It was three days before Reading Music Festival in 1999 when I got
the album “Nature Creates Freaks” by the band Cay. It was their debut
album, signed to East West (they released Tori Amos’s “Little
Earthquakes”), and it had been getting rave reviews. I’d spent the
previous weeks absorbing the media around it in a fashion so as to get
psyched for it.
I remember sitting down in my friend
Potter’s room and listening to the album and by the time we got to the end Potter turned to me and said:
“I wish I was going to Reading.”
Cay’s set at the festival was electrifying. They were this bratty,
angry fusion of Sonic Youth and early Hole. I bounced around like a loon
in the mosh pit while the band’s lead singer, Anet Mook, snarled her
way through song after song. I’d been to gigs before but none had felt
as raw and energetic. My girlfriend and I fell in love with them on that
day.
The CD inlay was soon photocopied and turned into a poster, stickers
applied to note books, lazy mornings spent listening to tracks like '
Skool'
as the sun crept in through the window in my bedroom and I supped the
remnants of a cold filtered Heineken with the sound turned down on John
Woo’s “The Killer”. This was during a time when my head was full of big,
small ideas. I was going to be a painter, draw comics, write novels and
then burn them all. I was full of myself when I really all I was full
of was shit. I wanted to be Bukowski before I even knew who Bukowski
was, let alone read any of his novels. The Matrix had not aired in
cinemas yet; the PlayStation 2 had been announced but not seen. Less
than 2 months later I moved out of my parents’ house and into a dirty
little bed sit that I shared with my girlfriend. Cay joined Portishead,
Bush, Limp Bizkit, KoRn, Nine Inch Nails and The Bloodhound Gang as my
soundtrack to this new and exciting life.
The people I hung out with were all like me, all felt indestructible,
like we some kind of creative beatnik group of musicians and artists
when really we were a bunch of drunken, stoned teens with delusions. Me
more than most with know-it all idiot ramblings, ignorant assertions
combined with continual foot-in-mouth disease. None of that mattered
though, I felt like I was on top of the world.
I saw Cay two more times. Once was at a convention room in Brighton
Center supporting Feeder. The band belted through the album as well as
some B-Sides. Anet was standing in the center of the stage with a
cigarette jammed in the neck of her guitar and a cheap can of Carling
standing at her feet. In those moments of frazzled chords and feedback
I’d rarely been happier. After the gig I bought a T-Shirt with ‘CAY SUK
ROK’ emblazoned across the back and their ‘Fuck Popp’ logo on the left
breast.
The second time was in London, the venue I am not sure about, but I
remember that they had two supporting bands: My Vitriol and Trashland.
While in the bathroom I bumped into the drummer from My Vitriol and
later the lead singer would make a dig about Trashland and referred to
them as ‘Trashcan’. I barely registered either band anyway; I was only
really there to see Cay. That night was a bit of a blur, the night is
hard to describe because I had been drinking pretty heavily but I
remember bundling into the crowd as the band played ferociously.
Certainly, by no means were Cay original but they were mine. Their
vibrancy was mine, the anger, the confidence, the noise was all mine.
Obviously that was a claim I couldn’t honestly hold true to. I hadn’t
been there during their time at ORG, during their inception only once
they had signed to their utterly incompetent major label (there were
stories of East West contacting ORG and asking them how to promote Cay). It didn’t matter though, Cay was important to me.
On night shifts in the convenience store I worked in, we would bring
in a battered CD player and listen to Cay, Everclear, Aphex Twin and
V.A.S.T. then finish work and go out drinking and partying until the
afternoon.
We continued that cycle until, slowly, things started to fall apart.
I worked too many hours in a job that I loved/hated, my relationship
was unravelling through no small fault of my own. We split up and it
caused a fracture in our friendship group that took over 2 years for me
to mend.
Cay played the Reading festival in 2000. It was weird to think how
much had changed in the last 12 months. Due to complications I was
unable to see what would turn out to be one of their last gigs. Those
that witnessed it said that it wasn’t right, that Anet was sloppy and
amateurish, possibly high.
And that was it, they were gone. A few years later I did a stint at
HMV, during my training on how to use the search engine on the shop's
computer I found that they had released a single called ‘
Resurrexit’.
Later I moved in with a guy who had all of Cay’s early stuff like
‘Seven Schizo's sat on a Bench’ and a lot of the vinyl versions of their
singles. Around that same time I finished writing my first novel,
secluded in the study of my parents’ new house over a long weekend. The
soundtrack was Cay, Pretty Girls Make Graves, and Meanwhile, Back in
Communist Russia. I started my second novel and called it ‘
Neurons like Brandy’
after a Cay song. Over a beer, the guy I lived with and I joked that if
I ever got the book published we would use the vinyl art as the cover
for my book and try and provoke the former members out of hiding to sue
me and find out what happened to the band. That was in 2004 and I still
haven't finished the novel.
And so I got older but that dirty garage band stayed with me.
I had two of their T-Shirts that eventually I had to throw away, they
were more holes than T-Shirt and as much as it pained me it felt like
it was time to let go.
Last weekend I visited the friend I’d lived with back in the day. He
now lives in Leeds and still has a great music collection. I saw Nature
Creates Freaks sitting on his shelf and commented on it. We grinned and
talked about how it was a great album, I told him it was still on my MP3
player. And then he hit me with:
“You know she’s dead, right?”
The news didn't really sink in until I was on the train back, in some
ways I just didn't want to believe it. As soon as I got home I looked
it up, hoping that it was some kind of mistake.
On June 15
th 2011, it was
announced that Anet Mook was hit by a bus (or train depending on who you read) in Amsterdam.
From the post
written
by the drummer at the time of her funeral she was clearly not easy to
work with and it was obvious that she had her issues. I knew so little
about her but she was most definitely my
hero and it shames me that I only get to bury her now.
So, as a tribute I am planning to start something next week as my new project.
