‘That’s him.’
‘Always playing really far-out jazz in the shop, really wild stuff. When I was younger, he’d be playing this mad, brilliant afro-funk or old blues, nodding along with his eyes closed and I’d go up to the counter with something by Boyzone or whatever, and he’d take it out of my hand and just sort of … smile really sadly. “Oh, my child …”’
‘Yep. That’s my dad.’
She peered at my face. ‘That’s where I knew you from!’
‘Well, I take after Mum, mainly.’
‘What happened?’
‘Competition. Discounts in the big shops. I think he overestimated the local jazz scene.’
‘So what’s he doing now?’
‘This time of day?’ I looked at my watch. ‘He’s either asleep or watching Countdown,’ I said and then felt a shiver of self-disgust at that gesture, examining my watch like that, a shabby piece of theatrical business. In truth, I’d not seen his face for days now. For reasons I couldn’t say out loud, I did not want to go home. But neither did I want to stay, not now that the conversation had been tainted with pity and mawkishness.
‘Well. It’s a shame,’ she said eventually. ‘I loved Vinyl Visions. Business is brutal, isn’t it? Everything great gets stamped on in the end.’ She took my arm. ‘We could walk a little further. If you want to talk some more?’
The Jazz Section
It had been something great, our family enterprise, while it lasted.
My father’s own musical ambitions had stalled. His only regular jazz gig was with Rule of Three, a trio that played the more open-minded local pubs, the kind of accomplished and committed outfit that is always being asked if they can play more quietly. For cash, he played the circuit in a famously slick wedding band, but he had grown to hate the kitschy eighties sax-playing that this work demanded, the screwed-up eyes, the head thrown backwards, as posturing and silly as using two fingers to represent a gun. He had wanted to be part of a British jazz revival, not honk glumly though ‘House of Fun’ at some anniversary, a surly ‘Careless Whisper’ at the Rotary Club’s Christmas do.
But neither did he want to inherit the family business. Vinyl Visions was a mini-chain, three branches on the high streets of small suburban towns, and my grandparents wanted rid of them. The term ‘independent record shop’ suggests dedication and expertise, the kind of place that might be curated, but my grandparents’ feeling for music was like an ironmonger’s feeling for buckets. Music was a commodity and each branch of Vinyl Visions was equally fusty, selling middle-of-the-road music to locals who couldn’t face the ‘big shops’. Before their mystifying left turn, my grandparents were stationers and remained stationers at heart, still stocking random items from that noble trade – lewd and abusive birthday cards, a totem pole of crêpe paper, random items that caught my grandfather’s eye at the wholesalers and that he felt belonged amongst the racks of popular classics, novelty records and easy listening on the Music for Pleasure label. Through disco and punk, metal and mod, post-punk and electro-pop and the early days of house, the shop’s most consistent sellers remained Richard Clayderman and the soundtrack to The Sound of Music. If your heart demanded bagpipe music on cassette and some ancient tinsel, then Vinyl Visions was the only game in town, a music shop for people who didn’t much care for the stuff.
The suburban high street was once the natural habitat of shops like this, ill conceived and inefficient, irrational and scrappy with dusty, fading window displays, closed half-days on Wednesday. But in this new decade, the retail environment was less hospitable, and music retail in particular was changing at a dizzying rate. Should they drop cassettes and commit to CDs? Abandon singles? It was all too much, and so my grandparents called on Dad. It was, they said, irresponsible and immature to live with two kids in rented rooms. Bad enough that he’d dropped out of accountancy, but there must be, what, five, ten people in the country making a living from playing the saxophone, all of them trained at academies and conservatoires, all with better contacts. Dad was an amateur. Silly to think he could be one of them. Besides, music retail was a stable business. People would always need music. In return for help with a mortgage on a proper house, why not come back and take over?
