The Outside Of Everything

Chapter 33
The Kent Records

Don’t believe all they tell you. Nothing’s not a bad word. Well, it can be. I popped into the library the other day. To see what Beckett books there were. There was nothing. There used to be plenty. All those names. Molloy. Murphy. Watt. We loved them all. We loved the way, it could be said, nothing happened. But there was so much to that nothing. And the pictures of Beckett on the dust covers. We loved that. Much ado about nothing. We loved the Subway Sect song, Ambition. The one that went nothing ever seems to happen to me. That wasn’t a bad thing either. We liked nothing happening. We could not understand people who said it would drive them mad doing nothing. We were happy doing nothing. When people asked what we’d been doing, we said nothing. Like that line. In The Fall song. What’s this song about? Er, nothing.

So some of our happiest days were spent doing nothing. For you can achieve so much when you’re doing nothing. We’d go walking, often. Wandering about. Particularly if the weather was good. We’d go up Blackheath, for example. Walk over the heath. Down through Greenwich Park. Round the market. Down to the river. Maybe under the river. Through the foot tunnel. To where there was nothing. This was before Docklands, the light railway, Island Gardens and all that. There was just a tunnel. Like in the Quadrophenia booklet. That was always good. Mooching along like Jimmy. Hands in jeans pockets. Scuffed desert boots. But better still we’d spend the time dreaming, chatting, making things up. Very productive use of time. And when we got back, if anyone asked, we’d say we’d been doing nothing. Why share our secrets?

I found an old badge the other day. A Kent Records badge. It was that which reminded of the happy days filled with nothing. Days spent wandering without a purpose. Kent Records was something very close to our hearts. I hope that you are aware of how from the early ‘80s onwards it transformed the old soul scene, by creating compilations that were in themselves highly desirable. Thus the need to spend small fortunes to hear a long lost old soul 45 was negated. This was quite revolutionary. And for us, living as we were on the cusp of Kent, the label’s name held special significance. It was quite the thing to stick a Kent Records badge in our lapels, and to wear it with pride. The singer from pop primitives The Prisoners did the same thing on one of his group’s record sleeves, but we won’t go into that.

So the sort of day that would see us each wearing a Kent Records badge, walking across the heath, down through the park, with the sun out. Joking that if we kept it up for the next forty years we’d be like the old boys in Last of The Summer Wine. There are worse things I guess. And when we weren’t traipsing round the park, retracing the footsteps of Conrad and his Secret Agent, we might loll around on the benches looking down on to the Maritime Museum, playing one of our favourite mind games, namely putting together that week’s edition of our Kentish Recorder local newspaper. We had great fun with that, and the editorial meetings could get quite heated. We’d then have to go and grab a cup of tea in the cafe, and calm ourselves down.

In our strange parallel world of The Kentish Recorder, lines got strangely blurred. The secret histories that were unearthed on wonderful records like Dancing Till Dawn and On The Up-Beat became oddly merged with the shadowy stories that lay behind the wonderful place names like Pratt’s Bottom, Bat and Ball, and Snodland. Our shadowy editor Crowborough Norris, a close cousin of the record label’s main man, would pen his regular column on the soul and the soil, and the unexpected links between black American rhythm and blues artistes and old revolutionaries from the Garden of England. Elsewhere we might include something on the literary landmarks. You know, the farm in All The Pubs In Soho. The transport cafe in An Advent Calendar. The beach in Toddler On The Run. There was a strong Shena Mackay theme throughout the paper. There might be a look back in time. A piece on Solomon Burke performing at The Black Prince hotel in Bexley. Dick Gaughan at a local folk club. Or an article on Albany Park and Patrice Chaplin. But nothing on The Prisoners. Or Billy Childish and his Milkshakes. Not our sort, dear. Sounds pretty sad really looking back doesn’t it? But it kept us amused. One way and another.

Daft. And yet. There seems something strangely commendable about investing such collective energy in something that simply did not exist. For beyond the simply keeping us amused angle there was a fairly serious point about doing nothing. This was the new dawn, the age of acquisitiveness. Thatcher’s Britain. We could have been contenders. We could have been someone. But we weren’t that concerned. We were quite content, sitting around in the sun, putting our imaginary news sheet together. Working out that week’s content. There was a perverse rebelliousness in this. With everyone, seemingly, running around, wanting to get on, get noticed, get heard.

We talked of many things besides. Out in the sun we often used to sit discussing the strangeness of the soul music we loved so much. The seemingly endless supply of old soul 45s that made our lives worth living. The untold stories. The recordings perhaps all but forgotten even by the people involved. Small ripples in a big old pond perhaps. Yet those ripples reverberated, if ripples reverberate or resonate or whatever, many many miles away, light years away, for many many people ridiculously removed from the yearning and burning that sent musicians, singers, sad eyed dreamers into small studios on the off-chance, hoping maybe for a break or an escape.

Then we might think of William Morris and A Dream of John Ball. Kentish peasants gathering almost on the very spot we were sitting. Ready to march on the Capital. And one of us might get up and stand on a bench, and deliver John Ball’s sermon, which we knew well. The one the great JL Carr called Ball’s Poor Man’s Guide to Christian Communism. “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.” Words to that effect.

And we’d toast our own liberty, and head off home for our tea. A bit of time to ourselves. Write a letter, or two. Play a few records. Timi Yuro or something. Read a bit. A Touch of Daniel. The Book of Daniel. That sort of thing. Old favourites. Graham Greene or Joseph Conrad, maybe. Maybe even Conrad’s Secret Agent again. Actually I only mention that because there was a passage that went: “The majority of revolutionists are the enemies of discipline and fatigue mostly.” Which was a little harsh. We worked hard in our way, keeping ourselves busy doing nothing. That was not a bad thing.