Love Death and the Crucial Three – Extract One.

February 2020

There are six words that have followed me around for my entire life. Just six. Not a mantra. I doubt I’m the only one with these words rattling around my head, but standing in front of the Grand Regal Hotel, trying to pluck up the courage to check in, they hit me. Full force. No mercy.

“What the fuck am I doing?”

I had been told that the hotel had been built on the site of ‘The Vault.’ Deb and I had spent most of our time at The Vault, both as club goers and latterly as staff. There had always been drugs. Every nightclub in town had been allocated a dealer from the so-called drug barons. You could get practically anything if you went to the right cubicle in the toilets or if you sat in the right booth – the one with a shady-looking guy, looking out of place in a shiny suit. What was it with shiny suits anyway? Ben Elton has a lot to answer for! 

With the “Just say no” campaign in full swing, the police here in the UK were forced to act., and if the police want a crack-down on anything, they’ll persecute the subcultures first. It’s like they don’t believe that ‘normal’ people could poison their bodies so. At The Vault, it was mostly speed and weed. If they’d gone to the townie mecca of “Bonnie and Clyde’s”, they would have found coke, MDMA and worse.

The Vault was demolished with obscene haste after its closure. This led to a variety of conspiracy theories about backhanders and bribes, but nothing that would ever stand up to scrutiny. 

Naturally, there were tears from the Goth and Indie kids, with Deb and me leading the requiem. Without the focus of The Vault, the Goth and indie scene all but died, usurped by “Dance Music.” “Dance Music” was a term I loathed. What had we been doing to the goth and indie stuff? Swimming?

The city had lost something beautiful and gained, in its place, a vacant lot and a temporary car park. It had taken almost twenty years for the site to be redeveloped. 

I stared at the hotel for a moment. 

I could see The Vault with absolute clarity.

On alighting from the tram that had taken me from the railway station to the hotel, I looked across the street. The black door that looked like the entrance to a prison cell, complete with an eye hole, had gone. The half pebble-dashed, half stone-clad wall, seemingly designed to take in the rain directly to the dancefloor, was replaced by towering panes of frosted glass. The sweating walls, the sticky floors were now architecturally sound and clad in honey coloured wood. The neon sign that never quite worked – it would give up trying, with studied boredom, after illuminating three or four letters. Sometimes it would be “T E VA,” sometimes “HE LT,” sometimes “T E V U T,” but never, ever the whole name – replaced by crisp, LED-lit, embossed, gilt signage.

The tramlines had taken on a mirrored sheen as drizzle fell, reflecting the neon signs that screamed against the oncoming night. The streets were lined with disco rope lights.

It was good to see that my hometown had come to life again after the devastation caused by Thatcherism, but this was an artificial life. Real people and their real histories had been erased for a slew of upmarket boutiques, artisan bakers, and microbreweries. 

A sudden nostalgia, on the part of the council and several redevelopment companies, had seen the street move from tarmac and potholes to cobblestones and tramlines—false heritage. There had never been cobbles here, but now the people in power squawked about traditional values and reclaiming the past for future generations. It was cynical gentrification, nothing more.

I felt my anger rising. There were plenty of other run-down streets, some that had actually had cobbles. Why choose this street to ransack? Why remove everything that was important to me for the sake of some designer outlets and a few backhanders? 

Eventually, I crossed the street, took a deep breath, and walked into the hotel lobby.

Six words? 

Living in the bones of my past for the next five days. That’s what.

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Love. Death, and the Crucial Three is available on Amazon in print and Kindle formats from February 2nd, 2026.

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Note: As much as I’m against the use of AI in creative endeavours, illustrating these posts is a ballache, not being able to draw and having no photos from the 80s that don’t incur copyright fees. So I’m having reluctant fun, the prompt was “create an image using the prompt ‘Love, Death and the Crucial Three.’ Set it in the mid 1980’s and keep away from lovehearts and religious imagery.”