It feels like the morning after. In beautiful but pale late summer sunshine I stare at the whisky-ginger ale in front of me, freshly refilled, then at Henry on the other side of the small round aluminium table, then across the boulevard at people hurrying for lunch, or back to the office again, I don’t know, I don’t care. Just a random Saturday in a city under communist rule. I feel wasted from the night before. The autumn sunlight breaks in weird and wonderful ways through the dust that permanently seems to hang over the streets. Is it real, caused by pollution, or an imaginary result of my hangover, or the lovelost feeling of loneliness. I look at Henry, who looks equally wasted but happier, like life has more and better in store, or at least in blissful ignorance of what’s to come. Henry had no fixed landing spot on the spectrum between U2 and Joy Division, equally likely to join the masses in admiration for  U2’s New Year’s Day or his friends in their reverence for Joy Division’s Day of the Lords. Max was easier, always somewhere on the Jaco Pastorius-Jimmy Smith-Kurt Weil continuum: artsy, theatrical, ecclectic.

My thoughts wander to the night before, that little impromptu discotheque in a factory made out of red brick. In between heaps of sand and puddles of mud. Sunlight had the same unsettling quality that evening, or actually that afternoon, because the authorities would not allow us to have our party late at night. ‘Future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades’. I wish I was thinking that, it would have justified my presence, my present thinking, all of the fears that were racing through my mind, but I doubt I was thinking much, just waiting for at least a bit of darkness, drinking cheap beer from bottles, always drinking too much, because that’s what we did, that’s my generation grew up, in the absence of parental control, in the age of mid 1980s moral bankruptcy and fear. Maybe we just didn’t know better, but in my case the explanation was simpler, less innocent too. I needed the alcohol to loosen up, to get over my most urgent fear of people, crowds and women in particular.

That night I needed to proof something. My presence as well as my musical knowledge. I brought my Magazine tape, rewinded to the point where ‘the light pours out of me’ would start, the only Magazine song that one could sort of dance to. I handed it over to the DJ, danced frantically for 90 seconds, until the DJ decided to fade it out and play yet another anonymous 80s pop song, and went back to darkness and anonymity. Even the day after it gave me a sense of security to have Howard Devoto on my side (and in my hand). I showed it again to Henry. He smiled and said: ‘will not do you any good my friend’. I reluctantly agreed.

Almost 40 years later I wonder what I agreed with. Did I agree with the underlying sentiment that being right or rigteous, that knowing better would not make me more likeable or popular, that hiding in the dark corners of the (proverbial) dancefloor would not make me heard, not even if I had a megaphone, not even with God and all of the best music on my side? As a teenager I was already an old man and now, in my mid 50s I was getting younger every year;  judging less, and accepting more, smiling when someone ignorantly calls ‘Melt with you’ a lovesong. In the end, what is the point of being right in a world where “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” is at the same time a long forgotten historic lesson and a reference to the immediate future. The future’s so bright…