*
Of the Nips’ managers, it was Howard who did the lion’s share of the work. I hardly came across John. Now and again he would show up at rehearsal. Howard, on the other hand, tirelessly orbited, on a distant ellipse, whatever brokers of power in the music business he could find and dedicated himself to the dogged maintenance of relationships with people who begrudged him what little they gave him.
Shane’s notoriety before I joined the Nips had attracted the attention of Paul Weller from the Jam. Weller had produced a demo of the Nips’ ‘Happy Song’ and ‘Nobody to Love’. When the Vapors – protégés of Bruce Foxton, the Jam’s bass player – had a hit with a song called ‘Turning Japanese’, it goaded Howard into the belief that Weller might be persuaded to become the Nips’ protégeur. For a while though, the best that Howard could come up with was Shane’s, my and Howard’s inclusion – though even that was never assured – on the Jam’s guest list when they played in London.
Eventually, the spoils of Howard’s war of attrition with John Weller, Paul’s dad, stretched to a couple of gigs supporting the Jam, at Queen’s Hall in Leeds and the Music Machine on Camden High Street. At Queen’s Hall, other than the fifty or so fans who sprinted across the empty hall once the doors opened to secure their places along the barriers for the Jam, we played to a sparse audience. We were first on the bill, before a group called the Piranhas.
For our support slot at the Music Machine, to John Weller’s anger, we wore pyjamas and nighties and forced our new drummer Jon Moss, who had recently replaced Terry Smith, to wear a negligée.
During our set, I looked across at Shanne over on the left side of the stage. She was by now five months pregnant. Her bass see-sawed over her distended stomach. I became despondent about what was going to happen at the end of her pregnancy.
By dint of tireless ingratiation, Howard finally managed to schedule us to record for Paul Weller’s Respond label in the New Year. Shane had let me know that, due to her pregnancy, Shanne would not be recording. To me, to work with Paul Weller was an opportunity too good to miss. It seemed a simple matter of my offering to play bass and getting it done. I made the mistake of ringing Shanne with my idea.
‘You’re not playing the bass on anything,’ she said. ‘You’re not in the band.’
I put the phone down and spent a glum weekend with a stinking cold in my freezing flat. The sun hardly seemed to rise above the horizon before it began to sink beneath the rooftops, beaming viscid orange light into the bamboo screens I had found and had hung at the windows. I was miserable. Everything had gone to shit again.
In the New Year I got a job with Camden Council Election Office, going from address to address – Saffron Hill to Somerstown, Highgate to Holborn – chasing up residents who hadn’t returned electoral registration forms. In the afternoons, I’d bring the completed forms back to the offices on Judd Street and then drop round at Shane’s new flat on Cromer Street.
I touched the bare wires together that sprouted out of his front door jamb. A bell tinkled aloft in his rooms. I stepped back out into the road, so he could see me from the window at the top of the stairs. Up above, the window opened and he put his head out.
‘What?’ And then he’d see me standing there in the street, say, ‘Oh,’ and retract his head. I’d have to wait a while longer until his head appeared again. He worked his arm out and awkwardly released a key into the air. It jingled on the pavement somewhere. I let myself in, pushing open the door against the tide of mail behind it and up the grimy stairs.
There was just the one room. The door opened onto a wooden table and a couple of chairs, beyond which the windows gave onto the Holy Cross Church and the housing estates across the street. In the corner of the room stood a bar of maritime theme, with gunwales and portholes. Across from the bar was his bed: a mattress on the floor across the hearth, the fireplace closed off by a four-bar electric fire mounted on plasterboard. There was a portrait of Brendan Behan on the wall. There were bin bags everywhere containing his belongings, or rubbish – I couldn’t tell which – heaped up along the walls behind the brown vinyl-covered armchair. The bathroom was a horrid affair. The bath was mounded high with more black bin bags. He had me make tea for us. The kitchen was a galley with flooring of mustard-coloured vinyl. It had a gas hob, an old kettle and a supposedly stainless-steel sink. On the draining board were scattered the filthiest tea mugs. They were encrusted with tannin on the inside and befouled with something on the outside that made water bead. There was no hot water to wash the mugs with, no detergent, no scouring sponge or even a brush. I brought the tea through to set on his bare wood table and gingerly went about drinking it.
