until he falls asleep. I’m always fearful of people like this dying alone in hotel rooms. You never want to feel *what if *or if only with this particular breed of fragile and fearless. So we lay next to each other on top of the bed as perfect strangers, fully clothed. Our hands are neatly placed on our own stomachs, staring at the ceiling… and we talk. For hours. I don’t even remember about what. Gossip. Existentialism. His history of drug problems, of course. He expects it to shock me, but my childhood was full of junkie casualties and it’s passé and uninteresting to me. In the recently post #MeToo era, I’m amused (and pleased) that he asks permission to spoon me, which I say yes to, then to put his hand on my ass, which I also say yes to, then (in the morning) if I wanted to have sex with him (in those exact words) to which I laughed and said definitely not. I was too busy, and besides, it was a weird thing to ask in such a matter of fact way. Tactless and unenticing really. I pretend to not be flattered. 

“Who would think… that two people could really meet in a spinning elevator, at night when the wind that’s called the Freemantle Doctor’s blowing over the sand and the lawn, where earlier we shook hands, and might never have spoken again” extract of poem by him. 

Back in the van, Alex informs me that my funny valentine asked for my number and (ever the protective boss) would I mind if he gave it to him? I’m embarrassed, also a bit chuffed and say “oh ok, whatever”, playing it cool. The boys in the band unanimously approve of the match, saying they *rate *him -which means highly. Apparently there’s an alter-ego he pulls out on tour called Bubbles where he is completely naked covered in shaving cream head to toe, speaking in a high pitched voice, and that intrigues me honestly. The next day, I’m in Auckland and he’s in Hawaii. With his mother. He sends me a picture of a fluorescent green Croc (I promised myself I would NEVER entertain a man who owned Crocs or toe shoes -even ironically, which in this case, I assume it was) followed by another picture of himself topless on a beach. This is something pasty guys in bands are not usually inclined to do. My eyes popped out of my head with hilarity to see a monstrous portrait of my favourite poet’s head in a flat cap tattooed on his chest -Pablo Neruda. I laugh to myself at how ridiculous it is, while also thinking to myself -It’s a sign! We’re meant to be! Because the only tattoo I have is a scrappy handwritten LVXI that I like to say is in reference to Pablo Neruda’s *Love Sonnet XI (*but is actually the initials of a junior doctor I dated -in 2011). 

He divulges to me that he’s seen a stripper with elephantiasis popping ping pong balls and live goldfish from her pussy and gets M to record a sweet little video from a Vietnamese restaurant saying what a pleasure it was to meet me (my hands were covered in honey from the cheese platter station when we met for the first time and we shook honey covered hands). He sends a picture of a Michel Houellebecq book (a writer my stepmother swears is an overrated misogynist pig, but my godfather sings all praises of).

I get back to LA a few days later, always the wanderer, catching Ubers across town with sprawling suitcases and stuffed Ralph’s bags spilling over with spandex and thigh highs, staying in generous friend’s glamorous homes from West Hollywood to Montecito Heights. He offers for me to stay with him off Sunset and I think “fuck it, why not” and end up with my oversized suitcase at what looks like a crack den just behind Guisado’s. He explains it’s a temporary rental from a concert promoter with bad taste in art. Terrible, in fact, tech-bro psych-trance graphics I’d call it. It’s to neither of our taste, but that’s neither here nor there. He’s wearing a beanie tucked behind his ears, chain smoking and I think he seems quite hopeless; an oddball and completely unlovable in the most completely loveable way. So I fall completely in love with him, naturally. Perhaps because of it, or in spite of it, perhaps he planned it that way and it always works that way. He falls in love with me because everyone does eventually, and he’s positively gaga about having an empathetic non-committal nurse with good boobs. That’s my take. Next thing I know, we’re stoned in a cab on the way home from my show, giggling (god damn that laugh), singing (badly -he’s famously a-tonal) and kissing (and slow spitting in each other’s mouths). Barf. He says “I think we’d be good together you know, like a good couple” and I said “I just want to love you, let’s do it, make it official”. We’re giddy. It feels stupid and exciting and very, very real. We’re both good at that though- making it feel real; love bombing ourselves and others, believing our own hype, believing it will be different this time, breaking hearts. We play the same game and we’ve met our match now, making it all the more scary. 

“When I’m lying in bed with you and we’re kissing and I’m looking into your eyes, it’s like the ultimate and most satisfying privilege that it almost makes me feel guilty. Like, how did this happen to me?” text from him.

We are both full-time road dogs, he goes South, I go West. He has a day off in the diary a couple weeks later and flies from Mexico to meet me in New York, writes me his first poem in forever and it’s all very romantic. I buy us a cute little Manhattan hotel room for the night with the per diems I’ve collected starving myself during the days. We walk past VR clubs, order boba tea and find ourselves stumbling on top of The Empire State Building by nightfall. Looking out over that iconic scene, he starts singing a Killers song (who I’ve been touring with) in his trademark a-tonal and totally sincere voice to crack me up and MY GOD I LOVE HIM. By the time we get home his eyes are wide like a rabbit again. They say pupils dilate when you’re in love and you like what you see, but in retrospect it was the valium and who knows what else. He’s sitting naked (Gaelic cross tattooed down the middle of his back) on a chrome wheeled black leather office chair, tucked into the desk, improvising esoteric soundscapes on a mini synth -“uh oh its getting a little serious now”. He calls reception (“mmhmm” “ok”) while I watch him from the bed with hearts pouring out of my eyes over absolutely every little movement he makes as he walks across the room smiling at me “there better be milk in that fucking minibar or I’m going to fucking flip”. I’m smitten. For no particular reason I can put my finger on other than I must’ve wanted to be.

*“It rolled in from the distance like a storm, a storm that turns the sky green and defines your longing in acutely articulated minutes, or fine details sharpened into a nail of fragrant wood. They burn it in the avenues, which themselves become redolent and full of smoke” *extract from poem by him.

It’s February 26 2018, I’m wearing his Calvin Klein shirt that I haven’t taken off for a week as if it will give me magic powers and protection. I’m in Chicago, I’m in Washington. I’m in Vancouver having a panic attack when his mother with long blond hair and a heart of gold, brings me a box of chocolates back stage. I’m reading Testosterone Rex ‘Myths of Sex, Science and Society’ by Cordelia Fine and there’s a photo of a bottle of Baby-Oil in my phone, so I guess we’re already into that. I’m In Seattle (literally sleepless in Seattle, thinking about the Tom Hanks film that screened every Friday night on free-to-air TV as a kid). I’m making a nude video in the tub to Future’s ‘Mask Off’ (his favourite song at the time). Percoset, Molly, Percoset… Ugh. Eye roll. The video is not hot. I put an X-Files X-Ray filter on it and a Star Wars credit roll. I’m tired af and my body is a mess. Did I tell you his dad worked on X-Files? I had Fox Mulder’s ‘I Want To Believe’ poster on my bedroom wall as a teen. *See! Meant to be! *And besides, he loved to well-up singing Emotions by Destiny’s Child together. As far as I’m concerned any man as pure and precious as that deserved all of me, forever. I’m in Oregon.

“We could talk about all of the recent movies we’ve seen and then move into a state of silence, allowing the thrum of whathaveyou to occupy us. The candle melting down a neck of opaque glass. That’s your heart! And the wax is the time spent between the moments you failed to notice. Maybe. Or maybe the neck is your neck and the wax is my saliva which dissolved in the breath of your affection and coiled into smoke” extract from poem by him.

We find a handful of free days we can squeeze in together in absolute desperation. I get the Yellow Fever vaccination in London and fly to Berlin to play my first solo show in what looks like a concrete prison cell to a small group of fans I didn’t even know I had. I finish up at 2am and go back to some very sweet fan’s flat for an hour before dragging myself to Schönefeld to hop on a 3-flight connection to São Paulo via Casablanca. He’s been taking Viagra for fun because he can and I really will never know what else. He’s reading Kathy Acker and I buy him Lost Connections: uncovering the real causes of depression -and the unexpected solutions by Johann Hari. We need it. We don’t leave the hotel room for 3 days. Baby Oil, Maple Syrup, John Cale’s Fear, Rickie Lee Jones’ In The Ghetto, Gummy Bears and lounge room Salsa lessons. We could’ve been anywhere. I didn’t even see Brazil. We were a flurry of absolute love. 