Respectability called. Five days a week, plus every other Saturday, serving and cashing up, meeting reps, sorting out the payroll – would it really be so bad? He could still pursue the thing he loved, but at weekends and in the evenings. And it wouldn’t be forever; once the business was on its feet again, he could take a step back, employ managers and return to playing. Mum was more hesitant, wary of how easily the temporary becomes permanent. She’d never got along with her in-laws, felt that they bullied and smothered their only child, and to be under an obligation … the walls of our rented rooms were thin enough to hear both sides.
But Mum relented, and so we moved back to the town where my father had grown up, into the big house with the solid walls and the stained-glass sunrise. My grandparents retired to a holiday home on the South Wales coast, a bungalow with two reclining chairs and a sea-view picture window. Thirteen at the time, I was now cynical enough to picture Nan and Grandad Lewis cackling all the way down the M4, used-car salesmen who had finally unloaded some famous wreck. Or perhaps they had our best interests at heart. Either way, my father found himself, in his mid-thirties, the managing director of a business he was singularly ill equipped to run.
He took over with a reformer’s zeal, pulling us along with him so that it became the Lewis family project. He’d always despaired of the shops’ fusty, scrappy atmosphere, the desolate window displays, the aggressive strip lighting that illuminated the stained carpet tiles, the tacky promotional material. A life-size James Last had stood guard over the till for as long as anyone could remember, and he would be the first to go, along with the dull stock of middle-of-the-road crooners and ancient novelty records that no amount of discounting could ever hope to shift. Most urgently of all, he longed to take control of his parents’ ‘Jazz Section’, where brass bands and the soundtracks of forgotten movies were filed alongside music made by anyone who was not white: Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Marley, the soundtrack to Neil Diamond’s The Jazz Singer.
Specialisation, that was the future. Yes, there’d still be pop and rock and chart hits in the shops but from now on the emphasis would be on the music that Dad loved. For one hair-raising month, all three branches were ‘closed for refurbishment’. Flush with a large bank loan, the stock was refreshed with CDs and collectors’ vinyl, all to be displayed in handsome bespoke pine racks. We took a Friday off school and over the weekend travelled from shop to shop, alphabetising against the clock. A credit card had paid for top-of-the-range stereo equipment – it was important that customers heard the music at its best – and we cooed obediently at the dynamics and definition as we played Miles and Monk, Mingus and Coltrane. ‘Listen to this one, kids,’ he’d say, lowering the stylus with a watchmaker’s precision, and there’d be that familiar wash of cymbals and the squall of horns, as incomprehensible in its appeal as coffee or olives. Like coffee, like olives, we’d grow into jazz and in the meantime, he’d intersperse hard bebop with the Beatles for us, Bowie for Mum, and we unpacked the boxes to this soundtrack as happily as if they were presents on Christmas morning, the sealed CDs as crisp and immaculate as surgical supplies, the vinyl heavy, old-fashioned and luxurious; rare Japanese 180g pressings and leather-bound box sets of studio out-takes. If I suspected that Dad had bought these things for himself, rather than for the general public, then it was worth it to see how happy he was, and Mum too. After all, the saxophone was a growling, disreputable, sexual thing born of late nights and seedy clubs; it could never thrive in the high streets and business parks of the Surrey/Sussex borders. Instead he would evangelise, sell something with passion and fulfil a need the customers didn’t yet know they had. On Sunday we arrived at our home branch and, fuelled by fizzy drinks and takeaway, worked for fourteen hours. When we were finally finished he made us lie on
the floor between the aisles, our heads touching in the centre, and placed one last record on the turntable.
‘This is ridiculous,’ said Mum.
‘Just listen!’
‘I can hear just as well standing up, Brian.’
‘Shh. Close your eyes.’ He lowered the needle and joined us on the carpet.
‘In a Sentimental Mood’, the John Coltrane/Duke Ellington version. I liked this one, the jangle of the old piano, the soft warm sound of the saxophone against the patter of the drums. It had a melody and it didn’t last too long, though still long enough for my sister to fall asleep snuggled into Dad’s arms. Without saying as much, the music was intended as a blessing for our new endeavour and when it was finished we stood silently, locked the shop door and walked into a new era.
