Gareth Rees’ new novel The Stone Tide (published by Influx Press) is an occult coastal odyssey featuring a host of mavericks and oddballs who’ve washed up in Hastings for one reason or another. Following in this proud lineage, he talks ghostly waterways, Aleister Crowley and bad Shakespeare jokes over a few beers in Michael Smith’s local bar…
Gareth walks into the bar for a beer with his pet dog Hendrix. Michael is sat down behind the bar having an impromptu lunch break with a kebab …
M: How do Gareth!
G: Hello mate … nice kebab?
M: Yeah, gorgeous, it’s a chicken shish from over the road…
G: I love it in there – the only kebab house I know that’s got a cave out the back…
M: Have you had a proper look at that cave? It’s fucking strange, something very spooky and ritualistic about it, goes right down into the bowels of the cliff…
G: Yeah, it looks like a kiddy dungeon or something…we went in for a meal once at that table out the back that looks out over the drop, and there were all these deflated coloured balloons that had fallen to the bottom, like the suggestion of a party gone wrong…
M: Did you notice the old chequered floor? Black & white tiles, all very occult, very Masonic…
G: Why, are black & white tiles Masonic?
M: Yeah, it’s a classic Masonic symbol, a black & white chequered floor – the level of duality of normal mundane consciousness we have to rise up the ladder beyond…anyway, do you want a beer?
G: What’s that “Lords of Acid”?
M: It’s gorgeous, like sour Um Bongo for gourmet alcoholics…
G: Go on then
They both get a Lords of Acid beer
G: So have you ever been in the caves under the Castle? Now they’re really weird – really, really occult, all these little winding tunnels leading to this big womb-like chamber they call “the chapel”, and at the far end of it there’s this primitive-looking idol carved out the rock – it’s pretty terrifying actually, like that stone statue of Pazuzu in the Excorcist or something…
M: Shit…no, I’ve not been down there…funnily enough, in the Kebab shop there’s a picture of the Peacock Angel, Melek Taus, guarding the cave…
G: Who’s Melek Taus?
M: You know they’re Kurdish in the kebab shop? For the Kurds, the peacock’s the symbol of their ancestral folk religion, kind of like a guardian angel that looks after the tribe – the Yezedis still worship it up in the mountains, they have a pact with this Peacock Angel, only his name’s Satan, and he’s been their guardian spirit ever since he gave them the gift of knowledge in the Garden of Eden! The local Muslims say they’re devil worshippers!
G: Really?
M: Yeah…(still eating kebab) so he’s there in the kebab shop, the Peacock Angel, watching over the chicken skewers on the ocakbasi grill…
G: Yeah it’s always animals watching over us isn’t it? I know this bloke who lives just by you, they’re renovating a house and they looked at the back and there was all this stuff growing over the back wall and they hacked it back and they discovered this stone ram’s head guarding the house underneath it all…you get lots of that round here…
M: Talking about animals, I always think its funny that when we both moved here, we both wrote about exactly the same thing – when we first arrived we both wrote about our first sleepless nights here, lying in bed shitting ourselves that we’d moved into haunted houses, when really we both just had trapped seagulls in our roofs…I remember hearing feet run across the ceiling on my first night here and thinking, “Shit, I’ve moved to the occult capital of England, and there’s a fucking unclean spirit in the house…”
G: Our house was a very ghostly house; it just looked like someone had abandoned it, it was untouched since the 70s; an old lady had been living there, but it was falling apart, it had this creepy atmosphere, full of dust and cloggy matter…the first night I went out to the garden because the dog needed to piss, I saw what looked like an eye, a big white eye, moving, scanning, like it was on the end of a long stalk; I was completely freaked out, I was too scared to go and look – I’m not one of these blokes to go and inspect…in a horror film I’d be –
M: The first one to get it?
