We Are Toten Herzen
Page 5
PART 2: REBIRTH
12 (May)
Dee noticed Rob Wallet staring intensely at his laptop screen, probably on one of his crazed webshopping runs that filled the Rotterdam office with parcels sent from god knows where. His room was a growing museum to the seventies filled with board games, a football with black and white hexagonal panels he'd always wanted as a boy and children's annuals that even she had been too old to read when they were first published. She crept in and continued a closer look at the poster of Johan Cruyff. Rene had threatened to rip down the image of the ex-Ajax (and Feyenoord) player and replace it with one of Ove Kindvall. Elsewhere Matchbox cars sat alongside old jigsaw puzzles and videos were arranged alongside DVDs of old British tv shows: Van der Valk, The Persuaders, Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World, recordings of Jeux sans Frontieres and On the Buses. Programmes familiar to Dee, but all of which had passed her by; when she was awake in the seventies television was off the air for the night.
"Van der Valk, Johan Cruyff," she said. "You're an honorary Dutchman aren't you."
"Funny coincidence, isn't it," he said without looking up from the screen.
She came up behind him. "End now you hef yer liddel houshe inderpoldersh. What are you buying now?"
"I've just bought Tournament Golf. A board game I had when I was a kid. Haven't seen that one for decades."
"Lovely. We can throw water over you if you want a real golfing experience when you play it." Dee picked up a packet of Top Trumps. "How many of these have you got now?"
"Ten."
"Anything interesting online?"
"Usual filth, extremity, hyperbole, Serbian racism versus Croat nationalism, trolls, perverts and intolerant weirdos. And that's only the Guardian's Comment is Free section."
"Why do you bother reading it? It doesn't make any difference."
Wallet paused and sat back into Dee's stomach. "Well, actually it does. There's a chance, minuscule, but a chance nevertheless, that something will be said on one of these sites that we do need to be aware of."
"Like what?"
"Well, if I knew that I wouldn't need to visit all these websites. I don't know. Imagine all this in 1976? You might have found out about Lenny Harper and saved yourself a lot of trouble." Wallet was scanning through a Twitter feed, endlessly scrolling down for more and more messages, most of it abbreviations, hash tags, symbols and truncated gibberish. "Look, look at this one... All the shit surrounding TH only makes me want to meet them even more."
"Who's that,"
"RavensWish." Wallet clicked on the name to see the user profile. "B Turkington. Toten Herzen follower. Out on a mission to meet the band who cannot be found."
"That's all we need," said Dee. "Another Rob Wallet. Set up an account. Keep the wolves at the door. We don't want any more surprises like you." Dee strolled over to the window seat with a Beano annual from 1979 and looked out across the flat endless farmland topped off by the perfect horizontal line of the horizon.
"I've got four thousand subscribers to my blog, you know," said Wallet.
"Good for you," said Dee holding the annual in front of her as if it was radioactive. She didn't care; she was wondering if Dennis the Menace's giant snowball was going to flatten Minnie the Minx. "Are they the ones sending you all this shit from the seventies?"
"Shit, what shit? Before I met you lot I had fifty seven subscribers. They're only interested in me because of who I know."
"And not what you know obviously. And you a professional journalist. Fifty seven subscribers, eh? And you're expected to promote us. You couldn't even promote yourself to your own profession." Biffo the Bear! Still hadn't been shot by trappers.
"I'm a writer not a," he stopped before he talked himself out of a job. "Why did Susan agree to me representing the band? She's not an idiot, she must have known it was a big deal for me."
"You're an interface," said Dee. "You know, like when the shit hits the fan?"
"Yeah."
"You're the fan."
"Great."
"Do you ever read anything worthwhile on there?" she asked wondering what Lord Snooty was up to these days.
"Sometimes, but common sense on the internet these days is hard to find."
"You rely on it too much. Anyone would think the world would stop if the internet disappeared."
"Do you never look at anything on here? What about book buying, all those books of yours, where do they come from?"
"That's about all I use it for. Rene checks the results, Susan emails and chats with people. Elaine, she's more interested in how it works than actually using it. Oh no, I tell a lie," Dee jumped off the window sill and rushed over to Wallet's laptop. "She saw an old video of us performing live on Youtube the other day. Go to Youtube."
Wallet searched for 'Toten Herzen live' and found Newcastle Trocadero 1975, a washed out televised clip of the band performing Blood on the Inside. "Do you remember that?" he said.
