4 hours ago
7
Kicking-out time, January 2004, and Laura and I are sitting on the kerb waiting for a bus outside Alexandra Palace in north London. Not that we’re in a hurry to be anywhere else. We’re having the best time on our kerb, cheeks flushed from hard liquor and the exhilaration of the White Stripes show we’ve just seen. We’re busy communing with a fellow nocturnal creature, a woodlouse. It is one of those rare moments in my 20s when just about everything feels right.
Laura and I had quietly become office allies over a few years, a bond initially forming around our mutual shy diligence in the face of not fully fitting in. We would conspiratorially skip downstairs to the canteen together most lunchtimes and temper any work worries by chatting shit, laughing hysterically and plotting small acts of rebellion. (Like the time we childishly made a “FUCK CHESS” sign and left it on the office chess club’s shelf, which for some reason felt necessary and hilarious. If you’re reading this, chess club, we’re very sorry.)
The White Stripes coming to town was our pivotal moment. We’d never been so bold as to make plans together outside our professional sphere before, and we were still respectfully reserved with each other – first date vibes, as it were.
Jack and Meg White were over from Detroit promoting their fourth album, Elephant. The support band, Blanche, came from Detroit, too, and their Motor City-greased gothic country enchanted us with its banjo, lap steel, gallows humour and irresistible showbiz mystique. Then came the mighty drama and conventions peculiar to the Stripes – virtuosity versus naivete, sonic sweetness versus wigging the fuck out – that held us in childlike wonder. This was the spirit in which our long friendship began in earnest, and in which on some level it has continued ever since.
Laura and I had needed this release. We were both struggling in our own ways to shrug off the stifling “shoulds” of twentysomethingness: establish career, get on property ladder, breed, and all manner of more nuanced crummy expectations. Accompanying our post-show exhilaration was a bereftness at it being over. We were instantly pining for a way to prolong our escape from what we had come to call Tall Buildings (as in offices), the title of a song by US folk singer John Hartford.
Ally Pally sits in a park on top of a hill with a panoramic view of the city below, and looking down over it, as its inhabitants switched off their lights and turned in for the night, made us even more wistful and defiant. A good night out can be a portal to a secret world where the daytime rules are suspended, revealing different possibilities and perspectives. We wished we could go and see what Detroit was like – the place that harboured these bands and so much other creativity, from Motown, the MC5 and the Stooges to Parliament, Funkadelic, Eminem and more.
The bus, when it finally came, was brutally lit. As we chugged down the hill on our portal back to normality we resolved to do just that and, come May, we were there, sniffing the spring-fragranced trees, compulsively photographing graffiti, fire escapes and steam rising romantically from underground air vents, choking back tears while singing Stop in the Name of Love during a tour of Motown’s original home. We saw Blanche play and were invited backstage to meet the band and their friends … Jack and Meg. We felt like absolute idiots but they welcomed us awkward British strangers graciously.
This was the start of a series of Homeric road trips, herculean nights out and epic friend-making sessions with Laura, in which one thing always led serendipitously to another. There have been dive bars, rock camps, tour buses, back-up singing sessions and late-night samosa street feasting. Together we have been charmed by an old bluesman and terrified by an Elvis fanatic in Mississippi, dipped our toes in Nashville’s Old Hickory Lake, taken a bonkers minibus ride with the Pixies in Chicago, pranced across Brooklyn Bridge in a blizzard in the early hours and generally gone looking for trouble, as Laura would say, which I love.
