Dear Sinister It's a while since I've been in touch so, writing now, I feel like a shady relative -- some funny uncle -- slipping an over-generous note into your card: hush money excusing another year of neglect. But happy birthday! How you've grown! I like to think, in my own sweet way, that I've kept in touch. I don't remember my own fifth birthday much; I imagine it was flushed with all the surprise, horror and creeping boredom of starting school. Isn't that what being five means? You can't stay in the nursery forever. "How you've grown?" Well, that's a pretty limp birthday wish. When you get to my age, you grow cagy of marking time, but let's not be shy: five years of sinister is something to celebrate. At the very least, it's an excuse for a party, where, tired and emotional, we might let slip all the sly sentiment we usually keep under wraps, the 'you're-my-besht-mate', the 'you-and-me-against-the-world'... Five years of idle gossip, primrose paths, plans hatched, crushed hearts, all-night phonecalls, freaky dancing, oceans crossed and celebrity stalking. Indulge me a little here. I remember when you bounced into the world. Fully-formed from the brow of a Princess? Well, it was messier than that, but let the myths have their charm. When you think of that inkling in the brain of Honey Mitchell some mundane afternoon in 1997, and how it would affect people, well, you realise how much magic was still left in the dog days of the twentieth century. And how you can stumble, almost by accident, across a skeleton key to the twenty-first, a key that unlocked a world-wide world of shared sillyness, secrets, energies and enthusiasm. Two anecdotes, five years apart: Autumn 1997, sent on errand by a plea to the list (find an out-of-print edition of the script to 'Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner') I fetched up in London's grand, shambolic Foyles bookshopI bump into someone who had got there before me. A complete stranger sent scurrying through the stone streets of the city by words whispered across continents and networks. Well it seems daft now -- now we're tri-band and peer-to-peer, livejournalists and instantmessengers -- but at the time it was rich and strange, this stealthy escape of private joke into the wider world, like Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49, stumbling across the Tristero: a "secret richness and concealed density of dream". Or you might think of that cliché-parable of global interdependence, the butterfly wings that could stir a storm. What was happening? Where would it end? Five year later -- last week -- I'm sitting on the balcony outside my house (which I share, funnily enough, with an Australian and a Devonian, who I first met on #sinister chat, one mundane afternoon in 1998) at 5am, chatting with D., still trying to work it out. D.'s been on his own sinister adventures, following his heart across hemispheres, from the arse of Australia to the capital of the twentieth century. The morning is broken, and we're still sobering from all last night's fun, and we're exhilirated by the accidents of technology and rumour -- the music of chance -- that have brought us to this moment. "Someone should make a film," one of us says, "go round the world with a digicam, recording these constellations of feeling, the stray sinister kids in Rio and Reykjavic, Aberdeen and Adelaide, all knitted together by..." ...Well, by pop music. Can it be as deftly daft as that? The soppy, sappy secrets we unearth from bits of vinyl, or whatever CDs are made from? Maybe right now someone on a Shed Seven list is wondering the same thing. But I like to imagine, fondly, that there's something unique about all this, and that it's the mystery, the mark and the hidden treasure of the best pop music that it persuades so many people, with nothing much else in common, that they constitute a community, provokes new devotees, reinspires lapsed believers and compels them to invest and invent so much of themselves. Certain People I Know reckon the community is more interesting than the actual music -- that it formed, supplying everything the music leaves out (the fun, the noise, the sex), like a pearl around a speck of grit. But I wouldn't know about that... But I do know that the adventure only continues as long as we stay interested -- like a cartoon character who stays aloft above the canyon as long as he doesn't look down. And so, if I have a birthday wish at all, maybe that it's that the band themselves are seduced by the challenge of leaving their own nursery -- the comfort and charm of their Jeepster cottage industry -- and that moving on means they're forced to find their own path between wonder and creeping boredom, between growing up and growing old... * * * * A birthday is also a time to dig out embarrassing old snapshots. One of the lovely, silly inventions of Stuart David, before he went electronic, was the ink polaroid. While I'm in the mood, here's five of mine: 1) I have a notably bad haircut in this one, so it must be 1998 - the first sinister picnic. I'm laughing heartily. Behind me you can see a member of Salako climbing a lamppost to disentangle a child's kite. Behind him you can just spot Susannah approaching with a croquet mallet and a smirk of concentrated mischief. 2) This one's a bit difficult to make out because it was taken at 4am. It's of a bunch of Irish kids lying on dewdamp grass in Southwark Park next to my old house, singing songs they know by heart as dawnwithrosyfingers rises above the Rotherhithe tunnel. 3) And this one is a bit blurry, tipsy with sentiment. It's 1999, in the basement of a Covent Garden café. You can't see them in the picture, but behind me the Lucksmiths are singing about bookshops, laundromats and that kind of distance that makes the heart grow. Instead, the picture is of the audience - too many new friends to single out, the kind of circle you'd given up hope of ever finding around you. 4) And this one is from the Spring of this year. Someone else took this of me, staring out across the lake in Chicago. The sky is blue, and the air is so clear you could imagine I can see all the way to a future that I could live in. 5) I've got one picture left, but it's not developed yet. I'm saving it for August 25th, when we're going to be celebrating Five Years of Sinister with a picnic at 3pm on top of Primrose Hill in London. Come along! Or better still, organise your own, wherever you are. And take your own picture, ink or otherwise... and Report Back. Many happy returns Stevie Trousers x x x x x __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-+ Snipp snapp snut, sa var sagan slut! +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+