“Trails of troubles, frozen battles, paths of victories we shall walk” Bob Dylan plays over a video I make of him smiling, then pouting, in the shower, with a hand over one eye, steam rolling down the glass door. My life moved so fast at this time that my memories have become nothing more than expanded versions of the snapshots I have left in my iPhone. 

At Lollapalooza, in front of thousands of people, he welcomes me up on stage as his girlfriend. I’m awkward and say something dumb on the mic. He sings his cover of Under The Bridge just minutes before the Chilli Peps IRL play it on the stage across the field in a moment that isn’t lost on any of us. He’s my dancing monkey. He’s M’s dancing monkey. He’s everyone’s oh-so lovable dancing monkey. In the hotel lobby at dawn I meet a morbidly obese man in a suit eating a cheeseburger who manages Morrissey and Perry Farrell. His hired young ‘lady of the night’ grabbed me by the arm, saying my name, claiming to be a big fan! She’s cool as fuck and I spend the next day by the pool with her and her sexy little cohort. They tell me of goths in the Amazon, how prostitution is legal in Brazil (and paid for by the festival, to provide pleasure for the bands) and how they just love bands and want to play music. I tell them to start a band together like The GTOs (google it) and to take advantage of their connections. I tell them to use blackmail. I’m joking on the outside. I’m dead serious on the inside. I miss The Killers at the same hotel by a matter of hours. 

“Then again I like alternative things, like not having children or owning a car, and men who wear lots of rings, the scent of vicious tar” extract of poem by him.

Next thing I know, I’m in Bologna. Something is wrong and even 30 year old parmesan wheels can’t put me into a food coma of pleasure that will ease my dis-ease. He’s not tethered to me. There’s a lost connection and I know it. My intuition screams at my gut and my heart.

*“Sugar is sweet and melts like honey, and when it’s hot the honey gets runny… watch the honey run away, say my name another way, but when it resolidifies- maybe on your lips? Your thighs? I’ll be there once again, make it warm and run like rain, and when you find yourself in pain, remember that I feel the same. Maybe not identical, like a pair of tentacles, but nonetheless I am aware, that because I do you too must care. Nothing to be done for it, the distance, the clock that oh so slowly ticks. The old warm ugly sweater doesn’t fit. This funny way we’re forced to sit! and dream again of when it’s warm again, when our bodies melt like sugar in rain” *poem by him.

It’s his birthday and he’s bleached his hair. Something is up I tell you. A gothic pair of friend’s from Canada have arrived and take him to Joshua Tree, fielding messages from loved ones to share with him. I scribble on my hotel notepad:

“The most precious gift that ever presented itself to me. The perfect offering; cracks included, not to be sold separately. Blinded and basking in the light. Sincerely, your Honeydew Melon”

Referencing Leonard Cohen’s “There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”. Against the advice of his therapist (who says it’s impulsive) he jumps on a first class ticket to Australia to meet me and it’s the beginning of the end. I’m on another stadium tour with the Killers (who he’s repulsed by at this point). He’s told his friends he’s marrying me, which makes them scoff. I’m into it though. I want his babies. He meets my family. I take a bite of one of my grandma’s home-made weed cookies and end up on the kitchen floor thinking I’m having a brain aneurism like the woman in the TED talk, begging to go to hospital. My hand looks like an octopus. My dad is doing nothing, watching tv on the couch. My boyfriend tells me we need to find Valium to make it better and even in my haze I can tell he is trying to trick me into revealing the location of drugs that don’t exist in our house. Apparently (the lies are a deep web I’ll never untangle) there’s a bottle of Oxycontin in the fridge (left over from a surgery of my little sister’s), that he got stuck into. He flies back to LA, followed by me, a day later. 

Things are weird. Demonic. Distant. Cold. Trashy. He always takes photos Downtown when he’s like this. He thinks he’s functional, but he’s just an asshole. A beautiful asshole. One night he starts vomiting and sitting in the shower. Yeah, sitting (something I do to this day when I’m suffering). Shivering. He thinks it’s food poisoning from El Compadres (where we drank flaming mojitos and argued last night). I stumble down in my satin slip to CVS on Sunset at 2am to buy Pepto Bismal and a hot water bottle. I’m reading him Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War On Drugs by Johann Hari -“The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety -It’s connection”. Even while he’s writhing in bed sick I’m desperately forcing paragraphs about the Rat Park experiment in Vancouver, saying we should move to Portugal where it’s legal and users are taken care of. I’m telling him that it’s about the connection to the culture and ritual of the drug taking, not the addictiveness of drugs themselves after all. This is a revelation to me, it’s a non event for him. I’m killing him with hope and drowning him in affection. I think he’s sober somehow. 

We go to look at a new rental property in China Town that we might move into with his goth friends (who are both in recovery and have an extremely volatile relationship). I try to be non-judgemental and positive but I think they’re all bad news for each other and a disaster waiting to happen. They have hope for themselves though and they’re trying so hard and my heart aches for them and their combination of purity and deception. This isn’t my world and I want my baby back. His friend says “you know he’s using right?” and I didn’t. I’d been with him every minute of every day. How was that even possible? I feel a heat rise up in me and I want to cry and scream and smash things, but I also want to act with compassion and acceptance; react with all the new knowledge I’ve gained from the books and talks and be the person who makes a difference and breaks the cycle with ultimate mind-fucking loving compassion. I ask him if his “food poisoning” was withdrawals and he doesn’t deny it. Tells me he snuck out while I was asleep to score from a guy off Craigslist at Dunkin Donuts in Highland Park and smoked it in the bathroom. I didn’t see the tin foil. We go to Narcotics Anonymous that night. I join him as a support person and volunteer to read. I accompany him and his friends to meetings every day, I wait for them at the front of Cafe Tropical and call my friends wondering how I ended up in this place. I even go to the House of Intuition fucking crystal shop and buy “Intention” candles that we light together and pray for his recovery. This is WAY outside my comfort zone and suddenly we don’t feel very cool at all. I fly to Berlin with hope. He’s sober. 

At the end of the fucked up two week European tour, where I’m so sick I think I might get stomach-cancer from the heartbreak, he answers my call for some reason, somewhere in Denmark. I know that 10 days sober is when his sex drive would come back and I know him so well I’ve already assumed he’s shacked up with someone, which he confirms. A cokey teenager. Great. I believe he loves me, but he’s doing his thing he does, and took my word for it when I said I didn’t need this shit. The inevitable cycle of lust, love, fear, drugs, cheating, implosion and going home to get clean. I tell him I love him unconditionally and accept what’s happening. I’ve watched a buddhist talk that convinces me if I truly love him I don’t need to possess him, I can love that he exists without needing to exist in the same physical space. 

On a 12hr budget plane back to the US with no TVs on the back of the seats, I write and record a song called ‘Dumb Bitch’ when I’m feeling less Zen. When I land, I post it online thinking I’ll delete it an hour later. Russell Crowe retweets it. FFS. My rabbit in headlights drops my suitcases to me at Nick Littlemore’s house, where I’m crashing like a dumpster fire. Nick plops a midi keyboard in front of me and tells me to write, a song a day. He orders me delivery pancakes for dinner as a reward. So I write. The only silver lining to hardships is that I can make something from it, from the void. I live with the ongoing fear that one day I will get a phone call that he is gone, not because he wanted to go but because his chemistry skills couldn’t match the concoction and the balance is off. Junkies don’t want to die, they want to live and it’s the only way they know how. They’re too precious for this slumland; every injustice we walk past and accept gives them perpetual unbearable pain. They’re intelligent and sensitive, they’re awake and they want to be asleep. I promise myself I will check in with him intermittently for the rest of our lives even if it annoys the hell out of him. I tell him I love him as often as I think it. No one gets it, least of all him, and no one ever will.

“A little bitty tear let me down, spoiled my act as a clown, I had it made up not make a frown, but a little bitty tear let me down” Burl Ives. 

TW: Miscarriage, violence, pet death, stalkers, black magick

There’s nothing like cleaning a public toilet to bring you firmly back down to earth. There’s something humbling about scrubbing a strangers shit stains from the bowl, wiping their dry crusted pee off the side of the seat. A stray pube. If you ever got on your high horse as an aspiring star, it’s an antidote I’d highly recommend for gallantly falling off. 

