1971.life

The charts the week I arrived said Hot Love by T. Rex. Starbucks had opened its first shop two days before me, and Britain had just gone decimal. But none of that is what I remember.

My first ever memory — I’d have been three, maybe four — is getting out of bed one morning, putting my hands on the window ledge, and thinking: fuck me, what kind of world do we live in?

Glaring out the window down Digby Grove, Ernesettle, Plymouth. I pulled my hands off the drenched window ledge, freezing cold. Windows you couldn’t see out of because of the condensation on the inside, which left puddles of water all along the ledge. And I just thought to myself: fuck man, we’re poor — our windows let in the rain.

People have no idea how it used to be before double glazing was the norm. God made it to stop so many people dying in the cold winters — the winters when we used to have snow, and a lot of it, blocking the roads and causing havoc. Coming from a seaside town the snow just blows over nowadays, or you need to go out on Dartmoor to see it. What have we done to the world...

Must have been three or four. And that was about the same time my dad — as I call him, because even though he’s not my father he treated me as his own, and I respect the fuck outta him — thanks dad xx — said to me:

Well well. We’ll get onto that later, and you take your own opinion on that. Funny he called me crazy — but I’m not the one who headbutted a bus driver for making him nearly drop me out of his arms when he slammed the brakes on hard. Get on, dad... xx

Years back I used to run into Tim Westwood every so often — met him a few times, even had his mobile number for a while, back when he was doing sets at venues and you’d text him to get on the guest list. God knows if that number’s even still his now.

I wrote two full pages of bars, took a photo of the lyrics, and emailed the whole thing straight to him. This is what I can still find of it — typed up exactly as I wrote it, spelling and all. No malice intended.

It’s Eminem style — long sentences, that flow, bars that don’t give you time to breathe. The beat’s gone — can’t remember what I did it to — but the words never left.

And one thing from those years isn’t a bar at all. It’s not wordplay, not a punchline — it’s a statement, and it’s mine:

And here’s the thing: that wasn’t the only one. Times were rough — I was homeless for a stretch — and This was 2009. I wrote a rap for a fella called Diggy Don Walshie. He took it out to Marbella, Puerto Banús, and did it out there. And because I’m me, I even dissed the man inside his own bars. Wrote his tune for him and buried him in it — I’m burdened with my Shane. That one’s coming here too, when I dig it out.

Diggy Don Walshie on camera — and listen to his intro: “I’m gonna spit a little freestyle for ya...” That line was mine too. I wrote the bars, and I told him what to say before he said it. He never claimed the thing was his — because it wasn’t. Ghostwritten, intro and all.

And the lines about paranoid schizophrenia — people probably heard them and thought it was wordplay. It wasn’t. I’ve got paranoid schizophrenia. I wrote those bars because I live with it. When you hear them on that video, you’re not hearing a character. You’re hearing me.

And here’s something else I haven’t told many people: when I left that whole world behind — Gibraltar — I didn’t get a plane, or a boat, or a lift. I walked home. That story’s the next chapter — read it.

Transcribed from an old screenshot of the email/lyrics photo — a chunk in the middle is missing where the page got lost. If more of the two pages turn up, it goes straight in here.

And before you think that was a one-off: I could write trap easy. I do it all the time in my head. Always have. Walking down the street, sitting in traffic, laying bricks — the bars are running. The Westwood ones got written down because I sent them. The rest live up here.

And before you think 2010 was my first one — I’d walked Spain before. Two years earlier, 2008: I walked from Gibraltar to Madrid. Then got a bus from Madrid to Barcelona — and walked from Barcelona all the way back down to Gibraltar, down the beach the whole way. So when the money ran out, walking home wasn’t a mad idea to me. I already knew the road.

When the money ran out in Gibraltar, I did what a boss does: I paid my workers off. Every one of them, as best I could. And I did it so properly I didn’t even leave myself enough for a flight home. Not a euro to my name. So I came out of Gibraltar, turned left, and started walking.

Somewhere up that road I found myself on the Camino de Santiago — the pilgrim road. Bottom of Spain to the top, the way they say the apostles carried St. James himself. Older than the religion that walks it now, this road that runs the length of Spain under the Milky Way — and me on it with everything I owned and nowhere to be.

Six weeks. 1,600 kilometres. And the Spanish people — fucking awesome, every one of them. If they never fed me, I’d be dead. I don’t care what anyone says about that country — they kept me alive.

One day on the motorway I heard the whistle of a bullet go past my head. A couple of blokes standing on the bank, shouting at me, rifle in hand. And what did I do? I just opened my arms and shouted “fucking come on then!” — because like I had anything to lose. Truth be told, I’d rather have been dead than walk that far with no money.

I walked it anyway. All of it.

The rest of this one — the nights, the roads, how it ended — comes as I tell it.

Now here’s one people struggle to believe. During COVID, the whole country was sat at home shouting at the telly. I wasn’t shouting at the telly — I was on Twitter telling the Prime Minister his next move.

Boris Johnson. Number 10. Me, @thefullshane, tweeting the man and Downing Street what he should do next. And then he’d go and do it. Every fucking time. I wasn’t giving my opinion of him — I was telling him the play, and he ran it.

One of them, plain as day: the Nightingale Hospitals. They built these massive emergency hospitals at a hundred miles an hour — and then didn’t open them. Just sat there, built and shut, while Covid was tearing through the country. So I told him: open them. And then the man did it. You can go and research it yourself — it’s all there, and it’s all true. There’s loads more where that came from, all sitting in my Twitter history if you know how to look.

Call it coincidence if you want. A bricklayer’s son from Ernesettle, no hotline, no connections — just telling the most powerful man in the country his next move from his phone, and watching him make it. But I know what I told him, and I know what he did.

And that’s just the Prime Minister. There’s presidents in this story too — Obama, Trump. We’ll get to them. The tweets are all still in my account, and when I pull them out, the receipts go right here on this page.