Dalston, London E8

One night, back in the pre-mobile days, I stumbled through the door and into the study of my Dalston houseshare to see the little red light on the answer machine blinking rapidly.

Dropping into my chair, I spilled a pouch of Golden Virginia tobacco onto my desk, fumbled a roll-up and hit play on the answer machine.

In those days, we used to buy black market tobacco from Turkish smugglers who roamed the darker corners of Brick Lane on Sunday mornings. I’d painted my study a heavy burgundy in an artistic frenzy one night whilst listening to Jimmy Giuffre’s free jazz masterpiece, “The Train and the River” on repeat.

The study’s previous occupant, now a internationally-respected professor at City University in New York, had quit the house share a few months earlier when her boyfriend, Gabe, a sound engineer at Shoreditch super-club, Cargo, had gone home with a young woman we came to call H-Bomb, an actor in training at the Poor School, a King’s Cross drama school, and, at the time, a waitress 10 years his junior at Cargo.

Gabe, who’d been a bosom pal since primary school was now upstairs with H-Bomb. Gabe’s sister, Droid, a manager at Cargo, occupied the final room of the 3-story terraced house. Droid was dating her brother’s boss, another Cargo sound engineer and a one-time manager of Drum n’ Bass legend, Goldie.

Gabe and his sister’s boyfriend never really saw eye to eye and one night Gabe, who liked a drink, tried to strangle his boss in the little vegetable patch we were cultivating in our shabby urban garden. The following morning, a bleary-eyed Gabe claimed it had just been affectionate horse-play but his boss was traumatised by the event and I think it’s fair to see that their professional relationship was never the same again.

With all these Cargo connections, I never paid to see a gig and on quiet nights, I’d cycle down to the club with my marking (I was teaching English at a college in the Angel at the time) and sit in the sound booth with G, doing my marking as Lamb, the Cinematic Orchestra or Gilles Peterson ran through their live sets. The sound console was the size of a dining table and Gabe, a heavy bunch of keys dangling from his neck, used to relish pointing out what he called the P45 button, an innocuous looking knob that, once turned, would fill the club with a sound sufficiently loud to burst the ear drums of all the assembled club-goers.

That night, though, I’d just returned from a solitary drink at a local pub, a copy of Dave Egger’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius under my arm.

Lighting my roll up, I settled in to listen to the message on the answer phone machine…