Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time: Chapter 21
An occasional series of possibly true scenes from a perfectly normal life. Let's call it faction.
Chapter 21: The Tale of Two Cities
(If you’re new to the book, you might want want to read the other chapters first. Links to each chapter are at the bottom)
4am in the alleyways of Barcelona’s Barri Gotic. Even Club Fantastic is closing down its sound system and ushering us out through the front door, but somehow, in the city which is determined to steal the title for never sleeping, the night is still young and hs much more to offer.
“Where now?” says the Radio Personality. Accounts of Marc Almond’s disreputable engagement with the parts of the city which don’t make the tourist guide are fresh in my mind, so I decide to test out what elements of his infamous nights’ out might have survived the 1992 Olympics clean up. I suggest we should seek out somewhere suitably ‘seedy’, but this is not an English word The Radio Personality is familiar with. I consider how to explain it.
“What we are looking for,” I suggest “is a bar full of American Sailors. Upon entry, we would be served flaming drinks by a person with a beard and comically sized breasts. As we collect our drinks and try to find a table, at a very minimum we should need to make our way carefully past a donkey.”
“Ah” responds the Radio Personality, “I know just where you mean”.
The One had led a very different life to my own. While my ring of acquaintances gradually settled into a relatively small group of people I had been in bands with, started venues with, put on tour, promoted, helped get up the stairs from Shuttleworths at some indescribably terrible time in the morning, she still knew all sorts of people from different parts of her life, including friends dotted all over the planet dating as far back as primary school. We had started visiting some of these in the late nineties, first attending a series of weddings, as they were all of a certain age, then moving on to the whackier end of her entourage. One of these, her oldest friend, had eventually settled in Barcelona in an unlikely tale that somehow involved a Fine Art degree, Gruff Rhys from Super Furry Animals, a shared flat, a mattress recovered from an alleyway, and simply deciding she wasn’t ready to leave yet.
This friend had developed a network of Catalans in the city she had decided to make her new home, all of whom seemed to be somehow involved in music or art or just goofing about. Two of them in particular, The Radio Personality and The Monk, had all sorts of odd projects going on which they conducted from the world’s best located apartment, a five bedroom, whole floor, slightly neglected mansion on Carrer Del Pi right in the centre of the the Barri Gotic. Despite its location, they had somehow managed to rent this colossal dwelling for the princely sum of about 400 euros a month, a rent that was so bizarrely low that people would come round to check the place out imagining it must be infested with rats. Or possibly a plague pit.
We started visiting Carrer del Pi so frequently that in at the turn of the millennium The Radio Personality asked me if we just wanted to rent one of the rooms. With my new career featuring an actual monthly fee which you could rely on, and a price for rent running to the princely sum of 80 whole euros a month, and bear in mind that at this time the rate of exchange was still hovering around the 1.5 euros to £1 mark, I quickly worked out that having a flat in the centre of Barcelona I could go to at any time was actually cheaper than going there every so often and paying for two nights in a hotel. Being the new, honoured guest, everyone agreed I should occupy the best bedroom in the house, which quickly revealed itself, in my first experience of adjusting to a very different culture, to be the entirely windowless internal room. Catalans favour darkness to sleep in, so a room with no chance of daylight is considered a treat. I persuade them that I’m not a vampire, and opt for a room with a balcony overlooking the bustling Placa de la Cucurulla instead.
Like most of the decisions I have ever made that would eventually turn into the whole of the story that makes up this book, my choice to rent a flat in Barcelona was made in approximately ten minutes and for no other reason than it seemed like a lot of fun. And was stupidly cheap. You can get a whole lot done doing daft cheap things.
Things were always happening in the Carrer del Pi. Musicians would drop in unannounced, videos were being captured, albums were being recorded, actors, writers, TV and Radio personalities would drop round. Initially I would spend time there once a month away from work, or at least trying to be detached from it, but very quickly the creative burble of the flat started to seep under the door to my room, offering all sorts of idiotic projects to become involved with. None of these looked like being a career, but they all looked like tremendous fun.
