The end justifies the means.

August 12th 2007 6.00pm

Afterwards in the dressing room everyone is feeling very pleased with themselves and Simon whips out a bottle and some plastic cups to make a toast to the end of the band.
Back in the mists of time after he had auditioned for the Neurotics and we told him he had got the job, we toasted the acquisition of our new drummer with a bottle of Pomaigne!
Now at the end of our career we say goodbye to the band with a bottle of Cava.

We certainly know how to push the boat out.

But this was not about grand gestures, we know what the band has meant to us and it is not measured in the contents of a bottle of alcohol.

From this point on, people approach me back stage, I attend the festival the following day and they approached me on several occasions there and I even got stopped at a motorway service station by people who want to tell me how much they enjoyed the set and if it is really true that it is the end.
They make me laugh, they approach and say “Sorry to bother you but…” No one is ever bothering me if they are telling me how much they have enjoyed the Neurotics.
They would be bothering me if they were coming over to tell me how shit they thought we were but fortunately they don't.

The strange thing about this years gig is that everyone thought the hour we were on stage flew and it seemed like half the time. It certainly felt like that to me and the rest of the band, but we were performing so I suppose it would seem like that to us. However I kept bumping into people who immediately said the same, our crew felt the same way too. Last year we played the same length of set and no-one said it seemed short. It may be because we never got to play ‘Kick Out The Tories’ but that was because some of the other numbers we did were longer than what we performed in 2006.

There was a Quantum singularity on that stage I swear and time was warping for us all.

Just like last year, Clare, Rosa and myself decide to stay on for the Sunday and we spend the day hanging out in the Pirate bar (Yo Ho Ho, let’s go! There I go again, any excuse!) and catching the odd band, like the Adicts, who finished off the festival.

We also managed a visit to the top of Blackpool Tower. Whilst at the top I gazed back at the Winter Gardens hundreds of feet below and could still see hundreds of punks outside, they looked like smoker ants swarming around their hill crying ‘God Save The Queen’ whilst doing a curious dance as they followed intricate trails of larger.

I sauntered around to the other side of the tower to look out at a ruby red sunset. I knew we would be leaving soon and I, like all who have made this annual trek to punk heaven had a heavy heart, I knew I would leave part of me here, forcing me to think of it at totally unpredictable moments.
But unlike some British towns which try to seduce you into thinking you could live there for ever if you had the money, Blackpool is more honest, it treats you as transient and asks you for what ever you have got.

For the people who live and earn their living there it is probably a totally different town. But we will never know that, because we are going home, where ever that may be.

Squinting through the sunset I gazed out to sea and wondered what was out there. Isle of man first, then Ireland and then America. Hmmm.
I then realised that I still had to finish my blog and that it was probably going to go on for a while before concluding.
I thought hard about how I was going to end it. I imaged myself at home at my computer tapping out the final lines and I imaged it would end something like, this...


1963

Later I got bored with being in my room and went downstairs for a change of scenery. I placed myself down in my usual place, on a pouffe in-between my parents to watch the TV with the coffee table in front of me. I leafed through the magazines with little interest and yawned at the programmes they were had on as they held little facination for me. Eventually, at some point my dad would make a sarcastic remark to my mum or he would criticise the cup of tea she had just made him ,anything at all really and off they would go sniping at one another until it was a full scale blazing row, accusation and retort back and forth over my head till mind was ringing with ricocheting bullets of distorted facts that made up the rationale of his idiotic logic.

Trouble is they were a double act. Although my mother was never the driving force behind these acts of demoralisation she was the straight man in this duet of misery. Just like it is impossible for a tennis player to play without an opponent, my parents arguments also relied on each other to play out this game of spite. However where the tennis player needs to anticipate the next move of their opponent; they knew the combinations of outcomes so much that there were no surprises left in this tournament of the tormented. It was a well worn formulae and I too knew it inside out, you just needed to replace certain key elements for the rowing to start from and then it was predictable from then on. However this ball of confusion never touched the ground, it just got hit back and forth with great accuracy with me in the middle. The looser would be the one who finally burst into tears. That would be my mum mostly but it also included both my sisters and myself. You couldn’t beat him, this was his raison d'être and he would have infinite reservoirs of energy to wear you down and grind you into the dust. He was the ultimate long distance arguer. The weirdest thing was I don’t remember him swearing, at least when I was there, that means instead of this being a rage of passion, it was cold and controlled, maximum spite, minimum swearing, ‘to stop the boy picking up bad language’. This was akin to the police interrogation methods in the Seventies of beating confessions out of defendants through a pillow so their faces wouldn’t look bruised in the courtroom the following day. And if the battlefield should fall silent for any space of time, the television would elbow it’s way back into our consciousness filling our heads with now more meaningless words because they had lost all context and therefore had no value at all to our existence , if they ever had.
If there happened to be something on the television that interested me I would try to concentrate on it through a crackling and hissing rage within me and I’d try for all my worth to cut out the white noise of infantile strife. I never managed it though, I didn’t have the self control. If I could have cut half the noise out it might have been somewhere near tolerable but the TV, like my parents could never be switched off.

Unable to bear it any longer I would take myself off to my room and lose myself once again in comics and toys. Later in my life, when my sisters left home, I got their big room which was situated directly above the living room. When I'd had enough of their auguring and came upstairs I could still hear their muffled bloodletting rising up through the floor. Headphones had just appeared in England at this point and I knew why they had been invented. I’d put them on to my head and they wouldn’t come off until it was time to go to bed. Later it would be an amplified guitar that would keep this hateful noise at bay and provide an umbilical cord to reason and sanity.

For now, the comics and toys would simply have to do.

Finally as the weekend came to a close and Harlow prepared to move a further week away from being a ‘New Town’ my mother would kiss my slumbering cheek and with a sigh, shuffle off, to once again sleep with the enemy.