This reminiscence is taken from the fall 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE, a Deftones special. We’ve sold out our copies, the only ones left are in stores—perhaps there’s one near you? Secure yourself the next 4 issues by subscribing.
The June sun beat down on the windshields of Japanese cars, and the Bosch cordless hedge trimmers whirred like cicadas. Middle-aged marketing execs on road racing bikes were taking deep breaths, readying themselves for the next diving sprint down to Box Hill, while women in yoga leggings the texture of honeycomb discussed exam results. Billy from the residential care home, who wanders the streets all day every day—thumping his bare chest, a dummy in his mouth to stop the voices—was nowhere to be seen.
This is the road where my parents live. Not the one I grew up on exactly, but somewhere I knew all too well, a place I had often come running back to. This time, it was 2PM and I was heading back from an ill-spent evening that had lasted too long and turned the daytime and nighttime inside out. The living room windows were open and I heard the faint crackle of early kick-off football. The Ring cameras on the doorbells seemed to follow me like the eyes of taxidermy in a haunted museum.
As I walked, I thought about how this street had gone from being so normal, so pedestrian—a place for nurses and teachers and double glazers to carve out non-intrusive lives—to a Long Island-style outpost of City wealth. The street existed in a state of uncivic paranoia. Outsiders were flagged up like bandits on a neighborhood WhatsApp, images of their cars posted for local scrutiny. Apparently, I’d already been mentioned several times.
And then, that humdrum suburban near-silence was exploded by something; a violent jangle scratched-out through some kind of primitive amplification system. The sound of half-formed hands working their way across nickel-wound strings and maplewood.
“Outsiders were flagged up like bandits on a neighborhood WhatsApp… Apparently, I’d already been mentioned several times”
I stopped in my tracks, trying to work out if I had heard what I thought I had. Leaning toward the sound I tried decoding the register, the rhythm, the part that came next. It turned out my instincts had been right; it was the opening salvo of a song I hadn’t heard in a long, long time. It was a song I too used to play on a £60 practice amp, on a similar street, similarly badly: “Be Quiet and Drive” by Deftones, a peculiarly earnest slice of NorCal nu-metal that, back in 2002, ensnared the imagination of West London boys.
Then it all came flooding back. The song seemed to be a genuinely Proustian impetus, in a way that many things touted as such are not. Robinsons fruit squash never transported me anywhere but the dentist; Jamie T didn’t take me back to long nights on Wimbledon Common; even methylenedioxy-methamphetamine isn’t portalling me like it used to. But hearing this really kicked up the butterflies in my stomach. It was more like past life therapy than French literature.
I found myself in a world of heavy denim dragging through mud; cheap silver jewelry leaving green stains on hairless skin; the taste of warm Dr Pepper, gin, and stomach acid on its way out of my mouth; making out with a chubby girl in fairy wings. A part of my brain that I thought had died—or more accurately, had simply forgotten existed—reopened itself to me, and out through it came a torrent of long-lost characters and the myths that made them human. I remembered one local mosher who’d attached a full-sized license plate to his wallet chain. I remembered Amit Raj-Deu telling me that Marylin Manson sent a live puppy out into a mosh pit once and demanded it came back in nine pieces, or he wouldn’t finish his set. Where did this happen? “In America,” of course.
I wondered if these people were on LinkedIn now.
That night, lying on my bed with the windows open, I wondered about the boy I imagined playing the song. How had he found it, and what had he found in it? Had a girl from school brushed him off, and now he wanted to drive and drive into the night, just like Chino Moreno did? Or was he younger than I assumed, and seeking flight from something darker? Could he be the son of someone my own age—perhaps even the son of a man who grew up with a license plate chained to his wallet?
“I found myself in a world of heavy denim dragging through mud; cheap silver jewelry leaving green stains on hairless skin; the taste of warm Dr Pepper, gin, and stomach acid on its way out of my mouth; making out with a chubby girl in fairy wings. A part of my brain that I thought had died—or more accurately, had simply forgotten existed—reopened itself to me, and out through it came a torrent of long-lost characters and the myths that made them human”
It wasn’t the first time I’d been forced to consider the grunger era; the pitched battles between the nu-metal kids and whatever your town called people who wore Adidas popper trousers and stolen baseball caps. For most of my adulthood, that outsider aesthetic had been co-opted by fashion labels and SoundCloud rappers, analyzed and dissected by a million Instagram cultural theorists. It had been on the periphery of fashion for ten times longer than the original era lasted, but this seemed to be something different. It wasn’t an affectation or a retread. I could feel it.
To this day, I have never seen the boy who was playing the 25-year-old Deftones song on the street where my parents live. He could be the coolest kid in class; he may not have a single friend in the world. But to me, something about the way he was letting it rip while hidden from view, pushing the street to think about him as it got on with taking its breaths, trimming its hedges, passing its exams, suggested that what he was broadcasting came from somewhere pure.
I hope the song has given him a weapon to tackle the world with. But I also hope he isn’t taking the world too seriously, and that if there is a girl he’s playing it for—or at—he won’t one day wield it against her, while parroting some stupid line from a movie. I hope he doesn’t grow up making the mistakes that found me walking back down that road, into the safety of the past.
Follow Clive Martin on X @clive_mart1n
This reminiscence is taken from the fall 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE, a Deftones special. We’ve sold out our copies, the only ones left are in stores—perhaps there’s one near you? Secure yourself the next 4 issues by subscribing.
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