The Turquoise Nylon Multi pocketed Packed To Stretching Rucksack Explodes....

The Turquoise Nylon Multi pocketed Packed To Stretching Rucksack Explodes....

Every day my journeys are rapt with fear and fantasy. I take a mini-cab, a tube train, a bus, a bike or I walk but at some point I am either gripped with the possibility of terrorist attack - a rotten cheating unstoppable way to die - or lost in the make-up world my music gives me.

The music started in car parks, I realised one day I could appear in my own thriller scene. Taking something mundane and letting music and motion place me somewhere more intense than the subterranean office car park full of Mondeos. Everytime I glided into the car park at work three jobs ago I would slow the car right down and roll it as if in slo-mo. Picturing it from so many camera angles. A key moment in a thriller, the strange artificial light gliding between the concrete pillars and parked cars. Electronic pop coating the tension with icing. And then I would sit in the dark, staring at the wall until the song had finished. Those final moments of dread before the daily employment strait jacket is fitted again transformed into something dangerous, mysterious, exhilarating.

And then, when I didn't drive to work any more I would take the underground to the always spring fresh Sloane Square and hit OHMSS by John Barry and walk down the Kings Road with that startling Bond soundtrack pounding. I felt I could see myself from different angles again. A man doing something far more important than the daily commute. A man whose brain is multi-tracked with cinematic images, looks, sounds. I didn't consider myself to be in a film, just that my life was being filmed. that the parking of the car or The walk to work was singularly more gripping than it had every been for a few decades.

And then the fear started set in too. I started to notice it. from fantasy to paranoia. Just as my imagination allowed me the possibility of an existence as thrilling as the music I listen to, so it can condemn me to a possibility of terror.
the terrorist bombs on the underground in recent years, the attack on gay Old Compton Street before them, the IRA bombs in the burger bar years before that. all places I pass and use. It could have been any of us, it could happen again. that rucksack, that suitcase. Clothes or nails and explosives?

If I sit by the Perspex divider will the blast fly over my head? If I change carriages will it help? If I play music will it take me out of real life fear and into fantasy? Are they the same?

The decision to imagine a camera that gives a new purpose to a journey illustrated song. Is it any different to a decision to imagine darkness, noise, deafness, terror. The inability to stay alive in the face of a bomb.

And so I sit and look at the rucksack at my feet and wonder. Is this fear, is it fantasy, am I someone else? The music stops, no-one shouts cut and the Turquoise nylon multi pocketed packed to stretching rucksack explodes....

James Brown