Sinister: Birthday Letters

[Stevie Trousers]

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


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