by Tony Parsons
Art Garfunkel looked pained. The record company flunkies frowned and flapped.
‘Any chance of a reunion then?’ probed Paddy. ‘Did romance’ – Paddy Clare bared his yellow fangs at the word, and made it sound like anal sex with a barnyard animal – ‘bloom with any of your co-stars? Are you really doing a remake of Bugs Bunny?’
It was a different kind of writing.
But Paddy Clare took a shine to the boy by his side, and after the strained press conference was cut short the old hack invited Ray for ‘a swift one at this little place I know’.
The Empire Rooms was billed as a private club, which made it sound very grand to Ray, but the shabby reality was a basement with a bar in a dustbin-strewn yard off of Brewer Street on the eastern side of Soho. Frayed curtains permanently drawn, potted plants wilting in the gloom, plastic Pernod ashtrays overflowing with fag butts. And all these pissed old people with no special place to be.
Paddy told Ray that there were hundreds of these places dotted around Soho, skirting the licensing laws by restricting entry to members only. And Ray wondered who were the members? Anyone the despot on the door decided was a member, Paddy said. They stayed for six hours.
When it was over, and unbelievably the Soho night was just beginning, Paddy – still sober but sweating more heavily than ever – went back to Fleet Street to write his column while Ray staggered the length of Brewer Street before puking up from one end of Old Compton Street to the other. From Wardour Street to the Charing Cross Road, heaving all the way.
‘Still here, are you?’ said the anti-Henry. ‘You a member yet?’
Ray shook his head. ‘Not yet, no,’ he said politely.
The doorman’s eyes blazed. ‘Go on, you little herbert – fuck off out of it before I give you a good hiding.’
Ray trudged back up to the top of the filthy staircase, peering out at the soft rain falling on Soho. What time was it anyway? When did the planes start at Heathrow? And then he heard someone call his name.
Paddy Clare was laughing at the bottom of the staircase, gesturing for Ray to join him. The hawk-faced bruiser on the door was still glaring up at Ray, but Paddy indicated that it was all right. Ray smiled shyly and came back down the stairs. Paddy Clare put a protective arm around his shoulder as the man at the door shoved a thick finger in Ray’s face.
‘No bluies, no reefer,’ he said. ‘Or I’ll give you a fourpenny one.’
‘Why is he so nasty?’ Ray asked Paddy as he led him into the smoky gloaming.
‘Albert? Well, the Empire Rooms are not really a club. It’s more like a private cocktail party. Or a fiefdom. Yeah, that’s it – it’s a fucking fiefdom. Nobody – none of the regulars – calls it the Empire Rooms. They call it Albert’s Place. And Albert doesn’t usually get your type in here.’ Paddy’s yellow teeth shone in the ill-lit room. ‘You know – the flower people.’
Ray breathed in a lungful of cigarette smoke. He rubbed his bare wrist. This wasn’t where he needed to be.
‘I’m looking for Lennon,’ Ray said, pushing his hair back. At least he was drying out a bit. ‘You know? John Lennon of the Beatles?’ Although Paddy Clare wrote the Sounds Groovy! column, Ray was never sure exactly how much he knew or didn’t know about the contemporary music scene. Sometimes it felt that Paddy’s interest in pop music had ended with Billy Fury, Jet Harris and the Shadows, and other times it felt like Paddy had never had any interest in music in his entire life. ‘He’s in town for one night.’
Paddy nodded thoughtfully. He lifted his glass to his lips, but it was empty. Paddy seemed surprised.
‘On his way to Tokyo with Yoko,’ Ray said. ‘My editor wants me to interview him. It’s really important.’
Paddy considered Ray for a moment, then slapped him on the back. ‘Don’t worry, son, I’ll give you a job on Sounds Groovy! when you’re ready to join the big boys.’
Ray felt a wave of despair. ‘Thanks, Paddy.’ He smiled wearily and scanned the dark room, touching his bare wrist. Paddy led them to a table where fag butts were spilling out of an ashtray with Pernod written on it. He signalled to the barman and two glasses full of transparent liquid were slammed down in front of them. Ray took a sip and it was the most disgusting thing he had ever tasted in his life.
