Detours

by Tim Rogers

  Goddamn! When I’m not dragging my heels I’ll shout his words from a rooftop. No wonder I’ve got an erratic attention span. Songs, huh? They’re manipulative little fuckers. Hell, yeah, c’mon Dick, I’m with ya. If I could just give over. I gotta get a different record on. Cars and girls, highways and lost days.

  Fuck it. Not today.

  For a long time I’ve regarded my own attempts at songwriting as a way of romanticising the banal or somehow squeezing some of the hurt out of something painful to make it possible to live with. Put it to music or reconfigure it poetically and for some reason you can swallow it and get on your feet again. I can write about my daughter and somehow she’s beside me. Write about having my heart broken and the anger is drained, leaving only the sadness which is easier to exist with. I recoil at the suggestion that songwriting is ‘therapy’ but, bloody hell, cloak anything painful or dull with a baroque chord change and you can drag it around like a pet rock rather than pushing it uphill each day like Sisyphus.

  When I’m onstage or talking about writing and making music I usually don’t need to manufacture any enthusiasms. A switch is flicked and the motors take over, thought gives way to action, and the drab possibilities of an evening playing to a pub three-quarters empty give way to sex and poetry and violence and deep joy. If nothing gets thrown in between the gears I’m utterly convinced that everyone in the room will be experiencing some rush of almighty stimulation. And then a wheel wobbles and I get distracted: there’s a heckler, or we miss an offbeat going into a chorus, or I perceive some slight from a bandmate. Then it begins. The chords underneath my fingers feel like a gate latch that just won’t click shut, when before they were dancing underneath my grip, playful as puppies under a blanket. After playing for almost thirty years, it should be a situation that can be addressed, but the wheels are buckled and everything’s hurtling to the kerb. Where’s my ride gone?

  The music was supposed to be the solution. My face is hidden behind a blur of arms and hair and chutzpah, any anxiety trodden on by a velvet stacked boot-heel, the misgivings and mysteries of the day atomised by an open A chord. And I’m going to let ‘the solution’ be undone by peripheral nuisances? Is this the stuff I’m going to recollect in my dribbling dotage? I don’t mind at all wandering the streets lost in daydreams like a shaggy Walter Mitty. But stranded on the perimeters of great cities absorbed by trivialities when there’s culture and people and art and theatre and food to indulge in? This is more than being ungrateful. It’s more than being wasteful. I’m being a fucking wanker.

  My mum tells a story about when I was a kid in Perth, about six or seven years old. I had some swimming lessons off a jetty in the Swan River. The teacher took Mum aside after the third lesson and told her I was no good, that it’d be a long struggle to get me to swim. She asked if there was a reason he could see as to why I was so bad. He replied, ‘I know this sounds odd, Maureen, but I think he’s angry at the water.’

  Nearing Highgate Cemetery, the streets billowing and heaving with greater inclines and ascents, I spy a huge rectangular modern house on my right with a large window through which I can see a kitchen, and two older gentlemen at a bench, one cutting and the other reading from what looks like a recipe book. They are both in T-shirts and reading glasses, both with neat, boyishly short haircuts belying their age. They don’t lift their heads to see the passing tourists, and why would they? They’ve got lunch to prepare! I think again about ambition and about Macbeth at the Globe, concluding only that my ambition should be to read an annotated version of Macbeth. There was so much to savour that I must have missed as I stared at the performance in soft focus wondering where ambition lay in me, and in us as a band, as friends. Would success and press clippings and full venues guard against the regular little breakdowns? No chance. Greater success means more flights, more talking about yourself, more mini-bars, more faces. Most likely, the mornings would still see me lying there in a hotel bed staring at my noxious-smelling gig shirt wishing I hadn’t responded to the taunts of pissed yokels in the front row, except then it would be a dozen instead of just the regular one or two; wishing I hadn’t polished off a gram of blow at 2 am; and wishing I was talking with my daughter anywhere in the world.

  I will look for gifts for her this afternoon to take to New York. She calls London ‘the place with all the really cool stuff’. I had thought that more success would allow me to see her more often than I am right now, but there’s never any guarantee about that either.