We spent hours talking – or rather, he spent hours talking to me, about the hostage-taking in Iran, Rupert Murdoch’s recent acquisition of The Times, Bobby Sands’s hunger strike, but then veered off onto subjects as far apart as Finnegans Wake, the Khmer Rouge and the buxomness of the women depicted on cans of Tennent’s lager. The connections Shane made left me with the feeling that I was lost in some potholing expedition. His meaning seemed forever to slip like water through the narrowest of chinks, into a neighbouring chamber whose reverberations scattered all its sense.
Shane had been to the library. A book about ancient Rome had put him in a lather about hedonism, wanton cruelty, tyranny and the proximity of death, not to mention ancient Roman fashion, which frothed him up too, with its flowing togas, leather and studs.
The Nips’ other manager, John Hasler, Shanne’s husband, had recently proposed Shane and myself get a band together. The New Romantics were au courant at the time. As opposed to New Romantics, our band would be neo-decadent. Shane was delirious to have noticed that Roman haute couture was an avenue which had not yet been explored by such bands as Spandau Ballet and Visage. If we were going to get a band together, Shane had earmarked the toga for himself, and wanted me to know that he had set aside the gladiator’s outfit for me.
He snapped through the pages at his table with the book on his filthy knee to show me the draped contours and laurelled temples of some patrician or other, slapping the page flat with his hand, cackling at the voluptuousness and the androgyny.
He smote the leaves of the book until he found a picture of a gladiator, wearing a leather loincloth, a shoulder piece, a net over the other arm and carrying a trident. I was sceptical, but prey to Shane’s enthusiasm. I couldn’t prevent myself rather liking the daft image he conjured up, of myself on stage in loincloth and with a casting-net.
‘It’s well sexy!’ he said. He brought his face close to mine, hissing with lasciviousness. I could see the blackened joints at the base of his dental caps.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said.
‘Nah!’ he said, emptying his face of leering prurience and replacing it with an expression of goofy abnegation, his mouth dropping, his eyebrows ascending.
‘I mean, you’d look – good! With a guitar? Wearing that gear? I mean,’ he said. ‘Come on!’
I humoured him. I didn’t want to test what I hoped was his irony too far in case he was actually serious. I wanted to give the outfit and the whole idea of gearing myself out in Roman attire, along with the matter of pandering to what seemed Shane’s ambivalent sexuality, the thumbs down. I was more interested to hear about the music a band dressed up from the first century might play.
‘Cretan music!’ he said. Shane’s inspiration seemed to have come from Shanne Hasler, who, since disbanding the Nips had apparently been trying to put a band together to play music from the Aegean Islands.
He clattered about in a pile of tapes on the counter of his bar and shoved one into a battered tape player. The music that came out, played on what sounded like a violin and a bouzouki, was sinuous, made of endlessly repeated motifs. It reminded me of the examples of pre-Western, minimalist and gamelan music that had been required listening at college. I told him I found it a bit on the boring, repetitive side.
‘That’s the whole point!’ he said. Slap
ping his book of Roman culture on his knee, he cited the fact that Finnegans Wake had already started by the time you opened it and seemed not likely to finish any time soon after you closed it. It was cyclical, without beginning and endless, like Cretan music.
‘Like Irish music,’ I said.
‘Well,’ Shane said, ‘Irish music’s like fucking Arabic music, innit?’
Five
The job for Camden Council ended and I signed on Social Security. I started getting the Melody Maker again and went off to the odd audition. Before long, I found myself in a band called the Giants. They played soul music. We recorded a single produced by Pete Watts and Dale Griffin, the bassist and drummer for Mott the Hoople. I had been a fan in the Seventies. A school friend and I had lamented their vault to fame when they released ‘All the Young Dudes’ in 1972.
I spent the rest of the year playing occasional gigs with the Giants, rehearsing in the bass player’s living room in Carshalton, clattering at my typewriter in my flat. That summer I spent the afternoons up on the roof with my back against the lift’s sheave-house and with the help of the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary read Joyce’s Ulysses from cover to cover.
