Long, long ago, my friend Phil and I decided to make our fortunes in the music business. Lacking the ability to sing or to play an instrument, we determined to be managers. We envisaged ourselves as a pair of Svengalis, with a stable of artists who would conquer the charts, allowing us to retire to Bransonian tropical islands before our thirtieth birthdays.

How could things possibly go wrong?, we thought, considering the first bands on our roster. There was Snakewizard, a generic heavy metal band of no great originality – but then, originality is the last thing the punters want in a heavy metal group. We would help them along with song lyrics, but otherwise leave them to practise their deafening din and grow their hair.

The important thing was to have a broad range of artists, covering different markets. Snakewizard took care of the heavy metal fans, and our second group – The Toofles – appealed to a wholly different audience. The Toofles were essentially a novelty band for pre-teens, not unlike The Wombles. Their songs had no artistic merit whatsoever but, we thought, would be wildly popular with the tinies.

The fatal flaw in our scheme, and the reason that the Bransonian islands remained forever out of reach, was that neither Snakewizard nor The Toofles ever existed outside our pulsating greedy brains. They were only ever figments of our imagination … where they remain lodged, now grown old and grey, and without a back catalogue – or indeed any catalogue at all – to fall back on.

They are still two of my favourite groups.

Hard to credit that half a century has passed since I was initiated into the Fellowship of the Cake and the Sash, but here is the photographic evidence.

‘Twas in the year 1983 I spent Christmas in Manchester with the ex-Mrs Key’s sister and her husband, a Mexican anthropologist with a particular interest in textiles. We were all young and achingly right-on in a very 1980s way, which is why we thought very carefully before buying our Christmas crackers. Not for us the crass commercialism of the masses with their false consciousness and weird tendency to vote for the hated Thatcher. No, we would make the purchase of crackers a political gesture. We bought them from CND.

Oh how we failed to laugh around the Christmas dinner table as we pulled our ideologically sound crackers. Out fell the expected paper hat and printed slip – and on the latter, there was not a terrible and groanworthy joke, but a sobering fact about nuclear weapons and the inevitable worldwide holocaust they would cause. We donned our paper hats and read out these visions of mass destruction, smug in our righteousness. Then we ate and drank our fill and had precisely the same kind of Christmas as the lumpenproletariat we so despised.

In days of yore, when I was young, I tried my hand at verse rather than prose. This was not a good idea. I do not have a poet’s sensibility, although I am not entirely sure what that means. I recall with fondness a handful of the verses I wrote. There was one in particular, in which I alleged that I was sitting in a room with massive shutters and had brilliantine in my hair, that nudges at my memory. Thirty years or more have passed since I wrote it. If I recall correctly, I was sitting in a room with massive shutters, and I did have brilliantine in my hair. But of course my recollections are all askew. I barely recall last week, let alone the early years of the Thatcher administration. It may be that the debaucheries of my Wilderness Years frazzled certain circuitry in my bonce. That would account for my imperfect memory.

Yet I know there were a few occasions when I slathered my hair in brilliantine, though I am no longer clear why I did so. One such occasion was New Year’s Day 1980, which I spent in a holiday cottage on the south coast owned by the parents of a friend of mine. This friend was a big-brained intellectual with an alarmingly high-pitched voice who went on to become a successful television producer of mindless tat. Even at that young age, he did not have enough hair on his head to slather it with brilliantine. He was prematurely bald. But I was not, and I had brilliantine in my hair.

Were there massive shutters in that holiday cottage? I do not remember any, but then I have never had much of a mind for architecture. This is a failing, akin to my failure as a poet, but I lose no sleep over it. I do not dream of a parallel world in which I roam through buildings spouting expert knowledge of them in rhyming couplets. Perhaps I would be a better person if I did. But I doubt it.

It has suddenly occurred to me that I posted that poem at Hooting Yard ten years ago. I mistakenly attributed it, then, to Dobson,

There were massive shutters in that room, and I had never left it. Ah, I had brilliantine in my hair. There were roses, there were lockets, I was lacking something, so unnerved – but for my hatred she’d’ve seen it, even eaten it, got it on her eyelash, crushed it, broken it, eked it out of someone’s purse or loved it, lusted after it. So here’s my signifier – you can read it, you can keep it. You’re so fucking thick you don’t even know what to do with it. Well … eyebrows, hair, my pastels, then breakfast and a lover. Oh come on, you must be guessing. Or maybe you’re just so fetching. I’m done with fleshing out my lying. My hair is in a tangle and I haven’t paid the rent. But I had brilliantine in my hair, and yours were better shutters. Damn it, I couldn’t even see your rubbish, but I had brilliantine in my hair.

What is all that about, apart from shutters and brilliantine? It sounds peevish to me. I note that, ten years ago, typing it out, I typed it as prose rather than verse. It makes little or no difference. Either way, it is a fragment of the past, of a different time, when I stood on a south coast beach on New Year’s Day and posed for a photograph, black and white, remembered but lost, with brilliantine in my hair.

