Tag Archives: loneliness

Jennifer Harlow

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It’ll pick up. That’s all that Cindy would say as she sent Jennifer home again, another busted shift because there weren’t enough bookings. It’ll pick up. They’d been busy, too busy really, in ’20 and ’21 when it seemed like the whole town bought a dog and competed with each other to see whose could be the best turned out. Trenton hadn’t suffered much with Covid but they’d shut down the places people could meet just the same, Frank’s Bar, the Community Room, the library, everything except church and even that was emptier than usual. Everyone seemed to decide that dogs were the answer. Jennifer thought they were just scared of having to spend any time alone confronting their reality in this town, facing in to all their little insecurities that they usually drowned out by speaking to each other. She didn’t speak much to anyone.

They shouldn’t really have been open in ’20 but they figured out a system, dogs dropped off in a small holding pen that Cindy had put up on the side of house and then they’d wait for the owner to push their horn when they were back in their car so they knew they could go out and get their pet. Cindy was on her own by that point, Randall had upped sticks on her and moved to Enders with Sandy Michaels just as she graduated. Nobody could ever prove anything but the word in town was that he must have been seeing her before she turned sixteen. People said they saw them down at Swanson Lake that summer, her in cut off denim shorts and a tiny bikini top, him in jeans, white shirt unbuttoned all the way down, holding hands, kissing, but nobody saw anything more. Randy and Sandy. That used to make Jennifer smile. Jesus, this town, man. 

Jennifer had known Sandy at school, she’d been the year above but had still been one of the girls that had made her life a misery after the hair incident. She’d been into Nirvana but thought all the conspiracy stuff about Courtney Love was crap and wanted to do something to look like her, she thought Courtney was pretty cool but mostly she thought that she didn’t take any shit from anyone and she could use a bit of that. She should have gone to Beauty Marks and talked to Stacey about it but when she was hovering around outside, deciding whether to go in, she’d seen a friend of he mom’s in there and it would all get too complicated trying to explain. So she’d done it all herself, full on peroxide treatment to banish the boring brunette and emerge as a bottle-blonde bombshell. Don’t try for more than two shades. She knew that now. As it turned out the number of shades was the least of her problems as she had some kind of reaction to the peroxide; her hair turned orange and then, a couple of days later, which she’d spent trying to style the whole thing out like she’d always wanted orange hair, it all started to fall out. The best she could salvage was a fairly dramatic buzz cut which left her the laughing stock of the school for weeks. Everyone pivoted over night from picking apart Diane Flint’s apparent Disney princess obsession to picking apart her new look. All graceless stuff about lesbians or cancer mostly. This town, man.

She didn’t regret dropping out. Mostly didn’t regret it. Courtney got expelled when she was growing up and things worked out okay for her. Why stay somewhere you don’t want to be and where nobody else wants you there? Just for a piece of paper saying you can do math and knew who George Washington was. Maybe she could have stayed, sometimes she thinks that Diane was open to being friends and maybe that would have been enough. But she was always hanging out with that Johnny guy, the older one who stayed down a year, and he seemed kinda intimidating, like he didn’t want anyone intruding, so she’d kept her distance. Besides, everyone said they were screwing and she didn’t want to get in the middle of that. Dropping out had been easy, as simple as not showing up anymore. The aftermath had been harder as her mom kicked her out and she’d spent a couple of weeks sleeping in the Community Room, hiding in the toilets until they locked up and then creeping back out to lie down on the floor until morning. Cindy had taken pity on her, maybe she just wanted company after Randy left her, but she let her stay at hers for a while, gave her some shift work grooming the dogs, and, slowly, Jennifer had put enough money down to rent a room in a pre-fab up near the 34. It was cheap because there was highway noise through the night, it wasn’t so bad except when the eighteen wheelers whipped past  and the room would shake, the loose piece of glass in one of the widows would rattle against the frame, and the screen door would swing open if she hadn’t remembered to jam it shut.  They had a steady stream of Big Rigs passing through the town. Sometimes she thought about thumbing a ride and taking off but she had nowhere to go.

