Dom's Rambles

As of the time of writing there are two main reasons why Down & Out in Sheffield & Lincoln remains incomplete. The first is that I’m still not happy with chapter nine and keep finding myself rewriting and rearranging large sections of it. As I’ve recently discovered, the subject matter is very, very difficult to write about. You strive to communicate, and to strike a balance between, the impossible mix of emotional extremes but to do so effectively and without leaning too far over towards mewling self-pity on the one hand or splenetic ranting on the other. This is proving exceedingly tricky, especially since recalling those events in such detail is still very painful and often has me foaming at the mouth with rage.
Much as I’m keen to avoid giving the impression that I’m trying to give the impression that I’m some kind of angst-ridden and glamorously edgy romantic whose tortured soul can only find succour through his verse, I do have to say that writing this stuff down for public display has been astonishingly cathartic (in the candlelit murk of his garret rooms, Dom launches into an extended bout of tubercular coughing before casually throwing his bloodied handkerchief to the floor, taking another swig on his bottle of absinthe and inking his quill for the next section). I always knew I’d feel better for writing it all out of my system but it was only when I finally – and unexpectedly - laid Helen’s ghost to rest that it started to become clear just how much better (and we’ll be using Down & Out… pseudonyms throughout this post).
When I first split with Helen my band was in its ascendancy and I was able to let off steam by writing songs about her. In fact I was producing a new one practically every week and Scratch, my lead guitarist, flatmate and former best friend, actually sat me down one day and told me to stop. We already had our heart rending power ballad, he assured me, and we wouldn’t be needing another until at least the second album.
I still found ways to address her though. Victim of my Love, the last tune I wrote while Lovechild were a going concern, was not so much about Helen as for her benefit. The song concerns the antics of a guy (me, obviously) who, in order to stop himself thinking about the girl he lost, goes around fucking and abandoning every female he can lay (sic) his hands on. I probably thought that once Helen heard this it would let her know exactly what kind of a monster she’d turned me into and the guilt would weigh so heavily on her mind that it would keep her awake at night.
Luckily, by the time the band broke up - and this outlet was plugged - I was over the worst.
Although Helen was a wound that time healed more or less on its own, I was prone to the occasional ‘Helen flashback’, I suppose you could call them. I even attempted to write about her from time to time but rarely managed more than a few paragraphs and certainly nothing I would have been prepared to show anyone. The last seriously vivid flashback occurred in 1998 and drove me to compose an essay rather grandiosely entitled The Ghost of St Paul’s. The name was inspired – if that’s the right word to use – by the fact that St Paul’s is the tube station which serves the hospital in London where Helen did her nursing training and where she lived in the attached nurse’s home for her first year.
I had been in London for a trade exhibition of musical equipment at the Docklands Arena and my journey happened to take me through this station. I couldn’t help myself, I got off the train and retraced those hauntingly familiar steps. I was even able to locate the window of Helen’s old room as I sat on a bench opposite the nurse’s home, blubbing pitifully.
I got home early evening, having bought a crate of Stella Artois along the way, and put finger to keyboard to produce the aforementioned essay. The next morning, when I recovered consciousness and reread the thing, I discovered that I’d written what was basically an overextended – and excruciating bad - teen-angst poem which it was nigh on impossible to read without wincing.
Believe me, I couldn’t press the delete key fast enough.
More recently, when I uploaded chapter seven, which contains a brief account of the break-up and immediate aftermath, it was like an enormous weight had been lifted from me and I actually felt quite light-headed for a while. This came as a total surprise as I didn’t even realise it still bothered me that much.
Doubtless when chapter nine goes live the relief will prove so giddying that I won’t be fit to drive or operate heavy machinery for at least a month.
This is basically how the process works – and I trust you’ll forgive the cod-Freudian metaphors that I use to illustrate it.
For years, I made a habit of bottling things up and keeping my personal demons locked away in the attic of my subconscious where, for most of the time, they remained and behaved themselves. Occasionally, and usually late at night, they would get a little antsy and I would hear them scurrying about. From time to time one or more of them would escape to go rampaging through my conscious mind, screaming and shouting, kicking tables over, smashing crockery, swinging from the light fittings and relieving themselves all over the soft furnishings. While this was happening I would find it impossible to concentrate on anything except wrestling the things back into the attic and locking the door behind them.
But they was still there and sooner or later they would get out again.
