TRACK 53 I’m Partial to Your Abracadabra

I saw online that the Angelic Upstarts had just played a historic gig in South Shields and wondered if there was any way I could get Melissa to see them. I emailed the band through their website and explained I had a friend who loved their music but wouldn’t go to any of their shows because of their use of a pig’s head to represent police brutality. Gaz Stoker, the bass player who also played with Red London and Red Alert, wrote back to me. He explained that Mensi, the vocalist, got the pig’s head at an abattoir and that they didn’t have a pig slaughtered especially for them. It was strictly for sending an anti-police message. But I knew Melissa couldn’t tolerate seeing them kick a pig’s head about like it was a football.

“That was a lovely thought anyway,” Melissa said when I told her. We were downstairs listening to CDs. Melissa had introduced me to the Argies, an Argentinian punk band she loved who’d been around for over twenty years and were like the Clash in Spanish, and two Clash-influenced Japanese punk bands called the Star Club and the Strummers.

Now I put on the official live Clash release From Here to Eternity. “You know this part?” I played “City of the Dead,” waiting while Joe and Mick harmonized at the end of the first verse, “and I wished I could be like you / Soho river drinking me down.” “I always sing it as, ‘and I went down to be like you,’” I said. “I sang it to the people in my head to promise them I’d always be there. That I’d never let them down. I guess I’m singin’ it to you.”

My favorite version of “City of the Dead” was from the Agora in Cleveland, Ohio, on February 14, 1979. It had the best harmonies and the most expansive lead guitar by Mick Jones. I got it off a bloke flogging cassettes on the side of the road between the Camden Town tube and Camden Lock in 1980. I bought a bunch of Clash, Jam, and Pretenders tapes from him. He let me listen to the quality on his Walkman. That’s how we did it then, before CDs and the Internet. Melissa had a copy of the same concert, with slightly better audio, from an online Clash site.

Melissa had gone out to the shops when Nick came in. Because Melissa had been honest with her about the rape, I decided I would tell Nick the truth about what had brought me to London in the first place. We sat on her bed.

“So that’s why you followed me that night,” Nick said after I’d told her how I thought I’d recognized her as one of my voices. “And thank God you did.”

“I needed to find out who you were,” I said. “I wanted to know you. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Mind? You probably saved my life that night. And it did feel like divine fucking providence when you suddenly appeared on that shite lit’le street sputtering inaccurate British idioms,” Nick laughed.

“You remember that?”

“I thought you were daft,” Nick gave me a playful shove, “fannying about, falling over that motor.” We both started giggling, and I shoved her back. “I thought to meself, oh no, this daft cunt is gonna get us both killed. You daft, silly plank.” Nick grabbed me and shook me affectionately. Then she threw her arms around me as I dissolved in paroxysms of laughter.

When Melissa returned, I was sitting at the computer downloading Oasis concerts. Nick had gone out clubbing with some mates, but I wanted an early night. Melissa came up behind me and put her hands on my shoulders. “Oh my God,” she said, leaning her head down next to mine and peering at the computer screen, “Oasis? And bloody hell, what’s this? Pictures of Oasis? You’re saving Oasis bloody pictures on my hard drive?”

“I can’t help it,” I said. “I love them.”

“You love them?”

“I love Liam and Noel.”

Melissa looked over my shoulder at the Oasis website I was on, and read a quotation from Liam Gallagher out loud. “‘My songs are the best fucking songs in the world—I write the best fucking songs in the world.’ Lovely.”

“I know they’re arrogant bastards, but they play and sing so sweet.”

I played her “Better Man,” “Born on a Different Cloud” and “Stop Crying Your Heart Out” from a favorite concert in Finsbury Park, July 7, 2002 with brilliant sound quality. And I played her the electric version of “Don’t Go Away” from a 1997 concert in Manchester, even though that song is a rip-off of the Real People song “Feel the Pain.” I played her “Slide Away,” “Morning Glory,” “Rockin’ Chair” and “I Hope, I Think, I Know.”

“Influenced by the Beatles much?” Melissa asked.

“Can you think of anyone better?” I played her a stinging live version of “D’you Know What I Mean?” The lyrics, “All my people right here, right now,” had always made me think of the people in my head. My people. I put on an early mix of “Better Man,” following that with covers of the Jam’s “Carnation” and the Who’s “My Generation.” Then I played a song Noel sang that always moved me, “Shout It Out.” Finally I put on the song that had made me start listening to Oasis in the first place, a bootleg version of Noel Gallagher singing “Live Forever” by himself with an acoustic guitar.

Melissa sighed. “It’s beautiful. I can’t deny it.”

I stood up and put my arms around her waist. “Remember that night we watched the horror video and I annoyed you by asking if you were sleeping with Martin?”

“Me? Annoyed? I don’t get annoyed,” Melissa laughed.

“I was lying next to you, and in my head I heard Liam singing ‘Songbird.’ The lines ‘A man can never dream these kind of things / especially when she came and spread her wings’ really got to me. I thought of the magnitude of the gift getting to be with you would be, and I just hoped he appreciated you.”

“That’s so sweet.” Melissa touched my face. “I’m sorry I made it hard for you.”

I rocked Melissa in my arms and put my head on her shoulder. “Well, all I was asking you to do was change your entire life.”

We listened to “Live Forever” again. During the last chorus, instead of singing “Maybe you’re the same as me, / we see things they’ll never see,” Noel sang, “Maybe you’re the same as me, / you take two sugars in your tea, / you and I are gonna live forever.”

And Melissa shouted, “Maybe you’re the same as me, you take six sugars in your tea!”