Rotten in Denmark

by Jim Pollard

  On the Saturday, Cal and I put the finishing touches to the two songs I’d been working on, did something similar with one of his and then wrote one together. Then we worked out ‘Promised Land’. We were determined to do something by Elvis Presley and ‘Promised Land’ was both Cal’s favourite and easy to play.

  We worked together easily and comfortably: one of us strumming and singing on the acoustic, the other messing about on the electric. Cal had also written lots of lyrics - he kept them all in that old leather briefcase, the one he’d had as an eleven-year-old - so we had plenty of material. In the afternoon we recorded our five song set on a cassette player - twice so we had one each, watched the football results and Doctor Who and speculated upon just how famous we were going to be.

  ‘Of course, you want to be able to walk down the street unmolested,’ Cal said over his pint when we were sitting at the bar in The Roebuck - our glasses sharing a black and gold Double Diamond bar towel.

  ‘Well, not totally unmolested.’ I said.

  Cal shook his head. ‘Look Mr Lennon, my sister is not available for your Yoko-ing purposes. To put it bluntly, she’s out of the frame for you, sunshine. You were, in the words of the song, born too late. She is already, even as we speak, being fitted for her nuptial gown.’

  ‘She’s getting married?’

  ‘Aye, lad. In a wedding dress of the most virginal white. Another dream made real by Mr Alexander Carter.’

  Although I would have surely swopped mine for his, I was strangely reassured by the disparaging way in which Cal would often refer to his father. I smiled. That Wendy was getting married came as no surprise. And hardly hurt. I knew my Eddie Cochran, I knew she went with only guys that were out of my class.

  ‘Three to one on - someone from your father’s work,’ I said. ‘Evens - another publishing company; three to one against - some other smart arse city slicker; and 500 to one, Terry Chambers.’

  Cal laughed. ‘You could make a good book,’ he said.

  I finished my beer.

  ‘I’m just letting you know,’ he said, squeezing my knee like Auntie Anne did when I was in short trousers. ‘Now, what do you want?’

  The bar man was loitering. It was Saturday night but The Roebuck was no busier than on a wet Wednesday. ‘Yes, lads?’ he asked. Cal ordered.

  The lack of customers was obviously bugging the landlord too. ‘I’m thinking of having these bands in on Saturday,’ he began. ‘Pub rock, the brewery call it. What do you think?’

  ‘Good idea,’ we said, sharing a thought.

  I looked around the bar: the usual crowd. There was also a table of bikers who appeared to have just crawled off the set of The Wild One. ‘They look like they’d enjoy it,’ I offered.

  ‘You reckon?’ said the landlord. ‘They look like they need a good wash. Two pints, son, that’s 72 thanks,’ he said to Cal. Cal pushed a pile of coins across the pock-marked counter.

  The landlord looked like a man requiring reassurance. ‘Bands are a good idea,’ I said.

  Cal was nursing his glass, waiting for my attention. ‘Are we going to do that thing, then?’ he asked.

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘The Lennon and McCartney thing. Every song we write regardless of who does it: me, you, both of us. Every song has the same songwriting credit. Every song says Dane/Carter.’

  ‘And we always split the royalties?’

  ‘Of course. Like Lennon and McCartney.’

  Sunday was infuriating and exhilarating in equal parts. When Cal and I presented our five songs, Jonathan was overwhelmed and Charlie open-mouthed.

  ‘We’re going to do five different songs,’ said our bass player, aghast. ‘Five songs today.’ He made it sound like the musical equivalent of swimming the Channel or climbing K2.

  ‘You want me to play Elvis fucking Presley,’ demanded Charlie when words finally came. ‘The guy’s a bloody dinosaur. And I don’t just mean physically. We’ll be doing fucking Frank Sinatra next.’

  ‘We thought Nancy,’ said Cal.

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Has he had any hits?’ asked Jon facetiously. ‘Apart from when he was with the Miracles that is.’

  ‘Course not, Jon,’ said Cal. ‘The devil’s got all the best tunes.’

