Espedair Street

by Iain Banks

  Even the songs on Ended were starting to sound too contrived to me; we'd taken twice as long to record single songs for that album as we had to lay down the whole of Liquid Ice. We were getting to be obsessive, losing sight of the music in the beguiling mathematical filigree of production and mixing possibilities. Wes, ever the perfectionist, was the instigator of all this, but we were all affected. We were becoming... I don't know; choked; decadent, even.

  Looking back, I'm surprised we avoided it as long as we did, given that we were hardly bursting with street cred to start with.

  And So The Spell Is Ended went platinum in what seemed like about a nanosecond; it outsold anything else we'd done. It was a muscle-bound, over-developed, strangled album; a collection of fairly reasonable songs held together with tourniquets, but it sold. Topped the American charts for weeks; they were rationing it in some stores, selling it straight out the back of trucks in other places. I'd suggested a special flammable edition with some kind of compressed, flattened fireworks worked into the vinyl and the cover, for the mental fundamentalists to burn, but this sensitive and caring idea was cruelly rejected by ARC, by now, of course, headed by Mr Rick Tumber himself.

  It was my turn to receive the platinum album; it was presented to me at a ceremony in New York where I got very drunk later on and slightly disgraced myself. I thought I'd lost the damn thing then, but a couple of years ago, unpacking some cases in the folly, I found it again. I prised it out of its glass case and tried playing it, just for a laugh.

  It was a James Last record.

  Jesus, we're not even on the same label.

  You want it in a nutshell?

  Phht. Dribble. Crack. Whee. Crash, Splash. Zzt. Beeeeep.

  The 'Beeeeep' was Davey dying, Davey dead. It happened like this.

  We'd done Boston, New York, Philly, Washington, and Atlanta; everything was working, the tickets had sold out within hours, punters were going bananas for us, and even the fundamentalists seemed to have gotten tired and largely given up on us, partly, perhaps, because by that time Davey and Christine were back together again and talking about getting married and having a family. Mickey Watson's exemplary bourgeois and stable family life was also made the subject of several exclusive illustrated articles. Also, Big Sam had made sure I hadn't been allowed to do any more interviews, and had put out rumours that I'd just been kidding some poor gullible cub reporter when I'd said all those horrible things. So the moral majority mob and the people who thought the universe was six thousand years old had mostly drifted off.

  We'd had fairly stiff security in Atlanta, all the same, but it hadn't been needed, not for axe-wielding Bible-thumpers, anyway. The Official Souvenir Programme wielders/thumpers were another matter, and probably no less lethal if they'd come within range. We arranged similarly tight minding for Miami too, even though we knew it probably wasn't necessary; Florida is Florida, not Dixie.

  Our convoy of trucks was delayed getting to Miami; one of the Macks was involved in a crash on the freeway. Nothing too serious, but the driver and his load were held up by the local sheriff. We'd hired a 737 (painted gold, but of course) for the American part of the tour, so we got there in plenty of time, but setting up all the equipment in time for the show proved a frenetic and slightly chaotic experience for the road crew.

  The auditorium we were playing was one of the smaller ones on the tour, though the stage was wide enough to use twenty of the smoke/ice units. We'd sold out, they told us. Could have filled the place twice over, easy. There'd been some confusion over the number of tickets for sale at the door, but otherwise everything was looking good.

  It was a hot, sticky, muggy day, followed by a hot, sticky, muggy evening; the air conditioning in the dressing room was noisy and dripped water, the champagne was not vintage, the bread for our sandwiches was rye, not wholegrain, and Christine's Chablis hadn't been chilled properly... but you learn to live with these hardships when you're on the road.

  I was learning to put up with something else; not having Inez around. Things had never been completely right between us after Naxos — though, looking back from far enough away, maybe they'd been going wrong since Wes' party at the house overlooking Watergate Bay... hard to tell. Ah hell, it's all a long story, and there's doubtless still a lot of it I don't know, but what happened in the end was Inez married Lord Bod. Remember him? Photographer and socialite and one-time ARC shareholder (not any more, or I'd have left the label). They'd been conducting a discreet on-off relationship ever since they'd met, ever since Inez and I'd met, at Manorfield Studios and Lord Bod's house, where the leaves blew and fell and I watched a juggler from up a tree.

  Lady Bodenham. Hot damn; did she have her sights on that all along? Did that strategic, middle-class planning get me again? God knows; I'm not going to ask her .

  So Inez had pulled out of the tour with two weeks' notice and we'd had to find a third backing singer in the middle of the usual last-minute organisational panic just before a major tour; could have sued her under the contract we had, but we didn't have the heart.

  I tried not to think about her; I involved myself in the logistics of the tour and spent all my spare time writing new songs. And despite missing Inez, at first it felt good to be back on the road again.

  Back on the road... with no idea we were about to crash, that night.

