Too Ecstatic To Be Yours
"Nothing is too simple or too good to be true, and nothing is too wondrous or too ecstatic to be yours - nothing." ~ Bashar
Back in 2011 I had sold up and left Blighty. 2009 had been a depressing year, lost father, followed by girlfriend. London was full of blood and I’d been there 27 years. So I figured I could decide on another country to live in, having various options based on work, friends, a love of other countries.
I found my way to the Gamlebyen, the Old Town in Fredrikstad, Norway which had once been a fort. Here I began to loosen up. I lived in a tiny flat, my landlord a British artist whose work I admired. I had time to sit by the Glomma, a deeply gouged, ice-age river, the biggest in Norway on its way to the sea, just before it gets brackish. I would sit in the sun, watching all kind of boats, families, sailing boats, industrial shipping on its way out to the Swedish sea and off to the trading world beyond. I fell in love with the place which I had visited several times, and waited for my belongings to arrive from London, which they eventually did.
During this precious time of being a nobody with very few friends around, I found liberty. I wrote a song about it, based on a TV news theme tune and the nightmare that had just happened in Libya. I got quite fit, running round the perimeter of the barricades, dodging round the old cannon which remained, prettified for the annual tourists. I wrote a novel, which was superceded by a dream which was much better, so I wrote that. As a longer term project, I started to write my auto-biography, as you do if you so desire and you have nobody demanding anything from you except rent, which you can easily afford, food, a local music festival, art, and the occasional conversation. I started to fit in.
A million things then happened, but before they did, some of the autobiographic writing was good. I may yet complete it. Since a lot of people knew me as someone who had worked with famous people (gasp!) I made up a title with a cheeky reference, which I will not mention now, just in case I ever finish the book and need to focus on getting people in their hundreds of thousands to read it. But there are some passages which I found that I am happy to share. I hope you enjoy this chapter written in Gamlebyen.
"My Life as Someone Almost Famous"
Dean F.R. Whitbread - Chapter One
Never was a company better named. Briefly very successful during the bloody and brutal birth of the UK internet industry, a blazing comet in the new technology firmament, Netmare almost killed me.
After years in the music business, full of hustle, ego and blatant corruption, in which making a living for me had meant either financial famine or feast, in Netmare, I was one of very few experts in a small field. I understood the possibilities of the technology and I could also speak to corporate marketers. I graced boardrooms and was taken completely seriously. I cashed large cheques from corporate coffers. Thus, I dived headlong into this new, warm tropical sea, enchanted by the beautiful fish and corals, but with no idea there would also be sharks. It was a sea-change which almost drowned me.
My interest in the net orginated from the artist Heath Bunting, whom I had met in Bristol and collaborated with a little. He had a bulletin board in his cupboard, and he explained Gopher to me one afternoon. I was entranced, it felt like I had just peered into a parallel universe of art and sedition. BBS technology was cool, email was useful, but there was this other thing called the World Wide Web which instantly called my name.
Using my girlfriend’s colour Apple Mac, and the software Heath gave me - a hooky version of Photoshop and BBEdit - I began to code webpages.
John Loder of Southern Records gave me my first break in this as yet unborn industry. He gave me webspace for free, and I erected a web fanzine with interviews, reviews, funky colour graphics, video and audio clips, which I called Core A.V. Netmare. I can honestly claim to have erected the first multi-media web fanzine in Europe and for three or four months it was the most popular website in Europe.
Then, through John we got a commercial opportunity. Before the days of bbc.co.uk, in March 1995 I helped to create one of the BBC’s first websites, part of a ground-breaking online-plus-radio experiment, Radio 1nteract. Thereafter, I created Netmare, went to Brussels, and through a musical contact, won the Levis Europe account, only for the criminally-minded colleagues who had joined me in the company split off to form their own company, and tear this high status, lucrative contract away.
