I shan’t make much fuss of the journey, we drove for a bit and then we got there. What is the most gruesome fate a human being can endure? What is the most painful death? The cruelest torture? It’s been a point of much discussion and pontification but I think it’s safe to say that the answer lies somewhere in Southend-On-Sea.

The people of Southend are broken and battered. No smiles exist on their faces, but for the creepy smirks of the manically insane. They all look like misshapen caricatures of people from a 1940’s documentary about dying mining towns. The town itself is dirty and sad, its only distinguishing feature being a really long pier.

I was riding with Troy again, and we got to the hotel we’d be staying at. The Premier Inn is a sort of homebase for frightened travellers, a safezone for people who have gotten in way over their heads. It was the only place where I didn’t feel the threat of encroaching death.

We decided to head to the venue, and park up. As we drove down Station Road, we saw Dave and his fiancee in front of The Lamb and Lion pub, having a pint. I rolled down the window.

 

Dave came up to greet us.

“He..”

“Where the fuck is the car park?” I said. We’d been told there’d be space behind the venue but all we could find was a residential underground lot.

 

He went inside and pointed us in the direction he’d been given.

We came to this alleyway, barely wide enough to accommodate my 2009 Suzuki Swift. We squeezed through and arrived in this sort of scrap yard. It was literally just the alleyway behind the venue, with space for a very small car and maybe a bicycle. There was a wooden door with no handle leading to the venue. I knocked, no response. We went back round front and ordered a pint. 

The beer was sour and left a horrid aftertaste. It was as if they’d been spiking the barrels with that cheap cider you find in plastic bottles, reserved only for the most desperate of the homeless. I hadn’t noticed yet, but pressure began to mount in the front of my head.

 

We sat at the pub for a bit, where our manager, Mark, joined us. A car pulled up, and a tiny man with a bushy beard stepped out. He set about unloading a drum kit from the car. I decided to introduce myself.

“Hey you must be the sound guy! Are you supplying the house kit?” I shook his hand.

“Nah I’m the drummer for the headliner, if you don’t mind I can’t leave my car parked there for too long,” he said. He did introduce himself, but I’ve decided to redact the names of the other bands to save them from the embarrassment inherent to their existence. 

We unloaded his kit, and I asked him once again about the drum kit.

“Well I’ve brought this six-piece rack-mounted setup, but my stands are all memory locked so I’ve brought some extra ones for the other bands,” he said.

My headache started getting worse.

“Oh and I’ve also heard that two of the other bands pulled out so it’s just us two,” he said.

At this point, the third band showed up. They looked like a gathering of the biggest fucking idiots the south had to offer, but I showed a friendly face.

“So which band are you guys with?” I asked.

“THE BIGGEST FUCKING IDIOTS THE SOUTH HAS TO OFFER!” They responded in unison.

 

In the days since this gig, I’ve been thinking about the state of my own happiness. In prior months I hadn’t really been feeling myself, but more recently I have recognised a kind of happiness in my life. It’s often been remarked that lasting happiness is impossible, and even sparse bursts are hard to recognise in the moment. This is because happiness, rather counterintuitively, is often absolutely agonizing. I feel happy with the trajectory of this band: where we’ve been, where we’re going. Yet in the present moment my hopes are fraught with impotent anxiety. Is this the climb up to the summit or euphoria, or a desperate walk along a sheer cliff edge? Today, I read a fortune cookie:

 

This is the moment to profit from your investments.

 

The synchronicity of my feelings with this piece of consumerist trash has irked me. Though I suppose inspiration does come from anywhere. A counterculture needs a culture to counter, it’s a trite little tongue twister I came up with when I was 18, but it rings true. 

Ultimately, life holds no guarantees, and it’s useless to think of an end goal one might not even live to see. Happiness is often the ability to look at yourself fondly. As Albert Camus would likely put it, happiness is the possibility of dying with the knowledge that you tried to do something.

