Mr Jenkinson’s got it off a showband in Liverpool was packing in the game. ‘The Corsaires’ they was called. Name in glitter across the bass. He’s handed me the sticks. And I’ve sat on the stool. And all I’m here to tell you – I hit them skins hard.
I hit them like I meant it. I beat them drums up. Mr Jenkinson, bless his heart, takes off his uniform jacket and starts blowing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ on his Funtime kazoo. I’ve eczema sores on my knuckles at the time but I hit them drums so hard [that] the sores broke open and bled down my wrists. That ain’t a thing you see every day of the week. Little kiddie with blood on him from the drums.
And that’s all I got to say. That’s how it happened. There’s days in your life when the whole story changes. Usually, in my experience, they’re the days you wouldn’t think it. Walk into a room. There’s a drum kit by the window. Every friend you’ll ever make, every country you’ll ever see, the wife you didn’t know you’d have, your beautiful kids, your whole life. All of it goes back to the day you first hit a drum. Scary thought, it might never have happened.
[The] morning I come out of Ellesmere was my thirteenth birthday. Mum told me we was moving to Luton. And I told her I’d go anyplace in the world where you could learn the drums proper. She said they had ’em in Luton. Off we went.
And I didn’t think I’d be back to London at the age of nineteen. See you just never know. That’s my point.
Nine
FOR A COUPLE of weeks Fran and I stayed in East Finchley with a college acquaintance of Shay’s, but it didn’t work out too well. Paul worked in insurance, and while he did his best to be hospitable, I don’t think it suited him to wend home at seven or eight and find the two of us had been on the sofa for most of the day watching tapes on the VCR he’d paid for. You didn’t see a VCR back in Luton in the early 1980s. Having one at our disposal was like waking up in Graceland. Fran’s ability not to go out or even twitch was astonishing. Crocodiles in the reptile house have moved with more vigour.
There was also the question of the particular tapes Fran favoured. By mail order he’d purchased a work entitled ‘Three Men in a Boat’, but it turned out not to be a dramatisation of Jerome K. Jerome. Personally I had nothing against the lads enjoying themselves, as clearly they were, just it wasn’t my own end of the dance hall. Paul didn’t see things in quite the same way. He was by nature a tolerant sort, quietly each-to-his-own, as most English people are, in my experience. You could be having it off with a trouser-press and no Englishman would mind, once you don’t expect him to drop around and watch. But Fran had the thoughtless habit of leaving about the communal areas the boxes in which his erotica was packaged. Noticing ‘Jockey-Room Bi-Boys’ on your living-room carpet and saying nothing about it is hard.
‘Dolby?’ Paul enquired, with heroic insouciance. But a point had been made all the same.
His mates were sound enough, suity guys from the office, and they knew what do with a joint when you offered, but they had a way of talking about football that I couldn’t quite get. Everything was football, even the girls they’d be rating. Anna was Arsenal, Meg Bristol City, Jenny was Everton, Vicky Man U. Boys will be boys, and it was innocent foolishness, but foolishness not your own grows tiresome. Fran could be taciturn with our host, whom he clearly didn’t like. There was a disagreement about the phone bill, I seem to recall. Fran was calling chat lines and I was calling my cousins in Auckland, who can talk at great length when surprised. Also, I’d been keeping in touch with a certain young woman in Luton, on every ludicrous pretext imaginable. Could she return the book I’d loaned her to the college library? Would she like to have my locker? I didn’t need it any more. ‘Trez, I noticed the Open University has a programme tonight that you might find pretty interesting. On the statistics for neurofibromatosis in Yuan Dynasty Tibet.’
Fran supplied a tenner or two, which I think covered the damage. But he had a way of settling debts that made the recipient feel small for having asked. Post-Celtic-Tiger Ireland could do with him.
One morning I awoke to find he’d gone out. There was a note saying he’d be back ‘in a couple of days’, he was visiting his ‘girlfriend Louise’ (his WHAT?). Unless wooed by some mysterious process involving looking out a window in East Finchley, it was hard to know how Louise had been met. In any event, he didn’t return for almost a week. When he did, he answered no question as to where he’d been wandering, merely offered that he and Louise had spent the entire time in bed. Not that you pressed the point.
