by John Grant
We got to know Jaques (spelt that way, no "c," and pronounced "Jakes") quite well over the next few weeks. He was an all-right person – very straight unless you were the SS, in which case I'd guess he'd have been about as honest as a magpie, with his six kids, invalid grandmother and mortgage repayments. His mum was nice, too, when we met her in the council house the two of them shared. She'd allowed him to rig up the garage as a sort of rudimentary recording studio – egg-boxes, ancient four-track, remember that Concorde goes over late afternoon – and he'd managed to con a couple of relatives into "investing" enough in him so that he could press a couple of singles a year. So far Scrubbadubba Records hadn't precisely recouped its capital, but the bands he'd recorded were slowly selling their way through his stocks at their gigs.
That was Jaques's resumé, as he told it to us in the Drunken Driver. His proposal: if we wanted to cut a disc of "Hill Snow," which he didn't much like himself but thought was commercial enough to outweigh his more worthy enterprises, he'd take a gamble. He'd only just got round to telling the SS that his uncle had contracted chronic diarrhea six months ago and moved in, so he had some back-pay to play with. He couldn't offer us anything but a share of the profits.
Well, why not?
We didn't have a B-side, that was why not.
We couldn't do one of the other numbers we regularly played, because that'd have got us all into copyright hassles.
No problem, said Alyss, smiling at me the way she smiled only at me: we can write another song together, can't we, Dave?
Two days later we had "Let Me Punch Your Wall." Alyss wrote the lyrics all by herself this time; and, although she meant them to be funny the way "Hill Snow" was, I could hear the sad little yearning voice that was hiding away behind their smothering shield. In her first year at university in Exeter, I knew, she'd been pretty lonely; all her Bristol friends had scattered to their different universities up and down the country, and she was having difficulty making new ones who didn't want to feel her up the whole time. I hadn't realized this, of course; I'd seen her across the Drum Bar a couple of times, sitting on her own with a book, and wished I'd had the courage to go and say hello to her, but I'd assumed she was waiting for some handsome, intelligent, athletic hunk bastard of a boyfriend. It's funny how prettiness can be a burden like that for women. They never know if men actually like them or are just hoping to get to bed with them, which most of them are; while the people like me who'd want to make friends with them as people are frightened off by the nonexistent competition. And she was very pretty – more than pretty. She was only small, and had very pale skin; her eyes were yellow-green. She wore her hair short in what I later learned was called a gamin cut; it was that kind of coppery red that the bark of silver birches can sometimes be. It sounds a cliché, but she had an elfin face: pointy little chin; small, expressive mouth; cheekbones tinged with pink.
Anyway.
I tried to get as much of her remembered solitariness into the tune of "Let Me Punch Your Wall" as I could, and though I say it myself it turned out a very, very lovely little song. Even Buster thought it was good: "haunting," he called it in an off-hand sort of sarcasm when he first heard it, but often enough later I'd hear him whistling it. It'd have been all wrong for an A-side, of course, but it was just right for the flip of "Hill Snow." That was round about the end of the period when people bought singles for their A-sides and ended up playing the B-sides instead.
As I say, Alyss wrote the lyrics all by herself. She was to do the same for our next three songs, too. I wrote the last one in its entirety – words and music both.
But that wasn't to be for a while.
~
Someone – presumably God – must be orchestrating your journey today, because the minibus arrives just as Dave's thumb presses the "stop" button again. He looks satisfied, as if there isn't any luck involved, as if things are working out just exactly the way they were planned to be.
Politely he gestures to the two bags, who're still talking like geese, up the steps ahead of him; neither of them pauses in their logorrheic spate to acknowledge the courtesy, which is about par for bags. He has his exact fare ready for the driver; he takes his ticket and pushes up the narrow, shopping-littered aisle to a vacant seat at the back. A couple of other people clamber on, one of them a young mother with an unbelievably tiny alabaster child clamped against her chest in a sling; he half-rises, but someone nearer the front of the minibus has already stood. The driver lets in the gear with a groan.
