New York, I fucken love you

In New York we stayed off-island, on the sprawling mainland of the USA. I found it thrilling to go walking in the early morning light, while everyone was sleeping, admiring the funny little wooden frame houses and hanging over retaining walls at the back of the hill in Union City. From up high there you could see the green troubled plains spurting with industry chimneys which defined the settlement, the invasion – a train was snaking by across an immense landscape the first morning and I said to myself, this is where America begins.

The name of Union City gave me thrills, and every time I passed the Madonna-blue Union City Laundromat, filled all day long with Hispanic mothers and their children, settled in and gossiping while they fold, the greatest song by Blondie came through my head: power, passion… plays a double hand. Chrissie Hynde, consummate rocker, was interviewed and the journalist said, New York, punk rock women, you and Debbie Harry, ya know… The hissing intake of breath was almost visible on the page. With evident restraint she said, Well… I actually write my own songs, I play an instrument…. Blandly the unhearing journalist persisted with her. “What’s your favourite Blondie song?” I don’t really have one. “Aw c’mon, you must have a favourite Blondie song.” “Oh, must I? Ok… that, like, Union… Union City thing.” That’s what ran through my mind every time I came home along the avenue and passed the dreadlocked barber who is always trying to get my friend to jam with him, the sky blue launderette, the falling-away streets of the dingy houses, and the kids sitting out front on their stoops playing dutifully the games that can be confined to a palm-sized screen.

New York is a strange and dramatic thing, as much an event as place, a complex of unending events telling stories of itself all day as it rolls round the tilt of the earth, helping to tip the planet perhaps a little further (so it seems) with its wealth of heavy buildings, giant prongs struck into the stone, its thin crummy soil and the island extended by refuse and landfill in the sea, its sprawling park immaculately mowed and spread with bikinis, its returned vets disabled by war and grief and sleeping on the subway on cardboard, its screeching underground trains, its spires into the blue eternity, its forever sleepless bleariness, jostle, crowd, and lace. It exists in all our minds even when we can’t touch it – like the internet – and have never been in it. The dream city hovering forever in your mind gets on the instant dispersed, it never exists again, and the real place you find yourself almost flattened by is more than you even imagined, like nothing you’ve ever known, yet punctuated with known experience like the Monopoly board come to life that is London.

It was four years exactly since I went over for six weeks to record my first album, gathering a strange international collective of musical souls (the New Government) to work with me and dragging in some of them literally off the street where they had cat-called me and I said, “Hey. I need backing vocals.” Some of those people I will never meet again and some are now among my dearest friends: the guitar goddess who teaches in the West 30s, upstairs from the studio in which we recorded our album Hey, Big Splendour four years ago. Four years exactly. It felt strange to be going back to the same rooms, the same streets. I ate street meat here from a cart, I had a conversation with the man who said, You look like. On this much more recent return visit we stayed with her, in Union City on the Jersey shore, and every day we rode home on the jitney which leaves from outside Dean & Deluca’s every ten minutes all night and all day. You pay the driver in dollar bills – $3 – and he folds the notes in greasy fans stashed in the open-sided cup holder by his steering wheel, you climb aboard and you’re the only white folks on the bus, a more normal kind of normal, in the tunnel you pass a brother jitney from the same company that’s broken down, he takes the corners like a racing driver and at the unofficial stops he lingers, hoping more passengers will show up to make the ride worthwhile, and if he takes too long to get going a huge black lady up the back will sing out, Let’s go!

Let’s go! A week from today I’ll have landed in New York – and be up in the Bronx – where I have never been before, staying with someone neither of us have ever met. It feels like entering the world’s filthiest cathedral. A fortnight to walk the streets, record maybe two or three songs towards an eventual new album. I hope they’ll be filthy with real soil and not just street grime, I hope they will ring and chant and stomp their feet, I hope they’ll be just divine.