Some time for the sound to gather

Hitting the punk rock record shop, taking in art and browsing for books – plus why a pause was needed

All through the tail end of last year and halfway through this summer I’ve had a ghost soundtrack from The Replacements rattling around my thoughts.

I didn’t actually listen once to ‘God Damn Job’ during that time, but it was still there, soundtracking that long period of unemployment as – like plenty of others before me – my thoughts came back to:

“I need a god damn job / Oh I need a god damn job / I really need a god damn job / I need a god damn job”

And then, I got a god damn job. No more soul-destroying applications, prospective employers that ghost you or the lurking fear that my niche of a publishing niche wouldn’t ever yield me with a paying job again.

Along with a whole heap of things to start dealing with, both professional changes (good) and financial recovery (less so), the last month or so has also provided a humorous reminder that work is… tiring.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I took August off from Fire Red Sky to ease myself back into the work-a-day week. The changes include my first car commute in 24 years, which has destroyed my step counting, with no more regular walks to the station or across London, but is proving to be a bit more comfortable than taking the train all the time.

This is the sound

Before I started the new job I gave myself a day off. An actual holiday day rather than more of unemployment’s every-day-is-a-holiday aimlessness and it was one that took in art, some touristing and a certain record shop.

The image at the top of this post is from the copy of Ren Aldridge’s pamphlet-like book Cut & Stitch that I was reading on my way into London. I picked the book up from Rough Trade East on a previous art/books/records trip to London. Alridge is the singer with the (on hiatus?) UK/Austrian feminist post-hardcore band Petrol Girls and her book shares its title with their 2019 album. As she puts it in the album notes:

“Cutting and stitching is a process that can go on indefinitely - stitches are easily unpicked, new shapes can be cut, everything can be rearranged. We cut our patches off of old clothes and sew them onto something else. Continuity is an idea that underpins the record, from ‘the sound does not arrive’ to ‘we’re not finished, we never fucking will be.’”

Cut & Stitch, the book, explore those ideas in more detail, taking in the scourge of nationalism as well as more positive topics such as community, solidarity and resisting perfectionism. Reading it on the train to London Bridge made me wish I’d downloaded a copy of its album to re-listen to it. You can give some of it a listen above (or here).

Walk the house

I’m always trying to get more use out of my Tate membership and that outing was a perfect opportunity to amble around the converted power station that is the Tate Modern and its modern art collections.

After admiring the view, I took in Do Ho Suh’s Walk The House, which was a delightful, immersive and very Instragamable exhibition. Even before walking through the exhibition’s titular house, I was very taken by the Korean-born, London-based artist’s visual sense, particularly those that seemed related to my until recently unmoored state of mind.

Tackling thoughts about intangible, metaphorical and psychological spaces, the exhibition’s title of ‘Walk the House’ is drawn from a Korean expression referring to the hanok – a house that could theoretically be disassembled, transported and then reassembled at a new site.

London loves

From the Tate Modern I walked to Brick Lane. The journey is a little over two and half miles, but en route you can pass the Tower of London with its near 1,000-year-old central White Tower, the ever photogenic Tower Bridge and the 13-year-old Shard, towering over surroundings.

Even amid weekday tourists and office workers there was a sense of peace from walking by the river. Maybe that’s related to growing up in a town by a river or maybe it’s just being away from the traffic. Either way, it gives you a different perspective on your surroundings.

I’ve been to the Tower of London with Mrs T and Son2 fairly recently, so didn’t feel the need to fork out 35 quid to see it again so soon, impressive though the towers, Crown Jewels and palace are. Instead I paused for a brief view of the outside before heading straight for Brick Lane.

The East End street has been home to successive waves of immigrants from French Huguenots in the 17th century to Irish people and Ashkenazi Jews, but these days it’s best known as the centre of the UK’s Bangladeshi community. Many of those who made the area their home in the 20th century set up or worked in the ‘Indian’ restaurants that still line some of the street.

It’s also long been a special area for me that combines elements of my wife’s Bengali heritage with hipster record shopping options at Rough Trade East. Inevitably, the East End street has had some gentrification changes over the years. The shop I once bought bootleg Bengali DVDs from is now a sushi restaurant, while my old source for cheap Bollywood soundtracks has become an off licence that’s “open till late”.

But, there’s still at least one sweet shop selling a wide variety of sandesh, which are made from milk and sugar, and my favourite spicy vegetarian samosas – the mighty singara, mighty that is if you ignore the frankly insulting Kolkata size they do these days. Speaking of changes, I do wish I’d clocked that the shop had turned self-service since my last visit and hadn’t tried to order in my halting Bengali. Oh well.

As much as I’ve seen our local chain supermarkets widen the types of foods they offer as the makeup of the local community changes, Taj Stores is another must-visit stop for me in Brick Lane, though this time just for some masala tea bags (the perfect accompaniment to sandesh).

From there I went for a leisurely browse around Rough Trade East’s book selection, telling myself over and over that I was not (today at least) on the look out for more books. I was very tempted by Patti Smith’s A Book of Days, Kathleen Hanna’s Rebel Girl, the Shoegaze 33 1/3 genre book, Krautrock Eruption and The Name of This Band is R.E.M. amongst way too many for me to be able to carry on my day trip.

A recent revamp to the shop means that it hardly stocks any CDs (seriously, does everything have to change?), so there was much less to tempt me there. But I was impressed by how great the latest Wet Leg album sounds over their stereo.

The punk rock record shop

Then it was up to Camden on the tube, perfectly soundtracked by Stereolab’s Instant Holograms on Metal Film, for a visit to the punk and hardcore shop All Ages Records.

Maybe I should get out more, but I did get a kick out of seeing a Descendents t-shirt wearing dad dragging his family around the shop.

The shop has plenty of CDs to choose from (vinyl too of course, if that’s your thing). I picked up a copy of Never Enough along with a D.O.A. tribute album and Power Trip’s Nightmare Logic, which I’ve been looking for on CD for ages – even if shop owner Nick thought I should buy the live Power Trip album he’s had on his shelves for a while as it’s apparently a rarity.

And then home.

The Weekly Digests will begin again on Sunday.

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