Rotten in Denmark

by Jim Pollard

  ‘I’ve only had them a few days to tell the truth,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t say,’ said Terry.

  ‘Actually, they’re a present for passing my O-levels.’

  ‘Passing them? You haven’t fucking finished them yet.’

  ‘Yeah, well...’

  In the event, both Charlie and I failed Art but for quite different reasons, he for using too much paint, me for using too little. We got our O-level results through the post, of course (I opened mine in the toilet) but failures were summoned to a personal interview with the relevant subject teacher. Quite a queue formed outside the office of Mrs Garrison the art teacher.

  She peered at me over the top of her black-rimmed, crescent-shaped spectacles. Two matching wisps of grey hair accentuated her taut temples while the hair-grip charged with containing the brooding black balance of what everybody knew to be a wig shook menacingly as she spoke.

  ‘Water colour does not mean that one paints exclusively with water, Dane.’ The words left her lips like recalcitrant peas. ‘It is necessary to employ a certain amount of paint in order to render one’s work visible.’ She showed me a sheet of damp paper which she said was one of my submissions. There was a faint blur of brown which I identified for her as the walrus. As she slowly shook her head, her pupils held me like wire. I looked down, embarrassed, shy and feeling stupid, and noticed that she was writing a letter to Charlie’s parents. It included a bill for thirteen classroom size tubes of matt black paint.

  Cal passed all his exams and got As in pretty much everything. But, surprisingly enough, I did second best with nearly as many passes - in fact, I also passed everything I sat except Art - and nearly as many As. All four of us - Cal, Jon, Charlie, me - were comfortably into the sixth form and eligible to do A-levels. Terry got his three CSEs, one, some technical subject, at grade one.

  We all finally met at Cal’s end of exams party. It wasn’t a party in the numerical sense - only the five of us were present - but it was certainly a celebration. Cal had the key to the wine cellar with his father’s blessing while Terry, having tapped his old man for a post-exam present, turned up with a crate of Long-Life. It was fairly typical of one of our teenage events, more keenly lubricated with alcohol than most with Jon, rather to my surprise, proving as adept a roller of joints as Cal. With the other three locked in some debate over the correct way to use a condom or how best to pull a non-English speaking bird or the benefits of water-based lubricants, Cal gestured for me to follow him.

  The old country and western guitar was lying on his duvet, a plectrum stored between the strings. Guitar books, song-sheets and records littered the room upsetting its usual dense museum-like serenity.

  ‘Well, get yours then,’ he said.

  I was confused. I took a step forward and went to pick up the ancient acoustic but he stopped me with a hand on my forearm. ‘No, that’s mine,’ he said. ‘Yours.’ He pointed to the wardrobe.

  I pulled up a chair and climbed on it. On top of the wardrobe was the Fender Telecaster just as I had left it. I ran my finger along the scratch-plate disturbing the accumulated dust. I looked down at Cal who was smaller than ever.

  ‘Get it down,’ he instructed.

  ‘Haven’t you played it?’ I asked.

  ‘No. It’s yours.’

  Cal tossed me a T-shirt with which I cleaned the guitar’s neck and body. He watched me as I dusted it, my movements slow and tender like caresses. I was unable to believe that it was mine yet he clearly hadn’t touched it. The lead was still plugged in as I had left it, twisted around the strap. Cal waited patiently as I tuned each string, picking notes for me on the acoustic as required.

  ‘Have you really not played it?’ I repeated.

  ‘No, you’re the best. You play lead.’

  He watched for a moment as I played my usual licks. I was slow, rusty having been away from it for over a month. I made mistakes. As he watched he held the acoustic around its neck like an expired chicken.

  ‘I’m a bit out of practice,’ I said, repeating a creaking note-bend.

  ‘Yes,’ he said and then proceeded to do things on the flabby acoustic that I couldn’t even do on the lithe electric: no more clumsy strumming, no more wayward fingers, no more fumbled fret-work. Cal had been a hesitant beginner and I had surpassed him rapidly. He had not failed to notice how and now, as his fingers flew around that old six-string, the roles were reversed again. I held out the now gleaming black Fender and our eyes met like reluctant neighbours. He put the other guitar down carefully and accepted my offer. I plugged the other end of the lead into the amp. Listening to him play the electric was, I can admit now, a treat: six weeks on the older instrument had given his hands strength and precision, his technique fluidity and style.