It was getting harder when it should have been getting easier. In her head she’d thought that if she could keep the shifts at Cindy’s until she turned twenty one then things would open up a bit, she could take a bar job, worm her way in at Frank’s. He wasn’t getting any younger and she knew he had no family. It wasn’t much of a plan but it gave her something to hold on to, an imagined future where she owned the local bar and all those losers from school would have to pay her to drink in the only place in town to hang out. She figured she’d change the name, maybe to “Jennifer’s” or maybe to “Love’s” in a little nod to Courtney, and she’d put a proper jukebox in, get rid of all that bro-country that Frank had on all the time, put in the pool table everyone wanted but Frank said he couldn’t afford, stop watering down the beer, have open mic nights for singers and comedians. It was when she got to the open mic nights part of her fantasy that reality usually crashed in. This town, man. Nobody in Trenton’s coming out for slam poetry at Love’s on a Tuesday night. She was two years off twenty one and the dog boom was over, Cindy was barely making enough to make her mortgage, let alone enough to give up any shifts and pay someone else. It’ll pick up. Will it, Cindy, will it?

In her darker moments she wondered if her only option was to screw her way out of Trenton. There were a lot of truckers passing through, probably lonely, criss-crossing the country, no ties, no need for alibis. What would even be the going rate for something like that? There wasn’t anyone she could ask. What was it worth, half an hour of fucking? What was she worth? She’d never really been with a man before so it felt like a desperate leap. There was that time with Bobby Davids when they were both fifteen, he’d tried to take things further than she wanted to and she’d spent most of the evening moving his hands away or refusing to join in as he’d pulled himself off. An entirely different version of events went round the school the next day and she’d stayed away from boys after that, wrote them all off as assholes. Not much dissuaded her of that view before she dropped out.

One evening she’d fixed her hair up, pulled it away from her neck, and dressed in a tight, low cut top, spaghetti straps and cropped at the stomach. She’d squeezed herself into year old jeans, slightly too small for her now but they accentuated her hips, and stopped to check herself in the small mirror above the sink in her room. She practiced what she thought was a confident, sexy smile, pushed her lips into a pout, tried to look casual. Her eyes betrayed her, blinking slightly too often, unable to maintain eye contact with herself, she would look away, around the room. It was okay if she caught a glimpse of this girl in the mirror, this stranger, familiar but different, but it wasn’t okay if she stared her down, realised that she was looking back at herself. She thickened up her mascara and applied some more eye shadow, like she was building defences around the source of her betrayal, and took the edge off her lipstick, blotting her lips against a tissue, leaving the imprint of her mouth in scarlet. The suggestion of a kiss.

She’d walked into town and made her way towards the truck and car wash. Some of the freight from the 34 stopped off in town, they could get their wagon freshened up at Dirt Dawg, chat to Marv, or, more likely, go join him at Frank’s for a beer. She didn’t really know what she was going to do, thought she would just walk around for while and see what happened. Maybe they would know what to do and things would happen naturally and she could pretend that this was all just a regular night for her. Fifty bucks. That was what she’d settled on in her head. That was her worth. Fifty bucks for everything, maybe thirty bucks for hand or mouth, and she absolutely wasn’t doing anything other than those things. Fifty was a week’s rent. Twice a week, maybe she could get by doing this twice a week, maybe things would pick up a bit at Cindy’s, and that would get her through.

There was a light on in Dirt Dawg but it was closed, the main shutters to the garage were down. As she came closer the shutters screeched into life and began to rise, on the other side was Marv’s pick-up, headlights blinding her as the barrier rose higher and higher. She shielded her eyes and moved to one side.

“That you, Jennifer” came a voice from the pick-up. She blinked, squinting, eyes adjusting to the flood of light from front of the truck. Was that Diane Flint?

“Hey, yes. It’s me. Diane?” 

Someone else had walked over to stand next to her and she noticed that the driver door on the truck was open, presumably whilst someone had been opening the garage shutters. She recognised him as Johnny.

“You won’t tell anyone,” he said. Jennifer wasn’t sure if it was a question or a demand.

“Tell anyone what?”

“Johnny, she’s cool,” shouted Diane. “Let’s get going. We should put some miles on before it gets too late.”

Jennifer pieced it together. “You’re leaving town, right? You’re taking off?”

“It’s not your business whether we are,” said Johnny. “You sure she’s cool?” This was directed back at the pick-up.

Before Diane could respond Jennifer interrupted. “You don’t need to worry about me. I won’t tell no-one. I haven’t really got anyone to tell anyway. But even if I did, I wouldn’t. Go on, get going.”

