Captain Obeah Man
Tankerton, a small suburb of my home town of Whitstable, sits on the North Kent coast overlooking the Thames estuary. It consists of a promenade, a shopping street, and a late-19th century housing estate of gridded streets. The population is overwhelmingly white (98.7 percent) with a significant number (22.3 percent) of retired people.
I often go there to take my sister’s dog for a walk. It was on one of these afternoon jaunts that I first caught sight of it, on a side street, on a whitewashed stretch of wall: the spray-painted portrait of a man with a moustache, a halo of stars and moons, and the single word “Adapter” floating nearby.
I probably would’ve recognised the face anyway, but it was addition of that out-of-context word which confirmed the man’s identity for me. The face, I knew, belonged to Don Van Vliet, better known as Captain Beefheart, a singer/composer from the 1960s to the early-80s, and the word was a reference to his song ”Dropout Boogie,” from his debut album Safe As Milk, released in 1967. The word “adapter” is repeated 12 times in the song and is so insistent as to be almost like a chorus.
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