Bill Quay

The blackness of the water moves in channels. The water is not all black. The water is not black. The water reflects that what is around it. I watch the water reflect it. The water looks black to me.

We picked our way down through the thicket. It was a place used to be other than it is now. There were boats that were made here. Or they loaded the ones up that were built in distant lands here. 

They loaded them up with coal or stone, and sent them off down the river that curves (and disappears) here. It curves into infinity. What is round that corner. I don’t know man, I just load the boats.

The sky was obscured as we came out into the clearing. You could say that it was a shame that the sky was obscured here. You could say whatever you wanted; no one was around.

...

On the rocks the black weeds washed in the black water. I picked my way down in the mist to the waters edge. The phone had said the tide times, but it was higher here than expected.

The plan had been – the plan had been to do something else actually. But it just so happened to take this turn. The water lapped in and amongst the stones and bricks

which is what we had come for. I took the trowel from out the ruck sack, put on the blue plastic gloves, and started the work of turning and picking through that which was discarded.

We were after the ones with names on – or anything that took our fancy. His son had taken home half a Victorian cistern once on the Metro. He had said it was quality stuff that

when it had become apparent that the smell of it was bothering some of the other passengers and one in particular. He just said it and looked at him, and then looked out the window.

Did you bring the brush? Nah. Because the water here was higher than expected a lot of the good stuff we had been aware of the time before when we’d said we’d come back was

submerged. The bricks were discarded in strata which is a pluralization of stratum which means a layer or set of successive layers of any deposited substance.

Basically the better bricks to us were the older ones with names you didn’t find too often and these, at least in this section of the river, were deposited where we should have come earlier.

I stood up and looked down the river. The waters lapped in the channels and there were some large buildings across the way and a whirring sound like an alarm in the distance.

There was no breeze. Birds I didn’t recognize the calls of called. They were saying to piss off out the territory, and they were saying it how they were made. The sky was made. The clouds.

Last time we had come there had been a tile that he had wanted to get out of the ground but we didn’t have the tools then. He was working on it when I came back up the black stones and the

blanks and black weeds with a bit of a tile that said ‘Engla’ on it and another place name I forget the name of cos I left it. He took a breather and I started to work on it for him.

Sometimes they are so firmly lodged that you can’t get them up. Sometimes they are cemented in to something else and you can’t even see it and can wear yourself out trying for nothing.

Sometimes you break a piece of it off in the process. Bastard. I worked a piece of stone out close to it. Grasped at the tile and pulled. Nothing. I started in on another edge of it.

There were a few insignificant drops of pattering rain. Tottenham were playing Newcastle at St James’s. There was a structure by the water. Last time we’d come some lads were sat

smoking on it. The structure was something he would know about but you would have to ask him. He came down on the other edge of it now and worked at it there.

I can’t remember getting it out of the ground, but we did. I went back down to the waters edge. Because the deposits were no good, I started to turn up the stones under the black weeds.

This was interesting. There were things here. Creatures ran when I turned them up but I couldn’t see them. Were they weevils? If you got bit by one you got a terrible disease.

The ground sucked. It was mud, and the black water ran where it could. I was down on my haunches and looking across the water, I was almost level with it. I don’t mind getting caked up in it

but I wouldn’t have lain flat on the stones and weeds to be flush with the waters edge. I didn’t need to do that anyway. It was beautiful to see the way the water worked and went

in different ways – in the middle it seemed to be returning against the flowing of itself there were patches of it there reflecting differing intensities of light such that you could

just stop thinking about it and watch this. I tossed a nail into the black water and didn’t find an old sword or amulet with an inscription on account of I probably might’ve if I’d had a metal

detector in my bag. But that’s for them that are serious about this kind of thing. That’s for them in waders. (and it wasn’t even my bag, cos I never bring a bag, but that’s beside the point).

Continuing along to a different section of it to work on. There was an old slip way. You could see the sleepers where they lay in the mud. You could stand there and imagine it. I walked up

along an old cobbled path made of granite settes cos a man said on Facebook that cobbles are just stones of different sizes that are found at a beach. These looked more

defined. After a time of going this way, I turned back and found him in the remains of a something with concrete blocks. He picked the startings of a rose and put it in a sandwich bag.