Johnny nodded to her, the briefest acknowledgement, and jumped back into the pick-up. He and Diane spoke quietly, Jennifer couldn’t hear them over the sound of the engine. He was shaking his head, Diane was gesturing and doing most of the talking, both of them seemed to be getting frustrated. Jennifer broke the stalemate. “If you’re arguing about whether to ask me along then quit it and get going. Three’s a crowd and I’ve got plans in this town.” Jesus, this town, man. Diane raised her hand, a small, sad wave that she barely had time to give as Johnny gunned the accelerator and left Jennifer standing there.

She didn’t really know why she waited. There was something about the truck wash being left open, unattended, that bothered her so she sat on the kerbside, stared up at the street light, and just waited. That was where Marv found her, about an hour later, when he came back from Frank’s. It had been a quiet night, Frank was in a bad mood, so he’d only stayed for a couple before deciding he should check on how much Johnny had taken in the afternoon. He was a decent kid but Marv knew his heart wasn’t really in it. Marv’s heart wasn’t really in it these days either.

He took in the scene quietly, mentally putting it together. The shutters were open and his pick-up wasn’t there. There was a girl – and she was definitely a girl much as she’d tried to dress up like a woman – on the sidewalk. He thought he’d seen her around town. She might be the one that helped Cindy out from time to time, Cindy always said she was a good worker. He went inside and checked that nothing else was missing. It looked like Johnny had left the safe, the day’s takings still inside, he’d just taken the truck. No note. Had he just borrowed it for the night? Taken someone up to the lake, maybe? That didn’t seem right, he’d have asked if it was just that. Marv figured he’d split town. He was about to pick up the phone, call the sheriff, when he heard a voice behind him.

“Everything okay, now? I… I waited ‘cos I noticed the place had been left open and it didn’t seem right.”

Marv turned round. “You see what happened?” He didn’t expect her to tell him the truth. She didn’t.

“No, I didn’t. I was just coming in to town to… well, to have a drink, but I saw it all open like this.”

“You seem a little young to be coming to town to have a drink,” said Marv. He slowed on the word drink, raised an eyebrow. “If you want my advice then I’d stay away from drink.” Again, he was deliberate on the word. More gently he said, “You don’t want to be messing around with that.”

Jennifer suddenly felt exposed. The night air had cooled and she was aware of the chill on her uncovered arms, her shoulders, her stomach, her neck. The change in his tone, its softening, had pulled away any last remnants of forced confidence, of fake front, that she had left. Fifty bucks? Was that really what she thought she was worth? She felt tears pricking at the edges of her eyes, sensed that the mountain of mascara she’d applied before was about to dislodge in a black avalanche down her cheeks. She wanted to run away, back to her room, sit and sob listening to the sounds of the rigs rattling past, all those truckers she thought she was prepared to give herself up to disappearing into the night. She turned away.

“Come see me tomorrow if you want work,” Marv said. “I think I might have an opening. Dress for washing cars though. You know, appropriate like. It’s honest work and I got more demand than Cindy does. Place like this, dogs go out of fashion but trucks and cars? They seldom do.”

Jennifer didn’t turn around again. She didn’t really want him to see her like this anymore. It wasn’t who she was. She wasn’t completely sure she knew who she was but she knew it wasn’t this.

“Thank you,” she said, back to him. “I think I’d like that. I’ll be back in the morning. Some honest work.”

She left and Marv watched her walk back up the street before he closed the place back up for the night. He thought about calling the sheriff but decided it could wait until tomorrow; get to wherever you think you’re going, Johnny. He flicked off the lights.

I decided I had unfinished business in Trenton after my earlier story: here. I may round out a loose “Trenton Trilogy” and tell Marv’s story at some point. Anyway, Jennifer deserved more than the couple of lines she got first time out, hopefully things work out for her from here. I think I may have switched tenses towards the end but that’s the sort of thing an editor is for, right?

This is another in the series of stories for my Great Ormond Street Hospital (UK children’s hospital for my non-UK readership, yes, both of you). Donations welcome here.

April alone

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April like to be alone. Not lonely, that was different, that felt unasked for, unchosen, but alone was fine. This felt lonely.

