Psycho will provide towels

Back in 77/78, the New Regent was Brighton's main punk venue - a long, narrow, cramped bar smelling of leather and beer. (It features in this evocative piece by Gwyneth Jones.) Me and some other underage mates would go every week, seeing acts like X-Ray Spex, Penetration, Slaughter and the Dogs... one week we went to see Adam and the Ants who weren't allowed to play because one of them was underage. But the most memorable act was a local band called Psycho Normal and his Stiff Victims. They were flamboyant, entertaining, surprising and simply exploding with energy. With hindsight I can see their cocktail of pre-punk influences - early Who, the Bonzos, Alex Harvey - a richer brew than that served by many of the three-chord merchants of the time. The set included songs about Aleister Crowley and the Marquis de Sade, standard punky stuff about the delights of low-paid work, and absurd humour. We later discovered that they were even more local than we thought - not just a Brighton band, like the Depressions or the Piranhas, but a band with Portslade connections - as their leader Graeme Hobbs aka P. Normal lived in Abinger Road and worked by day at the Southdown coachworks.

A bunch of us took to hanging round at Graeme's house, listening to records and songs in progress, sometimes to the annoyance of his family and neighbours. We would put up posters and generally act as a sort of Baker Street Irregulars.

All of this was a scarily long time ago. Recently I decided to see if I could track Graeme down on the interweb, reasoning that he may have left some cyber spoor, and thinking if he was still around Portslade I might be able to lure him out for a drink. I had heard that he had been in another band, Tricks Upon Travellers, who have a MySpace page. Unfortunately I never saw this group, for who could resist a 'cross between Fairport Convention and Iggy Pop'. The comments mentioned Graeme's departure for Spain, and referred to 'Casa Zalama', which I assumed to be a village, but which turned out to be a 'casa rural' (sort of b&b/hotel in the countryside) owned by Mari-Cruz Totorico and... Graeme!

Fascinated by the possibility of staying in an establishment run by Psycho Normal (who if memory serves once beheaded a teddy bear filled with stage blood sacs, and would regularly bound around wearing sheep's head codpiece (or was it a cod's head sheeppiece)) I researched the possibilities. Cunningly I showed Jennie the gorgeous pictures and ecstatic reviews, and let her suggest that perhaps we could go there. At that point I whipped out the (surprisingly reasonable) tariff that Mari-Cruz had emailed over, and mused aloud that yes, perhaps Jennie's idea of going there was in fact feasible.

And so, thanks to punk rock and the Internet, our 2007 holiday was planned. We had many odd conversations in he run-up to the trip: 'I expect Psycho will give us tourist information'; 'I'm sure Psycho will provide towels'; 'I wish Pscyho had drawn a clearer map'.

The reality proved to be delightful. Graeme's philosophy of rock n role mayhem hasn't influenced his approach to hospitality - in terms of food, comfort, and attractiveness Casa Zalama is quite simply one of the best places we have been.

There were of course reminiscences. Graeme produced a comic I drew 30 years ago, satirising his verbal mannerisms, hairstyle and penchant for fearsomely strong tea. I had completely forgotten this work (produced as a pre-Facebook distraction from homework.) My ability to write and draw has evaporated since then - I'll try and get a scan of it to prove that I once had these skills.

My Zap Years

Receiving an invitation to celebrate '25 Years of Cultural Innovation' at the Zap Club in Brighton has left me feeling a mixture of nostalgia and excitement. But I find I'm unsettled too - as if I've accidentally picked up an unwieldy mass of strangeness that I don't quite know what to do with - a bundle of odd things I had forgotten over the past quarter-century. (Something like: a tangle of fishing nets, tinsel and unspooled C90 cassette tape, smelling of seawater and stale beer...)

In those days (early 80s) the Zap Club was a venue for 'comedy, cabaret, poetry, film, installation, dancing, theatre, music, street art, pantomime, alternative circus' with much audience involvement, often cross-programming these genres - so an audience might experience a juggler, a comedian, a performance artist and a band all in one night. After a period based in various venues, two arches beneath the seafront road and right on the beach were converted to be a permanent home.



