[...] It’s not about the music any more, Johnny said. Well, what the fuck is it about? Like I said, I did it to stand up for Airdrie. I did it because of Memorial Device. I did it because, for a moment, even when everything seemed impossible, everybody was doing everything, reading, listening, writing, creating, sticking up posters, taking notes, passing out, throwing up, rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing in dark windowless rooms at 2 p.m. like the future was just up ahead and we better be ready for it. And now already it’s the rotten past. That’s why I did it, if you want to know the truth.

We cottoned on early that there were certain bars that the musicians liked to hang out in and certain cafes too but most of them are long gone so it would be pointless to tell you about them and heartbreaking too, the booths with the torn leather seats, the shakers stopped up with damp clusters of salt, the chipped Formica tables, all vanquished in favour of faceless coffee shops full of idiot middle-class couples and pregnant mums. On Saturday evenings, after lying around in Johnny’s living room playing our latest purchases – The Modern Dance by Pere Ubu or Like Flies on Sherbert by Alex Chilton, which still sounds perverse and macabre, like a suicide note where you’re not sure whether it’s a joke or it’s for real – we would head out to one of the bars and mooch around and scope the scene. Occasionally we would bump into Big Patty and we’d both feign surprise, wow, what are you doing here, we hang out here all the time, etc. It got to the point that we struck up a real friendship, which at first was exciting. I’m in, I thought, bohemia here I come.

[...] But it ended up where I was going to these … clubs … these … bunkers … really these fallout shelters … because that’s what it felt like … I’d be sitting in the dark watching this punk group … going through the motions … acting gobby … playing three chords … staggering through a bunch of songs that really they had rehearsed to death … There was no spontaneity to it … no reality … no life … and that’s when I began to think … Christ … we’ve dug these complexes … deep into the ground … we’ve built walls … we’ve filled in all the windows … we’ve painted the toilets black … we’ve drunk ourselves to the point of oblivion … just to keep life outside … Art was supposed to open you up to life and here we were … we had narrowed it to the point of a fucking black box … with a bunch of dirty mirrors lining the walls …

I would say that Mary was in about fifty per cent of the best groups to come out of Airdrie in the middle 1980s. She was certainly in demand. At first some people speculated that she was a lesbian. But it was more that she was just aloof. How did I meet her? Well, I am glad you asked that question because that is another story and in fact it has nothing to do with music. It was the first summer after I graduated from high school. I was seventeen years old. It was the kind of summer that we simply do not get any more. I swear to god that the tar was melting in the streets. People were swimming in rivers. These filthy rivers. These stinky summer rivers. But even so. I took a job at a cement factory in Coatdyke. I worked on the desk, which was no work at all, lucky me. You do not get a lot of drop-in customers looking for bags of cement. Although of course you do get a few. It was normally people that had just bought their council house and were looking to build an extension, or freelance labourers. We dealt a lot with the trade.

[...] I would be coming home depressed and of course even these kinds of issues were anathema to Mary, she was one of those people who would just create without a second thought. At this point I had a flat in town. A bedsit with a bed built up on legs and underneath it a workspace where I would paint and eat and I had a small black-and-white TV set up. Mary would never sleep. My best memories are of lying in bed after we had made love and of listening to her down below, painting or writing, she was always writing in her journal, and all the time she would have the TV on low, late-night monster movies like Creature from the Black Lagoon or It Came from Outer Space, and I could smell the smoke from her cigarettes rising up and soaking through the mattress combined with the smell of her hairspray. [...]

What are you reading at the moment? he asked me. Vanity of Duluoz by Jack Kerouac, I said (I fluffed it). Bullshit, he said. Don’t tell me, he said. Charles Bukowski. William fucking Burroughs. Patti fucking Smith. Jim fucking Thompson. Hermann fucking Hesse (Bullshit von fucking Bullshit). Try this on for size, he said (and he pulled out a copy of Diary of a Madman by Gogol from his rucksack). Read the Russians, he said. And forget satire, he said. And forget metaphor, the Russians have no truck with metaphor. And forget time, they have no truck with time, either. When you read Gogol it’s neither yesterday, today or tomorrow. You ever heard John Coltrane? he asked me. I have Kind of Blue, I said (he’s on there). Bullshit, he said. You need to listen to Ascension. You need to listen to Meditations. You need to listen to Interstellar Space. You need to wake up to now, my friend. He stubbed out another cigarette. I need to get to sleep, he said. You have no idea the weight of my brain right now. I told Samantha. We have a visitor upstairs (I said).