  Loudon has written a lotta songs about his relationship with his kids, and they’ve written a few about him as well – most piquantly son Rufus’s ‘Dinner at Eight’ and daughter Martha’s ‘Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole’. I had Martha as a guest on my short-lived cabaret television program. As the cameras were adjusting for our short interview, I told her that unlike every other interviewer she’d encountered I wouldn’t ask her anything about family. She bet me twenty bucks I wouldn’t hold out. I won. My respect and admiration for Martha as a writer and performer supplanted my imagined kinship with her dad. There are songwriters who expose themselves to such a degree that digging for anything personal about them is a transgression. Breaking the treaty between writer and audience. I was subsequently rewarded with a few hours of her company. She was great fun, engaging and mischievous, and then she asked why I didn’t ask about her dad.

  ‘Is it that obvious I’m a fan?’

  She gave me a hug and walked off with a friend. It must have been that obvious.

  Before tackling the cemetery I note that it’s midday and The Flask will be open. I’m seeing The Hurricane as I duck inside the centuries-old pub, one where Dick Turpin used to hide out. My bartender is a young lady with bobbed dark hair and possibly a Russian accent, not the Irish rose I was craving. I ask for some scrap paper and a Guinness to accompany the pen in my top pocket and slink to a table in one of the snugs. The pub seems to have been architecturally conceived for avarice and vice: 180-degree vision is impaired every few metres. It’s the perfect place to start working on a song about travelling 16,000 kilometres just to get a glimpse of home. Loudon would be all over this, sculpting something wry out of feeling so rueful. In the mid-eighties he took a job writing and performing ‘topical’ songs for a UK talk show hosted by Jasper Carrott. But his songs about Reagan were passed over on the final episode for ‘Harry’s Wall’, about a singer who becomes a little popular because he’s on a TV show. The singer wants to be on a surname-based relationship with maître ds but as yet is only ‘whatshisname’. He’s asked to put his 8 x 10 portrait on the wall of Harry’s Dry Cleaning, right next to Chas & Dave: a minor honour it would seem, but still the smug pleasure is there to be taken. It’s such a beautifully droll take on aspiration and success.

  I dig in to the new song until I look up in self-congratulation and see, partially hidden, a well-coiffured middle-aged man in a corduroy jacket writing in a notebook, looking for all the world like a university tutor lusted after by many, or a goddamn singer-songwriter. He looks up but doesn’t meet my gaze. He is rapt in his own daydream. It’s time to get walking again.

  Back outside on the opposite side of the road I recognise an older gentleman walking the other way. His gait is a little unsteady and when he looks up it is in quick furtive glances. He isn’t hunched, but the lurching of his legs isn’t involuntary – each lunge needs a distinct thought. It is Ray Davies.

  I had spent an afternoon with Ray in the late nineties in Sydney after my friend the photographer Tony Mott called excitedly to say he was doing an extensive shoot with Ray while he was there on tour and asked if I would like to be his assistant for the day. He knew I adored The Kinks and had modelled so much of myself on the songs and look of the band and the man. When we met, Ray declared that he wasn’t keen to have a photo shoot but that Tony could take some shots at sound check. Tony, originally from Sheffield, chanced upon talking about English football, which snared Ray’s interest. The three of us headed to a dressing room to drink r
ed wine and talk all things England, football, cricket and trains. Tony told us he’s remodelled his entire house, through years of collecting, as an unofficial railway terminal. Although I had little to contribute conversationally, Ray was generous, and shot me little curious looks every now and then. Me, in my little Carnaby Street mod suit, with my fringed mop of hair, looking for all intents and purposes like a wannabe Kink, circa 1966.

  To recognise him across the road stops me in my tracks. My hero, pounding the pavement in the north of London that he has written about so often and so wonderfully. He moves with haste, but what I first take for intent is, on clearer inspection, fear. His hair, dyed dark but flashing burgundy in the sun, is now two plumed clumps on either side of his crown so he resembles a great horned owl. He looks hunted, or at least pursued. I don’t cross the road to express my love and admiration because I don’t want to interrupt the songs spinning in his head. But, really, I just wish him some peace. Some joy.

