by C Harrison
Success! Possibly. The exchanges were Pearl's first experience of Twitter and his heart was fluttering from the rapidity of it. Who was RavensWish? Whoever it was, he, she or it, was obviously trained at the Toten Herzen school of etiquette. Typical of today's moronic instantaneous textspeak vulgarity. The silent k an errant coincidence. The task now was to sit and wait for another private message and hopefully further details about a meeting. He wondered who it was behind the TotenHerzen name replying to him. Possibly Susan Bekker, or maybe Rob Wallet. Hopefully not an intern or low paid lackey with no authority to set up meetings. And Slater was still standing, still on his feet, nibbling his ribs as sticky hoi sin sauce dripped off his chin.
32 (September)
They all had tablets now. All four of them. Susan, Dee, Elaine even Rene, sat around and paced about regularly glancing at their seven inch tablets (ten inch models were too cumbersome to double as a vanity mirror), checking their hair, mascara, lipstick, as much for novelty as function. They had thirty five years of vanity to catch up with. Thirty five years of making do with trust, guesswork and out of date photos.
Not anymore. The vampire mirrors were a Walletsend and never more so than now as they waited to go out in front of the press, gathering in the Koningin Beatrix Hotel on the southern outskirts of Rotterdam. Their first encounter with 'food.' On the menu tonight were journalists, bloggers, photographers, cameramen, presenters, reporters, writers, commentators and the curious. Don't forget the curious. It was on both sides: curiousity about what the band would look like, what they had to say, what they were going to announce; curiousity about how they'd react, what the mood would be, what questions they would ask.
The press pack were on the other side of the double doors separating them from the band sat in in a side room with Scavinio. He wanted to go through the press brief one more time.
"Back catalogue reissue: midnight October 31st. Special box set of five vinyl LPs - Pass on By, We Are Toten Herzen, Nocturn, Black Rose and DeadHeartsLive. With a booklet of previously unreleased photographs by Lance Beauly. Also included, a bonus disc of interactive collaborations with online vocalists adding music and lyrics to unreleased backing instrumentation."
"We need something a bit shorter to describe that disc," said Susan.
"And new cover for We Are Toten," confirmed Dee.
"Photoshoot is in your diaries," said Scavinio. They all waved their tablets in unison.
"Okay." Scavinio continued. "Tour dates. Six in total for this year. November 14th, Ahoy Arena, Rotterdam; November 20th, Midlands International Arena, England; November 24th, Allianz Halle, Berlin; November 27th, WienerHalle, Vienna; November 30th, Laszlo Papp Sports Arena, Budapest; December 3rd, SEG Geneva Arena, Switzerland."
"Pity we couldn't get the tenth for the Ahoy," said Susan.
"Yeah. Try again in 2017."
And that was the brief. The kind of brief the band preferred: brief. And off they went again in a mixed state of agitation, expectation and confrontation. Susan stayed close to Scavinio to focus his attention on backing up the band if things got rough in the next hour or so. She wasn't expecting trouble, but she wouldn't rule it out either.
"If only we were a normal band, Tom, we'd have buckets of coke to keep you awake."
"Normal. Yeah, I'll stick to coffee thanks. I think there's another hour in me yet."
He wasn't going to miss this for the world. Toten Herzen, mid twenties if they were a day, walking out in public thirty five years after they walked away. Over sixty years since they were born. Wallet was also looking forward to it. He wanted to see what the cameras would capture, what the microphones would hear, what the reporters would say. No, he wouldn't miss this for a pot of gold the size of Holland. Scavinio had said he wanted a distraction and this was it. The only one in town. The only one worth travelling half way round the world to witness. Wallet's distraction hatched so long ago he'd forgotten how it all started.
Wallet heard a momentary leakage of noise through the double doors. The sound of trouble, the din of a fight. "They've kicked off again," he said.
"Are you surprised?" Scavinio replied staying solidly in his chair. "Seventy five people in a room with no windows and as big as a pick up truck."
Susan didn't look too happy.
"Stops them from getting complacent and cocky. They've turned on each other instead of turning on you. Trust me, I actually know what I'm doing."
"So what do you mean they've kicked off again?" said Susan. "What's been going on?"
Wallet brought her up to date.
