Mental Disc Selecter
In Hove Public Library there is a small local history section. As is the custom in local history collections, there are a large number of pamphlets, monographs, typescripts and photocopies on diverse topics produced by amateur historians: geological surveys of the South Downs, genealogies of past mayors, legends of Anglo-Saxon Hove, histories of Brighton and Hove Albion. Local histories have one thing in common, being the work of devoted localists they all represent Hove (or Portslade, or Shoreham, or Brighton) as distinctively omphaloid and, usually being the work of autodidacts, they generally claim to be definitive.
Each word produced on local subjects distils the knowledge of previous writers. Every word presents itself as the last.
During my time in the public library one summer’s afternoon I gathered some useful information regarding St Anne’s Well Gardens, and I followed some interesting diversions along the way. The last tome to attract my attention was a thin pamphlet outlining the profound geomantic significance of Shoreham. With five minutes before the library shut I had no time to read it, so I photocopied a diagram, an aerial photograph and a contextual map. On removing the pamphlet from the photocopier, a neatly folded sheaf of papers fell from between the last leaf of this booklet and its blue card cover. I quickly read the first few paragraphs as the librarian tidied up. Its contents, written in green ink in tiny capital letters, were unusual. I don’t expect to read anything like them again. Of course, I took the papers with me when I left. They weren’t catalogued and I reckoned no one would miss them. I reproduce the contents here in full, altered only to suit standard typography.
I have always lived in the Brighton and Hove area. Frequently, when it’s raining, I walk down to the sea and feel at one with the wind and water. I can smell possibility as I smell memories, and in dreams, too. Memory and possibility are expressions of the experience of time, but from outside. It is now 2000. My name is Arthur. My mother’s name is Mum. I am usually calm as the sea in August, except when I talk about the past.
As a young man in Brighton I used all the facilities this seaside town had to offer. After work, by night, and at weekends, I forgot my job as a pox doctor’s clerk and visited pubs and coffee bars, meeting like-minded youngsters whose main pleasure was talking, mingling and dancing to amplified beat music. Where this urge towards idle interaction came from I have no idea. My dad worked all day long and sat indoors until bedtime. My mum looked after my dad.
The years in between then and now are crystal-clear, I remember all the names as if written on a flowchart, or scrolling down a page of text. Parochial beat groups writing their monickers everywhere in indelible ink, and reciting these names amongst each other at school, work, sport. Mystery adhered to numerous Prowlers, Phantoms, Druids, and inevitable genuflections towards the Far East showed in Pyramids and Fenmen. I remember fighters and bombers, both Axis and Allied. There were precious stones, card games, times of day, body parts, overlords, various tradespeople, numerous kinds of inclement weather—inevitable perhaps for a town involved in the fishing industry—makes of car, states of mind, big cats, birds of prey, ancient and mythical beasts, gods, goddesses and insects. Ancient war-tribes were invoked: Vikings, Saxons, Vandals, Hittites and Incas, and there were also unspecified Invaders, Outcasts, Rogues. There were Kults and Kriminals, also Krusaders and Kut-Throats. Templars, and other Knights and Monks, came into being and presently departed. I don’t remember any sea creatures, plants or global conflicts, perhaps some emerged for a while before vacating the stage. I just don’t know. Some local groups made it into the studio, but most avoided success, preferring the freedom to fail. These have all passed, leaving a heritage trail and many questionable historical annotations and musical footnotes.
I reckon every band has at least one good, genre-shattering tune in them. I have tapes in my possession that prove this, tapes the whole pop culture industry would like to suppress. I own computer discs and other evidence too. These recordings don’t just replay quaint sounds and names of yesteryear, but provide actual, tangible real evidence – realised, incidentally, for years by adepts – that it’s the unknown greats who have changed and progressed pop culture, not the famous few, nor the consuming masses, nor steering committees of academic experts. Were it not for pale British and American and European boys and girls continually replaying, and incorporating into their own work, parts of recorded songs long since forgotten (or subsequently re-released by bootleggers), then the world would be very different. This part of the story is nowadays a dialectical commonplace. What is more startling is the fact that I have proof positive—as if any were needed—that QUALITY is quantifiable as a reverse coefficient; that the less rock’n’roll you produce the BETTER it is. Or, the less POPULAR you are, the BETTER you are. The ‘album’ banished cool kids to the dungeon of taste, like christianity destroyed Keltic magic. All the really great rock’n’roll tunes are by UNKNOWN or TALENTLESS groups who generally produce less stuff than ‘successful’ ‘artists’! Also, early work is better than late stuff. All this has been known for years by hipsters. Now, with digital sounds, everyone’s cool. As more people come to realise that The Eyes are better than The Who, that The Monks are better than the Velvet Underground, pop music is getting better.