  The set we were playing included a quarter — twenty minutes — of Nifedge. We had had plans to perform the whole thing, making it the second half of a three-hour-plus concert, but there were too many problems. The main problem was we didn't have the nerve to do it, but that's just a personal opinion. Big Sam and ARC both thought it was a potentially disastrous and fan-losing departure to perform a lyricless piece of music as long as a movie to entire stadia of people who'd probably come to hear us recreate our singles. Probably correct, but pretty gutless. If you did nothing but give people what they already like, there'd be no new sounds at all (a state it's possible to feel we are already fast approaching if you listen to some radio stations).

  Anyway. We were doing the song 'And So The Spell Is Ended' (itself a good twelve minutes long, just on the album), and the first side of Nifedge. Plus all the favourites, to keep the unadventurous happy.

  We'd been delayed getting to the auditorium, held up while we waited for a helicopter to fly us in; the crowds and traffic outside the place were too dense to get a limo through. We started about half an hour late, in an atmosphere of sweat and heat. The air conditioning in the main hall had broken down and the place must have been sweltering even before they let twenty thousand excited, often dancing, mostly smoking humans inside it. Once they were in place it became like a sort of vast communal sauna.

  We'd decided to start slow, so began with 'Balance', where everything's black dark (saving the Curtain for later; people had already heard about it, so we didn't always start with it working), and first the drums, then one, then two guitars, then vocals and finally bass and synth together gradually join in and build up, each lit as they slot in, but (the clever bit) all at about half-volume. We played a different, quieter, more wistful version of the song for concerts anyway, using harmonising backing vocals where on the album version there's just the band playing raw and a purposeful, eventually driving, beat, and the lulling effect on a keyed-up audience was always — assuming we played it with conviction — dramatic.

  Ater the last line of 'Balance' faded away ('... as the balance ... of your mind... was disturbed...'), Wise William, our mixing wizard, wound the volume up to near maximum, we fired all lights and slammed into 'Oh Cimmaron'.

  Audience reaction: Wild.

  We played another twenty, twenty-five minutes of well-known stuff, then let the stage go dark, and kept it that way while the Curtain was switched on. Lights, music; on into 'And So The Spell Is Ended'.

  Our first on-the-night hitch with the Curtain; one of the dry-ice machines had packed up. The fan had fused, motor burned out. After a couple of minutes a few wisps of dry-ice vapour leak
ed over the unit, but otherwise there was nothing; just a vertical column of clear air where there should have been a soft waterfall of cold mist, just left of stage centre, about where Davey usually stood.

  We carried on anyway, as we'd agreed if something like that went wrong. It would take too long to fix, and the effect was still impressive. Spots spotted, lasers lased, and the Burst (when the whole centre of the Curtain was blown out by small explosive charges), all worked fine.

  We started side one of Nifedge.

  I was sweating. I felt thirsty already, and the noise was intense; I didn't know whether we had the monitors turned up too high, the crowd were just exceptionally rowdy, or there was just some sort of weird resonance with the main speakers and the shape of the auditorium, tut the noise sounded deafening to me; an internal feedback. I had programmed myself well enough by that time (translation; I was professional enough) not to be unduly put off, so I still did my bit, played my part and my music, but I felt ... strange.

  Perhaps, I remember thinking, we've hit that point in a tour when you've lost the initial impetus of enthusiasm, have yet to work up the momentum of routine, and cannot yet tap the energy of knowing it will all be over soon. Happens that way sometimes, I told myself.

  We played. They listened. A few must have heard the album on import, or got their newly released copies very early (or been incredibly avid fans) because some of them seemed to recognise a few of the tunes, and even sang along with one or two of Christine's lyricless voice parts.

  The Curtain had gone through its paces, firing all up, then all down, then sweeping through a whole slow staccato sequence of firings, flowing left-right, right-Ieft across the stage. The still-misfiring unit near centre stage made the whole display less than perfect, but you could tell just from the noises the punters were making the overall effect still impressed.

  We got to the end of our twenty-minute (nearer twenty-five minutes, on stage) excerpt of Nifedge. That side, that movement (if you like), ends with one vast sustaining chord, punched out by every voice and instrument on stage, plus a synth key-triggered echo and reverberation sequence looping the resulting noise through a pre-figured programme for a digital analyser/sequencer which, at the time, was state of the art.

  A stunning, sublimely furious noise, with the sound system at a hundred per cent plus whatever reverberations the venue could provide.

  In Miami, the noise sounded like the crack of doom, like the whiplash of a galactic arm snapping, like an earthquake wave riding a major power line; we hit our individual assemblage of notes all at once, in a single blasting moment of impacted noise.

  And brought a small section of the house down.

  Ho ho, ha ha.

  And killed Davey.

  Because the dry-ice unit above him had blown a fuse, and the fan didn't work. Because the unit had been put up wrong; in the rush to construct the set, they'd put some part on upside down, and excess vapour and liquid couldn't drain away. Because the air in the hall was very humid, and the moisture in the air, the natural heat of that steamy city, and the collected body-breath of all those worshipping people, had collected around the great unused lump of granulated dry ice sitting way above the stage there. Because a bolt had been tightened up with a monkey wrench, not a torque wrench. Because this was before the days of radio mikes and leadless guitars, so we were all connected up, linked to the machinery.