It wasn’t just Levis - they took everything I had, computers, musical instruments, even my desk and furniture, which they locked into the London Bridge space next to Ninja Tune that we shared. Without the money to issue a writ, I waited until it was quiet one Sunday morning , and simply walked in through the open door. I took back everything of mine, including all the paperwork I needed to carry on without them, crossed London and set up in Ladbroke Grove.
So that was Netmare’s first six months.
We were based in a great spot, Kensal Road, right next to Virgin Records, on top of Portobello. I had become part of the world’s first internet band, Res Rocket Surfer, for whom I created a logo and a website, which was then splashed across 25 million TV screens via Nick Glass from Channel 4 News, and so I found workspace next to their music studio. The diversity of the work grew and developed by the month. I conceived and commissioned a “create your own tshirt” website way before any such things existed. I thrived in West London, grew the business there, scored work for McLaren Formula 1, MTV, and all kinds of smaller businesses.
Netmare started to appear in the press; I was featured in Design Week, in The Times. We streamed audio from the Notting Hill Carnival rap stage. Working for the Health Education Association, aka the UK government, I was a member of SCODA, the Standing Conference On Drug Abuse (a non-PC title which would never wash in euphemistic post-Labour Britain) providing ideas on how to reach the drug-addled youth of Britain with harm-reduction messages. When I had to extricate us from that contract, as we carefully avoided being made the fall guy for their bad project management, it helped that our solicitors were Mishcon de Reya.
Having started up with no money and a single computer, despite this success, its scale and remarkable speed, I was haunted by the spectre of going bust, and as it turned out, with very good reason. My business partner, a New Yorker who had lied about her qualifications and bought her way into the business with Dad’s money, after a few months persuaded me to move offices, then, in league with her future father-in-law, conspired to put the business under by calling the staff together, telling them the game was up, and doling out the contents of the current account by writing £500 cheques until there was nothing left. Frustrated by my failure to give up, six months later, she sent Zionists to terrorise me. One of them looked just like the scary convict in Porridge, so l laughed at him, and swung round the other guy, avoiding his theatrical punch with greenbelt aikido move as he flashed his gold Star of David at me and pulled a face. I never saw them again.
In 1997, as the combination of this roller-coaster business ride and the strain of my love relationship with a manic-depressive girlfriend was beginning to take its toll on my health, I was courted by a couple of smooth-talking city boys in an exclusive Mayfair club who wanted to launch Netmare Limited on the Alternative Investment Markets - AIM - an IPO. I would sign away my company, make a few million.
We dined, and they schmoozed me over the silverware, soup spoons returning to their plump mouths because after all, they belonged there. Unlike me, I realised; the gulf between us was huge. I was an state school boy from Croydon, who more by luck than judgement found himself starting a new business in a tech boom. I knew I could easily lose everything. On the other hand, they came from money, lived with money, made money from money, ate people like me for our money and shat us out like so much small change, all day, every day, jingle jangle plop.
“We’ve looked at your business,” the fatter of the two was saying, oblivious to the asparagus on his Saville Row suit, “and we believe that in the current climate, we can raise two million from interested venture capital and private funds.”
As he spoke, I looked at him, and he looked not at me, but across the table at his chum. His face was well behaved, but his voice was leering, nudging and winking.
I waited for him to look at me, and said nothing but “I see” and “Really?” and “Excellent.”
He got to the point.
“If you are in a position to proceed, we would like to kick this off pretty much straight away.” By now devouring the plaice, he put the fish knife down, and finally looked at me. He peered over a pair of invisible bifocals like a kindly geography teacher.
“Now, this would require snoop percent of snarfle goop,” he said. Or rather, that is what I heard. I knew he was going to ask me for money, and this was the build up. The rationale was meaningless.
