So, here’s my question:

What’s wrong with you? Seriously. No – don’t start that. Never mind what’s wrong with me. We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you. YOU. It’s home truths time. Realising your responsibilities, facing the music, taking it on the chin and asking for seconds time. If you learn one thing today, you’re going to learn that. So pin ‘em back and start listening, or you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.

Did you really think you could carry on this way? Sauntering about the place without so much as a by-your-leave? Without attracting a second glance? Well here is the news – you attracted a first glance. Then a second and third one. And those glances came from me. I’ll get right to it – I didn’t care for what I (very briefly) saw. Oh, I know what you thought. You thought it was OK. That everyone does it. That it doesn’t really do any harm. That you didn’t have a choice. Wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong again. After all – would you want everyone else to do that? To carry on the way you do? Where would we be then, eh? Up shit creek, that’s where.

It’s time to take a long, hard look at yourself and start asking some serious questions. Is this really the kind of person you want to be? Are you really headed in the right direction? Because, my friend, if you don’t stop, take stock, wise up and start flying right sometime soon, you’re going to be lost. And I think we all know what that means. It doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? Well I’VE thought about it, and maybe other people could bear thinking about it too, but not you. You haven’t got what it takes. You’ve probably thought about it for a little bit, got scared, and then run home to Mummy. You’re lucky I’m here.

Don’t start with me about it either. I’ve heard it all before. The lies, the excuses, the snivelling self-justifications. The what-ifs and I-could-haves and what-are-you-talking-abouts. I’ll tell you something right now – it doesn’t wash with me. Not for a second. I’m in this thing for the long haul, whether you like it or not. I haven’t some this far just to give up and walk away. Not now.

So here’s the bottom line – first thing tomorrow, we’re going to get started. Crack of dawn, it’s rise and shine. Shower, shit, shave and then off to play with the big boys. You’d best bring your ‘A’ game, son – it’s big league time. And don’t start crying about it either.

You knew this day would come.

Top 5
Things I remember about living in Saudi Arabia

Being Nicked

The houses my friends and I lived in were all detached, but with shared walls separating the boundaries of the gardens. As everything was built on a US-style grid plan, it meant that the nimbler members of the gang were more than happy to follow my suggestion, one bored afternoon, that we discover how far away from my back garden we could get without touching the floor.

Quite far, as it turned out. Somewhere along the way, we unwittingly walked along the walls of a house that was empty. A neighbour saw us, somehow convinced herself (I’m sure it was a woman) that we were a crack team of 9-year old burglars and called the police. Or what passed for them, anyway. The sanitised company-built neighbourhood we lived in saw so little crime as to render proper police superfluous, and a private security force took care of everything else. The fear that they caused when they showed up, armed and ready to throw down, was quickly dissipated by the fact that they then had to send for three more squad cars to transport our bikes to the station.

The Heat

Obviously it’s hot in Saudi Arabia. But you really wouldn’t believe how hot. Over 120 degrees in the shade, every day, except for four days a year when it rains constantly. I once tried to emulate the emerging fashion at the US high school I attended by wearing a pair of combat trousers, and suffered the humiliation of appearing to have wet myself less than five minutes from the house, such was the level of perspiration.

Four litres of water a day as standard, emergency water in the car in case you broke down, and a personal habit of at least four cans of Mountain Dew on top of that – and everyone still had to spend all but ten minutes of the day indoors if they didn’t want to fry or go mad.

During Ramadan, the hottest part of the year, it was strictly forbidden to consume any food or drink on the street. This made little difference to us, or our Arabic neighbours, who slept all day and feasted wildly into the night. The burden was on the Indonesian and Filipino street workers, whose shifts didn’t alter, but could be thrown in jail for taking a sip of water.

Flying Over There

I was nine, and my Dad had taken a job in Saudi Arabia. This meant the whole family would relocate. Ignorant of all things Saudi, my brother and I chose to hang all our excitement and trepidation on the forthcoming aeroplane ride. Neither of us had flown before, and back in 1985 an international flight was still sufficiently glamorous to merit a degree of interest and jealousy from classmates.

It was amazing. The flight took about seven hours, and I’m sure there must have been moments of relative boredom, but all I can remember is he overwhelming novelty of it all. We got to sit with the pilots in the cabin, amid banks of lights and switches. When we got tired, the stewardess let us both into the back of first class, lifted up all the seat rests and gave us blankets so we could stretch out.

