Arena Homme+ | The Husband Diaries
Photography by Marcus Ahmad for Arena Homme+
I was sick. Poorly. Queer. Under the weather and out of sorts. I was ill. I prefer this to the previous words and expressions. It conjures up damp English afternoons.
In fact all the illnesses that accompanied overcast days throughout the decades. Mumps. Measles. Hypergonadism. Kidney stones. As Prufrock’s life was measured out in coffee spoons, and the passage of Eno’s life in shirts, my adulthood has been punctuated by kidney stones. The last was surgically removed days before the nation went into self-isolation. The weekend before was spent with a catheter. It was retrieved by a nubile nurse who said that after her shift she planned to settle down with Love Island on catch-up and a kebab. Her look was one of alarm. Maybe she was shocked that my penis had shrunk to the size of a skin tag. Or perhaps she didn’t realise this bald, bespectacled middle age man was once a redhead.
The next day the nation was under the weather; life in the time of Covid. In the silence myself and a neighbour, Mr P, made a noise. We were in an altered state. He’d gone through the 1970s series Survivors on youtube (a plague pandemic released by a Chinese scientist spreads across the globe). I remained in that phase of illness that heightens the perception and reduces self-consciousness, according to Virginia Woolf: ‘It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals.’ So, two middle aged men in a living room interpreting a PWR BTTM track, with him on guitar and me on vocals. I changed the title. Altered lyrics. The song’s best original line struck an odd chord with a man one year from sixty, his body riddled with morphine and reeling from Diclofenac suppositories. Nevertheless: ‘I want someone who thinks it’s sexy/when my lipstick bleeds.’
These prescribed drugs weren’t rock and roll (Always hated that term. Give me ‘Pop music’ any day, any place. New York. Wuhan. Paris. Munich). This sitting room duo were not rock and roll. We were old. Ancient, even. Not like young PWR BTTM - a cross-dressing, pronoun-hopping duo who blew it the moment they were on the brink of greatness. Someone took to Facebook accusing one of being a sexual predator. No explanation. No evidence. Kaput. Cancelled. Come back PWR BTTM, we’d forgive you ALMOST anything for I Wanna Boi. Our first track. Fresh title: I Want Someone (To Keep The Bed Warm When I Shower). Wemade the song our own.
I guess we’re an old boy band. A house band for the housebound. Old people playing new pop. We merged Alice Cooper’s Eighteen with George Michael’s Older. Altered lyrics (‘It took Sixty years to get this far’). A new title: Ancient. I’d never sang. Didn’t believe I could and still don’t. But now the two of us were having rehearsals with me in housecoat and stockinged-feet feeling like Susan Boyle on BGT, with fewer chins and more stubble. On buff walls, courtesy of Snappy Snaps, images from Erwin Olaf’s ‘Grief’ series; still lives captured in stylish, sterile environments with their faces concealed; turned to a wall or a window as though the sight and the sounds were too much. Only Ronee Blakley, star of Robert Altman’s Nashville, gracing the cover of Interview from February 1977 - the last with Warhol’s name on the masthead - in the pastels of Richard Bernstein, trapped behind perspex, appeared to be listening.
This wouldn’t have happened at any other time. Blame Covid. Blame kidney stones. We needed a pastime during the national slumber. A weekly rehearsal took the place of the evening I gave to the ‘Over fifties and disabled’ session at the swimming pool. ‘You’re new here, so I should just let you know,’ an officious elder confided at my first session, ‘as a courtesy, we leave the fast lane for the epileptic.’ Several Baileys in Mr P was complimentary. He compared the situation to Johnny Rotten back there in a bleak mid-winter in the 1970s auditioning at Sex, with his take on, coincidentally - Eighteen. Mr P has taken the look and his passion for punk into his dotage, despite being born seven years before the event itself in 1976, the hottest summer of the century. It was apt that our third song, another cover, should be Johnny Mathis Feet. In a spoken refrain I paraphrase the original: ‘Johnny, looked at Dave’s old collection of punk rock posters/Anonymous scenes of disaffection chaos and torture.’
Mr P collects Jamie Reid posters and punk artefacts. He’d just sold a Sex cowboys t-shirt - Tom of Finland figures with cocks exposed and touching - that belonged to Gene October. It was torn, tiny and musty. I swear I witnessed him wearing it at a Chelsea show in the last century. I was fifteen in 1976. Over the following year, I trawled those clubs for anyone that channelled the Glam sensibility in fashion and pop music that supported me through a Seventies adolescence. The pickings were sparse. Yet bliss it was in that summer to be alive. Occasionally you come across people that recall the oddness of that season as the young will one day remember the age of Covid.
