ST IVES: BLOOD, BASS AND THE ELECTRIC LIGHT
The St Ives I Remember Wasn't Made for Tourists
Forget the postcards.

Forget the pastel-coloured shops, the ice creams and the crowds wandering around with cameras looking for the perfect photograph of St Ives.

The St Ives I know was built on granite, salt, sweat and hard graft.

Men went out into the Atlantic and dragged fish back in.

They hauled pilchards up steep streets until their hands split. They worked in weather that would send most of us running for cover. There was nothing romantic about it.

You worked.

Or you went hungry.

I've had Cornwall rattling around inside my head since 1976, when I first arrived in Newquay as a kid and discovered the Atlantic.

But Newquay was only the beginning.

In 1990, I found St Ives.

And St Ives got under my skin.

It still hasn't come out.

THE SHIRE HORSE: SWEAT, BASS AND TROUBLE
Then came 1993.

Now that was a fucking summer.

The sort of summer you don't really leave behind.

You carry it around with you for the rest of your life.

For me, a big part of it happened inside The Shire Horse.

Back then, St Ives wasn't just about art galleries and second homes. There was another side to the town. A darker, louder, sweatier side.

The Shire Horse became one of the places where Cornwall's underground music scene came alive.

You walked through the doors and the outside world disappeared.

The bass hit you in the chest.

The floor moved.

The walls sweated.

People came together from everywhere and, for a few hours, nobody gave a fuck who you were, where you came from or what you were supposed to be doing with your life.

It was about the music.

The people.

The madness.

And being there.

Names from the British electronic scene passed through those nights, alongside DJs and musicians who would go on to become major figures in underground dance music.

But I wasn't there to write down a history of electronic music.

I was there to live it.

That's the difference.

You don't remember nights like that because somebody tells you they were important.

You remember them because something happened inside you.

I met people there who became lifelong friends.

Nick Warminsham was one of them.

We were surrounded by a cast of characters who were young, restless, broke, wild and completely alive.

There was no Instagram.

No phones held above your head filming the moment.

No algorithm deciding what you should listen to next.

You were there.

That was enough.

When the night finally broke, we'd stumble out into the Cornish morning and head towards Porthmeor Beach.

The music still ringing in our ears.

The Atlantic air cutting through the sweat.

The sun coming up over St Ives.

You didn't need much more than that.

THIRTY YEARS LATER, I'M STILL COMING BACK
Funny thing about places that matter.

You can leave them for years, and they still know your name.

These days, when I come down West, I head up towards Penbeagle and stay with Nick and Rebecca.

From up there, St Ives looks completely different.

The slate roofs.

The harbour.

The Atlantic stretching away beyond the town.

And sometimes, if you stand still long enough, you can almost hear it.

That bass.

Still somewhere in the walls.

Still somewhere in my head.

The town has changed.

So have I.

But some things don't disappear.

ST IVES AND NIGHTMARE IN JAMAICA
I came back to St Ives in 2018 for a completely different reason.

This time I wasn't looking for a party.

I was looking for somewhere to write.

I was working on Nightmare in Jamaica, the book that grew out of my prison diaries and my time inside Kingston's Maximum Security General Penitentiary.

That wasn't easy writing.

Going back into those memories meant opening doors I'd spent years trying to keep shut.

Fear.

Violence.

Survival.

Bad decisions.

The people I'd met.

The things I'd done.

The things I'd seen.

And the things I couldn't forget.

St Ives gave me somewhere to sit with it all.

There's something about the Atlantic that strips away bullshit.

You can sit there looking at the ocean and pretend you're somebody else.

But eventually the truth catches up with you.

The granite doesn't care.

The sea doesn't care.

And neither does the weather.

So I wrote.

Page after page.

Sometimes with the wind coming through the window.

Sometimes staring out towards the water when I couldn't find the words.

The place didn't make the memories easier.

It just gave me the space to face them.

THE OTHER PEOPLE WHO CAME HERE TO ESCAPE
Of course, I wasn't the first person to discover that St Ives could get inside your head.

Artists, writers, poets and outsiders have been drawn here for generations.

Virginia Woolf spent childhood summers at Talland House, looking across towards Godrevy Lighthouse.

Alfred Wallis lived a hard-working life at sea before becoming one of Britain's most remarkable outsider artists, painting boats and the sea with whatever materials he could get his hands on.

Barbara Hepworth came to St Ives and turned stone and wood into something that still feels alive.

D.H. Lawrence spent time nearby at Zennor during the First World War before local suspicion and hostility forced him to leave.

And W.S. Graham lived and worked around St Ives alongside the artists, producing poetry that was anything but comfortable.

These people came for different reasons.

Some came to work.

Some came to escape.

Some probably came because they didn't quite fit anywhere else.

I understand that.

Maybe that's part of the attraction.

St Ives has always had room for outsiders.

THE ST IVES OF TODAY
Of course, St Ives has changed.

You can't stop time.

The old fishing town now sits alongside galleries, restaurants, holiday lets and the Tate overlooking Porthmeor.

The tourists arrive.

The money arrives.

The property prices rise.

That's modern Cornwall.

But underneath all that, the old town is still there.

The harbour is still there.

The Atlantic is still smashing into the rocks.

The gulls still sound like they're arguing over somebody else's dinner.

And if you get away from the crowds and walk up high enough, you can still look down across St Ives and see something of the place that existed before the postcards.

A working town.

A hard town.

A beautiful town.

A town that has always attracted people who wanted to make something, escape something, or live differently.

BLOOD, BASS AND THE ELECTRIC LIGHT
That's my St Ives.

Not the one on the postcard.

Mine is granite under your feet.

Salt on your face.

Blood on the hands of fishermen.

Bass coming through the walls of The Shire Horse.

Friends made in the middle of the madness.

Porthmeor at sunrise.

And an old bloke sitting at a desk years later trying to make sense of a life that has taken him from Warrington to Jamaica, from prison cells to rock 'n' roll, and eventually back to Cornwall with a notebook.

That's the thing about places.

Some places you visit.

Some places you remember.

And then there are the places that become part of you.

St Ives is one of mine.

I first came here decades ago.

I'm still not finished with it.

And I suspect it isn't finished with me.