  ‘Charlie,’ I said. ‘Listen to it. It’s not “My Boy” or “Moody Blue”. It’s rock and roll. It’s got lots of really loud drumming in it.’

  Cal produced a tape and played our version which, of course, didn’t have any drumming on it at all but it seemed to work. Before the demo was through Charlie had applied the back-beat and was rolling around his tight-skinned drum kit with a sadist’s savagery. ‘Nice one, man,’ he yelled.

  ‘Charlie,’ I said, waving my arms to catch his attention behind the beechwood blur of his drum sticks. ‘Would you mind shutting up until we’ve plugged in our guitars?’

  Cal had promised us that despite the fact his father wouldn’t be seen dead doing DIY the garage had four power-points, making one for me (if and when I got my own amplifier), one for him, one for Jon and one for the vocals. As we plugged in and tuned up Jon practised. ‘Promised Land’ had cheered him up too.

  ‘It’s just that twelve bar walking bass thing you showed me yesterday, right?’ he asked Cal.

  Cal nodded. For the vocals we were using Mr Carter’s old hi-fi. When Cal had told me this I had imagined some great heavy radiogram like my dad’s but this was actually only about a year old - almost state of the art. It had two enormous speakers and a very professional looking microphone which we attached to the overhead light fitting and allowed to hang down for singing into. A dispute ensued as to how far it should be allowed to hang.

  Cal pulled it down to his height.

  ‘I can’t reach that,’ I said, raising it.

  ‘Well, I can’t reach that,’ said Cal. We looked at each other and around the room - little grins beginning.

  ‘Couldn’t you stand on a box?’ asked Jonathan.

  ‘I am not standing on a fucking box,’ said Cal Carter.

  In the end we compromised by putting the mic halfway between the two of us. This was probably the best of all possible worlds because as a result the vocals were inaudible.

  It didn’t matter at first anyway as we ran through ‘Promised Land’ a couple of times with out any singing.

  ‘You getting the hang of this then Jon?’ asked Charlie, after the second time.

  Jonathan nodded.

  ‘I have to ask because I can’t hear a fucking note you’re playing.’

  ‘Charlie,’ Cal began, ‘No one can hear a fucking note that anyone is playing because your drums are so loud that the sonic boom from this garage can be measured on the Richter Scale. Every time you hit the fucking snare I feel like I’ve been shot. Look, they sound great and I’m sure they’ll be brilliant live but in this little garage...’

  Charlie was cursing under his breath as he loosened the snare drum. ‘What’ll I do about the others?’ he asked, a little smugly.

  ‘Try these,’ said Cal and from a tea chest in the corner of the garage he began to pull old blankets and sheets. We helped Charlie to tie them over his tom-toms and bass drum and, where possible, to stuff them inside. They were mostly pink and decorated with flowers. I wondered as I placed one over the floor-tom and smoothed it down whether it had once been on Wendy’s bed.

  ‘Can we get on with it then?’ requested Jon.

  ‘Not quite,’ said Cal. ‘Charlie does have a point about your dearth in the audibility department.’

  ‘But the amp’s at max volume. I can’t turn it up any more without the cabinet rattling,’ replied Jon, demonstrating his problem.

  ‘Is that so?’ said Cal, striding menacingly towards it. He inspected Jon’s brand new but perhaps rather small bass amplifier for a second or two and then kicked the back in. Two sh
arp kicks and the rear of the speaker cone was visible through the shattered wood. Cal pulled away the loose fragments. ‘Try that,’ he said.

  ‘What the heck.’

  When the amp’s position was adjusted so that it was the correct distance from the solid wall of the garage, the volume of Jon’s bass was increased about a third. At times the whole garage seemed to shake. ‘You cannae change the laws of physics, Jon,’ said Cal, ‘and you’ve got to admit it sounds better.’ Jonathan sulked and muttered his way through another rendition of ‘Promised Land’ - audible in every sense.

  ‘Okay, boys, let’s hear some singing,’ said Charlie as the final cymbal crash died away.

  Cal and I looked at each other. We hadn’t actually got round to working out who was going to sing what.

