Bring down the pool cue hard down on my head
Show me that you really care
There must be blood on the staircase every night
Because your stupid little girl upstairs
She cannot cope with all this - she's in a tizzy in a twist
And there's a smack in the mouth not just a slap on the wrist
For everyone

Bring out the toolkit scream down the house come on
Come on - beat me black and blue
Then give us a smile while you dial all the nines
And lead me to the boys in blue
I almost fell in love with you when you threatened to bash in
My head with your billiard cue
Welcome to Camden Town

The only trouble was I didn't know anyone in Chatham who had even the faintest idea how to be a bizarre little group - everybody I knew round there was stupid, especially the musicians - they all seemed to play in old pop groups like Vanity Fayre and Edison Lighthouse, reformed using non of the original members.
Then of course there was Denim 'n' Lace - a sort of grotesque lounge-bar-of-the-pub cabaret duo. They were in fact Lee and Mel (short for Melvin). Melvin was very fat due to a monolithic drinking problem. He was also a constant dope smoker and as he suffered from asthma as well as weighing twenty stone he was frequently out of breath. He sweated a lot too and wore aftershave to couteract the stench that eminates from obese whisky drinkers.
Melvin played the guitar, supported by a bar stool, and wearing a denim jacket over his white shirt and dickey bow. The back of the shirt had been cut out because it had split owing to Melvin's massive bulk, but this suited him because he reckoned to get very fucking hot under the denim. Lee was his girlfriend - she wore a floor-length skirt and a lacy blouse and sang Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue and You Make Loving Fun by Fleetwood Mac with lots and lots of reverb.
They originally got together to do a residency in the Middle East - for them that had been the big time - but since they'd been back in the Medway Towns things had been going downhill...
But one day Melvin drew me aside, eager to confide with somebody in the pub - their hard times were about to end - they were going to buy a name. They'd been offered a chart-topping pop group name - for fifteen hundred pounds they were going to become Picketty Witch and earn a living playing I Still Get That Same Old Feeling every night for the rest of their lives.
But something must have gone wrong - you see, the last I heard of Melvin he'd been arrested for trafficking heroin and was sitting in a cell somewhere in the Middle East awaiting death by execution.
Anyway, the point is, these were not really the sort of people with which to form a cool little combo to play the Edinburgh Festival.
It's a real shame.

words and music Eric Goulden (MCPS / Copyright Control)

These two songs got stuck together by accident and now I can't separate them.
One night after The Hitsville House Band played in London we went to the Laurel Tree in Camden to meet my friend Mark Luffman who was doing a short DJ set there. When we arrived the girl on the door, a mousey indie chick in a polyester fur coat, wouldn't let us in, even though Mark had put us on the guest list. We didn't mind, we said we'd wait until he came out. But the girl thought we were taking the piss because Fabrice and Denis didn't speak very good English and didn't quite understand what was going on. And we were laughing a lot anyway because we always did (except when Denis was in a bad mood).
So she called the manageress who chased us out clutching a broken pool cue. It was all quite unneccesary and almost erotic - especially when Fabrice, a black-belt in Karate, made a few moves on her because she was threatening to break the pool cue over my fucking head.

When I recorded the song it was shorter than I thought it was going to be and there was all this good stuff on the backing track past where it should have faded out or ended. I didn't want to waste it so I thought I might read something I'd written over the top of it. The story of Denim 'n' Lace (which is a true story by the way) came into my mind, I think, because of a pool connection. I was fascinated by Denim 'n' Lace - when I first moved to the Medway Towns in 1982 I used to go to some very dubious pubs to watch them play, and in one, The Engineer on an estate in Gillingham, I ended up playing pool with the locals. I'd never played pool before and I was very drunk but I somehow managed to accidentally win the game which upset the locals very much. I can't remember how I made good my escape but I obviously did because I'm still here and I think those people would have killed me.

When it came to the reading the backing track wasn't quite long enough so I had to do a strange edit which resulted in the track falling to pieces and reassembimg itself at a very suitable point - since they'd been back in the Medway Towns things had been going downhill... It was a complete happy accident.

On the recording I said that Melvin was arrested for trafficking cannabis - I felt that I was a bit hard on him, even though he was a very unpleasant person, a complete cunt in just about every way, but then I found that it wasn't cannabis, it was heroin so I felt better about it. And anyway, he wasn't executed, he spent a few years in a jail in Thailand before being pulled out and shipped home by the Home Office.
In the interim the lads at the Beacon Court Tavern in Gillingham got together and did a benefit gig for him every Sunday lunchtime to raise money to send him jars of jam and toothpaste and suchlike. A whole new generation of loser musicians grew up with Melvin in the background as an absent guru.
When he came back he'd discovered God but apart from that he was just as awful as he was before. He even had the same blow wave hair-do. They must have been very disappointed but at least he hadn't been around to sell smack to them.