It normally takes about seven minutes to get to the High Street, where he has to change buses for the river. In the rush-hour it can take a lot longer, of course, but this isn't the rush-hour. Anyway, delay's not the worry. Mid-morning, like this, the road's pretty clear and, if there aren't many people wanting to get on or off and the driver's in a rush, the trip can take only three or four minutes – which is cutting things fine. The next track on the C90 lasts just over four minutes.
The whole journey becomes quite exciting for you. You're not listening to the tape, of course; instead you alternate your not-gaze up and down between his digital watch, where his hand rests on the rail in front of him, and the road ahead. It seems to take forever for the numbers to change, and the vehicle is whipping along merrily, skipping right past the stops because it's already full.
Dave notices nothing of this, naturally.
Fortunately a child's been run over in Sidwell Street, so the traffic's being diverted round by the bus station. That'll add at least a couple of minutes to the journey time – more than enough.
How kind of God to maim a child especially.
~
all the other women they got stockings and tights
but when I snuggle with my lover that just doesn't seem r-i-i-i-ight ...
so I'm a little looker wantsta turn back all the clocks:
when I strip off for bedtime I just strip on my socks,
'cos I got socks
socks
yeah I got socks.
I ain't got the measles
I ain't got the chickenpox
I got socks ...
~
Devonair, the local radio station, played "Hill Snow" quite a lot, but for a while that was the only airtime it got.
We weren't too worried. Our finals had suddenly stopped being in the infinite future and started being nine months away, so all four of us were spending most of our time working: although of course we were living in the same house, we only really saw very much of each other on Friday nights, when we'd get all the gear together and trundle off in the back of the old banger Crotchy had bought himself to whichever pub reckoned it needed us. Jaques popped around from time to time to tell us gloomily about all the copies the single wasn't selling (the half-dozen or so we were getting rid of at each gig was about the extent of things), but soon he saw he was just interrupting our studies and he stopped coming.
Buster split up with his polytechnic girl; or, at least, she split up with him – preferring, as she apparently explained to him, someone younger. He was pretty fucked up about it for a while, but then Fallopia very sweetly took pity on him and, as it were, screwed him back to sanity. It was an act of genuine friendship on her part, she told me, but I was unconscionably relieved when the arrangement fizzled out. Shared houses can be a bit of a strain at the best of times; sex between the occupants can so often lead to emotional tensions that shatter the whole precarious edifice. The same applies to bands, of course.
What I couldn't get over – still can't – is the way that Fallopia and the two guys could carry on afterwards living in apparent perfect amity as if they'd never been anything other than good friends who happened to live in the same house. It wouldn't have been possible for me to act that way. To me, lovemaking involves the complete disrobing of the soul, the unveiling of one's innermost self so that no blemish, no failing, is left uncovered. When you're making love with someone you're allowing yourself to be seen completely without pretension; you're saying to
the person you're with: "Look, I trust you enough to see me totally raw. Will you trust me that much?"
Don't get me wrong. I'm not necessarily talking about love and devotion here. Well, love maybe. I could quite understand Fallopia having enough love-of-friendship for Buster that the two of them could trust each other sufficiently to be soul-naked together – and, anyway, Buster was so fucked up then that he was soul-naked in front of everyone, all the time, so the sex part of it must have been purely a technicality, a symbol of the everyday reality. But it's the afterwards that baffled me. I could have come to grips with it if he and Fallopia had thereafter become sort of brother-sister close, or even if they'd been occasional lovers when one or other of them needed the comfort; but instead they were just back to the way they always had been, good buddies, nothing special, a whose-turn-is-it-to-go-to-the-launderette-type relationship – as if they'd both suffered some kind of joint amnesia. And the same went for Crotchy and Fallopia.
I was alone in the house one afternoon when Jaques phoned up. He was in a call-box, as usual, so the first thing I did was jot down his number and ring him back.