I was not surprised, when I set out to reacquaint myself with Robert Wyatt’s complete back catalogue, that memories came flooding back. The earlier part of his career coincided with my adolescence, that time when some of our enduring enthusiasms lodge themselves in our souls. Wyatt was my great musical hero when I was fourteen, and he remains an abiding figure, even if I no longer worship him, as I did then, as a god. But listening to the very first records, with Soft Machine, prompted memories of another of my teenage talismans, and more particularly of something irrevocably lost, and lost not just to me but to everyone.

At the beginning of Soft Machine Volume Two, Wyatt announces that what we are about to hear is “a choice selection of rivmic melodies from the official orchestra of the College of ‘Pataphysics”. Like many another spotty youth with intellectual yearnings, I pored over the lyrics of my favourite albums, and in this case I wondered: was there really such a college?, were Soft Machine really its official orchestra?, and, er, what the hell was ‘pataphysics anyway? That word rang a faint bell, and it was not long before I recalled where I had heard it before. “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” from Abbey Road – arguably the most irritating song in the Beatles’ canon – opens with Joan studying “’pataphysical science in the home”.

Because it was Wyatt, because it was intriguing, because it was obscure, I wanted to find out more about this ‘pataphysics business. But where to start? And that, precisely, is what we have lost, that question of where to start. If I were a teenager today, the question would not even occur to me. I would head straight for the wikipedia. From the comfort of my smelly sock-strewn bedroom, and pausing only for the occasional pot noodle, within a few hours I could find out all I wished to know about ‘pataphysics, familiarise myself with the life of Alfred Jarry, download the texts of his plays and prose, and veer off in other promising directions, towards Dada and surrealism. By the time I tumbled into bed my head would be crammed with the knowledge that, four decades ago, took me years to acquire.

And this, I think, is a great loss. Complete access to everything all the time seems – and sometimes is – wondrous, even miraculous. But what is lost is the pleasure of pursuit, following a trail, serendipitous discoveries, unexpected byways, and – most importantly – the time taken. The instant availability of all that information to me, aged fourteen, could never be as valuable as the process of its gradual acquisition over months and years.

Where I did begin was with my parents’ bookshelves. I have written before about the experience of growing up on a bleak council estate, but of course I was never culturally impoverished. Quite apart from the teeming bookshelves, I was a bus- and Tube-ride away from London. Also, back then, my local library was still a building filled with books, and not the “chat-‘n’-snack zone” (in the approving words of Labour’s last “culture” secretary) it, and so many others, have become.

Unfortunately, eclectic though my parents’ tastes were, they did not run to a love of screechy-voiced madcap alcoholic visionary French writers of the fin de siècle. I was able to dig out stray references in some of their many art books. Further mentions popped up from time to time in the pages of the dear old NME in its halcyon days, usually in interviews with some of my other favourites like Slapp Happy or Henry Cow. In the library I found a copy of Ubu Roi. I somehow discovered the existence of a book called The Banquet Years by Roger Shattuck, a quarter of which was devoted to a biography of and critical essay on Jarry. I remember asking my father to buy it for me the next time he popped into Foyle’s (which was pretty much every week.) On one of my own forays into town, at a time when Charing Cross Road was packed with bookshops, I found a Jonathan Cape anthology of Jarry’s Selected Writings. And one day I was unreasonably overexcited to receive in the post, as a gift from my sister in America, a copy of the Evergreen Review (Volume 4, Number 13, May-June 1960), a 190-page paperback special issue entitled What Is ‘Pataphysics? It remains one of my most treasured possessions.

The point is that this was all very piecemeal and gradual, and therein lay the pleasure – of pursuit and discovery, stretching over time. It is a pleasure to a large extent lost. Had I not sworn off the booze, I would celebrate it, mournfully, in the spirit of Alfred Jarry, with a couple of bottles of wine and a pint of absinthe before breakfast. No wonder he was dead at thirty-four.

Twenty-six years ago, the Malice Aforethought Press published Penitence And Farm Implements in an edition of twenty-six copies. Each copy was individually lettered from A to Z. The front and back covers contained twenty-six photographs, snipped out of (I think) old copies of National Geographic magazine. One of the original snippages was pasted in on the inside title page of each copy.

The preface – or “A Few Words Before The Drivel” – ran as follows:

The seventy-five pieces in this book were written between 1981 and 1987; they are arranged here in no particular order. Readers whose brains become frazzled by the often turgid nature of these poems may prefer to muck about with the illustrative matter; this consists of sheets of sticky labels inserted here and there within the book. Indeed, it is possible to ignore the texts completely and to spend hours of idle amusement rearranging the pictures in jigsaw-like fashion, or to remove the labels from the book entirely and use them as charming decorative accessories, guaranteed to brighten up the home, office, or slaughterhouse.

To which was appended a line from John Aubrey’s Brief Lives:

“after his Booke came out, he fell mightily in his Practize, and ’twas beleeved by the vulgar that he was crack-brained”.

The “illustrative matter” consisted of further snippages from National Geographic, printed – in black and white – on to sheets of Gestetner sticky labels. Of the written content, the less said the better.

Penitence And Farm Implements is possibly the rarest of rare out of print pamphlets published by the Malice Aforethought Press during the last quarter of the last century. I would be interested to hear from any long-time Hooting Yard fanatics who actually own a copy. There can only be twenty-five of you in total.