She had been unconscious for three weeks. There was an old Joe Strummer song she liked called Coma Girl that she’d sung afterwards; nobody else seemed to find it as funny as her but nobody else was carrying as much darkness as she was. Too many dark secrets. In some ways she’d preferred it when she was in the coma. It was more honest at least.

They’d brought her back as her blood levels had stabilised, when they were sure her organs weren’t about to shut down. They’d flustered around her, treated her with kid gloves as if scared that they might break her again but she knew it was less about her and more about what she represented to them. She was vaccine. And based on her first conversations about what happened next she was vaccine and not heard. She’d signed the papers to save Aps, waived her rights, offered up her immunity, and agreed to submit to whatever was required to produce the cure. They said it was for her own protection, that it would be too much of a burden to be known publicly as the girl-that-saved-humanity (her embellishment, they’d said something slightly drier). She wasn’t entirely convinced that Vaccine Girl would be joining the celebrity ranks of the Avengers any time soon but was more inclined to believe their other arguments, notably that she might receive a lot of unwelcome attention from the anti-vax movement. It was still a minority fringe but the idea that the virus was a result of mankind’s desire to immunise itself against disease had picked up some traction. All of the test facilities and labs were anonymous now. And it looked like she was too.

They wouldn’t make promises but said they’d probably need her for a year. Maybe eighteen months to be sure. They weren’t really apologetic about it – there’s nobody else that has shown your immune response so we’ve got no choice – but had said that they would be able to open up her contacts, electronically, as long as she stuck to the script. She could continue with her studies remotely, it had all been arranged, most of the lectures were recorded anyway for people that struggled to make it to campus to fulfil their difficult five hours a week schedule. April hadn’t been one of those people. She didn’t mind about the lectures but she knew she would miss the arguments in her tutorials, the smell of books and the silence in the library which had an almost tangible quality, not just the absence of noise but the particular sound of people consciously not making noise. She would miss the walk down to the University and the bustle of the Union bar on a Friday afternoon and the smell of spilt beer on pub floors and the feeling of dancing through dry ice in a club.

Mostly she would miss her friends. It surprised her how much this was true, how much it had become true in the last few months since they’d met as strangers, shared a house, and formed their little coven. She knew no-one except her was calling it a coven. She wanted Leah’s standard greeting, an exaggerated kiss on both cheeks; she wanted Cora to  braid her hair, feel her tease out her tangles and smooth down the strands; she wanted to walk arm in arm with Aps, listening to her talk and talk and talk. She wanted to touch Aps most of all, to feel that she was really there, that she really came back, that she really did save her. She’d seen them all, part of her new video call friendship community but it didn’t feel real until she could hold and be held.

Her captors (again, her embellishment but, hey, this one was broadly true) tried to sell her on her sacrifice. You stay here, they get to go out, and maybe we get to stop this whole thing. She couldn’t argue with it, with its relentless rationale and logic. She could live with that but still couldn’t live with the deception and the cost. Aps had nearly died. If they’d just asked her then she’d have signed up for whatever they needed. She was sure she would. Mostly she was sure she would.

April, you alone can help us with this. Nobody else has your blood profile, your immune response. The whole program rests on you, so we had no choice. You alone.

Her phone rang. April hesitated before picking up, the screen announcing that it was Aps calling which meant that it would be all of them. This was how they usually called. She pressed the button to answer, turned her face to the screen, the small, circular camera, and waited. There was a brief pause as they connected.

“Hey April, it’s us, we see you… we still see you.”

April

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April liked to be alone. Not lonely, that was different, that felt unasked for, unchosen, but alone was fine. Alone had always felt safe. She didn’t know why it felt safe and, in a way, it really shouldn’t have. When she was fourteen she contracted a viral infection and had been sent to one of the Isolation Containment Units that had been built after the big Covid-19 outbreak in 2020; she’d picked up one of the mutations that seemed to surface every couple of years. Sent away to the ICU. Or, the ‘I don’t see you’, as they quickly came to be known. She didn’t feel special, it happened to lots of kids.

When she’d applied for University they’d asked her about it. There were rules around disclosure and changes to the privacy of your medical history, all for the greater good but there was no hiding your viral record anymore. They seemed as interested in how she’d coped with six months on her own as her physical health, lots of questions about how she felt she’d integrate with the student body, how she worked with others, what the experience had taught her. What had it taught her? That she liked to be alone. Was that it? She was savvy enough not to say that, primed as she was through endless rounds of re-integration therapy to talk up the importance of social connections, the work she’d done in remaking friendships, and learning to physically be with people again. We are social creatures. She’d nodded through enough sessions with a succession of earnest counsellors to be able to regurgitate that stuff by rote. Sometimes she’d even believed it. Sometimes.

