the dope feels good

[helenic]

Out to the Charlotte last night with Simran to see the Warlocks, who are my new favourite band. I spoke to Simran for the first time since A-level results on msn yesterday and suddenly I was meeting her for coffee - we talked for almost four hours about our courses (she's doing journalism at the London Institute), men and everything, me sugar drunk on latte with hazelnut, stumbling over my words and into walls. One day I really need to give up coffee. We were never very close at school but she, Roisin and I were a threesome in art and she's so easy to talk to even I managed it; so friendly and funny and intelligent she's impossible to dislike even if she is almost perfect. We discovered we both wanted to go to the gig but had no-one to go with, and that was that.

The Charlotte's a dump though; the walls covered with A4 posters printed in two colours on someone's deskjet and no seats apart from black boxes that mark your jeans. Muse named it as the worst place they ever played before they were famous. I think my dad even played there once, in the days when he was a long-haired pot-smoking rocker. Still, it was full of cute indie boys and the bassist of the first support band was so so fine, biting his lip with his hair falling deliciously over his cheekbones. I drank VK and Simran was on her ubiquitous jack&coke, trying to make one drink last all night because we're poor. During the second band my period arrived quite suddenly and two days early, and I had to walk back to Lamplighters to spend two pounds on the smallest packet of Lil-lets ever seen from the machine in the ladies. (I needn't have bothered - it had stopped again by the time I got back to the gig.) But it was all okay because the Warlocks were too beautiful to be true. I couldn't take my eyes off the Nico-esque keyboard player - she was just stunning, from the thick fringe falling into her eyes to her diamond-patterned ankle socks. The sound rose from two drumkits through all three guitars like a tidal wave of swirling, out of focus chords, settling into long, mellow explorations that made me ache for a joint. It was a blissful, limb-filling noise with shivering basslines and big, fuzzed-up riffs. The strobelight made the smoke from their cigarettes flicker and hang around their heads, and they were lit from behind by the beams of five multicoloured spotlights rising into the air like the spokes of a wheel. Every time a drumstick sliced through one it scattered and danced across the ceiling in time to the beat. I could happily have drowned in it.