  When I picked up the acoustic, I’m not sure I even felt upset or hurt. We sounded so good, you see. As if there might be something there.

  ‘We’ve got a drummer,’ I said. ‘Charlie’s got a drum kit.’

  ‘I know,’ said Cal.

  THE SULTAN OF SHAKESPEARE

  Ten years on, Frankie Dane treats Miranda Paxton to a slice of the south London he once shared with his fellow Go-Kart, the late Cal Carter.

  (from one of the Sunday broadsheets, 1989)

  Designer jacket, loose-fitting flannels, a hat, of course, sunglasses and a few days growth. Frankie Dane doffs his fedora and smiles. The thinking man of punk is back and looking rather donnish.

  We’re sitting in The Duke in Deptford and he’s relaxed and oddly at home. The docks have gone but this is still a working-class drinking den. Dane’s chatting before the pints are on the table. He tells me there are rumours that the area’s one south-east London landmark - an art-deco cinema at the top of the market, a listed building - is to be sold to a chain of hotel developers.

  It’s a travesty he opines but his is no Johnny-come-lately celebrity concern. Dane comes from round here. The Go-Karts conducted their first interview in the pie and mash shop down the road. ‘We have to take responsibility. That’s the lesson of the last ten years.’ Dane is very open and not at all as one might imagine given he has a public profile lower than Lord Lucan’s. ‘You can’t put your head in the sand.’ He describes the pastel green cinema as a fading emerald, one of the area’s last links with its past.

  ‘I don’t say glorious,’ says Dane, ‘There’s nothing good about back-to-backs, outdoor bogs and ringworm.’ But history is on his mind, of course. It is almost ten years to the day since the death of his close friend and song-writing partner Cal Carter from a drugs overdose. Does he dwell on the past?

  Dane laughs and deflects the question. ‘Not at all but did you know that in the late sixteenth century this pub was once the local of playwright Christopher Marlowe.’

  Did you come here with Cal?

  ‘You know there are some people, academics, who think he wrote Shakespeare’s plays.’

  Who? Cal Carter?

  ‘They say Marlowe was never killed in a bar-room brawl at all but escaped to France and wrote on. Shakespeare was his nom de plume. Legend has it that the fight started after a quarrel over the bill and that’s the bit I don’t find convincing. Have you ever actually seen that happen? A fight over the bill - that’s so soap opera. At the same time he was wanted by the Queen’s privy council on charges that were never disclosed and after his apparent death was condemned for his atheism and blasphemy. Motive enough to do a runner?’ He pauses. ‘But why Shakespeare? That was as much a stupid name then as it would be now. Unless, it was symbolic, the pen being mightier than the sword and so on...’ he trails off. ‘Others say this is rubbish and that actually Francis Bacon wrote all Shakespeare’s plays.’

  I get the message. Dane looks well and so he should - his one solo album to date, Stolen Moments, has sold more than anything the Go-Karts ever did - but inside the scars must still be there. In the meantime, he�
�s doing an Open University degree and is obviously keen to tell me about it.

  ‘The thing is,’ he says, ‘does it matter? Who cares who wrote them? All I care about is whether they touch the soul. Whether they stand up as art. There’s this middle-class obsession with authors as individuals. I don’t want to decontextualise but you can deconstruct so much you’re left with nothing but some sort of literary determinism. What surely counts is the plays not who wrote them. The key question is are they any good?’

  Dane is one of the few contemporary pop stars who can use a word like art and get away with it. And, of course, the Shakespearean references are nothing new. The Go-Karts debut single, arguably punk rock’s first number one, was the anthemic ‘Rotten In Denmark’. Dane chuckles when I remind him but right now he’s keen to show me more of south-east London - he has a zeal for his home that most reserve for Greek islands or ski resorts. Nor is there anything patronising about his enthusiasm. He says his one regret is that his fame and his subsequent choice of lifestyle, the pop star without a public image, prevent him from participating in his community to the full and I believe him. Dane is genuine. Many of the new wave’s icons are tarnished now: Joe Strummer, Paul Weller, John Lydon have all lost direction or to use the common parlance ‘sold-out’ but you don’t hear anyone saying that about Dane.

