by Gordon Burn
A smattering of the Rons, Lens, Terrys and Harrys who had reinvented themselves as Jet or Rock or Deke or Ricky were familiar to me from La Caverne, The Condor and other clubs around the London scene: pretty-boy hustlers and actor/drifters who made up the shifting entourage of the leading managers and promoters and were in the pop racket as a career move, getting while the getting was good. They needed no lessons in how their hair should be puffed and tinctured or in how to pack their jeans.
Most of the fledgling idols and stage-struck musos, however, were pubescent lathe-turners, panel-beaters, spot-welders, abattoir attendants, hot-dog vendors and pub pot-boys, getting their first taste of showbiz.
‘I’m young, dumb and full of cum,’ the bassist or rhythm-guitarist for the Congars or the Krew-Kats or the Cameos announced as he climbed on board the bus on his first morning and, over the next few weeks, proceeded to prove it.
The buses reeked of sex. The bench seats at the back of the bus at the end of every tour used to be scabbed and caked with it. The windows and chromium appointments were bloomed with it. The walls and ceiling seemed to be smeared with it. They were all cock-happy. It was like a contagion.
Because the cost of where they stayed at nights came out of their own pockets (and because it tied in with their new idea of themselves as rebel rockers), many of them chose to doss in the coach, parked in some municipal car-park or round the back of the hall.
At every stop there were the same eager mouths, arcade eyes and hungry hands swarming round the bodywork in a recognisable formation. Most mornings saw cheap-speed blondes frantically ratting their hair, applying spit-and-mascara and stuffing their knickers in their handbags before staggering off to work at the Market Café, C&A or the Co-Op. (Where they sluiced their sticky dumpling thighs, flaked the glueyness out of their intimate seams and gullies? Or opted perhaps to go through the day with the funk of bus sex clinging to them; to wear it on their fingers as a kind of trophy or memento and share it around with their workmates and customers? I was certainly curious and tempted sometimes to ask them.)
The newly-minted Shels and Troys, meanwhile, washed their underwear in the handbasins at transport cafés between gigs, then hung them to dry with their shirts and socks along the luggage-rack inside the bus in ludicrous parodies of what they had seen their mothers do on boxy verandas or in soot-streaked council-house gardens.
‘I got nipples on my titties big as the end of yo’ thumb/I got somethin tween my legs can make a dead man come …’ In the beginning, they used to sing this sort of stuff because they knew it made me uncomfortable. I used to go up front and talk to the driver when it was dirty-joke time. But then I learned to face it up.
The realisation that I was the only one present who knew a crotchet from a hatchet (if only just), who could tell a C-chord from a head of lettuce, heralded a switch in attitudes. I started to join in on the Lucille Bogen and Big Mama Thornton numbers. I began to get attuned to an atmosphere which was a combination launderama, approved school, pleasure charabanc and knocking-shop.
There was the usual delinquent mooning and synchronised pissing and hurling half-pound bags of flour at passing traffic. Some of them acquired shotguns and would get the driver to stop at the edge of fields to let them shoot at bottles (and sometimes birds, though I didn’t want to know about that).
Dean Vance’s (of the Venturas) history – absentee mother, drunken father, a smoker by nine, a drinker at ten, first conviction at eleven years and nine months for wounding with intent; at fourteen charged with assault causing actual bodily harm; at fifteen with housebreaking and larceny – was extreme but not untypical.
I got it in bits at night as I painted black eye-liner and navy-blue mascara on his eyes and smoothed nacreous Max Factor factor-5 over his violent viridian face pustules and chest acne. He tended to dwell on the idea that his mother had been murdered, and there was nothing anybody could do about this preoccupation because nobody knew where she had gone when she suddenly disappeared from home with the off-licence takings. He spent much of his time on the bus working on a song about it – the Everly Brothers out of Leadbelly – which, to the best of my knowledge, never got finished.
Obviously this was a lot different to life on the road with Betty Kayes and her Pekinese, The Balcomes, Fun on a Revolving Ladder, Kay and Kimberley, Balancers Plastique, Winnie Atwell, Pat Hatton and Peggy, Tommy Wallis and Beryl and all the other mum-and-dad acts who I knew were still out there, still tummling away.