In November, Jon Moss, handsome with guarded, dark eyes, came to visit me. He brought with him a demo-tape of the band he had joined after the Nips ended, called Culture Club. They wanted to replace the guitarist. My cassette player was broken, so we went down to sit in the dark of his car, which was parked in a side street round the corner from my block of flats. We listened, tapping our feet. I became aware of a guy walking up the pavement at the same time as I realised that our foot-tapping was rocking the car. It occurred to me that the guy might be forgiven for misconstruing what we were doing.
When the song finished, I said if they got rid of their guitarist, I’d play with his band. Moss said he’d ring me.
*
After Christmas, Howard Cohen started taking me out to see a band called Dolly Mixture, at the Marquee, the Starlight Room, the Venue in Victoria. Dolly Mixture’s second single with Paul Weller’s Respond label was due for release in March. At the end of February, the band was to start a tour with other acts on the label. In his seemingly chronic endeavour to get close to the Weller family, Howard toiled to win at least Dolly Mixture’s tolerance. He hardly missed an opportunity to invite me out to see them.
Dolly Mixture was an all-girl group who favoured frocks, berets, striped tights and Dr Martens. There were three of them: Rachel, prim but with flame-red feathered hair, played guitar; Hester pounded the drums with an injured ferocity; Debsey played bass, her mascara’d eyes lucent, scanning the space above the audience. Debsey and Rachel shared lead vocals, but I loved Debsey’s voice. I adored its plainness and its nasality which imbued the songs she sang with an unselfconscious irony.
Debsey was lovely, with pale skin, raven hair and a flick of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She was full of accents, with an ironic sense of her own refinement. We flirted with one another. One night, after one of Dolly Mixture’s shows, as the cab containing us and some of Dolly Mixture’s entourage dropped me off outside my block of flats, Debsey and I fleetingly touched hands through the open window. After one of her gigs at Dingwalls, a few weeks later, she came back to my flat. I didn’t hear from her for a week and a half, until she came to knock on my door. By closing time in the local pub she had become my girlfriend.
In the first week of our relationship, when we weren’t in my flat – drinking tea, talking, reading books – we went on walks through the West End. She would wave her slender arm to point out some detail of cornice under the eaves of the buildings in Berkeley Square. In Regent’s Park, she widened her nostrils and narrowed her eyes in rapture at the roses in Queen Mary’s Gardens.
She was particular to the point of fastidiousness. When it came to making her breakfast in the mornings, she taught me how to prod toast straight out of the toaster, to prevent it turning stiff like cardboard. She would bring to my attention the fact that I had not spread the butter and the marmalade to the very edges.
Dolly Mixture had started up in Cambridge, where Debsey’s parents had been to university and where her grandmother still lived. Debsey now lived with her parents in the top two storeys of a Georgian terraced house on Liverpool Road, Islington. Her father worked in public relations somewhere on City Road. At the weekends, he played piano for The Water Rats, the Victorian music hall at the Pindar of Wakefield on Gray’s Inn Road. Her mother had been in theatre. She was a formidable woman, sensitive to the point of injury.
Dolly Mixture had already released a couple of singles. The first had been for Chrysalis Records – a cover of the Shirelles’ hit ‘Baby It’s You’. She and her band hated their version of it. The fact that Chrysalis had chosen it as their début single, intending to market Dolly Mixture as a teen girl group, depressed Debsey to the point of suffocation. Their next two releases had been recordings of their own songs, both released on Paul Weller’s Respond Records and both produced by the Damned’s Captain Sensible and Paul Gray.
We had been going out a week, when Debsey went away on the ’82 and Responding Tour. I had a meagre idea of what life was like on the road. I had no idea where in the country she was or where she was going next. Though she wrote to me, her letters contained scant descriptions of the cities she was in, the venues she played. No sooner had she returned home it seemed than, in April, she went away to a studio in Kent to sing backing vocals with Dolly Mixture for Captain Sensible’s solo album, the single from which was a version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘Happy Talk’. I didn’t see Debsey for days, sometimes weeks at a time.
