The Ruins

by Mat Osman

  1:45 Baxter stumbles across the back of the stage because I didn’t like the lights on him. For his own good mainly; he messed up the whole aesthetic. There he is, getting comfortable, twirling his sticks like he’d expressly been told not to, and then “1, 2, 3, 4”, and we’re away.

  1:50 Why did we start with this song? In my mind the drums at the beginning are huge: massed Burundi drummers recorded in Olympic Studios’ stone room. Not this polite little patter. I know it’s an uploaded copy of a VHS through laptop speakers but God, still this is weedy.

  2:03 We’re locked down. Tribal drums, Kimi’s stiff-legged funk, Saul playing the little piano figure with just his left hand. All ready for….

  2:30 ….no one. It’s definitely my cue but nothing’s happening. After the fight backstage I was probably still there, licking my wounds. Or someone else’s. Was it then that it happened, me and Mel? I know it was some time that night, and to do it while her boyfriend was sweating away at the drum kit sounds like the kind of thing I might do.

  2:45 The cameraman focuses on the mike in its stand like something is happening. Judging from Baxter’s nervous glances stage left I must be in the wings by now. Two minutes is a long time to go around this riff, especially for an audience as uncommitted as this. And here, listening back fifteen years later, there’s a nice touch that I didn’t notice on the night. At 2:59 Saul alters the tune he’s playing on the keyboard: it changes to “Send in the Clowns”.

  3:03 Here’s our hero. Onstage to the kind of applause that the word “smattering” was invented for. Forgive me, but I look good, right? There are very few things that I appreciate about Remote/Control never becoming famous, but not having to compete with my younger, prettier self, is one of them. Hair looks good. Just the right side of styled. Skinny enough to enrage you if I stole your girlfriend. Clothes are on point too; I don’t look like I dressed up for the gig. A bow to the audience wins not even an ironic cheer. I turn my back — to say something to Bax? No — I remember now, to do my flies up. Right in his eyeline with his furious girlfriend still backstage.

  3:05 An introduction swallowed by the racket. (Though I actually said, “They say you play every venue twice, once on the way up and once on the way down. Hello Borderline, it’s nice to be back.”)

  3:10 And I’m in. Voice sounds all right. I’m moving a bit, trying to pull the audience in a little closer, trying to fill that semi-circle. We sound OK actually. These little speakers don’t capture any of the power but you can still hear that we’re tight.

  7:15 It’s not going well. If by the second song the crowd aren’t moving then they probably never will. You have to work for those moments when an audience turns, when they change from a collection of individuals into something else: a mob, a gang, a crowd. Even a third of them can be enough for a contagion to set in and suddenly every noise you make sets the puppet-strings twitching. It’s an amazing feeling — truth be told it’s the amazing feeling. To sing a line that’s being sung back to you in a thousand rapt voices. To see the room bounce in time to a kick-drum. Watching hands pulled aloft by a guitar riff. Remote control: it happened a couple of brief, magical times in my whole life and I treasure those moments like others might treasure their kid’s first smile.

  7:30 This is not that. This is the other thing. And you can see I’m already desperate. Twisting and snarling and dancing and trying to wring some kind of power from the song, trying to transmute the lead of this lumpen audience into gold. We’re three songs in and we’re getting nothing back. The record companies are here to see if we draw a crowd, to see if we can work a crowd but of course they’re the oil on the water that’s stopping that happening. The more we try to drive the audience the more desperate we look and desperation is the most unattractive look of all.

  7:25 No between-song banter. No onstage chemistry. It’s effectively over here, now, but we just keep flogging the corpse of the gig onwards. We’re halfway into “The Driver”, which runs to seven minutes, when I turn to Saul and run a finger across my throat: not a threat but a mercy killing. End this now.

  7:30 Which he ignores. The band plays on.

  8:30 I signal again to end.

  9:00 And on he goes. Baxter hasn’t noticed anything but Kimi is all eyes.

  10:15 I conduct Bax to a broken stop, my guitar swinging and feeding back. Kimi looks frozen as she slows with him. Saul pointedly closes his eyes, throws his head back and continues with the riff. Louder now and speeding it up, the chords so broken as to be squalls of noise. He turns to Bax and nods his head: one two three four.

