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Matt Connor: I was 13, but can’t remember what it was about now. All I do remember is that an English teacher complimented me on my writing, which got me saying I wanted to be a writer whenever adults asked me what I wanted to do with my life. This was partly because this was the first time a teacher complimented me on anything.Writers tell stories, but there are as many types of writers as there are stories. At first, most of my writing was informed by this idea that the writer was a "reporter," a "recorder of information." In my case this largely consisted of writing to bands I had read about in fanzines, asking them questions that they would answer on a cassette which I would then transcribe, trying to shape 45 minutes worth of hums, ahhs, and silence into coherent text. This transcribing, editing, cutting and pasting was my writing at the time. My interview with UK Hardcore mavericks Extreme Noise Terror (complete with portraits of the band hand-drawn by the late Phil Vane on the back of the return letter) was one of my early short stories. Now, I can see that I was practicing what I am still practicing today, even though my methods have developed, for better or worse, the more I have read and have written.
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In the beginning, my knowledge of writers went as far as the Shakespeare we were meant to read at school, plus a bit of Kerouac, Burroughs and Bukowski that I probably read about in Thrasher. I tried to emulate things I read in fanzines, and things I'd seen on the counters of record shops, or had been sold by lone men or women at gigs. The NME of the time was also a big influence, and I remember being caught reading it at the back of maths, the teacher genuinely bemused that I was reading a "newspaper." This made me want to be a reader, too.From quite early, I associated being a writer with a sort of freedom; being able to escape the drudgery of my actual life in a small town. What I gleaned from the aforementioned books, for better or worse, encouraged this idea. What freedom meant, or what I would actually do with this freedom if I was ever granted it, I had no idea.Until one day, when I was invited, as an older friend’s guest, to a terraced house in Bolton, where the owners of Manchester's Eastern Bloc records lived. In their front room they had a mini ramp. It didn’t matter that you had to bend over to avoid banging your head on the ceiling when you were stood on top of it, or that it was only six feet wide and a few feet high. Because these were the first adults I had known who weren’t either my parents or schoolteachers. And they had a ramp, standing where I had only ever previously seen a television and sofa. This I now associated with freedom.
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I moved to London on the premise that I was attending university, but really I moved here for the skate spots, music, books, art and culture which I had read about. It was my roommate who first had the job in Dreamy Lips, and he introduced me to the shop’s elderly Maltese proprietors.Looking back, I can see that working in there was the culmination of reading a lot of American crime fiction (Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Charles Willeford, Raymond Chandler, etc). In my head, I had created the impression that a writer’s life, if he is going to be a proper, "authentic" writer, needs to be gritty and a little bit of a messy. This can be problematic, because it can, and nearly did, get in the way of any actual writing.For example, I didn’t actually write anything during this period, and just behaved as if I might be working on something. People succumb to all kinds of ghastly habits that they can stay stuck with years later. Fortunately, I only worked in a dirty video shop for a year, and I now know that you can be just as good, or as bad a writer, even if you’re a babysitter.Soho’s changed quite a bit since your days there, eh?
The Soho that I gravitated to, the one that is all alleyways, illegal drinking dens and neon lights, does seem to have shrunk. Things have been tidied up, but essentially people are still the same. For example, all the male prostitutes used to congregate in Burger King in Leicester Square. That’s where they went, and so would you if you were looking for their company. While they don’t hang around there now, or with the advent of the internet, have to, prostitution has not gone away. It has just changed. People still fuck and get fucked regardless of Jamie Oliver opening up a new restaurant.
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It wasn’t just listening to the music that was a fun thing to do—it was everything that went with it. For starters, I had to find a record shop—once I exhausted Woolworths, the nearest one was 25 miles away. This meant travelling to the city alone for the first time in my life. I would find the record shop I was looking for, and then hang around the counter or the section I was most interested in. A couple of times I got lost and was robbed by local kids.
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Definitely Maybe came out the year I stopped attending university. Oasis' first album is the sound of a band taking their first steps outside of the bedroom/rehearsal room they had been writing the songs in. Songs written when they were still living at home, dreaming of big houses, immortality, hotels, what goes on in London and generally being a rock "n" roll star. What they would do with their freedom once they had secured it, was always going to be their business.Until I dropped out of university I felt that, even though I had moved to London, I was still living in my proverbial bedroom—listening to the same records, reading the same books and eating the same food. Until 1994, I hadn’t ever drunk coffee or eaten couscous. Suddenly, I not only drank coffee and ate couscous (mixed with tinned tuna), but found myself collecting glasses in a gay club and smoking cigarettes. Before that I worked in a launderette and lived on cheese and onion sandwiches. It was as if, like Definitely Maybe, I had also finally arrived that year.
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I’m not sure she is a fan, although she has had my fanzines pushed upon her as presents by mutual friends. Like books at Christmas—who knows what happens to them. I am a nanny, and the children I look after are friends with her children. I once had to pick up the children from hers, and while she got ready she put on the Peter Kaye Christmas Special, before making me a vodka and tonic. I remember thinking that to be in that position could be seen as enviable – especially since, looking back, I would have been being paid hourly at the time. But she got ready, we went to the kids party, lost each other and life goes on. The children are now older and don’t need picking up from people's houses any more. And I don’t get invitations to go on my own.The life you have lived—with all the different jobs and travelling all over, working and being friends with artists – has been kinda wildly bohemian, but not in the Rolling Stones 1960s sense. Do you know what I mean? Do you consider yourself a bohemian?
I don’t know about that, really. I haven’t really had a proper career, just a succession of jobs that have never paid more than the minimum wage. And I’m now 43 and back at school studying to be a nurse. I suppose you could call that being a bohemian. Whereas once I found this lack of direction frustrating, I am now glad of the experiences I've had doing different things, especially when, at a certain age, I saw others who had focused on one thing: "succeed."
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I think she was in the same building as me for a while but we never actually met.Cool.This book about Lindsay Lohan is available for £3.50 in the UK and £4.50 worldwide from Oogabooga in Los Angeles, Good Press in Glasgow and Dolon Books in London.Wolfboy's Greatest Hits compilation is available here.Follow Andy on Twitter