The coffee and cocktail bar I worked at in Waterloo (and it’s sister bar in Oval) was a hipster dive. On my first day, the manager (a former bubblegum pop star in Poland) was yelling at the owners, dramatically threw her pinny on the floor and walked out. The coffee machine was a 1950s Italian Gaggia- lovingly referred to as a “Jawbreaker”. My bosses illuminated me to this fact with a carefree chuckle after the faulty lever flung into my face -indeed nearly breaking my porcelain jaw. I spent the rest of the afternoon sulking with a bag of frozen peas on my face I bought from Iceland because, lo and behold, the ice machine was also broken. I would moan to the other waitresses that it was perhaps fashionable to have 1940s chairs, but did we really need to be so authentic that the mop was from the 1800s and the metal dust pan and brush too?! 

Vintage chic has a limit, and for me that limit is functionality and hygiene in a place where people eat and drink -where 2 cats roams freely. One of the cats died in fact. Probably from eating or drinking weird leftovers from a customer. The sad soft creature was often desperately dehydrated, drinking water from the tap over the sink where we washed dishes. They buried it in the first slush of wet cement out front before it was fully paved over by the council. Or something of equal horror and morbid sentimentality. I seem to remember they had to pull it up again?

At the torn and frayed end of my two year tether, I threatened to report them to occupational health and safety. After a waitress’s wrist (and tendon) was slashed by a broken wine glass on a slippery slanted wooden shelf, after all our formerly pretty hands had scalding scars and sores from the temperamental coffee machine; no rubber gloves to handwash the coffee cups and cake plates; after exhausting my respect and gratitude basically -they responded that I just didn’t get their “bohemian” vibe. This made me laugh. If there was one person who *got *Bohemians, it was me; I didn’t know one “suit” or “normie” in my whole life; we didn’t have hot water running in our kitchen during my childhood. My paternal grandmother was in a decade long ménage à trois and left hash cookies in the freezer for the family on weekends!

One of the waitresses I worked with now refers to our clan at the cafe/bar as a cult. So many of us ended up stuck there in a time warp, years longer than we ever anticipated. Like so many small businesses (as any friend whose day job is in hospitality or retail will attest), owners sometimes, often, welcome staff in to their “family” to create a culture in which it is easier for them to royally rip you off and take advantage of your wanting a “cool” job with “cool” people while they cut every corner they can at your personal expense. I don’t know if this is entirely malicious or conscious, but it’s a tried and tested phenomena of the small time capitalist. This particular work “family” had the catholic hipster cult of artsy goddesses thing down pat. Our boss was a handsome stoic ex airforce pilot from New Zealand who wore Hawaiian shirts and ran a scooter repair workshop. He roasted his own coffee beans and flew a vintage aeroplane on the weekends. His wife was beautiful, blonde, neurotic and charming. She came from a huge catholic family and liked us to wear 1950s pinafores, making sure the playlist on the iPod was jazz, chanson or something old timey. She befriended us on a very personal out-of-hours level. We were there when she went in to labour and brought her first baby home. She was a shoulder to cry on and a sounding board when we needed it. They lived above the cafe. They were a home and a family to all of us and I still love them, of course.

When I say “us”, I mean the staff. They hired women, because you sell more drinks that way I suppose. There was one man on staff, who worked at the bar further down south, perhaps because it was a bit rougher? That didn’t stop them from rostering me (and the other young waitresses) for solo shifts at this cavernous bar, where we closed up at 3am with the fear that any creep you served that night who decided they wanted to creep on you, just had to wait for this opportune moment while you shuttered to make their move.

I was a pretty fearless 21 year old when I arrived in London. I grew up in the red light district of Sydney, and played in bars and clubs since I was 14. I knew how to keep my head down and confidently deal with creeps and crazies. I was not prepared for London. I would fall asleep on the night bus, across the thames, up to Edgeware where all the hookah cafes and carpet stores were. I’d often miss my stop. One particular time this happened, I was chased down a dimly lit unfamiliar street by an Arabic man hurling “slut” at me, grabbing at me, until I gained some ground and waved down a black cab that whisked me away. I was living alone in a friends flat, and no one would have known for a while if I’d disappeared. I used my last £10 on that cab. 

Then came Tom Collins. Just like the cocktail, yes -“A sour cocktail made using a base spirit”.

“You’re Australian! My favourite Australian film is The Year My Voice Broke” 

“Really? That’s weird. My mother is in that film”

“Oh my god, is it Loene Carmen? She’s my favourite actress”

“Yes… ugh”

I suspect he had done his research, but Tom Collins took a shining to me at this bar further down south, where I often worked alone, as my boss tried to save costs on staffing. Tom Collins was in my ear non stop commenting on the way I looked, questioning me, rambling, accosting other customers, staying for hours on end at the price of one black coffee. He was a menace to us all. He was loose. Frightening. Hard work. Twisted. I’d have nightmares about him murdering me, and in fact, it turned out he left a hand-scribbled note in an empty DVD case for my bosses saying “you need to stop hiring filthy immigrants, tell Holiday to watch out, she’s going to get hurt”. They didn’t tell me about this, but they told the other staff. Eventually one of the girls told me, because she rightly thought it was unethical not to, and wanted me to be aware. I confronted my boss about it, he said he spoke to the police and they said until he did something to me, they couldn’t put a restraining order on him.

We were an interesting collection of beautiful young women trapped in the weekly “wage-cycle” (as a rich friend of mine liked to point out), working two jobs to cover rent, whilst also pursuing a career (usually in something creative). 

G was well educated, eloquent and fiercely witted, with a posh accent. She came from a family of famous architects and being the black swan wrote alternative poetry-laden music and took arty photos of filth in the cafe -like the bucket of gray water they made us wash cups in to save costs on water bills. She had a mildly famous Canadian musician boyfriend who often had her in tears of rage and embitterment. We’d catch them stalking each other down the street with arms flinging in the air mid-argument. She’s a like a pig in shit, just like me, in cynicism and unravelling the uglier sides of life.

K was raised by lesbian moms like me, and worked at a bookstore part time. Sometimes when I had no money left for lunch she would cook for me or offer to lend me cash. She was no bullshit; a protector. I will never forget watching this frazzled couple in the midst of an epic fight (several bottles of wine deep and in direct earshot), when the man cried out, humorlessly “we were the love story of the century!”, to which the woman drunkenly retorted “you broke my heart, my art and my arse!” at which point we both dropped to the floor behind the counter howling with silent laughter - “Did she just say Arse?”. We would sometimes put Bedtime Beethoven on the stereo 30 minutes before close to calm the drunken baby adults and kill the vibe. K bravely confronted a couple that had been fucking in the toilet cubicle (who had left jizz on the mirror) by eloquently explaining why it was disrespectful to her and others. It was like listening to an in-depth lecture from a brilliant ethics professor, as the dirty doers nodded their heads and whimpered away. I think the poor sod even went and cleaned his mess. No tips. We went to see O (a young French actress/waitress colleague) in her first play at The Globe and nearly got kicked out for hollering words of praise at her drunk in the rain from the “pleb” section of the theatre. Isn’t that what shakespearean times were all about? They should be lucky we didn’t have rotten vegetables to throw! 

H was a petite Australian woman who called everyone Darling and remembered every deranged patchouli scented, botox lipped, feral cat breeder customer’s name and order and became our manager. This put her in the uncomfortable position of trying to be our friend, while having the responsibility of reprimanding us. There were two Swedish girls with blonde hair, annoyingly svelte, poised and pretty. One told me that she didn’t understand what was so great about sex and that she usually just stared at the ceiling. I told her she must be doing it wrong or sleeping with the wrong people. Maybe she was a-sexual. She made great Kannellbullen at Christmas. 

S was somehow smiling and frowning at the same time; a slight look of perplexity and frustration mingled with soft care and concern. She played saxophone and danced flamenco. She laughed often, and it was a brilliant laugh. She was wise. She’d suffered a small brain aneurysm in her teen years and I like to credit this for the fantastic, bizarre and original clothing items and combinations she put together. I adored her. Her father was a painter, who went blind, but started making the best paintings of his life!

N was from a small village in Russia. She was a former classical guitarist and currently moonlighting as a Silent Film scholar who would frequently visit Vienna for festivals where fabulous nonagenarian silent stars would make grand appearances in furs and wheelchairs. She was totally divine, smouldering and tactile. R was polish catholic and looked like a soviet era high school teacher, she had great hair. She learned English very quickly on the job, and came to London to make music with a British producer/boyfriend about 20 years her senior, a fraught dynamic. When I walked in the door she would say “rrrock chic, I like your staiyle” (slight Borat accent) “mm, hee-pi staiyle”. I let her ruin my life and (I like to believe) a budding romance with a wealthy art dealer by asking her to trim my fringe one day -“hmm, space age! I like!”. My eyes popped out of their sockets at the bowl cut left behind. We were even when King Khan came in to the bar to visit me. He was doing a Jodorowsky tarot reading when she half-screamed half-squealed, visibly distressed, saying it was the work of the devil and not to do these things around her. She was probably right.  