Great news, great news! As always when he was excited it was a bit hard to work out exactly what the great news was, but I made myself appropriately jubilant anyway and then tried to worm it out of him.
Actually, as news goes it really wasn't bad.
Some pinstripe from Floozy Records plc (Jaques was quite meticulous about including the "plc" every time he mentioned the company, and later the rest of us got into the habit, too) had been driving back home from his hols in Cornwall with the wife and kids, and had caught a bit of Devonair while passing through. One of the DJs had stuck on "Hill Snow" as a golden oldie – six months is a long time in the pop biz – and the pinstripe had rather liked it. Liked it enough to phone Devonair on the Monday to get the details; liked it enough to get Jaques to sell him a copy (possibly a unique experience for our youthful tycoon); liked it enough to start making noises about it being time for us to take the next step toward (yawn) stardom ...
The following few weeks were hell, and the direct cause of the fact that I don't have a degree. Because I was the band swot, I was regarded as the one most likely to sail through the finals without further work being needed, and so I was selected to go through all the business mill. I got us an agent in faraway, exotic Bristol – Hawkeye Poulton – and he negotiated a contract for us with Floozy Records plc on terms that were so favorable to us that we only ever saw about ten per cent of what we earned. I went up to London a handful of times to have my hand bathed in the pinstripe's moist grasp and get taken to L'Escargot. I agreed the dates when we could go into the studio to recut "Hill Snow" and "Wall" as well as a couple of further tracks that Alyss and I would write. I did everything for the Flaming Ghoulies that needed doing, because the other three just didn't have the time; I tried to keep my own studies up to date as well, of course, but it simply wasn't possible.
"I Got Socks" was a nice song. Once again Alyss caught that strange happy-sad emotion in the lyrics. Some of the kids might just be perceptive enough to read into them what was actually there, but I doubted it; I tried to help them by way of the melody, which was another very delicate one. When I listen to the track now it reminds me a bit of early Kate Bush (say, maybe we're where she got her ideas from) except that Alyss's voice was different – sort of like a virginal Chrissie Hynde might have sounded.
Fallopia and Jaques got something together for a while during my absences, I gather, but it wasn't anything serious.
~
It's a short walk between the two stops in the High Street, but the two of you negotiate it easily enough, Dave dodging among the fixed-eye shoppers and the pebbledash litterbins and the benches. And all of this he manages even though he's temporarily blind. There's nothing in the earphones at the moment, of course; he hears the pedestrians trailing their feet along the pavement and the straining of the minibuses as they trudge away from their stops as a single white noise.
Anyone looking cursorily at him now as he leans against the stop would think he was either drunk or had been up all night. But someone who peered into his half-closed eyes would see that instead it is a matter of his body being empty: his entity has retreated far behind them into some secret place known only to him. There, he is hearing the echoes of a long-stilled voice and the sounds of lilting music; he's seeing the lights, some of them quick-dazzling and others muted; there's the touch of many hands on his body, fingers tugging at him ...
You – the only one, perhaps, who could join him in that place – choose, by contrast, to drag him out of it. Running yourself down his arm, you make his fingers twitch, then move towards the Walkman's solid box. There should surely be time for him to play the next song before his minibus comes. It's a short song not just in terms of the number of minutes and seconds it lasts; it's the one track that, in the course of his annual pilgrimage, he plays only because it's there on the tape, because it needs to be played if he's going to get from the previous track to the next.
Forcing his fingers to clasp themselves around the Walkman is more difficult – for the first time since the pair of you rose this morning, you feel yourself consciously having to undergo some exertion – but soon they respond to your urging. Then his thumb presses down on the play button and, as the preparatory hiss returns to his ears, his self eases itself back into his body, uniting him once more, like a caveman returned to his cave.
