by Kevin Brooks
Kenny just shrugged.
Curtis said to him, ‘Give it here then.’
‘What?’
‘Your bass.’ He sighed. ‘Come on, Kenny … we haven’t got all day.’
Kenny gave me a sideways glance, then – somewhat reluctantly – removed his bass and passed it over to Curtis. Curtis smiled tightly at him, waited for him to move away, then turned to me, holding up the bass. It was a Fender Mustang … not that I knew that then. All I knew then was that it looked really big.
‘Right,’ Curtis said to me, his smile back to normal again. ‘I take it you’re right-handed?’
‘Yeah.’
‘OK, let’s try it on for size first.’ He stepped up close to me and looped the guitar strap over my head, then gently lowered the Fender until the strap was taking all its weight. ‘How’s that?’ he said.
‘It weighs a ton,’ I told him.
‘You’ll get used to it. Do you want me to adjust the strap? Or is it OK as it is?’
‘I think it’s all right.’
‘OK,’ he said, stepping back and looking me up and down. ‘Yeah, it suits you. You look good.’
I didn’t feel good. Not only was the bass as long as I was tall, it felt like it weighed the same as me too. Never mind trying to play the damn thing, it was difficult enough just standing there with it.
‘Maybe it might be better if you sat down for now,’ Curtis said, looking at me. ‘Hold on, I’ll get you a chair.’ He went over to the back of the garage and came back with an old wooden straight-backed chair. ‘There you go,’ he said.
I felt slightly pathetic as I sat down and rested the bass on top of my thighs, but it was much more comfortable, and that easily outweighed my embarrassment.
‘Better?’ Curtis asked.
‘Yeah, thanks.’
‘All right … let’s get started then.’ He looked at me. ‘Do you usually use a plectrum when you’re playing the guitar? Or just your fingers?’
‘Plectrum.’
‘OK … well, with the bass you can either play fingerstyle, like Kenny, or use a plectrum. Fingerstyle players can sometimes get a bit snotty about using a plectrum, as if it’s not the right way to play bass …’ He glanced over at Kenny, half-grinning. Kenny ignored him. Curtis turned back to me. ‘But, as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t really make any difference. I mean, as long as you get the right sound, who cares how you get it? Anyway, it’s entirely up to you … but as you’re already used to using a plectrum, you might as well use one to start with.’ He passed me a plectrum. ‘All right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Right … well, all you really need to know is that it’s tuned exactly the same as the first four strings of a guitar.’ He reached over and touched the first string. ‘So that’s E, then A, D, and G. OK?’
‘Yeah.’
‘This is your volume,’ he said, indicating one of two control knobs. ‘And the other one adjusts the tone.’ He looked at me. ‘And that’s pretty much it.’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘So …’ He smiled. ‘Off you go then.’
I looked at him, guessing that he was waiting to see what I’d do. Would I hesitate? Would I ask him what he wanted me to do? Or would I just go for it?
I took a breath and went for it.
The only guitars I’d played before then were acoustic, and mainly classical acoustic, which have nylon strings and aren’t particularly loud, so when I hit the open E string of that big Fender Mustang, and the huge throb of the bass note boomed from the speakers … well, it’s hard to describe how viscerally thrilling it was. That deep, dark, massive sound, the feel of it … vibrating through the floor, into my flesh, my bones … it was just so unbelievably good.
I played some more, thumping the open E string – doomp-doomp, doomp-doomp – and then the A string – domp-domp, domp-domp – then back to E again. I reached down the neck of the bass, held down the E string on the third fret, and pumped out a big fat G. The string was incredibly thick and tight, much harder to hold down than the soft nylon strings of a classical acoustic guitar, and my finger started aching almost immediately. I played a few more notes, sliding up to A and then B, and then I had to let go of the neck and waggle my fingers in the air to ease the pain.
‘All right?’ Curtis said.
‘Yeah … brilliant. It’s just a bit hard to hold the strings down.’
