For much of my teen years and well into my twenties, I used to have night terrors. In the in-between state of awake and asleep, spiders used to drop onto my bed. Or build webs over my head. Dark shadows half-concealed themselves behind my bedroom door. Other times I would wake up, paralyzed. I could feel someone holding me. On other occasions, I could sense someone watching me. Don't move. If I don't move, they won't see me.
The cure, it turned out, was simple. I kept the freebie sleep-masks from long-haul flights and used those as amulets to protect me from my nightmares. More prosaically, it meant that when I opened my eyes, my mind was not overstimulated by the night. All I saw was pitch-black. comfortable, pitch-black. Instead, my dreams became the battleground for my anxieties, and hopes, and fears, and despair. As they ought to be. That's what dreams are for. There are no nightmares, just alarming fragments of fact and fantasy melded into terrifying magical reality.
For several years from 1997 or 98, I saw a lot of crappy wannabe bands playing third or fourth on the bill on a Tuesday night at the Rat's Ass in Camden, or the Bumfuck and Firkin in Stoke Newington, or the Stoned Gnome in Islington. I was there because I had a lot of arty friends who were in bands trying to get noticed. Some of them were old and wise enough to admit that that they just wanted to perform their songs in public for a few, kind, non-judgmental friends and that it got them out of the house on an otherwise depressing, grey, wintery, London evening.
There are no other kinds of evenings in London.
Others really were trying to make a career of it. They had websites. They played festivals. They recorded demo tapes. Jazz Summers was in the venue one time, I remember. (look him up, kids.) But in them end they gave up their internship at a record company, stopped pulling pints in pubs because the hours were convenient, and did what their parents' wanted them to do. Get a regular job. Get married. Have kids. Let the waistline expand.
These days hipsters pulling pints in brewpubs is quite the thing, I hear. Funny how things change.
But one time I went to see my older, wiser friend Patrick and his equally old and wise friend Mike perform their songs in front of a few friends. They played rootsy acoustic stuff: things they'd written, with a tasteful cover version on the side. Naturally, they were deep down on the bill. Headlining was some guy I'd never heard of.
David Freeman. Turns out he wrote a song in the 80s that barely scraped the charts and clearly didn't receive much radio-play. But his band, a duet called The Lover Speaks, toured as an opening act for the Eurythmics. Clearly Annie Lennox remembered who they were, because ten years later she did them a massive favor and recorded one of their songs on Medusa, her album of covers.
No More I Love Yous was fucking massive in 1995. Inescapably fucking massive. It. Was. Fucking. Every. Where. On the radio. On the telly. In cars, buses, trains, airplanes. It was one of those epochal records that no matter how many times you hear, it stays fresh and provocative. The kind of record that makes you want to stop driving and listen to the whole thing on the hard-shoulder, because you ask yourself "What. Is. This?"
The video captuared my attention, as I guess it did everyone else, because of the performance by Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo ("Les Trocks"), a campy group of American ballet enthusiasts who combined drag and brave athleticism. Think Judith Butler meets the Bolshoi with a twist of Klaus Nomi.
Lennox is an honest performer. Her unforgiving rawness have won her a fanatical following of men, women, straight, gay, bi, questioning, normal, stark raving mad, boring, quite interesting ... who feel that the only role she is interesting in performing is herself. "Why," from he earlier solo debut, Diva, remains a painful and powerful testament to the ways relationships get fucked up. And how much it hurts. I worry for Annie Lennox whenever I hear her perform it, and I feel sorry for the audience members for whom it has become the perfect encapsulation of whatever pain it is they are experiencing.
But her rendition of No More I Love Yous is merely ok. If you want to feel the full affect, visit the original by the Lover Speaks. When I heard David Freeman and his partner perform it, you knew right away who wrote it. Like hearing Carole King singing (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman. Sure, Arethra has the pipes, but Carole has the pain.
Both the name The Lover Speaks and the lyrics of No More I Love Yous are inspired by Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments. In it, Barthes endeavoured, in the manner of his greater and later project of avoiding "writerly" texts, to create a work based on fragments that reflected the quicksilver nature of this thing we call Love. Moreover, it was a discourse that reflected the rapturous highs and the wretched lows of Love.
"Isn’t the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language — the amorous language? No more ‘I love you’s.”
It is the most painful feeling to wake up one morning and realize that you no longer love someone or that they no longer love you. In doing so, you lose a little piece of language. It is a form of censorship, the destruction of language. But the emotion lingers. In order to create anew, we must first destroy. When I have met other people who undergone similar experiences - by which I mean the same, but different - the loss of a loved one who still lives is as painful as losing a loved one who dies.
In this digital age, marriages and relationships don't die. They remain embedded in the digital ether. The reminders are constant. Facebook. Instagram. Flickr. Twitter. These fragments are the basis for the archaeology of past loves. Maybe in the future a Neo-Barthes will create a work based on these digital fragments. The demons of the internet. The only way to avoid them is to switch off and sleep in digital darkness, where one can dream.
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