Trez arrived in town wanting to talk about the band. I was delighted to see her, but things weren’t quite clear. She explained that she intended continuing her studies, the group must take second place to her pursuit of a degree, but Third Year required her to be in London a bit, visiting galleries and the British Library. It was a strange conversation. I wanted her to be our full co-conspirator. Fran surprised me by insisting he understood her position. The group would never compromise her in any way, he promised. We got drunk over a curry he bought us.
Next morning she went to Deptford, where Seán was gaffing with their uncle Stephen, a nice old cove, full of stories. The distance between us seemed vast. It sounds ridiculous to say so now, but the Tube put me in convolutions of thundered paranoia, a maze of illegible connections, body odour and claustrophobia, its roaring, fetid tunnels and cage-style elevators an amateur Freudian’s field day. I’d like to give you a hymn on the neon delirium of London, the small-town bumpkin singing ‘Bright Lights, Big City’. But it wasn’t like that. Most days I hung out in East Finchley, trudging its estates, marvelling at the sheer variety of pebble-dash and carriage lamp available to the English self-improver. Occasionally I’d go mad and look about the garden centre down the road. Hail hail, rock and roll.
Somewhat to my surprise, Louise proved to be real, a flame-haired, laconic but amiable Goth, of many byzantine tattoos. She came from Haslingden in Lancashire, I seem to recall, and began showing up at the house with her drugs and a dog, a mutt whose name was Richard. It was clear that Louise and Fran were fond of one another. Their lovemaking was frequent and loud. Feeling prudish, among other things, I would take myself out, with Richard on a string, and we’d walk the leafy avenues until we felt it seemly to come home. Thoughtfully, one afternoon they invited me to join them in the shower, not, I feel sure, because of any huge sexual attraction but they didn’t want me feeling left out. Maybe they just thought I needed a wash. The gesture was appreciated. Well, politeness costs nothing. That I declined is to this day a tiny regret.
I don’t remember the band playing any music at all for at least the first month in London. We’d meet up now and again in a pub on the border of Chinatown, a Dutch joint that sold lager of frightening strength to frighteningly strong Australians. I’d fume and feel aggrieved, resenting their muscles, despising their backslappery and chummy braggadocio, the glow of antipodean snazz. Their laughter had a triple-X surfer-beach suntan, and even their silences boasted. I hailed from an island where teenagers were ritually warned by sworn celibates that taking off your underwear made the Virgin Mary weep. But these dudes transmitted pheromones with omnidirectional cheerfulness, a megahertz of detestable brio.
Midst the howls and how-AH-yahs sulked the Ships in the Night, anchored in immigrant glum. Three pints of Oranjeboom and a point-scoring squabble would flare between us. A whiskey, we’d be trading the barbs. The politics of the kingdom, our disappointment with the electorate, the disappearance of the ozone layer, the war on the unions: these controversies of the era were sullenly rehearsed, each of us trying to catch out the others in an admission of less than North Korean ardency. As though the advent of Margaret the Mad was the fault of your friend, who was secretly offering satanic sacrifices for her victory. You’re saying you’re not totally crazy about every track on the Clash’s second album? Take that back, you fascist! Like leaking water, private anxiety will always find an outlet. Trouncing each other was our plumbing. If Trez was among us as Seán and I got
into an argument, she and Fran would exchange the what-are-they-like look used by girls since the dawn of creation when boys are starting to bore. That would annoy me further. One night the pub’s TV happened to flash a shot of a woman in a skimpy bikini, plugging bingo in a tabloid newspaper or perhaps foreign holidays. Seán, the most courteous and chivalrous of youths, uttered some mild remark into his beer about what he saw as her attractiveness. I think he called her ‘Leeds United’ or ‘Stoke’. Fran and I rose up like a pissed Cerberus of self-righteous hypocrisy and outdid ourselves with denunciations of his shameful sexism, so viciously that he was dumbstruck for an hour. In our circle, to call someone a sexist was like calling him a Klansman. Young men were feminist at the time, or, if they weren’t, often pretended to be – in my view, a damn good thing. But that Seán, of all people, was a recipient of our disingenuousness is a sign of how unhappy we were.
