by Lesley Jones
A short woman, probably in her sixties, appeared through a side door, pushing a mop bucket by the handle of the mop that was resting in it. A younger woman, about thirty, and not bad looking, appeared beside her and slung the cloth that she was holding over her shoulder.
“Told ya, Kell. David Essex, but with brown eyes and a better voice,” said the older woman.
“Fuck. Me,” the younger woman said.
Maca ended the song and winked at the two women who were now giving him a round of applause.
“Don’t encourage him, ladies. His head’ll be too big to fit through the doors when it’s time for us to pack up later.” I told them.
Maca licked his index finger, pulled up his T-shirt and circled it around his nipple. What the fuck had gotten into him this morning?
The two women fanned themselves as they left by the same door they came in through.
“You seem happy,” I told him as I walked towards the stage.
He smiled and his eyes were shining. “That bird I brought home last night sucked like a Hoover. Three times, and she swallowed every drop. What’s not to be happy about after a night like that?” He stared at me for a few seconds after he finished speaking and I could see that the anger was still there. He couldn’t fool me.
“I’ve got a new song I wanna try,” he said, jumping down from the stage and pulling a sheet of paper from his back pocket. “I’ve got an idea of how I want it to sound, but I wanted your input first.”
“Mac, c’mon, man. I really don’t think this song is a good idea,” Billy said.
“Chill the fuck out, dude. It’s just a song,” Maca told him.
“No, it’s not just a song though, is it Mac?” Tommy added his voice into the conversation.
I looked between the three of them, my eyebrows pulled into a frown caused by my obvious confusion.
“Yeah, Tom, it is just a song. What the fuck is your problem?”
“You’re my problem, Mac. You’ve spent the last year bouncing between being catatonic with grief, drugs, and booze, and then pinging off the walls and trying to fuck anything with a pulse, all to try and get Georgia out of your system. You’ve changed all of that up the last few weeks and have been miserable as fuck, walking round with a face like a smacked arse and wanting to punch anyone that looks at you the wrong way. Then you turn up here this morning, cracking jokes like a fucking game show host and pull that piece of shit song out, knowing full well that it’s gonna upset people.”
I swear to God, still to this day, that was the most I’d ever heard Tommy say. He was seriously pissed off about the song, and I had no idea why.
“How about you fuck off and mind your own business, Tom? When was the last time you wrote us a song?” Maca asked.
“Never, Mac. I’m not a songwriter and I’ve never claimed to be, but if I was, I wouldn’t pull a stunt like that.” Tommy rubbed his hand over his shaved head and turned his pale blue eyes on me. “I can’t be part of this, Marls. I’m sorry, mate,” he said before turning and walking over to where all of our equipment was set up.
“What the fuck was that all about?”
Billy put his hands up, as if in surrender. Shaking his head, he said, “Nothing to do with me. I understand why he’s pissed, but it’s your shout whether you want us to put some notes down for this.”
“Well, I’ve not even seen the fucking thing yet, so how would I know?” I told Bill as he headed in the same direction as Tom, who was now banging on his drums.
“You gonna show me what’s got him so pissed off?”
Maca took a draw on the cigarette he’d just lit. “Why the fuck are you smoking? Len’ll go ape shit if he walks in here and catches you.”
“Fuck Len. In fact, fuck the lot of ya.” He threw the sheet of paper with the song written on it at me. “Until you lot can come up with something better, we’ll keep using my lyrics, and if any of you have got a problem with them, then I’ll just stop writing and leave it to you three.”
He could be such a fucking diva sometimes. Between him and George, I couldn’t tell ya who wore the biggest crown.
I bent down and picked up the song sheets and started to read.
You called this on,
Now you’ve got your way.
Time for me to move along,
Tomorrow’s another day.
Fuck you, baby, I did my best.
Fuck you, baby, now I’ll go fuck the rest.
I tried to reason, to make you see sense,
But you walked away… No recompense.
You gave me no chance to talk or say my goodbyes.
You ignored my pleas, ignored my cries.
So fuck you, baby, now I’ll go fuck the rest.
I fucked you, baby… You weren’t the best.
When you meet another, which I’m sure you will,
Just remember me and the way I can make you feel
When he slides inside you, and when he holds you tight.
I hope you think and dream of me, all through the night.
When he pushes in deep and looks into your cold hard eyes,
When he says and does those things that only I know you like
Don’t you forget that I was your first, the first to hear your moans, the first to hear your sighs.
So fuck you, baby, my time here is done.
I’m through with crying, time for me to have some fun.
Fuck you, baby, maybe see you around some time.
Then you can join all the others and wait your turn in line.
“You are fucking kidding me, right?” I looked up at him, then back down at the words.
“Why would I be kidding?” he asked. He was actually being serious. This wasn’t a joke, he really meant for me to write music for this.
“You seriously expect me to write music, then get up on stage and perform a song that talks like that about my sister?”
“You’ve had no problem singing any of the other songs I’ve written about your sister, and you’ve had no problem living off the royalties either.”
