It’s a phrase that’s thought to derive from the folklore of the ancient Indo-Europeans, since the belief once prevailed that spirits lived in trees to knock on wood was to summon the good spirits to help you, or to deafen the bad ones who might seek to do you harm. I knocked on wood so often that you could see the varnish on my sore knuckles.
This was music that at the time infuriated me – fey, soppy, cerebral – and yet, with hindsight, embodies a time in pop – fun, communal, tuneful - I would welcome back warmly now. In the earworm chorus to ‘The Impression That I Get’, Barrett roars the line “Never had to knock on wood” over the parp of trumpets and saxophones that defined the largely wretched output of most 90’s ska punk. Yes, but what if they mixed my blood up with someone else’s? What if they’d labelled it incorrectly? What if… One evening I plotted to break into the clinic with the green door on the outskirts of Newcastle to check they hadn’t. You’d think that a blood test would answer my fears definitively. Were I to touch a wet surface of a bar, it was ‘proof’ I’d got it even if I hadn’t previously. I looked for signs and symbols in the cosmos that might guide me were I to find myself on a street that housed a branch of HMV, it was ‘proof’ I had the virus. All my obsessions shared the same central tenet what if? The inability to know for certain was what tormented me, and in 1999, it reached the demented state such ruminations had always threatened to.
But the time I woke up and decided I was HIV positive was the first time I had a thought that genuinely derailed my life. With hindsight, it had always been there - I’d had strange, upsetting, sometimes difficult obsessions for years prior.