  I decide to forgo the cemetery. My head’s awash with thoughts and I need somewhere open where the rhythms of the walkers aren’t the same pace that they are in a cemetery, or in a gallery. I wanna let my daydreams run like a kid, then slow to a dawdle, do a cartwheel and then lie down, stretching out at all angles with a satisfying growl. The fug hanging around my head is evaporating.

  I head back towards Primrose Hill. The sun is now worming its fingers underneath my jacket and warming my bones. I buy a four-pack of Tennent’s long cans from a little off-licence. The gentleman behind the counter, handsome in his pagri and with his long black beard, gives me a smile as he hands over my change. ‘Nice day for it, yes?’

  Yes, it is. I find a patch of the hill spattered in shade from an oak tree and pop a can, surprised to find another Loudon song whirring. This one is ‘IWIWAL’ (‘I Wish I Was a Lesbian’). Funny bastard. Fuck, beer tastes good. Tomorrow the band has a gig in Hamburg. I wish we had one tonight. I’m gonna get to the airport early tomorrow morning and I’m gonna smash that gig outta the park.

  Conversations with Maureen

  They spoke in tongues ’n’ languages

  As the syntax hovered like feathers

  Attentions stubborn as mercury

  And you’re no weatherman, you’ll forget ’em

  [The phone rings four times before there is a shuffling sound like roughly cut lengths of wood being dragged from a hessian sack.]

  [In a slight but musical voice] Hello?

  [In the voice of Dr Smith from Lost in Space] Hello, Mether . . .

  Hello, boy. I just got in from the garden I’m a little out of breath sorry. Everything okay?

  Oh yeah, don’t worry, I’m surprised you answered. Just walkin’ up the road, just checkin’ in. Should I call back?

  No no no if you can [coughs] excuse my, uh, heavy breathing. [In a Southern US accent] I’m a-gettin’ old, boy.

  How’s life in the faux-bohemain hinterland, hmm? Still the whitest town in the universe? [The sound of a car – tinged with a little rattle, then acceleration] Whoah, brown Volvo. Steady on!

  I’m sorry, what? Brownlow?

  Nah, just a car. Christ, if that wouldn’t be a kick in the pants, getting run over by a brown Volvo.

  Yes, darling, watch out for the brrrrown Volvo. ‘The whitest town in the universe?’ Is that what you said? How dare you. It is very pale, though. But, my Lord, these summer months and the traffic, you know? Bumper to bumper all up the main drag. Going through to the beaches or Ulladulla. Good for local business, I think . . . It’s good . . . you know, it’s really good, darling. I’ve been singing with my choir group and learning piano from the bloke next door. You know the family next door? They’re lovely. And mad. I introduced them to you when you were last here. Every night there’s music coming from the windows and they’re playing it, really playing it, you know? So I asked if I could get piano lessons off the dad and here I am, two months later and almost getting songs together. He asked me what my goal would be, what the ultimate song would be to play. I had to say – oh, what’s it called . . . The Sting, you know?

  ‘The Entertainer’? Scott Joplin, oh yeah. Love it. Geez, go in at the top end, why don’t you? Playin’ that stuff is like a cat dancin’ on the keys chasing a bloody mouse back’n’forth. ‘Chopsticks’ not good enough for ya up there?

  ‘Chopsticks’? Bling blink blink. Yesss. I’ve been there. You need to have a goal though. That’s what I was told. Hang on . . . Lovey, are you there?

  Yeah, yeah.

  Right, sorry, I thought you’d dropped out for a bit. Did you leave a message for me the other day?

  Oh yeah, I did. I wanted to ask you about your Aunt Monica, the one who managed the Windsor. Was it the Windsor in town?

  No, no, it was the . . . Australian, The Australian on Collins Street. An unusual lady. I adored her. God, we thought she was so bohemian. Always with a cigarette in her hand and cocktail. She was like . . . Do you remember that film Auntie Mame?

  Rosalind Russell. God, yeah. My first crush after Maggie from The Sullivans.

  Really? Well, yes, you would have loved Monica. She’d wear these long flowing black-sleeved dresses and heavy makeup. Very glamorous, particularly to us then in Melbourne. She was . . . well, there was talk that she maybe wasn’t exclusively . . . ah . . . that she was not exclusively for the blokes, you know?