  Even in this pixelated darkness you can see the second of frustration in Bax’s eyes before… a click of the sticks and he’s back in. Kimi shrugs and starts up again and I’m left there. Captain fucking Bligh with a Telecaster.

  The applause is hesitant. It’s not just that we appear to have restarted a song that had already gone on too long, it’s that they can tell that’s someone’s gone off-script. I start to sing and as soon as I find my place Saul changes key. I slide down to match it and he changes again. Kimi is white with fury.

  11:30 I was pissed off at Saul back then, but at the same time this constant drone of sound he’s spewing out is thankfully hiding the reality of the situation. The dry ice, the intro tape, the micro-seconds between songs: they were all there to hide the ignominy of casting our pearls so passionately before such a small audience of swine. The non-sound of an audience after a song has finished is a crushing feeling, like waking up next to someone you shouldn’t. So yeah, Sturm und Drang Saul.

  By 12 minutes you can see Saul and I are enjoying ourselves. A song finishes, Bax’s drums sound like something pushed downstairs but Saul just keeps on playing, with his Madame Tussauds eyes and Ian Curtis headshake. And this time Kimi and I just glance and bang — we’re back in with another song. Saul’s still in A minor, part of the long coda to Ambulance Man, while the rest of us are in D, so it kind of works. Bax is lost somewhere in between, just a white noise of cymbals, more visual than aural. He’s stiff with frustration, no improviser our Bax, but trying to follow along. And then there’s some secret signal between Saul and I and we stop in unison. Jackknife of hands across strings and then stock-still like the Kraftwerk robots. The other two limp to a close and the crowd perks up. This has gone from underwhelming to disastrous and that’s got to be worth watching.

  13:03 Fuck knows what Saul is playing here. The video isn’t clear enough to see what chord shape he’s making and the sound — well you guys can hear — it’s just brutal. He’s slashing across the strings and every time you catch a second of melody or rhythm he messes it up again. Now, fifteen years later, I can’t remember what I started singing, nonsense I guess, so low and rapid as to be a rhythm instrument. Bax starts to count in so Saul speeds up. I shout chords out at Kimi though lord knows there’s no chords in this din. Every iota of tune has been bleached from this noise.

  14:09 The semi-circle around us widens. Saul is laughing so hard that his cheeks are wet. The amps are on full and every time Bax or Kimi finds some kind of stability within the noise we tear it away. A couple of guys from Dillon’s entourage throw themselves at the stage, hands on each other’s shoulders in some kind of demented pogo. Saul turns his back and hunches over his guitar, thrashing at open strings.

  14:55 Baxter and Kimi snap at the same time. Bax throws his sticks at me (and misses of course) and then Kimi gently places her bass into its stand and walks away. Her arm is around him before they even reach the side of the stage. His head on her chest like a child’s. The roll of his shoulders tells you he’s crying. Not that I’d known at the time. Once they stopped playing they were lost to me.

  So it’s just Saul and me and two guys flailing around with their beers in the air. And without the rhythm section it’s about to grind to a halt until Saul reaches for a low note on the keyboard. There’s a stuttering blare and then the pulse of “OU Kids” starts up. And I know none of you are here for a Remote/Control history lesson
but this is the first thing Saul and I ever wrote. It relies on this brainless sequencer riff, as if “I Feel Love” had been rewritten for Nuremberg, so we could play it even if Kimi and Bax were offstage. The synth judders — I’ve heard more tuneful pneumatic drills — Saul tears at the guitar and on we go.

  And now the two lads from the front are up on stage, my stage, lurching and windmilling like retards and one raises a beer glass high and I don’t stop playing, just kick the mike stand low, near its base so it crashes into Idiot A and sends him backwards off the stage. And when his friend turns to see where he’s gone it’s just too perfect, and I catch him in the small of the back and send him crashing on top of his mate. Saul doesn’t even turn around. And because the riff is just A and D, the kind of thing the Mary Chain would think was a little basic, you can sing anything over it. Which is what I’m doing. As Saul thrashes, head down, you can hear snippets

  15:10 When I fall in love….

  15:30 You’ve lost that loving feeling. This facing Saul, eyebrows raised, giving it the lovelorn fawn thing to hopefully get some fucking reaction from the front row. Onto my knees like Johnny Ray.

