only after dark

“her face is sans feature, but she wears a Dali brooch” 

The borders between Selly Oak and Edgbaston. Not the kind of place you’d expect a revolution, let alone a cultural one.

It’s a dank dark Autumn evening and for some reason I’d been making my way home late, quite some time after tea and the kids were getting ready to go out for the weekend. I was heading for the bus stop. I approached. Standing in a ridiculous orderly queue at the main stop for the city-centre were the most bizarre strangest living curiosities imaginable.

Young teens, all gender victims. A very fat girl dressed in a black bin-liner, modified somehow, to fit her ugly shape and retain the functionality of an outfit – I often wondered how long it stayed like that or whether it got ripped off later and if she had a contingency for such mishaps – and her make-up, bright reds and hugely-exaggerated eye-lines passing the forehead. Great hair, black and spiked and in places pulled boyishly at odds with the vertical. Her friend, also in black, but stunning, daring, legs gorgeously decked with fishnets, completely out of place in a Birmingham suburb, like a porn-star in a chip shop. Another chick, in a long dark blue evening gown, like something from a Roxy Music cover shoot, too glamorous for a bus stop. 40s or 50s hair, not my usual taste but I’d have died for her that night. This was a mash of history, not a queue. And, finally, hilariously, the most poignant statement of the lot, blindly oblivious to the stares of the other older locals waiting for the 7.45 into town. A very young youth, maybe seventeen years of age but looking fifteen, dressed like a replicant of Bowie on the cover of David Live, the 74 ghost persona, which is all the UK kids had to go on. Complete with the auburn-stained ginger tones and greased-down strands. Right down to the light blue suit, perfectly-cut. Where did he get that from? His face was not at all like Bowie’s, that wasn’t the point; it was the feel, the look of the past and present imploding, it was kids not needing the stars anymore because they could be whatever they desired themselves, to immerse themselves in their own fantastical slice of reality for the night – it had to be in the dark.

I had been dreaming of these characters for some time, you could sense something had been brewing for a while. They were straight out of the lyrics of my favourite albums, and one in particular resonated that night. For those of us who had been desperate for Bowie to write a fully-fledged sci-fi novel the waiting was over. We had no novel, no books, something much better. A living-narrative of the strangest curiosities ever and they were inhabiting my world. This wasn’t about punks and safety-pins. This was attitude, New York colliding with the back streets of Bute town, ludicrous, the future and the past erasing the purgatory of the present. Months of flaky dreams were lucidly transformed there and then.

I shook with excitement. Prophetic and salacious. They barely acknowledged each other.

Their casual demeanour was spectacular. Mannequins with kill appeal.