Bit of a Blur Read Online Free Page B

drums as well, but there were no drums around so he played on his knees, with air cymbals. There was a piano in the hall and we used to sing ‘Blue Moon’ a lot. Graham only knew how to play ‘October’ by U2 on the piano, so we sang that a lot as well. We were friends. We were interested in each other’s record collections and we both had guitars; we connected through music, but it went beyond that. We were happy in each other’s company just waiting for a bus or sharing a packet of cigarettes and making up words. I liked him because he was instantly brilliantly artistic, but vulnerable; strikingly stylish, but quite awkwardly shy. Why he liked me, I don’t know. Maybe it was mainly because I liked him. Still, when you do know exactly why someone likes you, that’s not really a friend. That’s a fan.
    We didn’t often go anywhere apart from college and places that sold breakfast. We didn’t have any money so we just sat in each other’s rooms listening to each other’s records, me, Graham and often Paul as well. Jason got involved with Jo from English and drama and disappeared.
    One of Graham’s proudest possessions was a half-drunk bottle of tequila in a sealed plastic bag with a ‘police evidence’ sticker on it. He was planning on keeping it forever, but that was patently never going to happen. We did get drunk and run out of booze quite a few times before it went, though, and we’d try and persuade him to open it. Then one morning the bottle was empty and Paul and I were quite disappointed he’d drunk it without us.
    Paul loved the Beatles, but not as much as Graham. Graham’s dad, who was a clarinet teacher, had brought him up on the Beatles and Beethoven. Paul’s sister was friends with Captain Sensible, the singer, so he had the final say in all conversations about punk rock, but Graham was the authority on the Beatles. I had some quite odd records. Papa’s, mainly: he was a big-band man. I worked my way through them all keeping the ones I liked and selling the ones I didn’t to Ray’s Jazz in Covent Garden.
    Occasionally Graham would disappear to a studio in Euston, where he was recording with a band. I was insanely jealous. I’d messed around with four-track recorders a lot, but I’d never been inside a studio.

Goldsmiths
    Goldsmiths College is a wonderful place. It’s taken over most of New Cross. It’s spilled out of the original building into the surrounding Victorian terraces and municipal buildings. There are new additions too, the latest in library chic and all sorts of departments, faculties and facilities. It’s really thriving. The university buildings are bisected by the flooding A2, but to turn into one of the little side streets is to enter a world of studious calm. Most of the French department was in a neat little antique cul-de-sac called Laurie Grove. London SE14 doesn’t have the grandeur of Oxford: more screaming tyres than dreaming spires. It’s very much a feet-on-the-ground part of town. It’s quite bewildering how many things are happening at once around there. New Cross manages to be part campus, part ghetto, part middle-class suburb and part motorway, with a lot of pubs. There are always all kinds of people striding around. It is easy to spot the students, especially in October. It doesn’t conform to the traditional image of a hallowed seat of learning but you’d learn more about the world in a couple of terms at Goldsmiths than you would in ten years of eating crumpets and punting around Cambridge.
    I do like Oxford and Cambridge; Goldsmiths just happened to be the best place to be in the world at that time. I’d underachieved my way into the right place and dallied on my way to arrive at the perfect time. The cataclysmic big bang that kick-started the ultimate decade of the last millennium can be traced back to a small area of the bar at the Student Union at Goldsmiths College in 1988. Somehow or other the drunkest people in that bar went on to instigate a