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It’s weird how much you will come to appreciate school the very second you start uni. It happens to everyone. As the people carrier pulls away, leaving you in your tiny blank cell alone for the first time in your life, you will feel as vulnerable as a new born kitten dragged from its mother’s teats and dumped in a burning wheelie bin.

Before you’ve even Blu Tacked the Bob Marley poster to the cigarette smoke-stained walls, the realisation will hit you that, as great as it is to be away from home, the whole experience is going to be much less exciting than you thought it would be.

Once the first week is over, you will realise that you will never again experience anything with the same wide-eyed naivety as you did for the first time at school. Here are just a few things you will miss.

FOOD
School food, as genuinely awful as it was for you, tasted fucking delicious at the time. Processed “chicken” burgers speckled with bits of bone slapped between two pieces of warm soggy bread and covered in ketchup so cheap and acidic it could strip paint? Yum! I don’t care what Jamie Oliver the fucking cunniliungus face thinks, school dinners rule.

When you get to uni it’s all healthy eating and “Did you know those crisps have monosodium glutamate in? I only eat Kettle Chips because I like to be in control of my body at all times” and “You know you should shit in the lotus position to release all your negative energy, right?” That last bit has nothing to do with food, obviously, but someone did say it to me at uni once.

MONEY
The day you start uni is the day your money trouble begins. All you had to do at school was stick out your hand each morning and your mum would pour enough change into your hand for as many Chomp bars and cans of 7-Up as you could stomach. Life was a breeze.

Now you’re at uni you’ve got rent to deal with, bills to pay and food to buy. For the first time you will have friends who want their 10p back, with interest. You will be the guy buying toilet roll for the whole house because your flatmates would rather wipe their arses across the edge of the sink than fork out 69p for six rolls of tracing paper.

Oh yeah, and then there’s that problem of the tens of thousands of pounds you now owe the bank once it’s all over.

SCHOOL DISCOS
Ahh, how amazing were these? Prancing around high on a mixture of fruit punch and petrol you found in the shed at home, locking lips with anything that came within three feet of you, and trying not to ejaculate if you got to do a slow dance with a girl. And all this while teachers stood there watching with full-on tents in their trousers. Actually, that was a bit of a weird, pervy experience, thinking about it now.

You’ll never again get the chance to dampen a digit with a fat girl behind a tall stack of chairs in the assembly hall, and then go and let your mates have a sniff of your finger as you all stand around giggling.

Instead, you’ve got to ply some hippo at the student union with 11 pints of cider to get her back to your room, only for her to cry during sex and tell you she’s deeply in love with some morbidly obese 60-year-old lecturer with neck acne and a chronic sweat problem.

Photo by Sohrab Farahmand

FIGHTS
You are very, very lucky if you will see even one of these at uni. I don’t think I witnessed a single punch being thrown the whole three years I was there. School fights were amazing though – everyone huddled round screaming, “FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!” like they were watching two randy hamsters battle it out. I’d say I must have witnessed about 30 fights in my first week of secondary school. You’ll never again get anything that rivals the fun of you and 40 of your mates going on the bus to take on three tiny kids two years below in a nearby private school.

“SPECIAL NEEDS”
None of the “special needs” kids make it to uni. You know, those slightly unhinged, but quite smiley people who can barely spell their name, constantly smell of piss and come from severely odd families. You will not find that innocence and naivety in anyone you meet ever again. As much as you laugh at them while at school you will come to miss them (until they are hunting you down on Facebook to tell you they have four kids and they weigh about 25 stone and would love to hang out).

CLOTHING
Let’s compare the average school uniform to the average university attire.

School: Cute girls with pigtails in short skirts, long white socks and open neck white shirts (I’m talking about those who are 16 and upwards here, obviously). And you get to spend every day hanging out with them. You are forced to hang out with these divine goddesses. I don’t think you can ever possibly comprehend how much pervy Japanese men would pay to experience this even for five minutes, let alone five years.

University: Frumpy, flat-chested, frigid girls in combat trousers, a Che Guevara T-shirt, a Berghaus fleece borrowed from their older brother who was in the TA and trainers which can double as hiking boots.

NAME-CALLING
You can’t call people “a fucking idiot cuntface dicksplash” any more because somebody in the Fucking Idiot Cuntface Dicksplash Student Protection Society will overhear and then they will have a massive protest outside the student union the next morning and threaten a mass suicide unless you are thrown out.

Instead you have to be civil and mature the whole time and stop yourself any time you go to say something offensive. At first people will think you’ve got Tourette’s with all the unfinished outbursts you’ll be making. Fuck ’em!

PRANCEHALL

From the archives.

In between all the partying, making friends and doing a miniscule amount of work you will have to do to scrape a pass in your degree, you will also have your time taken up with a thing called “being ill”.

Once you are taken out of the sterile test tube of the family home and are exposed to the myriad health risks that university lifestyle throws up, you’re really going to have to start to look after yourself properly.

Uni is a big festering, dirty shit pit of student digs, going out every night for weeks on end, eating food that isn’t really fit for human consumption and gorging yourself on bad drugs and cheap vodka.

If you ever bother to go to your lectures, sitting in a big room with your fellow students and having germs pumped around a confined room by dirty air conditioning doesn’t help too much either. In short, going to university is going to make you ill. Here’s what you can look forward to.

STDs
With the brave new world of the first year free-for-all fanny-buffet that cheap drinks and awful pop music in the student union brings comes new danger. In theory, every one goes at it like rabbits at university, but in reality after the first few months most people end up chained up in relationships or are put off sex having caught a hefty dose. There is more chlamydia going around your average uni than in a brothel, probably because hookers get checked more often. There were 121,986 cases reported across the UK last year, an impressive 150 per cent increase since 1998. While the symptoms are hard to spot and occasionally border on non-existent you may start pissing fire and passing gross discharge. Also watch out for the American exchange students because they are the ones who are most likely to have genital warts (we don’t know the reason for this but Yank students have higher levels of genital warts than Brits. Fact). Once you get warts you have the virus for life. Treating them involves a lengthy, repetitive and painful freeze/burn combo on your genitals. There are a tonne more STDs you can get and none of them are good. The best advice is to just keep it in the bag.

