You don’t live in London. You play London – to
win. That’s why we’re all here. It is a city full of contestants, each chasing
one of a million possible prizes: wealth, love, fame. Inspiration.
I have the pages of the A-Z stuck on my wall – so I can
stare at the entirety of London, trying to learn every mews, alley and byway.
And when you take four paces back from the wall – so you’re pressed up against
your chest of drawers, staring at it – what those network of streets most closely
resembles is a computer circuit board. The people are the electricity jumping
through it – where we meet, and collide, is where ideas are hatched, problems
solved, things created. Where things explode. Me, and the sad man from Blur,
and six million others – we’re trying to rewire things. We’re trying, in
whatever tiny way we can, to make new connections between things. That is the
job of a capital city: to invent possible futures, and then offer them up to
the rest of the world. ‘We could be like this? Or this? We could
say these words, or wear these clothes – we could have people like this, if
we wanted?’
We are Henceforth-mongers, tying to make our Henceforth
the most enticing. Because the secret of everyone who comes to London – who comes
to any big city – is that they came here because they did not feel normal, back
at home. The only way they will ever feel normal is if they hijack popular
culture with their weirdness, inject themselves into the circuitry, and – using
the euphoric stimulants of music, and pictures, and words, and fashion – make the
rest of the world suddenly wish to become as weird as them. To find a way to be
a better rock star, or writer. To make the rest of the world want to paint
their walls electric blue, too… because a beautiful song told them to. I want
to make things happen.
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