Back during prohibition times, when we were teenagers, I used to run a small speakeasy from my garage. I didn’t drink, as I didn’t want to upset God, but I facilitated all my buddies, like Jesus would’ve done. The garage had guitar amps and deck chairs and a desktop PC we used to very gradually torrent things over the space of a few months. Pretty sure it took like six weeks for Snakes on a Plane to complete. It was basically the crime headquarters of Greenhills.
We even had a couch for a while that Gary’s family were getting rid of. We carried the big wooden frame exactly a mile along the main road from Orwell to Greenhills, looking like a bunch of unambitious goth burglars. I remember being very annoyed when someone drunkenly scratched their name into one of the big flat armrests. I think we had to get rid of the couch eventually, ’cause it took up too much room amd smelled a bit, from all the teenagers. It wasn’t a big garage, about the size of two of those airlock thingies they have in banks, but I remember one time we had about thirty people in there, and every bit of floorspace was occupied.
I think it used to sometimes be called the Cavern, after the Beatles venue in Hamburg, but it was a very forced nickname. It wasn’t like a cavern, it was like a big hollow brick. In a photo I found of it our politics were very clear from the decorations on the wall: a small photo of Bill Hicks on printer paper, an A2 poster detailing International Humanitarian Law, and one of those green and blue spirally optical illusion things.
This was back at the dawn of the MP3 player, which were these electric boxes people played music from before records were invented. My MP3 player powered the house sound system; a set of computer speakers that sat on the armrests of the couch, with the sub-woofer under the middle seat. On my Creative Zen Vision M, a mp3 player with a 320 pixel by 240 pixel 4:3 display, specifically marketed for watching movies on the go, there was a shortcut button that you could set to do whatever you liked.
I set mine so that it would start recording audio if it was pressed. My buddy Niall accidentally pressed it more than most. I kept those recordings deep underground until I found them the other day. These are those recordings:
Postscript: Niall is now a computer engineer.