Alex de Campi: Gojira!

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16.3.06 The lay of the love and the death of the Moor Street Peacock

I think it began in August.

Freelancers always go a little crazy in August. Our editors are on vacation; no new books are being launched; and we are not getting nearly as much attention as our vast and sensitive egos require.

I'd been coping by listening to a lot of old blues, and I'd developed a habit of making up blues lyrics about life in London to the general pattern of Son House's "My Black Mama" or Ella Fitzgerald's storming version of WC Handy's "St Louis Blues". It passed the time, and got me thinking in rhyme again.

So there I am, sitting at my desk rolling the sound of some words around in my head, just messing around and feeling a little sentimental. I scratch out a few lines, drink a little coffee.

"On any given night in Soho
A thousand stories start
Some broken souls are made complete
And some are torn apart"

It continues. Before I realise, it's 44 verses later and I've written a love story.

Yes. Me.

I mean, all stories are love stories, and everything I've ever written has had a love story in it, somewhere. But I'd never written a Love Story, capital L, capital S. No, I'm way too cool for that.

What do I do now, I thought. Hide it? Throw it away? I mean, I've just written a really long poem about an artist and a showgirl who keep meeting each other at the wrong times in their lives. If anyone finds out, I might have to turn in my Cynic Card.

On a whim, I email frequent collaborator Lee O'Connor and rather sheepishly send him the poem. What do you think about making it into a little illustrated book, I ask. A6 size, so pretty tiny, and with a stanza or two on each left-hand page, faced by an illustration on the right? You know, the kind of thing they sell next to the cash register at the ICA Bookshop. Then I waved my hands around a bit and muttered about Toulouse-Lautrec and acid-green and Soho at night.

Lee of course understood this instinctively, was amused by some of the more satirical parts of the poem, and crucially understands the mysterious and undeniable appeal of fit girls in top hats. Then we all got rather busy and took our eye off the... uh... pole.

We've finally gotten around to working on The Artist & The Showgirl again, and I'm starting to get roughs in my inbox. We don't have a home for it yet, but if anyone is crazy enough to publish it, we'll let you know.

Meanwhile, you can smile to yourself at this brief slip in my veil of irony.

But then again, it was August, and I'm always a little crazy then.

( 2:06 PM )

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