Sinister: Trash

[Kieran Devaney]

Dear Sinister,

Before I start proper a tiny addendum to last time’s post – I mentioned that 
the Moldy Peaches were playing in Sheffield on the 21st November. Well, as 
any English student will tell you, close reading is key – unfortunately I 
neglected to read the advertisement poster closely enough to discern that it 
is in fact just Kimya Dawson, who is one half (roughly) of the above 
mentioned band that’s playing, but it should still be good anyway. 
Nonetheless, a lesson is to be learned here – don’t go reading posters 
whilst running past them at a considerable distance and talking to someone. 
Is toothpaste a liquid or a solid? That’s what we were talking about. No 
firm conclusions have yet been drawn – what do you reckon? See I’m thinking 
that stuff like toothpaste disrupts the whole notion of the solid/liquid/gas 
trichotomy as it’s taught in low level physics (I gave up on physics after 
GCSE, I was no good at it and the department was up three flights of stairs) 
and instead that states of matter should be seen as a continuum rather than 
three separate entities in themselves. Possibly most scientists would just 
say: “Well, obviously” to that, but we were always taught that you had to be 
one of the three. It’s all up in the air anyway. I’ve started proper by the 
way now, in case anyone isn’t clear. I really want to talk about the song 
‘Trash’ by Suede now – you’ll remember me saying in my last post that they 
didn’t play anything I requested at the most recent Offbeat, well ‘Trash’ 
was one of the songs I requested then. Even though, if I were forced to 
choose, I’d probably say I was more anti Suede than pro them, I do think 
‘Trash’ is one of the best singles of the 90’s, easily the best thing the 
band has ever done etc. Though I’m not at all sure why, it’s not markedly 
different from the trademark lush, vaguely anthemic in a 
pseudo-anti-anthemic sort of way trademark Suede trademark sound. I don’t 
know. It’s healthy to have irrational likes and dislikes anyway. Since they 
didn’t play it at Offbeat the other Friday then I requested it yesterday 
evening (which was Thursday evening if I don’t get round to finishing this 
before tonight is done). Actually I might go off on a little tangent first 
about the Thursday night Fuzz Club at Sheffield SU – or at least about 
Coin-Op who were the band that played there last night, they have bands on 
before the disco bit in a clever hybrid of gig and club, giving you just 
that little bit more for your money, unless, as frequently happens, the 
bands that are on are crap. I wanted to go backstage or shout and ask them 
if they liked The Pixies and The Fall quite a lot but I didn’t get round to 
it. They were good though, I enjoyed myself. And anyway, it’s unfair and 
lazy to describe bands in terms of combinations of other bands, or just in 
terms of other bands really – I’m not saying Coin-Op were Pixies/Fall 
copyists anyway, they weren’t, but there were definite vocal inflections and 
dynamics in their sound that heavily recalled both those bands. No bad 
thing? Well that depends. Anyway, speaking of all that, I saw much 
maligned/adored American emo-folkster “about as alt as alt-country gets” (Q 
Magazine) types/type (I’m not clear on where the band starts and ends 
really, is it just Connor Oberst that counts as Bright Eyes or are the rest 
of them part of it – ditto The Magnetic Fields and The Divine Comedy) Bright 
Eyes on Wednesday in a tiny venue in the back room of a pub in Leeds – yes 
his ears really do look that big from up close. To be honest I probably fit 
more into the ‘maligned’ (as in I malign them, him, not the other way round, 
gah) side of the above split, but it was a good show with the boy Oberst 
quaffing a whole bottle of cheapo red wine on stage (which isn’t, I don’t 
imagine, a very good sign for the tour – if you need to be that trashed to 
make the evening go ok then it can’t be a very stimulating tour, musically 
or otherwise) and flailing around and singing and generally looking like an 
indie poster boy extraordinaire. He sang some old songs too, which I 
recognised, and that was nice. Thing is, though, his music is so defiantly, 
brutally introspective (which is what puts, I guess, a lot of people off – 
it certainly puts me off – or not just that it is introspective, but the 
manner in which it is and how that’s expressed) that I expected the gig to 
be quite low key and acoustic – more about drawing the crowd in rather than 
projecting to them, and in such a small venue he could easily have gotten 
away with that, in fact it might even have worked better, but instead he and 
his band thrashed (ok it wasn’t quite that crude, but there was a sense of 
abandon, I think, to the way they went through the songs – again, not a good 
sign that this is a very stimulating tour for team Bright Eyes) their way 
along, turning even the more delicate numbers into cathartic paroxysms of 
angsty indie rage, and as Oberst got drunker and drunker even those laboured 
words of his began to blur into one another, just leaving his hoarse, 
abstract exorcisms behind. Perversely, not being a fan of his lyrics 
particularly, this actually made the gig more enjoyable for me – and my 
