Much as I love her, Susan was driving me mad at that point, so in order to avoid getting a flat together, when we moved to Oxford, I lived in a car for about 4 months. (the bullet-proof logic of a 20-something teenager)

I have no idea how I managed to explain that one to her – we hadn’t split up, but were arguing bitterly every 2nd day… and I’d had enough. The plan was that I’d get a flat after she did, and in the meantime I’d live in a car (which was a mini).

This was at exactly the same time that Boris Johnson and that pig-shagging one were doing their Bullingdon Club thing – destroying restaurants etc, before they destroyed the UK economy, and (possibly)(at the time of writing) the UK itself.

When it started getting colder, me and Rich went through a phase of breaking into houses that were being painted/done-up so we’d have somewhere to sleep… then breaking out again at about 6am before the builders came. It was me that booked all the gigs (for some reason) – so the big challenge was to find a public-phone-box that took phone-cards, and wasn’t on a main road. There were two of those in the whole of Oxford. That’s how we got our early gigs.

Holy shit – it’s still there:

That’s the phone-box I used to book the early poppies gigs when I was living in a car.

That’s one of the nice things about Oxford – things don’t change a whole lot – pretty much all the old red phoneboxes in the UK got ripped up and replaced with plasticy green ones in the 90s… here’s another one… with Vicky.

This one is in Camden (3 years later), at the end of the street that our squat was on. Even in those days, the locals were so middle-classed that they managed to get an Historic-Building protection order placed on it, so BT couldn’t replace it with one of those nasty new ones. There’s a little brass plaque inside. No need to do that in Oxford because the entire place has this great big invisible snow-globe dome over it, and everything inside is protected forever from… capitalism basically. Ironically.

…

Anyway, eventually Susan got a flat… so then I got a flat (to be fair, the whole band did – shared this big house with Swervedriver)… and she came round to mine, and only went back to her place once… to pick up her stuff.

I’m not sure how that came about… why I was such a push-over… possibly because I loved the fucking fuck out of her, possibly because the only thing I can remember about her place was me taking a load of shrooms and getting stomach-cramps… attempting to vomit these tiny iridescent/technicolor tadpole like things (all singing discordantly) into her bathroom sink. I was in a state of heightened suggestibility.

So we all moved into this great big house – two bands… moderately feral, but at least it had a phone.

And it was in East Oxford, which was cool. Kindof crustie/hippie/punk place, with a pub on every corner (pretty much), although everyone went to the Temple bar on account of there being one of those football-table games. When the pub shut, everyone would go and get chips, then all go back to someone’s house and smoke A TON of dope. Everyone was unemployed. Everyone was in bands. It rocked. We had absolutely no idea what we were doing.