G: Yeah! So the next morning I discovered it was just this poor little wretched seagull, and it just looked sort of possessed, its neck was at this right angle, its eyes were sort of weeping…anyway, the next night we were scraping back the wallpaper and I discovered a cartoon by the Victorian builder who built the place, where he depicted himself having the head of a seagull…I’m not superstitious, but all the bad luck in that house, everything was sort of…SIGNS! Telling me NO! Telling me I shouldn’t be in that house! Things like hearing my children shouting next door and then going in their room and discovering they were fast asleep…and then there was this slime coming out the back of the house, this pipe in the back of the wall that was just letting out drips of slime, and to deal with it the people who’d lived there before had just put a bucket underneath, which was full…and behind the house was this underground stream, coming down from Old Roar Gill, this ancient waterfall, and every now and then it would flood and all the neighbours would get water in their cellar … they say that running water is associated with supernatural experiences don’t they? Hauntings and all that…so our neighbours, their kid had a bit of a breakdown, thought she was talking to Victorian people; I used to think people were walking past the doorway in the bedroom, I’d look, no one there…there’s a creepiness to that waterway behind the house; I’m terrified of things under the ground, water flowing underground –
M: It’s the suggestion of hidden dimensions, innit…
G: In my first book about Hackney Marshes, I wrote about something similar, the idea of the new River Lee versus the old River Lea, this idea there was a tension between the two; the modern one’s all straight lines, very industrial, but in the older, wilder one, there were spawning fish and dragonflies and kingfishers –
M: There’s also loads of African Evangelical churches alongside the old river up near Waltham cross –
G: Well, one day up there I stumbled across this ceremony, a load of people dressed in white crossing all these swords over a child in the middle…it’s one of those things when I walked past, I thought, you know, I’m gonna keep going and not ask any questions! I’m just gonna keep walking and write that in my book!
M: Thinking, “Of course you’d see this happening there” (laughs)
G: In Hastings you’ve got the same thing you know, you’ve got this wilder town beneath the new town, and you can really feel it, it bursts out at points, the outfall pipe where that underground river hits the sea, this amazing confluence of industrial ugliness and this atavistic ancient waterway; and you’ve got these strange bits of forest or crypto forest round Old Roar Gill…
M: I don’t know Old Roar Gill, tell me more about it…
G: So one day I was looking for the old Walled Garden of Bohemia –
M: (laughs) I suppose we’re all really only looking for the Walled Garden of Bohemia aren’t we? [NB: “Bohemia” is a Victorian neighbourhood of Hastings]
G: Anyway, I found what looked like a giant sarcophagus, but then you go down beyond these pastiche Roman baths, this very classical-looking square pool, but with rusty shopping trolleys in it, this remarkable secret place…but the stream goes out to Old Roar Gill, a waterfall; the canopy above it seals over, and it has its own ecosystem…it used to roar, but it’s dried up mostly now, just a trickle in a grotto really; when I went you could hear this noise, a bit like what happened to me in my house – you could hear children laughing up above, weirdly, but what you don’t realise is that above the canopy of trees is a load of back gardens of houses! Again, you feel like you’re in one of those old films where they go down under the Earth and there’s a lost kingdom of dinosaurs or whatever –
M: Or the idea of intersecting layers of reality – you know that idea of a ‘thin place’? Where the veil between this world and the next is a little more threadbare than usual? I’ve always thought Hastings was a bit like that; it’s a bit otherworldly innit, a bit of a threshold place –
G: The place it always reminds me of is the Hackney Marshes, where you’d go from a brutalist apartment block into an primordial river via a Victorian sewage system into an Ice Age marsh…it felt like you were walking through a bunch of scenes, like you were lost in a film studio, wandering through different film sets –
John, the bloke who has re-launched the Stylophone, walks in; the phone rings
M: Hello? Hello? Twat! (slams phone)
John: (laughs) “Hello, customer service”…do you have any vermouth?
Yeah, we have this Lillet from Provence, some Punt e Mes, or this Antica Formula from Turin, which is the best one you can get – but it’s forty quid…
G: Hello John
J: Hello Gareth…how’s the band? [NB: Gareth is also in a band]
G: Good, yeah – we’re doing a festival of three days of surf guitar and psyche down at the Royal Standard in a week or two; I’ve just written a couple of songs for the first time…I’m not gonna say they’re our songs, I’m just gonna put them in among the covers, see if anyone notices, and if they don’t, I’ve got away with it…
J: Should be good for the lyrics
G: I dunno, it’s just that garage rock sound, I don’t want to make it too writerey…much as I’d like to, but you don’t want to be too sophisticated, it sort of needs to sound like an 18-year-old’s written it…it’s not poetry, I don’t really like poetry, it’s like writing lyrics that are deliberately not…they’re quite cumbersome.
