Here Comes Everybody

by James Fearnley

  ‘Hullo,’ I said.

  ‘Nng,’ he said and nodded.

  I laid my case on the floor and took out my guitar. Terry pointed me to the amp I was to use.

  ‘What’s the name of your band?’ I asked.

  ‘It didn’t say in the Melody Maker?’ Terry answered.

  ‘It just said “name band”, ’ I said.

  ‘The Nips,’ the singer said lazily.

  ‘The Nipple Erectors,’ Terry said.

  ‘The Nips,’ the singer repeated.

  As soon as he stood up I realised who the singer was. There couldn’t have been many people who hadn’t seen the photograph on the front of the NME of a guy called Shane O’Hooligan having his earlobe bitten off by one of the Mo-dettes at a Clash gig at the ICA in 1976.

  We went around our names. The girl bass player I was told was called Shanne. I wondered if the similarity of her name and O’Hooligan’s was by design rather than chance.

  I took my guitar out and slung the strap over my shoulder.

  ‘Telecaster,’ O’Hooligan said. I couldn’t tell if the guitar was a disappointment to him.

  I was proud of my Telecaster. It was the blonde pre-CBS Telecaster with a rosewood fingerboard and a £220 price tag which I’d pulled again and again out of the rack at Barratts on Oxford Road, Manchester, to put back again and again, paralysed by the thought of forking out that kind of money for a guitar, or for anything for that matter. I had saved the money working for three months on one of Fearnley & Sons Ltd’s building sites. Being the boss’s son, it wasn’t particularly hard-earned, but it was a lot of money nonetheless. Part of me wanted to find fault with the guitar, an excuse to put it back and walk out, not so much on account of the expense, but to spare myself the presumption of thinking that buying such a thing was ever likely to change my life. At the same time, I dreaded walking out and away from a vocation I had always had.

  I left Barratts, walked through the pelting rain and phoned my brother.

  ‘Get it,’ he had said. ‘It’s your ticket out.’

  I plugged into the amp Terry had pointed out.

  ‘Telecasters are good,’ Terry said. ‘We haven’t seen one of those all afternoon.’

  ‘Yeah,’ O’Hooligan said. ‘Telecasters are all right.’

  They had me play a song that was all downstrokes: A to D to E. It was easy enough. The chorus consisted of slashing out A and D chords. Now and again I looked across at Shanne the bass player’s hands in an attempt to predict when a chorus was likely to come up. Her face was inscrutable. O’Hooligan was in a world of his own, singing to the wall, tall, cocking his head from time to time. I had to rely on Terry, his mouth in an O, to nod me into changes in the songs, not that there were all that many of them.

  O’Hooligan sang with his eyes half-closed. His nostrils flared as he lifted his head up to the microphone, positioned higher than his gaping mouth, which was full of crowns white as mortar with blackened joins where they met the gums. Where one of his crowns was missing stood a tiny brown prong.

  He sang with abandon. He would clutch the microphone with both hands and then buckle away from it at the end of a verse, as if it repulsed him. His voice was guttural and artless and he sang in a London accent.

  When the song came to an end, O’Hooligan stepped clear of the microphone, sniffed, wiped his nose on his wrist, cleared his throat with a cough, looked over at Shanne, remembered a packet of cigarettes on the ledge, shook one out, patted his pockets elaborately for a lighter, wheeled around to see if there was one nearby. At the end of the sequence, he caught my eye and nodded and quickly looked away. He lit the cigarette and looked round for guidance from Shanne as to what to do next. I took something in their exchange of looks to be an indication that the audition was going well.

  We finished a couple of other songs which were indistinguishable from one another. Puffing on a cigarette, O’Hooligan stepped down from the dais. He came to stand close to me. He was tall and his proximity was threatening.

  ‘Can you do disconnected shards of industrial noise?’ he asked me, in such a way as to imply that he doubted I could. I relit my roll-up.