But my tapes and discs and electronic archives will give little comfort to the music industry, and no hope at all to smug materialists eager to separate the warp of uniqueness from the weft of ubiquity. For the so-called collective creation of pop music is spoiled for them by what I am now able to reveal. I have hidden in my flat evidence that creativity is the product of individuals who didn’t give a shit about what the world thought. Punk is not an anonymously communal process as some have claimed. Only individuality counts—only self-satisfaction and creative spurts. And as a supplement to my original project, one which will alienate scientists in addition to sociologists and cultural historians, I hereby affirm that humans can travel in time. You see, I own work by a thousand groups, all signed and dated, each tune better and more UNIQUE than the last. And I am responsible for hatching every one of them. And I made them, with hindsight gone mad, by infiltrating myself into the past, where I worked for years producing classic upon classic for a future hungry for novelty and heritage.
All this is incidental to my task. I shall not trespass upon your valuable time—although fruitful digression is yet another proof of my work. At Shoreham yesterday I wished to progress from the promenade towards Worthing along the A259, but a gang of workmen was crowding the harbour, impeding my progress westwards. I was forced to return home without completing the necessary cyclical journey I had planned. I, of all people, know how infuriating it can be to be re-directed, re-routed, sidelined. In no time at all I will revert to the matter in hand. I have no choice, temporal movement proceeds by volution, so the point will always be made, but never directly.
Initially I had no knowledge of my covert ingress into the past. This state of affairs emerged piecemeal. I came slowly to the enormity of my predicament, to the understanding that I was a real time traveller. I was already aware of certain differences in myself as early as November 1964. Presently, I seemed to know what was coming next – if you like, to experience events before the fact. Such as the moment I first heard ‘Move It’ by Cliff Richard and The Drifters – I had created the guitar part in my head weeks before. The very first time this thing had happened was when, at the age of 13, I heard The Beatles’ ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. I experienced a tingling, as if a battery were held to the tip of my tongue—but located in my prostate—and realised that I had made up the melody line earlier that same day after listening to Johnny and the Hurricanes’ ‘Red River Rock’, from which source The Beatles undoubtedly lifted their own tune. Eventually, I saved up and bought an electric guitar, a serviceable Fenton Weill, and a useful amplifier—a powerful Elpico—it was several months before I managed to save the cash necessary to buy a Grundig tape recorder. Only then was I able to back up my remarkable discoveries with physical proof of my prowess. My first triumph was the composition of a slowed down version of The Tornadoes’ ‘Telstar’, which turned up later that year, done by someone else, as the theme tune for Doctor Who, ironically a new television drama about a fictional ‘Timelord’. And so I recorded every one of my musical performances, every new tune, diligently cross-referencing my compositions with new discs as they appeared. In a matter of months I had enough evidence of my peculiar ability and I prepared to reveal my visionary talent to a wider audience.
My first initiation into my own mystery came in the Evening Star public house on London Road, Brighton, one evening after work. I had taken my pint to an unoccupied table and had began reading the Daily Mail left by the previous drinker, a woman, who had sat there before me. A slip of paper fell from the inky pages, upon which were written certain instructions. I sprinted to the door of the pub to catch the lady, but she had disappeared. However, the contents of her note left me in little doubt that, having seen me enter the boozer, and liking what she’d seen, it would be to my considerable advantage to present myself to an upstairs flat at the seaward end of Waterloo Street, Hove, no later than one half an hour from that moment. I saw off the pint of beer and raced across town to what I supposed might be a vivid sexual encounter.