(Fritz from 23 Skidoo walks in with a broken leg and a crutch)
Hello
G: What’s happened to your leg Fritz?
F: The 5th misotasa
G: You what?
F: The 5th misotasa
(John wanders off with vermouth)
See yous later
G: You had a massive foot last time
F: Oh yeah, that astronaut’s sandle
G: If I didn’t know I’d’ve just thought that pet tortoise of yours is getting randier! How is your tortoise? Out and about?
F: Yeah he’s come out the fridge for the summer now, nice to see him mooching about the garden…
G: Do tortoises have any natural predators in Hastings? Seagulls? Foxes?
F: Yeah they’ll do your tortoise like dressed crab
G: Can a seagull fly away with the shell?
F: In countries with eagles, they do what seagulls here do with mussels – just fly up high with it and drop it and crack it open on the rocks
M: Here, I’ll tell you a mind blowing fact: there are tortoises still alive now that were young in the time of the Napoleonic conquests
G: They found a Greenland shark they think’s at least 400, maybe 600 years old – imagine, a shark that was swimming about in Shakespeare’s day, forsooth…
F: “There are more things in heaven and earth, dear Gareth, than your reason doth allow…”
M: Shakespeare walks into a pub. The landlord goes, “You’re bard”…
G: Have you been into that new Crowley’s Bar yet? [NB: Aleister Crowley spent his last years here and is the man whose shadow looms longest across this town]
M: No not yet. Someone told me there was a storm and the lightning struck and the letter Y fell off…do they do weird occult cocktails?
F: Menstrual Bloody Marys
M: If I had a boozer in this town, I’d call it The Great Beast. We’ve not really talked about Crowley’s curse on Hastings yet have we? Sometimes you get a bit of local lore like that that sticks, because it just seems to work – Crowley’s curse on Hastings is a great one for this town – a bit like Freud thought jokes were a little window, a shortcut in to the unconscious, the unsaid; well so are these myths in a way, they tell us something about the underlying psychology of the place…
G: For a start, Crowley’s curse is something that never happened; he cursed his doctor because he wouldn’t give him his morphine on his deathbed, and then his doctor died a few days later, and people conflated that with him cursing the town; it’s unlikely he cursed Hastings, because he loved it – for me what it’s really about is as you say, when Crowley died in the late 40s was the last time the town saw any real prosperity, it went into a long slow decline, with package holidays to Spain and all that…
M: Well I was told the curse – you know, “Once you’ve come to Hastings you can never leave,” by two ex-Hastonians who were by that point living in London – I just thought, well if you’re so sure about this curse, how come you’re telling me the story in Hackney then?
F: Unless you found a stone with a hole in it off the beach, of course – that breaks the curse and then you can go…I first heard it the other way round though, that for the fishermen, if you found a stone with a hole in it, you’d return home saf …
G: Fishermen are obviously famous for having…I mean, my friend Martin the fisherman says there’s all sorts of weird lore, like you can’t have a banana on a boat for example…
M: In Whitby, you couldn’t say “egg” on board, you had to call them “roundabouts” – Whitby’s a minefield for that sort of stuff, man – even worse than here…
G: Well with all these places, this sense of peril working at sea, this closeness to death all the time, this sense of a borderline between different worlds, people coming in from somewhere strange and far off –
M: It’s the threshold between the familiar and the unfamiliar
G: You seem to get these little pools of occult gatherings in these places…
M: Well, the two places I’ve been that are very witchy, Hastings and Whitby, they’re both so similar…and they also both have a load of magic mushrooms growing on the hills enclosing them, which must have something to do with it…
F: I’ve got some fly agaric at the minute, enough for two trips
M: What, the big red poisonous toadstool one?
