Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands

by Will Carruthers

  Dig, dig, stamp, stamp.

  I aspired to stop digging. I was digging so that eventually I could stop digging. The only reason I did these shitty jobs was to earn enough money to stop doing them. Maybe that is why I kept on doing them too. At that moment the digging was the most interesting thing on my horizon. Speed is great like that. It narrows your perceptions until boring jobs make all of the sense in the world.

  Dig, dig.

  Stamp, stamp.

  There was the sound of a big old self-important power chord from the PA. It was soundcheck time. There was a bloke onstage with a guitar. The guitar had a Union Jack painted on it, which completely failed to make my heart swell with nationalistic pride. The urchins from the back of the Luton van were fucking mesmerised though. This was probably the closest they were going to get to the gig of the century.

  My feet were hurting a bit.

  The bloke played some more chords, then John Squire from the Stone Roses came out and played a bit of guitar. His band could have been as big as the Beatles or as big as Oasis pretending to be the Beatles but they fucked it up. Or maybe they didn’t. John Squire looked a bit uneasy. I liked him for that.

  Dig, dig, stamp, stamp.

  It was time to go home, thank fuck. My legs and my feet hurt from all of the speed-induced stamping and digging. I had played my part in rock and roll history to little fanfare and less applause. The cable was well and truly dug in. Nobody was going to inadvertently trip over that while wondering what a fucking wonderwall was.

  I think I earned about eighteen quid for that five-hour shift. It was something like that anyway. I recalled a quote from the songwriter of Oasis. He had called for all members of the royal family and all Conservatives to be beheaded. I found that pretty funny. Fucking four-fifty an hour and I had to buy my own Sudafed. I wonderwalled how much the band got paid?

  We all got in the van.

  Everybody was much happier than they had been in the morning. Those of us who were not already drunk began to get drunk. There was a bloke from Belfast who worked on the crew. He had been chased out of his town by the local hard men because he stole the wrong car, or something. He brought out four cans of super-strength lager and drank them in about fifteen minutes. I never saw anybody get drunk so fast. He died of liver failure a few years later. He told me the best story once. He told me that when the bailiffs had arrived at his house with a policeman over some unpaid debt to the council, he had been forced to let them in. When the bailiff went to pick up the first of his belongings, Joe smashed it with a hammer before they could take it out of his house. He told me he smashed a lot of his own stuff that day and it was all completely legal. The police couldn’t stop him smashing his own stuff.

  I never got the call to work at the actual show, but I did get to watch it on telly. I was sat watching it at my mum’s house after a night when I hadn’t slept in the front garden. I saw the fucking golf carts. I had never been a big fan of golf. I saw the band driving the little white golf carts around backstage on the telly, like the Queen, or something. I looked at the people in the back of the golf carts on telly. I recognised someone I had once been in a band with. I hadn’t seen her since. She had married a rock star and lived in a big house in the country somewhere. Her musical career had obviously been slightly more successful than my own. Oasis had a line in one of their songs that said, ‘Where were you when we were getting high?’ Well, I had been digging the fucking cables in. Any idiot could have done it, but in a way I’m glad it was me.

  A Very Strange Dream

  Shortly afterwards, I had a strange dream. After the terrible conquering armies of Britpop had driven all of the shivering independent weirdos into the stadium for execution, the victors had moved to vast palaces in the countryside, decorated with the skulls of their enemies, to count their spoils and compose bloated rock operas and triple-album collaborations about the films of Michael Winner. It was like David Essex in Stardust, but without the glamour.

  Kate and Richard were living in their shocking-pink mansion in the country, with Kate employing a cook to dish up all sorts of terrible avant garde meals for him. He was wasting away and Kate was noticing how fat the dog was getting. Richard smiled grimly around every forced mouthful and quickly spat it under the table to the dog, who was terribly constipated and prone to awful bouts of farting and explosive diarrhoea. Richard had to eat late at night in the music room and hide the Ginsters pasty wrappers from her, as he relived the glory days of the Verve on YouTube, while one of Oasis drove John Lennon’s Rolls Royce into the paddling pool of tears that Chris Martin had shed on a crying jag after two glasses of champagne shandy and a crafty line of Lemsip. Then a huge booming voice crackled out over the psychic tannoy: ‘Truly, success can be a greater curse than failure, especially if we must guard ourselves with robot snipers and surround ourselves with horribly fame-addicted Hollywood celebrities in order to bolster the fragile self-esteem that we used to get from … oh, I dunno, playing music with our friends.’ Then a huge flaming banner appeared in the sky. It said, ‘There is nothing quite as seductive and as disappointing as the things that we are told we should want and then do.’

  Of course, this was merely the politics of envy, and it was only a matter of time until all of that wealth trickled down. Even in dreams.

  No Lawyers, Only Longbows

  Can you imagine what I would do if I did all that I can?