  Well, well.

  Yes. You remember Uncle Wally, right?

  She was Uncle Wally’s missus? The Wally we used to stay with in Applecross, and he’d buy us prawns and those little cans of Coke?

  Yes, Wally. Well, they never had children, and he was, maybe – I’m just saying maybe – he was a fella’s fella.

  Well, bugger me.

  Hang on a tick . . . Sorry, I’m waiting for my friend, a new special friend, a lovely lady I met because I was selling some meshing she needed for her chooks. Anyway, she’s about my age but has lived in the city her whole life. She’s been here a year and found it tough – it was just too quiet after being a city gal and anyway it’s been a year and she told me the other day that she doesn’t even want to go to the supermarket because she doesn’t even want to leave her house and the solitude, isn’t that amazing?

  I understand, yeh.

  What d’you reckon? Could you get outta the city and all the rabble?

  I’m finally thinking I might. In twelve years, once the backpackers have finally taken over.

  Is it really like that? God, I remember when that suburb used to be a swamp. I love coming down now, all the cafés and the little bars, it’s still got something, doesn’t it?

  Remember that time we were at that little food market up the road and there was a bottle-blonde lady behind us squeezing the fuck outta a twenty-dollar organic bullshit avocado, and she was on the phone and said something like, [strained whining accent] ‘Anyways, he says he’s bipolar and I says geez everyone’s a little fuckin bipolar these days.’ [nasal chuckle]

  Yes! [laughs]

  Well, Mother, that is the suburb in a bleached nutshell. Somewhere between that and the bloody backpackers – oh, I’m just bein’ a grump.

  Aha. Well, yes, you are sounding like a grump. Now, not to make a deliberate segue, but how is your father?

  He’s good, he’s good. We send messages and see each other a bit. He looks a little tired but generally good. I worry he’s becoming a conservative but that’s only from group emails. I dunno if he sends them as a parody or he’s complicit, you know? I just don’t want him to be . . . well, you know how old blokes can get? They kinda become scared of stuff and well . . . I don’t want him to get like that.

  Uh-huh. It would be nice to talk one day. I don’t think it’s going to happen. [Sighs] You know I loved him, don’t you?

  Yeh. Sure, sure. We don’t need to always—

  But he just stopped talking one day and I just can’t stand that. [A dog barks close by – four insistent, short demands] Yes, Bonnie, come on now. It’s not your circus, not your circus, darling. Sorry
, doll. [Three more barks, completed with a softer grunt] She really is a sweet thing but, geez, the sight of a bird is enough . . . Look, darling, I need to talk to you and I hope it’s okay. I heard a thing, a talk you gave. I heard it because someone sent it to me, that thing about your health when you were a teenager and all the anxiety . . . the attacks, and look . . . I’m just really sorry. I had no idea. You know, your dad and I were breaking up. I had all these . . . feelings I had to deal with and I was very . . . distracted . . . and, you know, this woman comes along and I—

  Mum. Mum, we don’t need to talk about the big stuff all the time, y’know? It’s fine, really. I don’t know how much you coulda helped anyway.

  But it must have been awful.

  Yeah nah. No. If there’s one thing, it kinda gave me a reason to play guitar and stay indoors. Stopped me being a teenager. Kept my dick in my pants. It’s orright, Ma, it worked out, y’know? I don’t think about it, so you shouldn’t either.

  Well, yes, but I need to ask was it a drug thing or a . . .

  That wouldn’t have helped, but I dunno. I guess some kids are on the edge and if they start smokin’ weed and dropping trips ’n’ stuff it just nudges ’em over the edge. Coulda been worse. Least we didn’t live near a river.

  [The line drops out for three or four seconds] —so often these days. In counselling sessions. These poor kids come through and they’re like little origami shapes in the wind. Now, tell me, are you being stupid these days?

  Generally, yeah, but whaddya mean? Drug stuff?

  I need to ask, boy.

  Ahh, I’m pretty good, I guess. I mean I forget every now and then but, nah, I’m stayin’ orright. What, are you lookin’ to score?

  [Loud chortle] Just stay away from that bloody cocaine, okay? Every time I’d see three hundred dollars out from your account, I just bloody knew it.