The Wit & Wisdom of Andrew Weatherall

But if that time comes when London doesn't hold that (allure) it'll be the seaside. The peeling paint of what was once a thriving place. 

There's nothing better than the faded glory of British seaside town in the winter time.

- Andrew Weatherall

Whatever happened to Napalm Shakedown? - In the beginning, there was nothing

Like a misguided intercontinental missile…

They shot across the Sussex night sky on the early evening of Thursday 27^th May 1982 only to immediately implode somewhere over Cross Levels. Napalm Shakedown were the ultimate one gig wonder!

No recordings, demos, ticket stubs or posters survive. A couple of murky images of young men in dark brown army shirts with severe Afrika Korps haircuts, taken at the infamous Archery rehearsal may survive somewhere in a closely guarded and faded WH Smith’s photo album. But certainly, no photo of the White Horses pre-gig run through ever existed, nor do any polaroids from Mr T’s garage. Napalm Shakedown were barely there before they disappeared.

Or so, everyone thought. The gig had lasted barely 40 minutes. From the truth, a story emerged, from the story a myth, from the myth a legend, a legend which grew and grew. By the middle of August barely 2 months after the event, a small but devoted following had evolved. Rumours of a whole rehearsal session recorded on a simple cassette player circulated – the legendary Archery Tapes. 

Within a year Napalm Shakedown were being quoted as a major influence on bands as far away as East Kilbride and Truro, Norwich & Shrewsbury. Imagine a post-punk, proto-funk Velvet Underground and you would be somewhere near the mark – all without a Warholesque Svengali pulling the strings or a Nicoesque chanteuse adding a hint of Nordic glamour to the proceedings.

The NapShack (as they had swiftly become known) saga continued to dilute and regenerate throughout the decade. Even as the former band members joined different outfits and forged new careers, the NS (as they later became barely known) virus mutated more and more…

By Jack Nash

(from the forthcoming book - Whatever happened to Napalm Shakedown? - 

Due out late 2023 on Soul Bay Press subsidiary 'Clandestino'

Day in the life...

A Moment in Meads 

(Part 2)

--The storm raged

black sky, silver

lightning, strobing

out over the Channel.

The silhouette of 

The Grand Hotel

flickering.

-- In Meads,

on the third floor,

a window was open.

Her back, bare and

tanned. Her hair

tied in a ponytail.

--The wine was finished.

He would always 

remember this night.

Day in the life...

The End of Days

-- An Empire built

on a shifting tide.

Intimacy swamped

by the dark waves

of imminent night.

Fog horns sound.

-- The South Goodwin

Lightship released

from Poseidon's 

relentless grip.

No more

no more

no more.

Day in the life...

Orpheum

Found myself 

in the cinema

slightly drunk

mid-afternoon.

The long walk

from happiness

to Seaford Head.

-- The battle

with the bottle --

Staring into

rockpools and 

chalk caves.

The delicate

twist of an

ozone breeze

gliding North

--- Time to take 

a deep breath

a small step.

Day in the Life...

Long Island

-- We know the route.

Down the path, alongside

the empty house.

--- Footprints in the snow.

On top of the coal bunker.

On the garage roof. 

In, through 

the landing window.

The immersion heater

left on, ever since.

The smell of fresh 

radiator paint.

---- Radio 4 on 

in the kitchen.

Night broadcasts

silent bedrooms,

the Priory.

The inevitable,

hovering ---

A shadow over

Long Island.

* Langney is derived from the Anglo-Saxon words Lang and ey for 'Long Island'.

Day in the Life... (September 2020)

Isolation

-- Communiques

are fading

in the ether,

in dawn's

evaporating

mystery.

The final

notes of

a symphony

disappearing

on the neap tide.

---- A ship

goes down

all hands on

deck -----

Love's final voyage.

Day in the life of... (September 2020)

Onyx 

-- White crows arrive,

as the fret moves out.

The garden is yet to fall

to the clutch of the sea.

Grass stoached though.

An olympic white Fender

leans against the bookshelf.

Mustang ---

The notebooks red, filled

with black ink spider 

scrawl and sprawl. A long

black hair trapped

in the stapled pages. 

---- Tanned yet white,

long fingers stretch.

The songwriter looked down.

"Never can recall exactly

when this Onyx ring

came into our lives...

It changed everything"

Tea is ready, the fire is lit

and the whisky is 

just an hour away...

