Next something even darker grumbles low in the dark while Tricky and Martina intone the same lines in unsteady unison until her clear cool water voice takes over for the chorus "I met a Christian in Christiansands and a devil in Helsinki". Some inaudible speaking mixed two rooms away and what sounds like the beginning of the Strat riff from Bowie's Golden Years. Don't know what it's about but it sounds nasty.
And on. These sounds are from a club at the wrong end of the pre-dawn, a paranoid, tunnelvisioned whispering threat. Everyone's conversation is audible at once clear and hating. And all of them want something all of the time and all of them get something less than they want and all of them try again. And the night will come and it will come soon when their bodies will pile to the ceiling in a writhing mess of bleeding filth. ......
That's just what I needed to write and draw the second issue of Hysteria. The main story of #2 was about obssession and began with the line: Phil got up again and woke the fly. Phil's girl had been stolen by his best friend and he couldn't let it go, eventually lighting on a plan to flay the Judas. When he goes to the dictionary to ascertain what flay actually means he is all the more determined to capture his victim and remove his skin. He reads up on taxidermy and starts in on mice and other small animals of the neighbourhood, fighting the hallucinogenic effects of sleep deprivation.
The sleep deprivation part was autobiographical (the rest of it wasn't). From late 1997 to early '98 I was on the floor of my room with pencils, ink and crow quills, inking over the pencils themselves. No tracing paper here, if I blaffed a page I did it again or it went in as is, the idea was a controlled murderous chaos.
Trip hop and techno are the 90s pop music legacy. NONE of the rock music from the time was anything but revivalism. The only things that sounded like exceptions moved into electronica and away from rock (eg My Bloody Valentine or Beck's Mellow Gold). Trip hop had a cinematic edge to it; spy movies or outright horror were evoked when not actually sampled and what lyrics were decipherable were impressionistic confessions or suggested vague atrocities.
For me this was all timely. I was at the apocalyptic end of my sharehousing days and fighting in vain against the realisation that in my mid thirties I had just grown too old for it. The only flatmates I could get for my elegantly wasted innercity hovel were the not too choosy poor of the eager youth bouncing through studies to careers; brats and the near desperate. After a string of those over about three years I'd sworn off. But until I did I had to live with it.
I was working part time, day on day off which fit perfectly with comics creation. Recovering from a nasty back injury, I'd lie belly down on the floor of my room and draw on toothy A4 pads Which I'd then ink. Hysteria #1 came out to a good localised reception (leave me alone, it was self-published and everyone was starting that way). The cover was adapted from a photograph of one of Charcot's hysteria patients in a kind of ecstasy.
The cover of #2 was an original based on the same figure but she'd grown long metallic talons and fangs. The whole issue was about situations escalating into horror. A woman gets on a tram and sits opposite a man who looks safe until hands grow out of his eye sockets and stretch toward her with supple snake-like arms. The Rortsen character who'd been such fun in the first one meets and kills his doppleganger. The autobiographical Oblomov Days strip was about the momentarily terrifying realisation after a relationship that it will never be the same as it was. A boy whose sister went missing grows up on a futile quest to find her only to be confronted with her riding a black cloud which might or might not be only his insanity amping up. That kind of thing. The seasonal theme was my most hated: summer.
I was allowing myself to feel beseiged by my circumstances which meant that I not only thought these stories up in the first place but eagerly rendered them almost unreadable through poor page layout and logic leaps unfamiliar to anyone who had not been me at half past two in the morning of the day that I'd done them. The main story ran for seventy-five pages of this. It really did have a three act structure that worked. Most people who managed to get through it gave up and looked at the drawing. That's the opposite of what should happen with a narrative comic. A review in the justly short-lived magazine Milk Bar not only disliked the issue (which is perfectly acceptable) but lost its own way and seemed in the end to damn the comic for not being more like prose (which is unacceptable): even my critics were unreadable. Fun in a Samuel Beckett story but not in life. Eventually, I had to admit to having created something unreadable and moved on.
My next project was the unfinishable and never titled tale of a serial killer who was taunted by the ghost of his first victim to kill more so that he would never repay the debt to his conscience. It was left unfinished because I just burnt out. I read far too much about serial killers online and watched all the increasingly purulent entries in the born-purulent serial killer genre, and even a tv show called Millennium from the same team as made the X-Files but wanted to out-dark it. The times they were a fearin'.
I had taped a horror movie I'd never seen from tv and watched it over and again, completely haunted by it. I followed up by raiding the local monster sized video shop for more and nastier examples. All this fed my comics and writing to the exclusion of all other influences. Guess who else was into horror.
Tricky was riding a tide of admiration after creating one of trip hop's grand structures, the Maxinque album which like the others (Massive Attack's Blue Lines and Portishead's Dummy being chief among them). The colour drunk journey it took its listeners to had been absorbed into the cool cafe scene the world over and had fallen on soft times, the soundtrack to blather about what are now termed first world problems. Pre-Millennium Tension not only alluded to stress in the menstrual cycle linguistically but visually in the cover art as the stark black light nudes held glowing red globes over their groins. This was not to be an album to carry coffee chats about piercings but to disturb that fan base into the knowledge of where they were.
Makes Me Wanna Die is a Martina vocal over a thick trip hop thud and tremolo Rhodes electric piano. "You're insignificant, an isn't..." And more lines that teeter between Tricky's tendencies to be either puerile or paranoid. Eventually, we start to hear his whisper very gradually rise in the mix preceeding her lines by seconds as though feeding them. The plaintive short melodic phrase frequently cutting away from the established rhythm gives the sense of the centre failing to hold.
I listened to this a lot at this time not because its horror was an escape but a reminder of the reality. The Matrix was a year or two away but I'll still use the figure it left with the culture: this album was the red pill.
I felt detached from a workplace that I convinced myself didn't want me after all those career building years and left it after each shift to a home that wanted me to move on. My one solace was the welcome I received from the indy comics crowd who liked what I did and shared their time and encouragement without effort. And the comics I gave them were indigestible.
I was in one band that had a funny song about fears of global disaster at the change of millennium and another, comprised of new age geese who went on uncritically about lizard people conspiracies and the Mayan calendar who wrote songs about the apocalypse. Tricky's singular take on hip hop which dived here into alienating his own genre was a comfort in the same way that touching something colder than you are on a winter morning is a comfort.
I have never been that unhappy for that long before or since. Since then I have never once made it all the way through this album.
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