  We’re in my car. Dane doesn’t drive. ‘I leave that to my wife and my manager,’ he explains. In the mouths of some that would sound pretentious, arrogant even; in Dane’s it just sounds as if he’s not a very good driver. Suddenly in the middle of Greenwich, he slams his paperback - I wonder if it’s a copy of Dr Faustus rather than the new Frankie Dane songbook - onto the dashboard like a driving examiner.

  ‘That,’ he says, indicating a hostelry called The White Horse, ‘is a piece of pop history. That is the pub Mark Knopfler ducked into to shelter from the rain. Inside, he found a trad jazz band playing to a pubful of teenagers who were completely ignoring them. The dichotomy inspired him to go home and write “Sultans Of Swing”.’

  ‘Sultans of Swing’, Dire Straits first single, went to number 8 in March 1979 and Mark Knopfler and the band went on to become one of the biggest bands of all time. Is it true?

  ‘I don’t know. But it’s a good story.’

  I sense another opportunity. Is Dane jealous of Knopfler’s success? If Cal had not died perhaps the Go-Karts would have become as big as Dire Straits?

  ‘I’m not jealous. I can’t play like Mark for a start. And I think Cal’s music does live on. I certainly wouldn’t want to be in the public eye like Mark is. If Cal hadn’t died, yeah, maybe we would have become like Straits or U2 but I’m not sure I’d be very happy.’ Then Dane looks at his watch and he’s keen to get off. There’s a curious mixture of easy-going openness, when he’s giving his opinions, and a fierce closedness when it comes to his private life. That, he explains simply, is why he so rarely does anything. He hasn’t toured since The Go-Karts - just a couple of benefit gigs - and only one album in all those years. My remark about Lord Lucan was no joke. Our cuttings library actually yields more information on his recent life than on Frankie Dane’s.

  ‘It’s all about family. I don’t want them dragged into it,’ he explains but it’s rather enigmatic. Dragged into what? Dane, with his books and his local causes and history and his one blockbuster album every five years seems to have an idyllic lifestyle. ‘Yeah, but I wouldn’t have if I did too many of these, would I?’ he says, referring to his distaste for interviews. Why did he agree this time?

  ‘For Cal. I don’t want to talk about him but I wouldn’t want you lot thinking I’d forgotten.’

  Dane has a second solo album out shortly too. ‘It’s not really solo,’ he says, self-deprecatingly. ‘Most of the old band are in The Denmarks as well as a few people who can actually play a bit.’ In the meantime you might be able to find him in a Deptford or Greenwich bar looking for inspiration for his new single but even if you do recognise him, don’t expect to be invited back for coffee.

  17

  I knew that on paper I had good enough exam results to do A-levels. Apart from Cal only a handful of boys had done better than me and they were all very boring people. Indeed, for that short, sweet shaft of summer after the results came out and before we went back to school, I felt proud - savoured the feeling of being even taller, the feeling of the air going right into your lungs. Even my father was not able to puncture it, although to be fair to him I don’t think he was trying.

  The new school year began with a personal interview with the headmaster. We were waiting in our common room with its easy chairs and tea urn - rejects from the more refinedly furnished staff-room.

  ‘Got a fag?’ Terry asked Charlie, stirring a seventh teaspoon of sugar into his putty coloured coffee. The three of us exchanged cigarettes - trying each other’s brands while protesting an intimate knowledge of all of them. ‘Those Sobranie Black Russians,’ Charlie was saying, ‘well classy fags.’

  ‘Foreign shit,’ said Terry. ‘Dunhill, mate.’

  I sucked on my Silk Cut - shifting uncomfortably in my chair. ‘This cushion’s got a fucking spring sticking out of it,’ I observed tightly.

  ‘Jonny boy,’ called Terry, ‘Frankie’s found a nice seat for you.’