But it’s hard to imagine a time less primed for a bebop revival than the mid-nineties, when the only piano to be heard was in those choppy house-music chords, the only saxophone a synthesised sample. Treacherously, I was listening to the chug of guitars when Fran Fisher was buying that Boyzone CD and making my father’s face fall. But the economics of the independent retailer did not allow for snobbery, and so he’d bite his tongue and sell that too and edge the volume up on The Modern Jazz Quartet.
And for a while it seemed to be working. People liked my father, and I saw this and relished it. He had a swagger at that time, and a work ethic that we’d not seen when he was still struggling to be a musician. His optimism was contagious, and we were infected by his confidence. This was the beginning of our family’s golden years, and if I could select a moment when my parents were most essentially themselves, the parents I’d choose to remember, it would be about this time.
The closure of the first shop was presented as a consolidation of resources, a shrewd business move. The money they’d save from rent and wages could be used to pay down the interest, loyal customers would travel, especially now the shops were so much more appealing, so well stocked, so modern. This was the pitch I’d hear during Dad’s long, fraught phone calls to his parents in their bungalow exile; he knew what he was doing, and wouldn’t let anyone down. So keen was he not to disappoint that he found it impossible to make staff redundant, and instead they were relocated to remaining branches. We’d see great crowds of them on our weekend rounds, chatting by the tills, outnumbering customers three to one while Kind of Blue played over expensive speakers.
But the first closure also marked the start of the condition we refused to name. God knows, he’d never been an Olympian but coffee and insomnia gave Dad a confused, exhausted air, as if perpetually struggling to snap out of something. Somewhere between his shoulder blades he seemed to carry a great knot of tension, an object, a ball of clenched muscle that he would press and probe throughout the day, rolling his shoulders, cracking his joints. In the mornings, getting ready for school, I’d sometimes catch sight of him through the bedroom door, bracing himself against the wardrobe as if pinned to the spot by some awful realisation. I don’t think anything frightened me more than those moments of baffled stillness, and I’d stand on the landing, holding my breath, waiting for him to shake it off. Outwardly at least, he remained affectionate and loving and funny, but it was the artificially bright good humour that precedes bad news.
Six months later, the second shop closed. My mother began to take a more active role, persuading my dad that diversification, rather than specialisation, was the key. We began to stock batteries and cables, elaborate gift-wrap and greetings cards. For my father, this was the curse of stationery, a terrible step backwards, and he felt heartsick. Wasn’t music enough? Where was the love, the passion? Why couldn’t they hear it in the music he played? Confidence shaded into plucky defiance, then sour resignation. ‘You know what I should have gone into, Charlie? Carbon paper. Crinoline petticoats, lace doilies, inkwells. There’s more money in inkwells than this.’
My mother was having none of this self-pity and defeatism. The answer, she said, was coffee. On days off, she would sometimes escape to London to meet up with old friends and it was here, in a café near Berwick Street Market, that she’d hit upon her scheme. Soho was practically one big coffee bar. Why not shift the business sideways, invest in a second-hand espresso machine, bentwood chairs, some old school desks, and play music over the speakers. ‘What’s this we’re listening to?’ the customers would ask, and we would sell them the CD. If not, the mark-up on a cup of coffee was immense. With only the fusty Cottage Loaf Tea Rooms and an Orwellian greasy spoon for competition, there was no way we could fail.
‘You’d go, Charlie, wouldn’t you? And your friends?’
‘I don’t drink coffee.’
‘Quite right too. But you will, and when you do—’
‘I’m not doing it, Amy!’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s catering! I’m not a caterer.’
‘You weren’t a retailer either, but you learnt, didn’t you?’
‘Well, apparently not.’
‘But you can make coffee. How hard can it be to stick a bun on a plate?’
‘I don’t want to sell buns, I want to sell records.’
‘And no one wants to buy them, not any more, they’re too expensive. Just try it. I’ll help you, we all will. You’ll see.’