MUMPS
More people are getting mumps in 2008 than ever before. Due to lower immunity levels among young adults there was a five-fold increase in cases of mumps from 2003 to 2004. It’s a virus and spreads nicely when you have 200 dirty, room-bound 19-year-olds living in a hermetically sealed block. If your glands swell up and your balls follow suit, you could end up infertile or deaf, so when the halls administration freak out and make everyone report to the dining hall to get a jab just go and do it. It’s probably the only thing you will see executed efficiently during your three years of university life. Mumps is spread by micro droplets of gob in the air from coughs and sneezes, so there isn’t much you can do to avoid it, except refraining from liking sick peoples’ spit, and washing your hands a lot. You may look like Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets but at least you won’t be frothing like an extra in a Romero movie.

DIET
People’s excuses for eating woefully for three years are usually something to do with good food being “too expensive”. This is utter bullshit. It costs a lot more to buy takeaways, sweets and shitty microwave ready meals than it does to go to the local greengrocers once a week and buy a load of fruit. It sounds a bit gay, but the whole five-a-day thing really works. Similarly, things like vegetables and wholegrain rice and pasta are pretty affordable, especially en masse. Not eating like a Glaswegian dole monkey will help stave off most minor ailments and may even go some way toward giving your skin some sort of colour, rather that the typical waxen student pallor. Eating well is the best way to avoid getting ill and takes zero effort. Try it. If you are cripplingly lazy then just buy smoothies and have a glass a day. Good luck with the heartburn though.

MENINGITIS
This is a biggie. Meningitis is probably one of the most dangerous things you can catch at uni. There were over 1,000 cases of meningitis in the UK diagnosed last year with a 10 per cent mortality rate amongst sufferers. Considering that Meningitis UK believes the disease to be rife among students and without your mum there to fret over you and check you for rashes every time you have a headache you will probably just assume you have flu for the first week. It’s worth looking like a pussy and asking your flatmates to check your back for rashes if you feel really ill, otherwise you could end up with your brain swelling and a nasty case of being dead. If you have a killer headache, a fever, stiff neck, and you are chucking up you may want to rush to the doctors. But remember that not all sufferers develop the infamous rash, so if your other symptoms match, get moving.

SPORTS INJURIES
If you are good enough / care enough about playing extremely competitive games of rugby then you can join your departmental team. You get to wear a special tracksuit and say things like, “Dude, those wankers from the geography 2nd XV are going to get totally annihilated tomorrow, yah.” But the whole uni sports thing really comes into its own when you hurt yourself. The people at the hospital give you crutches and you can hobble into lectures drawing extra attention to your sporting prowess as well as upping the chances of getting your dick into a sporty girl. Sports girls are sluttier than any other female student demographic, they like to go to parties with the rugby team and end up being filmed on camera phones sticking beer bottles in their asses. Crutches are like an aphrodisiac to them so, use them well.

PILES
People don’t like to talk about these much. They are one of the most unglamorous ailments you can have and come with zero sympathy from anyone but they are a very real ailment. You see, what most people don’t know is that something like one in four men get them at some point in their lives. Kids don’t get them much, but once you go to uni you had better stop trying to force shits out before going clubbing or farting on command, otherwise you will end up with painful little blood filled lumps popping in and out of your arse all day. These are exacerbated by spicy food, alchohol and sugar (aka your diet). Your best bet is to shit leisurely, hold back on the curries and avoid sitting on cold concrete, or radiators. Seriously. Piles suck ass.

DIARRHOEA
One of the real downsides of living on bad food and drinking vast quantities of cheap lager is the infamous “beeriod”. Fun as it seems to be downing pints all day, see how much fun it is pissing out of your arsehole for three hours the morning after. Uni is where a lot of people get into using stuff like Imodium. These are spiteful bombs of hate as far as your colon is concerned. In spite of the wondrous advances of modern science it seems there is still no such thing as a anti-diarrhoea pill that stops you pooing but doesn’t give you shit-block for four days. Taking Imodium means you will have to take a laxative later. Therein starts the never-ending cycle of chemically altered crapping. Best thing to do is just take it easy for 24 hours and resign yourself to a day in the toilet. No big deal. You might even actually get some reading done.

WEED PSYCHOSIS
About a fifth of dedicated weed smokers start freaking out at around 19 years old. We’re not talking about guys that have a cheeky spliff at a party now and then, we mean those kids who wake up and reach across for their vaporiser before rolling out of bed every afternoon. Those who made it through sixth form will either start losing it soon after freshers’ week, or they will be fine forever. The fragile ones start out getting irritable, jumpy and not being able to deal with the “green hangover” and end up walking around halls at 3 AM staring at their feet and scarpering into doorways if other sentient beings approach. An increasing number of students are ending up in therapy due to smoking skunk all the time. Cannabis users are 40 per cent more likely to develop a psychotic illness than non-users and heavy users are more than twice as likely to suffer mental illness. It is predicted that by 2010 25 per cent of all cases of schizophrenia will be cannabis related. This will lead to things like “long-term social interaction issues”, so if you don’t want to end up being the guy who spends the rest of his twenties in his room repeatedly checking that the windows are locked and that the oven is turned off then take it easy.

MENTAL HEALTH
People who suffer from mental health issues tend to keep them quiet at school. Similarly, it pays not to be too blatantly insane when you are looking for a job. But at uni the crazies love to party. They all come loony leaping out of the madhouse and head down to the bar for all to see. Usually they sort their shit out and become functioning human beings, but there’s always going to be one who you’re going to find nailing bacon to the bathroom walls. I knew a girl who ate ketchup in a bowl for her three meals a day and talked to her dead grandmother every night. As fun as it seems in halls to have an “eccentric” buddy, moving in with mad people can be tiring. If you are someone with issues: think carefully about whether three years in what is effectively a madhouse is right for you.

