Dear Nessi

Like any teenager, I used to have obsessions with popstars. It started when I was 11. I was odd though, somehow ashamed. I'd hide my fixations away, listen secretly with an earplug in my tape recorder (this was pre-walkman days). I moved onto bands, Led Zeppelin, then the Clash (this was Ohio, this was late 70s, early 80s.) and then (don't kill me, it was Ohio), the Boomtown Rats.

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"Are you in a silver car that looks like it's from Back to the future?" asks the youth on the other end of the phone. We're outside a college building, phoning cos we can't find the bar. I can't remember that movie but Frankie's car is 1984. It's not old enough to be retro but there isn't much on the road these days that looks so angular, diagonal, hatchback. The passenger door doesn't open. Suzy climbs out the window whenever we have to get out. She is like Daisy in Dukes of Hazard.

It was that kind of day. Revisiting schools days. The sexy girl with a Russian name and a crooked smile had booked us to play her art college bar before Power Pack decided to split the band up (this is the Succulent Singles, not my surf band which is going strong now. pay attention). So our last gig was a day out in a south-west London suburb.

We planned on a walk by the river but it was pissing down rain and we spent 2 1/2 hours in traffic. We all agreed that congestion charge zone needs to be bigger. Inside the zone, we drove along at a nice pace; outside, the traffic was worse than ever. Frankie is exempt from payment because he shares his car with a neighbour who has a disabled child. He thinks congestion charge should be £100 a day. Then it would only be us, in his crappy car, and a load of Rolls Royces driving around London.

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Obsession dies hard. Cut to mid 1990's, after the Juju Princesses European tour. After I met Martian in Switzerland. Listening to his tapes while I slowly prepared to leave my boyfriend. Listening to tapes he made me, trying to read things into his choice of songs. Dreaming of the day I'd arrive in Zurich, single and free and ready to begin the rest of my life.

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Power Pack, Frankie, Suzy and I ended up in a boathouse pub and restaurant. It was modern and yuppie inside but we had a lovely view of the river. We ate over-described, overpriced but tasty food - where was the 'rocket and goats cheese'? And since when are 'roast vegetables' only potatoes? We watched swans and geese fly around. I went outside for air but it was raining too hard to go anywhere.

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Now I have a new obsession. I listen to him every day. His voice rings in my head even when the music finishes. I take the CD to work to play after everyone's gone home. I even looked on the Internet for information about him. All I found was that he taught himself to sing opera while living above a brothel (or strip joint - the story varies) in Soho.

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So we get to the local art college bar. The worst band we'd ever heard was sound checking. The sexy girl with the Russian name and the crooked smile is a nice person and also has a band where she sings and play bass and they sound like the Fall. But this, what was this? A load of students, who couldn't play, couldn't sing, couldn't hold a song together. I tell them the vocals are too quiet then wish I hadn't. Suzy says to me that if Bush wanted to bomb them she'd be right there with him.

We went out to the car to smoke a joint. That really felt like high school. Hanging around an 80's car in a school car park. Smoking, talking, laughing. Suzy sitting halfway out the car window. The Bootlegger had now joined us with his mandolin.

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There is a twist to this obsession. Not only do I play the CDs for friends when they come round (they say it sounds like Dame Edna or someone in Monty Python, hm, that's not very sexy is it?), but I make my husband go around singing the songs, which he does gladly, and often unprompted. "Murder is easy/ murder is fun/ its better than sex/ cos I always come." We share this obsession, my husband and me.

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We walk to the town centre. It's like anywhere else. Dixons, Marks and Spencer's, Starbucks. Suzy tells us her local florist has been shut down and is going to be replaced by a Starbucks, even though there are already 3 in that street. She tells us she will go in with a load of shit and dump it there, saying "I used to give my manure to the florist. Oh well, you can have it."

We go into a newsagent to buy fags. There's a magazine that says "luxury sex" on the cover. We wonder that means. Sex on a bearskin rug with a fireplace? We decide to go back to the car to smoke joints and drink cans of beer. Frankie and Suzy could have sex in the front seat, and Power Pack and me in the back. That would be economy sex.

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I have met my obsession! I can hardly believe it now. The first thing I said to him was 'you remind me of my husband.' He was wearing a gold dress and white face paint streaked with sweat. He was signing autographs after a show. As I write this, he is singing his heart out every night in Athens. For 6 weeks. And I am here in London, with only CDs and my husband's impersonations.

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Back at the Art College, there are some 70's sofas in the foyer. Suzy wants to take them home with us. She tells us about her mom stealing a fruitcake from a café in Norwich. She says funny things all the time though I can't recall details now and they might not be funny out of context.

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"I'm a pervert/ I go down on the pope/ I'd whip the holy mother/ then give her a poke". Sordid tales of the whores and abusers, lowlifes, tragic rentboys, filth and scum, bank robbers and tarts...why exactly do I like this so much? It's the way it's sung. I guess I prefer the more operatic ones though the Python ones are good too. I went through a Bonzo Dog band phase you know, but couldn't manage to convince my band to cover "Hunting Tigers in India"

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So our last gig was an anti-climax. The bar was packed but it was free to get in. This was the place for students to drink cheap on a Friday night. Most were not playing any attention to us at all. When we did the quiet keyboard ones we were drowned out by talking. That was ok; we will do those at poetry readings anyway. But it felt sad knowing we were playing most of the songs for the last time.

We split before the last band could start. Doors were locked all over the place (what kind of fire escape is that?) and we ended up walking down alleys and over bridges that crossed a sewage-smelling stream. "Never trust a hippie, never trust a student," Power Pack murmured. He'd been miserable all night. The rest of us just laughed it off, an odd day out, no more no less.

We sped through nighttime London with cans of beer and smoke. Well, not exactly sped. There was a lot of traffic for 11 pm. We decide the congestion charge should be later, too. Too many people wait 'til 7 pm and then go out in their cars. We got stuck in a real traffic jam on Higher Street. Suzy marvelled about the yuppification of her neighbourhood. Said she'd like to chop down the people with a scythe. Said they are abattoir scraps, "the sort of thing you'd put in sausages." She's got that kind of Tom and Serena snobbery but with such a wicked sense of humour you can't really hold it against her. Or maybe you'd have to be there to get what I mean.

We rounded off the evening with a slabbo pizza, much to the Bootlegger's chagrin. Our local pizza take-away place is the company that broke his leg. Two summers ago, one of their delivery scooters ran him over as he was getting off the bus to go to a party at Cocktail Road.

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There's a final part to this obession... while it might not be our opera singer himself, we know at least one of his band members, right now in Greece, is listening to our CD - the CD of the Succulent Singles, the band whose last gig was tonight. I know cos the bassist email me. Mutual appreciation...such a long way from goggle-eyed star worship. Now if only they needed a guitarist...

Petra