‘You’ll get used to that too.’
He went over and picked up his guitar. ‘Do you want to try playing along with us?’
‘I don’t know … I’m not sure I’m ready to –’
‘You’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘We’ll just play a bit of 12-bar blues, you know … the basic three-chord stuff. E, A, and B … do you know what I mean?’
‘Yeah, but I don’t know –’
‘Just keep to the single notes, you know – dah-dah, dah-dah, dah-dah – like you were doing just now. All right?’
I nodded. ‘I’ll do my best.’
‘Good.’ He turned to Kenny, who’d picked up a guitar and plugged it in and was standing by one of the speakers. ‘Ready?’
Kenny nodded.
Curtis turned back to me. ‘Just join in when you’re ready, OK?’
I nodded.
Curtis turned up the volume on his guitar, ran through a couple of quick blues scales, made a slight adjustment to the tuning, and then – with a brief nod at Stan – he began to play.
He kept it quite slow, starting with a traditional descending blues intro, and then Kenny and Stan came in, driving the rhythm along as Curtis kept things going with some simple, but very effective, blues riffs. It was, as Curtis had promised, pretty basic stuff, and I knew in my mind how I ought to be playing along with it … at least, I knew what notes I ought to be playing and where and when I ought to be playing them. It was just a matter of actually doing it.
Don’t think about it, I kept telling myself. Just do it. Just get that rhythm into your head – dah-dah, dah-dah, dah-dah, dah-dah – and start thumping the open E string.
I waited … while the key changed to B.
Dah-dah, dah-dah, dah-dah, dah-dah …
And then back to A.
Dah-dah, dah-dah, dah-dah, dah-dah …
And finally back to E again.
Dah-dah, dah-dah, dah-dah, dah-dah …
Dah-dah-daaaahh …
And then I joined in.
Although I was only playing single notes, it still took me a little while to work out how to play them with the solid thumping rhythm of a bass guitar, but after stopping and starting a few times to experiment with the positioning of my right hand, I finally figured out how to control the length and sustain of each note, which gave me a lot more control of the rhythm.
As we carried on playing that basic three-chord pattern over and over again, I gradually became more and more confident, and I soon felt competent enough to start adding a few extra notes here and there. I was still a long way from playing a bass line as such, but I wasn’t just playing single notes any more. I wasn’t feeling anxious or overly self-conscious any more either. In fact, after a while, I realized that I was actually really enjoying myself. Despite the almost stupid simplicity of the music, especially the part that I was playing, it was just as mesmeric – and easy to get lost in – as anything else I’d ever played, including Debussy. Perhaps even more so. It was addictive. I didn’t want to stop. I just wanted us to keep going, to carry on playing that wonderfully idiotic music – dah-dah, dah-dah, dah-dah, dah-dah – over and over and over again …
But, in the end, my fingers began to hurt so much from holding down the bass strings that I simply had to stop. I physically couldn’t play any more.
A few seconds after I stopped playing, the others stopped too.
‘Sorry,’ I said, waggling my throbbing fingers in the air.
‘N
o problem,’ Curtis said, smiling at me. ‘It might be a good idea to keep your hand still for a minute.’
‘What?’
‘You’re flicking blood all over the place.’
I stopped waggling my hand around and gazed at my fingers. The bass strings had dug into my fingertips so much that my index finger was bleeding.
‘Shit,’ I whispered.
Curtis laughed.
I glared at him.
‘Hey,’ he said, still smiling. ‘Welcome to the band.’
4
Everything changed for me after that weekend. I started spending a lot of time with Curtis, going round to his house a couple of evenings a week to practise the bass and learn Naked’s songs … at least, that’s all I told myself I was doing. And, at first, that was all I was doing.
