...Will Happen Today.
Which is probably rather unlikely, seeing as there's only about an hour of it left. Still, one thing which will happen is that the epic Doubtless Wonder will finally be unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. And that's about as close to Everything as you can get.
But what a long, strange trip it's been. Way back at the dawn of the second Summer Of Love, when clothes were baggy and the Stone Roses were the hot young things, a couple of Northern schoolboys decided that rather than pay attention in Maths class, they would instead spend their time in pursuit of far loftier ideals, like the creation of a completely new universe and the ceaseless psychological torture of the fat kid at the next desk. We broke him in a week, but the universe took a little longer to assemble.
Starting out as a hazy, drug-soaked riff on Alice In Wonderland, Doubtless Wonder was a fairly straightforward tale: Swallowing an experimental halucinogenic, a young woman finds herself trapped in a nightmare world of crazed fishermen, sword-wielding David Bowie clones and robotic policemen. Simple.
But while the plot was too small, the ideas were probably too big for us to do them justice at the time. We thought we knew it all and that we could express it in a better way than anyone else ever had, but looking back on photos from the time we were little more than babies. Judging from some of the fragments that remain of this and other great projects, we were dour, earnest, hopelessly in thrall to Philip K Dick and JRR Tolkien and possessed of that special strain of pretentiousness that can only be found in wannabe teenage poet-warriors. I can't speak for Phil, but I know that I was so bad I thought Jim Morrison had a really, y' know, incisive grasp of, like, the human condition.
Sweet Jesus....
So time passed and things changed. Jobs came and went, girlfriends too (and lets face it, how earnest can a warrior poet be once he's finally got his end away? Lets see My Chemical Romance weep on stage when they've all been blown in the dressing room - The best they'd manage is a guitar-heavy rendition of I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing...). College, university, psychotic breakdowns and trips to Amsterdam all left their marks on us and our little shared world. Phil made short films and worked as a runner for one of the more embarrassing hair metal bands (and I'm too much of a gentleman to say which one, but if you pester him enough he might let it slip). I wrote a Brit-pop vampire screenplay called Live Forever and a mutant police procedural in which everyone was dying of the plague, neither of which went anywhere, mostly because I didn't have the balls to show them to anyone beyond my immediate friends and family. Every so often, we'd get together, shoot the shit and reminisce about the great, lost works of our youth; Bloodstock. Limelight. And what was that wierd thing with the fishman?
Oh yeah. Doubtless Wonder. What was that about again?
Sometime around the turn of the millenium I moved down to Essex to be with the great love of my life. At the time the internet was something that other people had, so we would have to settle for snail mail to stay in touch and we decided that we would send something more than the usual Hi, hello, how are you? We would start to write a lengthy, episodic tale, each responding to the other's chapter until we had a whole novel to start shipping round publishers. We'd both hit 25 by this point (Phil was all grown up, with a house and a dog and everything), so time was ticking by and if we wanted to write the first great English novel of the 21st century then we had to get started pretty sharpish. Phil's first piece features Monk Blue and Felicity Makeshift as terrorists blowing up schools. Mine features Storm Thorgerson and sigil magic. Before we know it, we're back in Doubtless Wonder. It seems that ten or so years of neglect had turned it into some sort of wierd fictional graveyard where all the unfinished stories dragged themselves off to to die. Arihaily was in there somewhere, various vampires and superheroes, pretty much anything we had ever intended to write. We had a whole world full of ideas that were crossing and colliding in strange new ways, sparking off each other and sending ripples outward through everything we did. It couldn't fail.
So naturally, we ran out of steam after about 5 chapters.
Flash forward another couple of years. I'm moving back to the North to find a job and a house because the prices in Essex were ridiculous (This was around March 2003 - God knows what they're like now). Phil has the house to himself and works bizarre shifts and agrees to let me crash there for as long as it takes. In the end, I'm there about a month and a half, and in all that time we see each other for more than five minutes maybe half a dozen times. Other than that we leave each other cakes and cryptic messages in the kitchen and try not to get in the way. When we do get together we watch documentaries about the siege at Waco, eat lots of nachos and talk about what might have been. Bloodstock. Limelight. And what was that crazy thing with the terrorists?
