This album means a lot to me. I originally had this on tape bought as a birthday present [I think] by a friend from my village. Lisa and I both went to air cadets and our friendship grew over the years we spent together. Towards the end of my cadet career we would give each other lifts to the squadron. 309 was based in the nearest town to the village and we had to get there somehow.
Lisa bought this tape for me. We listened to it together in the car and I loved the rawness of the sound. As I grew up further it amused me that this band were put together pretty much to sell things at a shop on the Kings Road. Brilliant marketing and hilarious at the same time. Punk being used as an overt advert for the shop Sex. Brilliant!
Not all the songs are brilliant but a good proportion are and the production is excellent. Again, it’s amusing how well produced this album is given the whole punk pastiche [not sure that’s the correct word there, I might have just mentioned a Danish pastry].
- Holidays in the sun
- Bodies
- No feelings
- Liar
- Problems
- Seventeen
- Anarchy
- Pretty Vacant
All amazing songs. All really well written and produced. This is a one album band, everything else was shit. This album though, it served them well.
This does what it’s meant to. It scares your parents. It makes them worry for your sanity and the future of humanity. It’s ingenious.
Then, while I was at university, in possibly my second year, Lisa died. Suddenly. While playing football. Fuck. My dad told me. In a bar near Goodge Street. “I’ve got some bad news” he said. Lisa was dead. Fuckin’ dead. At about 21 or 22. They didn’t ever find out what happened. She was fit, played sport and ran all the time, smoked all the time, was great to be around.
The funeral was fucking terrible. The church was packed. People sat in the aisles. I think we all, the cadets, wanted to run away afterwards, but her dad asked us to stay a the wake. It was shit. I think we were all numb. We pondered going to look at the coffin in the hole, I said we shouldn’t, let’s remember her the way she was, we didn’t look. That night we all went on a pub crawl around Sawbridgeworth and drank many round to Lisa.
I used to go and chat to her grave for about ten years after she died. I just went there to think. I might have said stuff, but I also know that’s just stupid because she was dead and gone. Once you’re dead that’s it. Your gone. But it felt like the right thing for me to do at those times. Even my mate Rich and I once went to speak to her after a dining in night at 309. We left our girlfriends with my parents at about midnight and just went to chat to Lisa. Fuck knows what the girls thought about that. It’s just what we did.
I have a newspaper clipping about Lisa dying folded inside the CD case of this one. I moved it there from the music cassette when I upgraded.
Life’s shit quite often and then every now and then you get a bit of happiness. Then you die. Some of us die before the others. I miss you Lisa.
We’re so pretty, oh so pretty, we’re pretty, va-cunt.