‘Tastes like that stuff my mum used to give me for toothache,’ Ray said. ‘Clove oil.’
‘Yeah, good, innit?’ Paddy said. ‘You can’t beat a G and T.’
Ray gulped down another mouthful, grimacing, but not wanting to appear ungrateful.
‘As for John,’ Paddy said, ‘the last I heard, he was down at the Speakeasy.’
Ray gawped, the gin halfway to his mouth.
‘I’ve got a couple of snappers down there.’ Paddy Clare chortled into his drink. ‘Never know what the pair of them are going to do next, God bless ‘em. Staying in bed for peace. Sending back his MBE because “Cold Turkey” was going down the hit parade. Eating chocolate cake in a bag to stop the war – now what’s all that about?’
Ray stared at him in wonder. Paddy was a product of the old Fleet Street. Sometimes you felt like he knew nothing. And other times you believed that he knew all there was to know. He was on his feet, scrambling, suddenly aware that he still had Terry’s tape recorder with him.
‘Thank you, Paddy.’
Paddy looked pleased with himself. Ray could tell he was happy to help. Under that stained suit, there was a kind man.
‘Told you I owed you one. Yeah, my editor’s very excited – he loves John and Yoko – they’re his two favourite weirdos. Fucking loves ‘em, he does!’
Ray gulped down the remainder of his drink, not wanting to abuse Paddy’s hospitality. He scanned the room for a clock. But there was no clock in Albert’s Place.
‘What time is it anyway?’ Ray said.
Paddy looked at the younger man with sorrow and pity, gin-sodden tears in his rheumy eyes.
‘Oh, it’s very late,’ Paddy said, and Ray’s fingers touched his naked wrist.
What was it about that face?
It was as though you could see her whole life in it. She would be a beautiful old lady one day, and she must have been a beautiful baby. There was something otherworldly about her face – something angelic. The face was alarmingly symmetrical, the face of the most beautiful girl in the world, as though God had placed everything exactly where it was meant to be. She looked like an improved version of the girl in The Last Picture Show. That was it. Like God’s second attempt at Cybill Shepherd. The wavy blonde hair, eyes that could see into your soul. And a mouth built for snogging.
Everything’s just stuck on so nicely, Leon thought.
‘My dad liked Elvis,’ she said, shouting over Kool and the Gang. ‘I remember watching him as a little girl – the films, you know, they would show them on Sunday afternoons. And he always seemed to be either in Hawaii or the army.’ She smiled, and Leon’s heart fell away. ‘I thought he was a film star – like Steve McQueen or something. Clint Eastwood. Like that. I never realised he’s a singer.’ Then her lovely eyes brimmed with grief, as though all those Sundays watching Elvis films with her dad were gone for ever. ‘That he was a singer, I mean.’
Leon nodded enthusiastically, leaning close to her so she could hear, his mouth just inches from that face.
‘We have a strange relationship with the music that our parents love,’ he said, and she thought about it, smiled politely, and Leon cursed himself – why do you always have to try to say something clever? Now she thinks you’re a pretentious wanker!
‘Oh, I know what you mean,’ she said. ‘Because my mum likes Frankie Vaughan so I always sort of liked Frankie Vaughan.’
And when the talking was done, Leon did this impossible thing – he danced. Leon danced, and the world slipped away. He danced, forgetting about the Leni and the Riefenstahls gig he was meant to be reviewing, forgetting about the copies of Red Mist – abandoned on a table sticky with spilled alcohol – and almost but not quite forgetting about the Dage
nham Dogs who were hunting him down. They would never find him in here. He would be safe in the Goldmine.
So Leon forgot about everything except the music and the dancing and the most beautiful girl in the world.
Leon danced – which in his case was a modest bobbing movement, his head nodding thoughtfully under his trilby, the index finger on his right hand raised, as if he was about to make an important point – but nobody cared! That was the glorious thing about the Goldmine. Nobody cared if you were cool, or doing the right thing, or just treating dancing as though it was another form of breathing! That’s what he liked – oh, he really liked it – about this place.
It was its own kind of underground. He could see that. There were the dancers and the hard men and the peacocks, all with their own rituals. But they left a little space for someone like Leon. He could sense that there was room for a non-dancing nerd such as himself. You just needed the confidence to take that giant step on to the dance floor. But Leon found that it was like stepping off a cliff. Once you had done it, there was no going back.