BRUNO BAYLEY

Without daytime television, students would have an awful lot more time on their hands. They would have enough time to wash their genitals and cook nice meals and study more and sit around camp fires singing songs about carefree squirrels and stuff. Maybe the world would be a better place. In fact, the world would definitely be a better place. Unfortunately daytime TV will never go away, so for the good of the world we have made a definitive list of which programmes you should and shouldn’t waste your precious time watching. Thanks, us. No problem, world.

TELEVISION THAT SUCKS

NEIGHBOURS
Due to its scheduling this mundane tramp through Antipodean triviality will sort of act like your alarm clock. You are bound to have at least one housemate who insists on watching this every day so you can work out how heavy the night before was by whether you wake up in time for the midday or evening show. Nothing ever changes anyway so if you snooze through both it’s no big thing.

THUNDERCATS
You aren’t seven anymore. You don’t get up at 6 AM and eat four bowls of Coco Pops cereal and then doze off in the afternoon (well, we really hope you still don’t). Trying to re-live some lost sense of innocence by buying T-shirts and DVD box sets from HMV is pretty creepy. If you are not careful you will start playing Warhammer 40000 again and then you are one step away from becoming comic book guy from The Simpsons.

STAR TREK
By the time you live in your own house you have no excuse for not having Sky+. Once you get there you will soon begin to wonder why this is on almost constantly every day on about 15 different channels. It’s almost impossible to have a clue what is going on as they seem to have a total disregard for ordering and everyone looks like they have a cauliflower stuck to their heads. It might however have some kind of brainwashing quality as usually discerning people seem to fall under its spell like Xanax-dosed flies to a big glowing orb.

THE BILL
How is this thing still going? The only good thing about it was that alcoholic womaniser guy that played Tosh. He was pretty good and he had a great moustache. Now he’s gone it’s kind of like The Office but without the funny bits. This is largely because crime in Britain is generally pretty lame. People aren’t stupid or opiated enough to commit crimes that look fun on TV.

COUNTDOWN
How is this fun? Rudimentary spelling and maths games? Do people actually fancy Carol Vorderman? It’s like your mum presenting the Daily Mail coffee break page after she’s been to a health spa for the weekend. Count me out.

TELEVISION THAT DOESN’T

MONK
This guy is great. For a minute from the name you might think that he is Cadfael – the detective/ rebel/warrior/monk. In fact he is just a guy called Monk who gets into a whole bunch of scrapes and comes off like the wisecracking bastard child of Kojak and Columbo.

AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE
Rather than buying into the revivalist trappings of studentdom, why not attempt to watch something aimed at human beings with a reading level above Peter and Jane stories? This, along with pretty much every Adult Swim cartoon, is a tiny piece of greatness that you should never let the rugby-playing, campus bar crawling cunts find out about. Those people ruin everything that is good and are your enemies.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
Now here is some sci-fi you can run with. Not the outmoded camp fiesta from the late 70s with Face from the A-Team but the amped up Sky One remake. It takes the pretty cool anyway pretext of the original series (rebels on the run from scary killer robot army) and shoves a testosterone-stuffed dildo up its arse until everything explodes in a massive action-soaked orgasm.

THE WIRE
This is the best thing on TV full stop. Even better than The Sopranos. It manages to show you both sides of the fruitless war on drugs in the notorious projects of West Baltimore. It makes you love the cops and the dealers because it so perfectly pitches the moral ambiguity of each side. It also has drunken police brutality, tonnes of heroin and crack, gun play and an amazing soundtrack.

HAVE I GOT NEWS FOR YOU?
This is consistently one of the funniest things on British TV and remains well worth going out of your way to catch. It’s basically Private Eye on TV so you get prescient, witty, topical, social comedy handed to you in handy half hour chunks. If you watch this every Friday you can basically get away with not reading the newspaper for a week.

Drugs can be fun and amazing but they can also totally ruin your life,make you penniless, change your personality for the worse, send you to prison and kill you. We’d say that the latter half of that sentence was more consistent with what happens to people who REALLY get into drugs.

GHB

Lots of you will experience your first brushes with the wild and crazy world of drugs at university. Some of you will puke up, have a panic attack and never do them again, but the majority of you will keep doing them, in all their different forms, until something really bad happens or your parents find out.

With this in mind, here’s a rundown of the drugs that are currently “doing the rounds” among “the young folk”. We got the guys at FRANK, the drugs helpline, to tell us about them as well.We thought only leather boys who went to fisting nights in Berlin sex clubs still did this but apparently it’s making a resurgence at student nights. People are putting it in Snapple bottles and drinking it. Expect a euphoric high that’s akin to alcohol without the sloppiness, bad breath and aggression. Be forewarned, though – mixing it with alcohol or taking too much will end up with you puking your guts out, passing out on the spot and possibly dying. Do not under any circumstances take it with coke – it will make you feel like your head is going to explode.

FRANK says: A small capful will give you a euphoric effect, make you feel happy, sensual, uninhibited. If you take too much it’ll act like a sedative and a downer and make you really sleepy. Too much will make you feel really disorientated and physically sick. Your muscles can go numb and they can start to go into spasm. You may well make yourself unconscious, maybe it will slow down your respiratory system, maybe it’ll stop.

ADRENALINE INJECTIONS

These little darts of potential pleasure are prescription only but as they are given out to anyone and everyone who is allergic to nuts, or bee or wasp stings, you are pretty sure to know at least one person who can get a year’s supply from one trip to the chemist. They are intended for people whose allergies result in them going into anaphylactic shock, which causes tensing of the muscles and can lead to death by asphyxiation. The EpiPen combats this tension by relaxing the muscles with pure unadulterated adrenaline. Ever read or seen Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? Yup, adrenaline is the stuff they do at the very end that causes a three day blackout. You can get over stabbing the inch long propelling needle into your thigh.

FRANK says: Adrenaline is going to make your heart go faster. It’s not a common thing which people take. It will make everything go faster – your heart, your breathing. There’s a big danger of a heart attack. It’s something that should only ever be prescribed. It’s potentially a very dangerous drug if taken on its own without a controlled medical dose.

