Naked

by Kevin Brooks

  There was another non-band member in the van that night too, a man in his mid-twenties called Jake Francis. Curtis had introduced us to Jake about a month before when we were rehearsing one night at the squat in Seven Sisters. None of us had ever met Jake before, and when Curtis brought him down to the basement and told us that he was going to be our manager … well, it didn’t go down all that well, to say the least.

  ‘He’s going to be our what?’ Kenny said indignantly.

  ‘Our manager.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since I asked him,’ Curtis said calmly.

  Kenny shook his head. ‘You asked him to be our manager?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What about the rest of us … don’t we get a say? I mean, fucking hell, Curtis … we’ve never even talked about having a manager, and now you just turn up, out of the blue, with someone we don’t even know –’

  ‘All right,’ Curtis said. ‘What do you want to know about him?’

  ‘That’s not the point –’

  ‘He knows people, Kenny. He’s got contacts … he used to manage bands in Manchester –’

  ‘Yeah? Like who?’

  Curtis looked at Jake.

  Jake said to Kenny. ‘Do you know the Black Angels?’

  Kenny shook his head. ‘Never heard of them.’

  ‘How about Meat House?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘10cc?’

  Kenny looked surprised. ‘You managed 10cc?’

  Jake grinned. ‘No … but I’m a good enough liar to make you believe that I did. And that’s exactly why you need me.’

  Jake was kind of creepy-looking. Spider-thin, with short black curly hair, a bad complexion, and wire-framed granny glasses that made his eyes look really small. He always wore a greasy old dark green suit, dirty black plimsolls, and no socks … even in winter. He listened to reggae music all the time, at unbelievably loud volumes, and he constantly smoked dope, from first thing in the morning until last thing at night. Although, strangely, he never seemed to get stoned.

  ‘So,’ he said, turning to Stan. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Do you want me to be your manager?’

  Stan shrugged. ‘I don’t really care, to be honest …’

  Jake looked at me. ‘How about you?’

  ‘I think we should talk about it first,’ I said, glancing at Curtis.

  ‘Yeah, of course you should talk about it,’ Jake said. ‘Take all the time you need, have a chat between yourselves, and if there’s anything you want to know about me …’ He grinned. ‘Well, I’ll do my best to tell you the truth.’ He turned to Curtis. ‘I’ll be in the pub, OK?’

  ‘Yeah …’

  After Jake had left, we talked things over for quite a long time – asking Curtis lots of questions about Jake, most of which he couldn’t answer, discussing whether or not we actually needed a manager at all – but, in the end, we couldn’t come to an agreement. Kenny was still totally against Jake, Curtis was still for him, Stan still didn’t care, and I couldn’t make up my mind.

  ‘Why don’t we just leave it for now?’ I suggested. ‘We can think about it over the next few days and then, when we’re all ready, we can get together and talk about it again.’

  Apart from Curtis, everyone agreed that that was the best thing to do.

  But it never happened.

  Because the very next day, Curtis broke the news that Jake had got us a gig at the Conway Arms – which, although quite small, was a well-known venue with a good reputation for breaking new bands. And, according to Jake, if the first gig went well, there was a possibility of us being offered a residency, and that would mean playing the Conway every Friday night.

  And even Kenny was impressed by that.

  So, although we never officially asked Jake to manage us, and despite his undeniable creepiness, and the fact that none of us – Curtis included – actually liked the man, he somehow just sort of became our manager.

  So, anyway, there we all were that night, the six of us crammed into Chief’s stinking Transit van – Curtis and Jake in the front with Chief; me, Kenny, and Stan stuffed in the back with all the equipment – making our way along the Seven Sisters Road towards the Conway Arms. Jake, as ever, had a big fat joint going, and Curtis and Chief were both chain-smoking cigarettes, and the smoke was so thick inside the van that I could barely breathe.

  ‘How about opening a window?’ I said, coughing.

  ‘It’s too cold,’ Jake replied.

  ‘I’m suffocating back here.’