The diminutive, silver-haired receptionist at the surgery for instance. Now a grandmother, she was once the only punk in her village. Now she feared being furloughed. Soon the divide would begin between those that willingly complied to whatever rules were imposed and those that wouldn’t, as rituals rapidly hardened into traditions whether it was wearing masks, clapping in a doorway or taking the knee. Under different circumstances many would have objected, but now the minority that did were pariahs.
Proust observed that for each illness a doctor cures they instil a virus in ten others more powerful than the microbe: the idea that one is ill. Those that could afford to endure the restrictions accepted the idea that they were ill. The surgery receptionist complied. She wore the mask and kept her distance. She played by the rules but remembered when she didn’t, as the only punk in the village. ‘On some mornings,’ she once told me. ‘I still listen to Atrocity Exhibition in the shower.’
Mr P had been in bands years earlier, long before he became a neighbour. A stranger recently asked if he’d like to front a Billy Idol tribute band. I was never in a band. Never had the nerve, the nous, the overview or the talent. Not that this bothered many bands back then. They got up and did it, churning out songs about unemployment, lack of prospects. No future. Looking back, their generation don’t mean a thing to me. Or does it? When I listen to anything produced in that season it’s never the music and rhymes I played at the time, apart from Low. The words from that year that touch me now never reached me back then: Hejira. Robert Ashley’s Private Parts. Larkin’s Aubade.
Mr P suggested I write a song. Over time I’d become adept at essays and articles, there was even a book and TV scripts, the song lyric was something altogether different. What to write about at this age. The lack of prospects? Being unemployable in any other industry when the writing finally dries up. No future. No pension for me. Grant put it so succinctly, so sweetly, in her young, alt-pop Swedish way when she chorused: I don’t recall growing old. Hemingway said old men don’t grow wise they grow careful. He solved the issue of his future in his dotage by picking up a gun and pulling the trigger.
Help the aged. It’s not necessarily who they are or how they feel, but how they’re perceived. Your sin is not merely being old and sticking around, but harbouring ideas with hopes of acting on them. Bringing creative thoughts to fruition in the form of, say, a song. What to sing about at this age? An absence of prospects. No future, literally. (‘The end is nearer than the beginning,’ I sing on the self-penned John’s Gone.) Which wasn’t the case when you were young white punks on dope and snakebite, or Blitz Kids in doublet and hose and blusher. At this age you’re falling apart - bones, muscles, joints, nerves. You’re more in command of your record collection than your faculties, if you still collect vinyl. I don’t. It went the way of all things/flesh aeons ago - love, sex, hair, homes, parents, siblings.
Old age brings artists, bands, performers, composers to the ’late style’ era of their career where, after an impressive and evolved body of work, themes relating to their age take centre stage: illness, reminiscence, regret, loss; musings about The End. But what if age make these your subjects, but they are delivered with all the clumsy, naive, amateurishness of a band just starting out? One that has formed in its late-style/late-works phase, without all that has gone before?
The name of this band is HUSBAND.
A friend of the late Gilbert Adair told me the author used to list his ailments whenever he met someone new. He called it ‘the organ recital’. Warhol said he never fell apart because he had never come together. With this in mind there came two more songs. Originals……FINALLY. My Golden Years is a take on the forced redundancy of a life in its later decades; Memento Mori, a song about the end, when some of us will go without a big finish as both Bowie and Karl Lagerfeld opted to do. No ceremony. No eulogy: ‘Let me smoke and let me burn/ Take the ashes from this urn/Throw them in the face/Of someone that I hate.’
The one time I attempted to write lyrics was back in 1975. I had a much older, smarter mate who, in hindsight, may have been grooming me. And if not - why not? Was it the ginger thing? He was also poor and common, but attended grammar school so he could not only read but write as well. He knocked out lyrics in joined-up writing. Biro. Foolscap. The titles were lost on me, one whose voice had yet to break, whose balls had yet to drop: Confrontation (Teenage-Style). It’s All In The Wrist Action. We took a bus across the river to the west end and the Private Stock record label on Savile Row, where Abercrombie & Fitch now stands. The Beatles Apple Corps HQ was opposite. The door and portico coated in graffiti from the hands of fans. The men at the record company were decked out in Jean Machine, with hair that belonged in Godspell. They politely lifted us from the pistachio green leatherette chairs in their office, and escorted us off the premises when we informed then we couldn’t sing, play an instrument or read music. Within a year they would be scouring the clubs for those without these qualifications in a bid to sign them. Within weeks a poem we’d written as a paean to the pop music we loved was ‘Letter Of The Week’ in Record Mirror. We signed ourselves Groucho & Kemo Sabe, hoping to be the next Cheech & Chong. Even at that tender age we knew that in the face of failure, mockery, bullying - be funny.