By the year 2000 my ongoing fight with my degenerative disease had been reaching a bit of a climax, seeing me ingesting vast quantities of daily pain management and anti-inflammatory drugs which, in turn, required the consumption of a second set of stomach settling medications to try to stop the prescribed interventions for my Ankylosing Spondylitis from tearing holes into my internal organs. As a consequence of the war going on inside my body, I had been forced to adapt to incredibly limited hours of sleep, normally 2 hour sessions of an average twice a night, but sometimes three on a really good night. In between these power naps I would pace around in circles or do stretching exercises, the purpose of which was to avoid the embarrassment of waking up as a statue. Nights of four straight hours of sleep would require The One to lever me into a standing position and were to be avoided. Luckily, if you’re going to not sleep anywhere, I strongly recommend staying awake in Barcelona, because something is always open and something is always happening.
In the late nineties and early noughties, the city still had a very open approach towards creativity, fun, and culture, which translated into a laissez-faire attitude towards where, when, and how it was permitted to take place. Later on, residents would force the city council and the mayor to clampdown on much of this activity, forcing it out to places on the edge of civilisation like Parc del Forum and Fira Gran Via. At this time all of the city’s biggest events, Sonar, Primavera, BAM, were still taking place right in the middle of residential neighbourhoods, underneath terraces which, far from being filled with angry neighbours complaining about the noise, were occupied by people who couldn’t believe their luck they were getting all this for free right outside their front room. It was not unusual to look up from the main stage of Sonar in the streets around CCCB at 3am and see balconies packed with families of all ages simply enjoying a great night out together. Barcelona was having a proper, adult, discussion with itself about what type of city this was and who it belonged to. A conversation which it sadly, like too many of the world’s cities, went on to lose.
These night time activities were built on an exclusively Catalan view of time, which I have never encountered anywhere else in the world. In Catalunya, time is optimistic. If it’s 2.15, it’s un quart de tres - one quarter of three. You are looking forward to when it will be the next hour, and time is calculated and considered in that forward facing way. One quarter of three, two quarters of three, three quarters of three, hooray… it’s three o’clock! Even more confusingly, fractions of this time methodology are calculated by how near or far you might be from the next quarter marker. The time 2.36 is therefore expressed either as two quarters plus six minutes of three, or as three quarters minus nine minutes of three. Which you choose I have always imagined depends on the level of your optimism that day.
As a by-product of this interesting approach to the hours of the day, Catalans, and particularly those of an artistic bent, have a very brief and cursory relationship with punctuality. ‘See you this afternoon’ incorporates a period of time somewhere between 2pm and 8pm. ‘See you this evening’ might be any time between 7pm and midnight. ‘See you tonight’ is an invitation to ingest most of the caffeine output of South America and prepare yourself to get to bed at about 8am. My first invitation to dinner in a restaurant with The Monk was proposed for the illusory concept of ‘this evening’. When I demanded a time slot with slightly more connection to reality, he offered to nail it down to ‘sometime about 8, or 9, but definitely by 10’. Eventually he arrived at 11. Both The One and I have, in the intervening years, made very significant efforts to learn both Catalan and Spanish to the extent that most English people would consider us to be fluent. The thing we have come to understand is that speaking the language is not, however, your only barrier to being fully integrated; you also have to familiarise yourself with the culture and attitudes, many of which are significantly more challenging than trying to learn how to roll your Rs sufficiently so as not to sound drunk when trying to say that something is boring - aburrrrrido. Turning up three hours after an agreed eating time to a restaurant would be a grave and unacceptable offence to everything good and proper in London. In Barcelona, it doesn’t even warrant the flimsiest of acknowledgements.
As a temporary resident in the centre of the metropolis, it seemed to me that the city was constantly in the middle of an ongoing party. It could just have been incredibly fortuitous timing, that somehow every time I turned up it just happened to be a lucky coincidence, but it was rare to arrive to not find it was the feast day of some saint or other, whose legacy required everyone to stay up late throwing fireworks at each other, scoffing down mountainous plates of food and imbibing a small brewery. The Radio Personality once told me that it was considered ill mannered and boorish to be drunk on the streets of Barcelona, with the notable exception of this being seen as a necessary behaviourial element of any major festivals or saints days. The minor detail hidden within this statement is that there are 365 saints days in a year.