-
The last stragglers from the inaugural World Angry Birds contest had left earlier that day. By the time the first members of the media were arriving the late timing was showing. I had a wander around as they were gathering in the bar and one or two were up for it, excited, mystified, others seemed a bit, I don't know, somewhere else.
"It's Rob Wallet," said Alex Roundtree, a fellow freelance music journalist and blogger. She was there on behalf of the Huffington Post. "Looking very pale and withered."
"It's all this working at night with the band," I said. "Reduces all the vitamin c you get from sunlight."
"So how's life on the other side?"
I had to think before answering. Other side? Did she know how many other sides there were these days. "Other side?"
"Publicist. Dishing out the propaganda instead of having to cut through it?"
"Oh that. It's good. Yeah. Liberating. Gets a bit boring at times because they're very private. Quite old fashioned really. They don't believe in trying to be everywhere all the time."
I was spotted by another journalist who knew me from my freelance days before I moved down to London. Charlie Craig was a sub-editor for Csharp, an online music magazine based in Paris. "So who are they really?" he asked standing alongside Alex and me.
"Wait and see."
But he continued a subtle probing exercise. Are they in it for the money (no), do they need the money (no), are they the original four (yes), have they calmed down (not a bit), what did you do to persuade them to come back (turned on my usual charm), what happened with the Sony deal (Sony bottled out).
It was at approximately that moment that someone, possibly the guy from Bild, came in and spoke to everyone in the bar.
"Have you seen the size of the press room? We won't all get in there."
I followed Alex to the room to see what some of the others were saying and there was a consensus.
"It's like a phone booth," said one.
"Twenty four chairs! There must be sixty of us here already," said another. And the photographers who were setting up were growing tetchy. There was a lot of babble, but two guys, somewhere in the middle, had started arguing over a chair."
"It's the last one."
"And I sat on it. It's not my fault if you didn't see me."
"You weren't sitting on it, you could see me putting my phone on it."
"That doesn't make it yours, now get the fuck out."
"Or what? Or you'll do what?"
"I'll do this."
They must have been grappling; there wasn't enough room to throw a punch, but others were shouting 'come on, fellas, get a grip'. Then I heard a chair going over, someone must have been sat on it. Other voices were shouting 'watch it,' 'what are you doing,' 'fuck me, this was bound to happen.' There were choking sounds, people yelling, you could hear the chairs being thrown around, banging on the walls, bodies banging against the wall, shrieks. I think it went on for about ten minutes. I heard someone shouting because his tea cup had been kicked away, one woman lost her phone, then a crunch - I think that's when she found it again - then I heard 'for fuck's sake get a doctor.'
That was the guy from ETV Rotterdam. He was hit by a saucer. Oh, the irony. 'Flying saucer spotted at Toten Herzen press conference.' You could see the headlines writing themselves and a picture taken on a mobile phone of Bert Klaussens with blood pouring down his face.
So they eventually settled themselves do
wn when all the bigger guys had claimed the chairs. Nothing democratic about it. Didn't matter whether you were broadsheet or tabloid, hard copy or digital, television or radio. In the end it came down to body mass index. And then the photographers kicked off. A camera went over and that was the start of the second round when someone was nudged forwards into the back of the cameraman from ETV Rotterdam who tried to stop his tripod from falling over. The assembled photographers had already been tangling for position like a badly organised rugby scrum. As the cameraman tried to catch his camera he fell forward scattering several bodies knelt and squatting at the front.
Like any scrum that collapses blame was passed around with no one prepared to admit responsibility and within seconds punches were thrown at any face that came within range. Colleagues from the same organisation soon joined in to help their photographer and the whole melee began again and scores settled from the previous round of fighting.
It only stopped when they were all so physically knotted together they couldn't move. It was like a human bottleneck; no one could move up, down, forwards, backwards, sideways. So I stepped in.
-
"I don't want to know this," said Susan.
"I pulled three of them apart and, yeah, I got some funny looks." Wallet's strong arm tactics convinced everyone to settle down and shut up. "I think Alex Roundtree wants to have my babies now."
Scavinio cleared his throat. "Well I'd like to see how that turns out. So, are we ready now?"
The others gathered round. Four hungry looking, uncompromising individuals who were not only ready for round three, were probably looking forward to it. But tonight, Scavinio reminded them, there are no antagonists, no enemies, no threats. Treat them as a partnership; treat them with respect. They have a job to do, bills to pay, some of them will have bosses they'd love to strangle, so make it easy for them - disapproving sideways glance at Wallet - and get them on your side.