friends, who are all pretty much confirmed Bright Eyes fanatics didn’t seem 
to mind either, or perhaps they were just too star struck to notice. If you 
were there (you never know), then my friend Laura was the one who jumped on 
stage right at the end of the encore and gave your man a necklace. Cute. 
Also, we managed to charm the (ok non-existent) security and ran backstage 
afterwards to meet the band, who obviously had no interest in us and didn’t 
want us there (they can’t really be blamed for that though, I think I’d be 
the same) and I stood awkwardly while other gobs hung open gazing at 
Connor’s lovely blottoed visage. Then they bought tshirts and stuff and we 
went home. Yay. Oh, yeah, while I’m thinking about it, during the gig I 
really, really felt like heckling. Is this natural? Barring the wittiest of 
the witty, I’m generally not at all impressed by heckling, I don’t think 
many people are – but during the oddly reverential between song silences of 
Wednesday night I was itching to make myself heard. I felt like shouting 
something like: “Say something profound, Connor.” I’m glad I didn’t 
actually, it wouldn’t have worked. That is, it wouldn’t have been a 
sufficiently witty heckle to get the crowd onto my side, not that Oberst 
wouldn’t have said something profound, lord knows, he might have huge chunks 
of the Dhammapada to heart, and what a bootleg that would have made. 
Incidentally, my philosophy lecturer, the one who made the mistake about 
Tracey Emin last week, this week redeemed himself by using the term ‘scare 
quotes’ which I like. Presently we come to something of an impasse – next 
week is reading week, which means that I don’t have any lectures or 
anything, most people have gone home for the week, but I couldn’t face that 
personally – not that I’ve anything against my family, of course not, but 
we’re having building work done at home at the moment, and the thought of 
being stuck in that tiny house whilst builders traipse through all the while 
really doesn’t appeal. I’m going back soon anyway, for some A-Level thing at 
my old school, I can’t decide if I’m looking forward to seeing various 
people or not, some of them I definitely didn’t stay in contact with for a 
reason – I imagine it’ll be all “How are you getting on?” “Oh fine, you?” 
“Fine, yeah” type conversations and then we’ll all go back home and wonder 
how we could grow so far apart after just a few months. Or I will anyway. 
But an impasse here because I don’t really have anything to do, particularly 
– I have letters to write and a couple of essays to do, but that doesn’t 
really structure my days very well, not that they particularly benefit from 
being structured – I suppose this is the eternal paradox though, if I’m ever 
obliged to do anything at all then I moan about it, and now that I have a 
week so empty that there will be barely anyone around that I’ll have to 
grunt “alright?” at as we pass on the street and I moan about that as well. 
I suppose I’m just worried that I’ll retreat back into the malaise of doing 
nothing except staying in bed reading and keeping completely unsociable 
hours as I did during the summer. It wasn’t that bad, really. I just don’t 
particularly want to be there again, even if it is just for a week. Still. 
And it’s not as if I don’t have enough free time anyway, in fact I have 
inordinate amounts – I suppose I always did though. Almost everyone being 
gone is almost certainly a good thing, though, I think – no more queues for 
dinner, no more long waits for the lift, even if it is just for a week. Oh, 
and I meant to tell you this last time, but further to the tales of 
‘hilarious’ student debauchery, the guy who lives opposite to me, lets call 
him ‘Matt’ (it is his name, after all, and any possible allusions to a dull 
surface are appreciated as well as appropriate), this is the person that 
plays ‘Eye of the Tiger’ and, recently that Bombfunk MC’s record that was 
around a few years ago, a song which I thought had been thankfully consigned 
to the annals of one hit wonderdom, but apparently not, repeatedly, loudly 
during the wee small hours of the morning, as well as several other hours 
during the day (‘wee small’ is a bit of a tautology isn’t it? That blonde 
girl has fair hair), he anyway, managed to break his sink by throwing his 
weights at it, whilst drunk. Oddly, and disconcertingly he didn’t seem at 
all bothered by what he’d done the next day, still found it highly amusing 
actually. Some people, honestly. He’s a bit of a case all round really, from 
the lewd posters on his wall to the other day when I was, not out of choice, 
mind, sitting opposite him and dinner and he started complaining about how 
hard it was to do work in his room, about how it was too noisy and about how 
there were too many distractions. But it’s you making all the noise! All the 
time! Some people. Honestly. Actually, I was mulling this over the other day 
on the way home from something, we more or less have absolutely nothing in 
common, Matt and I, no shared interests, no common ground, we don’t have 
anything that even remotely resembles a rapport in conversation. Chalk et 
cheese. I was wondering, then, whether this is a good thing or not. Is it 
