DESPITE WHAT Roger Waters might be singing, whenever I hear Vera by Pink Floyd, I think about my closest childhood friend Michael - not Coronation Street's Vera Duckworth, writes John Butler.
When we were nine, we were thick as thieves, Michael and I. Our families spent every summer in adjoining holiday homes in Co Wexford, and mums and kids from each family would spend June, July and August together. Dads would join at the weekend and for two weeks in August, as was the way in those times. Every summer, Michael and I were together every hour of every day. Then we wouldn't see each other until the following June, at which point we would pick up exactly where we left off.
He and I were bound by music. We would spend days sitting in his families' chalet in the middle of a hot July listening to Low, the bleak instrumental opus recorded in the depths of a Berlin winter by David Bowie - so much time, in fact, that I can still recall the exact shade of brilliant orange that the sun would daub the living room through thin, drawn curtains. Had he been living in the sunny south east in 1977, Bowie would never have recorded Low - he would have been on the beach writing the lyrics for China Girl. But if we weren't listening to Krautrock, it was the equalling uplifting back catalogue of Pink Floyd, particularly The Wall. This was not the commonly accepted music of the day. To offer some context, that summer the local Sunday morning kids disco was wearing out the grooves on the theme to Beverly Hills Cop and Come on Eileen by Dexys Midnight Runners.
Michael's family became my family during the summer. Unsurprisingly, they couldn't always tolerate our worship of Pink Floyd and the Thin White Duke - not with the searing sun outside and the normal kids shrieking and spraying each other with water pistols. Sometimes, Michael and I would be banished outwards and we would slink behind the house, heading straight for the woods. The woods were dark and damp and stank of stale rainwater and pesticide. Michael would produce a pack of 10 Major and we would smoke, swatting away fat horseflies and imagining the muddy banks beneath us as quicksand.
Michael loved little with the ardour with which he loved David Bowie and Pink Floyd. But there was always tomato sauce spread on toast to vie for his affections. This simple dish would have made the menu at his last supper. He would devour four slices of en-sauced toast and invent surreal, frenetic games immediately afterwards. We would suddenly have to put cardboard boxes on our heads and run around the garden outside - quite unable to see. We would rip branches from the sickly looking plantain bushes that dominated the landscape in our village of chalets, and with them, swipe wildly at invisible enemies. I can still recall the pungent sticky glue the branches left on our hands.
He could be funny, too. Their family dog was a narky old mutt called Missie, whose default condition had been set to growl for as long as I could remember. Missie was hard work, and I remember clearly the day Michael bit her because she had just bitten him - to this day, I find it hard to find a fault with the brutal lucidity and fairness of his logic.
In our pre-adolescence, Michael and I shared a bond that meant we never had to explain ourselves to each other, because whatever it was, we already knew. To this day, I can't help bristling when I hear someone applying the word schizophrenic in the wrong context. Many years after those long summers in Wexford, Michael was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and from experience, I know exactly what it is and what it is not. The diagnosis didn't matter much to me, because I already knew who he was. No matter what the doctor said, he was pretty much exactly like me, and our choice of music back in that hot wooden chalet had been no coincidence in the first place. All of our idols sang about schizophrenia. The original cracked actor David Bowie had a schizophrenic brother, and I could tell that The Bewlay Brothers had been written with him in mind.
"I was Stone and he was Wax
So he could scream,
and still relax, unbelievable."
The founder of Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett, suffered from serious schizophrenia, and even after his enforced departure from the band, the lyrics of Roger Waters constantly alluded to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, and withdrawal from reality into fantasy and delusion. Which Pink Floyd album doesn't relate to that in some way, and which incarnation of David Bowie? Which rock musician, for that matter - and isn't that why we love them so much?
If not born, my love of music was certainly cultivated during those years in Wexford, those afternoons and evenings sitting around a record player with a stack of albums brought down from Dublin. There was a huge gang of kids hanging around during those days, and sometimes up to 20 of us would be gathered in a house listening to albums belonging to older brothers and sisters. And before the era of headphones and iPods, it was a collective experience, and quite an education too. Punch the Clock by Elvis Costello, Rumours by Fleetwood Mac, I Will Follow by U2, The Fine Art of Surfacing by the Rats, or The Smiths. You can keep your blazing sunshine and your water pistols, because everyone knows the best summers always happen indoors.
John Butler blogs at lozenge.wordpress.com