A had long wavy blonde hair, was always sensible, smart and rational; she had a very long term boyfriend who wasn’t nearly as beautiful as her. One afternoon she turned to me and whispered in a slight panic “is that Johnny Depp? I can’t serve him, please can we swap!”. I looked at this wanker impersonator and said “no, it’s just some handsome try-hard wearing the same hat, you serve him”. The man went downstairs and within two minutes the regulars were coming up excitedly saying “is that Johnny Depp?”. I laughed them off, saying “of course not!” and went to serve him tea. Within minutes paparazzi had turned up and yes, the actual Johnny Depp shuffled out of the cafe. Kevin Spacey was a regular I never recognised either, he often sat in the disintegrating floral armchair in the corner. I suppose he’s still there, metaphorically speaking. The only famous customer I recognised was Wayne Swan (deputy Australian prime minister and treasurer). “Swanny!” I said, as if knew him, “Wanna beer?”. We sat down over candlelight together and discussed political gossip and the future of the Great Barrier Reef, he was animated and generous and it really felt like we *were *old friends by the end. 

Early one morning a homeless elderly man came in demanding a hot breakfast. We didn’t serve hot food at the cafe, so we offered the man crisps, cake, tea and whatever we had really. I’m pretty sure we offered cash too! He staunchly refused to settle for anything less and continued to demand a hot breakfast from our non existent kitchen. After much back and forth, the sensible and rational Ms. *A *said (in a painfully literal example, so ridiculous it did make me scoff) “Look, beggars can’t be choosers sir!”. 

The third memorable experience I share with Ms. A is one of those darker experiences you can’t quite believe is real. I went downstairs to mop the toilet cubicle floor at the end of the night shift, switched on the big light… and found blood pooled and smeared all over the floor with what looked like a portion of someone’s intestine. In total shock and horror (the kind where you start laughing -the pseudobulbar affect?) I went upstairs to *A *and said “I think someone has been stabbed and some of their insides have fallen out or something, what do I do?”. She was working at the hospital part time while training to become a dietician, so I thought she would be able to deal with it better than I. She got the torch for the coffee machine and looked at the piece of human tissue on the floor, it was… clearly a foetus, half the size of my thumb. Some poor woman had miscarried at a bar and walked away. I like to hope and believe she was really drunk and didn’t even realise it happened or know that she was pregnant. It felt like something you should have a clean up crew in white SOCO suits deal with. We wrapped it in a tissue and flushed it, and I mopped up the blood with a weird sense of guilt, disgust and disbelief. £5.90 an hour for this was NOT worth it. We told our boss what had happened, he didn’t know what to say and offered us a shot of Honey Krupnik and a £20 tip each for our troubles.

100 metres from the bar, on my way home that night there was a man lying on the side walk with blood pouring from every orifice. I stopped and stared at him -eyes glazed over, wondering if he was still breathing and what fresh hell I entered into that day. A gang of men who I assumed where responsible, ran past hollering. Thankfully, someone else who had the emotional wherewithal had stopped too and was calling an ambulance. I sauntered away.

Then there was a regular customer called E who was 6’2 with white hair, who spoke Spanish and looked like Zeus. He worked on construction sites and made art. I ended up at his house one night after a flamenco show at Sadler’s Wells. Between the energetic handclapping and dramatic guitar strums, something very bizarre happened to me. I kept hearing a voice telling me to “go to E” and the next thing I know (I didn’t even have his phone number or address) he is standing in front of me opening the door to his home in a grass skirt with a warlock cane with a skull on it, listening to forest trance. This is really weird, but he walked on my back and honestly I think he did some voodoo on me. He said he was roman catholic. I never spoke about it again until now, deeply disturbed by the memory. At one point he was homeless and swimming in public pools to wash. He grew a long white beard like Gandalf, I avoided speaking to him like the plague unable to process this strange memory, and the following Christmas, he brought me a children’s book called “The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil”. He also gifted the cafe a Twin Peaks Log-Lady style log and emailed me an image of him naked, crouched on it. H-E-L-P. 

Fairly, I was nearly fired one night for getting drunk and letting a cute director I was flirting with stick around after hours while I did a sloppy job of cleaning and spilled the giant bucket of sour milk that we collected under the counter. My mother visited at the end of my tenure and said I was a terrible waitress, blunt and dispassionate. You get that way after a while. I mostly enjoyed teasing the posh boys from Eton in their penguin suits after charity events and placating the dumb oil refinery guy who came once a month and tipped us 20s for every espresso martini.

I’ll leave you with a fun little story of the bosses catholic priestly dad telling me I needed to be saved (from Hell) for having shared a hotel room with my boyfriend at the time. I decided in that moment that I would very much like to corrupt his country boy son who had just moved to the big city and joined our ranks. I took him to Dalston Superstore for a Gay Bear night, where he told me wide eyed that a couple of MEN were loudly doing things to each other in the cubicle next to him. Maybe I am going to hell. Maybe this whole time in my life was hell, but either way -you better work, bitch. 

There was a songwriter/producer who someone important at Radio 1 said was singularly going to “save radio” and it wasn’t me. It was a cute guy I met when I was fifteen years old at a cafe in Bondi Beach. He worked at Happy Hockers pawn shop and his long-haired girlfriend was singing folk songs on an acoustic guitar to a handful of barefoot and sandy drifters drinking dandelion tea. I remember thinking how bored I was of that soft, whispery vocal tone with an oddly inflected accent (is it Elvish?) and mundane lyrical content (akin to a still life painting) that became popular over laundry liquid commercials in the noughties and is now considered somewhat mainstream instead of just Sia ‘Breathe Me’/HBO series soundtrack territory. I also remember thinking he was cute and I’d like to date him when I was older. 

So, however many years later, after playing in bands at all the same venues, sharing all the same friends but never really speaking, we end up in London at the same time, on the same hustle and yes- I do date him. Only now that I’m older, of course. When I was younger and introverted I liked to think of myself as mythical and mysterious. In fact “something of a myth to behold” (a direct quote from a newspaper at the time) is how the press described me. I didn’t party with the crowd. I took my work very seriously. I was tortured and I wanted the cooler older people (adults) in the scene to know as much, to think ‘she’s special, pure, virginal, untouchable’ -like I had a golden halo of once in a lifetime prodigious talent around me that no one could enter in to and no heartbreaker could dissolve. In reality I probably came across as a moody bitch in person. And I probably was.

So here we are in the big city, with the big music attorneys at the same big firm in London that all the ‘hot new acts’ get sent to. We’ve been shopped around to the same big time managers and publishers. The sharks are circling (or that’s what it feels like in our ego-driven imaginations). It feels like that moment before you get really famous and everyone can taste it in the air. Except 80% of you never really do climb that next mountain, with the same glittery air hovering around you. It’s exciting, and we bond over the shared moment, going home together for what we both assume will be a one night stand. He tells me the following morning he has a girlfriend, to which I respond poe faced -‘I have a boyfriend’, and we admit solemnly that we should probably deal with that situation. We plan to make phone calls to our respective others on the same day so we can move ahead together as a couple. I really don’t know why or how it was so obviously committal so immediately, but it was and we were in love like boiling water on a cup of 50p instant noodles.  

Next thing you know, we are living together in a terrace over looking the canals in Angel that belongs to a floppy haired synth musician friend of his/ours who is dating a cumbersome wealthy diplomat who brokers oil deals between countries. They are off on Safari in Africa at the moment and honestly, that’s my idea of the sexiest daddy-complex in a gay relationship I can think of. So we have this luxe-pad, immaculately furnished, stocked with San Pellegrini in the mini fridge by the bed and don’t get me started on the thread count. Radio saviour spends half his time in an abandoned church/studio he’s put together in the middle of a sunflower field in the south of France. He’s recording the debut album he’s signed a big money deal with a *trop *cool French label for. It has an absurd amount of pressure and expectation placed on it based off one single release that got a lot of “buzz” and “traction” and the hot air that is necessary in London to get such a deal. I notice a sample in the single from a 60s garage girl-band from Chicago called Daughter’s of Eve. The song is called “Help Me Boy” and it’s on a U.S.A Records vinyl comp I would spin during DJ sets. He can’t believe I picked it, asks me not to share my finding and then to re-record the sample for the album version so they don’t come across legal issues. So, it’s me singing the sample for any indie sleuth trivia nerds out there and that’s the reason why.