They couldn’t really turn her down in the end. Her grades were outstanding: they would have been good but six months soaked in syllabus and then, more and more, off syllabus had set off fires in her mind. She’d found it hard coming out but not for the reasons they’d anticipated: she was bored, hemmed back in by a curriculum she felt she’d outgrown. In turn that had just made her withdraw more, retreat back to her safe place to be alone with Shakespeare and Sartre, Plath and Plato, Joyce and Nitetzsche and Austen and all the other dead intellectual heavyweights she counted as friends. She’d heard them whisper round school that she was intense, up herself, aloof, distant, but it wasn’t that. She felt as insecure as the rest of them but held it all inside, looked for answers in the past from people that had thought all this before, not people stumbling around in the present trying to figure it out for the first time. That’s how she saw it then. Now, sometimes, she has doubts. Same as her doubts about the difference between being alone and being lonely.

In the ICU she’d spent long days listening to music and had latched on to a bunch of bands from the 80s that no-one else seemed to remember. The Cure and Bauhaus and Sister’s Of Mercy. Nick Cave. She’d find one band, listen to them on repeat for days, and then the algorithms did the rest, leading her on to the next like a virtual version of an older sibling she never had. It wasn’t fool proof. She listened to so much stuff from the late 80s that her recommendations started to fill up with hair metal and house music. She never understood house until later, feeling it vibrate up through her feet in a club, watching a tangled mess of aloft arms, slack jaws, saucer eyes, from the throng on the floor. It wasn’t music to be alone with. The hair metal she never understood. But it did point her to the New York Dolls and so she always chalked it up as a win.

It wasn’t that she missed it. There had been hard nights, video calling parents in tears, scrawling out angry diary entries, sinking into a withdrawal deeper than being alone, sinking into depression. It wasn’t all literature, music, and a Zen like state of self reflection. She was a kid. A lot of them were. Most of the ICUs were stacked with either kids – Aggressive Virus Spreaders – or the elderly or people with poor auto-immunity. Some of the doctors had started calling them the AVS and the AV nots. She didn’t blame them, it had sounded pretty funny to her, even locked up, but some of the older patients had complained. She’d had a fairly dark sense of humour before isolation and nothing in the experience lightened it.

April was nervous. They’d told her when they’d offered the place that they couldn’t guarantee her accommodation on her own. In fact, she’d had to avoid requesting it, just in case it appeared as a black mark against her application: not adapting post isolation, unwilling to risk placing with other students. It wasn’t that. She just liked being alone. The lack of guarantees had proven prescient.

April hesitated at the door. There was a discrete plate next to the letter box identifying the house as the property of the University of Bristol. She pressed the buzzer, turned her face towards the small, circular security camera and waited. The intercom crackled.

“Hey, you must be April. I see you. Come on in.”

 

 

 

Everything is broken… phew, for a minute there I lost myself…

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28. The Bends / OK Computer – Radiohead

Me and Radiohead go way back. We first met when they were supporting, believe it or not, The Cranberries at Leicester University who were touring off the back of “Linger”. I’d like to believe that I had my finger so firmly on the pulse that I was only there because I’d been tipped off about Radiohead but I suspect it was more that I went to pretty much every gig at the University that year. Sometimes this unearthed a gem (Maria McKee) and sometimes it didn’t (T’pau). In this case it did both. For avoidance of doubt The Cranberries were not the gem.

So the first time I heard “Creep” was at that gig. It’s impossible to recreate now as the song is too entrenched in memory but that first time that Jonny Greenwood’s guitar went into spasm, that stab of distortion into the chorus, was a real jaw dropper. It was visually arresting too, him hunched over his telecaster, slung low, face covered by his hair as it fell forwards, and then this twitching, violent slash over the strings and a burst of white noise erupting. The wannabe rock star in me took copious notes. The only thing I actually pulled off was the telecaster. Maybe the hair.