My Zap career began simply enough. I was watching a boxing match in my girlfriend's flat when Neil Butler, one of the Zap directors, ran to ask if I'd like to do some cleaning at the newly-opened club - he had seen a performance piece I'd done on a cleaning theme and thought the work would appeal to me. (This was very much the modus operandi of the organisation - getting mates and artists to do things rather than professionals. Recruiting an unemployed graduate who had once done a performance about cleaning, rather than, say, an actual cleaner, was one of the more normal business decisions.)

Aside: My cleaning performance was inspired by part-time office cleaning jobs I had whilst at college. The process appealed to me on many levels. Being in buildings after hours, not part of the real purpose of the place but a sort of nightside crew; the repetitive ritualistic actions; the occasional moments of surrealism, such as entering a floor that had until the previous night been full of desks, filing cabinets, shelves and the traces of people's lives (kids photos on partitions and comedy coffee cups) and finding it completely empty apart from 10 telephones on the carpet - the reality seemed like performance art, so turning it back into an artwork was tempting. I recall mixing a bucket of Alka Seltzer and drinking it, most of it going on the floor where various electrical items were lying; setting fire to a Christmas angel by fire-eating with methylated spirits; rainbow arcs of cleaning materials everywhere. No Health & Safety Risk Assessments in those days - just good honest entertainment.

I was the cleaner there for two years, my first full-time job. I also did maintenance, bar work, compering, performance, and publicity - the latter a mostly voluntary add-on which I have somehow parlayed into a career in marketing.

The cleaning part was occasionally challenging. Let me just say that I dealt with anything which might emerge from a human body, placed everywhere that such things don't belong. I must have swept up tons of broken glass and cigarette ash, leavened with the detritus of the Zap's peculiar programme: if the trash didn't include something like a sequinned jockstrap, 17 dead fish painted fluoresecent pink, and a broken euphonium, the previous night had probably been a private hire for an accountant's birthday party.

Amidst all of this I got to meet lots of great people, such as Kathy Acker, Pete McCarthy, Forced Entertainment, Ivor Cutler, Ken Campbell, Billy Childish, the People Show, dozens more. I got drunk, fell in and out of love, made lifelong friends, repainted the walls, killed rats, ruined a pair of Simon Fanshawe's trousers by leaving a freshly-painted table in a corridor, learned to be vaguely entertaining, improvised woodwork, poured drinks, ate microwaved lasagne and tomato crisps, helped present amazing acts, and cleaned up the next day.

It was an unforgettable time.

And yet I don't always put the Zap Club on my CV - sometimes that slot is filled with the blandly sinister 'Gresham Associates' (the off-the-shelf company name of the four directors who had invested to create the Club in its permament premises) coyly described as an 'arts organisation'. Somehow the Zap feels like a chink in my symbolic armour, like turning up for an interview in a standard suit and tie, but wearing mascara or riding a unicycle. My fear is that if I did list it, next to a string of local authorities and polytechnics, someday a Vice-Chancellor or somesuch would boomingly ask what this 'Zap Club' was all about. What would I describe? Hurling a burning sculpture into the sea, with artist Roland Miller and some men from an airgun club who had stopped in for a drink and become embroiled in a performace art spectacle? Attaching lychees to the outstretched fingers of a blindfolded audience member on one of Ian Smith's unwisely-named 'Abuse Nights' ('Hold out your fingers madam... here comes the eyeball')? Having a curiously normal conversation about Eastbourne with the (completely naked) Neo Naturists in the (ironically named that evening) dressing room? Or one of the weird nights?

And yet maybe I should mention it. Thinking about it now, that sprawling, UV-lit, Seven Hundred Drunken Nights period taught me a lot. From that crucible of hedonism, creativity, enterprise and fun I emerged with an unquenchable sense that the the show must and shall happen; even without boring things like budgets or plans, amazing unpredictable lovely things can be brought into being; take a bag of mad ideas and pursue them with utter conviction; even if you have no script for what you're going to say or do or why, you can walk on to the stage, do your three minutes,

provisionally

solve

the

equation

of

love.