He said that it might do well cos if it come up here just of its self then it was likely it would do well. He had another cutting, and another tile but he’d chipped it chucking it down.

He couldn’t believe it but he wasn’t that bothered. There was a path along the top that he was trying to get at and see. It was properly grown over and there was a couple of rails you could

just about see. He speculated on this. Was it the managers path? I pointed out the time. We had said we would only be a couple of hours. Aye, he said.

As we walked up the path he lit a cigarette. I smelt the smoke and he pointed out a gap in the fence.

Introverted exhibitionist stick, Mark Wynn, is not no longer a cleaner, but he does keep his hand in the register is being called later and you are late for it. In Truth, the album by Jeff Beck, he is holding out for that point in the future when all the rubbish will probably be online by then anyway.

With this in mind, it is potentially polite to assume that York’s one and only revolving dancefloor, Mark Wynn, probably still has the boogie, yet is reluctant to be out with it. The Lovely Eggs, on the other hand, haven’t much truck with these kinds of probababilites and have asked him straight up the email to do it. This is written so the people will know what to expect.

The people are to expect what their expectations tell them, and their previous understandings may be of use. Mark Wynn is expecting to perform to a standard he can no longer attain, what with the hours available to him now to practise pretending that he doesn’t. Mark Wynn expects to turn up. He does not wish to carry home the records he has brung with him to go in your houses.

Recently, he has been looking at the promotion of the institutions that are larger than is his small operation. The institutions saying is that the collective people are individuals and that they can, they am, and they know who they are. Mark Wynn knows who he is probably a collective, and has spent some-much time pretending to be other people.

Mainly he has been building up to supporting people who need support. A few years ago he supported Sleaford Mods for a large amount of money without much problem at the border; at present he is supporting a number of men in their latter years who cannot do what he can help them with on account of a number of things attributable to age for less.

What this all means is that when he was younger the Mark Wynn wanted to be a dead junkie guitar player and then he wanted to be a cowboy. But he was a bad cowboy, because cowboys do not come from York and fill their Mother’s loft with recordings of themselves trying to be a dead man from Prestwich.

In short, the Mark Wynn, distracted off his email by who is dead now, has been asked off The Lovely Eggs to come stand the dance he does, in the space and time before they go on stage, ten times in a row. In order to achieve this, Mark Wynn has asked for his holiday off the people make the form disappears once you make your request so you worry you even sent it in the first place.

Further information is that the Mark Wynn is from York - which is in the North of England - which is the midlands of the UK. He does not do the boogie like he used to, but it is still the boogie what he does he says. What he does he says. He says he is coming to all the dates to make the racket before the Lovely Eggs and after the band before. He does not know what it is going to be like, but it will probably make his tax return a little longer next January.

 It seems there has been some business on the old telephone Chris give me for dancing in front of his wall they buggered up the painting of and I was there to see the man try to make him interested in the reason for the fuck up when it was the birthday of the Chris and he just wanted the paint to stop running in the rain or whatever I was doing. The business is that The Lovely Eggs have asked me to come stand in the space before them in all the places in England but not the ones in Scotland because the holiday would not stretch to it said the people with the form where I asked and then the form disappeared and I didn't know what I'd asked for so I had to ask what I'd asked for.

I am very pleased to have been asked because I made a right meal of it last time and so this time will not be doing that.

The Jelly

NORMAL TEA

Brand new video business - which won't be tomorrow.

Here is the release to the press. You go on up ahead. I'll stay here and keep you covered. Mark Wynn is an unregistered repletive and requires plenty introduction. Please respect his privacy and plaster him plenty places on the internet if that's your fancy. Taken from the album/ep/splurge sound masterpiece 'Normal Tea', available at https://markwynn.bandcamp.com/album/n...

Is that big enough? Have you been reading the things make you speak like you aren't? Why has the radiator brush not come to my attention previously?

Answer me?

If you come, maybe bring me some questions. Mine are getting a bit the same.

Banana

Of course, yesterday, I was posing with a camera in a bandana in front of a painted sunset in a pub car park. I did this because it is important to remember that this page has had 23 visits from the United Arab Emirates today. Not sure why this is, but it must be understood that there is no way for me to continue without that scarf in the back of my jeans. 