I also distinctly remember the first time I heard “Paranoid Android” I was stuck in traffic on the outskirts of Liverpool, making my way there for something related to my job at the time working for Boots – back in the days when radio got first play of a song. It’s still vivid for me because the song was astonishing on first listen: those snaking, sinewy verses, tense chorus that hints at some terrible future peril (in so much as it is a chorus) before the build into the off kilter solo and gorgeous break down into the defeated, resigned “rain down” section. It’s still astonishing now. Whisper it but it’s kind of a prog record although I don’t recall much of the cooler-than-thou indie press reporting it as such at the time.

Shortly after that I eagerly purchased “OK Computer” on its day of release – a Monday lunch time mooch around either HMV or Virgin (as was) or Selectadisc in the centre of Nottingham was very much my routine then. That evening I lay on my bed, put my headphones on, closed my eyes and listened to it straight through. It was an event. I sort of miss the days when a record release was an event for me. There was something almost ritualistic to it. The album didn’t disappoint and its over arching themes of a vague pre millennial anxiety and sense of displaced unease resonated strongly with me at the time; echoes of that sense still resonate strongly with me now.

The record sandwiched in the middle of all of this – post “Creep”, pre “OK Computer” – was “The Bends”. Released in 1995 it caught me post graduation, recently moved to Nottingham, trying to figure out what to do with myself. It also largely sound tracked the disintegration of two relationships that were important to me; both of which I can look back on now with fondness but these songs are forever attached to their messy ends. In many respects both records are associated with a time of unhappiness, or at least, a time of uncertainty. In that period I had no idea what I wanted to do (plus ca change…), was clinging on to the idea that old relationships might still work, and gradually became separated from most of my friends who were largely living (and living large) in London. I was scraping by in a job I didn’t really want, sharing a house with people I didn’t really know, and spending any money I did have on train fares to the big smoke. It’s not really a surprise that two albums, more or less book marking the beginning and end of this time in my life, that major in themes of alienation, listlessness, torpor, and a twitchy anxiety should have been so important to me. I probably should have spent three years sitting in a back corner of The Salutation reading Camus. I didn’t. I think I spent it sitting in one of the five homes I had during that time watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It’s angst, Jim, but not as we know it.

In 1997 they headlined Glastonbury. I was, by that point, a regular festival goer and had enjoyed the previous few years in blazing sunshine at Reading, Glastonbury, and the short lived Phoenix festival near Stratford. Had enjoyed the sun so much that for Glasto ’97 a small group of us decided to arrive at the festival site on the Wednesday (it usually ran Friday to Sunday) to soak up the atmosphere, chill out, have a little mini holiday. It basically threw it down for five days, the site turned into a swamp, and we spent our time turning bin liners into makeshift rain coats: it was miserable. Somewhere in amongst the mud though Radiohead closed the Saturday night and it was possibly the finest live performance I’ve ever seen, certainly in the top three. There was an intensity to it, and in the reaction of the audience, that happens rarely and very rarely for me at an outdoor gig. There was a real buzz around the festival ahead of their performance as “OK Computer” was pretty well cemented as album of the year and it turned into one of those very special events, almost a shared communion, between audience and band. Quite a bit of it is on YouTube: here. Inevitably it doesn’t convey the atmosphere – the palpable electricity in the air – but there’s a sense of the intensity.

There’s a bit at 18.30 on that BBC clip which I remember clear as day when Thom Yorke asks for the stage lights to be turned on the crowd: somewhere in that heaving throng was a 25 year old me. I watched that headline set on my own. Surrounded by thousands of people, obviously, but alone. I was at Glastonbury with a bunch of friends but I deliberately took myself off to watch that performance by myself. I had a strong sense that it would be a deeply personal experience for me and, in some respects, an intensely sad experience. Sad might be the wrong word. It would be  – and was – a deeply emotional experience, a space where those songs would connect directly to feelings that were tucked away, hidden, and give them expression. It was a year or two characterized by loneliness and I knew that the songs that would make up their set would speak to that. I remember I wanted it to be a private experience – laughable as that seems in the churning throng – but I wonder now why I wanted it to be private. I wonder now whether I might not have been better off watching it with my friends, telling them I wasn’t happy, and sharing it all.

Within the next six months the relationship I was in was over, which was better for both us, I left my job in Nottingham, and started again in London.

……

That bit about “maybe” pulling off Jonny Greenwood’s look / hair. I didn’t. I was that skinny then though. Thems were the days…