  ‘We’ll be there in a minute.’

  ‘I could be dead in a minute.’

  Curtis looked over his shoulder at me and smiled. ‘Excited?’

  ‘I would be if I could breathe.’

  He didn’t say anything else, he just carried on looking at me, and as I gazed back at him through the smoke, I suddenly realized how blissfully happy he was. This was what he’d been waiting for – this coming moment, this day, this night. This was his dream. To get up on stage and play his songs … this was all he’d ever wanted.

  ‘Yeah,’ I told him, smiling. ‘Yeah, I’m excited.’

  We stared at each other in silence for a while, sharing an intimate moment, and then Curtis took a drag on his cigarette and turned to Kenny, who was squatting down awkwardly between two stacks of speakers.

  ‘You all right there, Ken?’ Curtis grinned.

  ‘Yeah, fucking great.’

  ‘Ready to rock?’

  Kenny actually smiled. ‘Yeah, I’m ready.’

  Curtis looked at Stan. ‘You ready?’

  Stan grinned. ‘Fucking A.’

  ‘Let’s do it then,’ Curtis said. ‘Let’s go out there and give the world something to remember.’

  I’m not sure if we were that memorable that night, but anyone who was there will tell you that it was probably one of the best debut gigs that London has ever seen. And I know that I’ll never forget it. The whole experience … it was all just so raw, so pure, so wrought with primitive emotion. Even the simple process of walking into the Conway Arms at eight o’clock in the evening, when it was already quite busy, and announcing ourselves as ‘the band’, and then being taken upstairs to the bar where we’d be playing, and being shown into the ‘dressing room’, which was actually just a converted toilet … even all that gave me a weird kind of thrill. A nervous thrill, perhaps. But a thrill nevertheless. And then we had to unload all the gear and set it up on the stage, which meant traipsing up and down the stairs for an hour or so, lugging our equipment out of the van and carrying it through the downstairs bar, which was gradually becoming more and more crowded, which meant that we all had to put up with quite a lot of staring – which wasn’t too bad – and a few friendly comments – ‘what kind of stuff do you play?’ – and quite a few not so friendly comments – ‘who the fucking hell do you think you are?’ And, of course, because most of the crowd were men, most of whom had been drinking, and I was a sixteen-year-old girl – and, what’s more, I’d been persuaded by Curtis to ‘dress up a bit’, so I’d ‘borrowed’ a lacy white cocktail dress from my mother’s vast wardrobe, and I was wearing it with blue-and-white striped tights, bright red DMs, and half a ton of make-up – so, obviously, I was the subject of a fair bit of attention myself. Some of it was OK – young men doing their best not to stare, others just smiling shyly – but a lot of it consisted of out-and-out leering, which was really unsettling, together with the kind of remarks that you’d expect from a pub full of men. Comments such as ‘Show us your tits, love,’ or ‘Listen, darling, if you’re looking for a father-figure …’

  Arf arf arf.

  I did my best to stay cool about it, but I felt really angry inside.

  So by the time we’d got all the gear set up, done a quick soundcheck, and gone back to the dressing room to wait for th
e crowd to amble upstairs, I’d already been through enough different emotions to last me a week. I’d been thrilled, I’d been nervous, I’d been angry …

  And now?

  Sitting there in that cold windowless room, with Curtis tuning his guitar, a smoking cigarette lodged in his mouth … and Stan winding strips of tape round a drumstick … and Jake all twitchy and hyper, pacing up and down, puffing away on a joint … and Kenny just standing in the corner, staring nervously at the floor, his face deathly pale …

  How did I feel now?

  I could hear the room filling up outside – voices, laughter, chinking glasses … a hum of expectation. I could feel the butterflies in my stomach, the fear of what I was about to do, the rush of excitement, the edginess of not knowing what was going to happen …

  Would I be OK?

  Would I remember the songs?

  Would I mess everything up?