When I write this stuff what I do is to deliberately set a manageable number of these demons loose and describe their antics. Once I’ve done so, and the descriptions are in the public domain, the demons go with them and are no longer running around inside my head.
Despite what some might think, writing Down & Out… was never about trying to revive or relive the past but about finding closure and putting the past in its proper place. It’s an exorcism, not a nostalgia trip (even if there is a strong vein of nostalgia running through the thing and, as exorcisms go, I like to think it’s a rather entertaining one).
That said, I’m still undecided as to whether I’m going to upload chapter nine for public (i.e. free) viewing.
Come on, I’ve suffered for my art don’t you think I deserve some kind of remuneration?
Then again, not to upload it seems a trifle counterproductive given that the reason I embarked on the project in the first place was to get my version of events to as large an audience as possible and thereby reclaim the moral high-ground – which had been pulled out from under me - and demolish the virulent myth - which someone so busily propagated - that I was the villain of the piece.
That particular fairy tale has become so firmly entrenched within the folklore of a certain section of Lincoln’s population that the women I date and hit on today still get warned off me because of it.
And I’m not fucking well having that.
Not by the hairs on my chinny chin chin.
The second reason we’re behind schedule is because there are a couple of the major stars of our show, the people I called Mötley Süe and Danny O, still to be accounted for and until they are I can’t sign off under the ‘where are they now’ section.
As far as Mötley Süe goes none of the old Sheffield crew I’ve managed to track down - or who have paid me the same compliment - have the slightest idea what became of her and neither does anyone on the usually very informative Sheffield Forum.
The last time I saw Sue was in Sheffield in 1998 when I was on the bus home from town one Saturday afternoon and spotted her standing on a street corner with a gang of old school punks.
The last I heard of her was in early 2003 when she was reportedly seen queuing up at the methadone van which cruises around Sheffield’s sink estates for the benefit of the local smack addicts. Although this was entirely plausible I’m inclined to be suspicious considering who told me and I’d have to get verification from a third party before I’d be fully convinced.
I found someone with Sue’s name – and with the same slightly unusual variant of its spelling – on http://www.192.com/ and for a moment I was sure I’d pinned her down. However, when I pulled the address, which turned out to be in a rather upmarket district of Sheffield, I began to have serious doubts. Then again, I thought to myself, the area did have a large student population and it was conceivable that the place might have been a multiple occupancy household or had been converted into bedsits. I gave Malcolm a call and had him check it out on his way home from work that evening.
At around half six I got a text message telling me that the address in question was a large, well maintained, semi-detached private house and that there was no way on earth Mötley Süe was living there – not unless she was now the kept plaything of some pervert multi-millionaire who liked to relieve the stress of a career in international finance by unloading his plums into the various bodily orifices of foul-mouthed underclass women.
The last time I saw Danny was in the autumn of 1994 and shortly after I moved to Sheffield (for the third time) to start university. Danny had been living in Nottingham since early 1993 and we were still loosely in touch. Every now and again he’d call me at my parent’s house and we’d meet up for a night out at Rock City.
Danny had called my parent’s place a few weeks previously, my old man had given him my Sheffield number and we’d met up in the Yorkshireman’s Arms one afternoon when he was in town visiting his brother. Awful though it is to admit considering how close we once were, we had absolutely nothing to talk about anymore and I found Danny’s company way beyond tedious; I couldn’t wait to get away to the Student Union bar to hang around with my new – and infinitely more sophisticated - set of friends.
Four years ago I was informed that Danny had been at an LA Guns gig at Rock City. Apparently he was completely bald, had gone totally mental and, from what the person who bumped into him was able to gather, spent most of his time running around his back garden waving burning torches about and hurling abuse at his Pakistani neighbours.
At about the same time Danny was seen in Rock City, Malcolm had been given his phone number (which he has since lost) when he was out on the town and had bumped into some girl from back in the day. According to what Malcolm was told when he called, Danny who was now married with two kids and had just completed a five year stretch for manslaughter after killing some guy in a pub brawl.
Again, I’m inclined to be suspicious about this as no one from the old Nottingham crowd seems to have heard anything about it and I can’t find a trace of any such incident in the local press archives. Nor is there a record of Danny’s alleged marriage to be found at any of the usual sources.
If anyone could enlighten me regarding Sue or Danny then I’d be most grateful. I’m sure I don’t need to give their real names - anyone who has read my inane blather and is familiar with the Sheffield heavy metal scene of the time will know perfectly well who we’re talking about.