You Are Awful (But I Like You) by Tim Moore

Author:Tim Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409041115
Publisher: Random House

Chapter Eight

IT WAS A crisp and rosy dawn, one that cast a flattering blush upon Fife. Lochgelly’s porridge-plastered, bargain-bin housing stock looked a lot better with a hint of pink on it, and so did the rank of chimneys lined up atop a neighbouring bluff: the massive petrochemical plant of Mossmorran, staffed by Lochgelly’s former miners and tawse-testers. I yawned my way north-east on an empty road, the rising sun strobing painfully through the roadside oak trees. Past the brief shimmer that was Loch Gelly, past Kirkcaldy, Gordon Brown’s constituency and at this stage of political history perhaps the only place in Britain where his name was more than a punchline. Music, Maestro: Babylon Zoo’s ‘Spaceman’, the Gordon Brown of one-hit wonders, a track that promised much but delivered only failure and embarrassment.

Recorded in 1995, ‘Spaceman’ had been hanging around unnoticed for a year when an ad agency knob-twiddler chanced upon it, or rather one very, very small part of it. And so in 1996 Levi’s released a TV commercial that incorporated a massively speeded-up sample of its stunted chorus, which severally employed the title in a manner I am not permitted to replicate. A swiftly released remix incorporating multiple repetitions of this sample sold 418,000 copies in Britain in its first week, and very quickly went on to top the singles charts in twenty-three countries. To the astonishment of those unlucky few familiar with the rambling, dirge-like original, Babylon Zoo were eagerly tipped for enduring global stardom – most energetically by Jas Mann, the band’s Wolverhampton-born frontman and sole songwriter. As the persistently tuneless, repetitive and garbled album I now endured made plain, this could never and did not happen. Almost every track exceeded six minutes. One went on for precisely eleven months. Babylon Zoo’s free-fall from grace swiftly achieved terminal velocity. Like many, I last saw Jas Mann making a ten-ton twat of himself on satire juggernaut Brass Eye, sombrely agreeing with the suggestion that he ‘might have a few more genes than normal people’.

The approach to most of my bad places meant an air of ratcheting dread: the grotty ring road, the squat housing blocks, the brownfield wasteland. Not so Methil. One minute it was all heathery brae and crofters’ cottages and villages called Milton of Balgonie. The next … well, here’s how Wikipedia’s overview of the town begins: ‘Immediately adjacent to the mouth of the river is Methil power station, which is now unused and awaiting deconstruction.’ A few months before I’d found some 1960s home movies on YouTube, showing Methil’s heaving prime in jerky, luridly coloured silence. A logjam of railway trucks massed by a dockside full of smoke and funnels, a sea of sensibly trimmed heads packed into a football stand, bunting strung across a crowded, sunny street. I thought of them now as Craig bumped through the puddles in the car park outside East Fife FC, and came to a halt between two upside-down sofas.

Never before had the chasm between vibrant past and bleak present yawned more hugely.

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