Nearly four hundred people attended the gig: many times the number that frequent my musical soirees. There is, it seems, no accounting for taste. Especially Nat’s, for he was repelled by the whole crowd, despite the band’s convincing acquittal on their London debut. Greg and Jim “mingled”. Nat didn’t even try to find kindred spirits. He watched cynically, comparing notes from the “spastic’s show” and coming up with many similarities, not least the frenzied attempts at dancing. I suggested it was the band’s music that proved to be so consistently emetic. He also mumbled something about “no disparity betwixt intellectual capabilities”, although I couldn’t tell if he was condemning both peer groups or patronising one more than the other. Still, it is good that he found the playing, in itself, exhilarating. They even got paid for doing it.

WED OCT 14

I dreamt of humble bees and hobbledehoys. I must renounce my occasional indulgence in hashish.

SUN NOV 1

Nat is almost too busy to see me now. He is struggling to get another thousand E.P.s pressed and covers ready. Yet more money has to be begged from the parents! It will be some time before the cheques roll in from the selling of the initial pressing. Ah, the ubiquitous cash flow dilemma! And what do the D.H.S.S. have to say about all this? It seems that Nat will be okay. He is not actively flouting their regulations; indeed, most of the time he is not receiving any “hand-outs” due to his continued nonattendance at job interviews. Nat has become a gentleman of letters. Foolishly, he and Greg put their addresses on the record cover, and now Nat considers it his duty to respond to anyone who has taken the trouble to put pen to paper.

Quite a few cryptic scrawls arrive each day. His favourite correspondent at the moment is one “Puskiss”, a fellow artiste of the macabre who lives as far away as America.

He finally gave me a copy of the E.P. today. I was quite touched. Why hadn’t he given a locket of his hair free with each one? He blushed.

The sleeve is curious: disappointing drawings compared to those he has shown me; lyrics written out like mediaeval mass. The content, all devised by Nat, is as gothic as anything I had imagined: zombies and curses, sick youths and hearses. There is more wistful and lyrical material too though: rock- pools, towers of strength etc. The label is a “clockwise” foetus that spins dizzily round, 45 revolutions per minute, poor thing.