There’s a thing in the London music scene (I should say industry) that is the antithesis of the culture in Australia. You aren’t “allowed” (by management) to perform a show in London until you have a hit. Which at the time meant a song being played on Radio 1 or BBC6, or a soundcloud/hype machine success (laughing at this one now, as it’s already obsolete but was such a big deal in 2012). You must also perform some shittier shows somewhere like Liverpool or Birmingham (where no one important will see) as a test run before the fated London debut. This is based on the generally held belief that if you do your first show in London and it’s not unanimously agreed upon as the most amazing thing anyone’s ever seen by the room full of every industry who’s who with folded arms (pretending to be serious about their job while they fuck each other and do blow in the bathrooms), if they aren’t subsequently falling over themselves to sign you, then your career is over. Dead. Right there and then. It’s dog eat dog. This is something I was made to understand. Also, it’s expensive to put on a show in England and no one gets paid (because everyone else needs to get paid) if you know what I mean. A support show at The Old Blue Last (when it was just about still acceptable to play there) used to get you 50 quid if you were lucky, but the hipster guitarist in your band would need a retainer contract and £250 for the night, plus £90 p/hr rehearsals. Oh and unless you’re happy to settle for “house lights” (aka, all the lights on), £250 for a lighting engineer.

In Australia, you cut your teeth, so to speak, and build your 100 000 hours (or whatever The Beatles did) on stage in the club scene. You play as many live gigs as you possibly can. For practice, for money, for exposure, for buzz, for the scene. You want everyone talking about you. You want to be a regular part of their lives. You grow with your audience and you’re allowed to. The songs grow too. Any good DJ or live performer will tell you that you learn everything you need to know about the structural and dynamic power and mechanisms of a song from the response of a live audience. When to drop, re-enter, build, repeat -the most effective sequence of a set list. You learn what falls flat and what makes people holler and yell and go wild. You can actively tweak the songs over time to get the most effective tension and reaction. Only then do you usually have the opportunity to go into a recording studio and cut a record.

Well, that’s how it was in the late noughties in Oz. That’s how we did it then, and that’s how my first band was signed, and how my friend’s bands were signed. So by the time of this memoir, everyone has access to a home studio inside their laptops and that sets an expectation for high quality recordings from YouTube-tutorial bedroom producers, preceding a high production performance (usually from artists who have no experience performing live). They are actually two completely different art forms. Performing and recording are an entirely different set of skills in my opinion. Not everyone is good at both, and they both need practice to make perfect. I’ll never forget watching this young major label signee living at my friend’s place getting basic “movement coaching” from a choreographer the label paid for in preparation for her first live show. She had a great voice, but no style, personality or charisma, couldn’t write songs and couldn’t move for shit. So they had to hire people to do the rest for her. How to stand and the angle to hold a mic even. That was a revelation to me; it expanded my understanding and appreciation of the industry -all ways to create are valid and valuable and the collaborative process is fruitful. I came from the Prince school of thought -that to be the real deal, you had to be the full package, and you had to just naturally tick all the boxes of every facet of your act, your craft. Whew, went on a tangent there…

“She accepts the ways of this visitor as a natural phenomenon; How he comes and goes, exists, talks, laughs with her, falls silent, listens to her, and then he vanishes.” Excerpt from La Jetée by Chris Marker.

*I’ll meet you at the steps to Sacré-Cœur at sunset. *I caught the train to Gare du Nord on a Friday and made my way up the steps to his smiling face, with the dry yellow brick sun curling it’s way around the spire and the belly of the basilica behind him. We kiss with all the little pieces of paris laid out beneath us. It’s stomach churningly romantic. It’s before 3G roaming is affordable in Europe, so there was the thrill of the chance for failure to show or find one another, but we achieve this glorious filmic success. We eat baked camembert over candlelight, buy a citron tart and a pack of cheap Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes on the way back to our room at Hotel Amour. We smoke them on the balcony with a glass of red wine in the significantly blue light of 3am, draped in crisp ivory bedsheets and the flush of love, because… Paris. The memories are so cliché, like a succession of black and white arthouse snapshots, and I think this is purely for his wistful comment that I looked like the girl from La Jetée (in the dream scene) when I was laying in bed under moonlight. He went to film school obviously (I see you rolling your eyes), and wrote me a list of classics to study upon request. I still have the hand scribbled thing in my little envelope of special papers, along with the bag tag from the hotel. Sometimes I keep these momentos in case I ever get dementia in old age and long for a trigger. Touch wood.

Many of my first songs in London were written for him, my muse. I would play him demos I’d made on my own with garage band and an omnichord with it’s built-in drum machine (which he loved), then these ultra produced tracks I was making with the songwriters my managers were putting me in the room with -and he hated them, and I would cry about it. I was so proud of them; they were close to sounding like how I had always imagined my songs. I didn’t want them to sound like mysterious, charming and sloppy bedroom music. I wanted them to last the test of time, I wanted Lionel Richie status and expensive chords. He didn’t think this was cool, but I don’t think he understood that I didn’t care very much about being cool (I knew I was cool) and that I wanted to make a classic record full of hits. I wanted to be secretly cool, so if you dug the surface you’d find a “if you know, you know” pleasant surprise, but publicly I’d be a Britney Spears/Tina Turner/Cher. I was confused about it, and so was everyone I worked with. Everyone could see I was talented, but no one knew quite where to place me. They still don’t. I’m too pop to be indie and too indie to be pop, and it’s just weird for people to wrap their heads around apparently. It’s uncomfortable for people when you don’t fit in a box, but this is especially true of women.

The first songwriting session I did was with the guy who wrote Dido’s ‘Thank You’ and the demo I’d made that was floating around (“Gardens of Paradise”) made this match-making make sense. I had never written a song with other people on the spot like this before. I had been writing songs since I was 3 years old, but always alone in my bedroom, usually when I was sobered after a bout of tears, and then I’d take them to my band to flesh them out. I was terrified. What if I couldn’t think of anything? How could I be vulnerable in front of these two random older dudes I’d never met? What if they understood my lyrics and could see straight through my soul?! I knew my voice wasn’t like a conventional trained pop voice either and wasn’t sure they would know what to do with it. Maybe I was CRAP? Imposter syndrome is unavoidable. It was all a completely foreign process to me. They brought up a Spotify playlist of references, none of which I was familiar with or even aspired toward in any way, but I bit my tongue and decided to go with it, stay cheerful and see what happened. 

They built a Berlin “You Take My Breath Away” style synth bed track and I wrote an OTT poetic love letter to this guy. To my absolute joy and pride, I finished the song and recorded the vocal. When I got home the producer emailed, telling me they wanted to change the structure of the verse melody completely and could I adapt the lyrics to it? WHAT!? At that time, the song writing process was sacred to me, I believed every bit of music that came to me was perfect (even in utter frailty). I believed I was a conduit for some higher force and I had a purity and protective approach to what I channeled -it stayed as is, in it’s celestial form. I was scared to mess with it honestly. I didn’t feel like I could rely on lyrics and music coming to me on demand back then, I would wait for a song to find me and respect that process. Maybe growing up with the indie music ethos that lauded the “mistakes” and fragility you would hear on an early Cat Power record, built this sense of protectionism. The Steve Albini attitude. The recording to tape attitude (which is how I recorded as a teenager). Capture it -the feeling, above all technicalities. Anyway, out of some sense of duty, I rewrote the lyrics to fit the new melody. It was simpler, more obvious, far less poetic and less wordy, but… it was honestly better. This was another complete revelation to me and the beginning of an explosion of productivity and expansion in my writing. The song (Call of Love) thematically ripped off of Ain’t No Mountain High Enough. I learned to let go and give in to where a song wanted/needed to go to flow right. Let some lyrics slide for the bigger picture and greater good of the song. Go with it. 

I heeded the Call of Love and made my way back to France. This time we caught a train to the Loire Valley where the church and the sunflower field was. We sat in cast iron furniture on gravelled garden paths eating the most incredible soft cheeses to ever dissolve on my tongue. The sunlight, the claw footed bath, the window looking out over the garden full of rosemary. Call Me By Your Name. I even made Ratatouille one night from a dusty 1980s Marie Claire recipe book I found in the barn, served on one of those cabbage/lettuce ware plates you’d expect to see in The Big Chill kitchen. The young raver who owned the property had inherited it from his somewhat wealthy parents (who I think were symphony musicians). I suffered over my demos, while he suffered over his masterpiece upstairs. 