Wallet watched them go and felt something for the first time: respect. He realised that he'd never been this close to a real rock band before. Yes, he'd been with them for seven months, but they were off duty for most of the time. Now they were clocking on and going to work. They looked a foot taller, a stone heavier, the expressions meant business, the mood was diamond tipped. With Scavinio leading them out they were the real deal, not the Keystone Cops that Wallet had been organising or what passed for organisation if it included bad planning, lack of preparation and plain old incompetence. He was pleased for them. Pleased for Susan. He knew what it meant to her. Then they disappeared into the strobing brilliance of the camera flashes.
-
Once the band, Scavinio and Wallet were sat behind a long low table the press were formally welcomed. Scavinio apologised for the room and claimed it was out of his control. Questions would come later, but first details of the tour dates and the back catalogue box set. When the cameras stopped and all notes had been scribbled he opened the floor to questions. The reaction was an unexpected heavy silence. Then the first question was lobbed in like a flying boulder.
Q
"Who the fuck are you?"
Susan Bekker
"I'm Susan Bekker and we are Toten Herzen."
Q
"You're supposed to be in your sixties. Where is the real band?"
SB
"We are the real band."
Q
"How can you be the real band?"
Dee Vincent
"Because we are. If you don't like it reception will ring for a taxi for you."
Q
"Wait, wait. The real band formed in 1973. You are not Toten Herzen."
Q
"Come on Rob, what's going on?"
Rob Wallet
"You wanted to meet the band and here they are."
Q
"Is this a hoax?"
RW
"No."
Q
"Can you explain your appearance"
SB
"In what way?"
Q
"Why four sixty year olds look as young as you do?"
SB
"We can't say. If Micky Redwall was here he might know, but he isn't."
Q
"Are you a tribute band? Are you lookalikes? What?"
SB
"We are who we say we are. We're not imposters. This isn't a trick."
Q
"But you can't be the real band."
SB
"We're not robots if that's what you're suggesting."
Q
"Susan Bekker, how old are you?"
SB
"That's a very impolite question. You're not supposed to ask a woman her age."
Q
"Rene van Voors, how old are you?"
Rene van Voors
"You're being sexist now. Just because I'm a man doesn't mean you can ask me my age."
Wallet could see chins being scratched and hands paused above notebooks. The camera flashes and motor winds were still interrupting, but at a decreasing frequency as the mental fog began to drop on the crowd.
Q
"Tom Scavinio, can you explain any of this?
Tom Scavinio
"Nope. I gave up asking questions like that months ago."
Q
"Tom Scavinio, is it true Sony rejected the deal after getting the band's medical reports?"
TS
"No. That is not true. It was the bad publicity following the murders in New York."
Q
"And none of that worries you?"
TS
"No. I know the band better than most people. There are things that are still a mystery to me, but there are some things we're not meant to understand."
"Q
"What do you mean some things we're not meant to understand?"
TS
"Some people are different. Some people age better than others. I don't know how they do it, but they do. It's beyond me."
DV
"The tour bus won't be a spaceship either."
Wallet detected three different facial expressions within the pack. Those looking at him, wondering what half baked scam he'd created and how he expected to get away with it; those aimed at Scavinio, wondering why a respected artist manager had defected across to join in with all this hocus pocus; and those warily scanning the band like they were the result of a particularly baffling magic trick with four people sawn in half and put back together again forty years younger. He wanted to smile, but figured maybe now wasn't the right time.
Q
"Can you tell us anything about Alien Noise Corporation?"
TS
"It's a company made up of investors and will include the band's label, publisher, tour management, legal representation and so on."
Q
"Does the band own Alien Noise Corporation?"
SB
"Yes and no. It's a complicated arrangement. You don't really need to know the details."
Q
"Where’s the money coming from?"
SB
"The band and private investment."
Q
"Why are you only releasing the back catalogue on vinyl?"
RvV
"Because we're an old fashioned band. And you have to listen to a vinyl record. You can't go jogging with a record player strapped to you."
Q
"You could make a tape."
RvV
"Good for you. We like people who show initiative."
