Diving for Dear Life

My name is John Doran and I write about music. The young bucks who run VICE’s website thought it would be amusing to employ a 41-year-old who remembers getting into heavy metal because of Daley Thompson. In case you were wondering or simply too lazy to use urban dictionary, "menk" is Scouse/Woollyback slang for a mentally ill or educationally subnormal person, and is a shortened version of mental. As in, “Your Sergio Tacchini trackie is sick la, look at that menk Doran, he can’t even afford a Walker trackie. Let’s hit him with a brick and push him in the canal." MENK 56: DIVING FOR DEAR LIFE I was on holiday in the middle of nowhere when she died. In a way it was like it never happened. Even days later it was as if she was still lurking in the shadows like some bogeyman: part Steve Bell cartoon, part Spitting Image puppet, part Emperor Palpatine except covered in bright blue veins rather than bright blue electricity. While she was slipping away unnoticed I was in a hotel restaurant near Birnam Wood, Perthshire. She would have liked it there. The walls were covered in photographs of her, Tony Blair, the Queen and family, Sean Connery in a kilt, Ewan McGregor wearing chinos with a sweater knotted loosely round his neck with a quote about how seriously he took being Scottish, Annie Lennox and some spam coloured lummox with an ABH haircut and a rugby top. Maria is always delighted to be in posh restaurants in the same way I'm usually deeply uncomfortable in them. I have hyper-atrophied table manners and have to concentrate on not eating with my fingers at all times – a battle I often lose. My grandparents wouldn’t have stood for the way that I eat. They were aspirational working class immigrants from Ireland who moved to a small house on Scotland Road, Liverpool early in the 20th century. My daddy-gran, a merchant sailor, may have looked uncannily like Popeye – down to the pipe, cap and bulging biceps covered in nautical-themed, Indian ink tattoos – but he knew every last rule there was to know about positioning of cutlery and the setting of a fine table.

And he may have left school at 13 but he also liked to read Byron and Shelley. Maybe less so after he got home from the trenches of World War One with gangrene (in a leg that got whittled away over the years), shrapnel wounds and shell shock. The PTSD became his unintentional bequest to some of his nine children; the youngest, my dad, included. It manifested itself in them in the form of alcoholism, prescription drug addiction, obsessive compulsive religious mania, a whole raft of mental illnesses and perhaps, most debilitatingly of all, the virulent contagion of nihilism. My dad’s dad died when I was eight and I didn’t hear him say much before that, but I did hear him say this: "They were bloody cowards. They took some valley boys. Crying for their mothers. Could barely speak a word of English. Only enough to pray. They knew all the words to ‘Our Father’. Their nerves were shot. They couldn't carry on. They should have been sent home but they were shot dead crying for their mothers and buried in ditches by the road side."

I got told this stuff on a daily basis from as early as I can remember. Some of it Frank McCourt would have baulked at putting in Angela's Ashes, for fear of it not being believed. I mean, who coats their children in thick layers of goose fat and brown paper for the entire winter? (This was one of many baroque stories that was wheeled out when I made requests for branded sportswear. Even I had to admit that my dad had me on this one though and I’d have to settle for some bizarre looking tracksuit bought from a unit on an industrial estate in Prescot for a few quid instead of the brand new Sergio Tacchini I wanted. I’d sigh on sight of the single stripe piped onto the arms of the monstrosity thrust upon me. My dad would say: “Your mum will sew a few more stripes on it for you and you can draw your own logo on in pen.” Only a man who had been brought up to think of goose fat as seasonal underwear could employ such logic.)

The author with his friends Stu and Mike and their respective sons today.

There was no time for learning about cutlery for my dad. During the German air raids on Liverpool during World War Two, his friend who lived next door was killed along with his family. My dad was evacuated to the countryside to stay on a farm but he was left to sleep in a stable, was fed leftover scraps of food and was never washed – it was during summer, so there was no excuse for this – so his sisters went down there mob handed and took him back. They’d sooner he was killed than made to live like an animal.