  Each sixth former had been allocated a locker. These were housed in a single wood construction that ran the length of one of the common room walls and resembled, to my way of thinking, nothing more than a great pigeon coot - the executive version of what Uncle Alan had in his shed. Cal had been allocated a top row locker and was completely unable to reach it. ‘Come on,’ he was saying to anyone who would listen, ‘swap. Come on. Top row’s best. Jesus, what’s the matter with you? You won’t get expelled for changing your locker!’

  My locker was in the middle row and I knew, when the time was right, that I would swap with Cal. However, I wasn’t about to do it now what with him scurrying around all over the place drawing attention to himself like he had a label on his head.

  ‘Look, I’m too short to reach it. I’m a fucking midget. It comes from having a heavy brain you know - stunts the growth.’ Still nobody was paying much attention. His voice was growing louder all the time. ‘And also because all my growth is in the underwear department - my skin quotient is used up - exploited to the full - by my twelve inch cock.’ He was both bellowing and belly-laughing now: dancing from side to side, like Mr. Magoo, and pulling people by the sleeve. ‘Twelve inches when flaccid that is, when it’s fucking flaccid. That’s limp to you, boys and girls.’

  He was getting through. Even the surliest, snottiest students were laughing. The atmosphere had changed and we were kids again. Simon Hawkins, who had the only bottom-row locker which still had a door, began enthusiastically kicking it in. ‘Someone else will do it sooner or later if I don’t,’ he explained excitedly, ‘I may as well get the pleasure.’ We watched. After three blows from Simon’s size nine’s, the door was hanging by a single hinge. Simon wrenched it off and stepped back proudly. ‘Look out, the head’s back,’ shouted Terry, his terrorist’s timing still impeccable.

  Simon Hawkins leapt diagonally backwards and up - a distance of about six feet. He was no longer the junior zeppelin he had been as an eleven year old but he was still a substantial lump of youth. He fell awkwardly over a low-level table and as he hit the floor screamed too loudly for comfort. In his hand he still held the locker door.

  ‘Thanks, Simon,’ Cal said and began putting his stuff in Hawkins’s locker. ‘And someone call the ambulance will you because no one’s ankle is supposed to be that shape.’ Even as Cal was stealing his locker, Simon Hawkins, through gritted being-a-man-about-it teeth, appeared to be thanking him.

  The interviews were in alphabetical order so I was after Terry. When he and I later passed on the stairs we could hear an ambulance coming up the school drive. He was lighting another cigarette, I was looking around for somewhere to stub
mine out.

  ‘Fucking old cunt,’ Terry began, smoothing his hair. ‘They don’t want me here, do they?’

  ‘Don’t they?’ I managed to reply. And that was when I noticed. I’d been aware for a while that there was something different about Terry - certainly since that time I’d gone to see Charlie’s drums. Now - standing on the stairs, Terry on the stair below me - I saw it. Somewhere down the years he had stopped growing.

  When we had first started at Beech Park, Terry had been one of the tallest in the year - dominant in playground football and condemned, with me, to three years in Mr Blake’s ‘big kids with no talent’ rugby set. Now I stood a clear head and shoulders above him. It was possible that even Cal was taller than him now. When had he stopped developing?

  ‘Senile old fucker - told me this wasn’t a kindergarten. Some bollocks about the pursuit of academic excellence. He said he’d give me a reference and a start down at the garage.’ For a moment Terry’s eyes lost their jagged sparkle. ‘What’s he fucking think I am - poxy petrol. Jesus, the cunt. I’ll show him - I don’t need his shitting reference.’ With that he took my still burning cigarette from my hand and stubbed it out right in the middle of the stairs. Then he did the same with his own, lighting a fresh one even before it was out. There was a slight smell of burning - varnish and then wood. Terry inhaled.

  ‘You better hurry up Frankie, mate,’ he said, moving up the stairs. ‘I’m gonna burn this fucking dump down.’ I watched him go. At the top of the stairs he muttered, ‘as if I need a reference for that fucking garage.’

  I took a deep breath and eased the dog-ends into the corner of the stair with my foot. Then I rubbed my shoe against the back of my calf - grey fag ash on grey trousers - trying to get a shine in it.