Roses In The Thames

I was sitting in a bar in Euston with a bunch of people who genuinely believed themselves to be vampires when it occurred to me that I stuck out like a sore thumb. The goths, as a whole, have always been my allies, however these guys had taken it too far, and my black suit and shirt along with my discourse on the brilliance of Sir Christopher Lee was not enough to convince them of my comradery. It seemed bizarre, I thought. Most of these ‘vampires’ worked for transport for London. So that’s what became of all those make-up wearing white and black checkered phantoms I knew at school, they had disappeared into the underworld of the underground. A few weeks later I would learn from an American writer that the gothic scene in Texas is based around Morrissey. This defies all reason. I love The Smiths; I hate Morrissey.

 I’d gone to the bar in the hope of acquiring another person’s soul. In blues folklore, there is a well-known legend that one can sell their soul to the devil at the crossroads at midnight to master their chosen instrument, only I’m quite fond of my soul, so I thought maybe I could sell another. -Deals with the devil always go down well, right?- Indeed, my solidarity with the goths comes from my love of the blues which, as is well known, was the first genre to be branded ‘the devil’s music’. However, there was no solidarity with these goths who convulsed against the intruder in their midst.

 The solution to my exposure was not hard to find as the bar was a dive, half bottles of wine were going for three pounds each, and I’m a fast drinker. Three half bottles later and I could have blended in with the Royals or, at least, that’s how I felt after bringing that third empty bottle back to the bar and bowing to the bartender. I’d had enough of the staring down from the phantoms in black with fake plastic teeth; it was time to bust out of there. 

But where could I go to next? The British Library was just round the corner, but it would be closed by now and is not the place for drunks. Camden was a short walk away, but going to Camden alone, already drunk, seemed to be asking for trouble. Only the Southbank seemed to enter my mind, yet that is hardly surprising as I adore the Southbank; nowhere in London is more beautiful. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again I’d reached the station at embankment. As I staggered across the bridge to the south side of the river, music from the many buskers covered my shoulders like a warm blanket shielding me from the cold. First the trio of afrikan drummers that made my feet bounce, then a punk guitar player thrashing out incoherent power chords. Finally, I found a north afrikan jazz trio on brass with an accordion accompaniment: now you’re whistling Dixie. Leaning against the rails of the bridge I soaked in their improv over expanded dorian and mixolydian scales that had enough blue notes and chromatic jazz runs to make my back shudder. Music has always had a profound physical effect on me. When it hits just the right spot, my shoulders twitch and I become entranced, lost to everything else. After emptying the change from my pockets into their hat and giving the trumpet player a high five I staggered on to find my next cultural experience.

This came in the form of the royal festival hall. The RFH’s bench spotted foyers across its five stories is one of my favourite places to sit and write during the day, or crash out in full view of the public after a long night performing. Many a time I have laid on a couch in the twilight between sleep and wakefulness as businessmen and overly formal types held informal meetings against the skyline of Parliament, Somerset house, the Eye, and the other major attractions of London. Tonight I admired a photography exhibition, currently in vogue, that littered the main foyer and open space cafes and bars on the ground floor. The subject matter was refugees from environmental disasters. You gotta know the blues to play the blues and these guys knew the blues. These guys had the blues, the mean reds, the down and outs, and they had it up to the nines. Ghosts of greyscale and high-def colour shot frozen still in angles only an expert could achieve haunted every corner. As I chicken walked across the foyer through the haze of wine, the faces of the condemned jeered at me from the facades, while my outstretched arms mimed jazz movements attracting the attention of several other patrons. Disparate peoples in rags stood in torrents of rain, tornados, and the wrecks of their former dwellings as London’s bourgeois debated as to whether they should sympathise with the subject matter or admire the photographer’s aesthetic; Disaster and destruction has always been crucial to art.

I had more political objections. Was the whole thing not a farce? A statement of irony? I declared to an audience amused at my slurred outburst. The west’s reaction to these disasters was to send in a flash photographer to chronicle the suffering of others. By the time the shots had been edited, organized, and displayed, the next catastrophe had occurred somewhere else. All that was left was a perverse and empty reminder that we should value what we have and not gamble with it in helping others.