  ‘Do you want to give it a go?’ he asked me. My guitar part was easier.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Have you got the words?’

  In the corner of the garage I had already noticed a brand new sports bag - one of those massive ones that were fashionable. Apart from a few spare guitar leads it was virtually empty but it was Cal thinking ahead. From deep inside the bag he took out the old briefcase and from the briefcase he took two sheaves of paper.

  ‘I got the old man to photocopy the lyrics,’ he said and gave me a set. The paper was shiny like photocopies were then.

  ‘These are probably easier to read,’ he said, giving me his own copy of ‘Promised Land’. I looked around for somewhere to put my set but I didn’t even have a guitar case.

  ‘You may as well have this too,’ Cal said giving me the old briefcase. ‘I’ve got the bag now.’

  There was something about being given that briefcase, my first briefcase - an adult symbol if ever there was one, that reinforced the feeling I had had about not going to Terry’s party - the feeling of opting, the feeling that I’d decided what my adult life would be and that now it was starting. I put the photocopies in the case. There were lyrics and chord sheets and licks noted in tablature. I liked the briefcase even more now that it was old. It was rough and grainy like a face.

  I took Cal’s handwritten lyric sheet and attached it to the microphone lead with a bit of sellotape. Then we played ‘Promised Land’ again and I sang.

  DON’T TALK TO ME ABOUT THE NEXT BIG THING

  The Go-Karts, The Roxy

  by Ian Martyn-Baker

  (from the New Rock Journal, 1978)

  You want a band who are wild with a capital P.A.R.T.Y? You got it. Midway through the first number the diminutive lead guitarist hurls his outsized instrument to the floor, marches across to the bass player’s amp and cranks it up. ‘You may be shit but you may as well be audible,’ he bellows at a volume that transcends both his size and The Roxy’s poxy PA system. It’s what you might call an inauspicious start but with it hangs the heavy irony beloved of the paperback writers that Cal Carter (for it is he) and his loping, lanky, less digitally dextrous partner Frankie Dane yearn to be. And they yearn with a vengeance. On tonight’s electrifying evidence, The Go-Karts can run anyone off the tracks.

  And they run through their tracks with a punch if not a precision, a vigour if not a virtuosity (dread mot), that suggests the debut album will be a veritable stonker. The buzz seems to have reached the tiny minds of those executive dinosaurs with a rare pace that would appeal to any Karter. The message that these boys are hotter than a Harley on heat has resulted in the collective removing of fingers by the record companies and, if the suits around the bar are any sign, something of an auction ensues. All power to your pedals Cal.

  It’s bassist Jon Waters who’s on the receiving end of Carter’s vitriol but if anything it fuels his performance. He responds with a curt two-fingered gesture and an open grin. The Go-Karts may be shelling the castles of reaction but they’re cute about it too. The Roxy has ne’er seen so many lasses. And not all in leather or bondage gear or bodices, ripped and torn. No, some of these ladies look good enough to take home to mother. Carter, at barely five six, appears to break the first rule of masculine attraction but nobody here seems bothered. He’s a little ball of teenage lust - the bastard.

  If occasionally Waters stutters rather than strums, drummer Charlie Ball more than makes up for it - crisply efficient, he’s got rolls as long and loud as Keith Moon when the moment’s right. Over the top, the dual, or is that duel?, rhythms of Carter and Dane roll and crash, peak and soar. Their voices, low and high, rich and reedy, are equally complementary. Sometimes it sounds as if rock and roll was only ever meant to be this way. Sometimes. And then Dane breaks a string or Waters treads on his lead. There’s something refreshingly human about their deity.

  In ‘Wonderful Moment’, there’s the briefest of brief bass breaks and Jon drops his plectrum - no finger-picking here. Ball’s been twice round the kit with tread to spare before anyone but Carter notices. However, his anger is awesome: ‘Jon, the one meagre moment when you matter and you fuck up.’ Waters holds it together until the end of the song - his thumb, a blubber of a pick, slobbering over the strings - and then, as Carter is pattering, chattering, he picks up the leader’s truncated microphone stand and shoves the base through Carter’s amplifier.

