From ‘You’re Doing It Wrong — My Life As A Failed International Rock Star (In The Best Band You’ve Never Heard)
I’d forgotten.
A bit like how Peter Pan in that 90s bizarro-sequel, Hook, had forgotten and had to be slowly reminded that the boy who never grew up, grew up. I’d forgotten. In the mid 00s, I was in the best band in the world. And I’d forgotten.
Don’t get me wrong, I hadn’t forgotten I was in a band because it’s still the only thing that makes me remotely interesting, but I’d forgotten what it meant.
I was clearing out an old hard drive because I thought, you know, when I die, someone might find these hard drives and I need to make sure there’s nothing on there that’ll end up completely misrepresenting my legacy with truth. But I found untitled video footage. Shadowy AVIs in a folder titled simply ‘No’. At first I thought, as any reasonable person would, these would be videos of cats, but it turned out to be 5 hours of unedited, digitised camcorder footage of my time in an indie punk band called We Are The Physics.
Never heard of them? Me neither, I say out of shame. Although, if I hadn’t been in them, I’d have forgotten they existed. We existed. Apparently.
For a brief moment in the mid 00s, we were everywhere. We were on the cover of the NME when humans wrote it and actual people read it to learn about bands not just to be sold shoes; we were touring the world as the support act for a big Hollywood band called 30 Seconds To Mars, fronted by arguably the fourth best Joker, Jared Leto. We had people turning up to our gigs cosplaying as us. We had a fan club, believe it or not. We had been touted as ‘the most perfect new band ever’. But as quickly as that ascent had come, it disappeared and I became me. I’d forgotten.
The first file I clicked to open was dark, punctuated by flashing, strobing lights and a soundtrack of aural carnage — yelping, frantic voices in an indecipherable language. And then a familiar image appeared, horizontal white stripes, broken up by my own feet stamping across them. The camera quickly zooms out to reveal the famous Shibuya crossing in Tokyo, with the piercing light from the video billboard screens illuminating the road, and the screeching, competing voices from commercials. Then a sixty foot high image of Rod Stewart for a brief weird apocalyptic second. The camera spins round to face the operator. And it’s me. In my early 20s. Undernourished and young, as if gravity has had no effect on my face yet. And I’m staring into the lens, in clear awe of where I am and I say ‘Aw fuck man, where am I?’
And I felt exactly the same when I saw it. I’d forgotten. Where am I? Where was I?
This footage was from my first night in Japan, and I was there to play a week of shows as a promotional tour for my band’s debut album. Two years after myself and my three school friends started it in a bedroom in Cumbernauld, of all places, there we were, in Japan. A proper other country. And, most importantly, we hadn’t had to pay for it.
The camera spins to show my friends, all gazing up at the towering buildings, the HMV sign, when it still mattered, piercing the sky. I utter into the microphone, “It doesn’t look real until you look at it through the viewfinder.” One of my bandmates can be heard over the shrieks of the ads: “It’s like you’re inside a Mega Drive”, and he was right. It all starts rushing back to me. There was a strange, buzzing old-school vintage electronics feel to the super-tech of that city, so parallel to the Japan we’d seen in films growing up that its futurism almost seemed retro.
And then the camera turns to Gary.
Gary was one of a few tour managers we had throughout our brief careers as the world’s most forgotten band. Gary’s ability to be both incredibly organized while making it seem like he had no idea what he was doing was basically performance art. But Gary wasn’t being paid to be there with us in Japan, he’d come because we’d convinced the Japanese record label we needed someone to look after us. It was really just that we liked Gary.
Gary was an overall affable guy, and I say was because I haven’t seen Gary since he basically disappeared from my life, and the last I heard he was in some form of island-based self-isolation to try to remove himself from the pressures of potentially finding a morsel of cocaine at a bus stop. But when it came to managing a band, his only real merit was that he was the only one who wanted to manage us. In spite of that, he had an intensely acute knowledge of 60s psych music, and someone had somehow trusted him with a credit card, so he was invaluable to us.
Since I first met Gary, he’d always had the same jacket — a dusty, velvet dinner jacket two sizes smaller than his long but chunky torso. And it was a great look, but the thing was falling apart constantly. One time I saw him stooped, squint in the street and I thought he was in pain. I’d approached him and pointed at his drooped shoulder and was like, “Gary, you alright, man?” and he just confusedly shrugged, because he wasn’t alright, but it had nothing to do with his stance. It turned out that the lining inside his jacket had torn so one of the arms was floppier than the other, meaning it just hung on him like half his body had melted.