I didn’t hesitate for a second. I swung a punch that caught him square on the chin. Luckily, he hit a chair on his way down, preventing his head from cracking open on the concrete floor.
“Marley!” Jimmie screamed my name from the doorway. She dumped the brown paper bag onto the first table she saw and came rushing towards us. Len followed her through the doors, carrying coffees and a carrier bag.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she screeched, the sound echoed around the quiet warehouse.
“Me?” I actually pointed at myself as I paced in front of where she had Maca’s head in her lap. Now that his eyes were open, any concerns I may have had that I’d actually hurt him were gone.
“Read this before you start accusing me of wrongdoing, and tell me you or Len wouldn’t have done the same.” I shoved the pieces of paper at her and she started to read.
“What the fucks going on … what’s that? Why’s he on the floor?” Len fired off.
“Marley knocked Maca out.” Jim held the paper up to him before moving and letting Maca’s head hit the concrete. He gave a groan of complaint.
“Now it’s your turn,” she told Len. “And when you’re done, I want first dibs before Bailey finishes him off.”
Len read the words to the song, looking up at me and laughing a couple of times, then down at Maca, who was sitting up on his own.
“Wh-what is this?” Len laughed nervously as he asked.
“That’s this pricks latest offering. He expects me to come up with a tune for this. He expects me to perform and record it. A song about him taking my sister's virginity, about some other bloke fucking her.” Jimmie put her hand on my chest as I stepped toward the fucker again.
“Have you finally lost the plot, Maca? Stand the fuck up,” Len shouted. Maca stood, still rubbing at his jaw. “What the fuck is going on with you, boy?” Apparently, Len turned into my dad when he was angry.
“It’s just a
song.”
“Just a song? And you really expect him to get up on stage and sing a song like that, knowing it’s aimed at his sister? You really think that I want to be the manager of a band who sings a song like that, about my little sister?”
“So as long as I write songs about how much I love and miss your sister, we’re all good, but if I write something honest, about how she shut me out with no chance to explain or apologise, or I write about how she let me shag her when she was just fifteen, that’s—”
He didn’t get a chance to finish before Len flew at him, knocking Jimmie over in the process.
“He seriously has a death wish,” Jim said as I was helping her up. We stood back and watched as Len and Maca rolled around on the floor for a few minutes before Tom and Billy separated them.
They were both breathing heavy, bleeding from the nose, and had split lips. Surprisingly, it was Maca that was trying to break free from Billy’s grip and get at Len again.
“This is bullshit, fucking bullshit. How much money did you all make from the songs I’ve written about her the past couple of years, eh?” He looked around like a crazy man, still breathing hard. His white T-shirt was ripped at the neck, and bloodstained.
“She broke my fucking heart. She’s a cold-hearted bitch who won’t answer my calls or reply to my letters.” He’d actually gone beyond shouting and was screaming at us.
Jimmie stepped up. “How dare you. How fucking dare you. You broke her heart … You.” She punched him, like a girl, with the flat side of her bunched hands on his arms and chest. “You broke her heart, you stupid fucker, and you almost broke her mind. She’s shut you out because that’s the only way she can survive. You’ve no idea, you have no idea what she’s been through. She’s hurt and humiliated. They wrote horrible things about her in the papers and she didn’t ask for any of it. She gave you her virginity when she was just fifteen because she’s loved you since she was eleven years old, since that very first day we set eyes on you in their back garden. She loved and trusted you and what did you do, Maca? You went off to a hotel room with that slut, that fucking oxygen thief of a human being, just a few days after proposing to George. You went into a hotel room and snorted blow from Haley White’s tits. Of all the people in the world Maca, it was with her? Why her? Have you any idea what you’ve done to my best friend?”
Jim was breathing heavy through her tears. Len, Billy, and Tom were watching in stunned silence while Maca and I both cried.
Fucking tears. They just come from nowhere.
Guilt sat like acid in the bottom of my stomach, in my chest, and pumped through my veins, burning me from the inside out.
“It wasn’t his fault,” I said quietly. Jimmie’s head turned quickly and her brown eyes were on me, sweat glistening on her light, cocoa coloured skin. I’ve never seen Jim so angry.
“Fuck off, Marley,” she spat. “He went to that room willingly, knowing all the while that he had a girlfriend, an unofficial fiancé. He asked your sister to marry him and just a few days later, he’s in a hotel room with the one and only person I’ve ever known George to hate. Yeah, you’re as much to blame as he is, but he was the one with a girlfriend. He was the one that should’ve stayed away from that conniving little cunt, but he didn’t.” Her face crumbled as she looked at Maca.
“You broke my beautiful friend. You broke her sixteen-year-old heart and I don’t know if I’ll ever get her back. So don’t you dare stand there telling me that she’s a cold-hearted bitch. Don’t you fucking dare stand there spitting the dummy because she shut you out. What you did was shut her down.”
“So why won’t she just talk to me? Why won’t she just let me explain?” he pleaded. His voice was full of desperation. It hurt my heart so bad to watch him, to hear all of it and know that I was to blame.