Festivities for these events would never start properly until sensible English people would already be looking at their watches and considering a trip upstairs to Bedfordshire, and would rarely conclude before daylight started to reveal the horrendous mess that had resulted. The Barcelona Accio Musical, for example, used to open its main stage doors in the Estacio de Franca train station at sometime just after midnight. Tens of thousands of people would flood onto the platforms using parked trains as seating areas. First bands on stage at about 1am, and not until 3am would artists like Soft Cell, Stereolab and Buzzcocks finally be allowed on stage. By dawn, people would decide they’d had all the fun possible in a train station, make way for the morning commuters and head to an afters bar. Club Magic was just across the road, it used to open at 5am.
One night in September 2001 we are running late for the start of the Estacio de Franca stage. The Monk and the Radio Personality have been working all day on their latest project, an animated video for a new electronic act. I pop in to see how the work is going, and finally at about 1am it finishes rendering and they press play. The song is a minimalist dance number but is actually so laden down with hooks that it’s an instant ear-worm. The video they’ve created looks like nothing else I’ve seen, featuring the two creators of the music turned into cartoon versions of themselves. The features of these two characters, Mr Furia and Profesor Manso - literally translated as Mr Rage and Professor Meek - are exaggerated and animated for comic effect. The whole package is quite brilliant. We watch it a few more times, then finally head over to BAM, the time now heading towards 2am.
One hour later I am standing in the guest bar of the train station talking to the tour manager of one of the British acts about what an incredibly mad time it is to put any band on when, out of the corner of my eye, I spy a chap with a handlebar moustache, thick glasses and coiffed hair. He’s dressed like the ace face of Barcelona, all mod cuts and carefully chosen shoes. And he’s walking exactly like the cartoon character so obviously based upon him that we were recently admiring.
By now this book should already have convinced you that success, failure, and everything in between, in the music industry isn’t something you can design. There isn’t any manual that will tell you to form a failed rock band, hang about in refurbished sex clubs, buy an old toilet, then insult an interview board, as a logical path by which you can progress a career in music. There’s no degree you can hold in staying up until 4am talking to the real life version of a cartoon character you got to see because somebody offered you the chance to live in a mansion flat in the centre of Barcelona with a group of crazily creative people. If everyone in the music industry actually knew what we were doing, there wouldn’t be any need to do it. If we knew why that sound made by that person dressed that way shifts that number of units, we could all retire and just tell a machine to get on and do that. Success in this industry is 90% luck and 10% hard work. But if you’re ever fortunate enough that luck comes knocking, it better find you working hard when it does.
My chance night out in a train station led to meeting a character who, in turn, would become pivotal to decisions that The One and I would go on to make about our family and our future which would stretch across the next two decades. Within two years of that meeting I would have a third full time career and we would be planning our exit from London to the place we would learn to call home.
It is 4.20am by the time The Radio Personality leads an excitable group of about twenty revellers along the darkest alleyway in the already darkest part of the Barceloneta area of town near the port. Everyone has heard about this new English word they need to learn, and regular chants of “Seedy! Seedy!” have accompanied us on the way there. Seemingly without reason, he pauses in front of one of dozens of non-descript metal shuttered doors, leans in and bangs on it. After a couple of minutes, it rises up about one foot from the floor, and a man’s head appears in the gap.
“We are here to see Carlos!” declares The Radio Personality.
The shutter rises all the way to the top of the arched entrance, revealing a huge throng of late night merrymakers in full bacchanalian celebration gathered within. About half of them are sailors, a good half of those dressed in the distinctive uniform of the US Navy. On the corner of the bar sits a large vat of absinthe, and behind this, pouring it out over sugar cubes and setting fire to it, is our host for the evening, a statuesque fellow with a thick black beard whose ample bosom is barely contained by a tight basque number he has elected as his casual wear for the evening. We gather up our drinks, make our way passed this real life enactment of a Bosch painting, and find a table in a corner that stands out mainly for the virtue of being one of the few available flat surfaces no one is trying to have sex on.
We all agree that this is, indeed, exactly what we meant by seedy and roundly congratulate the Radio Personality on fulfilling the brief. And then it strikes me.
“Wait though… I did say there would need to be a donkey?” I point out.
The Radio Personality considers this point, sips his absinthe, then points to a stool at the far end of the bar. Perched atop it, eating peanuts out of a bag, sits a fur covered creature, its tail snaking down out the back of a waistcoat.
“Sorry, I must have misheard you” says our night time guide. “I thought you said Monkey.”
Read the previous chapters of Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time here: