Funky Town.

He left the house one evening and walked the coast road toward Weston.

Occasionally he would hear a vehicle in the distance and as the sound grew closer he would stand at the roadside, raking his hair, straightening his coat, waiting its appearance. And as it drew near, he’d snap out a thumb and with skewed head, and an approximation of  an angelic face, mouth this phrase into the blinding headlights,  ‘Give us a lift’.

He found himself at The Warehouse Theatre (sadly, now defunct). The doors were open, so he wandered in. A teenage band, fronted by a boy with dreadful hair, were playing matted funk. The guitarist wore a stripy mohair, the kind he once much coveted. The whole thing – the sound, the look, the atmosphere – was really quite exciting.

They played a mash-up: Lipps Inc’s ‘Funky Town’ knitted with the melody from ‘Swan Lake.’ (At the time both tunes were floating round the charts – PIL had just brought out their ‘Death Disco’ single which incorporated a similar motif from ‘Swan Lake’, and Lipps Inc had had a recent hit with ‘Funky Town’. But, to draw the two together… well, this was something quite amazing!)

“Oh, you know the type,” she later said of him when they dropped him off in Penn Beacon. “A joint for breakfast and suddenly they’re a world authority.”