I dabbed my face with a thick, well-laundered napkin. He reached into his briefcase, and passed me a plastic-bound document, printed on 200g A4, and fronted with an embossed logo in navy blue behind glossy plastic. It was supposed to be impressive, but I knew all about proposals. I picked it up and flicked through it, apparently reading parts of it, then skipping to the numbers pages, because, I had learned, that is what businessmen do. It looked about an hour’s work, if that, the kind of document they would produce while discussing totty and scratching their flaking scalps.
By now, the dessert was arriving, a medley of berries and cream fresh from the gilded teats of Lord Wimbum’s prize dairy herd.
They wanted twenty grand to kick it off. I didn’t flinch.
Fat man and slightly less fat man were on their third glass of wine now, and slightly glazing over, but also they were hardening more than their arteries, as their rugby player proportions loomed over me, and they began pushing me for more of a reaction, so, I began to speak. I was also a little drunk - the wine, like the food, had been excellent - but I was clear-headed, and well used to operating under all kinds of inebriation.
“The money will not be a problem,” I said, looking first one, then the other, staring into the cold dark eyes of Satanic fish. “I actually have that in my bag.” I nodded down to the black leather satchel at my feet.
Fat Man sat back in his reproduction Regency chair and beamed, all top lip sweat and Harley Street crowns, clearly delighted by the thought that he had just eaten in close proximity to that amount of hard cash. Until now the more taciturn of the two, Less Fat Man’s eyebrows went up and stayed there for half a second. He seemed to have problems breathing, and had to resort to an indelicately hasty sip from his glass of mineral water. I got the impression that he was now controlling an urge not to stare down at my bag.
I had nothing in there but a mobile phone, a couple of CDs and a proposal for a website, but this complete lie was the perfect hook for their greed.
“Of course,” I continued calmly, “I will have to read through your proposal and discuss the timing with my accountant.. “
As we left the club, and emerged into Manchester Square, weak sunlight filtered through the trees lightening the grey London sky. We parted with old boys’ handshakes and splendids, and as I murmured my thanks to their plummy blather, noting the size of their cufflinks, I knew I would never see them again.
The facts were very different from the illusion of success in a booming tech industry into which these city boys had bought. We were the first and most creative company in a field of half a dozen, leading a rapid surge of web production from 1994 to 1997, part of a great proliferation of investment by old money seeking a new place to thrive, but suddenly there were no more prospects on the horizon and the business was running on empty.
For the previous twelve months, every time I did the deal which was supposed to make all the difference, it vanished into thin air. The one just gone was EMI, for whom I had put together an inspired pitch, delivered in a charity shop shirt, after a sleepless 48 hours, to the EMI board in their icon-embellished boardroom. We won a major slice of the corporation’s online contract against the expectations of the comfortably sitting incumbents, only to be sacked by fax before we could begin, when the sad truth of their ten million pound financial black hole was revealed less than two months later in a headline-grabbing public announcement. This contract alone should have made the business seven grand a month, pushing us into steady profit and growth; instead, having reconfigured the company to begin the work, I found myself with a business in no shape at all, running low on cash, beginning to realise that the best I could now do was salvage, and sell.
That same day, I went to my workplace in Ladbroke Grove, and told my loyal and intelligent staff that they should find themselves jobs in companies which would survive the recession which was about to hit. Sure enough, 12 months later, it broke over California, New York and London like a blasting winter storm.
As the shrapnel fell from the bursting tech bubble and caused widespread job casualties in this once brave new industry, I had managed to sell off what remained of the company, write off the vast majority of its debt, and keep almost all of the intellectual property, none of which was worth that much any more.
That was a result, after what I had been through; I wasn’t bankrupt. But personally, I was a wreck.