  Once I had bought my guitar, I had gone back down to London. The ‘guitarist wanted’ ads in the Melody Maker sent me all over the city. In Harrow I had played soul music – in Carshalton, rhythm and blues – in Covent Garden, metal – in Teddington, new wave. I thrashed punk in Camberwell. In Islington, I chugged blues. I crossed and re-crossed Central London.

  I had shown up at my appointed times – at a classroom, a Sunday school, the back room of a pub, the offices of a record company for an interview for Billy Idol’s newly renamed Gen X, where I was only asked if I would be prepared to wear leathers, to which I said, ‘Yeah, why not?’ and then was sent away. I’d spent an evening cross-legged on a beaten leatherette sofa opposite an owlish Glaswegian, meshing guitar riffs until the last train while he recorded on an old TEAC. I had gone to Wood Green and handed my guitar down through a hole in the floor of a dilapidated front room, shimmied down a pole into a tenebrous basement to find myself standing among mute creatures wearing black jeans and sagging cardigans, with shocks of black hair hanging over their faces.

  I had been waiting my turn at an audition in Covent Garden when I had heard the thud of a jack going into an amp, followed by a cascade of harmonic distortion interspersed with wails and shrieks. The noise ended just as abruptly as it had begun.

  I didn’t play that stuff. I stuck to percussive, metronomic rhythm-playing, the plectrum close to the bridge, going against the grain every now and again in a way I hoped sounded like Steve Cropper, Mick Green or Wilko Johnson. Chords I knew. I had done my time sending burning spasms into my extensor muscles over Mickey Baker’s Complete Course in Jazz Guitar. My fingers bore dark, ingrained calluses because of it.

  But if O’Hooligan wanted something that called for the stretching of my fingers into jagged and discordant chord shapes and torrents of splintered notes, I could do that.

  ‘Can I do disconnected shards of industrial noise?’ I answered O’Hooligan. ‘I can do disconnected shards of industrial noise. Where do you want them?’

  The song went from A to D to A to D for the most part. It was moronically simple. I whacked the chords out, watching Shanne’s fingers on the bass, alert to when the solo was going to come, but not wanting to appear too eager to launch into it, in case it might be mistaken for showing off. O’Hooligan suddenly pointed to the ground.

  I thrashed into the solo, chafing the strings with my guitar pick, dragging it back up towards the bridge where the sound was harsher, bundling and splaying my fingers in discordant configurations on the fret board, spidering up the frets, clustering in one place or another, my head down. I had no idea what I was doing. Remembering O’Hooligan’s comment about my guitar, it occurred to me that perhaps a Telecaster mightn’t be the best guitar for this kind of thing.

  Then O’Hooligan hurled himself into the chorus, about how he didn’t care, how he was getting nowhere and how, when everything was going wrong, he’d sing a happy song.

  At the end, he nodded.

  ‘Awright,’ he said and rubbed the side of his nose with an onion-coloured finger.

  A small, balding guy came in, churning his eyes I guessed on account of his contact lenses and the smoke in the room. He was introduced to me as one of the Nips’ duo of managers and was called Howard. The other manager I’d met on my way into the audition that afternoon was a guy called John Hasler, a tall hollow-cheeked man with blond hair and a comic-book countenance about him. Howard needed to bring the audition to a close. There was another guitarist waiting.

  I packed up my guitar in the bare-boarded lobby with the strip lighting and the lock-up cages and was about to leave to go back to Kingston-upon-Thames where I’d been living for the past ten months, working at a bakery, the band I’d been in having gone to shit, to wait for a phone call – or not – when Howard came out of the rehearsal studio.

 
; ‘They want you to hang about.’

  In a pub down Holloway Road, Howard asked me where I was from, what bands I’d been in, what bands I liked. He didn’t really listen. He folded an arm across his chest, propping up the other, his fingers either prodding his eyes or squeezing his earlobe. He had a round, fleshy face, which he kept at a continually oblique angle to me, and wet lips.

  ‘You all right here for a bit?’ he said.

  I was excited by what looked like the prospect of being in another band – a band back in the city, in North London too. After an hour, the door to the pub opened. I looked up to see Howard leaning in.