When we woke up, we stepped off the plane into a wall of heat like nothing we’d ever felt, walked past the first ever uniformed men with guns we’d ever seen, and started life in a brand new world.

David Sablowski

We got new neighbours about two months into our stay, and I couldn’t believe my luck. Not only were the Sablowskis exotic Americans, they also owned jet skis and a catamaran, had a foxy teenage daughter and –wonder of wonders – bought their son David a three-wheel Honda motorbike one afternoon. We’d fallen out briefly, David and I, but when I head the news I resolved to get round there and put things right as soon as possible.

My transparent efforts were rewarded and punished simultaneously by David, who rationed my access to the machine with a torturer’s cunning, and never let me be anything but a passenger. Served him right when riding in shorts one day, the engine block got so hot that it melded to the flesh of his right leg and scarred him extensively.

Every Which Way But Loose

My obsessions as a nine-year old were few but intense. Ocean Pacific sportswear (no idea why), the Beatles, Wham, basketball, Natasha from year 4 and ‘Every Which Way But Loose’, starring Clint Eastwood and a large orangutan called Clyde. TV in Saudi Arabia wasn’t up to much then and it’s probably worse now – endless footage of the Saudi royal family getting in and out of limousines, the very cheapest, least smutty and therefore unfunny US and Brit comedies (‘Charles in Charge’, ‘Upstairs Downstairs’) and the whole shebang stopped five times a day for prayers.

Some expats formed an unofficial video hire business with copied tapes from back home, and EWWBL instantly became my favourite film. There were obvious reasons – Clyde knows how to flip people the bird, a lot of bikers fall in a lot of mud, and an old lady swears with relish all the time, but there was something else too. For all the fighting, slapstick and orangutan footage, it’s actually pretty bleak. Eastwood’s seasoned street-fighter loves, loses love, and eventually throws his greatest fight on purpose, seeing his broken future writ large on the face of his legendary and battered opponent.

Strong stuff, and well worth a watch. A lesson there for us all.

Maverick scribbler Tim Wild reviews… things

This month – Top 5 Rejected Top 5s

Top 5 Albums I’m Supposed To Know About But Don’t

While the list of seminal, world-changing albums I’ve never heard is certainly of an impressive length, this idea bit the dust fairly quickly. I’d made all my limp jokes about musical bores (real ale, Taliban-style denunciations of people who don’t treat their vinyl properly etc) within the first three sentences, then I realised that apart from ‘Blood on the Tracks’ by Dylan, I don’t even know the names of most of the albums I’m vaguely guessing other people regard as classics. I mean, I’m fairly sure there’s one by MC5, and one by the Stooges, perhaps a Bowie or two, but the idea of looking them up on the web just so I could make poor jokes about not knowing anything about them seemed stupid, so I stopped.

Top 5 Things I Do To Avoid Work

Again, this initially seemed like a rich comic vein, and one likely to resonate strongly with you. After all, here you are on this website about dangerously alternative music, with its seditious take on modern media and irreverent interviews. An article about slacking off? Yeah, motherfucker! Stick it to the man! And so on. However, as I congratulated myself on this stroke of journalistic flair, it dawned on me that the things I do to avoid work are just the same as everyone else’s, and that five hundred words on daytime masturbation, computer games and making unnecessary sandwiches is really more of a Loaded thing anyway.

Top 5 Moments Which Were Supposed To Be Great But Weren’t

I thought I had a good start with losing my virginity of course, or attempting to, but it’s fairly shite for everyone, right? Or so I’ve chosen to believe. After that, I couldn’t really think of any classically life-changing moments I’ve had that haven’t been quite good – meeting my missus, proposing to her and then becoming a Dad have all been pretty great, all things considered. Then I was going to pretend that those moments had actually been a bit disappointing to make the whole thing a bit funnier, but then I started worrying that:

A) My missus would read it and think I was a bastard; and
B) I might be incapable of writing anything halfway funny without exploiting the few precious moments I’ve experienced in my life for cheap laughs

Which killed off the whole idea, and my mood for the rest of the day.