SB
"It also means we have better control over the sale of our music. With downloads there are too many retail companies we don't like. They're taking a cut for essentially doing nothing. CDs are all very well, but they're like the sickly siblings of vinyl with their tiny little booklets and fragile cases. We were told CDs are better sounding, indestructible and we were lied to on both counts. With download files territorial restrictions and copyright restrictions are used as an excuse to get more money out of fans for nothing in return. It's disrespectful. I'm n
ot saying we'll never issue music digitally, but it will never be a replacement."
Q
"Aren't you making this difficult for your fans?"
SB
"No. If they really care about the music they'll understand why we're doing this. It's a totally better package. I know it's convenient having everything made smaller, but we're not interior designers, we couldn't give a fuck how much storage space you haven't got. The music comes first."
TS
"The thing to consider here is that the band are making decisions here instead of a corporate boardroom who place the music fans last in a long list of interested parties. The band are trying to reverse that pattern. Trust them. They know what they're doing."
Q
"Who do you think your fans will be? What age do you think they'll be?"
SB
"A wide range, we think. People listening to us for the first time. People, if they're still alive, who remember us from the first time round."
One or two were shaking their heads. Realisation, when it came, whatever form it took, would spread like a contagious disease especially in such a small room, but Wallet saw no sign of it yet. There was a reluctance to ask all the normal questions when such a fundamental one went unanswered. Couldn't be answered. What was the explanation? Detox, aggressive skin peeling, radical plastic surgery, cloning, black magic, a time machine parked round the back.
Hoax. Had to be a hoax. A bloody good one too!
Q
"Will you repeat the behaviour of the band in the seventies?"
TS
"There'll be nothing like that. No. A lot of it was fabricated, publicity stunts beyond the band's control. That won't happen again. We have no control over what the fans might do though. Especially the equestrian community!"
Q
"What do your families think of all this?"
That made them sit up. Wallet only heard the question, he didn't see where it came from. The camera flashes and squashed together heads made it impossible to find the source of some of the questions. The band paused awkwardly. Scavinio wouldn't, couldn't, answer for them.
DV
"If they were here I'm sure they'd be proud, excited, maybe a bit apprehensive how it might all work out."
A murmuring sound spread around the room and seconds started to pass as an appropriate follow up question was sought, but no one could think of one. The mechanised throat clearing of the camera motor winds filled the gaps between the swish and crumple of the uneasy pack. Wallet's perceived joke was turning awkward. It was turning outward, back on the press pack as if this was the culmination of an eight month plan of revenge for some unknown sleight, some unrecorded grudge. The joke was not the band anymore, it wasn't the mental image of three glamorous grans living it up with their geriatric mate on the drums. The joke looked like it was on them for following a trail of sugary media treats leading to this spectacle of ingenuity, this display of stage managed tomfoolery. A colossal gotcha that no one saw coming. An identikit band, a facsimile more accurate than the original.
And yet, and yet it wasn't a joke. The mirror hadn't been turned around to cast its mockery. The reality was there in all its unreal perfection. And no one could see it. No one believed it. No one could believe it if they stayed up all night trying. Wallet couldn't believe it when the band walked in on him at seven o'clock in the evening, March 21st 2013, in a house in a forest in southern Germany. He had to become like them before he could believe it. Without that contract, without those conditions written in blood, there was no way to join in with the pact, no way of obtaining the knowledge. No way of receiving the truth.
The murmuring grew to a babble and the babble to a cacophony and soon the questions stopped and individuals headed for the door and the uneasy fresh air of the bar. Wallet leaned forward to the others. "Stage two. Go out and speak to them. Mingle. Let them meet you one on one, no bullshit, no rehearsed lines."
Scavinio nodded and the four of them followed the pack as it spread out in a daze to fill the space in the hotel bar. "You look tired," Wallet said to Scavinio.
"If this goes on for another couple of hours I might need that bucket of coke."
-
For the next hour Wallet floated around, casually bouncing off questions and juggling small talk. He was always just over the shoulder of Elaine telling her interrogators, unconvincingly, that she was excited to be starting up again, ready to get onstage. Within earshot of Rene Wallet heard a convoluted explanation about making up for lost opportunities. It was heartfelt and personal. To Wallet it was genuine, it was Rene's soul speaking, but to those observers it must have sounded like a script written for the occasion and played to the camera. Dee was looking forward to using better equipment, not the battered old shit that carried her from town to town, city to city, not performing on sticky floored stages in rank venues and near derelict concert halls. Susan wasn't so forthcoming. Vague and opaque, she had a wait and see attitude to it all; wouldn't be happy until the box set was out and selling and the first concerts over. Then the real business of starting again would kick in. This was just the preamble, a dress rehearsal.
