Downtime (again)

 DURING
 

 It's been twenty-three years since Wembley.  The Doctor turned twenty-seven the night before. 

Twenty-three years (and change) since Wembley.  In that time an ocean of river's run under more bridges than you'd even find in Hamburg.  New names; loads of pack-drill.

Shaved for the occasion.  Right to the front, crush up against the barrier and get the sweating in early, every drop picks out tiny razor tears and magnifies them.

Lights.  Smoke.  Scream for speed, girls - here we go.

It's a different gig in the front.  Up with the gods twenty-three years (and a lifetime) ago, trying to guess which blur was which.  Now the Abyss looks right on back.  And points.  

"It's for you.  It's all for you."   

Rise, reverberating.



AFTER

 In illusion, comfort lies 
- Eldritch, Alice

So, yeah, I loved The Sisters of Mercy.

I came to music fairly slowly.  When I was really small it didn’t bother me, I was much more into reading.  The writing, drawing and falling off things came later.  Books, comics, trees and toys – that’s where the satori came from.  Childhood’s an odd state where everything’s incomprehensible and slightly bigger; dreams and colours are clearer than they’ll ever be again, you might say.  And I will.¹

The first record I remember having was an accidental purchase.  I’d really, really wanted the soundtrack to The Empire Strikes Back – so this must’ve been 1980.  The WH Smiths in Newport used to be a double-level beauty opposite the Market,² with all the vinyl stocked on the first floor.  They didn’t have the record I was after, so I picked up Jeff Wayne’s Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds instead.⁶ After that, I was taping radio dramas, picking up cassette soundtracks where possible and also recording soundtracks of TV programmes to listen to later on.  Alfred Hitchcock Presents rather than Doctor Who, like you’d think.

I graduated from soundtracks onto Adam and the Ants and a selection of compilation records collecting hits of the day.  These would either be picked up in branches of Boots, Smiths or from Seeley’s on Hill Road.  Nobody reading this’ll have a clue where that is, which is shame as it’ll almost crop up again after the next paragraph.

I’d listen to soundtracks while reading books or reading and drawing comics.  The soundtracks I liked the best were the ones that had moments of proper drama.  The truck chase in Raiders of the Lost Ark still sticks out.  I got the same trigger from the Burundi-influenced drum twins Terry Lee Miall and Merrick⁷ and that started driving me toward more full-on music.  Well, that and puberty.  After a brief dalliance with metal in its hairiest forms, I settled on early the Queen which in turn led to The Sisters of Mercy, long hair, cowboy boots and recording studios.

My first gig was in a venue you can see in M*****man.⁸  The third was in an underground bar opposite Seeley’s and hidden in fog.  We did a lot of Sisters songs but none by the Queen.  Over Christmas we recorded a demo in Bristle’s Rizound Studios and in the New Year headlined the Bierkeller.  We did one more gig and then split up due to ‘physical differences’.  I went to college and formed another band along with a chap who’d already had a letter published in Doctor Who Monthly.  We listened to a lot of Sisters but didn’t cover any. 

In 1995 I formed a new band with a Frenchman.  We played Floorshow for a while before moving on to other things.  There was some similar madness taking place in the University of East Anglia – albeit on a much grander scale.

Downtime⁹ is a sequel to The Abominable Snowmen and The Web of Fear.  Although it wasn’t endorsed by the BBC, they sure let a lot of their staff have a crack at it.  The Reeltime film came out as a video premiere in September.  Written by Marc (Ghost Light) Platt, it begins with Victoria Waterfield returning to Det-Sen Monastery fifteen years ago and continues in a fan-pleasing vein for much of the rest of its sixty-seven minutes.  Familiar faces, lines and locations make an appearance in something that should really be unwatchable but isn’t.  I’m not going to give the story away, because it would be nice if this cropped up as VAM on a future “Yeti Tales” boxset.  Well, a guy can dream. 

I was going to say a lot of clever things about the character of Hinton being a double-bluff – referencing both the late Craig Hinton and the inventor of the tesseract – designed with Moffatian precision to distract the fan from what’s actually going on.  I planned to point out the themes of education, aging, technology and the way that time is a perceptive illusion.  Platt’s lifted moments of (almost) occult mathematics from the gutters of From Hell - check out the two guys on the beach in the dream sequence if you don’t believe me.  This is a writer who totally understands the Cartmel Masterplan.  Throughout, the whole thing's suffused with the terror of the Millennium Bug: its huge wings and invisible teeth.

This makes sense to me.  In 1999 things were going gooey.  I screamed a pop song that wasn’t, into a Maida Vale microphone.  The same building that the Greatest Theme in the History of Ever was born.  Laughing at the bear under the stairs as it eats off your leg is not really a career move.  These things only look cool if you can get the angle right.

Whatever’s wrong with it, Downtime is made from love and high-energy enthusiasm.  Every penny is on the screen.  The old chums shine, the guests…  Not so much.  Other criticisms?  The music tries too hard; the camera direction’s inconsistent; the editing’s flabby and you can see the seeds of Craig Hinton’s greatest term in every in-joke that plays to the inner-circle.  That’s about it though.  It’s on a par with School Reunion and The Sontaran Stratagem by dint of spawning them, which is about all you really need to know.   

Fan love manifests in strange ways.  Sometimes it’s a success; sometimes it’s weird; sometimes it makes a difference; sometimes it doesn’t and sometimes you can’t tell what’s happened.  Or how you ended up wherever the hell it is you are.

So, yeah, I loved The Sisters of Mercy. 

Seriously loved them. 

With a wave to all the folks in the Heartland.

1.  And did.  “If I have to explain then you’ll never understand.” 

2.  Newport Market was a treasure trove for a while.  When I was heading toward my teens I found that the second-hand bookshop on the balcony also sold comics and seemed to have back issues of all the must-have titles that you couldn’t find anywhere.  I still hadn’t heard about comic shops at this point so most of my digging for periodicals was being done in newsagents.³ Later on I discovered where they hid the record shops.  For a while there – about the age of 14 - I could sniff out a shop selling comics or records in a city that I’d never been in before. 

3.  There used to be three comic shops/stalls in Cardiff.  One in Jacob’s Market where the Abzorbaloff later lived; one stocked by the Roach brothers (only half of whom now draw the really black bits of the Doctor Who Magazine strip) slightly above where the Philharmonic⁴ spewed onto Saint Mary Street and Roath Books which sat on City Road.  Roath Books was fantastic.  I’d spend hours in there.  Saturdays would fade away to the flicking sound of mylar bags as I went through every single box and checked all the issues.  The proprietor would chat to this weird little goblin creature, humouring its precocious trivia-spouting over whichever sign he was painting that week.⁵  I’ll tell you about Adam Warlock one day. 

4.  Years later, the band played many gigs there.  A couple were doomed, one got bootlegged and one was written up by the Big Issue. 

5.  I remember when all this were motorway/jumpers for goalposts/Spangles/Yorkies made your gums bleed etc. etc. 

6.  I’ve told you about the time that I didn’t meet Phil Lynott, yeah?  Very strange.  The pub it happened in, the Park Vaults, doesn’t seem to exist any more.⁵ 

7.  Years later the band recorded a version of Kings of the Wild Frontier as part of a BBC session, closing something shaped a bit like a circle.  The Adam and the Ants Fan Club liked it and gave it a bronze medal at a convention.

 8.  See The Payphone Story and Judge Minty blog posts for the gory details. 

9.  For a week there, every Doctor Who spin-off had a compound word for a title.

Downtime originally published, in a different form, in the Travers Tales Winter Special.

Dedicated to my long-suffering PA.