Head-On/Repossessed

Read out of casual interest, and tells you plenty about the man: as a consequence I can't say I ended up liking Cope any the more after reading the book(s). I'm not a Cope fan, hence I'm probably not the target audience. When not writing about himself his writing is considerably more appealing (e.g. 'The Modern Antiquarian') , but tales of drug-fuelled excess like this tend to leave me pretty cold.

A few short passages from Head On/Repossessed:

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Also, it was one of those days when you do something, it works out, and then you wish that you’d known in advance that it was going to work, so you could have enjoyed it while it was happening.

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I wondered about being nice. You know, what it really was.

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David Balfe sat, eyes blazing, fully upright on the bed and told me that I must try the Adolescent’s acid. I told both of them that I’d taken mushrooms instead, but this only fired her up more.

“Please take my stuff,” she wailed.

Okay, I’ll try some. But only if Kev takes some, too. I told the Adolescent that if she was so concerned with dosing us up, she should have some as well.

“No way,” wailed the Adolescent. “On acid, I show more could never handle that you’re more famous than me.”

“But you’re not famous at all,” I blurted, confused by her reasoning.

“Well, don’t fucking rub it in!” she howled.

Wow, even in my solipsistic, egoistic, Odinistic acid one-ness, the self-possession of that last outburst double-took me to the core. Right on.

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By noon every day, there were no problems. Whilst the sun was up, so was I. And free. Free from stupid rock’n’roll, and free from the phone which never stopped ringing. Only it did. It stopped ringing pretty soon. In fact, I’d gotten so used to complaining about its ringing all that time that it took me a while to actually notice that no-one called us anymore. I was hurt. I was used to attention. How could I complain about how hassled I was if no one hassled me?

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Of course, my brain was just too full of news and cultural information to let the mystic ever truly settle. I’d get angry with myself without giving my underground self a fighting chance. My cynical side wanted instant results to prove that it was worth going on – cynics are not world weary, quite the opposite. They are unformed humans who have prejudged situations before their actual experience takes place. They therefore don’t actually experience it at all, just a fax of what they’d presupposed it would be like. I was like a Sun reporter who doesn’t actually bother going round to see for himself, because he thinks he knows what the scene will be like in advance. I was cynical and presupposing, I suppose. Cynicism is not over-experience – it blots out actual experience. It is really closed-mindedness through the lack of genuine “experience”, for we can touch the mystic in so many humdrum ways.

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I saw old friends on TV. I saw everyone on TV. The airwaves were crammed with them. And each one had fallen for the falsehood that hits are good. Just as I had done. I began to feel guilty about that, as though I had inspired it.

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I had an unhealthy respect for the artist who sells out. Not everyone can sell out, even if they want to. Over the years, I have noticed that the strength of singers like Adam Ant and Billy Idol was their ability to sell their asses and still appear to be doing precisely what they wanted.

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Limitations. I had those in abundance. Now I wanted to use those limitations. I wanted to stand amongst all those enormous Western Artistes, declaiming their world-changing strategies and scream: “I made this song up!”

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Autobiography