FOXY (5-MeO-DIPT)

Foxy is one of those drugs that used to be legal, but got reclassified so it’s really, really hard to find now. It usually comes in white powder form and is the most unpleasant thing to sniff in the whole world – more unpleasant than sniffing your dad’s hangover poo mixed with vapourised sand and fumes of sulphuric acid. The effects are somewhere between that of an hallucinogen and an aphrodisiac, which means you feel frisky and get mild acid visuals. Like all drugs, the situation where you ingest it can make or break your experience. Do take with your new girlfriend at a friend’s house party, don’t take at a squat party surrounded by horny AIDS hippies.

FRANK says: I haven’t heard of that. It sounds like a form of ecstasy. Does it have a fox printed on it?

CLEAR

So-called because it dissolves to give a colourless solution, CLEAR is currently a favourite in European gay clubs, meaning it is only a matter of time before it will make its way over here. It gives a dreamy sort of high that works by actively inhibiting neurotransmitters. This causes a slowing of synapse reactions to such an extent that sound and other sensory perceptions take almost a hundred times longer to be detected by the brain. This results in the user feeling totally disassociated from their surroundings. The funniest thing about CLEAR is that in high doses it leads people into thinking they are invisible.

FRANK says: I’ve never heard of it. Quite often the gay community is where drugs start being taken - maybe even five or six years before everyone else does. That’s where crystal meth was started from. The gay community are the ones who started using ecstasy before anyone else. They’ve been doing it for years. This drug sounds like temazepam and things like that. You know, people who took those drugs used to think they were invisible. You could watch them in the shops and they could be stealing things, but in actual fact everybody could see what they were doing.

ZOLPIDEM

These are turbo nutter sleeping pills that can be bought over the counter in India. They are made to give schizophrenics a complete knockout so they don’t have lucid dreams and hear voices (great if your first term isn’t going too well). If you have been doing other drugs they have a crazy effect on you before rendering you completely unconscious. They make you really happy but slow, like a Down’s Syndrome kid that has been given a daisy chain to play with. Most commonly they make people run on autopilot and do things that they will have no memory of. The best thing about these is that you get up the next day after a nice sleep feeling great, no matter what you have been doing. The worst thing is there is a good chance you may piss all over your mate’s bathroom floor, then be woken up in a really nasty manner an hour or so later and forced to clean it all up in front of everyone (cough, cough). Don’t do in a public setting – the effect these things have on you is like the Energizer bunny running out of batteries. This opens up loads of mugging and “bum-the-unconscious-dude” opportunities for the public at large.

FRANK says: That is a prescription drug. You need to call NHS Direct before you take any type of prescription drug. I’m not sure if that’s a depressant or a tranquiliser. Tranquilisers are going to slow everything down. They are drugs which are supposed to be prescribed so if you don’t have a condition, then don’t take them. At best you’ll feel really woozy and out of it, at worst it can stop your heart.

DMT

Aka the-single-most-fucked-upthing- that-will-ever-happen-toyou. We can’t even start to explain how intense this is. No one can. It is one of the strongest hallucinogens known to man. Therefore, not the most social drug in the world. DMT is the chemical released by the brain in the final moments of life as your body shuts down to ease the moment of death. The great thing about this drug is that it only lasts for 10 minutes and there is no comedown from it. You could probably do it during lunch break at a court case and no one would be any the wiser.

FRANK says: DMT is a hallucinogen, so obviously when you hallucinate you’re never really sure what’s real and what’s not real. You could end up getting a bad trip. DMT is meant to be even more powerful than LSD, which is the best known hallucinogenic drug, so you’ve got all the dangers that go with that. If you’re in a bad mood, then you’re probably going to have a really bad trip. It definitely won’t make your mood any better. That bad trip could end up being an absolute nightmare and a nightmare that’s not going to finish until the drug leaves your system. Never take anything like that on your own. You’re going to start seeing things. It might start off with colours being brighter and then the coat stand in the corner might turn into a person. It might turn into a person you want to hug or it might turn into a person who you think is coming to kill you and that can be really frightening. You’re not in control, so you’ll misinterpret what you see. That big cuddly toy outside which is walking towards you might in actual fact be a bus. Therefore, it’s incredibly dangerous.

OXYCODONE

Aka “hillbilly heroin”, this is the drug that enslaved the Midwest of America at the start of the millennium. A super strong painkiller designed for blue collar workers who’d lost their leg in a logging accident, the itchy, smacky cosiness of these little white pills became so popular that people started to injure themselves on purpose just to get a prescription. You can get hold of these from crazy rich American girls or Yank bands on tour. It’s basically pharmaceutical heroin so it can make you feel really fucked up and is highly addictive.

FRANK says: This is a prescription drug. You should not take this unless you need to. It is for cancer patients. It can cause dizziness, light-headedness, nausea, sedation and vomiting. You need to speak to a doctor about this.

VICE STAFF

WORDS BY JOHN MCDONNELL
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TED PEARCE

At some point in your university life you will end up living in an area that is swarming with packs of wild-eyed rudeboys who, given half a chance, will happily clear your room of anything worth more than a packet of Maltesters. Securing your home and deterring would-be burglars is therefore very important. Here are some tips on how to do this.

PLACING THE TRAPS
Making your house look as unattractive as possible (despite the fact it is overflowing with 17-inch MacBooks and Lord of the Rings boxsets) is key. Think of it this
way: would you pick up a £20 note if it was covered in dog shit? Well, OK, apart from you, most people wouldn’t. I recently discovered a very effective way to make one’s house look literally very unappealing. This summer I had a fly problem in my house so I bought a load of sticky bits of plastic and stuck them on my windows to catch the fuckers. It was a terrible idea. Within a few days the adhesive strips were covered with dying flies. A couple of days later, these rotting insect corpses had spawned clumps of sticky yellow larvae. Up close, it was one of the most putrid things I have ever seen. Attach a load of these to the outside of your most vulnerable windows and any greasy, weed-addled teen who approaches will be dry heaving if they get within four feet. In fact, soon people will be crossing the street to avoid your house.