  I heard Jake saying, ‘Here,’ and when I looked up I saw him passing something to Curtis, a small rectangle of folded paper. Curtis opened it up, carefully tipped out a line of white powder onto the back of his hand, then lifted his hand to his nose and snorted up the powder through one nostril.

  ‘What’s that?’ I said.

  ‘Nothing …’ Curtis sniffed, wiping his nose. ‘Just some speed … you want some?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  Curtis nodded, looking around. ‘Anyone else?’

  Stan shook his head, Kenny said nothing.

  Curtis passed the speed back to Jake.

  I looked at Curtis, feeling slightly disappointed. I’d sort of hoped that the gig itself – the excitement of it, the buzz – might have been enough for him, and that, just for once, he could have gone without any artificial stimulation …

  But I didn’t say anything.

  I didn’t want him to think I was uptight, did I?

  There was a quick knock on the door then, and as it swung open, the noise from outside rolled in, like a breaking wave of chattering voices. The man who ran the pub popped his head round the door and said, ‘You ready?’

  Jake and Curtis both said, ‘Yeah.’

  The man nodded. ‘Good luck.’ And walked off, leaving the door open.

  I could see the people outside now. There were about fifty, maybe sixty of them. Some of them were from the bar downstairs, but there were quite a few who I guessed had arrived at the last minute – younger people, cooler people, the kind of people who go to see bands. And, hanging around at the back, I could just make out a raggedy bunch of over- and underdressed figures who I recognized from Sex: Malcolm McLaren, Jordan, Sid Vicious, Siouxsie Sioux …

  The girl with the swastika armband was there too, the one Curtis had ogled at the Sex Pistols gig. I’d found out since that she called herself Charlie Brown. Whether that was her real name or not, I had no idea – and, to be perfectly honest, I couldn’t have cared less either way.

  I just didn’t want her to be there.

  ‘Come on, Lili,’ Curtis said to me. ‘This is it – we’re on.’

  As I got to my feet and followed him and the rest of the band out of the dressing room and across the room towards the stage, it suddenly felt as if all the emotions I’d already been through that night were now swirling around inside my belly in a sickening cocktail of dizzied confusion. And as I climbed onto the stage and plugged in my bass, I was convinced that I was going to throw up.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ a voice announced over the PA system. ‘Please put your hands together for … Naked!’

  6

  The houselights went down, and just for a moment everything hummed in a darkened silence. Then a spotlight came on, picking out Curtis at the front of the stage, and as he leapt into the air like a maniac and began thrashing out the first four bars of ‘Naked’, I just knew that everything was going to be all right. The sound was electrifying, stunning, the crash of chords ripping through the air like a thunderous shot of adrenalin, and when I started playing – coming in at precisely the same time as Kenny and Stan – and the stage erupted in a blaze of lights, it all felt so good that I thought for a moment my heart was going to explode. The sound was almost too good to believe. We were so loud, so fast, so tight … we were so there … it was incredible. The machine-gun beat of Stan’s drums, the punching rhythm of Kenny’s guitar, the booming thump of my bass … and, above it all, the screaming craziness of Curtis’s guitar and the mesmerizing sight of him twisting and reeling and staggering around the stage …

  He looked so out of it, so lost and manic, that I thought for a second he wasn’t going to get to the microphone in time to start singing the first verse, but I needn’t have worried. At the very last moment, he spun round, lunged across the stage to the mike, and launched into the first verse with perfect timing. He sang as if his life depended on it – spitting out the words with venom and passion, his eyes squeezed shut, his neck straining – and although I’d heard him singing so many times before, I was still taken aback by the sheer brutal beauty of his voice. The words screamed out of his mouth as if they’d been torn – ripped and bleeding – from his heart:

  IDLE BLACK EYES

  AND DRUG-YELLOWED SKIN

  THE DREAM FLOWERS DIE

  ON HER COLD NAKED SIN …

  His passion was infectious, and when we all joined in on the chanted chorus –

  I’M NAKED!

  YOU’RE NAKED!

  WE’RE NAKED!

  … NAKED!

  – we sounded like a bunch of mad demons.