  Sun Tzu

  I had received the green bolt of yew as a gift for my birthday. It had come via a friend who worked in the medieval armoury at Holdenby House (a stately home close to Rugby and the resting place of the bones of Lady Diana). He had received the wood from a practising witch who worked as a seamstress there and who kept a garden filled with feared and forbidden plants. The fact that I had recognised a few of these plants by sight when I visited had impressed her in some small way, and she had given the seven-foot stave of yew to my friend to give to me. It was a peculiar birthday present, but it was what I had wanted. The yew tree is the oldest living tree on the British Isles, and it is rich with stories and mythology. The Fortingall Yew in Perthshire is thought to be one of the oldest trees in Europe. Estimates vary as to its true age: some say one thousand five hundred years, and some say three thousand years. Local legend claims that Pontius Pilate was born beneath the Fortingall Yew and played in its shade as a child. Yews are difficult to age. As the heartwood of the original trunk rots away the tree itself continues to sprout outside its own decay. No obvious centre means no rings to count, and therefore no definitive way to age the tree. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the yew is traditionally associated with death, rebirth and the underworld. Many of the ancient yews of Britain are to be found in church graveyards, and whether the trees predate the churches, or the other way round, is sometimes a matter of speculation.

  The friend who had given me the yew wood from the witch’s garden was named Peter Prince, a big man with an eccentric and occasionally darkly depressive nature, who hailed from the Black Country and who claimed gypsy ancestry. He couldn’t read or write very well but he could make just about anything with his hands. Pete was a musician and an occasional shoemaker, who also liked weapons. He’d come round to the house where I lived and take me out to the country, where we’d shoot longbows or ride canoes, or fight with broadswords he had borrowed from the armoury. Once, he had proudly shown me two gleaming broadswords that had not yet been ground to a cutting edge, but which were big, heavy and extremely fucking sword-like. We went and drank a few beers and then decided to have a duel on the green outside the students’ residence at Rugby School, which, as one of the most expensive and highly esteemed private schools in Britain, attracts the sons and daughters of politicians, diplomats, captains of industry and gangsters. We thought it might be amusing to conduct a loud mock battle involving clashing broadswords and obviously regional accents to show our future rulers that the fighting spirit was not quite dead in the peasantry. The steel clashed, ribald and disgu
sting insults were thrown, we didn’t get arrested, nobody was seriously injured, and we thought it was funny. Anybody watching us probably thought it was another case of two drunk locals trying to kill each other again. There were always murders in Rugby.

  Peter Prince spoke, in whispered tones, of a man who we shall refer to as ‘Elron, the bow maker’. Elron was one of the original crew of Rugby hippies from the sixties who had a fairly formidable and mysterious reputation as a bit of a hermit and a traditional yew bowyer. The woman who owned the house where I lived knew Elron pretty well and had arranged an introduction for me. He had driven up from his remote and crumbling farmhouse in the Brecon Beacons in a car that ran on recycled chip shop fat. We bonded over a shared love of wild plants, and consequently I received some advice on the ancient art of bow making, none of it precise or scientific, but all of it invaluable. I never told him why I wanted the bow. I just listened and nodded as he explained about trial and error, the unique properties of yew, and the easily avoidable beginner’s mistakes. ‘Just work slowly and feel the way the bow wants to be made,’ he advised. I went to visit him down at his farmhouse in a remote Welsh valley. Each corner of the tumbledown cottage was stacked with longbows of varying sizes and strengths. Knotted, horned, silky and gleaming, dark hearted and with a pale band of flexible sapwood along the front, each one was unique and lovingly handcrafted to pull evenly and fling arrows far and fine.

  So, with my training from the eldritch bow maker and my bolt of rough green yew handed down from the witch through the master of arms, I was prepared for an epic revenge story of tragic proportions. I set about the task of making my weapon like a man quietly possessed. I felt wronged and thought only vengeance could make it right. I was going to settle a score. Any fool can pull a trigger without a second thought, but this was going to be personal. I was going to look somebody in the eye, and loose the arrow from a bow I had made with my own hands. My cherished hatred was preparing to flower into a bloody rose with a feathered stem. The sense of injustice had grown in me like a cancer, unseen and unacknowledged until I had begun to show symptoms of a disease which I did not recognise.

  Murderous vengeance was not the thing I actually wanted, of course, it was a reaction to the things I felt were lacking from the situation that had provoked me. Fairness, decency and honour being absent, I had been forced into dealing with lawyers, and my lack of funds to fight a case of missing funds was a frustration that lead me back to the basics of the old snake brain.

  I had begun chopping at the rough bolt of wood with my car-boot Bowie knife, carving off the bark and the first big chunks of wood until the basic shape of the weapon was made and it began to look less like a stick and more like a bow. I worked outside in the day and inside my small bedroom at night, becoming so fully absorbed in the task that I had little time for anything else. My bow was taking shape as the poison of the wood fed the fever that drove me on. My landlady, a woman of some sensitivity, did not ask too many questions, but occasionally I could see the concern in her. She had mentioned that there seemed to be ‘a brooding presence’ down towards the end of the corridor when I worked through the night. The small bedroom that I rented at the back of the terraced house was strewn with slivers and tiny scrapings of yew. They were in the bed, in my socks, and they completely covered the small area of floor space between the bed and the opposite wall of the room that I was sleeping and working in. This mess itself was invisible to me, focused as I was on the task in hand.