Much thanks must therefore be given to the couple at Murton car boot, who got up early to take it down to put on a piece of tarpaulin, in order for me to pick it up, stick it in my bag and come home to the scowls off them that wonder about me.

William Nix

And then there was this guy called William Nix. I met him in the Post Office Club one night. He was a tall gentleman with a drum kit and we started playing together on the weekends. We played a kind of music that nobody liked, but because we never played anywhere but in his garage, it didn’t matter.

Then all of a sudden it did. Willie said to me, half way through a boogie, ‘Hey, Markie. You know what.’

‘Yeah?’

‘We really ought to lay it down somewhere the people might hear it.’

‘Get the band back together, Willie? You serious?’

‘What the fuck are you talking about. I didn’t say no nothing about getting no band back together.’

‘I know, Willie. But you’re right - we really bloody should get the band back together.’

And that was when we went out of the practise room and into the light outside, and down the street and into the pub on the corner, where we said, to the big bar man the size of a house, we said ‘Baby! We got the boogie. Now, are you gonna let us lay it on you?’

The big barman the size of a house just laughed. And then he said how old we were?

‘Old enough to know better,’ I replied, pulling out the cigarettes.

‘Shit,’ the big barman said, bringing his dish rag down on the bar top. Then he just told us to leave.

So we went outside, saying over us shoulders that we’d be back.

I wasn’t so certain this was really the truth of the matter. But really, I didn’t think that had anything to do with it; what was important was we got the band back together. And so I said it again, ‘Willie, you’re right, we really should get the bloody band back together.’

But William Nix was not the kind of person who could deal with this kind of inccessant nonsense from one such as I. So he told me to leave it, that he was going into banking, and that he might get a day off some time, but it was likely that we’d never see each other again.

‘Into banking?! But, baby, what about the boogie?’

He told me it was through; a done deal; the end of the road for this thing we had going.

To which I replied, ‘But Willie, we ain’t never played it in front of no one but ourselves.’

‘Maybe that’s enough,’ he said, as he turned and went up the street.

Well, at this point, I was so despondent, I turned on my heel and I walked right back into that bar and I give that barman a piece of my mind. And, after a while of him saying he didn’t want it, I think he saw something in me made him think made he was making a mistake. So he gave us the gig.

God, I was excited, I ran right out of the place, all the way to Willie’s house. Only when I got there, Willie was nowhere to be seen. So I asked his Mother, and she said he was on the way down to the bloody Barclay Card, to hand himself over to the powers that be, put him a suit on, and forget forever about all the dirty music we had been laying down since that day in the Post Office Club.

‘Holy shit,’ I said, having a bowl of his Mum’s nice stew she always seemed to have on the go whenever I appeared.

And she looked at me as if to say, Well, you know what you need to do now.

After the unexpected dining situation, I was ready to go bust my baby William out of the bloody Barclay Card, and then we were going to play the show. Only thing was, what about the advertising. I mean, what with the gig he’d given us being that night, how were we going to mobolize the people to come hear the boogie, how would they know to come.

I decided on the way, to post an add in the evening edition of the newspaper. But the bloody bloke in there said we weren’t able to do this, on account of there ain’t no such thing as an evening edition of the paper anymore.

I just laid it on him that it was important, a real life and death situation, and if he didn’t do it, well, there would be some kind of repurcussions.

So after I’d stopped in at the press office I kept on into the town, to the bloody Barclay Card, the bloody boogie destroyer, Barclay Card.

And there was my buddy, William Nix, behind the counter like he was enjoying it. But I knew for sure he wasn’t enjoying it. And so I told him, right there and then, ‘Willie, it just won’t do, all this bullshit. It’s like that bit in the Full Montey, where Robert Carlisle comes in to get Mike Addy out of the Asda, so they can go and be strippers. It’s just exactly the same, only ours is more bloody believable. I mean, they weren’t even their real names. Bloody Gary and Dave – they were bloody Robert Carlisle and Mike Addy. But not us, not me and you, Willie. We are not so bloody foolish as to not call us selves by our own names.’