The Top 5 People I Really Hate

This one was a really shit idea, because all I really wanted to do was lay into Gillian McKeith off ‘You Are What You Eat’. I spent a good twenty minutes shouting at the television earlier this week as the skinny, malevolent fishwife reduced otherwise pleasant people into submissive toddlers with her cackling cavalcade of anti-fun horrors, so I thought it’s be a really good start to the column. But as far as targets for satire go she’s about as dangerous as an episode of ‘Murder She Wrote’, and I also started wondering if the whole thing’s just a sophisticated media construct deliberately designed to raise my lazy televisual ire, and that if I ever tried to criticise her like that in real life she’d just give me a withering look before lighting a fag and dispatching a flunky to McDonalds. I should probably watch less television.

The Top 5 Reasons For Not Doing This Column At All

The worst idea of them all, because there’s only one reason, which is that I don’t get paid. Passes the time though eh? Christ.

This month – Moments I relive in the dark night, unable to forget

The Hairdressers

I despise barbers and hairdressers of all kinds. Youthful humiliation seemed always to be order of the day, but this one incident still haunts me particularly. My Mum, ever-practical, booked me a haircut in her own favoured salon, which happened to be the pinkest, most feminine establishment in town. It was staffed with a 13 year old boy’s mortal enemies – confident and attractive teenage girls, one of whom set about my unruly locks with a mixture of amusement and condescension. Then one of her boyfriends came in while she was working, and mistook me for a girl from the back. Just as I thought my shame couldn’t deepen any further, I came to pay and was a quid short.

“My Mum (oh Christ) works just up the road. I’ll leave my bike here and go and get the money”. Dashing out of the salon, I made to cut across the green. Moving from a trot into a sprint, I reached the low hedge surrounding it, tripped, and landed on my face not ten yards from the salon window, from which I could faintly hear the sounds of uncontrollable laughter.

The French Exchange

I did not like the family, and they definitely didn’t like me. One look at the station when I arrived confirmed that the presence of a suburban proto-hippie with long hair, ripped jeans and a guitar was not the exchange partner they envisaged for their lumpen, potato-faced offspring.
They tried though. After several days of Siberian silence from both parties, the mother made a conciliatory gesture. Pointing to a magazine picture and gesticulating wildly, she managed to tell me that she wanted me to play the guitar for the family.

They sat opposite me on the sofa, silently, expectantly. I launched into my best Beatles crowd-pleaser, hoping to god it was one pop song they might actually recognise. I started tentatively, but actually began to enjoy myself after a bit. I was throwing myself about, hitting the big notes, closing my eyes, when I suddenly felt a tap on my shoulder. I looked up to see the father of the house, who uttered the first and last word he would ever exchange with me before kicking me out of the house three days later. It was “Stop.”

The prawn sandwich

It was from a well-known High Street bakers, and it wrung me out like a wet rag. I lived in the toilet for three days, alternately shivering in a duvet or exploding with intestinal discomfort. However, it was the end of term, and had to vacate my accommodation. A friend’s family had offered me a lift back down south with a stopover at their house in Leicester. I pulled myself into some sort of order before they arrived, but my composure didn’t last. By the time we reached their furniture shop in the town centre, I was in trouble. They had to detour from their evening plans to drop me at their house, where I literally ran up the stairs and into their one bathroom, remaining there for several dreadful hours.

I finally fell asleep about 4 in the morning, and was awoken the next day by my friend’s mother, who put a cup of weak tea next to my bed. As I came to my senses, my nose woke up first, and my friend’s mother looked at me quizzically. In a flash, we each simultaneously realised the awful truth – her bedsheets would never be the same again.

The Slow Dance

Her name was Melinda, and she wasn’t exactly going to make the cover of Vogue, but she was a girl, and that more than met my requirements at the time. I was thirteen, the church youth club disco was in full swing, and skidding about on the floor because it was shiny was no longer on the agenda. I had to step up. I think the song was ‘Wishing Well’ by Terence Trent D’Arby. I started chastely, with my hands on her shoulders, and then…I froze. My legs kept moving, fuelled by involuntary spasms of terror, but my arms remained straight. The poor girl was locked in a rictus of my embarrassment for the full duration of the song. As the other couples grew closer together and began their furtive grappling, her eyes slowly began to register her dismay, but I was powerless to act. My only hope was that the darkness and music had provided some small cover for my shame, but as the lights went up, I saw two of my mates reenacting my dance style for the benefit of a large group of onlookers.