I knew because I encountered them most nights when I put in at digs which, with their stuffed fox-terriers and formal ‘best’ parlours and moans about kid singers wearing mops of hair thick enough to hide a crate of kippers, were the pre-war world preserved.
All the talk, widespread at the time, about ‘modernisation’ and ‘affluence’ and ‘the crust of conventional life cracking from top to bottom’ went straight over their heads. They saw what was happening in the wider world as a parallel of what was happening in the business, which is to say: a fad, a freak of fashion, a flash in the pan.
(Many of the performers rehearsing for the 1956 Royal Performance wept openly when Van Parnell walked into the stalls of the Palladium late in the afternoon and announced that that night’s show had had to be cancelled owing to the grave international situation. At the time, though, nobody gave it any great significance.)
The Archie Rices were staying with what they knew, which was all they knew, and, as a consequence, were losing it. Unlike myself, I need hardly add, who was plugged into the new mood of youthful vitality and powie fifties optimism.
For me this found its most concrete form in the first solid-body ‘planks’ and ‘axes’; the Fender Stratocasters and Telecasters, Epiphone Coronets and Wilshires, the Gibson Les Pauls. With their futuristic shapes and colour-ways and textures – lemon yellow with gun-metal fleck, graphite with graphite mica – they seemed excitingly in step (what did I know?) with the new concrete environments of ring-roads, tower-blocks, transportels, expressways, sky-lounges, skylons and sputnik-style sportatoria.
My problem was that, although I was thinking 1959, image-wise I was marooned back in 1954.1 was locked into a persona that no amount of remoulding and remodelling and cosmetic rehab seemed able to break me free of.
My original style had been an outgrowth, a cartooning I suppose you would now have to say, of the New Look that came in a couple of years after the end of the war: hand-span waists, immense spreading skirts, bell dresses with warehousefuls of sequins, bugle-beads, tinsel, crackle-nylon and a lot of padding, pleating, stiffening, corseting and boning going on.
I was a work of conscious and total artifice. I wore long nails because I had stubby little hands. I wore high-heel shoes because I was short. I wore my hair big because my hair wouldn’t do everything I wanted it to. I thought that part of whatever appeal I had lay in the fact that I looked totally artificial but was totally real.
This look reached its apotheosis on the occasion that I had to be physically swung into position like a Portaloo or section of partition-wall when the outfit I was wearing – a real ‘Hey Doris’ number consisting of a floor-length ostrich-feather cape over a dress of jet beads and chainmail – proved too monumental to make it onto the set any other way. I had reached a degree of thingness from which the time had obviously come to beat a retreat.
By the package tour era, I had slimmed my outline down almost to street proportions. I’d also updated the press-button-A ballads and cutesie-poo ditties from my usual programme to a style that seemed more in keeping with the younger trend.
They were developments that had my manager, among others, climbing the wall. ‘You’re still a terrific piece of merchandise,’ he’d remind me every time he came on the line. ‘The less you change, the longer it lasts. You know what I’m saying? You know what I’m saying. Leave it alone.’
But unfortunately my ear had been turned. Instead of a clear horizontal simplicity in the music, I was now hearing the potential for notes to
be chopped up, jammed together, halved, augmented, twisted, stretched and dropped. Instead of a regular chugga-chugga pulse, I was learning new ways to bend, tease and subvert the regularity of the beat. Which was the beginning of my tsuris, as I should have known: the more I tried to break out and move from the old style to the next style, to introduce a more modern idiom, the more it went over like the proverbial turd in the punchbowl. To the point where I had to admit defeat and backtrack to the well-worn and familiar, the tried and tested. (More hits followed.)
I believed at the time of the package shows that my heightened awareness – I have to call it that – could be attributed solely to the new range of musical experiences I was being exposed to, the race music coming in on record from America, in particular.
But that alone couldn’t account for the soaring energy levels, the unusual alertness and receptivity, the unprecedented appetite for performing. Or for the dilated pupils, the popping nerves and the sense sometimes of being put in another dimension.