And with that, William Nix, this tall man with a drum kit I met in the Post Office Club one night, he was off with his tie and we were away, right out the front of the bloody Barclay Card, falling over this bloke from Asda pushing trolleys down Parliament Street. And we were running. Good god, we were going. Because there was a show tonight and we were not going to miss it.

Of course, when we got there, there was nobody about to even be bothered to see it. They were all in the snug watching the snooker. But we didn’t mind one bit, because we had a gig. And boy did we have a bar tab. I mean, it was like nothing I had seen before. I just said to the bar man, ‘Lay it on me’, and there before us, like something out of an advert or a film, were these two pints of bloody Bombadier bevvy, and just for me and Willie.

But what about the music? 
Well, let me tell ya. The music was good and the music was loud. And then I said, as I turned to the crowd, ‘No more bloody Barclay Card for me and Willie. We seen the future, and the future is laying it down – while you watch the snooker, or whatever it is you do to stop thinking.’

Of course, the real magic of the story is the late edition, the fact we managed to get the newspaper man to get us in there, at such short notice, in a paper that didn’t exist, until I walked in the room and told him that it did. But right now I have to be getting to the Argos to buy a mattress protector. Cos this mattress I got from Benson’s Beds, it is bloody hurting my neck. And they want the pictures to prove it ain't soiled. And the pictures need the protector. And I know that.

Ruth Means Pity and the Shat on Slates

22/02/19

The group are called 'Ruth Means Pity and the Shat on Slates'. They have been going since Sunday and they are poor but that's the point. It is important to be poor now, they have learnt, and so they are cultivating the cack about them, and they are shedding all connections with an affluent past.

The other day Dave the drummer drove his Dad's Datsun off the drive into a ditch. He didn't fit much with the band then, so they sacked him; employed a little dole scrote from the street-side. At least, they thought he was. Subsequently transpired that he was just a lot like them, only his face he didn't wash so much. So they called him Scrub and said it was he who should do the talking; because it was he who looked the most like he had been working (or not working - they couldn't decide); because it was he who fit the image, even better now he was disagreeing with them about it.

'The thing about kidnap is...' they said, as they tried to bungle him into the back of the van.

Because you’ve a website to update, about a gig you didn’t like, in mood you didn’t make, on a chair you didn’t make.

21/02/19

Having got tired of googling my own name, only to find nothing much of interest – and now I can’t even talk about the Mark Wynn as chairman of the Rochdale Hornets, as he has standed down after ten years; and the one who teaches philosophy in Leeds doesn’t do much music (as much as me recently?); and the one in America who often comes up something about domestic violence, so I don’t feel to good about that - I have decided to take the advice of the man who takes all the barbs in his back and laughs, and rethink the boogie in such a way that I may continue to do it.

Apparently, there is a glut - an excessively abundant supply - a glut. And this means that it is no space for you Markie, we have plenty. But this I cannot comprehend in the face no. And so I must to the window to observe it, and say to myself:

‘It is shit out there, sunshine. But in here it is death also. And no more to that please thank you.’

The point is to now, and the remembering that a glut is not so sensible a thing as it first seems. A glut there may be, and certainly, but not of the Mark Wynn. Oh no, the Mark Wynn has not glutted it for a while, he has not been abundant for some time since he stopped it.

But now it is different; and there are forms to cock your head at in the corridor; and the food is divisioned well into its requisite sectionings looking shonky; and the driver drives badly, by the school that got flattened, so they could put a library in the café – no, a café in the library – because he is not happy about the wagon, that the man keeps on putting, where he shouldn’t be putting the wagon, so the bus he drives badly, just to prove that it is shonky, his parking…

But what about the potatos in the canteen?

Well, exactly. 

They seem to get smaller, the later I go down when its evening. Maybe I should go down earlier. But what good would it do to make concessions in this way? I go instead – refusing to be bothered by it – to the other food bit across the canteen, buy a bara granola, an apple and banana. Because I won’t be conquered by this crap you see, Jim. Really, you should stop looking. But you can’t do, can you? Because you’ve a website to update, about a gig you didn’t like, in mood you didn’t make, on a chair you didn’t make.

Can I just remind you that you're not to eat or have any drinks next to the computers?