Dancing – which to Leon had always seemed as physically impossible as flying – seemed like a normal part of human endeavour in the Goldmine. He danced through the anxious, frazzled feeling you get after one line of speed and no more, he danced through his come-down, and he danced out the other side.
Leon danced to records he had never heard – this wonderful music! Full of thick, meaty funk and strings as light as gossamer and voices that were as ecstatic as some heavenly choir – singers who could really sing, voices trained in church choirs and on street corners – and he was totally in thrall to the face of the girl in front of him. She stunned him. She paralysed him. Just being in the presence of that face made him pause, his tongue tied with self-consciousness. But she made it easy for him.
During a break in the dancing, when they went to the bar for a screwdriver (him) and a Bacardi and coke (her), she was just so unaffected and natural that his tongue, like his feet, could not stay tied for ever.
‘Autumn Gold brings out a person’s bones,’ she said, and it turned out that’s what she knew about, that’s how she earned a living – cutting, crimping and dyeing in a salon called Hair Today. She gently lifted the brim of his hat to consider the merits of Autumn Gold. Leon took a half-step back.
‘Oh, come on,’ she said, smiling in that way she had. Leon couldn’t tell if she was flirting or just being nice. ‘Don’t be shy.’ ‘Okay,’ Leon said, grinning like a loon.
And then – how easy she made it seem – Leon found himself following the most beautiful girl in the world back to her natural habitat. Back to the dance floor.
And time just slipped away, time was meaningless out here. Lights struck the crystal globe slowly twirling on the ceiling, throwing flashes of colour across a face he knew he would remember on his deathbed.
She danced with this gentle swaying motion – taking small steps on high heels – almost not moving at all – but somehow it looked to Leon like great dancing – her hair falling in her face, then shaken away with a smile, a secret smile, as if she had just remembered where she was, as if something mildly amusing had just occurred to her. She was perfect. Much better than Cybill Shepherd, Leon decided.
And there was this other thing – she was inseparable from the music. Leon danced for the first time in his life and those incredible songs – tales of a world devastated, or made complete, because of one love – would be impossible to hear again without thinking of that fabulous face.
‘If I can’t have you…I don’t want nobody, baby…If I can’t have you…oh-oh-OH!’
‘Here,’ said the most beautiful girl in the world. ‘Have you got a cold?’
Leon didn’t want to lie to her.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I’ve been taking drugs.’
She raised her eyebrows. He was terrified she was going to turn away. For the first time that night, he knew real fear. The fear of never seeing her again.
‘Oh, you shouldn’t take drugs,’ she said. ‘You’re not yourself when you take drugs.’
Leon had never thought of it like that. And he suddenly realised that there was something he desperately needed to know.
‘What’s your name?’ Leon said, when what he meant was – may I love you for ever?
And she told him.
Terry felt like a tourist in his own life.
The factory hadn’t changed. The metallic rumbling from the guts of the place, like some great ship in the night, the reek of malted barley and juniper berries that turned your stomach.
And he wondered what would happen to her stuff. In the past, breaking up was easy. The girls he had known lived with their parents. When it ended there was nothing to sort out. You went your separate ways and then, months later, you maybe saw them with some other guy and an engagement ring. Seen in a park, glimpsed in a car, and then gone. It was more complicated when you lived together. There was all this stuff to sort out.
Her bags full of camera equipment, rolls of film, contact sheets, big cardboard boxes with ILFORD printed on the front. Her records by Nick Drake and Tim Buckley and Patti Smith. Her coffee-table books of Weegee and Jacques-Henri Lartigue and Dorothea Lange. Floaty dresses, skimpy pants, big boots. Some cracked tableware from Habitat. It had all arrived at Terry’s bedsit stuffed into her father’s Ford Capri, taking up every inch of the boot and the back seat and the passenger seat. Terry wiped his eyes, staring up at the factory. He supposed that her things would leave the way they had arrived. He didn’t want to see it. He didn’t want to be around for that.
