James Bowen - A Street Cat Named Bob

But for every person that gave me a dirty look another half dozen smiled and nodded at me. One West Indian lady, weighed down with bags of shopping, gave us a big, sunny grin.

‘Don’t you two make a pretty picture,’ she said.

No one had engaged me in conversation on the streets around my flat in all the months I’d lived here. It was odd, but also amazing. It was as if my Harry Potter invisibility cloak had slipped off my shoulders.

When we got to the crossing point at Tottenham High Road, Bob gave me a look as if to say: ‘Come on, you know what to do now’ and I plonked him on my shoulders.

Soon we were on the bus, with Bob taking his favourite position with his head pressed against the glass. We were on the road again.

I’d been right about the weather. Soon the rain was hammering down, forming intricate patterns on the window where Bob had once more pressed his face tight against the glass. Outside you could just make out a sea of umbrellas. There were people running, splashing through the streets to avoid the downpour.

Thankfully, the rain had eased off by the time we reached the centre of town. Despite the weather there were even bigger crowds in the centre of town than there had been the previous day.

‘We’ll give it a go for a couple of hours,’ I said to Bob as I plonked him on my shoulders and headed off towards Covent Garden. ‘But if it starts to rain again we’ll head back, I promise.’

Walking down Neal Street, once again people were stopping us all the time. I was happy to let them fuss over Bob, within reason. In the space of ten minutes, half a dozen people had stopped us and at least half of them had asked to take a picture.

I quickly learned that the key was to keep moving, otherwise you’d be surrounded before you knew it.

It was as we were reaching the end of Neal Street near where I turned towards James Street that something interesting happened.

I suddenly felt Bob’s paws readjusting themselves on my shoulder. Before I knew it he was sliding off my shoulder and clambering down my arm. When I let him hop on to the pavement he began walking ahead of me. I extended the lead to its full length and let him go. It was obvious that he recognised where we were and was going to take it from here. He was leading the way.

He marched ahead of me all the way to the pitch where we’d been the previous night. He then stood there, waiting for me to take out my guitar and lay the guitar case down for him.

‘There you go, Bob,’ I said. He instantly sat down on the soft case as if it was where he belonged. He positioned himself so that he could watch the world walk by – which, this being Covent Garden, it was.

There had been a time when I’d had ambitions of making it as a real musician. I’d harboured dreams of becoming the next Kurt Cobain. As naive and completely stupid as it sounds now, it had been part of my grand plan when I’d come back to England from Australia.

That’s what I’d told my mother and everyone else when I’d set off.

I’d had my moments and, for a brief time, I felt like I might actually get somewhere.

It was hard for a while, but things changed around 2002, when I’d got off the streets and into some sheltered accommodation in Dalston. One thing had led to another and I’d formed a band with some guys I’d met. We were a four-piece guitar band called Hyper Fury, which told you a lot about my and my band mates’ state of mind at the time. The name certainly summed me up. I was an angry young man. I really was hyper-furious – about life in general and about feeling that I’d not had a fair break in particular. My music was an outlet for my anger and angst.

For that reason we weren’t very mainstream. Our songs were edgy and dark and our lyrics even more so, which was hardly surprising, I suppose, given that our influences were bands like Nine Inch Nails and Nirvana.

We actually managed to put out two albums, though EPs might be a more accurate description. The first came out in September 2003 with another band, Corrision. It was called Corrision v Hyper Fury and featured two pretty heavy tracks, called ‘Onslaught’ and ‘Retaliator’. Again, the titles offer a fairly strong indication to our musical philosophy. We followed that up six months later in March 2004 with a second album called Profound Destruction Unit , which featured three songs, ‘Sorry’, ‘Profound’ and another version of ‘Retaliator’. It sold a few copies but it didn’t really set the world on fire. Put it this way: we didn’t get booked for Glastonbury.

We did have some fans, though, and managed to get some gigs, mainly in north London and places like Camden, in particular. There was a big Gothy kind of scene going on there and we fitted in well with it. We looked and certainly sounded the part. We did gigs in pubs, we played at squat parties, basically we played wherever we were invited. There was a moment when we might have started to make progress. The biggest gig we did was at The Dublin Castle, a famous music pub in north London, where we played a couple of times. In particular, we played in the Gothic Summer festival there, which was quite a big deal at the time.

Things were going so well for us at one point that I teamed up with a guy called Pete from Corrision and started our own independent label, Corrupt Drive Records.

But it didn’t really work or, to be more accurate, I didn’t really work.

At the time my best friend Belle and I were in what would be a brief relationship together. We got on great as friends. She is a really caring person and looked after me, but as a relationship it was kind of doomed from the beginning. The problem was that she was on drugs as well and she was co-dependent. It really didn’t help me – or her – as we struggled to kick our habits. When one of us was trying to get clean the other one was using and vice versa. That’s co-dependency all over.

So it made it really difficult for me to break the cycle.

I was trying to break the cycle, but, looking back on it, if I’m honest I wouldn’t say I was trying hard. I think part of it was that I didn’t really feel like it was ever going to become a reality. Mentally, at least, the band was something I put on the back-burner. It was too easy to slip back into old habits – quite literally.

By 2005 I’d accepted that the band was a hobby, not a way of making a living. Pete carried on with the record label and still runs it now, I believe. But I was struggling so badly with my habit that I fell by the wayside – again. It became another one of those second chances that I let slip through my fingers. I guess I’ll never know what might have been.

I’d never given up on music, however. Even when the band broke up and it was clear that I wasn’t going to get anywhere professionally, I would spend hours most days playing on the guitar, improvising songs. It was a great outlet for me. God knows where I’d have been without it. And busking had certainly made a difference to my life in recent years. Without it – and the money it generated – I dread to think what I would have ended up doing to earn cash. That really didn’t bear thinking about.

That evening, as I settled down into the session, the tourists were once more out in force.

It was a repeat of the previous day. The moment I sat down – or, more precisely, the moment Bob sat down – people who would normally have rushed by began to slow down and interact with him.

Again, it was women rather than men who showed the most interest.

Not long after I’d started playing, a rather stony-faced traffic warden walked past. I saw her look down at Bob and watched as her face melted into a warm smile.

‘Aah, look at you,’ she said, stopping and kneeling down to stroke Bob.