JOURNEY INTO MONTY'S BRAIN - PART 1
Who On Earth Am I And How Did I Come To Be Here?
Like
most kids I suppose I was annoying, destructive and grandiose. Obsessed
with noise and activity as boys often are, for some reason I thought that
soldiers and war were good ideas and cars (some folk have likened me to
Jeremy Clarkson 'cos I've got curly hair. That's were the comparison ends;
I have grown out of such things and walk everywhere: it's hard to run
someone over on foot, you don't have to park your legs, you cause less
pollution (unless you fart a lot), and these days it is often quicker
than sitting in a traffic jam, etc etc etc etc.) Fortunately strange influences
put a stop to all that!
Like, Far Out Man!
In
1967, during a cultural revolution that changed the world, I was six.
However the contrasts present in my grandparent's house in Cambridge were
too vivid to be unnoticed. It was cosy, typical catholic home smelling
of old shoes, wood and coal smoke from a small stove, and at mealtimes
of roast beef and Yorkshire pud. A painting of "the Sacred Heart"
hung on the wall on the living-room wall where grandpa would sit watching
Coronation Street and football. In the kitchen hung a photo of Pope Paul.
Open
the door to my uncle's room and you literally entered a new dimension:
an intoxicating aroma (perfumed oils and incense from the Far East) hit
you; psychedelic posters and images of planets, patterns and mushrooms
executed in fluorescent colours dazzled the eyes, and of course, strange
electronically enhanced music wafted through your ears into your temporal
lobes and beyond
Uncle
D.D. had a second den: a shed at the bottom of the garden. He put barbed
wire around the back fence (opening onto a public passage) and a sign
on the shed door said simply "Danger." This shed was a hermetically
sealed chamber of secret alchemy and skulduggery; a psychedelic laboratory
hidden unsuspected in the Cambridge suburb. This was the H.Q. for "Radio
Ginger", D.D.'s pirate radio show (named after the family cat) run
on home-made equipment. Better than Radio One, it broadcast a daily fare
of psychedelic rock, electronic noises, jingles and firework projects.
It ran until someone told us that the police and G.P.O. had become interested!
Fortunately
my uncle had the patience (most of the time!) to put up with, and involve,
an exited kid still pissing the bed. On my first broadcast I featured
as "the wizened gnome": the crazed laboratory assistant who
created chaos in the Radio Ginger studio, fixing a noxious brew (actually
a cup of orange and a straw!)
Another time, (probably to keep me out the way), he left me to my own devices making vocal noises on a home-made echo-unit for what seemed like hours (nothing changes!) At other times we drew and painted planets and monsters. His favourite TV show was Dr. Who, which was a huge influence on me.
Evenings
were spent experimenting with lights: the now common UV lamp, strobe,
and projections of bubbling coloured oils. (During the 1970's, he created
light-shows for bands in Brighton; a now sadly neglected and forgotten
art-form in need of revival) The lights seemed to change reality somehow
creating effects both strange and familiar as if I was being shown another
aspect of things normally hidden by habitual perception. Similarly, the
music also began to effect me. DD was particularly fond of The Pink Floyd
(then fronted by Syd Barrett). Songs of gnomes, scarecrows and fairy-tales
appealed, yet there was something extra in the sound itself: that voice
seemed to shimmer like burnished copper; that throbbing organ (ooer!)
and the scintillating glissando guitar swooping upward into the cosmos.
The music seemed to call us away to another realm above the sky that is
in fact home. I was also exposed to other bands: to Hendrix, the Move,
Lothar and the Hand People. I heard an electrified voice on another song
chanting hypnotically "Adapter! Adapter!" which I later discovered
was Captain Beafheart's "Dropout Boogie."
Some
of my uncle's inventions and firework projects were pretty dangerous!
He made a cannon out of a piece of scaffolding filled with nuts, bolts
and old valves which, when detonated, blew a hole in a park fence. He
also constructed a gun that fired microwaves that burned a hole in a field
behind the house! There was an old tree-stump in the yard that grandpa
wanted rid of, so to save calling in the council we destroyed it with
pickaxes, chisels, a blowlamp and home made bombs.
Another
time my baby-rage was mobilised by DD and his friend Adrian and directed
at poor grandpa's bike, (which he had left in the shed thinking it safe).
"Dad's bike is bust, why don't you mend it?" said Adrian, handing
me various tools for the purpose. The two teenagers edged me on with much
hysterical laughter at my "handiwork." I wrecked a terrible
destruction on that bike; grandpa was not amused! The clash between the
two cultures was bitter at times: grandpa would complain about my uncle's
long hair, about the smells, about young folk with bare feet, and of course
about the music which he would put a stop to by pulling out the fuses
in the understairs cupboard.
There
were strange chemicals in the shed; was I the focus of fiendish experiments?
More likely my developing neurones were overstimulated when, in 1968 I
began experiencing hallucinations every night one month. Some were colourful
and entertaining; others frightening such as writhing snakes appearing
in the folds of my blankets. Most fear inspiring was a dark, pulsing shadowy
mass emerging from a toy garage on top of the closet. It would come for
me, swirling in the darkness growing to the rhythm of my beating heart
only to vanish when my parents flicked on the light.
Enter
Dr. Swashstika Pumpenicle: large and furrow-lobed psycho-boffin! Dr.P.
"Das ist der classic Freudian situation: ze black shape emerges from
the garage made by his grandfather which is the mother's womb from which
vill kom an unknown being which will be a baby sister!"
Ahem! Yeah, and also linked was Icarus: a huge meteorite which some feared would strike the Earth plus a dim recognition of fear of the H-bomb in the minds of adults at that time.
Dr.P. "Ja, and there were also nightmares?"
I dreamt of a butcher's shop with a row of severed arms on hooks in the window a sinking feeling.
Dr.P. "Wunderbar! The castration theme associated with losing mother's love!"
This
is getting very Woody Allen! It all ended one night when I Knew: this
was it! Either I face "the Thing" or it would devour me. The
hallucinations were particularly vivid yet I knew "It" was all
part of my mind and I "told" it to go back into the garage,
which it did. After that night no more visions! I may have got the idea
from a Dr. Who episode "the Mind Robbers", in which they had
to deny the reality of the creatures that they faced so that they could
not be harmed. At any rate I had my own "bad trip" then.
(By the way I get on well with my sister now and am glad she exists!)