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haz
mark hampton
"…Sitting in a field,
full of flowers,
Trying to climb,
All the high towers…
Then I'm whisked away
by the wind.
Then I'm high…"
From the very beginning, Haz was the band slut. While the others played with Flem and Flem alone, Haz would join a new band every Monday and Wednesday. At one SBHS gig, he played in all five bands, and video footage reveals he appeared regularly in the audience as well. He left Flem, he rejoined Flem. He was a hippy, a rocker, a new-wave punk, even a Christian. The sad truth was that Haz was hiding behind a smokescreen of different identities, terrified that the world would discover that his one real passion was for ickle-pretty little flowers. While his spin-doctors told the press he was out drinking or miming to Led Zeppelin in his bedroom, he'd really be sitting in a forest glen comparing the reproductive/growth mass ratios of small ferns. The rest of the band knew the truth, but helped maintain the charade. They christened him 'Mad Louie', and told journalists he had shagged Margaret Thatcher at the height of the Falklands conflict, in a threesome with General Pinochet (an allegation that neither politician has ever denied). In retrospect, his mellow composition 'Field of Flowers' can be seen as a moment of rare honesty, and a prophetic vision of how he was to spend his post-Flem years. In his academic "high towers", he is, at last, high.