It made me think of the old days of the grand tour when the nobility used to traipse around Europe fucking whores and drinking in brothels after going to the opera at night, while pretending to read books and gain an education at major institutions during the day. Clothed in the rich colored, gold trimmed, fashions of the late renaissance, to the black and white formal cut suits of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they graced the grand decadent cities of Europe with their own brand of decadence which they would later bring to statecraft. They did not hide their corruption but rather strove to exceed such decadence with their own exploits, searching for some perfect excess of passion. At least the old nobles were honest in their debauchery.

Now, the rich send their young to third world countries to contribute to community projects during their gap years. This is, arguably, an ethical improvement to the lavishness of old. The downside is that, like the nobles before them, many return with a superiority complex unlike any other. No doubt they found some other vain chauvinist on the tour to fuck while making anthropological observations on another culture’s way of life. They gained an experience they would ultimately use to scramble onto the rat race like all the other rats. Had I met that photographer then in vogue, I would have found a smug professional courting compliments and sympathizing with patrons that shared his suffering. He wouldn’t understand that you have to know the blues to play the blues. The royal festival hall had not provided the soul I was looking for.

The time was approaching nine o’clock when I stumbled out onto the river bank. I sat on a bench and thought of my current exploits. It was time to clean out the table or run home empty handed; I needed to ante up. I thought back to the buskers on the bridge. As amazing as they were, those cats didn’t have anything that I didn’t. I took a look around and noticed that I was in a prime location for busking: A location where people can walk past freely and aren’t trapped by the sound, and with enough people walking past to make the endeavor worthwhile. I pulled out my trusty 10 hole diatonic and started reeling off my repertoire and improvising new licks.

It was the devil’s music. Rough blue notes that were once outlawed by the Catholic Church rode out and haunted those that strolled by in the evening. The chill of brass reeds grating over a slow bend that makes expression on the harp possible caught my audience and fascinated them for a moment or two. A black spectre going ballistic in improv by the slosh of the Thames is quite a sight after all. 

“Hey that guy is shit hot,” came a woman’s voice. I wasn’t sure if she was talking about me or my playing. I looked up and saw two gorgeous couples smiling back at me- she was talking about my playing. It had been an American voice, from the east coast. I’ve never met an American I didn’t like and, through habit, have learnt the location of their accents. Her eyes had lit up in the way that only love and passion can do. Music can do that to people. Smiling back, I opened up the conversation and the five of us began to shoot the breeze. I invited them to sit down and they did. They had been on a double date, though I could tell it had gone so poorly that they were in as much need of an adventure as I had been. Their love of blues, their experiences of England, and my interest in America circled through the conversation. They kept hitting the conversation back, not in that forced way of feeling one has to reciprocate to the question asked, but in the natural way of being quite taken by someone. They invited me to flitter with them further on down the bank.

I wasn’t doing anything better, so why not? I picked up the silver and copper that had been thrown to me and we ambled down the bank lost in the underpasses of the great bridges, shouting aloud to hear our laughter reverberate in the underpasses. I thought the night air and synchronized breathing needed to play the harmonica would have sobered me up, but my legs continued to dance a tune that I didn’t recognize. After walking for a short while, the street lamps flickered on to reveal the greatest terror of the night: we had, to my repulse, arrived at the Tate Modern Art Gallery.

The Tate Modern is a vile place where many a good man has lost his mind. Built out of a million bricks, it was originally Bankside’s oil-fuelled power station until it was converted into an art gallery in the year 2000. It feigns a false chic of postmodern irony; that a powerhouse of electricity is now a powerhouse for art. I went dizzy as I looked up at its great, sinister chimney which leered over me. The chimney which once belched black smoke onto the skyline stood against darkness again as night had now descended. Its façade of a million bricks is as much a prison as it is a ‘site’ for viewing great art. Since its rejuvenation it has been a magnet for many terrifying experiences -indeed, I believe the land it is built on is cursed. Whenever I have visited the gallery the experience has been so disappointing that I have broken off all contact with those I visited with. As such, visiting the Tate has been the kiss of death to several former relationships and I have since done everything within my power to avoid visiting the building.