He remembered the night she had moved in. The evening had begun the way every evening seemed to begin as 1976 became 1977 – with a trip to see a band. It was a few weeks after being on the road with Billy Blitzen. A few weeks after the midnight knock on his door. He was trying to stop thinking about her. They had both gone back to their lives in London. She had her married boyfriend, he had his one-night stands and his friends. There was plenty to do. Terry never stayed home. There was nothing to stay home for.
‘Grab your kaftan,’ he told Ray one night. ‘I am going to take you to see some new music you’ll love.’
At the foot of the tower there was a dusty little shop that sold sad souvenirs to the few tourists who made it across the river to Southwark Cathedral. Terry and Ray saw Leon in there, arguing with the Asian owner, pointing at a sun-bleached T-shirt in the window.
‘But you can’t sell this rubbish – it’s racist,’ Leon was saying. ‘Do you understand?’
The offending item was designed to look like a band’s promotional T-shirt. ‘Adolf Hitler – European Tour: 1939 to 1945’, it said, and under a picture of Hitler looking pleased with himself there was a list of countries resembling dates on a tour. ‘Poland, France, Holland, Italy, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Russia.’
‘This only fashion,’ protested the owner. Only trendy.’
‘It’s not remotely trendy!’
‘You bad for business,’ the owner said. ‘You a trouble boy. You get out shop.’
‘Come on, trouble boy,’ Terry said, taking his arm. ‘I’m going to take you to see some new music you will love.’
They caught the tube to the Hammersmith Odeon where Terry’s name was on the door plus one. He talked to the press officer from Mercury and managed to get a plus two. And it was a great night – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, one of the few bands they could all agree on. Fast and furious enough for Terry, jangly and long-haired enough for Ray, and enough like Dylan to keep Leon happy. They punched the air and sang along to ‘American Girl’ and ‘Breakdown’ and ‘Hometown Blues’ and ‘Anything That’s Rock and Roll’ and even though Terry said that the real Heartbreakers were Johnny Thunders’ band, there was something beautiful about this lot – it sounded like the kind of thing they would have heard on the pirate radio stations of their childhoods, but it was undeniably new music. In a black cab back to Terry’s bedsit, the three of them argued all the way.
‘But you hate hippies,’ Ray said to Terry as they trudged down the musty hall to the six-quid-a-week bedsit. ‘You hate all hippies!’
‘I like lots of hippies,’ Terry insisted. ‘And Tom Petty’s not a hippy.’
‘Name me one hippy you like,’ Ray said, turning on the electric fire in Terry’s room. They would be here all night now. Talking about music, listening to music. Drinking vodka until it ran out, smoking until the cigarettes were all gone. Maybe grabbing an hour or two’s kip just before dawn, and then catching the bus to The Paper.
‘John Sebastian,’ Terry said. ‘I love John Sebastian.’
‘The Lovin’ Spoonful,’ Ray said. ‘Looked a bit like John Lennon.’
‘One of the greatest songwriters of all time,’ Terry said. ‘“Didn’t Want to Have to Do It,” “Summer in the City,” “Nashville Cats,” “Younger Girl”.’ He cracked open a bottle of Smirnoff and poured shots into three filthy teacups. ‘Incredible writer. “Do You Believe in Magic?” “Rain on the Roof” – I love this geezer! He’s better than Dylan!’
‘Oh, bollocks, he is,’ Leon said, kicking off his DMs and lying down on Terry’s mattress.
“‘Warm Baby,” “Never Goin’ Back”,’ Terry said. ‘One of those Americans who fell in love with the Beatles but never stopped loving their own music. Blues, country – it’s all in the mix, buried deep. And he slept with thirteen women at Woodstock.’
Leon sat up, impressed at last. ‘Who did? John Sebastian? Thirteen in three days?’
Terry nodded. ‘Had sex with thirteen women at Woodstock and still had time to perform a solo set.’ He began excitedly flipping through his record collection. ‘And then, when the Lovin Spoonful was over, John Sebastian was still writing great songs, when he was a working musician, a writer for hire. He wrote this great song for the Everly Brothers – “Stories We Could Tell”. All about being on the road and sitting on a bed in a motel and talking about all the things you’ve seen and done. The Everly Brothers did an okay version – but John Sebastian’s version, that’s the one…’