[...] she was an artist, that’s how she saw herself, an artist that used sex and her body and gender and stuff like that – though she never talked about it in those kinds of terms, that wasn’t her style – and so early on we began doing music together where we would record ourselves having sex, she would get into the zone, there would come a point where she was so turned on, you can hear the moment it clicks on the tape when the voice would come out, this new voice, this automatic kind of voice, not always using words but sometimes, words that you wouldn’t expect, words like exhibition and tournament and procession, words that always seemed too long to suit a gasp of passion or an orgasm, words like calculation and expression and verification, sexy words, it seems to me even now and back then, my god, it was all I could do not to blow my load as soon as she began talking these words, these magic words that were like passwords to a whole other kingdom of passion, on her knees in front of me, sometimes with a single thin silver belt tied around her waist and a pair of heels, those eyelashes curling up, nothing else, and next to my penis a microphone so you never knew which one she was going to suck and which one she was going to talk into [...]

[...] honestly though, things had been coming to a head in terms of Vanity’s career anyway, she had peaked too young, she said, all the other girls had held back, they hadn’t done girl-on-girl right away, they hadn’t done anal or double penetration, and so they were able to demand higher fees and gradually move up the pay scale, but Vanity had been doing it all from day one, she wasn’t a goddamn businesswoman, she was a passionate artist, and here she was paying for it while all of these cynical bitches, who couldn’t even take a cock up their ass without going cross-eyed, were moving up the ranks, truth was she had nowhere left to go, no special trick to turn or ability to unveil, she had given it her all and that was her mistake, at least in the eyes of these maggots.

Her name was Ginny; I still remember her. She was lying with her legs spread on the bed with one hand holding onto the brass bedhead while wearing stockings and next to her this panty drawer was open and spilling over with lingerie. Oh my god, I said to myself. I looked between her legs and it was like two worlds colliding and it was like lingerie was the highest pinnacle of civilisation; everything we had been fighting for; in Gor and in Middle-earth and in reality. It was a profound moment of worship and afterwards I walked back through to the living room and it was like walking onto the command deck of a spaceship. I told them how great it was, that they should try masturbating on acid, and one by one – all except Findlay – they took their turn in the bathroom so that the magazine was soaked right through and I had to wrap it in a plastic bag and throw it in the bin in the morning. After that it was inevitable that we would form a band.

Someone had given the description of a person with blue hair and who was dressed like a schoolboy fleeing the scene. The band needs to split up, Alan said. We need them to go into hiding. We had a meeting at Duncan’s parents’ house; the four of us sat on the bed with a single bare light bulb illuminating the room and dirty clothes piled everywhere. Duncan’s dad came into the bedroom, he wasn’t quite drunk yet, just moderately sauced, and he asked us about the killing of the Chinese. I heard he was hit over the head with a paving stone, he said. Who is even strong enough to lift one of those, never mind bringing it down on some poor bugger’s skull? We shook our heads and tried to picture the scene and the superhuman effort involved; all except Alan, who just sat there with his head in his hands. Things escalated from there. I demanded to see the dolls, they were kept in boxes in the basement of Findlay and Alan’s house, and I insisted that we break them out and examine them. What for? Duncan asked. Are you looking for bloodstains? Maybe, I said. I might be. He looked at me like he was caught in the teeth of something; like a great mouth had opened up behind him and he had felt that first pressure on his flesh; that frisson just before the tooth penetrates the skin; which is the prerogative of young bodies, I realise now; that expectant shudder where doom itself seems like a fair exchange and more worthy of jaw-dropping awe and complete and utter surrender than total weeping despair. I felt like I was pregnant with every idea in the world and that none of them mattered.