By four o'clock Tom Scavinio had long since given in to fatigue and his hotel bed. The press may or may not have been satisfied, it was hard to tell. Maybe the big question had been too big for them in the end and without a necromancer at hand to answer the pseudo-scientific questions their brains had reluctantly given in to the circumstances and played along. Wallet allowed himself one final satisfied glance at those still left in the bar sending off their copy, their opinions, their comments and conclusions and followed Susan up the stairs to the first floor.
"Elaine won the sweepstake," she said.
"I was wondering who would."
Susan took a scrap of paper out of her pocket. On it were the predictions of what the first question would be. Dee suggested 'Did you kill Lenny Harper?' Susan thought they might ask about New York: 'do you know anything about the murders of Torque Rez and Mike Flambor?' Rene took a less serious approach with 'have you arrived here tonight by spaceship?' Wallet thought someone might be serious and almost won with 'why did you choose vinyl?' Scavinio's own guess was 'how has the music industry changed since you came back?' But Elaine's five word prediction turned out to be right on the nail: 'who the fuck are you?'
-
The hotel corridor had a settee with a small brass lamp on a table next to it. Its invite was too relaxing to resist. Wallet sat down hoping Susan would settle next to him for a moment.
"So what did Pearl say?" she said standing over him.
Wallet inhaled deeply, a second to recall the telephone conversation. "He has this mad idea that he can help the band. Join you onstage during the first concert and kill you all again in a scene that celebrates Lenny Harper's failed attempt. Then you all rise from the dead, to delirious applause, his words not mine, you get on with the show and the press hails you for your audacity and self-mocking humility."
"Right."
"He asked if there were such things as blood bombs. Bags of blood that you explode over the audience's heads and shower them with it."
"Lovely."
"He then suggested we kill him on stage, and all the pantomime gets written about blah blah blah. It's good for him, good for us, good publicity all around. What was that word he used: Osmodic! And the best part is he doesn't want paying."
Susan finally settled into the corner of the settee with both arms spread like wings and her perfume creating a gently euphoric air around Wallet's head, tranquillising him, pacifying him. She had a lot of Marco's businesslike confidence the way she occupied a space; she became the space, became the illumination and the ambience, unmistakable, unavoidable. "Tell me what he's up to," she said.
"It's a ridiculous scenario, every cliche in the book. It would make Alice Cooper look like Bertold Brecht. It's a cover to get close to us."
"Yeah."
"But what I don't get is why he thinks we're going to
agree to something that is so obviously, what's the word?"
"You already said it. Pantomime."
"Well, yes. Why does he think we'd agree to to do all that. He doesn't know we're suspicious, that we're onto him."
"Yeah he does," Susan interrupted. "I think that's it. Strange behaviour, totally over the top ideas that force us to have the very conversation we're having now. There's the option of carrying on talking to him, but he wants to meet us, doesn't he."
"Yeah. And that meeting is probably when the other guy makes his uninvited appearance."
Susan knew who he meant. Everyone in the band wanted to know who the doppelganger was, the Peter Miles lookalike. Wallet felt and understood the urgent need to meet Terence Pearl, but he was held up by a growing sense of animosity inside him. Not with Pearl, but with everyone and everything, the whole fucking world. It was a slow burning fury being prepared and stoked, ready to use as some cruel incentive to get his own way. Wallet could physically feel himself evolving into a creature out of the man he once recognised: the ex-journalist who had a habit of annoying the other members of the band with his facetiousness and flippancy. Far from using golfing analogies to make a point he felt he was becoming more likely to plant the heavy end of a one iron between someone's eyes and this urge to violence bothered him. He had never been a violent man, but as his time with Toten Herzen increased his initial disgust at their easy ability to reduce someone to a pile of mince was turning to an empathy and a casual disregard. Even a mild admiration. He wondered how long he would go before he too was making effortless demands for blood. Blood from total strangers. He could make Pearl talk, but did Pearl deserve it? Did he want to make him talk, force him to open up, bully him into surrender.