The last time I went to the knob doctor

You’d cry too, with a six-inch metal swab in your jap’s eye.

This month – the top five people I’ve always wanted to bump into but would probably make such a twat of myself if I did that I’d regret the experience for ages.

Stephen Fry

Not just because he’s really clever, and quite famous, and funny, but because he seems like a really nice man, doesn’t he? The kind of man that would put up with my fame-addled prattling for a good deal longer than most celebs and be polite about it too. In my head, when we meet, he’s quietly impressed with my erudition, with perhaps a wry chuckle at the obvious gaps in my reading and education, and foots the bill for an impressively expensive bottle of wine in J.Sheeky after an enjoyable evening of repartee and indiscreet celebrity anecdotes. I, having wowed the table with one last memorable zinger, finally have to make my excuses and leave.
Bye Stephen!

The Bloke From That Shitty Music Magazine I Worked For That Ripped Me Off For £500 A Few Years Back

I want to meet him for the most banal of reasons – I’d like to peel his skin off with a carpet knife and make a scarf out of it. That’s the trouble with being ripped off – it strikes deep at the heart of one’s basest desires. The particular trouble with this one is that, spectacularly stupid as he was, the chances of him having the money even if I did ever meet him again are practically nil. So what starts out as a thoroughly satisfying revenge fantasy where I serve up a dead-eyed and terrifying revenge ends with me locked up for the night after being apprehended struggling down the stairs with his battered and unsaleable Mac desktop, closely followed by a tearful and uncomprehending secretary.

A Girl I Used To Want To Shag Really Badly

Kept me up nights, that one, teasing out the hints and suggestions until I was practically psychotic with desire, before finally administering a blow job which she then refused to finish. Disappointing as this most assuredly was, it wasn’t nearly so cruel a twist as finding out that several other older, uglier men of our mutual acquaintance had received much more comprehensive treatment for considerably less work. Of course, I’ll doubtless bump into her casually one day, looking so well-dressed and nonchalantly handsome that she’ll be unable to resist throwing herself at me. This will be an offer I can then, being both happily married and slightly less susceptible to really obvious cock-teases these days, haughtily reject. It’s bound to happen.

Gordon Ramsay

This one’s a bit of a cheat, because I have met him, whilst having a private birthday dinner at one of his restaurants, and he wished me a happy birthday. So I, quite drunk, made what I though was an hilarious remark, at which point he compared me to a middle-aged Harry Potter and all my friends laughed their arses off, and I still wake up every now and again with the chef-flooring response my brain so pathetically failed to supply at the time on my sorrowful lips.
If it ever happens again, I’ll be ready.

OJ Simpson

Because there wouldn’t be any way to resist, eventually, asking. Then you’d have to leave, after not finding out.

This month – the top five people who must die if humanity is to make any progress at all

My Neighbour

I’m talking about the bearded (but strangely unmoustachioed) Serbian bloke who lives a few doors down the road and whose fucking kids run about in the street with their crappy broken toys screaming their little heads off at all hours of the night when all I’m trying to do is get the baby to sleep and catch a bit of ‘Desperate Housewives’ whilst simultaneously drowning myself in Jacobs Creek and hoping to exchange a civilised word with my intended wife before she falls asleep on my lap. The revolution’s coming, and he’s first.

The next person who tries to talk to me in a lift

That rush of panic you feel when trapped in a confined space with another human? That desperate sinking feeling that you can only plug with one-liners so banal they make me want to turn my head inside out with a fork and smear the resulting mess into a crude yet devastatingly poignant tableau of trauma? I don’t feel it. So don’t fucking talk to me. PS – That goes for urinals too.

People who say ‘I know you’re not likely to get the chance, but if you did get offered sex by Cameron Diaz, would you say ‘Yes’?’

What exactly are conversations like that supposed to achieve? My leisure time’s a precious commodity these days. I do not want to waste it in the company of people whose sole topic of conversation is which Hollywood actresses/bints off Hollyoaks/Zoo models the would poke (and how they would do it) in the stratospherically unlikely event that such an opportunity were ever to arise.

The fat bloke in a Burton suit giving a pep talk to his Budweiser promotional team in a dingy Dundee hotel at eight in the morning the other week.