SQUIRTING THE PERIMETER
When I moved into my new flat at the start of the year, a loud, camp American man would sit on the wall outside my bedroom window on the phone at 1 AM and keep me awake with his high-pitched squeals. So I did what any normal person would do. I smeared the top of the wall with the contents of a large tub of Vaseline and then splashed lots of thick bleach on top. He hasn’t been back since. If there is a gang of kids sitting on the wall outside your house every day, eventually they will decide to venture a bit closer and, next thing you know, one of them will be scrambling out of your kitchen window with your housemate’s George Foreman Lean Mean Fat Reducing Grilling Machine under their arm. You could use the method I have just described to deter teenagers loitering outside your property. A more fun take on this solution, however, would be to spread mayonnaise all over the wall and then pepper this with bits of leftover kebab meat or discarded bits of fried chicken (which will no doubt be thrown nearby). If you can’t be bothered doing that, putting up a sign which says “BEWARE! THIS IS A GAY DOGGING AREA” should also do the trick.

HIT ’EM FOR SIX
OK, so you’ve done everything in your power to keep would-be thieves from your house (well, except installing a burglar alarm). But what would you do if someone
does manage to break into your house? First, you pray they stumble across one of your housemates’ rooms first and there is a violent, bloody struggle, after which they flee (having maybe or maybe not mortally wounded your pal). If this doesn’t happen, you need to make sure the burglar has real difficulty getting into your room. If your bedroom door doesn’t have a lock, jam two wooden or rubber wedges underneath your door when you head off to slumberville at night and no matter how hard someone on the other side pushes, they wont be able to open the door. It is of course very easy for someone to simply slide these wedges away from the door and then casually stroll into your room, but most would-be burglars are so stupid they can’t even tie their own shoelaces (hopefully). Should they manage to get in, however, you will need a weapon at the ready with which to batter them to death. If you’re living with a well-to-do chap from the countryside, borrow his cricket bat and sleep with it under your bed. Alternatively, if you’re living with an American, use their baseball bat, and if you’re cohabiting with a medical student, try their squash racket for size. You may want to properly weaponise the bat by banging some nails into it or lining the edge with razor blades. The added bonus of this is that when Ollie is practicing his sweeps and leg glances in his room he may accidentally slash a major artery.

WORDS BY ALEX GODFREY, PHOTOS COURTESY OF MOMENTUM.
Dominic Murphy is a British commercials director. He met Vice co-founder Shane Smith a decade ago, and together they’ve made a great film called White Lightnin’, which is just out on DVD and totally deserves your attention. Set in West Virginia, it’s a story about a very troubled man, Jecso White, “The Dancing Outlaw”. He is an impulsive force of nature who lives life to its fullest, whether he’s dancing, drinking, fucking or fighting. Budding directors take note: here are Dominic’s top five filmmaking tips.

LET YOUR IDEA BOIL
Dominic and Shane developed the story for years before being satisfied enough to begin production. Dominic Murphy: This all came about because Shane had got fascinated by Jesco through documentary material, and he went down and met him and they bonded. Shane was excited about this guy, interested in his extreme personality and his whole culture. He reimagined Jesco’s story and came up with a more extreme version of what might have happened to him. Shane sent me this monologue, the story of Jesco White. At first I thought he was a fictional character, but the story had an integrity and made sense to me.

BE PERSONAL
Dominic went to West Virginia to meet Jesco himself, but was determined not to let him influence their own ideas too heavily. Meeting Jesco didn’t make us change the script much, we were pretty faithful to our original idea. There was this short story that we had that was a narration of his life and we had to build it into a screenplay, and we kept faithful to that. As a director, or creative person, writer, whatever, you’re kind of writing about yourself as much as anything else. There’s an emotional dynamic or awareness going on in the story, and that in a way is the most important thing.

USE CREATIVE LICENCE
The filmmakers never intended White Lightnin’ to be a straight life story, and much of it is fictionalised. We were never trying to portray him directly – it’s not a biopic, it’s a kind of dark fantasy inspired by him. The important things are the same: he was in and out of reform schools, his father did teach him the dancing to try to keep him out of trouble, and his father was murdered, although the scenario was different. Jesco was actually there, this fight broke out and these guys went off and got a shotgun and shot his father. There was tragedy in that the family found it very difficult to stay together after that, but essentially nothing really happened after that to Jesco. Our story is a kind of “What if…”, taking the key themes of his life and projecting them forward, taking it as far as it could go.

CREATE YOUR REALITY
Jesco’s own interpretation of events is dubious. Yeah, the unreliable narrator… Who knows what parts of Jesco’s story are true? There’s an element to storytelling, to memory, that’s unreliable, and I think we tried to build that into the film. There are portions of the film that don’t really add up and that was something we wanted to do, because our Jesco is telling the story, and he doesn’t
know what really happened – he’s
struggling to interpret the reality of
the situation.

MAKE SURE YOUR LEAD ACTOR HAS GOOD EYES
Jesco is portrayed amazingly by Edward Hogg, who despite coming from Doncaster, has the charisma and raw energy to be utterly convincing. His eyes are amazing, they pop off the screen. The UK Film Council, who funded the film, loved the script. But one thing they do, if they’re unsure about any element of it, is they ask filmmakers to make a pilot based on something they’re not 100 percent confident about. With us, they were confident about my filmmaking but they wanted to know who we could get to play this incredible, charismatic yet psychotic character and pull it off. So they gave us some money and we did a pilot and made a documentary of the casting process. We saw hundreds of people, and then I did workshops with about a dozen shortlisted actors. Some of them were bigger
names, but Ed just stood out. For the closing shot of this documentary the camera closed in on his eyes and he looked up. The Film Council watched it and they went: “Wow. You’ve got the money. Go ahead.”