  The little leader is inaudible but his body language is a scream and so ends one of the gigs of the decade. It’s lasted barely twenty minutes - and I don’t give the band a lot longer - but in years to come so many people will claim they were here tonight that you’ll think they must have been playing Wembley. Which is where they’ll be in six months time if they last. Come on, record companies get on your bikes: the world deserves at least one album before the Go-Karts spin off, crash and burn.

  19

  It wasn’t all plain sailing from that first practice because, and you won’t read this in any other rock biog but it’s true about most bands, we were bloody awful.

  Charlie could play but, as Cal said, Charlie had spent too long playing with himself. He paid not the slightest bit of attention to what anyone else was doing. We could have been Gregorian chanting for all Charlie cared. Cal used to change the lyrics, frequently singing of how Charlie had carnal relations with animals, with his parents, with Terry or with whatever came into his head. Charlie never heard a word of it.

  Jonathan, as you have probably gathered, couldn’t play. He still had regular lessons with Cal but at practices he tended to gradually ease down the volume control on his amplifier until only a dumb animal with incredibly sensitive hearing at extremely low frequencies could possibly have heard him. ‘But only a dumb animal would want to,’ said Charlie when we confronted him with the problem.

  At that stage Cal was probably the only one who was good enough to have been in a professional band. Wendy later confirmed that none of his family knew I had put the Fender Telecaster out of his reach on top of the wardrobe. ‘It would have necessitated asking for help, you see,’ she said. Getting an electric that was my own, albeit on loan from school, perked me up. So did simply being in the band. I started practising again. Not so much to catch up with Cal - he’d got far too good - but just to be good enough. At rehearsals we would swap guitars regularly anyway - getting the two sounds right and then switching depending on who was playing lead or rhythm. Anyway, I liked to think my contribution was as much in the songwriting as in the performing.

  To this day, I have never had a songwriting session like that first Friday night. That night when within three hours I wrote two Go-Kart classics. Slowly,we came up with more material. We aimed for a song a week. If we hadn’t written one, we arranged a cover version.

  We practiced most week-ends - usually on Saturday morning (so that we could watch football in the afternoon) or Sunday afternoon (so that we could play for The Roebuck’s woeful football team or recover from hangovers or both in the morning). We also practised in a more acoustic fashion in Mr Blake’s music room at lunchtimes.

  And thus were our sixth form years much the same as everybo
dy else’s then and, if we are honest, now. Whatever else changes in the flux of the human experience, the appetites and interests of older teenagers remain as stubbornly conservative as a bridge club. People ask me if I worry about what Philip will get up to. It’s not worth worrying about. It is going to happen. It’s as sure as the Ace of Spades. We went out (regularly); we drank (excessively); we slept with girls (infrequently and rarely successfully) and we followed fashions (slavishly).

  Once they started having bands on at The Roebuck we went down there most week-ends - usually Friday because on Friday nights, the fashion Cal and I followed was for smoking dope. Generally, after a spliff or two in the garage or some other unoccupied wing of the Carter mansion, we were stoned by the time we arrived at the pub. On the night of my seventeenth birthday we’d started early and had an extra one for the road. Cal was feeling talkative.

  Terry had his gladrags on but his military bandsman’s jacket and tightly drawn tie looked tired and old now like cheesecloth shirts. I doubt he’d had a bath. He smelt of petrol. Charlie, returning from one of his visits to the bar, offered to light his friend’s cigarettes for him to minimise the danger presented to him by a naked flame. ‘She’s over there again, Cal,’ Terry said, ignoring him. He had a fag on the go already.

  We were still pleased to see Terry - he at least had money - but I think Cal was beginning to get fed up with his regular opening gambit. Terry jerked his head forward like a woodpecker and then did it again in case Cal hadn’t noticed. Cal was drinking. Charlie and Terry had got there early to get the best table, the one in the booth opposite the stage. In a clumsy piece of symmetry it, like the stage, was raised about a foot from the wooden floor and afforded a view across most of the pub.