The Caterpillar Club

Foreword - Ross Clarke I met Mark Rae in the late 1980s. He was skinny, hip hop obsessed and dressed like a Geordie LL Cool J. He had a dark sense of humour, was funny and hard to forget. Even though we were at the same Uni in Manchester we actually really got to know each other in Sheffield through mutual friends. It was the weekend of the Hillsborough disaster and my abiding memory was a constant haunting wall of sound of sirens. Later we ended up DJing together, creating a club night called Feva with Kevin Hyde that was one of Manchester's few successful non-house nights at the time. It was all going well, until Kev, our partner in crime killed himself, without any real explanation - it stunned us all and stopped us in our tracks. I'm not sure either of us saw the world the same again after that, but we've never really talked about it. Meanwhile Madchester became Gunchester and Mark and I lived and worked together with Dave Walker and along with Ed Pitt they formed Fat City Records. Drive-bys, the best hip hop of the early 90s, stolen sound systems, armed robber MCs and much more crossed our paths in club and shop. Much of this time is better described in much greater detail by Rae in his memoir Northern Sulphuric Soulboy. I left Manchester and we fell out of touch for a good while. Mark formed Grand Central Records and his band Rae and Christian. Both with this label and as an artist Rae was even more of a triumph. Musically, the mid to late 90s was an amazing time with hip hop, trip hop, drum n bass, breakbeat, nu-soul and more all exploding and constantly cross breeding across the UK and the world. DJ culture was ascendant and new musical genres and great artists and DJs abounded. Mark was not only a fine selector of music, but after years of bedroom DJing from the mid 80s he was also an incredible scratcher and mixer. He put knowledge, skill and soul to great use making his own music (including at least one classic of the era, Spellbound with Veba), remixed some of the greats of the time, made friends with Bobby Womack and contributed as much to the Manchester scene as anyone at that time also touring the world as a DJ and Producer. I say all this to give this book you hold in your hand what you might call context. Northern Sulphuric Soulboy is a kind of prequel to The Caterpillar Club. This book is a story about what happens when the dancing stops but your head and feet still want to join the dots. It opens in a barely disguised approximation of the Notting Hill branch of Soho House where a DJ, Simon, is struggling with the reality of post i-Phone, post Spotify, post caring DJing. Time and technology can do that to a profession. From the second summer of love in 1988 through to sometime around the first i-Phone, DJs ruled the roost. But then like many of the creative industries the digitalisation of the world made YouTube and Google billionaires and paupers of the makers and creators. Rae's universe is one where the only person who seems to really care about music is the DJ, and he's pilloried for doing so. Anyone who has DJed in a so-called members club or DJ bar in the last ten years will recognise this "hell is other people with smart phones" scenario where keeping the punters happy involves Bieber and Britney rather beats and rhymes. In fact, caring about things seems to be a positive disadvantage in The Caterpillar Club and the source of much misery for Simon and his wife Sonia. Rae's protagonist, Simon, an ageing DJ who plays football once a week and can barely walk afterward, carries a heavy load both literally and metaphorically. His vinyl (which is stolen and later sold to fund his hope for a future) is the albatross of this DJ overtaken by Serato and USB sticks. Simon has a music career that is now in tatters. But this isn't About A Boy for the Rave Generation more Generation X meets the world of medicine for the middle aged (Rae himself is a psychology graduate). Rae digs much, much darker and deeper than that as Simon and Sonia face the ignominy and impersonal hell of fertilisation, IVF, health scares and other strange invasive techniques in order to procreate. Everything in Simon's life drifts away from him until he has to wrest it back. Entropy is everywhere. Simon has hit his 50s barely standing (he's so knackered and demoralised he sits while he DJs to an empty room of Euro bar staff), but he's still obsessed with music despite being ridden with tinnitus and mental health problems. As Rae says of Simon, the first night we meet him - He lays his head on the pillow and tries to forget how little he gets paid for the permanent ringing that lives inside his head. In a world of Instafame, where only that very moment matters, an era of ephemerality, of the commodification of everything and everyone Simon, and Rae as author work hard to remind us that the past really does exist. And that in the haze of mid-life the future may be harder to find than we think. Sometimes it's tragedy with humour, sometimes humour with tragedy and as the book goes on occasionally it's just the inevitability of loss that hits Simon like a sledgehammer. It is of course ridden with references to music (and occasionally Mark's other obsession fishing) as in this passage referencing Cutty Ranks as Simon awaits his biopsy - "Know him? I used to spar with him back a yard," the Jamaican replies triumphantly. "Dibby dibby DJ," starts Simon "Know me a death, know me a death," finishes his hospital friend and they continue in tight vocal unison driven by the spectre of the unknown."Nuff of them a worry, nuff of them a worry, some of dem a fret," Simon points at the Jamaican in time with the vocal cadence. Or later when Simon muses on his record buying habit and the line between sampling and stealing - "Simon paid GBP8 for the soundtrack to Frank's sex life." Just at the moment the music industry fails him, Simon's body does too. His tinnitus is so bad that it literally drives him crazy and in order to get the fertility treatment he needs his doctor says he must go to a Group Therapy for Tinnitus sufferers - the ironically named Rings and Things. Amongst the numerous therapists, gynaecologists, fertility specialists, group therapists and hypnotherapists the feeling that Simon is somehow trapped in a benign conspiracy emerges. Or something more sinister even? It's hard to say but it's thrilling to read.