It was fitting that he’d finally decide to go through with it right as the rambunctious crescendo of ‘Socialist Suicide’, with its violent imagery of scabs committing various forms of the act in the safe heavens of their homogenised suburban living rooms, arrived. To his surprise the blood arrived copiously before the pain. Upon the fourth stab into his chest his leg muscles began to sag, his breathing laboured before it declined to choking. As his knees hit the rickety slithery platform smeared with a sludge consisting of mud, fag ends, fag ash, vomit and booze, which somehow combined to offer a grotesque smell reminiscent of discarded fish fingers, he offered one final flail of the arms. His arms, elongated by a guitar in one hand and the knife in the other, propelled the bulbous globules of rich blood from his chest thoroughly over the crowd, who remained locked in their own delirium of indifference, before using gravity’s momentum to bring his left hand down with what turned out to be a timid attempt to slice his jugular vein.

Despite never finding himself in any sort of place or predicament that was liable to require its use, he carried a flick knife for security, but in truth its main purpose was to enhance the method. The imagery that accompanied the suddenness of the urge to use it on himself was cruelly sobering – he envisioned ‘no future’, that those dreams of super-stardom masquerading under the flag of rebellion was the zenith of self-deception, and Patti was talking hypocritical shit, having a record pressed means you’ve made it. He also froze in that moment, because, for the first time in his tragic artistic existence, he was truly convinced. For once he had the perfect situation to surpass himself; on stage, with an audience of nearly a hundred, and he had exceeded the level of intoxication which impairs self-preservation.  Charlie was upping the ante. Nobody else would carry the name after this, well, unless, like him, they already were.

What would happen next would be an ineffectual and lousy derivative of Sid Vicious self-mutilating himself on stage. But we have the benefit of hindsight, he does not. That the scope and value of an act is dependent on its impact, not its artistic merit, should favour him. If he had more talent and exposure the act could grant him a legacy, serving as an emphatic rebuttal to two of popular culture’s injustices; it would, albeit only ironically, inverse the mortality of his more famous namesake and posit Sid as a poseur. Slashing one’s self on the chest with a puny razor might’ve bolstered the commercialised, manufactured mania that punctuated the genre’s anti-establishmentarianism in the public consciousness, forming a vector which romanticised punk to the youth, but hard-core it was not. Not after this.

Irritation grew as Kev’s drumming continued out of sequence with the guitars, or was it the other way round? The key sensibilities of the punk movement was its post-modernist aversion to the slick production found in gentrified art, its impetuous cleaving to the strange and random, which owed much to Joseph Beuys, and its accessibility for musicians of mediocre skill. But, fuck all that, years of practice should at least lead to something that sounded coherent. The difference between art and the cynicism of self-promotion is a serious artist creates for everyone. As they were not serious, neither, by extension, was he. They were deadly serious about being provocative and finding ways to make sure everyone knew it, to hide their lack of artistic capability, and sustain their suitably meagre following. In truth his dissatisfaction, and his inaction, was linked to a vainglorious grievance. He witnessed the discovery and ascension of their ‘contemporaries’; the Pistols, Buzzcocks, the Clash, and the Ramones, while they toiled in relative obscurity. He had convinced himself that he had diagrammed the template for punk’s popularity before they achieved it, yet was left embittered and crushed by being unable to capitalise. Were these bands just better, or did they simply get there first? Mercifully, for the sake of taste, delusion had finally capitulated, and he concluded that his songs, and they, were just too shit, even for punk. Even their references to the family likely weren’t original. Shitty replication threatened to make punk dull. He, they, had become that threat.

He became entranced by the prominent forehead scar of the grimy haired girl standing at the front of the crowd. Thanks to her frenetic head movements the scar soon melted into an extensive nebulous distortion, married with the pounding drums and lazy thrashing of metal against plastic and wood, induced a mild dizziness. Earlier the grimy haired girl had revived herself by puking in a plastic bucket and was occasionally spinning it around her head spreading vomit everywhere. Sadly its stench allowed lucidity of who he was and where he was to barely hang on with its fingertips. Unnerved by this sensory collaboration, he wondered whether this was the prelude to psychosis, if not psychosis itself. It was balmy, too balmy for early April and the compacted air devastated his will to endure any more. He was sweating heavily, his frail physique wilting under the duress of a distressed layer of leather festooned with metal embellishments and the heavily cut cocaine pounding through his blood stream. The desire to cut through the dopamine, and vanquish psychological instability with physical damage had been building. Smashing up something, his guitar, maybe over one of the crowd, could offer a reprieve, but only temporarily, and anyway, he couldn’t afford another.