We’d meet up after school, maybe go somewhere for a quick cup of coffee and something to eat, then we’d go back to his place and spend two or three hours in his bedroom together going through the songs. I’d sit on the bed with the bass, Curtis would sit next to me with his guitar, we’d plug in to a tiny little practice amp, and then we’d just go over the songs – again and again and again – until I knew them all off by heart. At the same time, Curtis was constantly giving me advice about how to play the bass, how to get the best out of it, how to get the right sound and – more importantly – the right feeling … and within a couple of weeks or so I’d not only become reasonably good at it, but I’d also gained a huge amount of confidence. So much so, in fact, that I even started to sing along with Curtis on some of the songs.
The songs were all written by him, both the music and the lyrics, and I soon found out that – unlike his carefree attitude to almost everything else – he took his song-writing intensely seriously. His songs were everything to him – they came from his heart, from his soul. And they were so personal, the lyrics so much a part of him, that although he was immensely proud of them, he was always quite adamant in his refusal to explain them.
‘Songs are songs,’ he told me once. ‘They don’t need explaining.’
‘Yeah,’ I’d said. ‘But the words –’
‘They’re just words.’
Curtis was also very possessive and controlling about his music – very exact about how it should sound, very demanding about how it should be played – and he had no interest whatsoever in anyone else’s opinions or suggestions. Kenny and Stan, I soon learned, didn’t even bother trying to get him to listen to them any more – they just did whatever he told them to do. And it was at least a couple of months before Curtis would grudgingly acknowledge that my background in classical music and my years of study and training weren’t totally irrelevant and worthless. Actually, he was probably right in the first place, because in terms of the kind of music we were playing, most of my classical training was totally irrelevant and worthless. But I did know quite a lot about music – how it works, how things fit together, how to make the most of rhythm and structure and melody – and Curtis eventually came to accept that some of my ideas were occasionally worth listening to.
But that was later …
In those first few months, I was perfectly content to keep my ideas to myself, listen to Curtis, and concentrate on learning the basics.
Another thing that changed was that as a result of playing the bass all the time, the skin on the fingertips of my left hand quickly hardened up, which stopped the bleeding and made it a lot less painful to play. On the downside, in terms of playing the piano, the roughening of my fingertips didn’t help at all, and although I still managed to scrape through my Grade 8 exam, it was obvious that – to a certain extent – my piano-playing was suffering. Not that I really minded. Because, as time went by, although I still really enjoyed playing the piano, and I still really loved classical music, I gradually lost all interest in the academic side of playing. Music had become so much more to me now, and the idea of studying it just seemed so pointless, so artificial … so lifeless.
As well as spending a lot of time on my own with Curtis, we also spent as much time together with the rest of the band as we could – practising, rehearsing, working out new songs. It wasn’t easy finding somewhere to rehearse. Curtis’s parents had not only categorically banned him from using the garage, they’d even put a padlock on the door to stop him getting in when they were away. So we’d had to find somewhere else to play, and for a month or so we rehearsed a couple of times a week in a nightclub in Kilburn. The club was one of several in North London that Stan’s father owned, and he was quite happy to let us use it whenever it was empty … until, that is, Curtis somehow managed to overload the club’s PA system, blowing the speakers and causing about £5,000 worth of damage, which didn’t go down too well with Stan’s dad. After that, we practised in all kinds of places for a while – an abandoned factory, a lock-up garage, a dance studio, the basement of a squat in Seven Sisters …
Basically, as long as it had a roof and an electricity supply, it would do.