beneficial to occasionally come into contact with people that you absolutely 
cannot relate to at all? Does it somehow affirm your own sense of being? 
Prove the eternal variety of the human spirit? Which lead me, sans an actual 
conclusion on the above (other than to think that occasionally I am drawn to 
struggling through, say, a really hard book or article thinking that it will 
be somehow beneficial to have read it, despite not having enjoyed it very 
much, not sure that this is quite analogous though), to wonder if we maybe 
had one thing in common, I worked backwards on this one, reasoning that it’s 
easier to change him than me in this unlikeliest of scenarios – that, say, 
he enjoyed the novels of Vladimir Nabokov (he told me, incidentally, that he 
doesn’t like reading the other day, so there doesn’t seem to be much chance 
that he does on the sly, but I suppose you never know), would that then give 
us enough grounding to be able to get on with eachother without there being 
an awkward and occasionally menacing air when we speak? But then I thought, 
no, because if he did like Nabokov then surely this would change, albeit 
fractionally, his entire countenance – or would it? Could he be the same 
person exactly, but just with this one tiny addition? I didn’t think so, 
Nabokov isn’t a good example, obviously, but in a sense, to like certain 
things you have to be a certain way – it’s not really a chicken and egg type 
situation and one can’t function with the other. But then I thought that I 
was being far too essentialist – why shouldn’t someone completely different 
to me enjoy the same things as I do? There isn’t an answer to that. The 
reason Matt and I don’t get on runs much deeper than just surface interests 
– there are plenty of sporty people (and yes, I appreciate how much of an 
oversimplification that is) that I get on with and plenty of bookish people 
that I can’t stand. So, depressingly, it looks like our differences are 
irreconcilable. Pity that. The thing is, I feel that way about most of the 
people on this floor - that there is this huge vista between what I think 
and what they think – about everything. Pity that. So why is it that I still 
think of them, of Matt especially in terms of just those interests? Do I see 
them as a manifestation of the bits of his personality that are 
irreconcilable with mine, and with people I like that have similar interests 
to him, do I bury those interests and just see the personality that I do get 
on with? This is what keeps me up. That and the toothpaste thing, anyway. 
Perhaps this is why my friends seemed so horrified when, in Leeds a few 
weeks ago after we were drunkenly insulted by some townie types about the 
way we were dressed, harmless enough, I suppose, but not very pleasant, and 
typically our conversation turns to how moronic these people are, how they 
all dress the same and etc etc and I suggested that if that was all we could 
come up with about them was that, then we were no different from them anyway 
– we think we’re better, they think they’re better simply based on the way 
the other side appears, the only difference being that the townies have the, 
I don’t think guts is quite the word, but the impetus at least to voice 
their prejudices. I thought the whole point of not being like them was to 
*not be like them*. Didn’t go down too well though. Perhaps I’m trying to 
make a point about indie as a whole now, though guardedly. I’ll not press it 
though. I’m as guilty of it as anyone else is anyhow, so I’d be a hypocrite 
if I did. I wonder if Matt recognises this difference – or more to the 
point, I wonder what he actually thinks of me – it’s a subject I’d quite 
like to broach with him, if only I knew how. Incidentally, I don’t 
particularly mean to single Matt out, it’s just that his room is so close to 
mine and I seem the most estranged from him, it’s a discussion I’d like to 
have with plenty of people, but it’s one of those things that’s just too 
close to the bone to actually take up with anyone, even people I am friends 
with. I’m rambling now. Still. He’s gone home for the week anyway, Matt, so 
have most of them, it’s quiet. I think I already mentioned that. Still 
rambling, then. As ever. See, I did it with the pun on ‘Matt’ above, 
actually, witty as it was and as nicely as it lead on to ‘it does exactly 
what it says on the tin’ type nonsense I was still completely on the 
surface, totally 2D. Nobody is 2D. Perhaps this is what’ll happen when I go 
back to school for that presentation, we’ll all go back to seeing each other 
as just 2D people, strangers, I suppose they are now, in a sense, most of 
them. But I was here to talk to you about Suede. So I requested ‘Trash’ 
Thursday evening and they played it and I danced and in my cinematised 
version everyone was ecstatic and the song fit the moment so perfectly that 
all other music momentarily paled in comparison and today I went out and 
bought a second hand copy of ‘Coming Up’ for a fiver because I don’t 
actually have the song up here with me and I’ve been listening to it on 
repeat all day the end.

Love, Kieran
Xxx

p.s. I thought about taking out all the punctuation. Maybe next time, what 
do you think?





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