For many students, the best thing about going to university is the gap year. Traditionally, this glorious year of freedom and self-discovery known as G.A.P. (Gigantic All-Year Party) takes place the year before students start their university course but quite a few people are now choosing to take it in the middle of, or immediately after, their studies. Isn’t it better just to jump into an eight-month half-naked trek across the more salubrious slums of the Third World’s tourist resorts than to give up your dream of responsibility-free bohemian bliss forever? If that’s what you’re thinking, read this…

AUSTRALIA
If you travel here on your gap year, you have to be prepared for long slogs in the outback otherwise you risk getting caught up in the tedious holidaymaker parts of the country. Sure, they have big tasty prawns to eat, but culturally it’s akin to spending your holiday in an Outback bar in Islington only without it raining outside. All the best bits about Oz, like Nimbin (a valley about two hours from Byron Bay where they grow literally 1,000 acres of weed) and the Blue Mountains, are off the beaten track so you have to do your homework and be prepared for some serious travelling. Note: Whatever you do, please don’t end up on one of those Oz Experience bus ride testosterone fiestas. Seriously, those things are like 50 rugby-playing guys slapping each other round the face with their dicks and going “yah” a lot. Horrible.

BEACH
The chances are you will end up spending a few nights here with some local down and outs and fellow travellers. Where else is there to go when you run out of money? If you are going to sleep “al fresco” like a dirty old tramp be sure to wake up early and keep your valuables next to parts of your body that can’t be easily pickpocketed. By the way, regularly lying outside exposed to the early morning sun for five hours will leave you with skin like a sunbedloving granny from Essex. You might also get cancer, which is almost as bad.

CAMBODIA
This is a pretty insane place. Did you know that in certain parts you can pay to fire assault rifles and bazookas at cows and other farm animals? Here’s something else weird: our friend Rahul just came back from there and he told us he’d bought a Cambodian police officer’s uniform right off his back. The cop just wandered off in his pants. No lie. He even tried to sell him his gun! Be careful though, some people we know from Brighton went away with a friend who had a little too much of a taste for Cambodia and after getting his student loan on his return to England decided to fuck off back there again. This was three years ago. His parents were recently in the national press offering a £10,000 reward for information on his whereabouts.

DELHI BELLY
Don’t go to India. You will be ejaculating acidic streams of diarrhoea out of your anus as soon as you touch down. It happens to everyone. Also, you will have to face the fact that at one point during your travels you are going to feel really ill and shit your pants. Deal with it.

EUROPE
Sure, South America and South East Asia are cool but there is a whole continent on your doorstep. You know that crap movie Hostel? Well, the former Eastern Bloc countries aren’t quite like that, but they are cheap and full of beautiful girls. An InterRail ticket is next to nothing compared to an around the world flight. Or you could just buy a van, call it Doris and break down all over Stalin’s back garden.

FINDING YOURSELF
This is what it’s all about, man. But while you’re doing that, don’t forget that you are in a strange environment and stand out like a big red greasy carbuncle. Make sure you take any advice the friendlier locals give you. Our intern, James Knight, was about to get a bus over the Laos border into Cambodia when a little old lady came up to him and told him not to get on. James is an open-minded guy so he listened to her advice and instead waited hours for another mode of transport. Later in the day, the bus was hijacked and six tourists were shot. He had a lucky escape.

GAP CHALLENGE
This is one of the many organisations offering pre-college students the chance to work in developing countries like Peru, where you will get to spend all day hanging out with poverty-stricken kids. It may not be as selfishly fun as writhing around a beach on Goa on ketamine with thousands of other British pieces of trash, but it’s more likely to make give you a sense of self-worth and some stories that are better than: “I met this girl from Nottingham and we had sex in the sea, then I got dysentery and now we talk on MySpace occasionally.” Go to www.world-challenge.co.uk to find out more.

HELPING THE NEEDY
Seriously, though, who really wants to go all the way over to the other side of the world just so they can build some stupid school or teach blind orphans to tap-dance? If you are going travelling you need to make sure you look after number one. Ride an elephant, see a few temples, maybe take a piss in a massive waterfall, then spend the rest of your cash on booze, drugs and crappy souvenirs like a wine bottle opener in the shape of a man with a turban having his ten foot whanger sucked by a dog.

ICELAND
Don’t go here unless you’re a single mum of three and you want to buy 78,000 sausage rolls for 99p. Oh, the country? It sucks as well. Yeah, so it’s beautiful and everything is open 24 hours, but a beer costs, like, £50. Unless you are an Earl or have won the lottery or something it’s just not feasible. But if you were an Earl you’d probably be in Monaco or St. Tropez or somewhere else, so never mind.

JOB
You will need one of these to be able to afford to go away. So quit whining and get your hands dirty, you useless layabout. Get to temping agencies, bar work, labouring, do whatever it takes. Chances are you still live with mum and dad so any cash you bring in is 100 per cent profit. Enjoy it. Like we keep saying in these Student Guides, you’re going to walk out of university with a minimum of £10,000 debt.

KUALA LUMPUR
Fuck this place as well. Idiots namedrop Kuala Lumpur as a dream gap year destination because it sounds like a place out of Star Wars: Episode 9 where Boba Fett trained to be an assassin for the Empire, but in reality it’s boooring. Look, why go to a builtup urban area when all around it is the wilds of the jungle with lions and tigers and soft-breasted tribeswomen eager to milk some Western sperm onto their faces.

LANGUAGE
Don’t worry, you won’t need to learn any new languages on your travels. If the locals can’t understand some primitive grunts, then they’re not worth speaking to. But on a serious note, it’s probably worth taking some type of phrase book. We recommend one with pictures so you just point at the things you need and shake your fist. When you do this, make sure you’re really drunk, wearing a hat made out of a knotted handkerchief and your face resembles the colour of a freshly boiled lobster dipped in red paint. The locals will respect you for it, we promise.

MUM
You will miss her. She will miss you. You will miss each other. When you run out of money she will send it to you. When you go missing she will go on the news to make an appeal for your return. OK, this probably won’t happen, but remember: the most useful thing you can have on you when you’re gallivanting on the other side of the world is mummy’s telephone number.

NEW FRIENDS
One thing is certain: you will NEVER see the people you meet abroad on your gap year EVER again. In the unlikely event that you do, you’ll soon wish you hadn’t as you sit there staring at your feet waiting for them to get the train back, following the 10 minutes of forced chuckling as they reminisce about the time they slipped on a piece of shit on a rock in a stream and got water in their brand new plimsolls.

