Electric Fur

We have arrived at the night in north London, and i am not going to do it, and the refusal is the only honest thing i have on the subject.

The facts you will have read anyway. It was just off the Caledonian Road. i was walking home to Maida Vale. i got mugged, basically. Afterwards i could not sing, and for a while i could not speak, and there was a stretch - some say eighteen months, i have said two years, and in truth i stopped counting because counting made it worse - when the thing i did was not available to me. That much belongs to anybody who wants it.

What i will not do is the scene, the street, the hands, the sound a throat makes. Not out of bravery, and certainly not out of discretion, since i have told an audience in Hamburg about my kidney stone in some detail. A man who has had something taken off him in the dark can make a story out of it, in which case he goes back there every time somebody buys him a drink, for the rest of his life, and gets good at it, and the getting good at it is the second injury. Or he can put it in a box and get on with being an appalling nuisance in other ways.

i chose the box, and that is not the same as being healed. i sat opposite two hundred men in the years afterwards and nodded while they told me that what is not spoken is not healed, and it may even be true. But there is not spoken, and there is not for sale, and it took me until about forty to notice the difference.

The aftermath is comedy and comedy is public property.

They put me on steroids for my throat, and nobody tells you what anabolic steroids do to a man who is already, let us be honest, not at his most measured. i put on an extraordinary amount of weight very fast, and along with it came a sensation i have never been able to describe to a doctor's satisfaction, which was the feeling of being covered, at all times, in electric fur. Like being wired into the mains through a small animal. i would stand in a room and hum.

So: a thin-faced Fife singer with a voice that went up into the roof, turned into a large humming man with no voice at all, holding a solo deal at Charisma and nothing to put on it.

And heroin was simply there. i have spent years being invited to be lurid about this and years declining, so plainly then - it worked. It took the trouble away every time, for about four hours, and anybody who has never needed that done cannot be made to follow the arithmetic of it. i have said in print that in its own way it can be a very useful drug, and people write in, and i stand by it, in the way that a tourniquet is a useful garment.

Those years are thin in my memory and i have not padded them out. Little Venice. A pub called the Warwick Castle where i drank for so long that the regulars, one morning, collectively and in all seriousness, began calling me Jeff - and would not be corrected, and looked at each other when i insisted i was Jackie, and it was at that moment, with a pint in my hand at eleven in the morning, that i understood i had become a rumour in my own local. i was a dangerously unstable person at that time, and the regulars had good reason to be careful with me.

The turn, when it came, was so small and so banal that i have never been able to build a song out of it. Down by the canal there were children sitting on the bank listening to a jazz band, some raggedy afternoon thing, nobody good, and they were listening the way children listen, with their whole bodies, all the way in. And i stood on the towpath, a quantity of humming failure in a coat, and thought: i used to be able to do that to people.

Not that i wanted to be famous again, and not that i had wasted my gift. Just that i used to be able to do that.

Five weeks later i was clear. Everybody wants that to have been heroic and it was not; i had simply, for the first time in years, found something on the other side of the door worth the walk. Whether the voice would come back was another question, and the answer took the better part of a decade, and it came back different - lower, wider, the bright thing gone out of the top of it and something else moved in underneath. People tell me the something else is why they listen, and i have thought about that for twenty-five years without arriving anywhere i would want to write down….