  So the whole lot snapped and crashed and fell. Missed Davey by a good few feet, but spilled its load of collected water all over him and his guitar and, in seconds, while we were still trying to work out what the hell had happened, and the audience were still applauding the spectacular effect (that burgeoning bursting bow-wave of water had happened to be caught in an accidentally delightful pattern of lights and lasers), the water rushed and/or seeped into some errant wire, some badly connected part of an amplifier, and promptly electrocuted our Davey.

  Lasted... maybe two seconds, maybe five. Seemed like about three hours, but you could probably find some ghoulish bastard with a bootleg tape who could give you it down to the nearest tenth of a second.

  Before we ran for him, before he fell, before that ghastly, jerking, stiff parody of a guitarist dropped from rigidity to slackness across the stage, before Wise William and his cohorts finally realised the circuit breakers — also too hastily installed, we found out later — weren't working, and cut the power manually.

  And we gathered him up, and we took him to the stage exit. He was blue, silent, heart still beating weakly, but breathing only with the assistance of us all; taking turns at first until the paramedics in the ambulance took over. The medics and the ambulance were there according to the contract, but they only let Davey die slower. A chopper was ordered, but would take too long to get there.

  We went with the ambulance, but it got us, effectively, nowhere.

  The crowds were too great.

  There were just too many people. We got him into the ambulance, we surrounded him with our own bodies, we did all we could, but none of it was enough, because there had been a mix-up with the tickets, especially with the number for sale at the door, and so there were even more people milling, ticketless and frustrated outside the auditorium than there were inside.

  And we just couldn't get through the crowds.

  I stood on the ambulance roof at one point. Stood there with its lights flashing round my ankles and its exhaust smoke rising around me, like some tiny image of our stage show, me the star at last, and howled at those people, looking down a crowded alley of them to a crowded street of them, and fists clenched, head back, I screamed with all my might, 'Get oot the fuckin WAY!'

  ... but did nothing, accomplished nothing, communicated ... nothing.

  The swarming chanting tides close round the ambulance and its quiet, unminding cargo, like antibodies round an infection.

  We all thought that he would somehow live, that he of all people would find a way to pull through; another crazy death-defying stunt ...

  But, he didn't; a last practical joke.

  DOA.

  Davey Balfour. 1955-1980.

  RIP

  And that, folks, was very much the end of that.

  end of (a) story

  roll up that circuit diagram

  finished with engines

  shantih

  THIRTEEN

  'Good morning. Mr Daniel Weir?'

  I looked at the two young, clean-shaven men on the grey screen. Coats, suits, ties. I said, 'Yes.'

  The one who was speaking held a card in a little plastic wallet up to the camera. 'I'm Detective Constable Jordan, this is Detective Constable McInnes. Could we have a word with you, Mr Weir?'

  I think I was silent for a moment or two. Then I said, 'Of course,' and let them in. I thought it must be something to do with the club called Monty's, and that broken aquarium. What had happened? Another death? Another chance catastrophe? Had one of the bouncers turned out to have a thin skull, or suddenly collapsed with a fatal blood clot in the brain? Had the cracked glass given way without warning and crushed or sliced in half some glazier or plumber? Nothing seemed too bizarre or outrageous.

  I'd spent the first part of the night curled up on the floor of the bedroom, foetally tight, occasionally shivering, then climbed up to the tower's highest room, which is quite bare, just a couple of seats, and sat there, looking out over the city for a while. Then, still unable to sleep, still thinking about Christine, about Davey and about my own Jonah of a life, I went down to the crypt and tried to distract myself with music, composition, messing about with old tunes and new tunes, until I gave that up too and went for a cold, quiet walk through the mostly sleeping city, aimlessly wandering, growing cold and tired and coming back, and still not able to cry, and deciding that there really was very little left for me, that I had been responsible for both of their deaths and, if there was a God, then it was either a sadistic bastard, or didn't give a damn. And, if there wasn't, then the patterns and currents of cause and effect we dign
ify with the name 'fate' sure as shit seemed to be trying to tell me something.

  I came back to the folly at last, decided that I just didn't want to live any more. I climbed to the top of my high, blasphemous tower and looked down at the street, but knew I couldn't do it that way.

  What else? The only deadly drug I had was booze, and I suppose I could have tried drinking a couple of bottles of vodka, but my stomach has always protected me from the worst effects of alcoholic poisoning, acting as a safety valve and simply chucking back out the offending liquid before it has time to inflict maximum damage, so I didn't think that would work.

  I lay, unsleeping and dry-eyed on my bed, and put on the radio, hoping to hear a human voice.

  White noise; static.

  It filled the darkened room, filled me, and I thought it might send me to sleep, but it didn't. The bright, meaningless sound washed and broke over me, and I let it, surrendering to its enfolding, random signal, closing my eyes.

  And I knew then how I'd kill myself.

  I switched the radio off again, as the chilly, watery dawn slowly heaved itself out of the cloudy eastern skies.

  I had breakfast with Rick Tumber at the Albany, before he caught the shuttle back to London. We talked. I said I'd think about making a come-back. He seemed relieved, apparently believing I hadn't taken the news of Christine's death too hard. But then he didn't know how much of it had been my idea.