Back in London he became very sick with an immunodeficiency related illness to do with his colon (likely induced from the stress of thinking he had to create a radio saving album -as if any one album could take on a task so impossibly impossible!) and this became all encompassing. He was obsessed about what we ate -lots of raw foods initially. Which pissed me off as a young brat who preferred take away, pastries and spaghetti. He forced me to take nutrition seriously and bought me a good knife to encourage cooking when I was on my own. It irritated me, unreasonably, but I am retrospectively grateful. I was at the beginning of my adult life, trying to be a young pop starlet and wanted everything to be sexy and fun. He was in a lot of pain (bleeding), he must have felt so vulnerable, powerless and scared. He was prescribed a course of strong steroids as treatment. He warned me this might happen as a result, but he became kind of agro and super sensitive (and simultaneously I was being a fairly self involved and insensitive asshole about it all). I was navigating my way through my own persistent nightmares. 

“Our time so far has been magical despite the shifting sands and tears” is the contents of the only email I can find from him.

He went back to Australia to finish some work, deal with his health and I suspect (go back to his long term girlfriend who would take care of him). His illness turned out to be life threatening and he spent the subsequent years in and out of hospital between playing Glastonbury and Coachella. He nearly died. He said he didn’t think I had the unconditional love for him he needed to support him through this health crisis, and to be honest -I didn’t. I was on a mission and I had tunnel vision.

A few nights before he left he won a BAFTA for a film soundtrack he’d worked on. We went to the afterparty inside Battersea Power Station (the building on the Led Zeppelin album cover). I was quickly drunk and distressed about our inevitable demise and made my way to the dance floor. A familiar face (a family friend -a brilliant actor and playwright) bumped his ass into me in the midst of an exaggerated and limb heavy swaying action. To his total disbelief and my tangible relief - “Holiday !! What are you doing here? Are you okay? Do you have somewhere to stay?”. “Actually, no” with complete transparency, “My boyfriend is skipping town and I don’t have anywhere to stay… help?”. “I’m shooting a series in Hungary for the next three months” he said, “You can take my room”. A caveat, a pause… “I have a flatmate, but he’s never there. He’s kind of weird -just don’t go into his room, ok?”. I didn’t go into his room, but I did marry him. *spoiler alert*

*To be continued…  *

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Lloretta Del Mar

I was making bad coffees at a Danish Bakery run by a grumpy baker and a toffee-nosed business man (who had outrageously accused me of stealing from the till) when I got a text from an ex I hadn’t seen since my 19th birthday. 

“Hey Lil Rig, just got dumped by my fiancé. On my way to Barcelona. Join me?” 

I had £50 in my bank account and 5 shifts scheduled for the following week, so I obviously replied with “Fuck yes! I can afford a one way ticket, I’ll be there by 2pm tomorrow”. I left without a trace. I disappeared from the shitty job without notice and no one knew where I was or what I was doing. That, my friends, is what I call* LIVING! Or what a therapist might call impulsive and irresponsible. *Freedom tastes so sweet when you force it’s filthy hand over your mouth to suffocate you with it’s sugary allure.

He worked at the record store when we first met, oh about -one hundred years ago. He was a DJ (*ahem* turntablist/scratchologist) who drove a pick-up truck with hydraulics and a vanity plate that said “HU5TLR”. His name meant “crown” in French (a running royalty theme with the nomenclature of lovers of mine). He had a cupboard stacked with box-fresh trainers, a gun in the bedside table (“in case of intruders”) and a shelf proudly displaying collectible Star Wars battleships. My mom referred to him as the* Hip Hop Honey*. His dad was Willie Nelson’s weed dealer, he had elegant hands with which he played classical piano and an MPC, cooked like a king, loved like an addict and had a killer vinyl collection we would scour on Sundays for samples. He took me on the back of his dirt bike to a place he called “Narnia” (a field of daisies) where we recreated that Virgin Suicides love scene. He showed me his fluorescent orange fluffy flares from the original rave-era and blew my mind open with 12” remix versions of songs like “Let Me Be Your Fantasy” by Baby D and NRG’s “I Need Your Love”. 

More importantly, he saved me from an extremely destructive 3 year relationship I desperately needed to be dragged out of kicking, fucking and screaming. So when I got a call from a friend to tell me that my current boyfriend had just left a strip club at 10am with a couple of hookers (instead of driving home to help me unpack and set up the new one bedroom flat we just signed the lease on), I showed up on hip hop honey’s door step with a bottle of champagne and said “fuck it”. He was 10 years older than me, we watched a lot of Top Gear with Thai take-away food, spent many nights at clubs waiting for him to finish sets, and we lasted about 8 glorious months before I flipped the switch. No bad blood. He hated when I put back the passenger seat and flipped my heels on his spotless dashboard. 

Big rig (let’s call him) meets me at Aeroport de Barcelona sporting a giant smile… and long braids complete with beads (I think). I can’t help but laugh and cover my eyes with my hands (like that monkey emoji -🙈). I would usually find this Crocs™ level cringeworthy, but for some reason it makes total sense on him and who am I anyway? He’s a ridiculous human; super passionate, excitable, and enthusiastic. He’s absurd to me in a way that rivets and delights me. The energy he emanates bounces off walls; he walks like there’s springs in those pumped up kicks, and he talks in way that makes me believe that somehow the speed and happy pills he did at bush-doofs never really wore off. We catch up on all that has come to pass since we split and how fucking funny it is that we end up in Barcelona together. He reveals his new found bi-curiosity (which I’m gagging to hear all the juicy details about) and the world is our oyster.

One night, we meet some local friends he’s made who run an underground weed cafe (thick with smoke, dingy couches and TVs playing cartoons on the walls). Someone from that scene guides us to a Brazilian salsa night out the back of a small bar. I know how to salsa and I’ve flung my handbag down, hand in hand with a stranger twirling me in close to him before you can say ¡vamos!. This whole scenario is my idea of heaven and an easy way for me to flirt with my ex by making him thirsty and jealous *shrug*. I especially liked the challenge now there was maybe men to compete with for his affection.

After having a stranger grind up against my ass just long enough to make me uncomfortable (my first experience of the slow and sensual Bachata), I go back to my purse to get cash out for cocktails… and *hasta luego iPhone!! *The little shit with a felt fedora runs out of the club with my phone into the night. Our new friends say “Estupido! we told you! Mine was stolen 3 times last month!”. I do the ‘Find my iPhone’ thing on someone else’s phone, like that episode of Broad City. We follow the little blue dot moving across the map for a minute with baited breath, pounding heart and then it’s dead. They’ve pulled out the sim. These guys are pros and it’s all over. An entire crew of sweet drunken spaniards guide us down the streets for a funny forever to the police office to report it (with a caveat that a police report was only worthwhile for the insurance forms). I didn’t have insurance -duh, but Big Rig did and thought he could fudge a stolen laptop with it and scam the system. A futile attempt the cops weren’t buying. 

I guess I was supposed to be mad about being robbed, mad at the thieves (like everyone else around me throwing their hands in the air and shaking their heads in my defence), but I couldn’t help feel like if this dude was desperate enough for money or a thrill that he had to pull a stunt like that, then he could take the phone and he definitely needed it more than me (a dumb tourist). Also, quietly, we all hate having phones don’t we? I know I’m a cyborg, but goddamn I get nostalgic for showing up when you said you would, leaving a voicemail on the home phone and meeting at Town Hall Steps. The idea of having a blue dot tracking me everywhere I go is like having a monkey on my back.

After a day or so of day turning into night and night turning into day and feeling like I’m somewhere in between, I attempt to get into my social media and email accounts. Apparently with two step verification, there’s just no fucking way. Not going to happen. It’s like trying to locate and enter a secret tomb in the pyramids protected by all the curses and gods of centuries past, not knowing how to read hieroglyphics or having any tools whatsoever at my disposal. The chimes of freedom flashing! I go a week or more without contacting anyone who is not in my immediate vicinity, my present reality. My mother tells me she was about to register me a missing person. Aperol Spritz, please.

Big rig takes me to a party at the hair dressing salon and convinces them and me to cut a bob into my hair. A street party and a half later, I’m swinging with a fiiine bob and some ornate oversized gold earrings I bought (that reminded me of something you’d see in a Pedro Almodóvar film). He was right about the bob. Something transformative about it and I feel my entire personality shift.