During our meal, Maria looks out of the window at a row of gleaming classic cars dating back to at least the 1930s and announces: "Look at those posh cars!" The restaurateur chortles to himself, as if at some faux pas: "Well! I've heard them called old before but never posh…" The next day driving along the East Coast, I pass the time keeping a tally of the number of UKIP anti-immigration billboards I see in consecutive coastal towns after we hit England. We stop for tea in Whitley Bay and it takes us a while to find anywhere open among the shuttered and boarded up buildings and crumbling tenements. Whitley Bay, the seaside town they remembered to close down. The next day, when we get there, Stockton-on-Tees feels like a once-great town that's been punched repeatedly in the face but never offered an explanation why. It looks reminiscent of any British working class town that's been dealt a series of blows by out of town retail development and pedestrianisation. It's wreathed in road works, traffic jams and vacant units. As we pull onto Yarm Street, a hassled looking man with neck tattoos breaks into a jog next to the car and shouts through the open window: "Coppers?" "What?" asks Maria perplexed. "Coppers love. Coppers! Can you spare any coppers?" he says keeping up with the car. He doesn't wait for an answer but carries on jogging onwards with a limp – like a man with a grim appointment to keep. I'm visiting the town’s last remaining record shop, Sound It Out and it's an Aladdin's Cave of great music. It's a pleasure to meet Tom, the keeper of the vinyl, and the other staff who are on duty. I end up restricting myself to ten purchases but could have come away with 20 pieces from The Fall and Killing Joke sections alone.

The author and Tom from Sound It Out records.

I know about the shop because of an excellent documentary called Sound It Out by the filmmaker Jeanie Finlay and I’ve been after an excuse to visit since watching it. It doesn’t fail to disappoint. In fact, it’s a really moving experience. ('It’s like being in the film!' I think to myself and then can’t work out if that’s a stupid thing to think or not.) While I'm in there a hip young kid buys an original 12” copy of Joey Beltram's "Energy Flash" and a pair of excitable and evergreen rock chicks come in to discuss how many points you get for the word "fellatio" when you’re playing strip Scrabble and the just-announced Gary Numan tour. Tom puts the Nume's new album Splinter on order for one of them and a copy of Bowie's The Next Day on vinyl under the counter for the other until payday. They both leave made up.

Everyone who comes in is talking excitedly about Record Store Day and all of them – bar people selling vinyl – seem to know each other by first name. Even Tom's mum and dad pop in to see him. After two hours browsing in the shop watching people come and go, it’s clear this place is as much a community centre as it is a place to source very reasonably priced vinyl. Tom's working round the clock to get the shop ready for Record Store Day, including working on a modest expansion into a back room with new shelves – acquired from the town’s recently closed down HMV – another unit now boarded up in town. When I ask if they're getting geared up for the event, everyone groans. RSD is genuinely the thin black line between success and failure for many shops in the UK so they have to treat it with utmost seriousness. They're right in the middle of an order check and now, with a week to go, nerves are beginning to fray a little. "Metal?" shouts Tom. "We've got enough room for one Bolt Thrower, all the Mayhems twice, three Judas Priests, all the Aerosmiths twice and one Cannibal Corpse." In St Helens the next day we're driving from my parents' house to the nearest soft play area in Earlstown. As we park up, I realise the industrial unit with the kids centre in it is opposite the flat that my old friends Mike and Debbie lived in 20 years ago. The flat is on Chemical Street above the barbers opposite a junk yard, its contents piled high above the lip of the rusted corrugated iron walls, threatening to spill onto the damp pavements below. The flat looks like it has been burned out since. All the windows at the rear are boarded up and one of three at the side is as well. While I’m staring up, I see movement behind the curtains but then a man in overalls starts striding out of an adjacent lock up toward me, so I beat a retreat inside the soft play area. I feel momentarily guilty.

Mike didn’t talk to me for four months once because I laughed about the name of his road. He thought I was being a stuck up prick because I’d moved down South but really I was joking about the amount of drugs we used to do there. Someone has tagged "DOPE" in big, blunt letters all over Earlstown’s walls and doors. But then, why not? Someone has also gone round lashing up professionally made green plastic posters with the address of their "Growise Hydro" business, situated in a nearby shop unit. Weed looks like the only commercial enterprise that’s taking root in Earlstown at the moment.