I played a gig at the Crescent in York the other day, but there are no good pictures the internet has seen. So I have copied this one of me from a place that wasn't the Crescent in York from another part of the internet to go here. It was taken by this name: Jelmer de Haas. I fully intend to eat again by the computers tomorrow as well.

Interview

Desert Mine Music asked me to answer some questions. I took too long for it to accompany the release of Normal Tea to the internet - and I haven't even finished making the magazine to go with the music yet. But I will get faster internet, I promise. I will get faster, internet. Please just don't sack me yet. I mean, I have a wife and child now to hurry about. And how will they take me seriously when i'm telling them to hurry up and be better, faster, more interesting quicker, when they know how slack i'm being at working for you, internet.

What’s your favourite Oasis song?

I kneeled on my knees, in the remains of / that chip shop once was a newsagent. I looked hard at the pictures of the man in his band, with his red shirt and guitar, and all that stuff they said about him and his brother. Following this, I walked back over the bridge wanting to be a burglar man from Burnage, attempting that scowl like the man in his shirt. I wanted terribly to be able to do it. But I couldn’t. I sat in my bedroom and listened to his swaggering brother asking if I knew what he meant.

Oh, yes, Mr Burnage burglar man. Certainly.

Later, I watched the news conference where they said they were getting rid of some of the band. My Dad took me to Monks Cross (‘?) to buy Standing on the Shoulders of Giants and I was disappointed.

I didn’t realize then what I think I know now but probably don’t. I didn’t have the good sense to see past the myth at the truth that obscured it. I wasn’t from Motherwell, in Camden in the 90’s, playing pool when in walked this scrappy looking bloke in his swagger, and his sexy face I thought, but not in that way.

I wasn’t there to see through it; I only had the pictures. And because of the pictures so many things that have happened happened. Because with the force-fed of illusion, I have seldom slept very distant from a copy of What’s the Story Morning Glory. And all the commentators now keep shouting. I blame Andy Gray.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a favourite. And it doesn’t mean either that I don’t want to share it. What it means, as far as can be established before I really need to go put out the towels, is that the things you swallow when you are in small socks and each night you go to bed at the same time dreaming of standing on the school stage and performing in such a way with a scowl and an indifferent attitude that she will want to talk to you and be your friend, those things are the things unavoidable. And so you listen to them when no one’s listening. And when they come on in a pub, and some others turn their noses, you turn yours too, because when it’s gone, the song, then you’ll be left with those you don’t want to be different from, you want to relate to them, you wish to stay friends.

Because of this, I have started re-writing all the lyrics to What’s The Story Morning Glory. ‘I don’t feel as if I know me, I take up all my time. The days are long, and at night I make sure i’m in bed, because I sleep better in bed. I very seldom watcheth the weather, if it rains I’ll put on a coat. The zip it is broken, but if I do it up, pull it down, it’ll stay till I’m home. I live in the shadows of the people i’ve pretended to be. And i’m never doing that again, cos it’s horrid and spiteful and bad to my family. I’m never doing that again. And in the interview, half way through, I noticed the shite on my shoe.’

This ones about me being a big light bloke - it’s also about helicopters. ‘All your dreams are made. And your band are really cool they play in people’s kitchens. I like to make hummus but the food-processer is a bugger to clean. Another sunny afternoon, walking round town in a pair of trainers that don’t suit me, turning up my jeans and then turning them down in the window of a local eaterie. Waste another hour on Facebook. Apparently, the youth don’t use it, if that’s the case and you’re young you can treat this as a history. Waste another hour on Facebook. You know you should so I guess you might as well. Your hometown’s boring let’s move to Krakow.’

Do you sing with your eyes shut?

I don’t sing, I shower. This shit follows me round, and so I lie down sometimes wishing I could sing. But I can’t. Mostly I just pretend i’m naked when i’m not and try and catch myself out.

What is the secret of your success?

Secrecy.

What’s been your best ever soundcheck?

Mostly I just decide against going and phone ahead… Then I remember that if I want to eat a piece of salmon before I go to work, I better get one out of the freezer. I do this with my eyes open, because to operate a pair of scissors with them shut is just a bit thick… never operate a pair of scissors when they are shut...

Then? Oh, then we get back to the question. Would you open a vacuum-packed slice of a salmon you’ve never seen in its entirety with your eyes shut? No, you would not. So why do you sometimes sing like this?