When the publisher of Arena Homme commissioned a diary on the making of this band, he said be funny. When Mr P suggested I write more lyrics he said be funny. Wit, irony, sarcasm are the failsafes when it comes to lyric-writing late in life, especially when serious emotions creep in relating to loss, grief, death, illness. When you’re confronted with the news that so many others got there first and did it better, you can always say you were only joking. It’s funny.
‘It reminds me of The Smiths,’ said Mr R auditioning for the role of bassist when rehearsals branched out to the local cricket club. The band raided the bar, ditching Baileys for Stingers (Noel Coward’s cocktail of choice in The Astonished Heart ). Mr R, an accountant, favoured Breton jumpers and cheap, badly branded cakes bought at the garage en route. He’d played in tribute bands. Never Married reminded him of Morrissey: ‘It’s funny’. Arguably this was a comment on the shortcomings of the pop music industry as, despite itself having gone beyond middle age, it had produced so few bands with well-crafted songs defined by wit, irony, sarcasm and pathos. To list a few, and in no particular order: Sparks. The Smiths. Babybird. Roxy Music. Prefab Sprout. Pet Shop Boys. Pulp. PWR BTTM. Equally it was a comment on our lack of originality. Our one unique thought was that nothing we produced would be unique. A shortcoming due to our age and the ages we’ve lived through. We didn’t set out to emulate anyone but decided not to head off at the pass any lyric, title, riff reminiscent of anything produced by anyone else. Notably, those that saw us from 7-inch singles and 8-tracks, through Walkmans and CDs to MP3s and streaming. So yes, I guess we were a tribute band of sorts, and the name of this band is HUSBAND.
Mr P and Mr R are husbands and fathers, as were the numerous drummers we auditioned but didn’t recruit. We wanted brush strokes and subtlety, we got Whiplash wannabes who turned into Animal from ‘The Muppets’ when the chorus arrived. Fathers and husbands, as I say, none of whom took against Never Married, with lyrics suggesting it’s possible to live a satisfactory life without being completed by being in a couple or having sex. Or Mind That Child, a song inspired by the Cyril Connolly argument that children are the enemy of promise; the death of the muse. (‘I’d rather bring art into this world than life/I’d rather bring pop into this world than life’).
‘My first thoughts are - Morrissey,’ said the publisher of Arena Homme, on hearing Never Married. Comparisons were inevitable, regarding lifestyle choice rather than talent. We’re both on the wrong side of sixty; we’ve had a lengthy relationship with celibacy. If you’re a single, celibate, sixty year old man with a shoulder bag, society will cast you as an honorary gay. It doesn’t have the vocabulary or the breadth of vision to see you in any other light, despite the nature of the modern age. But we are rarely simply one thing. The last time I had climactic sex with a man the Spice Girls were on their third number one; the last time I had intercourse with a woman Take That were on their fourth. In the words of Never Married : ‘When it comes to love and lust/I started late and finished early.’
We covered Billie Eilish’s Wish You Were Gay. It has a lounge-like feel to it, with chiming guitars, a walking bass, and a tinkling piano that could be in the next apartment. We had five covers, and ten self-penned songs under our belt by the time we progressed to a recording studio, including a plaintive, Chopinesque nocturne about thwarted desire and impotence - The Night That Never Was (‘My big heart was willing/ A little part of me was weak’). Leaving the studio a band of a similar age, each of whom looked as though they’d consumed heavier and harder substances than Baileys and badly branded cakes from Budgens throughout the years. Transpired they were a Smiths tribute band. The guitarist, who looked more like Johnny Mathis than Johnny Marr, took me through the track and trace procedure. ‘Are you any good?’ he asked. ‘Probably not,’ I said. ‘But I guess being in a band is a bit like being ill. You stick it out in the hope that one day you’ll get better’.