The vistas from the train window were stunning but not in a good way, I looked out at the damage wrought by the recent storm over the fields of Perthshire, a lot of flooding, some might say of biblical proportions. I seemed to be the only person in this carriage which was odd as it was Sunday, it was pretty weird travelling by train when there were so few folk on board, it brought on a sense of dislocation, an almost lonely feeling, which was coincidental, as the book I was reading was entitled ‘In a Lonely Place’ by Karl Edward Wagner.
The first story, ‘In the Pines’ was a ghost story which was based on the old folk song of the same name, covered most recently by Nirvana on their’ Unplugged In New York’ album, the incandescent prose of Wagner was seriously good, I would savour this in my hotel room later, preferably with something alcoholic to accompany it. Meantime, I would gaze out at the flood lands as we moved further south.
I arrived at my destination of Glasgow, for a work-related training course which was on Monday, so I had time to kill, a stranger in a strange city walking in the loneliness of the crowd. I checked into my hotel, put on my old headphones and early 21st century I-Pod, to hear the sound of David Bowie’s ‘Low’, I played ‘Sound and Vision’ and ‘Be My Wife’, the latter of which stuck in my mind, especially the lyric that goes, ‘sometimes you get so lonely, sometimes you get nowhere’, that was me, going nowhere, not today anyway. I was going to wander lonely as a cloud with the objective of buying some vinyl albums in Glasgow, I’m not new to this, like a lot of young folk these days, I have been buying vinyl since my schooldays. I was looking for the new Bowie album also, that had been long rumoured , but couldn’t find it anywhere, it was weird, maybe it was fake news, but it seemed like something out of a story by someone like Ramsey Campbell or Joel Lane, where the protagonist is looking for that elusive recording that doesn’t actually exist but meets his demise in pursuit of it.
Hopefully that wouldn’t be my fate I thought , as I entered the Monorail record store, I selected a Best of Scott Walker cd and an album by a jazz guy called Sun Ra, a new one on me, but I am always receptive to new music. With my purchases in the requisite plastic bag, I made my way through the city in the late afternoon sun. The city looked illuminated with the sunlight reflected on so many glass buildings, the Glasgow of 2016 was very much a place of concrete, steel and glass buildings -a far cry from the ‘No Mean City’ image it used to have years ago, now it resembled a teeming sci-fi metropolis something resembling the city in Blade Runner, which I reminded myself was set in 2019, only three years away.
I dined with my colleagues in the hotel’s restaurant, we discussed our course the following morning, and once we had eaten, went our separate ways.
I sat down and opened my wee bottle of Bell’s and picked up the Wagner book again, read a couple of the stories, necked back some Scotch, with a wee bit of water in it, by the time eleven o’clock came, I was very tired indeed, and the hotel room was very hot, but above all very, very quiet. We had been told that the windows were treble glazed, as the hotel was adjacent to the railway station, so that would explain the silence. It was a lonely place, but living on my own, had I really ever known anything else? Maybe my thoughts tinged with the alcohol were tending towards the maudlin, but sleep soon embraced me and drew me into its long dark night.
My dreams were weird, I was in a forest , full of swishing , whispering pine trees, walking aimlessly , I heard a voice, a female’s voice singing the song from the story, ‘In the pines , in the pines where the sun don’t ever shine, I shivered the whole night through’, I couldn’t see the singer, for the trees, and I was thinking that there was also a song called ‘Whispering Pines’ , by The Band, I knew that one well , her voice changed to one that sounded for all the world like David Bowie, singing about Black stars, what was that supposed to mean? Was it the title of his new album?
My dream was interrupted by the chirrup of my mobile phone, bringing me back to Earth, it was one of my colleagues texting to ask where I was and why was I so late for breakfast. It was 9.30am, and seriously, the first time I had slept in in all my days. I popped in and out of the shower and dressed in record time, and was down in the dining room, where I managed to keep my cool, not look stressed out in any way, drink a coffee and eat a slice of toast. My slight hangover didn’t come into it, there was no time to think about that.
One of my colleagues stopped me in mid bite of my toast, ‘David Bowie’s died, by the way, it’s on the news’
‘Now you’re taking the piss’, I said in disbelief.
Once we were making our way to the course in one of the hotel functions rooms, Bowie was on every visible screen, in all his incarnations and images from decades gone by, the legend had indeed passed away. The man whose music had been a big part of growing up for folk of my generation was dead, like Lemmy Kilmister, just last month, part of my young life , I felt like I said earlier, dislocated.
(Inspired by the music of David Bowie ( Low and Blackstar), Nirvana and also Leadbelly- ‘In The Pines’)
The Eclectic Audio Lab 