"Yeah that's it. Susan broke three strings that night. Wonder where they found this?"
"Someone must have taped it when it was rebroadcast," said Wallet. His attention had been caught by another playlist item, but he kept quiet.
"We only appeared on tv when we did something wrong. I thought the Old Grey Whistle Test performance might be on here." Dee noticed the same playlist item and stopped talking.
"You've seen it too?" Wallet asked. Dee threw the annual onto the bed, ran out of the room and within seconds came back with Susan followed by Rene and Elaine.
"There," said Dee pointing to the thumbnail image of the band's logo and the title Toten Herzen Give Me Your Heart new single.
There was a moment's silence. The temperature in the room started to increase.
"Fucking click on it, Rob," said Rene leaning against the table where the laptop was sitting.
Wallet clicked the thumbnail and the band stood listening for four minutes and eight seconds until the logo, no video just the logo, was replaced by a mosaic of smaller images and titles. The song sounded like Toten Herzen, but it wasn't Toten Herzen. Susan's guitars could be heard playing, but they were distorted, flattened, almost secondary to the layering of autotuned vocals. And the vocals weren't Dee's vocals. The music was Toten Herzen's, but the lyrics and voice belonged to someone else. The drums sounded like Rene, but they were in the background, floating, occasionally making themselves heard, but only as a token rhythmic element like a digital clock. The bass guitar was merely a dim pulse and unrelated to Susan's playing; Toten's signature bass and lead guitar driven arrangements had been pulled apart. The composite was a modern rendition, stripped of its native energy and replaced with machine-made regularity and precision that washed the speakers clean. It was a sterile facsimile, a well dressed fake.
Susan spoke. "Who put that there?"
"Username is Generus." Wallet clicked on the name. Generus had a channel made up of videos and tracks scooped up from all over Youtube. The profile was blank. No indication of who Generus might be, no suggestion of where they could be located or how to track them down for questioning. How had they come by this track? Who had done it? Why had they fucked it up beyond all recognition? Why hadn't an original Toten Herzen song been remixed? Why a discarded backing track from 1976 with someone else's voice pasted all over the top of it? Wallet was encased by the four members of the band trying to click on links, grabbing at the laptop's keypad. Uploaded two days ago and already 11943 views, 3474 likes, 4 dislikes. Wallet scrolled back to the top of the screen to hide the comments. The initial confusion was transforming into a growing rage with one point of focus: Jan Moencker.
"I'm not going to fuck you guys. His very words," said Susan. "He sat on our fucking chair in our fucking house, drinking our fucking beer and eating our fucking food and he said to my face I'm not going to fuck you guys."
"Where is he now," said Elaine looking at Wallet for an answer.
"He'll be back in Berlin," said Wallet. "Can I say something?"
"Uh oh!" said Dee.
&nb
sp; "I don't know, Rob," said Susan straightening herself in expectation. "You seem to know him better than us and you know all about this social media shit and Youtube shit and uploading shit. Is there something you want to say?"
"Look, before you tear my head off, I had nothing to do with this. Let me finish. Give him a chance to explain, don't just go flying out the window and killing the first poor sod you come across."
"Was that my intention?" said Susan. "Fly out the window and kill someone. I was thinking much closer to home."
"Hang on," said Rene pushing Susan away from the table towards the door.
Susan softened and breathed out heavily. She picked up a box containing an Airfix kit. On the cover was a painting of a Spitfire and inside the various separate bits and pieces. Until it was all put together this was nothing, not a toy, not a plane, not a Spitfire. Its components were not the finished item until it was all constructed in one way according to a specific set of instructions. She replaced it carefully on the shelf next to a small plastic trophy. She shook her head. "Is all this supposed to be your life?"
"Earliest things I can remember," said Wallet.
"What if someone told you it was worth fuck all? What if someone came in here and replaced it all with what they thought should be in here?"
"I'd take it all back out again and tell them to mind their own fucking business."
"That's the right answer, Rob." She placed the trophy on the table in front of him. "You win a prize."
Susan left the room followed by Rene, still keeping an eye on her. Elaine was the next to go, but couldn't leave without saying something.
"Don't tip him off," she said to Wallet. "He needs to answer to us, not you."
"Mm, not a happy bunch," said Dee massaging Wallet's shoulders. "We opened a can of worms there, didn't we."