Pinned to the door of the building to which I had been directed was a letter from myself dated September 1999. This letter made it perfectly clear that what I was experiencing was not an unconnected series of events, but that the bizarre precognitions I had experienced were instances instigated by my future self and presented as concrete evidence to convince my 1965 self that I had in fact returned to the past. The knowledge of pop tunes yet to come had been given to me by adroit whistling in the street and by recordings replayed whilst I slept. In both instances my latter persona was pursuing me with glimpses of the future of pop. Naturally, I was cock-a-hoop. But I was told that on no account should I reveal my findings to anyone. This censure caused me little pain, for immediate fame was not my goal. By this time, of course, pop music had conferred celebrity on crowds of entertainers, and several young men were now stinking rich. Phil Spector, Andrew Oldham, and many more, were in clover, and I simply waited for my turn. Oh yes, the readies would come in handy, but for the time being I craved only the freedom to create.
At this early stage I wasn’t informed, nor could I remember, precisely how I had effected my own re-insertion into the seemingly inexorable flux of history. However, I soon came to realise, with help from me, that the knowledge of such a process, if made public before its time, could seriously disrupt world-historical events. The second intimation of my special powers came about in the shade of a rose-scented hillock in St Anne’s Well Gardens.
St Anne’s Well Gardens are a delightful contrast to the bustle of central Brighton, a place of tranquillity where OAPs can drift and unemployed men and women may rest awhile between the Hove Housing Office on Tisbury Road, the beach, and home. The site was, for many hundreds of years, famed for its chalybeate, or mineral spring, and when in the early 1800s, Brighton became fashionable a spa was constructed to service metropolitan visitors with enlivening seaside waters. St Anne is supposed to have been an Anglo-Saxon aristocrat who was tossed down the well that bears her name. The pagans who offed her probably regarded death as a personal epiphany and a collective rebirth, so christianity wasn’t such a big surprise for them after all. Thus, the woman known as Anne is now a residual part of the place, leeching into its waters, through restrospective association with the infant English church and the original inhabitants of Hove.
Later on, the entire site was very nearly enclosed by an entrepreneur who wanted to cap the source and bottle the water. I thrill to imagine the scented gardens, subsequently planted for the benefit of the blind, contained and regulated within a glass-roofed Victorian factory, the valuable mineral spring sucked through copper pipes and glass tubes into green bottles. Brass, leather and plush velvet. In my mind this speculative structure is always associated with the Brighton Dome, and a fine glass and cast iron Victorian jam factory demolished some years ago by property developers at Histon, near Cambridge. Presently, all three buildings will be removed to my mind: the vanished, the imagined, the refurbished.
In the early 1900s a motion picture industry flourished at Hove, and St Anne’s Well Gardens was the site of a massive studio built by the renowned film pioneer George Albert Smith. All gone now, crumbled with the fragile, flammable celluloid.
Once the gardens echoed to the shouts of staged fights. Once the Hove film industry matched the productivity of the dusty orange groves of rural Hollywood. In Hove, Smith made saucy shorts and shockers, later destroyed. Or ‘lost’, to use the wistful euphemism of arts administrators. That’s lost, as opposed to acquired—which means stolen when applied to distant folk items. What vast stores of knowledge were torched at Alexandra? What legendary riches relocated from Palestine? And all the folklore stifled by organised religion. Imagine what Henri Gaudier-Brzeska might have achieved had he not been gunned down on the Western Front fighting for German Imperial expansionism. And Eddie Cochran died at 21, Buddy Holly at 23. My gran died at 76 and she still hadn’t finished her important work. There’s no end to the losses.
Anyway, Smith’s negative porn corpus has since been redefined as respectable heritage product. Nevertheless, his lost movie experiments exercise my mind. Underpaid bellies slapping together in the ancient grove of St Anne’s Well Gardens, caught on acetate, the oiling of Victorian engines and sluices resounding throughout the vast glass-roofed sound-stage.
There, in that hallowed place, I spent a morning, an afternoon, and an evening, flitting from toffee wrapper to divot to upturned flowerpot. Finally, having read all the clues ingrained in these cleverly hidden sources I discovered a piece of writing carved, as it were by tooth marks, into a piece of chewing gum. So, following these cuniform instructions, I proceeded to await evidence of the mode of my transference from my future self, in whatever form I might deem necessary. And while I waited for enlightenment I busied myself with recording rough versions of songs of which I had some prior knowledge. These I sent to publishers and groups alike, thinking I had handed myself the keys to a veritable goldmine.
With remarkable foresight my latterday person left reminders to my unwitting historical person. I found notes and clues in blocked u-bends, behind cupboards, in the leaves of second-hand paperback thrillers and the sleeves of long-players. There was, it seemed, little I didn’t know about the sounds of the era into which I had propelled myself. And what my latter manifestation didn’t appear to know, or couldn’t possibly have guessed, I myself picked up from the weekly pop papers and from contemporary music business contacts.
With this extensive prior knowledge of future trends I sincerely believed I couldn’t fail. But my tapes were discarded amid mirth and misunderstanding, according to certain of my associates in the biz. My letters were returned unopened. More worryingly, my studio was never broken into, no demos were stolen, nor were my personal effects rifled by my competitors.
Of course, some of my songs made it onto record, but momentarily and infrequently. It became obvious to me that the function of popular music lay in satisfying other desires than pure delight, where startling personal innovations and revelations count for everything. In the country at large creative genius counts for nothing. I crept along a dark path more sombre than the one trod by the doomed famous.
Fame is transient, diaphanous and brazen, a rickety public edifice kept upright only by whispers. I tried to build long-lasting monuments, and therein lay my fault. Far from producing instant hits, I was being driven to create music that pre-empted later phases – music which employed novel ideas, but which remained stranded without the necessary cultural context in which it might survive. I was an alien organ, my host was rejecting me.
It seems that my mentor never intended that I should succeed in my own time. Instead, he caused me to produce tunes for another time. In short, I churned out numbers built to last, cult discs, genre-busting classics that could only survive in a market of their own; a market yet to be established; a collector’s market that he—my temporal twin—controlled some thirty years in the future.
The authentic sound I forced myself to create—cryptic dumb fuz crud—was achieved at the expense of my peace of mind. I effectively condemned myself to live a life doubled in pain, working twice as hard as any normal man, but for diminishing returns. My task was a solitary one, for no one seemed to care for my tunes, and the bands I initiated quickly dispensed with my services. My experience of rock ‘n’ roll could be likened to working a ghastly treadmill. I was constantly with the wrong people. I’d prefer to forget the whole thing.
Most weeks I’d locate yet more instructions informing me of which tunes to find, and where, and which songs I should plunder to achieve perfection. But these notes were entirely cryptic, and I could never be sure if the records I’d intended myself to find were the ones I actually obtained. By the middle of 1965, in fact, I’d stopped trying to make sense of my temporal puppet-master’s hints, preferring to go with my own instincts. As my understanding of my condition deepened, I delved deeper into the byways of rock and pop, searching for ways to scupper my employer’s chances for success. I began deliberately to write material based upon the most outrageous and simple-minded examples of genre rock’n’roll in an attempt to ruin his whole sordid venture. By utilising the most out of place intros, the most gut-wrenching effects, the gauchest chord progressions and key changes, I should, I calculated, be able to foil my latter day self’s plan to create a market in what he once referred to in a secret missive as ‘cult classics’. No one would buy the primitive abortions I’d hatched.
The morning when I was directed to buy ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal’ by Glenda Collins my heart leapt with joy. Afterwards, I began experimenting with extreme distortion, altered speeds, pitch and tape-effects, echo and vibrato, backwards and reversed noises and phasing. Phasing’s easy, just play two tapes at the same time, alter their speeds, and record the results. It sounds majestic and it’s a powerful ambient tool. The military use something similar to strengthen radio signals. When I bought ‘She’s Got Eyes’ by Him and the Others, I allowed myself a wry smile. Who on earth would be able to make capital from such grotesques? I’d beggar myself rather than submit. Nevertheless, I loved to select mental discs. And I continued to produce more ugly beat music.
Playing all the parts alone, and financing the entire deal myself, led to my increasing isolation from society. Now, don’t think I was some kind of sad nutter, I frequently enjoyed sex with prostitutes and drank only the best blended Scotch. It’s just that I was forced to create. In dark hours I imagined myself as a cultivator of rare orchids, mutating what was once strange enough into a million permutations of perversity. In lighter moments I simply thought myself mad.
