BULK RATES: The Early Years Of Future Pop Star Alderson Lupton

RIDING HOUSE STREET ADDITIONAL CHAPTER THREE: "BULK RATES"

(This chapter takes place during Alderson Lupton's early years in London as indicated and is complementary to Chapters Two and Three in the novel.)

'Walking the streets of Soho

An urban wilderness

Bordering Bloomsrovia

And Tottenham Court Road

I'm an unwilling guest

In this Phantasmagoria

Learning London ways

Getting street-engraved

Patiently, malevolently, slow

And failing the test.

Oh; that was Victoria.'

From track All Those Museum Streets, title track on the 1993 album The Museonics 2: Ancient Evenings. Music and lyrics by Alderson Lupton, vocals and flute solo performed by Calliope with location-based sampling and background voices and dialogues.

     Little Russell Street in Bloomsbury is one of the few places I lived that I didn't mention in my early days in London. It was between the time of my leaving a place off Battersea Rise. Finally finding decent refuge in a block of flats on Streatham Hill.

     On balance it was even worse than my sustained domestic debacle in Kentish Town. Worse even than the Starrs. Looking at it retrospectively many years later I'm quite sure of that. Not because the landlords were especially more rapacious.

     Or creepy. Or openly criminal in their behavior with complete impunity with respect to the local police. Or just generally outrageously grotesque by that difficult-to-exceed standard.

     Simply, I hated them more because they taught me just how completely hate can possess you. How much you can love the hate. Nurturing it for the strength it can give you and quickly becoming a willing captive.

     Found my way ultimately to Streatham Hill and a refuge of sorts, finally. But in fact it was a much longer process than that. Finally turned out to be a hiatus of something over a year.

     One I don't like to remember or talk about much. Although I made the mistake of getting drunk in Amsterdam once and telling Evel Tyler all about it, including my own criminal part and the unguilty pleasure I took in it. Forever afterwards he would pepper his unflattering articles and later online rants about me with allusions.

     In my desperation to find something else I must have looked at scores of rented rooms all over London. Generally looking in shop windows for the ubiquitous little file cards that advertised them. Many shops even had plastic jackets designed to fit rows of them for the purpose.

     Newspapers or listings sheets like the ubiquitous GRAB BAG which you found in every single newsagent's were generally no good. Advertisers in them weren't looking for layabouts or scumbags or dole scroungers like me.

     That was always the usual and understandable and inevitable response on my revealing I was unemployed. Householders and owners might not say it in so many words. But the smirking look of 'I got your number, (add expletive-deleted of choice)er' or a blank descent-of-shutters kind of glance would almost instantly take possession.