Alex de Campi: Gojira!

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31.8.05 I Crashed My Car Down Memory Lane, Now No-one'll Stop And Drive Me Out Again

Yes, still writing doggerel.

My days are packed. I'm writing so much and either I'm losing my mind or most of it is quite good. This is why I have been slightly incommunicado, gentle strangers.

I have been thinking a lot about the link between mania and creativity, thanks to one of those odd little London art-world synchronicities: an overlap of biopics about Joe Meek and Daniel Johnston. The most excellent Telstar has been playing in the West End to critical acclaim and half-empty houses, which is tragic because it is one of the best-written plays about manic-depressive genius I have ever seen.

The tourists, those cattle, are all off seeing Andrew Lloyd Garbage, and the hipsters are possibly staying away from Telstar out of a sense of schadenfreude: when most people can't even be mediocre in one creative discipline, they don't want to see someone like actor-playwright Nick Moran succeed in two. The hyphen is in some ways the creative kiss of death, which is odd because what most people don't understand is that it all comes from the same well. The end format of what you create is almost... irrelevant. Con O'Neill and Linda Robson act the hell out of the parts of Joe and his landlady, and the breakdown scenes had my companion Mr Brown (a psychiatric nurse) nodding in appreciation at their accuracy.

Then last night was the preview of Jeff Feuerzeig's The Devil and Daniel Johnston, about another reclusive musical genius who could barely play an instrument and who created hundreds of recordings locked in his bedroom-cum-recording-studio. Alan Moore once said that of the eight or nine true writers he knew, six were mad. He never said how he defined "mad," but my overwhelming reaction to the Joe Meek and Daniel Johnston stories is "there but for the grace of God go I..."

I spent most of Bank Holiday weekend on a 24-hour sail from Brighton round the Isle of Wight and back, testing out the boat for the ARC race. Off Chichester Harbour, the night sky was filled with glittering pink confetti: 15 or more aeroplanes, queued up to land at Gatwick. Their dazzle put the stars to shame. These celestial bodies, perhaps wishing to reclaim some of their heavenly primacy, riposted with shooting stars throughout the night.

We were somewhat preoccupied, however, for during the darkest part of the night we were navigating the Solent. The Solent is a bit of water that doesn't love boats and, between its tides and its hazards, seeks to do them ill at every opportunity. We hit it around 2am on Sunday night/Monday morning, playing a game of chicken with one of the Palmerston Follies (looming huge and black in the night) that guard its Eastern approach.

Dawn brought us to the Needles, shining white against the hot sun and spotless blue sky of the August morning. I thought how much less I would love the Needles if they were not punctuated by their red lighthouse, and this got me thinking about mankind's relationship to landscape. Can we love an unspoilt landscape? (Hell, have any of us ever seen an unspoilt landscape?).

I struggle to think of a well-known landscape painting that does not contain some sign of man in it. An unspoilt landscape has no story to it. It's a beginning, nothing more. The eye skims over it, not knowing where to rest. A landscape scarred or amended by mankind tells a tale, gives the eye a way in. And sometimes it is the ugliest and most exploitative use of land which becomes the most strangely beautiful.

My favourite seascape is the western anchorages outside Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong, as seen from the Lamma Ferry: the leviathan masses of thirty container ships moored mid-channel, becoming a sort of architecture, a silent sea-city in their own right. Would San Francisco Bay be as striking without the Golden Gate Bridge? Would we love Devon so much without its neat pastures and hedgerows? Is it the scars of humanity that we adore, or the tension between the landscape and the scar?

Gigs: King Biscuit Time at Cargo on Sept 26th. KBT is ex Beta Band frontman Steve Mason's solo project. Cargo is a lovely venue full of achingly hip and laughably-dressed Hoxtonites. Vincent Vincent & The Villains and Somebody's Mind at 93 Feet East on Sept 21st.

( 9:20 AM )

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