“Because she’s not ready to see you. You hurt her so much that she can’t bear to even hear your name.” She stood in the middle of all of us, but faced Maca, shaking her head. “She’s just doing what she needs to do to get by, but never have I heard her say such spiteful things about you. Why would you want to do that to her? Why, after everything you’ve put her through, would you want to cause her any more hurt and humiliation? Just get over it, Maca. Move on and stop acting like a lovesick kid.”
“But that’s what I am. That’s what you all forget. I may be twenty-years-old, but I’m still a lovesick kid. I always will be for her. When will you all fucking get that?”
We all remained silent, everyone realising in that moment that he was in fact right, even if he’d just behaved like a complete dick. We were still so young, stupid, clueless, horny, and emotional. Our lives had been turned on their heads in a short amount of time; cameras constantly going off in our faces, fabricated stories being written about us.
For us it was, and always would be, about the music first. I didn’t want celebrity status. Yeah, back then I liked the amount of birds it led to me banging, but right from the very beginning, we all hated the intrusion. Billy and Tom had settled down from the very start of the bands fame so it was always Maca and myself the press focused on, especially as we were also seen as the two front men. But we weren’t men, we were still boys—kids playing in a very grown-up world. We had no clue how to handle what we were feeling, and we didn’t always handle things the right way. Unfortunately for us, every fuck up we made from the age of eighteen was reported on, documented, and sometimes photographed. It was just part of the deal, it came with the territory, and there was nothing we could do about it.
At the end of the day, I suppose all that Maca was doing with those lyrics was what came natural to him, letting it all out in a song.
Didn’t stop me from wanting to put him on his arse again though. I knew my sister was no angel. I knew her and Maca were getting up to shit when she was far too young, but I honestly thought that they’d be together forever, that they were it for each other. At no stage did I ever account for me and my own selfish motives being the instigator in their downfall.
Maca and I didn’t speak for over three months after that. The album was delayed because we couldn’t agree on anything and all our public appearances were strained. Billy and Tom were finally taking over the interviews, leaving me and Maca to blend into the background.
Our studio time was cancelled, the label agreeing to let us have the summer to ourselves; hoping that some time apart was all that was needed. As long as we agreed to regroup in September and get the tracks down in time for a Christmas release, they left us alone.
After our March fallout, we finally had to meet in June and make a few decisions on the interiors of the apartments Maca and I had invested in together. We actually agreed on most of what we wanted during the meeting with the design team my dad’s builders had set us up with, and we went out and had a few beers together that night.
The place the label had set us up in, near the West London studios, were too big for us once Tom and Billy had moved out, so we had found places of our own. Both of us unknowingly bought penthouse apartments in the same building, just five minutes from where our own place was being built in the Docklands redevelopment area of East London.
We spent a bit of time together through the summer, working on new material, but things didn’t really begin to thaw completely between us until we got back into the studio in early September. Maca was still pretty quiet and withdrawn. I knew just from the limited time I’d been in his company that he was smoking a lot of weed. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to promote drug use. It was something I’d done since I was about thirteen, before I even met Maca I think, but yeah, all things in moderation. You need to be able to function and when we first got into the studio, I really think he was only just hanging on.
And then he met Carla.
Chapter Twelve
1987
The first day in the studio we were introduced to the team. The place Len had found for us was in a leafy suburb of London, not too far from Hampstead Heath. It was a bran
d new set up and we would be using state of the art digital technology, a lot of which was all new to us. The two sound engineers were a brother and sister team called Max and Lydia. We’d never worked with them before, but Len assured us that they knew our work and were the best in the business with the new equipment now available. Trevor and Nile were our usual producers, and we had every faith in them coming up with the sounds we were hoping to create.
We were introduced to a few office and backroom staff, and then we were introduced to Carla. She was a newly qualified sound and recording engineer who had been taken on by Max and Lydia. She was straight out of university and looked like a pixie.
No tracks were laid down the first week. They rarely were with us. We spent the time getting our sound tight, Maca working on his voice and listening to playbacks.
During that time, Carla was in and out of the live room with drinks and food for us, and I had noticed Maca watching her.
She was cute, don’t get me wrong, just not my type; short, and really petite, with an almost androgynous body. No curves, no tits, and spikey blonde hair. She told us that she was twenty-three, but she looked twelve. As far removed from my sister as you could get, really. Perhaps for Maca, that was the appeal.
On the Friday at the end of our first week, Max suggested we all go to the pub together and we ended up at The Spaniards Inn. It was a beautiful evening and we were able to get a table out in the beer garden and enjoy some late summer sun.
Drinks were drunk, conversations flowed, and we all learned a little bit about each other.
Max and Lydia were in fact twins. Their dad was a well-known session musician who had played with some of the biggest bands in the world over the years.
Max, it turned out, was married to Nile’s sister, Nicole, who joined us with their two kids an hour after we arrived at the pub.
It felt good to be in a crowd of people who just accepted you for who you were. No bullshit, no pretences. No one wanted to touch us or have us sign parts of their bodies. It was like being with family and I suddenly felt very homesick.