A meeting was arranged with the bank to approve a further loan. This was not the breeze that it had been the year before. It was no longer enough to simply stack high the piles of Brothers in Arms, and my father couldn’t hope to compete with the three-for-two offers at the megastores. So instead, they’d provide something new, a little slice of Berwick Street cool, tucked in between the Millets and the Spar. I remember them setting off to see the bank manager, my father in his wedding suit, my mother in a creamy ruffled blouse, like children in fancy dress. I remember them tumbling through the door, wide-eyed and hysterical with success like criminals after an audacious heist, and I remember the flurry of industry in the weeks that followed: stacks of second-hand chairs in the living room, multi-packs of frozen croissants – dense, dusty pellets like agricultural feed – and the toaster-oven to turn them into gold, and great catering sacks of oats, too, so that Mum might manufacture flapjacks in factory quantities, the profit margin on a flapjack exceeding even that of coffee and wrapping paper, and once again there was a kind of industrious harmony in the household. I remember the second-hand coffee machine, the Santorini Deluxe, all pipes and dials and valves like a model steam engine. Most vividly, I remember coming home from school and stepping into a kitchen that smelt of warm sugar and melting chocolate, a buttery condensation on every surface.
They stormed through money, yet for all the fear my parents must have felt, we still thought of ourselves as stable. ‘Poor but happy, but not that happy’, this was my mother’s joke, and the good humour we retained was down to her. I felt such love for Mum at that time, for her determination and resilience and ambition, the engine that kept us moving forward. Family life was unimaginable without her. She didn’t care about money or status or what the front garden looked like, she only cared that we were all fine. My dad adored her of course and relied on her, perhaps too much, but for all her teasing I never doubted that she still loved him. We groaned and looked away when they kissed or held each other, but secretly – what relief, what certainty.
The Blue Note Café opened in the same September week as my sixteenth birthday and my father suggested that we combine celebrations and have an opening party for family and friends and our regular customers. There were fairy lights and candles, Dad played with his band, the last time he ever played in public, toning down his jazz stylings and playing the wedding party set instead. Mum sang, there was dancing and, as the pubs closed, curious faces pressed against the window. We felt famous in our town, successful, a little beacon on the dreary high street. I’d taken to drinking from discarded glasses, anything I could find, and so was too fuzzy-headed to recall the last part of the evening.
But I do remember that my father took the m
icrophone and gave a speech in which he talked about his fine young son – sixteen years! How did that happen! – his beautiful daughter Billie, so smart, the inspiration Mum had provided, about his hopes for this amazing new venture after a rough couple of years. Cribbed from ceremonies seen on TV, the speech was sentimental but I think, know, that I cried a little. Perhaps all families have these fleeting moments when, without ever saying as much, they take each other in and think, we work and we fit together and we love each other and if we can remain like this, all will be fine.
But my father’s optimism was misplaced, an acceptance speech for an award that had not been given. At Christmas time, the last shop closed, leaving nowhere to hide the ruinous debt that he had been moving from one failed enterprise to the next.
Stage Laughter
Each day, the company grew, bringing new faces to the circle on the Great Lawn.
‘Hello, my name’s Sam,’ said a handsome minstrel in a collarless cotton shirt and waistcoat. ‘I’ll be providing the music and playing various small roles!’
‘And I’m Grace,’ said the pale girl at his side, her long hair flowing down past the low waist of her dress, the kind of girl you’d see, said George, with her arms around a unicorn. Sam and Grace – Simon and Garfunkel, Alex called them – were Ivor’s friends from the Oxford Mediaeval Society, though what happened at such a society, and why anyone would join, was another incomprehensible glimpse of the world of university. Perhaps it gave them access to the arsenal of tambours and recorders, stringed gourds and tiny bells that would provide the music for the show, backed, they told us, with cool, modern club beats.
‘Fuck-ing hell,’ said Alex. Grizzled veterans of Theatre Sports week, we were cynical and wary of new recruits.
‘Troubadours,’ sniffed Helen, who had been quietly assembling her own crack team.
‘Hello, my name’s Chris, and I’m going to be helping Helen on the design.’
Sweet Sorrow Page 17