CW: Drug or alcohol abuse
You may not know him by name, but you’ve definitely heard him. If you picture the Wasabi on Cornmarket street, what may also come to mind is a man in front with a microphone and a speaker. On most days, you can find him with a black speaker and a microphone playing karaoke backing vocals to which he which sings along with his whole body. People have variously described Richard’s singing as “punk”, “hysteria”, or “literally screaming”, none of which are necessarily meant to be malicious descriptions. There is admiration when people speak about Richard – his presence is iconic.
I went up to Richard one day after he finished a rendition of Amy Winehouse’s ‘Valerie’ and asked if I could interview him. Even though he agreed to an interview, he didn’t give me a place or time until the day of. We ended up meeting in Common Ground at 11.30am, and he sat on an orange sofa closest to the door.
Thirty minutes into our conversation, Richard leant forward to the table in between us, grabbed his green tea and let out a heavy sigh. He’d just finished telling me how he arrived in Oxford in late 2020, which is also when he started busking.
When COVID-19 first hit, divorced from his wife and without any reason to anchor himself in one place, he was out traveling. He rushed back to the Cotswolds to see his ex-wife and kids “just in case we all died… but we didn’t.” During his time in the Cotswolds he found no sense of community, so Richard moved to Oxford to be around people who were more his “spiritual age.” Before COVID, Richard had managed bars and restaurants so once he was in Oxford, he went for a couple interviews to try and get back into the motions of life. However, when the interviewer would ask if he really wanted the job, he would grit his teeth: “I would say ‘yeah, yeah of course’, but in my head I was thinking noooo.”
Richard partly aligned himself with the idea of ‘punk’. He told me that “proper punks are real lunatics” in reference to a street fight he once had with a ‘proper punk’ in Florence. While he did not self-describe as a “lunatic”, he did describe himself as a “nutcase”, but one with drive and passion. No matter how unconventional his life path, it is one that Richard took ownership over. Throughout our conversation, his sense of ownership became apparent through the various interjections he made of his theories surrounding life. Take theory one, which he told me after describing this aversion to working in restaurants again:
Richard’s theory of life #1: You’re not really required to do any work. We’ve got enough humans doing work all the time for existence to continue perfectly adequately for everyone’s needs. So there really is no requirement for everyone to work all the time. If you’re out of work, there’s guilt associated with it.
Not wanting to work in hospitality, and not knowing entirely what to do, Richard lived in Oxford at the backpackers hostel by the train station, and did, in his words, “nothing”. This nothingness consisted of sleeping, going to coffee shops, exercising and meditating, “mainly to block out the voices in my head saying, ‘What are you doing, you lazy bum?’”
At the backpackers hostel, he met a man who, for anonymity purposes, we’ll call Danny. Danny was busking and told Richard that if he liked singing, he should try busking too. Richard told Danny off: “I was like, ‘Man, fuck you. Like, you’re bum. You stay in a fucking hostel. You got no fucking money, you don’t have a fucking house. Like, you know, you’re drifting around and you’re, like, kind of depressed.’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, but I got issues.’ I mean, he was telling me to do what he was doing! Man, it’s fucking insanity. He’s like, ‘Fuck you, man, my life’s great.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah bullshit, your lifes great, you’re just lying to yourself [sic].’”
Richard thought about it: he did like singing. At his third university, Richard had run two small record labels but felt that to be a singer, you really had to commit. “I guess I started to think about, yeah, you know, busking was something that possibly I could do, and then I started to think about how to do it, and then there was a fear aspect to actually being able to do it.”
As he eased into the sofa, Richard became quiet.
I propped myself up on my knees. “Wait, wait, say more. What do you mean fear aspect?”
“Well, to sing in the street.” Richard gestured out the window of Common Ground. Looking sidelong out to the broken cement, I shifted my gaze back to Richard.
“What does it take to sing in the street?”
Richard replied, “Go and do it, and you’ll find out.”
It was three months of back and forth in his mind, of convincing himself he didn’t have the money to get a speaker, didn’t have the time, needed to sleep more. But all that negotiating was silenced by four grams of magic mushrooms.
Richard’s theory of life #2: My loose theory is that we made psychedelics in the future, and we sent them back in time. I think any altruistic entity – of which humans are certainly altruistic – would [do so]: if we found a solution to a problem and we had the ability to go back and forth in time, why would we not place it everywhere? The quicker we could find it, the more help it would be earlier.
Two days after his magic mushrooms trip, he found himself standing on Cornmarket street with a speaker, about to start singing. As he was standing there, with the public passing by, and no particular obligation to sing, Richard said it was sort of like when you are going to kiss someone for the first time: “I guess it’s like, when you’re sitting next to someone, [and] you’re gonna kiss. Sometimes, it doesn’t happen, [and] you got [no] fucking idea why. You just walk away. Sometimes it’s the same with the singing out there. You could just turn around and, like, not do it. No one would know, no one would care.”
But that very first time, he didn’t walk away and he didn’t know why he didn’t either, he just started to sing.
When Richard is singing, he chooses to sing songs that are related to memory: “Sometimes, some songs are about people, things, in my past. You know, good memories, bad memories. I sing Nat King Cole’s ‘Love’ occasionally, and I sing Nina Simone’s, ‘My baby, something, something, something’, which are two songs from my wedding – good memories. Divorce – bad memories.” At first he didn’t take requests, but now, his attitude has changed: “If you want me to sing Miley Cyrus, and you don’t really care whether I get it right or not, because you just want to act like fools on High Street and jump around and dance and have a moment of escapism, actually that’s, in a way, more important than me and what I think about it, so why not?”
The first two months of busking was filled with adrenaline; that ‘kissing someone’ feeling. But now, things have become mundane.
“What’s your daily routine?” I ask.
Richard laughs and then sinks deeper into the sofa, “Get up, feel shit in the morning because of certain things which piss me off. Walk to the coffee shop, drink coffee, feel less shit because of the effects of coffee. Go exercise for an hour, feel less shit because of the effects of exercise. Go and sit and waste half an hour charging my phone because I haven’t got electricity, because I don’t have a house, and my phone’s running out of batteries, and I need my phone to work. Go pick up my speaker from where I store it. Eat when I’m generally not hungry, but it’s probably a good idea to have some form of food in the morning.
“Walk into town, start singing. Forget about all the crap. Sing, sing, sing, sing, smile, smile. Finish singing, go and have some tea, because my throat is completely fucked, because I sing every day. Drink the tea.
“Have nothing else to do, because I’ve got all of about three pounds ninety nine and no house. Sing again, because there is nothing else to do in my life, and it helps to try and develop something. Continue singing all the way till nine, and I’m no longer allowed to sing anymore because of the council – which is a good thing, because if that didn’t exist, I’d probably sing to around about four in the morning.
“Finish singing, go and eat dinner. Stuff myself with food – I [don’t] necessarily even want to eat, because I [ate] lunch slightly too late. I eat anyway.
“Stand in the shower at the youth hostel for an hour because I’m freezing. Warm up and then leave and go and sleep down by the river in a sleeping bag. Think vaguely about going to a nightclub or something, but I don’t drink, and I don’t particularly want to drink. I don’t particularly want to fuck up my sleep pattern, so [I] just go to sleep.
“Then I wake up and just repeat that over and over again.”
Richard coughed and grabbed his tea. “Maybe 2025 will be the year I busk in Africa.” He glanced down, and then waved to someone. He focused back on the floor, then my face. “Maybe [I’ll] go to America, and learn how to be a country singer.”