  It was awesome.

  The song only lasted about three minutes, and as soon as we’d finished it – with a final crashing chord and a deliberate screech of feedback from Curtis’s guitar – we went straight into the next number, a song called ‘Crack Up’. It was another very short and very fast song, similar in style to ‘Naked’, but with a slightly jerkier rhythm. It was probably my least favourite of all our songs, but the audience seemed to like it, and by the time we’d played the final chorus and begun the introduction to ‘Heaven Hill’, there were plenty of people dancing down at the front.

  As far as I was concerned, ‘Heaven Hill’ was easily the best song that Curtis had ever written. It was so haunting and memorable that every time we played it my skin would shiver and I’d get a weird kind of fluttery feeling in my heart. It was a slightly unusual song in that it didn’t follow the typical verse/chorus/verse/chorus structure, consisting instead of three separate – but interlinked – parts that gradually built up into a final swirling chorus that brought everything together in a wonderful burst of multilayered melodies. Curtis had helped me to develop the bass line, showing me a simple chord technique that gave the bass a much deeper and more melodic sound, which I absolutely loved. I also loved playing ‘Heaven Hill’ because Curtis and I sang together on it – him taking the lead, me singing harmony – and at some point during the song Curtis would always glance across at me with a look on his face that said, Isn’t this great?, and I’d always smile back at him in silent agreement …

  It was our special little moment.

  And that night, as we began singing the final chorus together –

  HEAVEN HILL, REMEMBER

  HEAVEN HILL, REMEMBER

  HEAVEN HILL …

  – and Curtis looked over at me with a smile that said, Isn’t this just THE best thing in the world? and I smiled back like a love-struck fool, it was even more special than ever.

  That, for me, was the high point of the night.

  Unfortunately, it was followed soon afterwards by a couple of not-so-high points, the first of which occurred during the very next song, a two-minute slab of blood-curdling noise called ‘Stupid’. In keeping with its title, the lyric of the song boasted only one word, the eponymous ‘stupid’, which Curtis screamed out at the top of his voice, over and over again.
Towards the end of the song, as the music got louder and faster and crazier, he lurched right up to the edge of the stage, fixed his eyes on a girl at the front, and began howling the by-now almost unintelligible word at her – STUPIDSTUPIDSTUPIDSTUPID …

  The girl didn’t seem to mind all that much – in fact, I think she was quite flattered by the attention – but the man who was with her, a greasy-haired biker drinking beer from a bottle, he didn’t like it at all. I saw him glaring at Curtis for a moment, waiting to see if he’d stop, and when he didn’t – when Curtis carried on leaning towards the girl and yelling like a lunatic into her face – the biker took a swig from his bottle, pulled the girl out of the way, and swung the bottle at Curtis’s face. Curtis, though, had seen it coming and had already moved back from the edge of the stage, so the beer bottle missed him by miles. This only made the biker even angrier, and as Curtis carried on playing – with a mocking grin on his face – the biker drew back his arm and hurled the bottle with all his strength. Curtis leapt to one side, trying to get out of the way, but he wasn’t quite quick enough and the bottle caught him a glancing blow on the side of his head. He staggered slightly, shaking his head, but he didn’t stop playing. Even as a trickle of blood began oozing down the side of his face, he kept chopping away at his guitar, hammering out the chords, seemingly oblivious to any pain. Jake, meanwhile, who’d been looking on from the right-hand side of the stage, was now striding towards the biker, shouting obscenities at him, clearly intent on sorting him out. Which, although quite admirable, was patently never going to happen, as the biker was roughly twice the size of Jake and at least fifty times tougher. So I wasn’t surprised when the biker turned towards Jake, looked him up and down, and floored him almost dismissively with a single punch to the head. But then, as if out of nowhere, I saw a giant-sized fist rise up from the crowd behind the biker, and I caught a quick glimpse of Chief’s Stone Age face, and I watched in awe as he brought his fist down, hammering it into the top of the biker’s head, and the biker collapsed to the floor in a heap.