The Sundays
2 February 1990, Friday, Glasgow
If young-Toby has in ideal woman, it is the American film actress Louise Brooks (1906-1985), star of Pandora’s Box; if he has an ideal still-living girlfriend, it is Harriet from The Sundays. She is beautiful in an indie and a non-indie way, and seems friendly and shy. She wears sweaters so baggy her figure’s obscured. Her band sound like The Smiths crossed with Cocteau Twins, which could hardly be more ideal. She wears understatedly cool clothes. She sings that the finest hour she’d ever known was finding a pound on the underground. So there was obvious room for improvement in her life. Unfortunately, Harriet from The Sundays is happily going out with David Gavurin from The Sundays. David Gavurin is also beautiful in an indie and a non-indie.
On this short tour, before Harriet loses her voice in eight day’s time, three songs into their set at Trent Polytechnic, The Sundays are supported by Galaxie 500. The price of entry is £4.
Young-Toby hasn’t heard of Galaxie 500 before. In a contemporary interview, when asked what sound they’re aiming for, they reply, ‘Wimpy. Wimpiness. Two parts wimpy, one part atmospheric — a little dash of pastoral imagery.’ They are now often referred to as legendary; they are sometimes blamed for shoegaze and slowcore.
It’s likely they play these songs (though this is from a gig a few days later) —
Flowers
Snowstorm
Decomposing Trees
Don’t Let Our Youth Go to Waste (The Modern Lovers cover)
Blue Thunder
Victory Garden (The Red Krayola Cover)
Ceremony (New Order Cover)
But Toby isn’t there for them. He’s there for Harriet and her songs.
This is The Sundays’ setlist —
Here’s Where the Story Ends
I Won
I Kicked a Boy
Joy
What Do You Think?
Skin & Bones
Something More
My Finest Hour
Hideous Towns
Turkish (encore)
Can’t Be Sure (encore)
Before and after going to see The Sundays, Toby continues working on his ‘Preparation for an Elegy’. He has a red ringbound note book he bought in America.
Look at him. Even if you’re not sure about what he’s writing, see the wholeheartedness with which he goes at it. He is working out his entire life. He will say and say more, to see what’s there to be said. He has ideas about what it is to be a poet —
An elegy, therefore, needs to be prompted
by a death, however as I know
of no-one who has written an elegy
before a death that’s what I propose to do,
as novelty is really what we’re after admit it
and competition is part of the fun,
seeing what s/he did, trying it, doing
it better, then going on to something s/he
could not have done, even if it involves cheating;
‘Shakespeare could not write about Jumbo Jets’,
and perhaps would not have wanted to but
this is not the important fact, the important
fact is that Shakespeare hasn’t queered the pitch.
Then must, you ask, we scan the catalogues
for products which, as yet, have not inspir’d
a line of verse, a paragraph of prose?
Of course not, dummies, don’t pretend to be
more stupid than you are, just to make a point.
We all know that it takes a little while
for objects recently invented to
become useful, useful to us poets.
These thoughts were forced upon me by the silence.
I would not willingly pursue, or be
pursued by such thoughts as these. And normally
I have a record or the radio
to limit thought to practicalities;
where to go tomorrow, what next to eat
but now my neighbour’s taken back the small
cheap radio I listened to whilst painting
the room, this room, the first room to be ‘my room’.
The little speaker was so naif it couldn’t
tell static from applause. I am left here
in the room of myself debating with myself
about myself, unable to avoid
myself. Where shall I live? What shall I do?
What should I do? Questions as bland as this,
as unpoetic. I am a poet.
There, that wasn’t too difficult, now was it?
But now, and for the next forty years? Too long,
too long to risk. I am a poet, I don’t
even know whether a good poet or
a bad poet. If a good poet then
years from now, people will debate whether
I was a good or a bad poet. Judging
from this poem they will decide that I
was a bad, self-pitying, dull, unskilled poet.
And who am I to say they won’t be right.
These thoughts were forced upon me against my will.
What kind of life to poets lead? Here I
degenerate into prose. Or ascend, depending on
which side of this particular, perpetual, pointless
argument you are on. (Bad prose.)
But seriously, what kind of life? Long? Healthy?
Happy? Rich? Adored? Well, some of them,
at least, like Browning and his sycophants,
or with his royalty cheques.
But what of all the others, no romance here,
I’m not trying to portray us as brilliant losers. If we could have instant fame, vast wealth, huge dinners, don’t you think we’d take it? But the world makes it difficult, the world does not like poets. There is no academy for us. There is no wage for a poet. It wouldn’t have to be a large wage, just an honest wage.
I suppose, a poet can expect, late in life, if she’s good and/or lucky, to stay in someone else’s Florence mansion or Californian beach hut. But to do this they would probably have to lie about how good their host’s poetry way. Still we all lie.
No poet has ever become a millionaire except by birth (cf [James] Merrill), they usually have to toady (cf Tennyson, Virgil) or work for the bank (cf Eliot) or the insurance company (cf Stevens) or write too much (cf Auden) or be exiled (cf Horace) or go mad (cf Verlaine) or useless (cf Hughes).
There isn’t any choice in this either. It just happens. If someone offers me a job in a bank, or a bank job, I would take it. I would have to. The only choice I have is to tear this out, tear it up, throw it in the paper to be recycled bin. But I won’t. I am too much of a coward. Too much of a poet.
Watch me now, as I undress, putting
my clothes under my bedclothes
because my bedclothes, in themselves, are not warm enough
to let me sleep a night unwoken by the cold…
But loneliness is very rarely well written. And this bedsit in Glasgow isn’t exactly Dostoievsky.
I wouldn’t mind someone to watch me undressing now, although I wouldn’t purposely leave the curtains undrawn.
I would like the watch them back, to see if they found me in any way desireable, to see if that were possible.
I would even consider modelling for an artist, just to see what it would be like to stand nude in front of someone for that long.
When I was a child/young boy I did not read intensely, or go passionately to the cinema, or listen to precocious music. Instead, I had an intense passionate precocious friendship with an intense passionate and precocious boy named Adam. If I were being pat, aiming for the conclusive moral, I would say that I write in order to communicate with another person as wholly as I communicated with Adam. But that would be a falsification.
Friendship is, partly at least, being bored in one another’s company for vast periods of time. Not bored with one another’s company but bored in one another’s company. This observation I owe to another friend, Paddy.
Can’t be sure.