Ted Bar

On the down escalator
at Tottenham Court Road
after Stick in the Wheel’s
gig at the 100 Club, I’m
reckoning the last time I
took those steps was back
in the Eighties for Sonny
Fortune, walking up from
the Spanish Bar with Dave.
I’m still riding the buzz
of the gig as I cross the concourse,
hit the barriers and head
for the tunnels when
the chorus of Tiger Feet
starts running through my head
like a bone through a leg
tapping out a beat on the
sticky floor of a pub in
the 1970s and that sets me
on to one of Hank’s old stories
about this massive Ted unconscious
on the floor of a bar in Leeds
where he used to drink
when Mud were in the charts
and Tiger Feet was on the jukebox,
lights flashing in the crazy-angled
vaults of teenage discos where
I like to think I knew all the moves.
I’d have been eleven,
Hank in his twenties, I guess.
Did Mud ever play the 100 Club?
I fear I’m losing my thread here,
memory spilling out like tape
caught in the mechanism,
the sugar-spun beat of a hit
single from Seventies Britain
spinning into life again as train
doors open down through the
decades, weightless and ageless
on the south bound line from
Tottenham Court Road
and I feel myself spinning past
Sonny Fortune at the 100 Club
with Dave, Hank getting the drinks
in somewhere in London, silhouetted
at the back end of an afternoon
session stretching into evening,
sticks in the wheel from
a decade we’re starting to forget,
padding about on tiger feet,
aching for the needle to drop
one last time as one by one
we step over the massive Ted
lying unconscious in front of us
to where we have to go.

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Julian Stannard wrote for Wild Court about the poetry of Tim Cumming in his essay ‘A psycho-geographer slipping the coordinates of time’, here.