*
On my way to and from rehearsals with the Giants, or, when the Giants folded, to and from auditions, I’d often find myself in King’s Cross. Shane’s flat was a short walk from the station.
Nothing much had changed in the year since I’d last seen him. The detritus of bottles, books and bags had further encroached on the floor space. An enormous, broken colour television stood tilted by the wall. Again, he had me make tea. In the course of our conversation, Shane extolled the wonders of the DeLorean car and cackled over the fact that a team of scrap-metal dealers had hoisted the Argentinian flag on an island under British sovereignty in the South Atlantic.
We talked, too, about Howard Cohen’s plans to re-form the Nips. Howard Cohen had lately been to see someone at Polydor Records, whose response had been that it would be a nuisance.
‘But a good nuisance,’ Howard had said.
Shane and I barely touched on the subject.
‘If I was going to do anything, I’d want to do fucking Cretan music,’ he said. ‘If I was going to start another band I’d call it the New Republicans.’ He released a wheezing laugh.
We went out to get drunk in one of the couple of pubs in the locality he hadn’t been barred from. When the pub closed we staggered back up his staircase with a carry-out. I found a tin whistle on the windowsill. I asked him if he minded me playing it. He shrugged and sat heavily on the bentwood chair at his table. He shook out a cigarette and lit it. I took the whistle and sat down on his mattress with my back against the wall.
I’d recently taken a record of Irish music out of the library on Camden High Street. It was called Tin Whistles, by Paddy Moloney and Sean Potts. I had spent a couple of afternoons lifting the needle on and off the record, learning what sounded like the easiest melody on it, an air called ‘Jimmy Mo Mhíle Stór’.
Shane’s whistle was a dingy nickel one. Despite the crusted tidemark on the blue mouthpiece which I couldn’t wipe off on my sleeve, I put it to my lips to play. The instant I did, Shane was up out of his seat, dancing.
I struggled to get the tune right while he danced down the room, shuffling mostly, but taking a little skip from time to time. His arms flopped by his sides, one hand holding his can of lager. Not a lot of the melody joined together well, though I did manage a slide or two and to tap the empty holes of the whistle to mak
e a vibrato which I’d learnt from listening to Moloney and Potts’s record.
He capered round his room with his back to me in his rumpled black trousers, tall. When he turned round to skip back up the room the focus had gone from his eyes, not so much out of drunkenness but because he seemed to be in another world, ancient and immemorial, lost in the familiarity of the tune despite my clumsy playing. I fancied he had found temporary respite not just from the squalor of his flat, the confusion of London, but from his stubborn restlessness too. For ten minutes I blew into the whistle and covered the holes as best I could, and in the right order, while Shane paddled the floorboards, staring at his feet.
He happened to tuck one shoe behind the other. He twirled clumsily, staggered to the side and stopped.
‘I’m too fucking drunk,’ he said. I stopped playing. He slumped down on the mattress next to me.
‘But don’t stop,’ he said. ‘Don’t stop. It’s fucking good to hear that shit.’
I played some more, both of us sitting shoulder to shoulder on his mattress, feet on the floor, knees up, Shane’s arms balanced on his knees, but ‘Jimmy Mo Mhíle Stór’ was the only tune I knew and it quickly became tedious to go round and round it. I put the whistle down. We sat in silence. I was about to make my apologies to leave for the walk home up St Pancras Road when he said:
‘Do you think I drink too much?’
Despite witnessing his dispatch of two Black Zombies at Dingwalls, followed by our lurching, rancorous journey back to Burton Street, I hadn’t given it much thought. I avoided saying yes. Besides, I wanted more from him than I would have got if I had.
‘Do you think you do?’ I said.
‘I can’t get to sleep without a couple of tins of Tennent’s.’
I couldn’t say it sounded particularly bad, but there was something about his confession that he drank alone which drew me up. It obviously concerned him. I had assumed that all his drinking was done in company and that he’d go back to his flat, exhausted after a day’s round, as I saw it, of carrying sail from pub to club.
Here Comes Everybody Page 4