OPIUM
AKA guilt-free heroin, AKA the “get out of jail free card”, this drug is one of the best you can get. You have amazing dreams, an amazingly calm, positive outlook on the world and virtually none of the downsides of heroin like itching, projectile vomiting and being imprisoned for eight months for compulsively shoplifting minced beef from Sainsbury’s. North Thailand is the best place to find this stuff, but remember, if you get caught, you may end up in prison for years and years and years, especially if you try and bring some back on the plane with you. Opium’s pungent stuff and the drug dogs will easily sniff it out.

PREACHING
This is what you’ll be doing for the next two years after you come back. You’ll be sat at the uni bar regaling people with stories like the time you met some crazy religious holy man on the beach who sold you some mushrooms and made you “the most wicked potato curry you ever tasted” inside an old wigwam that smelled like twoweek- old cat litter and beer. Just remember that no one gives a shit about your “wacky” travelling exploits apart from yourself, so show some restraint and save yourself some friends.

QUEBEC
We met a girl there who knew stuff like Ian MacKaye was in a band called Teen Idles before Minor Threat. She also knew you can still get the Evergreen seven inch on Gravity but the LP is impossible to find. Basically it’s an OK place if you’re an emo nerd.

RELIGION
Remember, this is important to a lot of people, so don’t go offending anyone by trying to make jokes about suicide bombers or dozens of beautiful virgins or, worse, pretending you know what you’re talking about while drunk in a bar shaped like a pineapple in the middle of Bangkok. It’s interesting that no one ever really goes on gap years to Muslim countries. Why not try somewhere like Pakistan? This supposedly “wartorn” country has whole galaxies of unexplored amazingness that 99 per cent of other kids won’t see. The British Consulate gives out up-to-date, free advice on demand, you know. With a bit of effort you could be in Madagascar or Saudi Arabia next week.

SEX TRADE
Any of you desperate to jump on the AIDS bandwagon, look no further than the people who work in the sex trade in places like the East or Africa. Yessirreeeebob, for less than £10 you can contract this deadly disease by splitting your condom inside the anus of a postop transsexual you thought was a real girl after downing a bottle of whiskey with a scorpion at the bottom. It might be fun at the time, but the next 30 years (if you’re lucky) are going to be a total disaster.

THAILAND
If you’re planning on taking a gap year, this will be top of the list, no doubt. Why are people so keen to go here? We don’t really see the big fuss. You get to go scuba-diving and buy lots of cheap counterfeit clothes and hang out with peasants and loads of other students. Is that really worth spending a year of your life working towards and doing?

UNIVERSITY
Remember during your “horizonexpanding” experience that you are heading back here at the end of it all for three more years of loafing about. There’s no need to go totally crazy every night. Go to a museum or climb a mountain. Visit a temple or try eating a live snake’s heart or something. People who get drunk every day spend most of their time being hungover and lying down in smelly hostels half-asleep while mosquitoes buzz around them, ready to pass on diseases that doctors haven’t even thought up names for yet. Oh yeah, that’s the reason you should NEVER go anywhere vaguely foreign without getting ALL of your innoculations beforehand.

VAN
If you do end up choosing to go to a really, really big place like the US then you should rent a van or a car. They are really fun and you can pretend you are Dean Moriarty from On The Road. They also double as accommodation when you spend your last few dollars on some weed that turns out to be tree bark. Petrol is cheap as dirt in America (that’s why there’s a war) so there are absolutely no excuses.

WORLD
At the end of all this you may realise that Planet Earth is a pretty cool place. If you hang out in darkened rooms for the next three years playing Super Monkey Ball with the sound off while listening to The Dark Side Of The Moon and eating microwave pizzas, it has been wasted on you.

XANAX
We’ve talked about a lot of different drugs, but this is the one you are most likely to end up depending on when you get back. Your year of fun is over and it’s probably all down hill from here. This will be your lifesaver. People get addicted to Valium while travelling which is really great for long plane journeys but not so good when you’re doing seven a day and falling asleep in lectures having totally forgotten the night before when you told your best friend that it was “all over between us.”

YOUTH
People cling on to this until they’re in their mid-30s, but every time they wake up from partying their bodies get weaker by the day. This is why it’s important to pack as much fun and experience into the period between the ages of 18 to 25 as you possibly can. If you waste any of those years by being boring or moaning about how many problems you have, without doing anything about them, you’re going to turn out to be a very angry and sad old person indeed. This is why your gap year HAS to be pushed to the limits.

ZERO
Unless you are in the 0.001 per cent of the population that is a spendthrift, this is the amount of money you will have in the bank at the end of your trip. If you plan it right, it’s also the number of times you will have wished you were back home and the number of cares in the world you will have. Despite the SARS scares, stomach upsets and near-death experiences, your gap year should bring you some of the best times you are ever likely to have!

VICE STAFF

T-shirt model’s own and jeans by Lee. Vest by Quicksilver ‘Roxy’, hot pants by Esprit and trainers by Puma

Sweat top by I Saved Laurence, top by We, shorts by Lacoste, leggings by Puma and trainers by Penn

Dress by Serendipity, bracelet by Serendipity, trainers by Converse, necklace and jewels on dress by Claire’s Accessories

Shorts by Lee and knickers by Motel

TT-shirt by Chunk, jeans by Levi’s and trainers by Vans

Trainers by PF Flyers and Penn

Boxers by King Apparel

Top by Motel, jeans by Lee and trainers by Converse. Top model’s own, jeans by Lee and trainers by PF Flyers

Top by I Saved Laurence and knickers by 55DSL

Being in a band is great, eh?

All you have to do is find three other best friends who are amazingly talented and who you can easily share ten years of your life with while living in the same house, eating the same food, living out of each other’s pockets and having sex with the same people.

You’ll have exactly the same aesthetic sensibilities and will be generous and fair with each other when it comes to sharing interview time, guitar strings and practice space money. You’ll even all agree on the same band name and things like envy, jealousy, drug addiction, alcoholism and writer’s block won’t affect you at all! You’ll all be millionaires and live in country houses by album three! Won’t you? I mean, that’s bound to happen, right? What could go wrong? Ummm. How about EVERYTHING?