It was a difficult month, our first in London. Since the age of fourteen, I’d had a map of its songs in my head: I’d sauntered Abbey Road, gone Down in the Tube Station at Midnight, loaded the Guns of Brixton, done the Lambeth Walk, roamed Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street, knew how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall and marvelled at the Waterloo Sunset. But the wintry city was not the one of my teenage dreams. Carnaby Street, in my bedroom, was a yellow brick road, where pop-eyed Johnny Rotten and sultry Marianne Faithfull got it on with the Artful Dodger. The real metropolis, on the other hand, had the Northern Line and gridlock. It’s not that London was unexciting. But I didn’t understand it, felt lost. Its amp went up to eleven.
Trez was in Luton a lot of the time, which meant I didn’t see her too much. Whenever she and I got together, we spoke only of her studies, almost never of music or the group. Seán, too, seemed to have his own life. Phoning Uncle Stephen, you’d be told the twins had gone out and he didn’t know when they’d return. With bugger-all else to do, I began teaching myself to cook, out of an Elizabeth David book I found in the house while tidying. Anyone can learn to roast a chicken with trimmings, as my mum always said, and a basic omelette or cassoulet isn’t hard. The housemates developed a liking for my Light Salade aux Lardons and announced me the Michel Platini of cuisine.
But I was drifting and aimless. Louise was by now off the scene but Fran continued to absent himself for days at a time. I pretended not to know the reason.
This isn’t the place to go into his using. But you didn’t need to be a genius to see it was increasing. Faced with a direct question, or as direct as I could make it, he’d insist he wasn’t an addict, would never dream of injecting, that smoking heroin was safe. As though the means by which you take it is more of an issue than the substance you’re taking, and why. He grew secretive about his circle. That troubled me. Here was a boy who didn’t work but had thirty grand in a bank account. His taxi plate was taking him on journeys it might be hard to come back from. It occurred to me to shop him. The twins said I shouldn’t. Seán told me he’d speak to him, and I know that happened. But it bothered me that I’d left it to Seán.
There grew in me the bad feeling that we’d made this move foolishly, that the band would fall apart before long. If I’m honest, I suspected we weren’t ‘a band’ at all, just another collection of misfits with instruments. That seems an adult and retrospective thought, I know, but it assailed me even then. Maybe the effort of leaving home had taken all I had. I walked East Finchley a lot.
In the end, it was Trez who kicked our asses into something like a shape, as perhaps we’d always known she would. December froze up London and she told us it was time. The ‘fuckaboutery’, a favourite word – she’d learned it from one of the Oranjeboom Australians – would have to stop right now. She’d written two songs. We were going to record them. We hadn’t come to London for nothing.
FROM FRAN’S FINAL INTERVIEW
Trez is a remarkable person. Nobody knows how much. Me and her was never the closest but I always admired her. Single-minded. You know? Nobody’s fool. Kids, you know, they talk ten kinds of nonsense. But I never heard Trez say a stupid thing in her life. Innocent, sure. Never a cynic. But sceptical. Questioning. Watchful, all the time. And I’d say I learned to be watchful from Trez. Don’t give it all up. You know? Sometimes watch. And it put us at odds, because that weren’t how I saw things at the time. She had seriousness. Poise. And none of the rest of us did. You don’t when you’re a kid. You’re insane. My thing was, they call me effeminate, I’ll put on a dress. She said to me one night, you know what you should do? Go on stage in a three-piece suit. And actually she was right. Totally on the money. She was always a great one for staying ahead of the audience. Clever, clever person. Kept ’em guessing.
Trez suggested we get a flat, the four of us together. When necessary, she’d commute back to Luton for lectures. Things needed to change. ‘So we’re going to bloody change them.’ She’d been looking through City Limits and had options. An ‘amazingly sunny basement’ (is there any such thing?) was available in Brickfields Terrace near the Bayswater Road, a neighbourhood where life was grittily experienced back in those days but it meant the rents were cheap. We pitched up to look it over, Trez, Seán and I, Fran having refused to involve himself with a member of the landlord class. Perhaps it was just as well. His mode at the time was full-on Boy George with a seasoning of Alice Cooper and the Damned. He’d got hold of a sewing machine and begun making his own clothes from garments he rummaged out of bins – a chef’s checkerboard trousers he daubed with silver furniture-paint, a ‘naughty nurse’ uniform he slashed with a cut-throat razor. He’d go to nightclubs in a peephole bra accessorised with Winchester College Old Boys necktie and Carmelite wimple dyed scarlet. He’d asked me if I thought it practicable that his entire head be tattooed with a map of the globe; failing this, with a hammer and sickle. I told him I thought it would hurt like blazes, and he desisted, thank God, but his notion of himself as a Miro lithograph in knickers continued. He loved telling bikers in the bars we frequented that his ‘clitoris was pierced’ and offering to show them the evidence. Trez, as the only member of the band who was in a position to know, advised that you wouldn’t necessarily want it pierced, or displayed to drunken wastrels if it were. But Fran would rejoin that art ought not to be withheld from the masses. It’s possible that his mascara budget exceeded his expenditure on drugs, and in daylight the effect disconcerted. Also, he was listening a lot to the early Velvet Underground. It became part of his messing to address strangers in the croaky German accent fans of Nico will recollect with affection. Bayswater had a fair bit of prostitution in those days – every phone box in W2 was papered with lurid invitations – but whatever Fran might be offering the more exploratory of west London’s married men wasn’t something you wanted occurring in your basement.