  15:45 I would rather go blind. One hand over my eyes, one reaching for heaven. Than to see you walk away.

  Idiot A is back. This time with a posse: Idiots B through G. As he mounts the stage Saul steps forward and without even unstrapping his guitar jabs him with the butt, sending him flat and bloody to the floor. You can’t see it here but at the time there was a beautiful sight. One solitary tooth, spinning through the air in front of the band, caught in the stage lights. And this time the semi-circle does clear as his mates come to drag him away.

  16:07 I’ve seen the future brother, and it is murder. Fuck I’d forgotten this. It’s Leonard Cohen’s “The Future” and it sounds like I’m doing the whole thing. Look at me down my knees like some lovelorn soul singer.

  I’ve seen the future brother, and it is murder. Over and over again. Did I know I was fortune telling or did I just like the sound of the words? Probably the latter. Here come Idiots C through G though, arm in arm like it’s fucking British Bulldog. The cameraman is holding the camera overhead now as the crowd moves in. Finally they’re going to get a show.

  I’ve seen the future brother, and it is murder. And like that Saul’s gone. The cameraman doesn’t catch his exit, the keyboards are tipped on their side, their output reduced to one single thudding note. The camera pans across the stage in search of him and then snaps back to…

  Me, flailing at a guitar, ranting nonsense. At the time it felt heroic, boy-on-the-burning-deck stuff but here it just looks… sad.

  I’ve seen the future brother, and it is murder

  A bottle and then a glass are launched stagewards, beer spraying from the glass in an elegant parabola, the bottle hitting the guitar strings with an audible clang. I swing a kick at the bottle and miss. The camera shows a wall of backs. A scrum at the front of the stage like you’d get at a proper gig.

  The look in my eyes there at the end: it’s not entrancement, alchemy, transfiguration. It’s fear of the silence that would envelop me once I stopped playing. There’s the howl of a lead being pulled from an amp, a low hum and then a rectangle of light appears as Saul opens the dressing room door and I dive in. The pack are on it in seconds, the camera struggling to focus on the melee. Fists beat on the metalwork and the crowd parts to let one guy take a running kick at it, but the door doesn’t budge.

  21:27 The PA is switched off with a thump that sucks the air from the room. The house lights come on. As instructed the soundman plays our outro tape: Lou Reed’s “Goodnight Ladies”, a slice of camped-up oompah music that encourages the Idiot pack to one more assault on the dressing room door before the lights and the music and the pools of beer and hum of conversation bring everyone back to earth. It’s a matter of context of course. This kind of meltdown in front of an adoring crowd at the end of a glorious career would be, though I say it myself, legendary. But when this guy does it? This footnote to a footnote? Well, it’s pretty pathetic.

  I’ve seen the future brother, and it is murder

  The camera remains on the dressing room door but the director walks backwards, into the scrum around the free bar. There’s no awed hush, just a babble of plans for the next party.

  22:28 The camera’s been placed on a table somewhere because it’s steadily focused on the dressing room door. Nothing happens.

  23:11 Fade to black.

  So, there it is. Une petite mort for a un petite bande. Kimi learning from my mistakes quite how easy it is to derail yourself. The last time we four saw each other for fifteen years. A friend betrayed. An enemy made. A ripple in a silent ocean dying down to nothing. My life.

  Chapter Twelve

  I watched the Japanese video later on with the sound turned down, my feet dangling in the Thames. It was grainy and Brandon looked wraith-like. I started to read his commentary but the rhythm of his words annoyed me. The closer I got to him the less substantial he was. Brandon was a tone of voice, the arch of an eyebrow, a haircut. I let the video play on while I watched a moorhen painstakingly build its nest. Despite everything Brandon said about that final gig, it was the other three that looked real up on stage: sweating and crying and bleeding and worrying. I was ready to put him in the ground.

  The river was beribboned with twists of light and swifts feasted on insects. Ducks pottered about as church bells rang somewhere far-off. The island looked shady and inviting. Houseboats festooned with bikes and oars crowded the shoreline and somewhere nearby kids were playing.

  I kicked ripples in the water as my phone pinged. Rae, saying she’d found the song Brandon had mentioned, “OU Kids”. I didn’t care. Ten tracks, eleven: what did it matter?