Autumn 1975. It was a peculiar time for music, with change poised to strike. Disco was ubiquitous. Glam Rock was toast. Prog Rock had always been crap. They were unaware of Krautrock. Elton John was still relevant on merit. The Stones had exhausted themselves and Mick Taylor. The solo careers of The Beatles ranged from passable to abortive. David Bowie was re-emerging from selling out as a mediocre soul singer by recording Station to Station. Sabbath and Led Zepp were at their peak, but some in the group caught their fathers listening and signing along on the radio, so they were out. That blues derivative stuff didn’t represent their social inadequacy or teenage angst, nor did it match the political disquiet. There was a void to be exploited, a demand for something different, something new, something they could inform and take ownership of. He sensed something was happening. Songs had been written, rehearsed and an aesthetic had been cultivated, and they weren’t the only band around with this accent. To call this a premonition or foresight that they were actively aware of being involved in the vanguard of the Punk movement as we know it now would be generous. Music is forever mutating, and this is largely in thanks to the young skewing towards irrational positivity. They believe they’re exceptional and or are perhaps destined to be, or the more self-aware will try anything to avoid the dismal reality that awaits the vast majority of them.

Richie managed to procure a Patti Smith single on Canadian (apparently) import with a Jimi Hendrix cover of ‘Hey Joe’, but it was something about the B side’s construct that truly caught their attention. Patti encapsulated a mood, she spoke defiantly of refusing to be consigned to shit menial jobs and of wanting something more. This resonated on several levels; with their hatred of the shit menial jobs they’d left school for or that technical college was preparing them for, plus, her style of delivery was replicable. Craig was shot down when he suggested its vocal aesthetic, dry and wry, owed much to beat poetry. When parsed further the compositional elements belied its result; no drums, the freneticism of the piano and her voice fuelled each other, creating tension by overpowering the guitar and bass. It managed to sound sparse yet brash at the same time. It was an intriguing mix, and provided a formula which they could experiment with on their terms. Now they just needed a sound of their own.

Every afternoon during the school summer holiday they congregated in the local park under a towering oak tree. Park benches encircled its trunk and were shrouded by its generous canopy. Now mid-teens the menu was spliffs and rotgut wine, occasionally spirits if resources were pooled. Talk inevitably turned to music, and following some liberation from humility, the kind of music they’d like to make. They all enjoyed The Stooges, but all agreed they sounded too American. Somehow the debate shifted, highly presumptuously, to deciding the band name, and its inspiration was Charlie’s name. He remained quiet as his fear of someone else thinking of the obvious manifested itself in front of him. It was Craig, of course it was, who suggested calling themselves The Manson’s. Eventually, and to much puerile amusement, the idea expanded, each band member would change their names to match the real members of the Manson family and they decided their first album should be called ‘Finding Polanski’. As afternoon drifted into early evening they started to sense he wasn’t enthusiastic about the idea, which Craig tried to assuage jokingly, ‘that people will assume you’ve changed yours anyway’. At one point a mother with a pram passed them on the footpath nearby, Craig, at this point quite drunk, shouted at her ‘we’re the Manson’s, and we’re gonna come to your house’. It was hard to decipher if it was the bad taste, the aggressive tone, or general rudeness of shouting at a stranger, never mind a mother transporting her infant, that stunned her into stopping and staring at them with a willowy jowl. They were to be equally stunned by her sniping retort, ‘didn’t your mother teach you any decorum?’ ‘Nah, she killed herself when I was six.’ Replied Craig. There was rapturous laughter aimed in her direction because they knew she hadn’t and the woman didn’t, to which he joined in. ‘You could’ve just said no.’ She sniped back, indignantly power walking her pram away.

When the news broke it simply didn’t occur to either Michael or Mavis that it would shape their son’s life so negatively, and that he would be so weak to let it. For a short time, the name Charles became only slightly less toxic than Adolf, Genghis and Josef, to name three, in the contemporary lexicon. Some people may have the misfortune to share either the first name or surname with these repugnant figures, now so reviled in what we’ve come to term woke culture in the twenty-first century, but both? In the context foisted upon them by circumstances out with their control, the family name, and borrowing the name of his grandfather on his mother’s side, had cruelly converged to form a joke most of a glib disposition would inveigh as excessive.

Should his parents be blamed? Some, including their son, surmised Baby Boomers should be blamed for everything, but they supplied him with stability and everything he needed to be well adjusted. How could they have foreseen the events of early August 1969? Changing his name was floated by his mother shortly after that event, but Charles Manson, the latter, reached the age of eleven in 1969. His father deemed it too late to change tack, and considered it a feeble act. Not even the easily assumed knowledge that he was named before the original rose to infamy shielded our protagonist from years of ridicule, accruing to ultimately create an unimaginative despondency that it would forever define him and his art. What the name of Charles Manson does tell us is that historical context can be a self-fulfilling prophecy for the weak, or, to be more specific, that a gross sense of entitlement mixed with crushing artistic failure has always, so far, proved fatal.