Anyway, we began to regret taking Gary all the way to Tokyo as soon as the plane landed, really. Just as the seatbelt light was deactivated, I could see his nose start to twitch and his head darting around like an inappropriately operated marionette and he began yelping at us, sat two rows behind him, across the heads of seated passengers that he could smell burning flesh. Worse still, that he believed it was his own flesh.
And this wasn’t even the worst thing that happened on that flight, the guy in front of me had actually pissed himself rather than ask to get past the other passengers to use the toilet. And I feel for that guy, I once pissed myself in school because my teacher told me never to interrupt her when she was talking, so I get being so under the heel of weird shame that you’d rather take it out on yourself than inconvenience a stranger. But in this particular case, I wasn’t overly happy about it because it had pooled at my backpack under the seat and I had to spend the whole trip smelling distinctly of someone else’s urine. I didn’t say anything to the guy about it because I was so under the heel of weird shame that I’d rather take it out on myself than inconvenience a stranger.
So Gary’s level of hypochondria continued for the duration of the trip and often increased as we made our way through Shibuya’s neon streets. At its height he claimed the pollution in the city was causing his hairline to recede rapidly. He called this process ‘Supersonic Balding’, as if inventing a term for it somehow legitimised it. He championed it so convincingly and with such a vast body of knowledge on the fictional subject that, against our better judgements, we had all checked our hairlines in the privacy of the hotel.
In the tiny, cramped sensory overloaded kiosks in Harajuku, full of tiny, kawaii stationery, Gary had found an 6-inch shatter-proof ruler that featured anime figures having some sort of characteristically overzealous fight on it. He’d carry it around and place it against his forehead when he passed a reflective surface so he could measure the exact amount his hair had tried to escape from his head since he’d last checked.
“That’s almost half an inch!” he screeched at his reflection in every shop window, combing forward his thick mop with a sweaty, paranoid palm.
Gary stood at six feet four inches, six feet five with panicking eyes, so he towered over the majority of Tokyo’s inhabitants and they chose to treat him like the west has treated global warming — they’d ignore him completely or screech and recoil in horror as he shuffled past them with all the subtlety of an ecological disaster. I don’t like to think I was ashamed to be with him, but I think we’d all grown so accustomed to apologising with our eyes that it would’ve been easier to write ‘sorry’ on our eyelids.
Worse was that his eroding velvet jacket had developed a hole in each of the pockets so Gary had decided to use his own shoelace to attach the ruler to his wrist at one point like a weird stationery-based flick knife he could thrust up against his head at any given moment, even at the expense of his own ability to walk, which had become stuttered and jerky as he tried to keep his shoe on through willpower alone.
When we finally found ourselves in a situation of genuine panic — having wandered outside the city streets and into an uncharacteristic stretch of woodland where the spotlights of the buildings turned the grass flashing pinks and blues — we admitted to ourselves that we were lost. This was actually before Google Maps was A Thing, really. Gary had bought a new phone to come to Tokyo, which had a pull-out keyboard, and he’d shamed us all in the airport because he claimed it was made in Japan and had 3G. Japan was so technologically advanced when it came to 3G, it meant he’d get reception anywhere. Turned out he couldn’t get reception anywhere, and when we went to dinner with some of the bands we were playing with, Gary whipped out his wee retractable keyboard and they all audibly ‘oooh’ed like they’d never seen anything like it.
So, Japan didn’t have 3G reception everywhere, and we were fucking lost, and Gary was quickly getting antsy. The best solution was to find the quickest way back to the circuit board of the city, glowing and pulsing on the horizon. When we pointed towards it, Gary unravelled with a squeak and bolted through a set of trees, heading straight to the soothing electronics in the distance.
As he charged into the seemingly flat path, his untied shoe rebelled against him. It slipped off and somehow made a dart for the sky, straight past his face, illuminated by the distant lights, spinning in the air like the bone from 2001: A Space Odyssey, symbolising the actual human devolution we were witnessing before us. His arms flew up like a child on a rollercoaster as he soundlessly collapsed and disappeared into the purple grass as if he’d melted.
Fifteen minutes later, we rushed to help.
I’d forgotten about this. I’d forgotten about Gary. I checked his Instagram to see what he was doing now, 15 years since he fell into that wee grassy hole in Japan. It was a feed populated with images of beautiful, dusky scenery, ocean-scapes, mountains. And one lone selfie. Gary, in the blazing sunshine, crouching at a wall as the beach stretches behind him, scrunching his eyes and giving them shade with a salute. He looked happy, and healthy, and he wasn’t bald, Supersonic Balding having failed to take his crown. But you know what? He was still wearing that fucking velvet jacket.
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