I think death is still far away from me, as I’m sure Camus did when he got in that car in 1960. I’ve spent much of my life thus far not doing enough creatively because of chasing originality. I understand now that everyone has a unique perspective, most just let originality get in its way.

 

That’s why I’m grateful for this band, and the things we can do together. That’s why, despite the technical shortcomings, the crowd went absolutely wild in Southend-On-Sea.

 

About half an hour before the show, my headache turned into a full-blown aneurysm, and I’d left my earplugs at the hotel. Joe encouraged me to take a Paracetamol and an Ibuprofen, which seemed to perk me up. We played pool, Joe beat me. We played on the gambling machine and lost about a fiver. After that, we went downstairs to find they hadn’t finished setting the stage up. I started to get desperately hungry, and Mark offered to get some food, a Tesco meal deal consisting of a BLT, some crisps, and a bottle of water. It’s a glamorous life.

 

When you’re the first band on at a small venue, there’s this weird lull after you’ve gotten on stage. You sit there wondering if the sound guy is ready, if the crowd has fully gathered, and if you can remember the songs (almost all my memory of the music seems to disappear about five minutes before showtime).

Then, the zone sets in, and it’s time to play. 

As we headed into our second song, the blisteringly intense Medusa Abusa, I wondered if I was about to die from exhaustion. Luckily, I did not die from exhaustion, though I struggled navigating around the massive drum kit, which had evidently been set up by someone with little regard for long-term back pain. At one point, I stole the mic from Lucas and introduced Falling, our newest, and heaviest number. I insinuated that it would be a good song to start a mosh pit, and the crowd seemed to understand the assignment.

 

“I’m no longer a mosh pit virgin!” a man shouted.

 

After the show, we packed up and took our stuff back to the hotel, before coming back in time for the second band. There were smoking-area shenanigans with Lucas’ cohort of friends from down south. 

“Are you a porn star?” a woman asked Troy, who was wearing a tank top and shorts, just one degree away from sporting a mullet and tache.

“Yes,” he said.

 

After the show, Troy and I ended up at this night club with some folks from the show. It was this narrow, smoky corridor with a bar going along it. As I went to the toilet, I came across a couple making out.

“Sorry to interrupt,” I said, as I walked between them.

 

We stood at one end of the bar watching the UFC being broadcast on the TV. Something seemed off about this place. I looked to the right. 

A demonic, evil, depraved man, with a face like pure cruelty, and eyes full of void, stared directly into me. As our eyes met, he waved. 

 

FUCK!

 

I ran outside, gasping for air and trying to center myself.

 

The people we were with came outside.

“We need to get the fuck out of here.”

 

We stumbled to an off licence, where our group began an odd dance. They seemed to repeatedly agree that the night was over, and we should go home. The more they agreed on this, the more they felt the need to talk about it. I went inside.

“Excuse me sir,” a voice said.

I turned around. 

“Yes?”

“I’ve been hearing this word a lot lately, and I was wondering if you could explain it to me. What is a concept?”

“Err, it’s like an idea, but with more stuff attached I guess?” I said.

He walked off laughing.

I bought my beer. Leaving the store, I saw that our friends still had not decided on a course of action.

“Oh will you just fuck off!” I said. That seemed to do the trick.

 

We set off in the same direction.

We woke up at around eleven, checked out, and decided to explore Southend a bit.

We had a ‘spoons breakfast, perused charity shops, record stores, and got ice cream. We even hit the arcade and won a Porsche 911 rally edition, a Hot Wheels model of one anyway.

“Are you gonna let the fascists take over? Hospitals are shutting down! Old people are freezing! Children are starving! Kier Starmer has betrayed the working class!” a woman was babbling to herself in an inside voice, looking at the ground and walking with no purpose. It’s a pretty apt metaphor for the state of the modern left wing. It’s a real shame that towns like Southend have been battered so badly by austerity and crumbling infrastructure. Can anything be done to fix this? Do we just have to wait for time to erode the scabs that have grown around us, or is it an infection that has crawled too deeply into our flesh?