Music and my life, part eight...

T*H*E E*N*I*D

Strange name for a band, you might think. Silly name, maybe. And what's with all the stars? Patience. I have my reasons.

I also have a problem with memory, and not for a fun and exciting reason either, as far as I know, so I am not sure exactly when my association with the Enid began. I know the first time I heard them was on one of those radio programmes while I was still in exile, and I'm fairly sure it was Alan Freeman who played part of "Fand" from Aerie Faerie Nonsense, their second album. I quickly took steps to acquire both this and its predecessor, In The Region Of The Summer Stars, as well as their single, a gloriously eccentric version of the song "Golden Earrings."

If you haven't heard the Enid's music, well, you haven't heard it. At this time, it was kind of like Romantic classical music, only with a healthy dollop of rock influence in there. Instrumental, very keyboard-driven despite having two excellent guitarists, and utterly unafraid to face up to the all-devouring oncoming storm of punk and, well, not spit in its face. I was absolutely enthralled. The band's founder members, Robert John Godfrey and Francis Lickerish, could hardly have been more different; one had rather the look of one of those solid, velvet-jacketed Edwardian scientist-adventurers and sounded like Vivian Stanshall might have sounded when sober, and the other looked like an elf and as if a strong breeze might blow him away. Robert John did the vocal on "Golden Earrings," and I only discovered a lot later when I got the track on CD that it had a false start that wasn't on my single; I linked to a Youtube performance a while back on Livejournal, and you can hear it there.

At some point thereafter I attended an Enid Society Convention, which must have been in 1978 some time, and probably somewhere in or around the south-east of England, and thus bears the distinction of being the first convention of any kind I had ever attended. I had a wonderful time, and made lots of new friends with most of whom I promptly lost touch, but I managed to keep a connection to two or three of them. Everyone I had known from college had by now scattered to the four winds, so I was feeling somewhat cut off, and it was nice to have contact with some like-minded souls. I even wrote the odd letter, which anyone who knows me will tell you Never Happens.

Somewhere I have a copy of the first and to my knowledge only issue of the Enid Society Magazine, which contains the opening section of my Great Unfinished Novel, The Ivory Tower. (I still have the manuscript in a box somewhere, assuming it hasn't rotted; there were seeds of a lot of stuff in there that came out later. I wonder if anyone was interested enough to wonder what happened next.) Somewhere, also, I have my Enid Society badge, with its four dependent sub-badges, to indicate I had bought the third album, Touch Me, attended the convention, joined the Society and been to a gig. It all started so well...but the Enid's history has never been untroubled, and new storms were on the horizon.

Meanwhile, as 1978 drew to a close, I managed to get a job in London, was offered a place to stay in the house of a friend of a relative, and once again left my father's house, this time to make my way in the world. The job was at a bookshop on the fringes of the City, in the mail order section, and the pay was frankly derisory, but it was a Real Job, and that (as I had always been told) was the key to everything else. Get the Real Job and do your Very Best, and everything would fall into place.

Being in London enabled me to renew contact with one or two Enid Society members, and I went to some more gigs (Renaissance and Steve Hackett as well as the Enid). I found them painfully loud and not as good as sitting in comfort listening to a studio album at a reasonable volume (yes, I am strange, we know this) but still a rewarding experience.

EXACTLY WHICH COLOURS (MAN) WOULD THESE BE, THEN?

I was changing a fair bit during this period. I had hitherto been a bit of a puritan, and very much averse to the use of recreational pharmaceuticals, both legal and extra-legal. While at college I'd relaxed a bit and learned to be comfortable with alcohol (though most forms of it tasted vile to me, and still do; I've never learned to enjoy the taste of beer, wine or spirits, though cider's okay) but other drugs were still a big no-no as far as I was concerned. Around this time, though, my attitude suddenly flip-flopped, and I became fascinated (possibly to a degree that might have seemed unhealthy) with the notion of altered states of consciousness. If this had happened earlier, and I had done the experimenting thing when everyone else was doing it, I might have either got it out of my system once and for all, or else fallen into a downward spiral of addiction, brain damage, crime and ultimately death, as we are told happens to everyone who dabbles with certain substances; as it is, something of the allure still remains with me, though I know that at my advanced state of decrepitude and dullness I'm unlikely to encounter any such thing ever again. Still, I managed some limited degree of experimentation during this time, and discovered that (a) I enjoyed the effects of cannabis very much, and (b) thanks to my excessive body mass, it would take a lot more LSD than I ever managed to ingest to produce any pronounced effect. Which may or may not be a good or a bad thing. I know enough about myself now to know that there are things lurking in my mental sub-basements that are far better left there.

Towards the end of the summer of 1979, though, something happened that would have a far more radical and beneficial effect than any chemical could engender...

And that will be dealt with in part nine.