For that, I now know (though I didn’t then) I had the ‘nigger minstrels’, the black-and-white slimming capsules the boys on the bus were feeding me on a daily basis, to thank. The reason I was feeling so up for such a lot of the time – and so swimmy and strung-out for the remainder of it – was because I was staying permanently dosed on ups.
Now – today, I mean: November 20th, 1986, which happens to be a Thursday – I can experience the same speed-freak sensations merely by being back on the road, riding in a Rapide double-deck Shuttlelounge or Scenicruiser, with Sue or Sammy or Donna in the kitchen corner nursing a hangover and wrestling with the clingfilm and the sandwich-fillings she has raced round doing the last-minute buying for in a post-euphoric haze.
Having a doped dog in the bag planted between my feet whose unpredictable smells and movements could suddenly result in him being discovered gives that added extra urban topspin to the experience. I’ve been feeling out there ever since I got on. I’ve been feeling acid-blazed.
An hour ago it was sunny. The sun lit up the individual fibres of the pseudoplush on the seat-backs so that they seemed to be sensitive to every breath and vibration and swayed in the frazzled air in here like the fronds or stamens of anemones.
The wig worn by the black woman sitting in the seat in front was similarly ablaze with nylon filaments and fat perspiration-points, each one of which appeared to hold a perfect image of the shimmering, sun-bleached infinitised interior. The shaved pubic strips of velcro which anchor the head-rest slips bristled with a similar harsh black sheen.
It isn’t so apparent now that it has clouded over – the sky has a lowered, snowy look. But a while ago, every synthetic surface seemed to be animated with a jazzy streptococcal patina: the window stanchions, the window sills, the tissue head-rests, the seat-surrounds, the drop-trays – all could be seen to be evenly, but variably, textured, like different skin-types examined minutely in a purpose-adapted light.
When she came round with the first in-coach refreshment service, about forty miles in, I saw that Sue herself was glittering with these semi-subliminal patterns or patinas, which were over-printed on the polyesters of her otherwise solid-coloured company-issue skirt, shirt and jacket.
The woman directly across the aisle has been weeping intermittently ever since she got on. She hasn’t looked up from the door-stop novel in her lap (a Virginia Andrews) for over an hour. She has been eating crisps and occasionally wiping her fingertips clean on the fibrous pages of the book.
A small Asian girl several rows in front is screaming in what at first was a nerve-jangling way, but has now become like a mantra. The elderly man with her, whom I take to be her grandfather, keeps repeating the same phrase – ‘How do you do, little lady? … How do you do, little lady?’ – in a desperate counterpoint.
I can see the title of a magazine article that somebody’s reading: ‘Ever So Crafty Main Meal Super Soups’. I can also see a complicated elastic-band device keeping a pair of glasses on a man’s face, and the headline ‘Nick Nick Jim Punched At Disco’.
(How do I know that this is a reference to the young Cockney comedian, Jim Davidson, when most of the time I have no access to a television, take no daily paper, and rarely listen to the radio?
(The answer, I suppose, is that I know in the same way that I knew immediately without thinking what Sue meant when I asked for a packet of peanuts from her tray and she said, ‘Wet or dry?’
(It’s in the air like the weather, and you can either duck it or let it wash all over you, coating you with that distinctive late-in-the-century patina.)
Moving along. The videos are located at the front and centre of the vehicle. So far they have shown the motorway playing itselfout in a melancholy way, as a wavering scribble on a screen, the trace-line of a dicky heart.
Now The Mannequin – ‘a present-day fable of our time set in downtown Philadelphia’, you will remember – is being teed-up with trailers for Police Academy 4, Lethal Weapon, Who’s That Girl? – ‘films that will fill your home with quality entertainment’ – and other offerings from Warner Home Video.
I recognise the voice doing the talking-up – a disc-jockey from my own time, apparently still going strong.
I look out the window and see the computer-generated logos and graphics spinning and cavorting as a reflection on the bland agribusiness landscape through which we’re travelling.