I don’t sing, a man at lindy told me.

I know that, but why do you sometimes sing like this?

I’m scared?

Don’t fear the fish, Markie. And neither don’t fear the people who are possibly passing comment on you, within the shot of your ear, by the bar and they look drunken. Because it is hard to reproduce in front of people what you know you can do alone. It is this because that person alone is only that person alone when that person is alone. Amongst the other souls, that person is different. And that is perfectly alright.

Sometimes I open my eyes and look into the middle distance and think of all the things I’ll have to apologize for later. Sometimes I open my eyes and think if I go down that road then I might get my face in more of people’s screens, my bank balance might increase, people will talk to me thinking I am a picture in a magazine. Sometimes I listen to the builders talking about their phone contracts.

Any tips for the Autumn/Winter 2019 season?

Plenty.

What is the smallest audience you have played a concert to?

I seldom notice the ambulance. Mostly I just decide against going and phone ahead.

What is the greatest compliment you have received from one of your many fans?

‘It’s alright you didn’t come; I didn’t neither.’

And if I do, I tend to sift through all the good for the ugly. Sometimes people think it’s funny it’s not meant to be. Mostly I just try and find out what they do makes them tick and see if I can learn something.

When you play live, what’s your ‘rig’?

Mostly I just decide against going and phone ahead. And if I don’t, I drink the peppermint tea, while promising the man managing his stage, not to mess up his mop or his bucket.

How do you psyche yourself up and get ‘in the zone’ for one of your legendary performances?

I do some yoga whilst listening to the Stooges

Do you prefer the blues or the jazz?

I don’t even come into it. Really, I should. But I shouldn’t say that, cos then you’ll think I mean it. But I do tend to think that music and most things haven’t got much to do with liking them. Cos that’s dangerously close to relatability. And I don’t buy that blues lie like I used to. I think it’s funny how they took the piss out of the fact I was into country.

Performonce

A bit ago they give me the money to go to Switzerland and Germany and eat the food and sleep in some beds far away from the skirting boards I am still shirking dusting, even after my warning. I made a bunch of posters to send out of the country because I felt a great importance as I snipped the stuff and blue tacked it down. Fortunately, there weren't many gigs, so I asked the internet what was happening in November 2016. 

 Le Guess Who? Festival said the internet. 

So I added it to the poster in the hope that in the summer of 2018 they would ask me to play it and them three days I spent in August fretting about which trains to book to Utrecht wouldn't be yet another way I have avoided doing my tax return the whole ruddy summer. 

Upstairs of this means that I am playing a performonce at Le Guess Who? on the 11th of November. Basement to this is a greater detail of the account is broken Mr Wynn, I think you owe us money.

A nice man called Jacob informed me that there was a 'punk minded area' and that I would be welcome there. I said I didn't think I could come. He said that was okay. Then I was dancing to Bowie in the clinic when all the nurses were home relaxing or arguing, and I thought, 'Markie, you like the boogie. And you have never done the boogie in Utrecht. Now, that nice Jacob man, he asked you if you could come. And you said No. Why is this?' 

I had me there. And so the next day I asked if I could still come.

He said 'yes', then asked me for a bio and some high-res photos.

Oh for fucksake.

I did as I was told though, and promised not to tell anyone about it till September the 12th 2018.

It might look like this.

Or I might bring my guitar and it won't sound like this because I don't have the time to play with other people, or I can't afford to pay them, or i'm worried it wouldn't work..

This is off a thing that Desert Mine Music sent to the internet earlier this year, and I only just got round to sending it to the internet because i've been avoiding doing my tax return by putting the chips on the paper plates for the nanas at bingo.

'Can I have some more gravy on my cheese?'

Certainly. You've earnt it.

Brussels

SAT 07.04.18 AB Hall Complex, Brussels

SLEAFORD MODS + STEVE IGNORANT (CRASS): SLICE OF LIFE + NACHTHEXEN + THE LOWEST FORM + MARK WYNN + STRUCTURE + JOHN PAUL + SUDDEN INFANT + NAIL (DJ)

I was meant to be doing some gigs with The Lovely Eggs later this year, but i'm not doing them now.

SATURDAY 29th YORK