Love, Death and the Crucial Three Update.

The proof arrived, and I wasn’t happy. Word was being weird (who’d’ve thunk), and although everything looked fine on the doc. There were enormous gaps in the text and often entire pages that were blank. After much gnashing of teeth, pitiful wailing, and threats of defenestrating the laptop, I finally sorted the problem out. The next proof is currently in the post.

So, while I’m waiting for that, how about a prologue?

Love, Death and the Crucial Three – Prologue (1986)

Grab life by the bollocks. That’s what we were told in ‘Weekends’ by The Mighty Wah. Pete Wylie was imploring us to do something new, exciting, different. Life is short. Embrace it.

The irony of living this song was that we did it in the same place at the same time each week, screaming out our wild life in the safe environs of The Vault.

We were small people from a small town, with a small outlook on life, continents away from the message but feeling it so, so deeply. The Vault was life.

It’s not hard to fathom out, really. We were young, and we were there every weekend, because it was the only place to be. The only place we would want to be. Weekdays are pub days. Weekdays have their charms, but Friday night? Saturday Night? We’re at The Vault.

It’s the atmosphere, sharpened by the yellow tang of nicotine, the blue of cigarette smoke and the sharp chemical kick of amyl nitrate.

It’s the noise; it’s the way the seismic bass and drums tear through your head, forcing your feet to move on sticky and beer-slicked floors. It’s the sweat dripping from the ceiling; a sweet miasma. It’s the camaraderie, the moving together, the stink of tribe.

And the music. Oh god, the music. It is tangible here. Each crotchet, each quaver piercing the skin, bringing each writhing body to ecstatic life.

It’s me and him, shirts off, dancing as if the turn of the Earth depended on us, sweat flowing like Angel Falls, the beer barely keeping the flow topped up. We move as one, lost in the rhythm, lost in each other, and nothing else matters. It’s like nowhere else on earth.

And then, one day, he’s gone.

The music changed. The songs changed. They feel empty, and the world has stopped turning.

He’s gone, and I grasp at anyone, anything that will give me the same kind of comfort. Amyl gives way to ecstasy, ecstasy to acid, acid to things I don’t even want to think about and even then, there is nothing but void.

And I lose myself. 

And that, my friends, is the beginning of Jake Porter’s troubles…