Steven Savile

There are days, and then there are days, and the last forty-eight
hours would count double in both senses. I’m going to tell you a
story, it’s what I do after all. It’s an old old story (quarter of a
century in this instance, to be precise, but funnily enough the
details are all crystal clear despite the fact I can barely remember
my own birthday): boy meets girl, boy falls hopelessly for girl (down
a flight of stairs, nothing beats a bit of slapstick humour), and girl
hasn’t got a clue.

Ahh, is that Hollywood I hear knocking at my door? Did I just hit on
the formula for the next RomCom runaway success? Hmm, the story of my
life. Not sure I want it on the silver screen. Still, the show must go
on...

Boy was a little younger, a little less worldly-wise. Girl said, ‘Have
you heard this? It’s amazing... my favourite song,’ and put Icicle
Works’ Love is a Wonderful Colour on the turntable (oh yes, so so long
ago, back when men were men and mp3s were vinyl). And then it was
Camel’s Stationary Traveller, and the haunting West Berlin (which
became one of boy’s anthems for youth). Remiss in his musical
education boy rectifies this the minute he gets home so he can pretend
to be less uncool the next time they meet, as boys are wont to do.
He’s not quite as dumb as a bag of nails. He’s got the beginnings of a
personality as well as the beginnings of a crush to squeeze a planet
into a nice Marilyn Monroe hourglass. For a little while, a snatch of
time in the river of life, it’s bright and brilliant and fun and all
consuming, and then it’s gone. That’s another one of life’s lessons
boy learned from girl. Everyone leaves you in the end.

Of course it is natural, boy and girl are hopelessly young, they
drift, boy moves north, to his roots in Northumberland, girl in a
wonderful quirk of fate moves south, and the both end up within thirty
minutes of where the other had been, their orbits forever out of sync
after that... but as Roddy Frame told us back then ‘We Could Send
Letters’ and boy and girl did. Boy had never written letters before
that didn’t say ‘thank you so much for the Christmas present.’ Now boy
found he could write and write and write for pages, putting the pen
down and coming back to the paper hours or even days later, because he
wanted to share it all with girl. He’d never done that before. His
form of expression had been kicking a football. In one of those
letters girl mentioned a ‘poet’ whose music she loved, Martin
Stephenson, and his band The Daintees. She’d bought a book of his
poetry so he had to be good.

Now, and here’s an amusing little side bar, girl - woman - today has
no recollection of who Martin Stephenson and the Daintees were (or
are, because they’ve yet to go the way of all flesh and are happily in
better form than ever), but boy cradles those songs, Wholly Humble
Heart, Slaughterman, Little Red Bottle, Crocodile Cryer, Running
Waters, Nancy, they all mean something to boy because they are a link
back to a different time when life was simple and he had yet to make
all those hard choices about who he was going to grow up to be. And
don’t believe it if you hear boy ever say they weren’t tough. He’s
like that, this boy, he breezes through life and makes like everything
is bright and shiny and it all just washes off him like the ‘running
water coming down off a thundering cloud’.

He’s got secrets, one of them is how much he still connects to that
part of his life, back to when Aztec Camera, Love and Money and Martin
Stephenson and the Daintees were the be all and end all of his insular
little world. They were the fanfares of his strut into adulthood,
meaning they are a root (yep, like a tree) back to when they were a
connection to girl, or that life around the time of girl, to be more
precise, and boy’s itunes selection is still filled with those old
songs, but like the singers he’s grown with them and followed them
down the river to their new stuff, and instead of Aztec Camera it’s
Roddy Frame he listens to, instead of Love and Money it’s James Grant,
and of course, right now, writing this, boy is back listening to
Crocodile Cryer by Martin Stephenson.

Sometimes boy thinks living back in this other place isn’t so wise,
but other times boy thinks back there where he’s 16 and the world is
just waiting for him to do something brilliant is the best place to
be. It’s a hard balance.

Sure, he’s let people down by then, but he hasn’t walked away from his
first degree to spite his father and lay claim to his own life, he
hasn’t walked out on the most ‘important job of his life’ to likewise
fence it off and say no, this isn’t what boy wants to do, boy wants to
tell stories and the rest of reality can go to hell. He’s still 16.
He’s got a full head of hair and an infectious energy that just says
‘I could be somebody’.