~
and when your bloke has left you
and you're feelin' all bereft'n'you
've discovered that you're out of booze'n'cigs,
don't let your hopes go flaccid
or drown yourself in acid –
there's no need to leave it tacit:
just yell "PIG"
~
I haven't any idea how many palms had to be greased along the way, but somehow the publicity people at Floozy Records plc who'd promised us Top of the Pops or at the very least Old Grey Whistle Test managed to book us in for a slot on some late-night variety show on Harlech that none of us had ever seen. It was the first time any of us had ever been on television except Brian, who'd inadvertently been A Small Boy Passing By in a commercial when he'd been six, and we were naturally very excited. The Floozy Records plc people had supplied us with some new gear to play – they said it would come out of the royalties of our next disc (or platter, as Hawkeye quaintly described it over the telephone to me); a sign of their optimism was that the pick-shield on Chris's guitar was peeling off at one corner and had to be glued back in place. The other three were too cool to show it – the excitement, I mean – but I know that I was embarrassing. I even phoned my mum. The person who really blew his mind was Jaques. Exactly what his financial position now was vis-à-vis ourselves I had then and still have no idea – presumably he was getting some kind of a backhander from good old Hawkeye – but you'd have thought he'd just found the Crown Jewels on his doorstep. Of course, he insisted on coming with us in the van up to Bristol, sitting on the broad front seat between Brian, who was driving, and Alyss, who clearly didn't much like him sitting that scrunched up against her; you could tell it from the too-easy way she laughed at the rather coarse jokes he told as we belted along the motorway. Besides, that close to him she must have had two nostrilsful of his odor the whole journey: he wasn't a great one for bathing, was our Jaques.
Although the program wasn't to be going on air until half-past eleven, we had to get to the Harlech studios by early afternoon. When we arrived, a little late through having got stuck in Bristol's one-way system for a while, none of us had eaten. To be frank, I don't think I'd have been able to – I was knotted up inside by a mixture of exhilaration at the fact we were making it into the big(gish) time and a dread certainty that something was going to go terribly wrong, like a foot through one of the drums – but the others, excepting Alyss, were making a great song and dance about it. Hawkeye appeared from a crack in the wall and told us that we'd have a chan
ce to grab something in the canteen later on, but to shut up for now.
We were met by Laugh? – I Could Have Pissed Myself!'s producer, who looked about twenty years older than I'd expected: not at all the type of person you'd think of as running a show packed with alternative comedians. Those were the early days of alternative comedy, when everybody was still getting used to the idea that jokes about tits and bums and bollocks were ideologically sound and acceptable to the radical chic, not just sexist crap like they used to be. It's a style of humor I've always felt uneasy with, guilt smothering laughter, glancing at the half-open door to worry that my parents might be standing outside it, waiting to pounce.
Nicholas – the producer, and not a Nick – ushered us and our equipment down a confusing selection of brightly lit corridors, pausing to exchange words every now and then with people he didn't introduce us to. Finally we were into the studio itself, where that evening's live edition of Laugh? – I Could Have Pissed Myself! was going to be presented before an invited audience of a couple of hundred. None of the other artistes had arrived by then: we were the only ones who'd be rehearsing there all afternoon. Nicholas told us this was because it didn't really matter if the alternative comedians screwed up their acts because that was what the audience expected of them – all part of the fun – but the musical interlude was a different thing. Actually, he went on to unnecessarily explain to us, it didn't really matter all that much if we screwed up as well, because we were the bit of the program when the audience at home hopped off for a pee if they couldn't hold out until the ad break, but he had a certain professional pride. I think he was just winding us up, though; I think the point was that the camera crew wanted to get their angles sorted out – zeroing in on Crotchy's nimble fingers or Fallopia's jeans, that sort of thing.
The rehearsals were tedious.
We'd written a special song for the occasion, Alyss and I, so we could be more in keeping with the spirit of the rest of the show. I didn't rate it too highly, and I don't think even Alyss was very fond of her own lyrics after the effects of the Spanish red she'd drunk to write them had worn off. Unlike our other songs – even "Hill Snow" – "Pig" had nothing at all behind the words and the music: it was just a jolly bellow, something you could hear a couple of times and then be annoyed about, years later, when it popped back unexpectedly into your head.