  ‘You’re still here,’ he said. ‘Good. They let the last guy go,’ he added. ‘They want to play some more with you.’

  On the way back to the rehearsal room, Howard asked: ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-two,’ I lied.

  ‘We won’t hold that against you,’ he said.

  Back in the rehearsal room, Terry the drummer’s geniality, in the interim, had changed into unalloyed effervescence. O’Hooligan and Shanne on the other hand were reluctant to give so much away. They seemed sheepish about having brought me back to the rehearsal room: Shanne’s face, despite its lack of expression, now allowed the briefest eye contact; O’Hooligan was gawkily executive and impatient to play. I plugged back in.

  We went through a couple more songs. They were called ‘King of the Bop’ and ‘Hot Dogs with Everything’. They were fast but easy to learn.

  At the end of the afternoon, with nothing left but the prospect of packing up and seeing what was supposed to happen next, I started chiming an A chord on the guitar. The rhythm I struck out had little context or purpose other than the fact that I liked the sound of it. Immediately, O’Hooligan stepped back over to the microphone and started to sing, flipping the rhythm unexpectedly into a backbeat I hadn’t been thinking of.

  Sun arise she come every mornin’

  It was just him and me for the first verse. Shanne joined in. I opened the song up into a three-time rhythm. Terry took up with two on his bass drum and a backbeat. Halfway through, we broke it down to the A-chord figure that started the song and then built it up again. I had loved Rolf Harris’s ‘Sun Arise’ since I was a child. Though it should have been laughably out of context in the circumstances, we played the song with an ingenuousness that seemed to go hand in hand with the lyrics.

  ‘Fuckin’ hell!’ O’Hooligan said, when we’d finished.

  Howard sent me to wait in the pub again. When he pushed open the door, O’Hooligan was with him. We sat at one of the tables in the corner.

  ‘You want to be in the band?’ Howard said to me.

  ‘I have a condition,’ I added.

  ‘What kind of condition? A medical one?’

  ‘I’ll join the band if they give me somewhere to live,’ I said.

  The band I’d been in, in Teddington, had been gravely new wave and fronted by a singer called Geoff, small in stature, intense, quick and as insecure as a rodent. A Clockwork Orange had provided the band’s name – The Mixers – and had vaguely inspired Geoff’s dress sense, at least when it came to the few gigs we did. His wife, Jan, was his polar opposite – compliant, long-suffering, but with a mettle that wasn’t all that far beneath the surface.

  One night at Geoff and Jan’s flat, Geoff trudged upstairs to bed, tired and drunk. While Jan and I were clearing up, we fell on one another with an abandon that shocked us both. The affair advanced from glances and brief touches of the hands behind her husband’s back, to meticulously scheduled phone calls in a phone box at the end of my street, to meeting in a park on her lunch hour, to borrowing the key to the house of one of her co-workers. My affair with Jan was months old when the band broke up. The wave of destruction which had been bearing down on their marriage crested. I arrived at their flat one afternoon. Geoff turned me round at the top of the stairs and ushered me back down to the street.

  ‘Are you having an affair with my wife?’ he demanded.

  By the end of a month, Geoff had gone to live in Thames Ditton. Jan kept the flat above the car repair shop. One night when she and I were in the Royal Oak opposite the flat, a mate of Geoff’s followed me into the toilets. He stood waiting until I’d finished, and then said that if he’d come across me in the pub on my own he’d have given me a kicking. He told me not to bother ever coming back to Teddington.

  I viewed my ten months in suburban London as an aberration. I burned with regret at having wasted so much time. I didn’t want to go back to Teddington.

  ‘You want somewhere to live. Shouldn’t be a problem,’ Howard said. ‘He wants somewhere to live.’

  ‘Shouldn’t be a problem,’ O’Hooligan said.