And I quote: “I’m disgusted with you all. This isn’t a game. If you don’t care about this company, if you don’t want to succeed, than there’s the door. I haven’t got time for people that don’t want to succeed. I haven’t got time for LOSERS. So when you’re out there today I want every single one of you – that means you too, Jason -(withering glance to unshaven bored man in corner) to give 110% That’s ONE HUNDRED AND TEN PERCENT. Forget about your coffee – the minibus is here. Just get on with it.”

General Pinochet

What a bastard, eh? Honestly.

This month – The top 5 reasons to get fired

You’re not really that important

The dishwashing gig has begun to go sour. Having begun in a blitz of cheeky good humour and hard work, the relentless grease, detergent, heat and smoke have fogged your adolescent brain and dulled your spirit. The previous week, you have disobeyed the only clear instruction the boss gave you, and allowed a chunky piece of carrot to block the sink, flooding the service area on a busy Friday and earning you the displeasure of a waitress.

This same waitress is left in charge of the rota when the boss goes on holiday the next week, and calmly informs you that you’re not scheduled to work on the weekend. So you go to St Albans, ingest a horse-felling quantity of LSD, suffer a minor psychotic episode, and return to your parent’s home three days later, cradling your weak brain like an injured hedgehog. They immediately inform you that the restaurant boss has called several times asking for you, and that you’re fired for not showing up. With the last pops and fizzles of your trip still affecting your vision, you limp to work to state your case, where you are stoutly bollocked in front of several staff and told to get out.

You’re massively out of your depth

Having talked your way into a swish London PR job by dint of a personal connection and a barely credible CV, you quickly realise that you hopelessly under-qualified for the role. To add to your discomfort, you also realise that the one person who can help you, teach you and protect you is your immediate superior, who is the biggest pseudo-mystical public school drug dustbin asshole you have ever met.

Every time he tries to speak to you, your eyes fog over and a neon sign reading ‘TOSSER’ throbs relentlessly in your brain. He spends all day avoiding other people and only really works at night in a fog of skunk and strong cider, whilst you creep home at the earliest opportunity and stay up late, prolonging the arrival of the next day as long as possible.

Your mutual antipathy comes to a head when he leaves you in charge of a huge account and goes on holiday to Thailand, and you accidentally send an offensive email to over 5,000 of your client’s staff, get called a cunt over speakerphone in front of twenty people, and get told to leave and never come back.

You’re taking the piss

Not wishing to relinquish the regular wages that your poxy office job provides, you are nonetheless drawn to the more glamorous pastures of music journalism, with its heady promises of guest lists, free CDs and the company of hipsters. To solve your dilemma, you begin working for magazines whilst still at your office job, on their computer, during the day.

Undetected, your boldness grows, and you fake illness at 8.45 am from a hotel bathroom in Nottingham, having spent the previous night in fancy dress with a load of transvestites and a strange German man with a lot of space biscuits.

Whilst on holiday, your permanently suspicious boss gets your password from IT and pokes around in your hard drive, finding ample evidence of your duplicity, including invoices, and on your first day back you are frogmarched from the building by security.

You’re taking the piss again

At first, it seems perfect. The local factory, which makes vending machines, needs a warehouseman. Unbounded joy fills your heart when you realise that this entails little more than donning a tan housecoat, making the occasional parcel up and bantering with the UPS man at five every afternoon. A radio and comfortable desk chair are thrown in, and it takes very little time to rig up a small area behind the shelves for the rolling of spliffs and the odd cheeky midday lager.

One fine day you are gently supping your second tea of the day, digesting a bacon sandwich, entertaining fantasies about the work experience girl and one clue away from finishing the crossword when the managing director appears as if from nowhere, hauls you up by the shirt collar and tells you to get the fuck out, right now.

You forget your place

Your boss is a flighty sort. Happy as a clam one day, savaging hapless junior employees the next, you quickly learn that his moods directly correlate with the previous night’s level of cocaine consumption. You would be wise to play your cards close to your chest, pick your moments to speak up carefully, and work very hard indeed.

Instead, in the middle of a meeting where all the senior staff are present, the boss breaks off mid-sentence, flips you a quid and says’ Pop down the road and get me a cappuccino.’ Of all the options available to respond, the only one really worth taking being going and getting the coffee, you instead choose to reply with ‘I suppose you want me to do your fucking laundry done at the same time, yeah?’ and lose your job that very afternoon.

You are utterly incapable of showing any respect whatsoever to your superiors.

Because they are all cunts.