Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 28-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
I showed Dave the beginning of the BBC Punk Britannia series. Great footage. (And I realized that my dad is a lot like John Lydon in terms of vitriolic angst and misanthropic intensity, but I wonder if Lydon would actually hand back a Father’s Day card Ari Up had made for him. I mean, I was 10, and Ari wasn’t 10 when Lydon and her mother … anyway … sometimes one cross-references situations by reconstructing elements and imposing them on other people’s lives; or at least, that’s something I do.)
I don’t like to think of any 10-year-old girl making her father a card to impress him, and her father taking a look at it and angrily handing it back because it looks like a classic father (the one he isn’t): tall, dark and handsome … It was an imitation of a Hallmark card … He was a commercial artist and an art director … I was trying to impress him by being like him, making a generic card … I can’t remember if he handed it back or threw it on the ground … I don’t think he said anything; he was too angry … The words, when they came, I forget … I only recall being totally blindsided, expecting him to like the card … To give you an idea, once I was moving out and I didn’t tell them until the evening before that I’d rented an attic apartment rather close to where my boyfriend lived. I was 18. Well the song “Ice Floes Aweigh” tells the story. I say 17, but I think I was 18: “What I’d really like to know is why’d you throw that huge glass of chocolate milk on me when I said I was moving out at 17?/And did either of you read my last book?/And why do you tell people you’re gonna to kill the guy in the trailer next door? … I’m sitting here alone drinking tea instead of gin … “