  I visualised the final scene as the bow started to come to life. It was beginning to reveal its own shape and character and I knew every knot and contour of the wood by heart. I cut notches in the rough ends and strung it for the first time, bracing the wood against my leg and putting the first flex in it.

  I come from a long line of warriors, but I hadn’t known that at the time. My great-grandfather was an officer in the First World War. He was shot through the lungs in the Battle of the Somme and was pulled out bleeding but alive after laying in no-man’s-land for some hours. He had spent years at the front. My grandfather was a commando in the Second World War … joined at seventeen, was posted to the Baltic Sea, came up the beaches at the D-Day landings and was then posted to Burma. My father was a mercenary in the ‘Belgian’ Congo in the sixties, serving with ex-SS officers, and was a self-confessed ‘National Socialist’. I was adopted at the age of six weeks into a family with no history of war. When they got me they knew only that my father had been a mercenary, which was strictly forbidden information. They were also told that the strange scarring I had on my knee was from a mysterious case of frostbite. Nobody seemed to know how a six-week-old baby might get frostbite, but there we are. My adoptive parents never ever told me that they knew my father was a mercenary. I guess in the early seventies it might have been considered somewhat glamorous and exciting to be a ‘soldier of fortune’. They were aware of the realities of that only through films and the occasional news source. I imagine the truth was more squalid. Those mercenaries had been known as ‘Les affreuses’, the terrible ones. Regardless, they never told me what they knew of my roots. When I had asked my dad (adoptive) about my father (genetic) he had told me that my father had been an Irish musician. My dad was instrumental in guiding me away from war and into music. I had been keen to join the army at one point in my mid-teens, mainly as a way to avoid the drudgery and boredom of most of the working lives I was being offered, and partly because I craved adventure. He sat me down and said, ‘Just remember, Willie, all that they are training you to do is kill people.’

  Rather than trying to discourage me from joining the army, he encouraged me into music with praise and occasional support. He gave me the four hundred pounds to go and buy my Gibson Thunderbird when I joined Spacemen 3. I had taken that money with me and gone searching through the music shops of Birmingham. I tried a lot of basses until I finally walked into City Music on Colmore Row. As soon as I saw the Gibson Thunderbird I knew it was my bass. Playing it for the first time confirmed what I had known at first glance. It was love at first sight.

  When I met my father for the first time, many years later, I had left his council flat in Chesterfield totally shell-shocked. He had talked to me about his admiration for Hitler and war all night as he smoked the hash he had requested I bring with me. I had sat on his sofa absolutely dumbfounded. The only thing I remember saying to him after politely turning down his offer of moving to ‘a nice place he knew in South Africa where there were no black people’ was, ‘You don’t know me very well, do you?’

  The idea of a future filled with bad oompah music and inbred white supremacy really didn’t sit well with my own worldview. The first thing I had done after the meeting was phone my dad. ‘Hi, Dad,’ I said. ‘I just got back from meeting my father.’

  ‘Oh, really,’ he replied, keeping it light. ‘How was it?’

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Remember how you told me he was an Irish musician?’

  ‘Did I?’ he said, and then there was long silence.

  ‘He wasn’t. He was a mercenary. You knew that, didn’t you?’

  ‘Erm …,’ he said, searching for words, ‘it’s hard to remember. I can’t remember saying that to you … maybe I did.’

  ‘You did say that. Thanks, Dad,’ I said. ‘I’m glad things worked out the way they did.’

  I had never been more grateful for having been told a lie in my entire life.

  I didn’t know all of that when I was sitting in my little bedroom with a bloodthirsty urge and a bedroom full of toxic sawdust. I fixed the string in the nocks for the fiftieth time and then braced the bow with my left hand, pulling the string back towards my open eye. I could feel the power in it and the potential. They say a longbow will pierce bulletproof glass with a steel bodkin point arrowhead. It hits the target, the point penetrates, the shaft of the arrow flexes and then kicks the arrow through with the recoil. It is a powerful weapon. A decent modern archer with a good pull should manage to fire an arrow over one hundred and
eighty metres. An archer from the good old days of Edward III should have been able to reach a distance of three hundred metres and pierce a well-made suit of armour with a war arrow, regardless of the nobility of the prince inside it.

  I began to consider the reality of the act I was preparing. I guess that the meditative task of actually making the weapon had cooled my bloodlust a little. I decided that I would now be satisfied with an arrow in the leg. Perhaps around the thigh. I guessed that anyone with an arrow in their leg would have good reason to consider the consequences of the actions that had lead to it happening.

  ‘Yeah, just one in the leg and a pithy remark. That’ll be enough,’ I thought out loud, as I pulled the string back and took imaginary aim at my imaginary foe.

  With the balance and pull of the bow correct, I began to sand and file the wood, taking it back to a smooth grain with finer and finer grades of sandpaper until it felt like silk in my hand. It was a war of attrition in more ways than one. When I was completely satisfied with the finish, I set about the decorative touches, inlaying two slivers of mother-of-pearl at the nocking point. Those two curls danced around each other like bright halves of the yin and yang symbol. I guess the darkness was all in me and I was prepared to admit no outward signs of it.