This I do remember: leaning on the counter of the old Rough Trade in Kensington Church Street...and at my left elbow, leaning on the counter with me, Nikki Sudden.

When we met I have no idea now. It was one or more lifetimes ago and I prefer living life to putting it “into packets that won’t be opened ‘til I die", but I can see us there. Forgive this poor man’s poeticism. I’m entitled. So I guess it was an average day, possibly the middle of someone else’s work week, because work was always something other people did. Nikki and I knew each other because his band, Swell Maps, whose civilized art-punk alienated but fascinated me, and my own Barracudas, whose power pop punk fumblings endeared and bemused the mini-masses who once filled the Nashville to watch us thrash a piece of history from our shining young souls/ Flash-forward: Autumn or Winter 1982 or 1983 who cares? In a dingy converted garage kept company by an ugly four-track, maybe eight-track...anyway, there’s me and Nikki and Dave Kusworth who, like the Rowland S Howard who would come after him to indulge me, patently regarded me as some oddity tossed up by a mismarriage of intellect and obsessive listening to the muzak of the underworld and we recorded a “demo” of “Four Seasons of Trouble”. The tape has evaporated into the Void; all I recall is its dissonant but gorgeous chaos...the guitars fighting over my unschooled voice like vultures. I wish I still had that tape. Nikki and I were writing songs a long time, planning and scheming...get a budget, get a studio, give me a break, better: Give me an advance. A real one. Four figures.

So we made our humble demo and parted friends, again. Emerging blinking from the tunnel of Time, it is already 1986 and I am three years and more late for my collaboration with Nikki. The Barracudas are history. Nikki, ever the floating artist, is floating between studios and women and gigs...and there’s me, as good as married, a kid en route...the usual. We were in my room at dusk and he played me some songs, and they made my lyrics sound so good. The tail end of 1986 and Nikki and Rowland were wrapping up one of their records and the call comes, real Nikki-style...like, I just happen to be in a great studio with one of the world’s great guitarists, my brother the great drummer from outer space, and why not stop by for a week and we’ll have an album waiting for you to ruin with your bovine grunting? I briefed the wife-to-be, hit Flicknife Frenchy for expenses and a week’s worth of Woodworm and packed. Who wouldn’t? Destiny is not somebody you raincheck.

Moments I will always remember include walking into Woodworm, off the train, right into a playback of the backing for “Gallery Wharf”, a song so gorgeous that it lends credence to Rowland’s mock protestation that he and Nikki were giving me all their best songs.

I was entranced, to put it mildly. And then we just created en situ, reviving “Four Seasons”. Epic, spidery and intent behind the kit, hit everything and nothing, with that systematic, thoroughly Zen way he had of playing the drums. Rowland...all I know is when we were laying down the overdubs to “Looking For A Place To Fall” at another, much less salubrious studio, he asked what I wanted. What do you say to Rowland S Howard...considering you had a hard-on for the Birthday Party for two years, that is? Even if I could play a guitar, which I can't...so of course I said, “Play whatever you like.” And he did. It was awesome. Deafening, but awesome. Not that Rowland and I ever enjoyed much of a “relationship”...this is the man who told me, at a particular rehearsal, that if I referred to his playing one more time as “wacky” he would impale my baby daughter on his machineheads...but he knew damn well what I was after. And got it for me, in spades.

Jeffrey Lee, whose Club I would happily have joined, slotted in some sweet slide for enough money to pay his dues. We mixed the album in that dump in south London, Tony Cohen riding the console like a drunken, stoned bronco buster, producing echoes from before the grave. Someone said it sounded like it was recorded in an airplane hangar, and I can’t improve on that. Later, much, after the putative “cult supergroup” had enjoyed respectable sales, and in the midst of a shared vintage Jerry Lee trip, Nikki, Rowland and I threw “Burning Skulls Rise” against the wall and made that stick, too. “Sorrow Drive”, “April North”, “The Proving Trail”...they all came from places and things American (I was in car in Boston, 1986, and there was one those big green highway signs: ‘Sorrow Drive’. I almost puked with excitement). Jonathan Hodgson, another Nikki find, added some killing touches and Joe Drake, who deserves a book to himself, redesigned the bass. (And, yeah, the wife sang backing vocals, even as our girl-child gamboled amidst the leads and booms...) “Episode In A Town” is the best thing I ever did...no gross-out “look-at-me-I’m-spiritual” hanging rhymes, just a loud snare courtesy of Andy Bean (one of the most truly beautiful people in my existence), Rowl’s deranged bleating guitar and some divine pedal steel. Short and sour. The back cover I scammed from some long-lost 60s Sun Killer-filler and it worked, too. Marty Robbins loaned me “They’re Hanging Me Tonight” and then handed it on to Thin White Rope, bless ‘em.

Down the line, I got Britain’s most heroically and tragically overlooked band, Sheffield’s Harbour Kings (nee Rollin’ Thunder) to demo some new material, including “The Old Man’s Dream” and, as has always been my incredible luck, I was working with pro’s...they picked up tools and two hours later we had something so fine. “Sixteen Wheels” there is no excuse for: if you listen to trucking music long enough it does things to your mind even the CIA can’t touch, and this is the chastening proof. And that’s all we wrote. I remember all these things and keep them with mine. Nikki says, “the road goes on forever”, and I am privileged to have shared part of it with him and his brother and his friends and mine and so many other fellow-travellers. This is for all of them, but especially the ones who have already left us behind down here, where everything is hard except, and paradoxically, even love. Death is not the end.

Dedicated to the memory of Epic Soundtracks and Jeffrey Lee Pierce.