 There’s a street in the gothic quarter with antique stores where we snap up a portable record player and a couple John Lee Hooker comps (The Hot Spot soundtrack was *our album *when we were a couple). The record player never stops; we flip sides dutifully (unless we’re busy as such and the skipping needle continues on skipping until you know what the time is again), Boom Boom ringing across the Catalonian skies for the rest of the trip.

We roll up the coast to the Santa Maria de Monserrat abbey (built in to a surreal looking rocky mountain) then up to Figueres where they have midnight viewings of the Salvador Dali Theatre-Museum. We get very stoned and I find myself very much running around the halls of this museum at midnight with Dali’s creations popping out of the walls and reaching out to me, drinking pink champagne from the mouth of a figure carved in stone. Stoned. So stoned. 

"*It's obvious that other worlds exist, that's certain; but, as I've already said in many other occasions, these other worlds are inside ours, they reside on earth and are precisely at the centre of the dome of the Dalí Museum, which contains the new, unsuspected and hallucinatory world of Surrealism” *Dali, 1974?

All I remember from then on are old discos, bad sheets and Pina Coladas on Lloretta del Mar. Then the serene satisfaction of every kind of woman and her dog topless on the beach cove of Platja Cala El Golfet in an act of normality not even the sleaziest-eyed scrub would flinch at. The joy of being able to join in with my giant breasts and do the same; no one even remotely interested in blinking their eyes at me or hollering. On a cloudy day in Cyprus I get cars slow rolling up to me, yelling and honking, and the absence of that lamb to the slaughter feeling is hard to overstate here. 

At Cala de Sant Roc I spot an indie musician called Kindness on the beach. We’ve met in a studio briefly once before, but I’m actually too shy to say hello (knowing he definitely won’t remember me) and besides, his girlfriend is glowing so hard my insides turn to mush. There’s jocks on yachts, the water is crystal and the Patatas Bravas are hot. I’m omitting all the filthy melting moments, because I don’t want this to become Sex & The City… though I could be down for Mills & Boon.

I return to London, back to square one, googling careers like “wedding celebrant”, “coupon collector”, “professional competition winner”, “survey filler” and “transcription writer”. Tears in my eyes, huffing and puffing, woe is me. I’ve been through 16 phone numbers since then, but my my secrets to life and the predicaments they present are still one in the same. Luck, love, the kindness of strangers in a very Blanche DuBois way, and of course, winging it. 

So, I wrote an extremely intimate piece on falling in love, breaking up, sex, drugs & rock n roll at an appropriately War & Peace length, that just didn’t fit the occasion and freaked out the subject matter who texted “Woah- this IS personal” upon reading it, so I decided it was best to save it for the book or another time when time has truly healed all wounds. 

I’ve moved to Venus Beach this week and ended up spending Christmas Day with a 60 something year old Chinese/Iranian shamanic healer (among others) who I met at a spiritual group called The Circle of Light. He wears all white (to force himself to be more aware of his surroundings, more conscious, so as not to dirty the linen) and a jade pendulum necklace. He is two years celibate, has to fend off an ever growing number of middle aged women desperate to dote on him and was a disciple of Osho’s in India during the 70s. Has he seen Wild Wild Country? Yes, he loves it. Anyway, it’s just me and retirees searching for something here and he is my Father Christmas this year. I created a Tik Tok account for him. The other woman I befriended says her name is Hades (but maybe it’s Heidi and the German accent is throwing me off). She’s a retired, recently widowed sweetheart who sunbathes in fabulous bikinis most days. She says she’s lonely and misses her husband and I just adore her.

I digress. The best Christmas I can remember is also the earliest I can remember, and we all know memories are completely unreliable, more so the further we get away from them, so I can’t attest the to authenticity of the details. 

Christmas, Los Angeles, 1995

My mother and her girlfriend, Monica had taken 5 year old little me for a trip around the world. They had borrowed money from friends and family to help them, and by the time we got to Mexico (what I thought was Mexico -which was actually just Olvera St in Downtown LA) we had very little left. I remember walking through a street market and spotting a candy coloured plastic dolls house I really hoped and wished Santa might get me for Christmas (because I knew we couldn’t afford it). Further along, I became mesmerised by a mariachi band who were selling their cassettes to the crowd (there was a picture of a camel on the front which reminded me of my Dad’s Camel cigarettes). I wanted this cassette so badly and I loved the music so much, that my mum spent (what I dramatically remember as being) our last $5 on it. She was rewarding my love of music and in this moment she was truly an angel.

Me & Mommie Dearest, Christmas, Highland Park, Los Angeles, 1995

On a small Christmas themed train-ride in Griffith Park (which I remember as an epic journey to the South Pole at night) I ended up on Santa’s knee. I wasn’t totally convinced by him, but when he asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I gave him the benefit of the doubt and whispered to him about the dolls house. 

Christmas, Highland Park, Los Angeles, 1995

Back at Monica’s aunt’s house in Highland Park (with most notably to little me -big fluffy wolf dogs and an empty pool), we ate Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups and See’s Candy; luxuries we couldn’t get in Australia at the time (and would ask my mother’s acting agent to bring back in his suitcase after trips to Hollywood). I’m in seventh heaven, bubbling with anticipation and the night before Christmas my mothers (who made me refer to them as Mommie Dearest like Faye Dunaway’s Joan Crawford) told me to keep an ear out for Santa’s sleigh and the sound of reindeer hoofs on the roof. I heard them in my dreams, I was sure of it. I ran downstairs to the tree before anyone else had woken up and unwrapped all my gifts alone (they had told me I could open them “first thing in the morning*”*). There was a package from Santa. I ripped it open… and I was beside myself in complete amazement. It was the dolls house. The exact candy coloured plastic one from the street market. At that moment I believed in Santa with all my heart.

Cut to being in the school playground at 8 years old and the school bully -Alexa (a large boisterous blonde from a troubled home) is dunking my head in the trash because I flat out refused to say “Santa isn’t real”. I refused to say it because he was real. I’d met him! He’d delivered the gift I wished for and straight up asked him for! On principle, I couldn’t say it, because it would’ve been a lie and Santa might punish me eternally with a drought of gifts for not believing. Catholic guilt style. I came home very upset and said to my mother “Santa does exist right?!”. She laughed and said “no of course not, he’s like the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny!”. I was shattered. “You LIED to me” I said slowly with piercing child-eyes, feeling completely deceived; all the magic of being on this planet had evaporated in an instant. 

Moral of the story, no man (Santa, Christ, Bhudda, your husband, Osho or a Shamanic healer) is the dreamweaver, miracle master, saviour in the end; though just like the well-established effectiveness of a placebo, whatever gets you through the night (love, stories, magic, lies perhaps) and makes you feel like there’s something greater than this stark reality of chaos math, logic and reason…  I get it. Let someone fool you into believing something extraordinary exists, just once, then let yourself come back down to earth and appreciate it along “with all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world” (Desiderata). 

Wealth is an entirely different beast in England. It’s old money; embossed letter press class system money. It’s snooty and silly, with inbred facial features, a Hugh Grant middle parting, padded Barbour jackets with corduroy collars and red pants in the social pages of Tatler magazine. Coming from an arts based family, I had some limited experience of financially abundant actors and celebrities, but it ain’t nothing like stinky old British wealth. The British upper set aren’t “rich”, that feels too brazen and glitzy, they are Knights-of-The-Templar (I don’t even know what that is but it sounds about right) nobility, with dark family secrets going back to the 13th century, boarding school trauma and adopted-a-6th-child-for-philanthropy kind of Wealthy. Wealthy with a weighted capital W. 

My grandmother was terrified about me living in London. Even just today, she said to me “I hope you never spend another winter there ever again”, sheer terror in her eyes. She lived in Notting Hill in the 70s (when it was actually cool) where The Who rehearsed in the room above. My grandfather played keys in a reggae band, my uncle (a baby at the time) slept in an empty drawer, they bathed at Hackney Public Baths for 50p a pop and my grandmother (to her horror) stole a fur coat in utter desperation to stay warm. Us Australian’s will always be nothing more than petty theft convicts to Brits, and I kinda would like to wear that on my sleeve. Feels bad-ass.

