Saturday 11th June
Considering the amount of alcohol that was consumed last night I’m pleased to report that none of us seem to be suffering any ill effects today. No more than normal anyway. Handy has PMT and has stayed back at the apartment with slices of cucumber on his eyes and Fifi employed to read aloud to him from today’s gossip columns. On his request she’s fetching him the small pots of green tea that he swears by at this time of the month, and refilling his hot water bottle. And yes before you ask, Handy is male, but since he started his hormone replacement therapy you can set your watch by his monthly cycle- although I’m not sure exactly why he needed to buy the sanitary waste bin he’s had put in the bathroom.
The rest of us are down at the beach sipping cocktails and reflecting on our trip down to the Palace last night. Aldy, the manager was outside smoking a cigarette when we arrived, as if waiting for us. Maybe he was, because there was no one inside the club except the DJ and bargirl. Aldy it turns out is rather flamboyant and as camp as a row of tents, and as he got progressively more drunk throughout the night regaled us with ever more fantastic stories and swirling moves in the middle of the empty dancefloor. From a home in Jersey to three marriages, and from four grandchildren to six languages spoken, Aldy turned out to be a raconteur of the highest quality. He kept a string of complimentary shots of alcohol coming during the course of the night and seemed happy to have made new friends to drink with and to impress.
I asked him later on whether he liked my CD and he told me he did and had listened to it again as he opened up the club last night. He seemed a little vague about me playing though, and I’m hoping the fact that he tried to dance with me later on was down to the endless line of shots we’d been downing; and the fact that he followed me into the toilet nothing more than coincidence. Maybe it’s a classic casting couch situation, but I won’t prostitute myself for trance I tell you!
Not anymore anyway.
Damn, it’s tough being so pretty.
But it wasn’t always this way you know. Not many people know that the fissog I have today is the work of a surgeon in Horley Street. That’s not a typo, it’s a road in West Croydon. I’m not made of money you know. Anyway, when I first started Muck FM I employed Max Clifford for a little while to advise me on how to make the now global but then unknown Muck FM brand a success. He put me in touch with ETB to build our website, who I already knew, but was nothing more to me than a source of cheap kupus and moonshine chilli sauce. The fact that you’re reading this speaks itself for the success of ETB’s creation- unless you’ve accidentally stumbled across us while looking for porn, in which case move along please, nothing to see here.
I digress again, apologies. Anyway, I’m afraid it wasn’t long before Max paid a visit to my home one dark evening and sat me down gravely on the sofa. He told me that it gave him no pleasure to say it, “but Doc you’re a minger, and if Muck FM is to stand any chance of success at all you have no choice but to go under the knife.” Well, I’m ashamed to admit that I did prostitute myself that day, not just for trance but for all forms of house music. And I gave something far greater than my cherry that night- I gave my dignity.
Later that evening I was admitted into a dingy back room of a vet’s in Horley Street, and at some point in the small hours of the morning was wheeled on a scrubbed gurney into the converted kitchen at the back of the small terraced property which served as the operating theatre/tea making point. Under a solitary lightbulb, and with the smell of chloroform and freshly brewed coffee in my nostrils my life changed forever.
I don’t really want to go into the exact details of the procedures now- the mental scars that remain after such radical surgery are far deeper than the physical cuts. Even though the therapy is helping, Handy’s drunken taunts late at night of “Elephant Man” still reduce me to tears.
You see, I used to be slim, with a full head of dark flowing curls and a chiselled jaw, reminiscent of David Coulthard if he was just coming up after a double drop. My six pack was so hard that it was as if it had just come out of the freezer, and my skin an English rose albino white. All that changed that murky night in Croydon. Max had instructed the surgeon to change me into a commercial success, not an aesthetic one. That is to say, I wasn’t being transformed to get laid, I was being transformed to get paid. So I’ve learned to live with my now balding scalp, the extreme fake tan (orange wasn’t teak enough, so beige was settled on) and the lipoblowing (the opposite to liposuction) where fat was forced into every available cavity to maximise the “Eamomn Holmes” look- designed to make new contacts in the music industry trusting and comfortable in my prescence. These attractive qualities could well be responsible for my attention last night down at the Palace, but luckily these days if I need to fend off any similar unwanted advances I just send Handy in- that’s not a euphemism by the way.
Let me finish this revelation by saying that I’ve learned to live with my plastic face, and have accepted that any interest in me is only ever commercial and not down to physical attraction. And that includes Mrs Muck. But I have come to realise that the old adage of “any attention is good attention” is absolutely true. So if in the future you ever hear me being referred to as “the face of Muck FM”, you now know just how true that is…
As it happens, last night turned out to be a really good one. I also got chatting to one of the DJs, and a crazy Portuguese raver called Ana who had a fantastic purple ohm tattoo on her shoulder, and who turns out owns a bar in Lagos and organises trance parties… I gave them both CDs and flyers, and even if I don’t get to play anywhere we’ve met some sound new people and listened to good house music outside of our apartment for the first time since our arrival here in Lagos.
I couldn’t help but smile as I looked around me later on. The DJs and their crew reminded me so much of the Muck crew- a small group of friends who love and live for their music and meet up to party a little bit together when they can. It turned out that it really didn’t matter at all that there was no one else in the club, and it never ceases to amaze me what a wonderful thing house music is, a universal language that bonds those with no common tongue. We partied with them until just before four, and made our way home with our faith in Portuguese house music restored, and a feeling that this holiday is starting to spring into life at last.
Aldy claimed that tonight at the Palace will be a different kettle of fish crowd-wise, as he’s hired a popular African band to play which will pack ’em to the rafters and be the kick start to the season that the club so badly needs. He seems to have convinced himself that the place will be heaving, but he employs no one to give out flyers, nor dolly birds to haul in punters from the street, and as the club is tucked away in a back street it’s completely overlooked by people who pass by totally unaware of it’s prescence. Thinking about it, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Palace turns out to be nothing more than a money laundering front- especially as it was Sandy who told me about the club the day after being released from the police cells where he had acquired several dubious new contacts.
Why is it that no matter what happens, those twins seem to dictate my whole life and the dramas they bring inevitably end up in my lap?
At least it’s not boring though, I’ll say that…