Music That Made Me #20 - Thousand Yard Stare - Buttermouth

I met her in a boozy pub full of old men just off Trafalgar Square. She was alone and reading Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh. This was some time before the film came out - she was cool like that. She was a little shy but at ease and honest – there was none of that cat and mouse you sometimes got with other girls. By the end of the evening we’d arranged to meet again in some backwater bar where a band was playing.

She was geekily attractive – an odd one out with her glitter, eyeliner and vintage clothes at a time when vintage clothes weren’t the rage. Music, art and fashion meant everything to her. She was exceptionally intelligent too, not just in terms of education, but with her emotions, common sense and the wisdom of what was really important in life. She loved the sea, the city, literature and had the ability to drink me under the table. That summer I found my soul mate and as we stepped out every weekend into the city again we were invincible.

When after two months she spoke the words “I’m sorry, this isn’t working out,” the shock was painful and unexpected. The giddy rush of chemicals in the early stages of love had made me blind.

This was very much our song. We danced madly to its snappy guitar riffs. Our arms flailed in all directions without a care in the world down in her basement flat crammed with tatty coffee stained books, artworks she’d found in second hand shops, mannequins and old vinyl records by My Bloody Valentine, Depeche Mode, Adam Ant, Ride and The Cure. It was a song that had been released a few years before, by what in hindsight was a C list mediocre indie band with very average songs and flatly predictable vocals. But for those two brilliant months this song joined us.