The Americans seemed disturbed by the seething contempt that struck my face, but they did not know what horrors this building held. The TATE is so packed full with school children and tourists that it is impossible to find a moment’s peace to enjoy the works it contains- for it does, occasionally, display some awe inspiring work. But the greatest horror comes not in the form of loud, sticky, photo chronicling groups, but in the form of people who pretend to know everything about the works they stand before, when it is clear they know nothing. The worst wear blazers and polo shirts and use art in an attempt to tower over others like the chimney they themselves stand beneath; they use art to be chauvinists. Alas, the Tate simply is not a space for experts to deliver humble lectures and insights to curious audiences, both in love with the form(s) before them. People are sardined into rooms where more time is spent negotiating a path around the other spectators than it is appreciating the spectacle one came for.

Thus the horror comes not from the consumption of art by some god awful building- all art is consumption. Nor in who consumes it (I am not a chauvinist who feels art should be denied to sticky school children, herds of tourists, or pretentious wankers in polo shirts. Indeed I, almost, feel that those groups need art more than anyone else), but in how it is consumed. In the galleries, great works are warehoused next to over-flowing bathrooms managed by immigrant cleaners formerly exploited by middle men companies that paid them less than a minimum wage. Bins are loaded with sticky sweet wrappers and bottles from the overpriced cafes that feature on every floor. The whole enterprise is parody.

It was a tragedy that struck me to my core; though it seemed as much an opportunity to do something bold and daring, a beautiful artistic motion that would liberate the art inside and re-ignite that beauty again, as opposed to letting the institution ruin the evening. It was an occasion to rise to, to conquer, and overcome. I would find a room with a Picasso, a Dali, and a Man Ray all within close proximity, and then I would liberate them from the nightmare. I would take out my harmonica and play a scathing blues lick, let the sound reverberate through that empty hall where the machinery, boilers, and burners once stood. I would make the furnaces ring again; I would play something beautiful that all those artists would have understood, but that the herds would find a vulgar breach of the peace. I would perhaps have a minute or two before I would have to escape the building’s prison officers and flee into the night. It would be pure improvisation like the surrealists themselves: a postmodern statement decrying the prison ‘site’.  Or I would do what I saw Godard’s trio do in the Louvre in his band a’part, and run through the gallery, around every floor, up every escalator, taking in everything as quickly as possible, with guards in hot pursuit. I would do something, anything, that would bring the gallery back into the world of freedom and spontaneity; back to that moment of someone doing something beautiful without resignation which sets the landscape into new significance. That landscape of paintings and sculptures would understand and thank me. I had to do something, any act of defiance that would break the parody.

“We have to liberate them! We have to save them all!” I cried. The amerikarnas were further distressed by my outburst and I realized that my discourse on the Tate’s horrors and lobby for intervention to save art from the prison had only been rehearsed in my head.

I tried to explain my cause to free the Tate from within, however all my comrades understood was that I wanted to do something frantic and off the wall inside the gallery. Negotiations reached that patronizingly simple stage one has to adopt with drunks: ‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea’, ‘perhaps you’d better sit down’, ‘no no, it’s best not to do that’. Before long it was too late. The guards at the entrance were staring at me. I had been clocked and, if I did make it in, any act of liberation would be swiftly prevented. I sighed at the Americans, ‘you bastards probably wouldn’t sell me your souls anyway.’ The women laughed at this, but the men had had enough. The amerikarnas said their goodbyes, content that I had welched on my former plans.

I caught a seat on a bench in the shadow of that awful building that now jeered over me. All there was left to do was to start busking again and, with its tourist attraction, the Tate’s only redeeming quality is that it has a number of busking posts outside. I took up position and then a scene caught my eye. A couple, both parties movie star beautiful, were breaking up in the loud dramatic attention grabbing way everyone fears when they have to end it. It looked like the break-up from hell. Both stood crying and screaming at each other against a chilly waterloo night skyline. Finally, the man revealed his last resort from his bag, a bouquet of roses to apologize for whatever he had done. She was stumped for a moment, and then she grabbed the bouquet and threw it over the bank into the river. My kina gal. The stems scattered in the air, drifted for a moment, and then gravity tugged them into the tides.

And that was it. That was all I needed to see for the night to be worthwhile. I caught the next train back to Richmond, bought some chips from the best chip shop in the world, and then wrote a song about what happens when your woman throws the roses you gave her into the Thames. 

https://soundcloud.com/samsmusicandmusings/roses-on-the-thames