The last two days have been about man visiting with boy, kicking back
and saying ‘hey kid, do I disappoint you?’

That’s a really tough question for man to address, and coming face to
face with boy, like some arrogant ghost kicking back on his couch,
feet up by the fire, that sneer that says ‘you were going to be
somebody cool now look at you’ on his lips, is a shock, and it’s weird
but it is a good weird and a pleasant shock. Man isn’t such a bad man,
he may not be the same ‘somebody’ the boy thought he’d be, but he’s
climbed mountains, physical and metaphorical, to become who he is.

Okay, back to the story... bad narrative voice... bad. Tell the story...

Six months ago I happened across an advert for Martin Stephenson and
the Daintees playing at the Borderline on Friday 18th of September,
and I just knew I had to go. I couldn’t tell you why. I just had this
‘feeling’ that it was important I go. I’d seen them once, around 1989
I guess, back when I was at University, doing the accounts degree, not
the politics one, so before the ‘big break for independence’. I
remember it pretty well. The peculiar thing that stood out in my mind
was that this guy who wrote these melancholic songs had such an
incredible stage presence and the most barmy sense of humour ever.
He’s a talker. He talks during the songs. And he’s funny as fuck. I
mean he’s cracking jokes with the audience, going on walkabout and
leaving the bass player alone on stage riffing for far too long while
the rest of the band hide upstairs, he’s playing spot the look-a-like
with the crowd (Ted Nugent, Michelle Shocked, Sting, Bono, the stars
were really out) but like boy, he’s changed - and for the better. He’s
more accomplished, his playing is tighter, his humour is sharper, but
why shouldn’t it be? He’s been doing this a long time, he can
entertain.

So, tickets bought, flights booked, boy wondered, as boys do (even
ones who are trying desperately not to make Batman and Robin
references), whether girl would be in the audience? After all how many
Martin Stephenson fans can there be left in the world, boy thinks.
Maybe that’s why he’s meant to go. You can never know how the world
works. I don’t believe in fate. I don’t believe in destiny. Then again
I don’t believe in chance. I’m an enigma wrapped up in a conundrum and
tied off with a nice ribbon of mystery. I don’t have to make sense.
But I know this... boy hoped. Man let boy have his moment in the sun.

Boy couldn’t have banked on girl’s absolutely dreadful memory and the
fact that girl had lost all recollection of Martin and the Dainty
Ones... but, wait, you heckle from the back, how do you know this oh
great narrator on the screen?

I’m telling you this story, so ‘had yer horses’ as my granddad would
have said. You have to imagine the broad Geordie accent transforming
the word hold.

Last month, just before man goes off to LA for a jolly a name pops up
in his in box. Man does double-take for comedic effect. It’s like a
voice echoing down (or up) all the way from childhood. It’s girl.
Considering over the last quarter of a century boy in the process of
growing into man had probably tried a dozen times to track down girl
just to catch up and say ‘whether you realised it or not, you had a
hand in making boy the man he became,’ ‘you were awesome and I was a
kid and couldn’t find the words to say you were awesome’ and all of
those things boy would have said to girl back then if boy had been
able to put one word in front of another and make a sensible sentence.
But she had a knack of making it difficult for boy to frame his
thoughts so lots of things went unsaid.

See even back when boy knew girl was going to be somebody. She had the
‘it factor’. Turns out she’d been living in eleven countries making it
pretty darn difficult for boy to find, when he’d been sending out
words into the ether. Forget needle in the proverbial haystack, the
damned haystack kept moving a few thousand miles at a time...

So, when the name popped up man smiled and boy inside thought ‘holy
crap! What a coincidence... a woman with the same name as girl!’ Yeah,
man is no smarter than boy sometimes.

The story rolls on... via a slight detour. Bear with me.

On Thursday Man and Woman connected for the first time in twenty five
years, getting a glimpse of the finished article they’d each become.
It was like finding that gull-winged silver Delorian, firing up the
flux capacitor to 1.21 jiggawatts and punching down on the accelerator
and ending up in the mid-80s. But it was more than that. Man doesn’t
have the words, so it seems man is no better at this than boy was.
More people should have one of these time machines, I reckon. It’s
really quite incredible to meet up with lost loves and best friends
and just the ephemera of life that we’re so quick to jettison. I think
ephemera is underrated. I’ve had a really bad habit during my life of
compartmentalising it and burning the bridges between stage one and
stage two and three and four... There’s no one in man’s life from more
than a decade ago. Five years is a decent demarkation line. Three.
Clip clip clip, just move away and on. So this link back to then was
frightening. Who had boy become? Had he lived up to what girl imagined
for him?

It’s really quite peculiar just how easy it is to fall back into
conversation patterns of back then while leaping through the nineties
and naughties looking for amusing anecdotes to try and raise a smile,
dodging the difficult conversations and not wanting silence to ever
get a toe-hold in.

Boy was very glad to get that few hours to see all of the stuff he
imagined for girl worn into the creases of her smile and then realise
that girl had changed, grown into woman with all of those experiences
and heartbreaks, but girl was still in there the minute she laughed.
And she was every bit as awesome as boy had thought girl would become.
The voice is an interesting thing, man understands, because the face
might change, the hair might fall out, (boy’s not girl’s, silly,) the
wrinkles might thicken, but the voice remains. The voice is the key
that unlocks the door to all of those memories and moments that boy
still heard in the songs (see we haven’t abandoned the music yet).

Of course, the fact that scatterbrained woman had forgotten the band
he’d come all this way to see made man laugh, but then this was all
about boy and connecting with this boy’s life. It wasn’t about girl
really. Girl was a part of it. A nice memory to take out of the box
under the bed marked childhood. But it was all about this boy’s
life... it wasn’t the Hollywood RomCom in which man declared undying
stalkerish love and woman swooned with a ‘Why Mister Darcy....I never
knew you wanted little old me...’ and they all lived happily ever
after in a tent with their two daughters living off beans. Man has got
a pretty good life right now and the grass isn’t greener. Woman’s life
fits her like a glove. They’ve grown into them. Own them. Are defined
by them.

It was good. Now was the right time, and the grown man who lives his
life thinking all of those old friends are out there living
brilliantly has some proof at last that his imagination isn’t wrong.
At least one of them is doing just that. So man put girl from twenty
five years ago back in the box and went to listen to the music of his
youth with a smile on his face. Girl hadn’t wasted his hopes.

And the next sidetrack:

There are defining moments in our lives. Yesterday was one of those
for this man. The morning after the day before... was spent walking
down Charing Cross Road browsing the old second hand book stores and
the modern behemoths of Foyles, Blackwells and Borders, digging around
in the stacks looking for buried treasure, breathing in that wonderful
musty smell of old words, and out of the blue coming across a copy of
Douglas Coupland’s Generation A.

Coupland’s a special writer for me.

I was reading Generation X for the first time when I emigrated to
Sweden. A lot of the ‘me’ decisions were made during the days I
immersed myself in it. Finding a sequel I didn’t know was coming was a
treat. The internet might have made it wonderful for boy and girl to
connect across time and for a few hours pretend to be 15 or 16 or 17,
but it has made the High Street a really dull place. I know everything
my favourite authors and musicians are up to. I ‘itunes’ (if that can
be applied as a verb) my favourite cds weeks before the physical cd
could make it to Stockholm and my stereo. So, yes, very peculiar to
stumble across Generation A. I then sashayed (yes a boy can sashay,
damn it, swagger even, if a boy wants to,) around the corner to a
Costa’s and ordered the biggest latte known to man, and sat reading
for the next two hours.

The best part of the experience, I confess, was the fact that Coupland
cracks me up and at least a dozen times in those two hours saw
(heard?) me burst out into full-bellied shoulder-shaking laughter. The
cute crusty-student girls beside me started smiling and then
eventually laughing as well, because I mean, who wouldn’t laugh at the
nutter giggling at a book in the middle of London?

I’ve since been told that ‘men reading in public is sexy’. This
disturbs me on a bazillion levels because surely men reading in public
shouldn’t be that rare, should it?

After that little indulgence, it was back to the hotel to relax and
write some. One of the two got done. Man sat and wrote a nice ‘thank
you for the christmas present’ letter to woman, the present being
time, and hoped she had a fantastic weekend. Man also apologised for
talking way too much and not listening enough. Twenty five years of
stuff needed to get said. Then freshen up. When I’m overseas I forget
to eat. Or, no, that’s not right, I suffer potential entree envy. It’s
an opportunity cost thing. I know if I have X, I won’t be able to have
Y, and Z and A and R are really tempting as well, so I wind up having
nothing.  Yesterday was no exception.

Crossed the city to The Borderline, which is this brilliant little
subterranean venue like something out of the 20s Prohibition Era
transported over continents just for obscure bands to come and do
their thing. Ordered my bottle of Dog and leaned against the bar
listening to Helen and the Horns kick off the evening’s entertainment.
Then before things crowded up I moved across to lean against the sound
booth and get myself a good view of the stage. Being all hip and
modern I Facebooked a few updates because pics of the Silver arcs came
through right then, and I really wanted to share them (it looks
purdee). Zipped off a few texts back home.

Then Martin Stephenson came on stage cracking jokes about his ‘size 28
trousers from TK Maxx’ and how he couldn’t get into a pair of bloody
38’s now, letting us all into the secret that we’re older than dirt.
That was an odd thing about the crowd. Normally concerts these days
are these alien landscapes where the entire place has a collective age
of about 17. The crowd was filled with Mitchell Brothers look-a-likes.
I suspect, like me, most if not all of the crowd had found Martin back
when they were at college or uni and the evening was all about
connecting with their inner boys and girls. The rest of them were drag
alongs.

Then the first song strummed off and I was 17 again.

That’s the only way to describe it. It was as simple as that. Martin’s
guitar was my very own Delorian.

In the RomCom girl would have been there, transported back on the same
chord, but sometimes real life just isn’t about the perfection of
detail it’s about the imagined detail. In boy’s head she was there and
dancing with every fibre of her being, full of life and saying again
‘You have to listen to this guy, he’s a poet.’

It was pretty easy to tell who the drag alongs were because they were
the who looked like rabbits caught in the headlights when Martin
decided to do the last 30 mins of the concert with the house lights
up, seeing us in all of our middle aged pimply glory.

Beside me this vivacious brilliant bright shiny thirty-something and
her drag along were the perfect example. She hit every note and made
my concert experience twice what it might have been simply because in
her white and black top and librarian glasses she was rocking out and
having a blast. I was back at uni... actually I could have been. I
realised my clothing taste has pretty much gone full circle and I’m
right back wearing jeans, tee shirts and shirts hanging loose and open
like I was then. So cute librarian rocked out, dancing with her whole
body. That kind of stuff is infectious. I think we were the only two
at the back (at the Borderline the back means touching distance of the
stage) who knew every word. Much smiling, some laughing and a lot of
singing went on and for two hours we were Martin Stephenson mates,
bonded by something stronger than life.

That’s why I like gigs. Proper gigs in dark dingy halls where the
musicians just cut loose and have fun.

After two hours he’s apologising they’ve got to finish because there’s
a disco starting upstairs but invites us all to hang out with the
band, so I took a wander down to the front and had a little chat with
a guy who’d been one of my constant companions for quarter of a
century. And it was great. I have this inbuilt dread of meeting my
heroes because what if they’re not cool? What if they’re arseholes and
it changes the way I think of them forever? I was invited onto the
tour bus with Mike Peters of the Alarm about 15 years ago and didn’t
go because I was terrified he’d be a drunken idiot and I wouldn’t be
able to listen to Walk Forever By My Side and We Are the Light and
Sixty Guns and and and all of those again without seeing that. Kevin J
Anderson called me an idiot a couple of weeks ago when I told the
story, so with his chastisement in my ear, I swallowed my fear and
decided I had to go and say thank you for quarter of a century of
musical accompaniment.