Stoach - To trample grass to mud (Sussex dialect).

Day in the life of a Poet (September 2020)

One day Summer

-- Shingle shards
dig deep into 
tanned back.

Alone with the 
pages browned 
by age and 
the sea mist
that drifts 
along Seaside
into my
open window ----
Moonraker.
--- Time to swim
before the call
and clamour.

I miss the
solitary days
on the beach 
below the 
Holywell Beach Huts.

--- In the quiet days
at the end of 
the affair.

Day in the life of a Poet (August 2020)

Curzon 2

- The review said

it was a film

about why love fails.

-- I don’t think 
I’ve got the

time to spare. But

I like the actors.

--- And it is set in Seaford

so I would love the setting.

A long Sunday walk 

on the shingle.

-- with lots of silent pauses

and looking out to sea.

Very me

very you.

The Dreams of Children

She was younger than me, by about a year or so. Corkscrew hair, funny, sharp and dangerous. We'd all get the bus to and from school, cramming about 400 kids into about 8 buses from outside the school gates. Got to get on the first bus!

The queue was always carnage: Bags, elbows, knees and heads - nothing was off limits. Got to get on the bus first!

Traveling via the Station and things could only get worse. Off one bus onto another. Got to get on the next  bus!

To be honest I can't even remember why I bothered to rush home. Nothing to do or eat when I got there, except play music - loud!

I suspect it was just about getting on the same bus as the girl with the corkscrew hair.

Lockdown - Day #28

Loose change jangling in Levi’s pockets. Chip shop vinegar on the tiled floor. The Blue Room beckons. A day spent watching Pete play Space Invaders, Air Hockey tournaments that went on for the length of the summer holidays.

Along the Langney side of the pier, beyond the midway bar with the girl from Nottingham handing out the free pints and expensive kisses. Tourists grip the side rails or hunker down in the deckchairs.

A small souvenir hut full of dull shells and inaccurate replicas of the pier. Stuffed seagulls and badly made beachballs.

The sound of money spinning out of the hands of the unemployed into the bingo-masters back pocket. 10cc’s maudlin hit plays on repeat. One day, some bastard is going to torch the whole lot and retire to the Canaries on the insurance…

Lockdown - Day #27

In the passenger seat, twiddling the radio dial, messing with the cassette player, trying to finesse the soundtrack of another day. The Mini/Triumph/Morris Minor/VW Golf glides up and down the seafront at dawn/dusk midday/midnight.

The girl at the wheel, the boy looking seawards. The postboxes are full of Valentine’s cards and the phone boxes echo to the latest dial-a-disc hit. 

Stop in the bus bay by the pier. "Just drop me here..."

Meanwhile the cassette finally plays the track he'd been searching for since Princes Park.

'If you ever feel the time to drop me a loving line
maybe you should just think twice
I don't wait around on your advice
You tell me I can go this far, but no more
Try to show me heaven and then slam the door
You offer shelter at a price much too dear
And your kind of love's the kind that soon disappears

So don't brag how you have changed
And everything's been rearranged
I thought all that was over and done
But I still get the same from Each and Everyone
Being kind is just a way to keep me under your thumb
and I can cry because that's something we've always done
you tell me I'm free of the past now and all those lies
then offer me the same thing in a different guise...'

Lockdown - Day #25

The flags on the pier are cowering from the horizon, bullied by the eternal sea fret. Marine Parade (an interloper in the Grand scheme of things), smothered by the worn rubber of a million tyres. The Corporation buses grinding full-on Leyland chug, from the Point to the Head and all stops in between.

A Deux Chevaux stutters and shudders from East Dean to Churchdale Road. It takes a boy and a girl to drive AND change gear. The cassette player chews the latest release by St Pancras Records.

"Hegemony, hegemony...

You are the fairest creature

You are the fairest creature that ever I have seen,

And it's all for Monopoly

On all those pretty sexibles/sensibles,

That rot and raise a nation the capacity for change

An honest day's pay for an honest day's work

You can't change human nature

Don't bite the hand that feeds you…"

Lockdown - Day #23

The taste of another Kronenbourg night reminds me where I am, not alone in a single bed. Dressed, out and up the steps back onto Marine Parade. Back over the rode giving the flying fists of The Crown & Anchor I wide berth.