And then one day, I sit down at Phil's new PC, tear my eyes away from the amazing new world of internet porn (my far better half had handed her notice in at this point but was still trapped in Chelmsford for several weeks so don't judge me too harshly) and I start to write. I don't actually know which one of us suggested it, or whether my piece came first or not, but I remember the thrill of creation, of actually doing it. When Phil got home, there was a small pile of A4 next to the danish pastry I'd left in the kitchen. When I got up the next day, not too long after he had gone to bed, I found a similar sheaf of paper next to my bedroom door.
A month later, we printed everything we had and laid it out on the living room carpet. If we put this piece first, then this one, then that one... But what about this one? Where does the poem fit? The Japanese advertisement? The transcript of intercepted messages between Midge and Swedish Chainsaw?
Somehow, in the same way that a house full of women are said to gradually synchronise their cycles with that of the dominant female, we had both fallen into the same rhythm. Something about the concept allowed us to write entirely separate from each other but develope the same themes and ideas. We could take those chapters and assemble them into something far greater than either of us had previously considered; a patchwork novel of conflicting voices, hearsay and advertising jingles which would gradually coalesce into the story of three generations of outright crazy people and their connection to the strange realm of Doubtless Wonder.
And then the real world gets in the way. Again.
Another few years pass. We change jobs, repeatedly. We both get married. I buy a house, Phil becomes a father, I follow him a couple of years later. Sometime around 2007, we're talking. Bloodstock. Limelight. That mosaic novel thing, what was it?
Another dozen or so pieces appear in a flurry of activity. I start to work out the main themes in my pieces and obsessively annotate them, looking for points of reference, different ways in and out of the story. I rewrite old pieces as if they were 1960s underground comix, then write them again as kitchen sink alien invasion tales. I throw in every half-baked notion I've ever wanted to write about; my new found vegetarianism, my flirtation with buddhism and my thoughts about my father. And music. Always with the music. The day Tony Wilson dies I write him into a chapter. John Peel's in there too, along with My Sweet Lord and Freddy And The Dreamers.
There's a website and a myspace page, I steal the name of my cousin's band for a group of 70s stoners, then cheekily ask him to write some songs for them. Fliss and Monk get their own theme tunes and I start looking into print on demand services. All of a sudden finding a publisher doesn't seem like a concern, and making a profit never was. We can upload everything to a site like Lulu and let people make their own minds up whether to buy it or just read it for free on our own website. More pieces follow, layering in different levels of reality, divergent timelines and multiple identities. Song lyrics, photos, the beginnings of a screenplay.
And then it's dark, for a long time. Stuff happens, life drags along, nothing gets written. We mothball the website and take down the myspace page. There's one last effort at rallying the troops, previewing a few pieces under an assumed name on Urbis, and the results are encouraging but it's not enough. Doubtless Wonder dies a fourth time, leaving behind a trail of incoherent emails and a couple of nice collages that were intended for the dust jacket.
Felicity Makeshift is dead. Long live Felicity Makeshift.
And then last Friday night we went to see David Byrne at the Liverpool Philharmonic. Taking a pre-gig drink or two, we got to talking. Same as it ever was: Limelight. Bloodstock. Yadda yadda yadda.
But what if? And how about? And then?
And within an hour or so, we were back. It's about 20 years since we created this crazy little world (and about 18 since we last saw David Byrne) and a lot has happened in that time, but some things never change. The buzz of working out each new link in the chain is as strong as ever. Doubtless Wonder is the puzzle we've been trying to solve for all of our adult lives. Pretty much every idea we've ever had has come from those fertile grounds, however remote they may seem at times, and every path we've taken has somehow lead back there.
So here it is. The earliest pieces date back to the end of the last century, while the most recent is being written even as I type this. In between, there are dozens of fragments which gradually add up to tell the tales of Marg Cornell, Felicity Makeshift, Monk Blue, Harry Love and countless others whose lives are touched by Wonder. Every other Saturday, somewhere between the end of Doctor Who and the stroke of midnight, one of us will post a new piece on here. Between each piece we'll be popping back to see what's happening. If you want to discuss hidden references, plot developments, secret identities or major influences then this is the place to do it. We're more than happy to talk to anyone who reads our work, and if you want to go off topic and recommend films, books and music that might go down well then feel free. We'll probably go OT quite often ourselves to tell you about films we've seen, places we've taken the kids, the latest comics we've bought and the blogs we're reading. And if you just want to wade in and trash the great endeavour then go for it - I'm pretty sure it's tough enough to outlast us all now.
Cheers,
Karl
(Originally Published 05/04/09)
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