The author (centre) with his friends Mike and Stu in earlier days. As we drive back home, my mum sees the sign for Haydock along the East Lancs Road and says: “Do you remember when you had that terrible job?” “The roofing thing? That wasn’t so bad.” I explain to Maria: “It was a factory yard called Hoogovens Aluminium. We made the roofs for other big factories. Ten-hour shifts outdoors.” My mum says: “It was so hot that summer that you were working in just your trousers, do you remember? I begged him to take some sun cream to work with him because he was getting really burned but he said he wouldn’t have been able to put it on in front of the other men. They were horrible to you, weren’t they?” I ignore Maria grinning: “No, they were alright really. I think I was being a bit precious. Most of the people I met in factories up North were alright really. I learned how to do cryptic crosswords in an aerosol factory in Hull. These guys would take the mickey out of me because I was the youngest and had long hair. It wasn’t like in Hertfordshire. I worked with some proper recidivists, thugs and racists down there.” (I instantly feel bad – fuck knows how someone with a Cockney accent would have gotten on working in Haydock or Hull in 1993. Then I remember the broken pint glass and feel less bad. The chant: “Southern jobs for Southern boys.” Imminent violence in the afternoon outside a pub in Welwyn Garden City, 1996. “Why don’t you fuck off back home, you Scouse monkey?” But I was less than 500 yards away from my home.) My mum says: “You always worked though, didn’t you? Even if you had to cycle for miles.” I reply: “Well, I liked to be able to go out and drink every night. I tried it on the dole, remember? I gave that a proper try out! I was climbing the walls after a while. I couldn’t handle it. I wouldn’t want to try and put too noble a spin on it but yeah, I always worked.” My mum carries on to Maria: “A lot of very clever men ended up taking very poor work up here in the 1980s and 1990s. The competition was so fierce for the jobs… not like when I was young. You could leave one job in the morning and have another by the afternoon.” I say: “That wasn’t even the worst roofing related job I had. The year before me and Riki Day were working with this freelance roofer in North Hull. Ex-squaddie with dreadlocks. Dead hard. Pretty far out guy. We were putting the roof on a five-storey factory framework from this cherry picker, crane thing that would sway about everywhere with us skidding about on top of that. On this industrial estate they used to process vegetable oil, margarine and stuff. It felt like there were huge clouds of oil in the air. Like a fog of fat. You’d see some guys wandering round in what looked like NBC suits but you’d just be there in jeans and T-shirt. You’d be skidding round all over the place. On all the metal walkways and gantries, there would be stalactites of congealed fat. When you’d get in, you’d have solid white oil in your hair and you could barely wash this stuff off you.” It was terrifying up that cherry picker. We didn’t last that long. Even Riki Day was scared and his party trick was taking his eyes out with a spoon handle when he was drunk and pointing them round in different directions. And when a dude who takes his own eyes out for a laugh is scared, then I’m scared as well. On the way back, my mum doesn’t want to take the link road so we drive back through St Helens and I can only mark how much it has changed by checking off all the absences and presences. The far side of town has gone. It’s all just roundabouts and chain fast food stores. The last of the mines closed in 1992. The industry was going downhill but went into a tail spin in 1985. It wasn’t like a coal mining monoculture that you’d see in a worthy, but cliché-ridden, British TV series or film from the mid-90s but the guy who lived over the road from us with his family was a miner and there was a giant slag heap on the field at the back of my estate. You say the words “slag heap at the end of my road” to some people and they look at you like you’ve just announced that you were suckled by wolves in a hillside forest until the age of 18.

The slag heaps have gone now but the new roundabouts on the link road have mining-themed civic sculpture denoting the dignity of labour and all that fucking nonsense. From the M62 at the junction for my parents’ house you can see a big, cigar shaped, mopey faced sculpture about five storeys tall. No disrespect to those involved in commissioning The Dream but it looks like Primark Escher and really isn’t as good as the Angel Of The North. Most of the really big factories have gone bar the really big Pilkingtons glass works in town that look like something out of Dune. Beechams is gone. Ravenhead Glass is gone. United Glass is gone. Triplex is gone. The building where I played in a brass band has gone, replaced by the catering college. From production to service, the transition is nearly complete. Give it a few more years and Stockton-On-Tees will look exactly like St Helens except maybe with some different crappy civic art that’s of no use to anyone celebrating the no longer existent shipbuilding industry.   Then I tick them off one by one as we drive through Thatto Heath and Nutgrove in the thickening drizzle. The pub where Steve and his mate who died at Hillsborough drank. Gone. All the other pubs where you’d get beaten up for being queer. Still there. A club I drank in and had all but forgotten. A burned out shell, scorched to the brickwork. My high school – a hive of duffers, thugs and lads who weren’t credited with a hope in hell – that had an average GCE/CSE pass rate of one measly fucking result per 2.5 pupils. Gone – closed the year I left, replaced by Barrett Homes. Rainhill Psychiatric Hospital. Gone, replaced by Barrett Homes. Houses presumably not filled with the thousands of former inmates. No care for them in this community. The alleyway where I was beaten nearly blind when I was 14 by a gang of lads from about three miles down the road in Prescot: still there. And then just as we’re nearing my parents’ home, Maria spots St James’ Methodist Church. She says: “Oooh! Isn’t that the church you and Stu Green were arrested on top of?” “WELL!” I shout, tapping an invisible watch on my wrist. “Is that the time? We’d better get a move on! Dad will be wondering where we are! Do you know what I fancy for lunch? Cheese on toast…” “Eh? You did what?” says my mum. Maria grimaces apologetically and puts her foot down.

Previously: Menk, by John Doran – It's Educational!

You can read all the previous editions of John's Menk column here.