The tide is inching back, the gulls are hopping from bin to KFC box. I can clearly make out the miles of anti-landing wire & wood rolling along the beach. All the way from the threat of Operation SeaLion to VE Day.

Six young men in two different bands, split into two teams and yet another rusted can of Pepsi is converted into an Adidas Mondial. A blur of tartan shirts, Levis and chukka boots. A brace of bikes stolen from outside the town centre Library are leaning gently against the dark blue railings. 

Final score: Hip Troop 13 v 12 Aztec Camera... 
(Based on time-honoured last goal stands tradition)

Lockdown - Day #22

It is tempting to leave the seafront and just pop into the Marine for a pint or two but we’ll leave that for Christmas Eve (or post cup-final lash ups). Equally tempting to pop into Fusciardi’s Ice Cream Parlour, all the while remembering Dayville’s ghastly but memorable Bubble Gum ice cream…

The rear of The Leaf Hall (never did know what it was for) looming over some rooftops, backrooms and bedrooms. The Seagulls starting to mass on the rooftops and railings. The humdrum, dead-drunk pubs become more plentiful.

Waking up in one of the back bedrooms, to the sound of gulls bending TV aerials and tapping against windows. Going to sleep in a damp basement flat, with the sound of taxi’s careening round the corner at club closing time, with the taste of Rico’s Special Burger on my lips.

Lockdown - Day #21

A young George Orwell escapes from his prep school (St Cyprian's) for an afternoon. He finds himself on the eastern side of the pier, he misses the tiny clutch of New Romantics edging their way home from Dixieland after another brush with the Soul Boys. He also fails to see Frederick Engels taking a lunchtime break from editing the Communist Manifesto.

Eric Arthur Blair (as he was then) is too busy looking at the fishermen selling their daily catch under the pier, meanwhile Douglas Bader and Tommy Cooper pass each other 45 years apart

Time strolls along the seafront. Sir Peter Blake's Butterfly Man barely visible in the distance. Roger Moore leaving his penthouse for a barely relaxing walk. The famous and notorious arm-in-arm, stretching the length and breadth of history...

All the while, the tide shuttles to the rhythm of the moon, relentlessly shimmying up and down the beach. Picking its way over the pebbles, seaweed and the daily decay...

Another day, another wedding ring lost at low tide.

Lockdown - Day #20

Meanwhile back on the other side of Royal Parade, the B&B’s and Guest Houses transform into Hotels (no motels or Holiday Inn’s). The number of potential party venues increase. Eighteenth and Twenty-first, Wedding receptions and cricket club dinner and dances. 

Inside the sound of Southern Freeze warps minds. I don’t know what this is but I have to dance to it… On the road itself, the itchy/scratchy sound of FS1E (Fizzy’s) ricochet between the parked Capris and Allegros. The Hailsham Boys are in town, all Saxon and Iron Maiden. 

Meanwhile, Claude Debussy takes his daily walk along the promenade with his inamorata the young Emma. His life in exile only enlightened by the memory of her delicate kisses in the morning and the music of the sea… the eternal music of the sea!

Lockdown - Day #19

The smell of the seafront, all damp salt, John Player Special and the distant tang of Sarsons. Above our heads the row of lights sails on to Holywell. 

Jumping down on to the shingle, loose stones tumbling towards the dried upper sand. The permanently waterlogged groynes, used as wind-shelters, goals and wickets. 

The arc of the stone from hand to sea.

Lockdown - Day #17

Torn old copies of the Eastbourne Gazette and Herald, smudged newsprint and yellowing paper stuffed under the seat of THAT seafront shelter. The ripped clothes and the naked body of a girl on the beach. It is Christmas Day and the Sussex Constabulary swarm over the cold windswept pebbles. Still remembered and still try to say a prayer for her on Christmas Day. Poor Nicole (RIP).

Another winter and THAT shelter is home to a different kind of tragedy. An old homeless man, regular visitor to Seaside off-licence, wrapped in differing editions of the Gazette/Herald, moves along the bench to a cold teenage boy. Raised voices, a misunderstanding, shouting and the youth runs away towards Langney. It was just a misunderstanding.

The pace always quickens when walking by... So, time to move on from THAT shelter. Seagulls pirouette above, the sun silhouettes them high in the Sussex heavens and the (at first tinny) sounds of a ghetto-blaster reach out from above the shoulders of a group of golden souls… 

“Run for the shadows, run for the shadows

Run for the shadows in these golden years”