spring has come to sydney in the middle of winter

my life is stranger than most strangers

a long time ago in another universe

i was a junky

and every day a very good friend of mine

who was also a junky would pick me up in her VW

and we would make the long drive out to cabramatta in sydneys west

where in the mid nineties there was very good heroin to be had cheap

my friend was a musician and we drove out there which usually took an hour

and on the way out we were sick and twitching

we arrive and she always waits in the car while i duck up the stairs

up to a karaoke place but no one up there is fucking singing

theres a guy at the door

hes got half a gram of smack in a 150 buck wrapper

you can have as many as you like

the stuff comes straight from vietnam presumably

its fucking deadly good

it was killing people

man you bought your stuff and you fucked off quick

these cats selling it are hard faced bastards

jump in the car

we drive to this weird remote kinda park thing in the middle of nowhere

and me and my friend would hit up our sweet poison and the mood would change

everything looked so refreshed in the light of that fix

as we drive home we are relaxed and loquacious

drive so politely and within all the laws to the tee

this happens day in day out for a long time

on our drives out there and back

we chart the courses of other junky musicians

my friend has all the latest goss on whos using the stuff

at the same time i came across these records by glide which really impressed me

glide were chucked in with shoegazer but in fact they were much more than that

they were around mid nineties

hell they even did a gig with us

william approached me

its an honour to be playing with you he said and shook my hand

i think i told him how much i liked glide

and how good it was to have them playing with us

i listened a lot to a record called shuffle off to buffalo

it was no surprise when my friend began to mention williams name

on our daily pilgrimage to sydneys heroin mecca

the music somehow suggested as much in some subtle way

only a junky would understand

a lot of shoegazer is perfect heroin music

anyway glide really had something going for them

before william who was the singer and mainman went and overdosed

one day when she picked me up

my friend said

william died . he OD ed

i sat there feeling sick and worn out and sad

my first impression was to envy him

that he had found some warm safe haven in the embrace of an opiate overdose

this would not be an unpleasant way to die

youd go out on a carpet of dreams

obviously my thinking was warped twisted and totally fucked up

but in the end i just shrugged

another victim of her-o-in

i imagined i’d probably be coming along pretty soon myself

i didnt care

life as a junky was a half-life as Karin used to say

my impression of william arthur is that he had some real fucking talent

these songs anticipate a lot of what was to come

he was an audacious witty poignant writer

the band play with impressive fury and restraint

the guitars often sound orchestral and ambiguous

anyway

i am having the pleasure of singing 7 songs at a glide night

vanguard newt-town 21 and 22 of august

one day i wrote a song about those days

and its called keeper

the speed seems to have slowed me down

we talk about william from glide

the names of the towns go past

im driving on the wrong side