"If this guy is somehow connected to Peter Miles, and I'm talking about the doppelganger, what's his agenda? Why might he be after you?"
Susan was reluctant to answer. She folded forward, sitting on the edge of the settee. Wallet wasn't going to make it easy for her. He felt it was time for an answer. Did they kill Peter Miles?
"No. He probably killed himself. And his family knew it, but they always blamed us."
"What happened?"
"He had the chance to join the band. Second guitarist, but he wanted to play lead. He was a good guitarist, but Micky thought I was the better player. I thought I was the better player. And we got together regularly, rehearsed, practised. We sort of got along, the band were happy to have him, but he wouldn't let it go. He was determined to be lead guitarist. It seems trivial now. Such a big fucking deal over nothing. He played on a couple of tracks on Pass on By, but after a few days he was demanding this and demanding that, every dud note I played he was jumping on it. Everyone started to get a bit pissed off by it. So he quit. Said he'd start his own band and we'd see who gets to the top first. We found him that night almost unconscious, he'd drunk so much. And he started going on about how his father beat him and his mother would watch and he was the best at everything he did, but his father wouldn't give him credit. We'd never heard him talk like that before so we assumed it was the drink talking. Micky said he'd get him back to his flat, but apparently, according to Micky, he went off on his own. He could hardly walk. He never got home. No one ever saw him again."
"And with all the rubbish spoken and written about the band you were blamed."
"Micky didn't help. Putting a gravestone on the album sleeve and saying it was Peter's. Can you imagine what his family thought when they saw that?"
"Have you never tried to contact them, tell them what you just told me?"
"We should have done when they took us to court, but Micky wanted it. . . ." Susan turned away, rigid with frustration. "Now you know why we sorted him out. That scrap bastard fucking; we were too young to argue with him." Susan was pleading with Wallet now. "He had us where he could do anything, anything he said, anything he suggested, we thought he was right. We thought it was what managers do. He's not even here and people still talk about the things he created. He created us. The monsters that we are, the monsters the public sees, he created that. And I'm not a monster. Rob, I am not a monster."
Several weeks ago Wallet would have left Susan alone on the settee too nervous to hang around for what might come next. But this was the second time he'd seen her upset and he wasn't afraid of her anymore. He sat closer and put his arms around her shoulders. He wanted her to know he cared. He needed her to know. It would be a reminder that there was still a human being inside him. "You're not a monster," he said quietly. "You're not a monster."
Montreal Star
I witnessed the impossible last night
At around nine thirty pm, last night, in a conference room in an unknown hotel on the edge of Rotterdam in Holland, I saw four sixty year old musicians who looked like they hadn't aged a day since they were last seen in 1977.
The band's guitarist introduced herself as Susan Bekker and the band as Toten Herzen. Now I don't know about you, but when I wait months to see what this band look like after all these years I don't expect to see four twenty year olds. I've been asking myself all night how could this be?
Firstly, the obvious answer is they are lookalikes who, with the blessing of the original band and a truck load of money from a Singaporean gambling syndicate, have come back in their place to restart the Toten Herzen phenomenon. And they certainly lived up to the hype last night; a thirty second appearance came at the end of two hours of waiting and a brawl the Canadiens would have been proud of. I was unlucky enough to be at the front where most of the fighting happened and I have to say they were uncannily like the original members, with the exception of Elaine Daley's shrieking red mohican hairstyle. Everything else about them was, it has to be said, identical to the real thing circa 1977.
Alternatively the band have used their time away from the spotlight to indulge themselves in a number of visits to the world's finest cosmetic surgeons. Yeah, right. Do cosmetic surgeons alter the skeleton these days. Not one of them groaned when they sat down, walked with a limp, crouched, slouched or had ears like trash can lids on the sides of their heads. I don't think any of them had voluntarily been under the knife.
I know what you're thinking: hey Lucas, maybe they're real vampires after all. You think that's funny? I don't. I'm not going to subscribe to Terence Pearl's wackowebsite any day soon, but when you see what I saw in a small hate filled room on the edge of Rotterdam last night, you start to think anything's possible. Maybe when all this is over a bunch of tech guys from Lockheed-Martin are gonna come out with huge grins all over their faces and pull a switch out of Susan Bekker's robot ass and turn her off.