Into the decidedly non-Velvet Underground we moved, on a bone-chillingly freezing night. It’s tempting to ladle on the mildew-and-creeping-squalor of it all, as one or two of my former colleagues have done, but in truth our little subterranea wasn’t so bad. Naughty Seán once told the Christian Science Monitor that where we lived was ‘a former S and M dungeon’ with ‘mice the size of puppies’ and ‘whips in the wardrobe’, that johns would knock on the windows pleading to have unspeakable things done to them, but I don’t remember any of that. It was tenebrous, and the block could be noisy, admittedly. There were Colombians next door, amiable fellows, but they did love a late-night fiesta. You’d drink yourself into a slumber and hear the cha-cha-cha in your dreams, and occasionally what you told yourself probably wasn’t gunfire. But we each of us had a mattress, and there was technically speaking a kitchen, and a bathroom that sort of functioned, at least sometimes, usually Mondays. As for the view, one is reminded of an immortal line from Trez. ‘It’s improved since they painted the gasworks.’
To live with your friends when you’re young is pleasant. Fran, in particular, seemed to like the little routines, the rosters for shopping, the domesticities. Nearby Porchester Library had a collection of cassettes,
not vast but it had been put together by someone who cared about music. Fran started getting into Mahler and the Irish composer Seán Ó Riada, both great favourites of Trez. He grew fond of the Sunday night world-music show on a pirate station broadcasting from Tower Hamlets, a programme offering everything from complex-rhythm Balkan stuff to Youssou N’Dour and the Super Étoile de Dakar. I came into the flat one evening to hear something so strange and clean and beautiful that it made me stand and listen. Fran told me it was Vietnamese folk music, Hát chầu văn. He explained that it was based on the Five Notes Scale, ‘Ngũ Cung’ and that he remembered someone in the orphanage teaching him the names of the notes: Hò, Xư, Xang, Cống, Liu. In truth, I don’t know if it’s possible that this was a genuine recollection or something he’d learned from the radio. But to witness his awe as he spoke of this music was touching. The instrument sounding like a zither was called Ðàn bầu. The oboe-like timbre was Kèn bầu. That extraordinary shimmering lament was produced by a k’ni, a one-string vertical fiddle with a resonating disc held in the player’s mouth. ‘Listen,’ Fran whispered. ‘Shhh. Don’t say nothing.’ Trez came home, and Seán with a mate. We sat there, dream-blown, listening with Fran, while the sunset made the floorboards glow.
It was in the following weeks that Trez started trying to speak with him about his infancy in Vietnam. He remembered words to do with food, and the names of the days. Monday was ‘ngày thú’ hai’, Friday ‘thú’ sáu’. Fran could be gently playful, and it became one of his endearing routines to teach us the days by referencing them to pop songs. The Rolling Stones had a hit called ‘Ruby thú’ ba’. Hearing the juicy tones of Lewisham contend with those words was sometimes a music in itself. As always while joking, Fran appeared serious. He would scold us for mispronunciations, accuse us of ‘not trying’. He could also be very mischievous. One night the four of us went to a Vietnamese caff on Praed Street as a little test of our progress in the language. The waitress listened in mild surprise as Seán, Trez and I gave our orders for Bún bò Huế and Co’m chiên Du’o’ng Châu in a passable Hanoi accent. She then turned to Fran, who glanced up from the menu and said in broadest Yorkshire: ‘Could tha do uz an egg and chips, luv? I hate this foreign grub.’
The Thrill of It All Page 13