As my world crashed around me in 1997, I was alive but barely functioning. I awoke one day with the clear thought in my mind, as if spoken by someone else, “I don’t have much longer to live” and this persistently nagged at me as if I was on a train heading over a cliff, unable to jump off. Still, I pressed on - I had Edinburgh festival to cover, audio-visual web journalism with some cool bands, and a new limited company to construct. But, I was in huge denial. I was deeply depressed and exhausted, isolated and unsupported, and in no fit state to create anything except a bolt hole. In Edinburgh, working on the festival, with the victim’s cloud hanging over me, I was abused by a coke-addled promoter who told me to get down close to the band with my video camera, then had the bouncers eject me from the venue in order to impress the band’s manager. I was scorned and insulted by my girlfriend’s work partner, and treated coldly by my obsessive girlfriend, who put her performing work first, first, first. On automatic, while I was there, three weeks with nothing more to do, I bought black shoes, white shirt, black trousers, and dressed for a funeral that might have been my own.
I sat in the bus station one day, staring at the buses, considering which one to get on, just to be somewhere else, but I didn’t even have the energy to disappear. I climbed up high places, looking down. I began to have chest pains and palpitations, and went to see a Scottish GP. I shall never forget her kind, alarmed face framed with red hair and spectacles, as she explained to me that I was very close to collapse, needed to go home and see my GP as soon as possible, and if anything happened again before I was able to leave, to go straight to A&E.
The morning we returned to London, 1st September 1997, Diana died, and I felt the first relief I had experienced in months. It wasn’t me, I realised, it was Diana. That was what my wake up thought meant. I’d somehow caught a glimpse of the incredibly outpouring of national grief that was about to sweep the nation, and interpreted it as my own.
Back in London, my GP asked me the usual questions to ascertain whether I was a suicide risk (but even at my lowest, suicide never appealed) informed me that I was clinically depressed, wrote me a prescription for Amitriptyline (anti-depressant medication, which I never used - I should have) and a sick note to show my insurance company so that I would not have to sign on for unemployment benefit, and put me on the waiting list to see a National Health shrink.
A month later, my girlfriend left me, as they do, just when I needed her most.
I decided to call what I was going through a sabbatical. This not only rescued my wounded pride, but gave me some direction. I would pause, I would learn, and I would not rush back into the melée which had almost killed me. I needed to take a long look at who I was, and where I was going. I knew that I had not been a total failure as a boss and a businessman, but I also knew that the courage others saw in me, and the perseverance which my parents had instilled were no more than sticking plasters over my immense naivety and failure to marshal my personal resources.
I knew I needed to ensure that I never made the same life-endangering mistakes again, so I found myself a good therapist, and started the slow process of personal reconstruction.
* * * * * * *
…1998 …
* * * * * * *
By 1999 the United Kingdom was once more gripped by the economic balls. In the vicious teeth of recession, bankruptcies were reported on every newscast month after month, and if you had work which made you any money at all you were extremely fortunate.
On the plus side, I had generated a lot of money; on the minus, there wasn’t much of it left. Most had disappeared via staff, rent, taxes. However, now that the business was gone, I was actually a lot wealthier, with just a few private clients, who liked me and continued to offer me freelance work which I gratefully took. Slowly and patiently, I began to function once again. Having more time out than time in suited me just fine.
During this time, I went back and listened to the music I had made and abandoned while I was engaged in the awful struggle of the past few years. I could not even remember recording these songs, jotted down in the dead of night, and filed away. What had possessed me to forego this most essential part of my life, my creative side? I had even had a big hit in 1997 - Survival Game - yet I had experienced little pleasure in it. I felt I had betrayed myself, in the pursuit of glory and in the care of my ex-lover. All my finest hopes had been shelved and were now covered in a thick layer of dust.
For the first time in my life, I formulated a plan. I knew that I had to aim to be self-sustaining financially, work without employees, and become the master of my own destiny. I would work only for private clients, and develop my creative output until I was being paid to do what I most loved and making a living from it. My imagination would serve me. I gave myself a decade.
Working only a couple of days a week, with no big plans but a fundamental, core aim, I had just emerged from my numbed state and started to socialise again, when I met Julian.
So, dear readers, should I continue this? Answers in a comment below please.
What a tale!