So … as the days passed by, and the summer holidays began, Naked took over my life. We practised hard, we learned new songs … and when I wasn’t with the band, or practising the bass on my own, I was spending all my time with Curtis. I’d be lying if I said that there was nothing intimate about our relationship at that point, because I think we both knew what was going to happen from the moment we met in the music room, but there was no real physical intimacy between us during those first few weeks together. There was lots of smiling and joking, lots of playful flirting, and there were quite a few times when we’d sit side by side on Curtis’s bed, playing our guitars, and Curtis would lean in close to me, take my hand, and gently guide my fingers over the fretboard, and my heart would start pounding, and I’d get all hot and flustered, wondering if he was going to kiss me, and how that would feel, and how I would feel if he wanted to do more than just kiss me …
I wondered about that quite a lot. Asking myself whether I really wanted to do it or not, imagining how it would be, how it would feel, what it would mean …
When the big moment finally came though, on a sultry Sunday afternoon in July, in Curtis’s bedroom, when his parents were out … well, it wasn’t really anything like I’d imagined. That’s not to say it was terrible or anything, it was just … I don’t know. It just wasn’t how I’d imagined it was going to be. As I said, I’d kind of known all along it was going to happen eventually, and I was pretty sure that I wanted it to happen. I really liked Curtis. I admired him, I looked up to him … I was in awe of him, to tell you the truth. He was special. And I was, without doubt, physically attracted to him. So when he came back into the bedroom that afternoon, after excusing himself to go to the bathroom … when he closed the door and came over and sat down beside me on the bed, and he put his arm round my waist and gently kissed me on the lips … it was what I wanted. I still wasn’t entirely sure if I wanted it to go any further, but I kind of knew that it would, and when it did … and we ended up in bed together, with Curtis murmuring breathlessly, ‘Are you sure this is OK?’ and me saying, ‘Yes … yes, it’s OK …’
And it was OK.
Sort of …
It was my first time, for a start, and I didn’t really know how it was supposed to feel or what I was supposed to do. I didn’t know if it was natural to feel slightly afraid of what was happening, and – to be perfectly honest – slightly turned off too. It was just the sheer physicality of it, I suppose. The reality of the sexual act, as opposed to the fantasy of falling in love. There was a big difference. And I think the reality of it was all just a bit too much for me. The naked reality of Curtis’s body, his animal grunts and groans, his frighteningly desperate need … it had never been like that in my dreams.
I remember quite clearly lying in bed after that first time, watching Curtis as he pulled on his jeans and lit a cigarette … and I remember thinking to myself, Is that it? Is that what it’s all about?
But, lik
e I said, it was OK.
It was my decision as much as Curtis’s, and I could have said no if I’d wanted to. It wasn’t as if I was forced into it or anything. And Curtis, in his way, was quite gentle and kind. It was just …
I don’t know.
It just changed things so much. It changed the way I saw Curtis. It made me realize that – in one way, at least – he wasn’t any different to other boys. It changed me too, taking away the child in me and making me grow up too fast.
It changed us.
It changed everything.
And afterwards, there would always be a part of me that longed for the days before that Sunday afternoon, the days when I could go to bed at night and dream in innocence of the way Curtis had looked at me, or the way he’d smiled at me, or just the feel of his hand as he guided my fingers over the fretboard of the bass …
Before I met Curtis, I’d never been one for going out all that much. I wasn’t a recluse or anything, and I’d been to my fair share of parties and clubs and gigs, but I wasn’t the kind of person who went out on the town every night. With Curtis though … well, he was the kind of person who went out on the town every night, and now that I was with him, now that we were a couple, I started going out a lot too. Sometimes it’d just be me and Curtis, sometimes Kenny and Stan would come along, and sometimes Curtis would surprise me by bringing along people I’d never met before. He knew a lot of people, and even now I’m still not sure how he got to know them or where he met them. He just seemed to know them. They were all mostly arty kind of people – writers, musicians, poets, painters – and while some of them were OK, and none of them could be described as boring, a lot of them were far from pleasant. This didn’t seem to bother Curtis. They could be loud, rude, disgusting, dirty … creepy, crazy, nasty, even dangerous – Curtis didn’t care. As long as they were different, that’s all that mattered to him. He liked abnormality. He found it entertaining. It was almost as if he saw life as a circus, and he was the ringmaster, surrounding himself with performing animals and clowns and freaks. And that made me wonder sometimes if that’s how he saw me – as just another entertainment act in the circus of his life.