FORMING THE BAND

You HAVE to have some kind of common musical ideas. Often student bands are formed around a bunch of half-talented egomaniacs with totally different tastes who think their diversity bonds them together. For example, the Godspeed You Black Emperor fan cellist is fucking the singer who wants to be like if the guy from System Of A Down was a rapper who lives with the drummer who worships The Prodigy who used to go to school with the Franz Ferdinand-obsessed bass player who dates the tambla-player’s Beta Band-loving sister in Bradford, who used to be a backing vocalist but got replaced by the R&B singer from Hull who is an expert in “mixology”, who’s now got the hots for the new total idiot guitarist who lists Aphex Twin, late-Pearl Jam, Jeff Buckley, Dizzee Rascal and The Kinks as his influences. The overall aim of the band is to sound like a Far Eastern-influenced Killers but with drum ‘n’ bass beats, grime MCing, “fucked up shit”, a “Klaxons rave vibe” and early-Velvets, mixed with funk metal, lounge music and homophobic dancehall.

Oh shit, my ears just killed themselves.

BUYING INSTRUMENTS

Goodbye student loan, hello instant-ticket-to-virtuoso-musicianship-and-instant-blowjobs-24-hours-a-day. Maybe. Avoid the local music shops and their rude staff laughing at your outfit and their over-priced Epiphone guitars. The best people to buy guitars off are the desperate, broke third year students who’re about to split up their band because they’ve realised they have no talent whatsoever and Alex, the singer, is “a complete wanker”.

YOUR IMAGE

Like we said, you need a common bond here. Simplicity is best. Nobody likes bands that dress above their station or have outfits that don’t really correspond to the clothes they wear in public. Because your first gig will be under the microscope of everybody you know in university, your image, both on and off stage, should be seamless or everybody will think you’re a big phoney.

YOUR BAND NAME

This also has to reflect your members’ aesthetic interests, i.e. if you’re all self-obsessed outsiders who dwell on Situationism and wear grey cardigans (67 per cent of all bands), you don’t want to be calling your band “Chocolate Tits”, “Anal Chinook” or “Ultraviolet Booze Catastrophe.” Naming yourself after a film you can hire at Blockbuster is also banned, as is anything outside the most obscure book in the world. We get sent 5,670 different MySpace band pages every day and you can separate the wheat from the chaff purely by their names. True.

WRITING SONGS

Ohhh yeahh. That. Buying eyeliner and vintage My Bloody Valentine shirts on eBay is easy. Learning to play your instruments and crafting songs that will make angels weep slow-motion tears of blood that trickle into their vaginas is quite a lot harder. Unless you are in the 0.14 per cent of the population that’s a genius songwriter, here’s where outright plagiarism becomes your best friend. Hint: Read the music press and find out what records people in successful bands are plugging when they do those “What’s on your iPod” featurettes. Buy the records and rip off the basslines to the best songs that weren’t singles. That is literally how 99 per cent of most people write their first song. And unless you’re highly skilled, it’s easier to write a song on a bass than on a guitar or a piano. Fact.

YOUR FIRST GIG

Many bands decide to open their first gig with an “intro”. This is almost always a mistake. For some reason, the intros are usually overblown and totally incongruous with the rest of the set. And I’m sorry, you are not a “tortured musician” if you are on your first gig. Nobody will believe that you are so moved that you will have to pull off your guitar strings and leave the stage to 26 days of wailing feedback. Leave that to bands who’ve been going for 20 years and have lived through multiple deaths, squats and ill fortune. Like, say, Neurosis. For the first six months you should be playing 20 minute sets maximum.

RECORDING YOUR DEMO

Try and befriend somebody who’s already in a moderately successful band that can recommend a good place to do your demo. A friend with a four-track at home is better than turning up at a budget studio with a Rastafarian sound engineer who hates your music and is used to eating handfuls of weed and recording reggae bands playing one bass riff over and over again for three months.

MYSPACE

Sorry but it’s compulsory. Even extreme power electronics groups from Africa have Myspace pages. There is nothing “punk” about not being on here. Again, keep it simple. Bands who resort to flashing lights and animated GIFs receive less hits than people with easy-to-look-at pages. If you’re ugly wear masks or stand in the shadows of the pictures.

INTERVIEWS

If you get as far as being interviewed by somebody like the NME, it’s important to have some sort of well-rehearsed schtick to give the journalist. If you utter the phrase: “We just make music for ourselves and if anybody else likes it, it’s a bonus” to an NME journalist, you run the risk of having your New Bands feature dropped. Have some outrageous claims planned or be prepared to slag off your potential contemporaries so the sub-editor has a good pull-quote to put above your picture. Something like: “The album’s going to blow Exile On Main Street out of the water” or “the guy from Editors’ voice sounds like Alan Partridge doing an Interpol impression” or “Futureheads are basically the same band as Flying Pickets” or “Snow Patrol pee themselves on stage and drink it at the aftershow.”

I guess the main thing we’re saying here is that musical talent is about 40 per cent of the game. There are plenty of alcoholic buskers with more musical talent in their little fingers than everybody in NME this week. Still, you don’t see them being paid £40,000 to play the main stage at Reading, do you?

A large part of rock and roll is having the ability to attract as much attention to yourself as possible, by any means possible, even if it’s by being the biggest cunt in the world. If you want your shitty band to last more than a year, start practicing.

SIGNING A BIG DEAL

There are so many pitfalls and ins and outs of this process that it would take a thousand more pages to even cover half of it comprehensively.

The main thing here is, you will be expected to dedicate your every waking moment to the record company / your band up until the time you’ve made enough money to pay back your advance or you are dropped. This can be fun if you’ve got a good work ethic, have balls of steel and are prepared to spend half of the year locked up in a tour bus, eating shitty food and getting STDs from girls with floppy tits. 90 per cent of bands crumble after three or four years in a mess of drugs, depression, self-loathing and working for their dads. Be careful what you wish for.

ANITA CRAPPER