Presently I grew very tired and would have stopped looking for arcane messages from the future, except he always put them where I couldn’t fail to notice: in cereal packets, trouser pockets, cat food, dog turds, cigarette cartons. I crumpled them up and discarded them, but he returned them, ironed, with new writing added in different colours, insisting that I work harder. The more I ignored my overlord’s coercion, the keener his urging became. The nights I awoke sweating with a tune in my brain…
I used to run down to the beach, where waves imposed a different rhythm, in order to lose these interlopers. But every time I turned around, there was another exhortation to produce more unearthly hybrids. I even glimpsed, while bathing in the sea, hurried notes scrawled in the sand with a lolly stick, or spelled out in derangements of pebbles. In a culture that prizes idiot-savants, charlatans, and half-baked wankers, I had become Pope.
I continued receiving hideous musical instructions until February 18th 1972. On this date the past ended. Since that day I have been waiting for the future.
This morning, at 4:15 a.m., as I was walking home, I noticed how fine and grand the Hove seafront is. This surprised me so greatly that I yelped and scared seven gulls who took flight immediately. And yet, even though the massive white forms of old Hove appear to endure, through the morning sunlight I can see that they shall be gone soon, as shall everything I have ever known or done, except my tunes. Hove is almost vaporous, as fluid as the Himalayas.
On June 21st, 2002, my torment shall at last be ended. For me, this is the moment at which the future will begin. On the night of the 20th I shall go to bed a tramp, the next morning I will wake a vindicated man. The loop will be severed at the very point it was started. Although the rule of volution suggests I’ll have changed a bit.
My other self informs me secretly that we shall become one at the original site of the Gor Stone—an ancient British meeting-place according to antiquaries—on the hill above the Goldstone Valley. I don’t know where I shall live, but I (future) have taken considerable trouble to assure myself that I shall know precisely where I am. I have only a short while to wait for my work to be recognised. After I release my music archive the history of rock music will have to be rewritten. They are all there, all the songs I ever made, indexed, with copies of that week’s music press, or Dalton’s Weekly, or Exchange and Mart, containing small ads and hidden references I once placed as clues for my former self, ringed in green biro, alluding (secretly) to my tunes’ titles.
Within the last few days I have let myself know that the finances have been put in place to produce discs, and, diligent as I am, I have already written a book, which I am dying to read, detailing my astonishing discovery of practical time travel. A lesser man would have stopped, having stumbled upon such a find, but not I. Soon the world of pop culture, always ravenous for novelty, will hold its breath as its newest and most important phenomenon emerges. As our Druidic forebears visited psychic pain on their enemies, so I will destroy all self-proclaimed pop experts and scientists alike. When we become one again, that is.
Already I feel convergency in the æther. The two places—Brighton and Hove—themselves have been made one. Musicians and creative types are again flocking here. The place I love is overgrown now with fleshy weeds. I see talent bursting from the cracks in the ground. Crossover styling and historical revisionism is pop music’s recently discovered powerhouse, and here the future is being formed.
Even as I write I’m planning a more furtive ruse. My experiment will have taken, in real time, no time at all to complete, which means that I will be able to insert myself at many different temporal locations in order to subject smug pop culture experts and historians to further humiliations. Within the year we shall see proof that our Keltic ancestors intended the British landscape to remain sacred. I have intimations that labyrinths and barrows shall soon open of their own accord, revealing evidence of my descent from Bel himself, via Ambrosius and Boudicca. And all straight lines, except Leys, the flights of birds, and cursuses and avenues of ancient stones, will be abolished.
And so I delay my enlightenment, daily growing weaker, awaiting unity. Soon it will be OK. By night I cross and re-cross the ancient lines of power that intersect in virtually every twittern and street of Brighton, and in most of the avenues of Hove. During the hours of daylight I coax an almost endless bloody flux from my bowels. And without my affirmative perambulations at night the place will never be ready. My pure discharge foretells great changes.
Neil Palmer, 2001. Originally published in Alt-History: New Writing from Brighton, edited by Peter Oakes (Queenspark, 2005)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.