  *

  O’Hooligan took me out drinking. After a pint or two on Holloway Road he took me down to a couple of pubs near where he lived in King’s Cross. We had hardly settled in the Skinners Arms on Judd Street, before we had to go to the Norfolk Arms on Leigh Street. In the Norfolk Arms our pints were half-empty before we were up again. As we went from local to local, I thought his restlessness was a sign of boredom with me. To compensate, when we had pints in front of us, I found myself talking. I was inflated by my success at the audition and the more pubs we went to the drunker I got. I ran at the mouth. I painted for him a life of privilege: my middle-class parents, my private schooling, my father’s chairmanship of the family building company, the shares I owned in it.

  The evening went on and we downed more pints. By the time we got to the Harrison on Harrison Street, despite my initial ambivalence about O’Hooligan, I wanted to impress him, at least with self-revelation, and found myself divulging secrets, among them details of my affair with Jan, which had resulted in my turning up for the Nips’ audition that afternoon, together with the rumour that my grandfather had flushed a baby down the toilet in the Sixties. He cackled with delight.

  He rose to the exchange. The next thing I knew, I was struggling not just against the amount I had drunk, but to pick my way through a tangle of allusions to his childhood. He’d been born in England where his parents lived, but appeared to have been brought up by family in Tipperary. From the little I could comprehend, his first six years in Ireland had not always been happy. He laughed. It was a strange sound: a protracted Donald Duck quack.

  When the pub closed, I staggered down the road after him with my guitar. He weaved a little across the pavement, his hands dug in his pockets. We turned into a dead-end street, cobbled and lined with iron railings. With the exception of No. 32, where there were a couple of lighted windows on the upper floors, the street was dimly lit, the houses dark and clad in scaffolding. Shane let us in. He showed me a room with a mattress in it and left.

  I wondered if I would have cause to reprimand myself for having talked too much about myself. So ironic had been his laughter about his own disclosures that I told myself I had no worry on that account.

  Three

  ‘Well, you were told wrong!’ a girl’s voice bellowed down the stairway. ‘There’s no room here! Go round to Burton Street, that’s where Shane lives!’

  I stopped on the landing, halfway up the narrow stairs, leaning on my speaker cabinet, panting. Through Howard Cohen, Shane had let me know that there was a room above a bookshop on Marchmont Street in Bloomsbury. A friend had driven me and my belongings – my Telecaster, my acoustic, my amp and speaker cabinet, record player, typewriter, a suitcase full of clothes – up from the bedsit I had been living in in Kingston-upon-Thames that morning in a Transit van. I lugged the speaker cabinet back down the stairs, to the street and back into the van. I didn’t want to go back to the suburbs. I was finished there.

  Burton Street was a dead-end Victorian terrace. Just two houses were occupied: No. 32 and the one facing it, which had a BMW parked outside. No. 32 was administered by a local housing association. The guy living in the house opposite had made the mistake of buying his. The remainder of the street was a building site, the darkened brick façad
es hidden by scaffolding and dust sheeting. It was a Saturday and the street was quiet and, with the exception of the BMW and a couple of skips full of splintered wood and dust, empty. It was a grim sort of place, a backwater of Woburn Place and Euston Road.

  My arrival at No. 32 Burton Street threw the girls on the top floor – Jackie and Cath Cinnamon – into consternation. Of course, Shane wasn’t in and I obviously hadn’t been expected, but seeing as I’d turned up with a Transit van full of my belongings they couldn’t really send me away, though I suspected they wanted to. They laughed when I said I had an agreement with Shane.

  Jackie and Cath took pity on me. They showed me a room usually occupied by a guy called Jem who happened to be on a camping holiday in France. They were sure something could be figured out when he returned. I hauled my amp and speakers up the narrow stairs and leant my guitars against the wall. The room overlooked the street. It was scant of furniture. There was a mattress on the floor and a wardrobe. The Transit van pulled away from the kerb and drove off.

  The kitchen was a tip. The window-frame had been jimmied out and thrown onto the roof of the bus depot behind the house. A half-burnt chair lay at an angle in the hearth. Filthy mugs, milk cartons, plates, spoons crowded the table. The cooker was black with grease. I was standing in the room, taking in the squalor, when a girl called Jasmine came in.