F: Yeah…I tried to micro-dose myself the other day but I definitely took too much; not enough to…I mean, if you read about the fly agaric experience, people say it’s really different from the liberty cap, it’s like…you experience death. It wasn’t that full on, things just got a bit flickery round the edges, a bit breathey – you’re only meant to do it to the point before you get visual disturbance…
G: Loads of people do it like that in Silicone Valley before work apparently
F: In America there’s this particular magic mushroom that likes to grow on woodchip, and apparently you see a lot of it on the woodchip verges round police stations, because all the people getting arrested for them have all the spores falling out of their clothes, though I might be making that bit up…
G: I’m taking that as fact
M: In a post-truth world, that’s as good as a fact
G: It’s a lovely idea, the woodchip verges of police stations, supermarket car parks, business parks, the non-places of the neoliberal wasteland, all being re-planted with psychedelic fungi…
M: Hang on, back to Crowley a minute – Fritz, 23 Skidoo used to share a rehearsal space with Throbbing Gristle, didn’t they? And haven’t you got that tattoo? That Temple Ov Psychic Youth tat?
F: No, it’s the sigil of the Ordo Templi Orientis, my tattoo [NB: The Ordo Templi Orientis is Crowley’s magical cult]
M: Giz a look then
F: It’s a seven-pointed star, with a kind of cock’n’balls symbol in the middle. It was done by Mr Sebastian
G: Who was Mr Sebastian?
M: Wasn’t he like this cult knob-piercing pioneer?
F: Yeah, he was like the king of piercing before anyone knew about it when it was an underground thing; there’s all these pictures of him and his mates with their knobs connected by a big chain…when he was doing my tattoo he showed me his book, which to my mind was more like mutilation that piercing, it was just so extreme, what some of these guys were having done to them…if you’d’ve said to me back then though that everyone across the country would have a tattoo or their nose pierced I wouldn’t have believed it…
M: He was part of the Temple Ov Psychic Youth wasn’t he? He was like the voice for it wasn’t he? He had this lovely, deep, sonorous voice, and he did the voice on those tracks where it was like a manifesto for the Temple? Like the one where Derek Jarman mimes to his voice on that Psychic TV video?
F: Yeah he did a few bits with Psychic TV
G: Good name, Psychic TV…TV was originally intended as a spiritual device, people thought they were connecting to the dead, it was never intended for entertainment…
M: TV was first broadcast in Hastings, wasn’t it? John Logie Baird made the first transmission in the Queen’s Arcade? Did you tell me this or did someone else tell me, that the first broadcast image, and no one knows why – they tried to broadcast some image or other, but what actually turned up was this Maltese Cross, and no one knew where this Maltese Cross came from…
G: I heard it was like a face, a weird face, a ghost in the machine…goes back to this idea it was a ghost box – they were expecting ghosts to turn up, they were Victorian spiritualists who thought they were communicating with the dead…
M: It’s a lovely idea in your book, that Crowley and Logie Baird both ended up washed up in the same town at that time, dreamers or visionaries who both had this sense of exploring and manipulating hidden energies…
G: Crowley had this idea we were on the cusp of a new age, where men would become like gods, stealing Promethean fire type thing, but he failed, he ended up withered away just injecting loads of heroin in a B’n’B here; meanwhile Baird, just some capitalist inventor trying to make money, actually did usher in Crowley’s “Age of Horus” by accident…
M: Yeah, the telly is very Aeon of Horus, innit? There’s nothing quite as Aeon of Horus as X Factor is there? The perfect example of the age of the individual, the age where “Every Man And Every Woman Is A Star” [a quote from Crowley’s “Book of the Law” ]
So in the book there’s this other nice thing Crowley and Logie Baird have in common, that comes up in the story of Hastings again and again, this idea of people telling shaggy dog stories; in some ways it’s like you’ve written the book with a nod and a wink towards the shaggy dog story as a literary form in its own right – it’s very anecdotal isn’t it, the book? It meanders in that charming kind of way, you’re quite the anecdotalist yourself…
G: Well it’s like we were saying about these urban myths, like Crowley’s curse, they’e not necessarily true, but that’s not what’s important – it’s not really that important whether it happened or not, it’s that it says something that resonates…I sort of associate myself with your Crowleys or your John Logie Bairds, where they’re sort of well meaning in certain ways, but you kind of impose yourself on the world a bit, create new worlds in your own image out of it –
M: Sort of a bit like Alan Partridge in that Nomad book when he drew the face of a cat onto a map of Dungeness?
