Autograph Hunting

The setting: the world, a marble in glossy blue and matte green. The United Kingdom with its crenellated coastline. A grey growth that’s London; Camden Town a greasy fold in the north of the night-time city, coloured in as if by six year-olds with felt tips; alt-rock mecca, thronged night and day with the faithful.

Kentish Town Road runs behind the Electric Ballroom (loopy blue neon outside; inside, floorboards with decade-long punk rock memories), where the gates open from the tilted doors and windows. There’s band members with black markers and glam-rock hair, and their own crowded orbits: fan satellites, amateur photographers, old luckless friends.

We’re frozen and half-wet with drying sweat, aching at the joints with the capricious witch-fire energy of a gig seeping into the pavement with its cigarette butts and trodden flyers. His, his, his glossy black two-seconds’-worth of a signature, and then it’ll be the tube home, clinging to the bars like exhausted gibbons.