In the end I stuck out my hand and thanked Martin for helping boy
remember being 17. And he turned around and said something to me that
now, older, wiser, and wrestling my own demons, I ‘get’ in ways I
could not have at any other time (that’s what it is all about
sometimes, about it just not being the right time, but this weekend
was the right time). ‘This is what it’s all about, Big Man. Back then
it was all music industry and crap, but now it is just about playing
music and having a good time. Coming out here and connecting with the
people out in the crowd who love this music, and none of the rest of
it matters.’ And I get it, I can apply it to my own life and realise
that I’ve done a lot of stuff I had to do (in my head at least) to get
into the ‘industry’ and only now am I just beginning to do the stuff
inside that matters, the stuff that feeds the soul... it’s the reason
I struggle when people say ‘what book would you recommend we start
with...?’

And here’s a hard admission, but maybe boy would be disappointed
because man might be writing books, but those books haven’t all been
the books boy would have approved of.  Boy was a brilliant dreamer. He
wouldn’t think much of telling other people’s stories. But that’s
changing, because boy is kicking and punching inside man, and man’s
wise enough to listen (in between wincing) because boy’s not had that
determination sapped out of him yet and still dreams big.

Over the next year some important books (for me, for boy and man) are
coming out.

There’s Silver, of course, which is the first real novel that’s all me
(and the very sexy arcs are in Variance Towers and I am a little bit
in love with them, I admit) but there’s The Odalisque and Other
Strange Stories which could well be the first thing I’ve done ‘as a
whole’ that I am entirely proud of, love stories, peculiar fantasies
and little pieces of me laid bare.

So, like I said right up there three and a half thousand words ago,
there are days and there are days. These two days were important for
so many reasons, not just about the boy, as well, other reasons, too.
I got the contract for Gold, the follow up to Silver, so I know that
will be happening now, set for January 2011 release, which sounds so
long away but is just around the corner really, and out of the blue I
got an offer to co-write a book with a new friend who worked on one of
the most successful tv shows of all time, whose tell all will hit the
heights, and I signed contracts on a new series of novellas I’m
co-writing with a friend, Aaron Rosenberg, who was born on the same
day as me, in New York, about three hours after I came out kicking and
screaming in the Princess Mary’s in Jesmond, 4,000 miles away, and a
new Monster Town story, the Blues Singer, for Halloween next year,
with my mate Brian M. Logan... work work work.

This, of course, will worry my friend Barry, because whenever I sign a
new deal three celebrities die.

So if you are famous... I’m really sorry. Actually I’m a little
worried about Leonard Cohen, looking at the news.

Right, where were we? Oh yes, girl.

You knew her part of the story wasn’t over didn’t you? Back in that
other time and other place, she gave boy a keepsake, a sea bean that
boy took in to his exams and on planes and places because it was
‘lucky’. Woman had told man about her dream to write kids books, and
how she wanted to ask all these questions and had this stuff bursting
out inside. In between all the talking and catching up on life they
talked about what it took to write. She had a lot of the familiar
comments about time and fear and what if it wasn’t meant to be? Man
confessed to some hard and possibly wrong decisions he’d believed
necessary along the way, but tried to say how the only way it happened
was if the words were given a chance to live. Inside they’re not
telling anyone any stories. Woman got it. Of course she did.
But it was always about more than the words. It was about
determination, faith, strength, about not being ordinary. Man tried to
find one word to sum it up, to say this is what you have to do.... And
he’d had a while to think about it, because she’d warned him she
wanted to pick his brains, so he’d found an answer. There was one big
thing man had going for him, he’d never forgotten the one thing boy
was really good at: dreaming.

So man had a little keepsake of his own for woman, mirroring girl’s
gift for boy, something to put on her desk when she sits down to write
the first words of her book, something she can hold and remember boy
with, and something she can draw from like he did the sea bean of all
those years ago, a stone with the simplest message: dream.

Sometimes boy can be a genius. Man’s not too shabby either.

You want to live, you need to dream. You want to live brilliantly, you
need to dream brilliantly. You want to reach people, to connect, you
need to remember what it is all about: an old old story about a boy
and a girl. You know the one, you’ve heard it before. Just don’t make
the mistake of forgetting your own boy or girl. Don’t keep them in a
box under the bed, let them talk to you, listen to them and remember
the things they were filled with and the dreams they had before life
came along and knocked the sharp edges off them and offered an
alternative called ‘settling’. And then, take it one step further,
don’t just dream it... do it. If man can, you can.

-Steven Savile