Reality digitised and broken down into megabits or bongo-bytes, then replayed as a kind of endless fidgeting or fluttering on the periphery of experience, at the edge of vision. Motes dancing on the air. That’s what I see. That’s what I seem to be constantly seeing.
We slow to a crawl for no obvious reason. We are apparently climbing a steep gradient, although no incline is visible. Then we pack up speed again and glide past a racecourse with deserted grandstands and hand-painted numerals slotted into a big churchy frame giving the date of the next meeting.
The past, in the shape of a shingled farm building, a farm dog skirting the edge of a field on its half-haunches, a plot of country graveyard bordered by slabby barbered yews, will occasionally be glimpsed in profile for a few seconds before the road presents itself full-face and sets you back on course across the surface.
‘Minute in the mouth, month on the hips,’ I hear a child a couple of rows back chastising its mother.
‘It’s one of the places where you can get really good camel’s hair.’ This from a character in The Mannequin, a frail but feisty old lady, evidently the owner of the department store where the action – a bit of love-interest, a lot of knock-about – takes place.
I find myself wishing it was time for Sue to come round again taking orders. (There are no catering committees involved, no portion control practised here. It’s a system that allows the personality some play. Sue’s chicken roll with Paxo stuffing and honeyglaze ham with pease-pudding now both sound particularly good.)
I know that at this point, though, Sue will have got her head down, squeezed in among the cases of no-brand cherryade and cola, the caterers’ jars of beetroot and brown sauce that occupy the back seat and mark out her territory.
Her bit is the bit next to the toilet cabin. ‘If you sprinkle when you tinkle,’ a rather startling little notice in there says, ‘please be sweet and wipe the seat.’
Turbo-Intercooling. Chilled Distribution, the rolling logotypes say in the winter dusk.
Imagesetting. Interprint. Computrans. Superdrug. Control International. Corporate Synergy.
Then: Get In Lane. Filter Right.
We slide past convoys of wagons on the left, their house-sized loads mysteriously belted and tarped. There are no heads visible, only ghostly forearms and slicked denim thighs and the unexpectedly homely cabin bits and pieces brought along to fend off the loneliness of the road. (Already some Christmas lights are in evidence – strings of coloured lights looped round windscreens to give a festive/sad, lyrical/tawdry Santa’s grotto feel.)
We have slowed to a crawl again, due
to some obstruction or accident. We sidle alongside a lorry carrying an alp of giant concrete pipes. There is a dog curled up asleep in the seat next to the driver and a newspaper flattened against the steering-wheel.
SHAMEFUL, CYNICAL AND CRUEL it says in letters as black as death across the front page. And, over the constantly-retrieved, flatly-lit picture of Myra Hindley: ‘Police step up macabre search for young bodies in the snow as Moors murderess Hindley confesses after 20 years’.
The picture (blurring slightly with the movement of the engine) fills almost the whole of the page. Is it possible to discern evil, as many have supposed, in the cavernous upturned eyes, the pasty planes, the heavy bones, the holed hedge of bleached blonde fringe, the fondant of deep shadow, like a choke-collar, under Hindley’s chin? Is this the look – frontal, insolent, the unintimidated direct address to the camera – of ein richtiger Teufelsbraten, a true devil’s dish?
The features are individually too familiar by now to be read as an integrated, blood-warmed face. As usual, Hindley looks like a composite, an identikit, a media emanation, a hypothetical who never existed in the flesh.
But we are moving again. Or the wagon is. I have to look across at the dark field, the stripped trees, the traffic on the distant feed-road to get a bearing.
The cabin dog staggers to its feet, makes one and a half circles, then folds itself back into the hollow made by its body. Between my feet, in his bag and still, I hope, sedated (there are two hours at least to go), Psyche performs the same bit of business in perfect unison – as if one was the object and the other the shadow cast by it (remember all those Fred and Ginger routines?); one the voice and the other the echo.
I’m confused about how to react, whether to feel beguiled or repelled (why did I almost say ‘warned’?) by this sudden, oddly haunting piece of synchronicity.
As he inches ahead, I see that there’s a fresh and feminine-looking continental quilt bunched up behind the driver’s head and a bunk-space it must feel good crawling into at the end of a hard driving day.