I came to London with one suitcase and a return ticket for a fortnight later. A producer had reached out to me, encouraging me to write and record a solo album with him. He said that since Adele and Lana Del Rey had become mainstream he thought a door had opened for voices and songs like mine. This made me wince a little, but I got the gist and swallowed my ego. At the time I was living and working with my boyfriend Leroi (in Old French meaning “The King” -you see a theme here?) And his mother Tina. We sold 13oz Japanese selvedge denim, cowboy hats, boots and bandanas. We were moonlighting as 45s DJs for spending money. It was hip and I could afford exorbitant brunches and taxis. I told my father about the offer to come to England. I said, despite my lifestyle, that I couldn’t afford to travel for something so whimsical and I couldn’t let work down -I had 5 shifts that week. He was very serious with me and said they would get on just fine without me, that I simply had to go and he would pay for my flight. “Go on, get outta here!!”. Follow your dreams type thing. He cried when I left and went to the pub for a scotch on the rocks. I only know this because I went to the airport a day early by mistake and had to return from my triumphant departure an hour later to his tear stained cheeks saying “Oh, fuck you”.

I remember looking at that low soupy grey sky in London the first day I arrived, sleeping on this producers couch in a slightly damp house in Oval - south of the Thames, totally grim. I thought to myself ‘I could never stay in this dreary place longer than 6 months’. This producer, after his 8th year in London, said the city had a way of digging it’s claws into you and keeping you there. I was gobsmacked to watch him run outside every time the sun made a curt appearance for just a chance of catching one slivery ray through a broken cloud mass. That would never be me, I said to myself; I’ll just get in, do the job, get out. I laugh to think how naive I was about those claws. 

We made a demo recording of a song I wrote called The Gardens of Paradise (I’d read The Quran during a manic episode a year earlier), and before I knew it I had a famous (and well, honestly kinda hot) attorney and meetings with big time managers and the head of Warner publishing at the time (we bonded over Roy Orbison). It became clear to me that many songwriters lived off their craft here. They had nice homes with studios and mid century danish furniture, coupled with well-fed pets and seemingly functional families. All you needed was one Selena Gomez B-Side. There were government paid plaques on walls of buildings where musicians had lived -“Jimi Hendrix, guitarist and songwriter, lived here 1968-1969”. I couldn’t have imagine a world where cultural revolutionaries who played guitar with their teeth were celebrated and commemorated by the system. In Australia we have a saying that goes “get a real job and a real haircut” that is uniquely reserved for musicians (aka “good for nothing dole bludgers” and wasters). I concluded that if I stayed in London and gave it a good crack I could maybe make something of myself too. Make a little history, leave a little legacy. 

I asked my family if they would consider helping me out financially for 6 months while I tried my best to secure a publishing deal. They agreed, sending encouraging emails I wasn’t quite prepared for. I was so moved and honoured by their generosity… and a couple months in one pair of parents emailed to say they had decided to teach me a fiscal lesson and would stop sending money now-“When in Rome!”. I didn’t have a visa I could legally work on, so I did what had to be done and found a cash-in-hand, under the table waitressing gig. They paid me just below minimum wage (around £5.60 p/hr)  because they could. 9 hour shifts, 4-5 nights a week, sometimes finishing at 2am and returning at 7am. A thousand coffees, 500 cocktails, 250 weirdos and a badly lit basement toilet to clean. Any minute I had free was in the studio (let me be dramatic here) whoring my talent out on blind dates with a slew of hitmakers. A cog in the wheel of creation. 

My friend (and manager for a time) Cherish generously let me share her actual bed. Just two girls named after Madonna hits, who used to be in goth girl-bands snuggled in a pod. I remember spewing a lot in her bathroom early in the morning from alcohol poisoning. I’d never done so much socialising and drinking in my life, beginning with Bloody Mary’s in the morning. We’d bar hop from members clubs like Soho House, Shoreditch House and Groucho’s to dingy hipster hangs in east London -Barden’s, Birthdays, The Haggerston… I got the feeling we were all living way beyond our means and I could barely keep up. There was one woman, rabidly-thin with bleached hair and a sultry tortured pout that I bought pricey cocktails and food for a couple times thinking she was a broke musician. Apparently she was Osama Bin Laden’s niece. I began to realise that a lot of the “arty” types I was hanging out with came from bigger wealth than I had ever experienced; trust fund kids, politicians spawn and the like. They could afford to be artists and adults, you know? 

By the end of summer I was sleeping on my darling Fred’s infamous green Chesterfield couch (many indie musicians had met The Sandman there -Dev Hynes, How To Dress Well, Bryndon Cook from Solange Knowles’ band). It felt like a rite of passage to the gateway of a mid-level venue. I graduated to splitting rent on an actual room with Fred’s flatmate George after we decided we definitely didn’t want to fuck each other*. We shared a bed platonically to afford the rent. We spooned sometimes, but I’d get that thudding chest thing where I couldn’t actually sleep with a human body in such close proximity and preferred a pillow wall for the serenity. He had a cut out picture of 2Pac on the ceiling. I often wondered if it was to encourage him in the throws of a one night stand, or his prey? A few times he would come home, wake me up and ask if I could sleep on the couch for the night because he had a date. I complied, only a little begrudgingly, because I respect the hustle. One night while Fred was on tour I slept in his bunk bed -a fucked up metal monstrosity less than an arms length from the ceiling. You had to kind of slide in sideways to avoid breaking your neck. I woke up in the morning with that the ceiling ricocheting my breath back on me and felt something sloppy on my leg - a used rubber. Fucking great. Fred, he won’t mind me saying, was a hoarder and a slob. He didn’t like home cooking unless it was Ketamine and survived on cereal, delivery pizza and multi-vitamins. George and I both had OCD and tried to tame our simmering mental health struggles with the occasional chopped salad and a tidy minimalist aesthetic -manically reorganising and creating symmetry. We would move and rearrange Fred’s piles thinking they were just that, but he actually knew where every tiny piece of mess was and would ask for a specific receipt I’d have tossed in the trash, something sitting under dry chewing gum and a mouldy glass of Berrocca.

Planning their seasonal looks was an event for the boys and my tie-up cowboy shirts and high waist jeans perplexed, amused and I suspect -slightly perturbed them. George hung out my washing on the indoor clothes line and remarked that my black underwear were in very good condition and he respected that. I asked what he meant and he said “you know, no stains on the crotch, no holes or saggy bits… I’ve hung out some girls underwear in very, very poor condition and they really should’ve been thrown out about 5 cycles ago”. My favourite compliment to this day and a standard I’ve proudly maintained. 

Fred & George are two of the most neurotic, quick witted people I’ve met, together especially. Watching them converse is not dissimilar to a glazed-over stare at a pinball popping around a machine. I was always entertained. We still phone each other once in a blue moon to bitch and laugh about the ongoing failings of the other, welfare checks you know. They had both dated the same famous socialite, who my high-school boyfriend (a vampirically handsome catwalk model) had cheated on me with - “I wanted to tell you before you read it on the internet” he proudly told me while I sat rolling my eyes in my school uniform. She had cheated on Fred with my Dracula. And so we were bonded in this oddly shared transgression of teenage bodily fluids with a few continents in between. We didn’t know each other at the time. The world weaves trivial threads like that.

We sat in the lounge one especially Bridget Jones’s Diary All-By-Myself-esque night, going through simultaneous break-ups, intermittently sobbing. Fred tweeting, eating ice cream from the tub, passing the spoon and bucket back and forth between us, watching Britain’s Got Talent, a Drake scarf draped across the top of the TV. These are the kind of friendships that can only be made in your 20s when all semblance of convention and politeness can be thrown out the window. Jules et Jim without the sex or romance. The three stooges perhaps. A very weird trio indeed, united by our ability to laugh at how tragic we were as people and artists and how cynical we were about the whole thing -the industry, despite shamelessly forging ahead with full vim, vigour and delusion. 

Honestly (and anyone who knew me then will tell you now) my demeanour was too cheery for Londoners, irritatingly so. I’m brought back to a particularly rough night at Efes pool hall where I’ve been spewing in the bathrooms after my 7th shot of tequila. I can’t find Fred and George, but I find their tall blonde cokey A&R friend, grab him by the shoulder panting and ask if he can make sure I get home safely (I don’t remember our address and my phone is dead). The music video for Carly Rae Jepson’s Call Me Maybe is No.1 on the charts and playing in a blur on the television in the background, blonde tall guy turns to me with a smirk, eyebrows raised and says “each to their own babe, welcome to London”. To be continued… 

*Caveat: George says “definitely” is too harsh a word, and that it wasn’t not written in the stars.

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