G: Yes! (laughs)…once I read Nomad by Partridge, psychogeography was, well…I’m not necessarily a psychogeographer, I’m a writer who uses psychogeographic techniques, but also I’m aware of some of the limitations, and also some of the bullshit, the ridiculousness of it…there’s just a lot of that about it, where you’re kind of making things up, seeing things that aren’t there, forcing the history a bit…like you can create a world of your own…it’s like when I discovered the grave of Decimus Burton, who built this town, and it’s a pyramid, with an eye on the top of it; it’s a very occult, masonic symbol, it’s also related to lots of conspiracy theories about the illuminati and all the bullshittery round that, so I felt like there were all these stories connecting, but is it just me connecting them up? Is it just it my imagination, or is there something really there? And this is one of the things I like to play with in the book…
M: When you moved here, did you immediately have the sense it was a kind of enchanted place that was weaving a spell on you? I felt that very strongly when we first visited; I remember there was a big full moon over the sea, and it was pulling me in…as if it had already been decided for me that I’d be moving here, you know? Like it was out of my hands…
G: People said to me, “Don’t go to Hastings, it’s a fucked up place.” I felt that darkness creeping in, but it was a good darkness, a creative darkness; it’s like it’s tested me, it’s shattered me a bit, but cleansed me…something’s happened to me in Hastings…
M: It’s done that to me as well, but I don’t know how much that’s to do with the fact we’d just opened a bar and had a kid. It’s been like this mini…it’s been quite apocalyptic (laughs)…our life here’s been a bit of a game of whackamole – I stick my head up over here and…I thought it was just me, but when I read the book I saw it was the same for you – I like the way in the book you’re like, “Is the curse of Hastings working on me now?”
G: Yep. The first year I moved here, a massive chunk of cliff collapsed into the sea, there were all these dead mussels and clams all over the beach, this general feeling of climate catastrophe going on…but apocalypse is also a revelation…my marriage ended, who I am now is very different, it’s been a complete overhaul…
M: That happened to you during the course of writing the book as well didn’t it? I remember you had an early draft of it and were ready to go, then everything kind of went wrong, the marriage fell apart, Brexit happened, then Trump…when you were writing it, I remember you’d come in for a beer, and it was literally: one week, we’re leaving Europe, next week, Trump’s the president, all these impending ecological disasters, all the while your marriage was breaking up, I mean you were obviously having a really difficult time, but on a wider scale, things were looking pretty fucking desperate generally, weren’t they?
G: It was uncanny that; if you’d’ve told me three years ago, your wife would leave you, we’d leave Europe, and a fascist game show host would be president of the United States, with his finger on the button, I’d’ve said you were doom-mongering, like one of those radical “What If?” documentaries. It felt like I was Hitler in the bunker, getting all the bad news (laughs)…nothing went my way at all, I was getting deep paranoia about the weather, with all these extreme climate events, all the while I was writing about how this coast got reshaped in the middle ages in the Great Storm, towns that were on the sea were now ten miles inland, towns that weren’t on the sea were now ports, just crazy times…
You get that here, on the edge of England, on the edge of massive climate change: where we’re literally sitting having a beer here now used to be in the middle of a big bay, the best harbour on the South Coast, before it all silted up after the Great Storm; or walking to Dungeness round the corner, realising there’s this nuclear power station built right on top of this bank of shingle, right next to Old Winchelsea, a town which disappeared beneath the waves in the same medieval catastrophe that silted the bay up here, and you realise how perilously close we are to nuclear catastrophe (laughs)…that’s why it’s called the Stone Tide, because though we think of it all as solid, it’s all moving and changing…it’s an appropriate place to live in the End Times…
M: (laughs) Are we in the End Times?
G: We’re in a big change or shift – whether it’s the End or not, who knows…
M: Would you like another beer?
G: Go on then.
*
The Stone Tide: Adventures at the End of the World by Gareth E. Rees is out now, and available here or through your local bookshop.