  Dillon texted his every movement. He was at Hammersmith, he was at Chiswick, he’d be there in ten. I put my shoes and socks back on and straightened my hair.

  I’d marked my position on the bridge in chalk. Once I was sure I was in the right spot I rubbed it away. Clouds scudded high over the city but here it was bright and dry. There was more headroom, somehow, out here. My reflection broke up and rearranged in the river below. White hair, white shirt, clean against the oily sky. I switched off my phone off, leaned back and watched the swallows.

  I should have got Kimi involved earlier. When I explained Brandon’s plan, with its double-backs and layers of cruelty, she got it straight away. By the end of my explanation she was filling in the gaps and snapping her fingers with pleasure. There on the fiftieth floor, with Rae on the big screen, Ronnie and Reggie perched on the sofa and Jay hovering, her air of mischief reminded me of Brandon’s.

  “I know you’re only here to explain it because it all went so wrong Adam, but you have to admire the concept, no?”

  I made a face.

  “It is actually evil, I concede, and how he’s treated Rae and Robin is unconscionable.” She nodded at the screen. “But in isolation it’s great. It’s original, and that’s something I didn’t think Bran had in his armoury. This record, if it were presented the way he wanted…”

  She spread her arms wide. “It could be a new kind of thing.”

  So with that she and Rae decided how I would die.

  They dismissed my ideas to explain Brandon’s latest death: a suicide note or a video explaining the whole thing.

  Kimi was animated. “No no no no no. You’re trying to tell a story. You want it to make sense at the end. Tie up all the loose ends. But no one wants stories like that anymore. We have to make something loud and messy and confusing and real and let people pick whatever they want out of it.”

  She counted it down. “A murder. A record. And no answers.” She snapped her fingers with glee. “It’s not a story, it’s a Rorschach Test.”

  She and Rae talked quickly as my nausea subsided, testing each other out. Meanwhile Jay worked along some whole other trajectory: making phone calls that I didn’t understand, speaking in a jargon so dense with acronyms that I wa
sn’t sure if he was discussing drugs or guns.

  I lay on the rug and let conversations wash over me. Rae saying, “It’s like the Ripper thing, it’s fascinating because you can never prove it one way or another.” Ronnie: “but not too public, we’re going to be pretty fucking conspicuous in headdresses and all that business.” Jay cooing down the phone: “Two grams of the new stuff, smokeless blanks, and a couple of IV drips.” And Kimi, walking about the flat, talking to herself. “Chuck on as many references as we can. The crows, Dillon, John Dee. Money, drugs, blood, fire, whatever. Pile them on top of each other.”

  I dreamt of New Umbrage, seen from below, an invert city of pulleys and chains and dark corners fitfully illuminated as the city woke. I dreamt of water and fire. And when I came to, to a room full of sleeping people, Jay in Kimi’s arms like a baby, Ronnie and Reggie curled into the couch, Tahoe just a tableau on a screen, I knew what my part would be.

  A raised hand in the distance. Dillon on the river bank. I made no move. A car door slammed somewhere. Kids shouting. A plane soundlessly crossing the sky. Dillon with a bag tucked under his arm, a complaint on his lips.

  When the first shot hit I thought for a second that there had been a mistake. It felt so real. There was an instant shock to my chest, like being invisibly shoved. It spun me round and sent me scrabbling to my knees. The ground was filthy — gravel and fox shit — and I recoiled back. one two three four. Nothing. Where was the second shot? I told my head to ignore what my eyes were seeing, blood blossoming like a flower across my chest. Where was the second shot? I realised that the other blood pouch, the kill-shot, was taped over my stomach and now I had my back to the guns. I forced myself up and around.

  Birdsong. Church bells. The delicious smell of cordite. The headdresses were magnificent, pitched right between the avian and the robotic. Liquid feathers flowing like insect swarms. Ronnie’s shotgun rested at his side as Reggie raised his. From the corner of my eye I could see witnesses on the island, still unsure what this was. Theatre, or an advert, or actually something bad happening? Dillon was O-mouthed, ready to run. I was fucking freezing. It was important to be in shirt and trousers so that it was clear that I didn’t have scuba gear hidden about my person, but the day was cold and I didn’t want to look frightened on camera.