Rotten in Denmark

by Jim Pollard

  Cal wanted to work late that night - he was speeding again - and I was happy to continue. I had a bit of a buzz on too as we overdubbed guitar after guitar, layering them across each other like fabrics, thicker and thicker. I recorded some of the best work of my career that night and, with sweat, we did complete the project within a fortnight - planned so as not to interrupt our touring schedule too much.

  The tensions and the problems of the process also helped me when later I recorded my own albums. Where Cal gave them a hard time, I gave Charlie and Jon their parts in advance and often recorded them with them alone eliminating the goldfish bowl feeling which Jon, for one, must have felt. If there was a sacrifice of spontaneity on the sessions for the two Frankie Dane and The Denmarks albums there was a calmness which was never there on Rotten In Denmark. At the sessions for Stolen Moments and Phoenix we gently joked about the absent Cal - Portmeirion was his size of town we said.

  One of the few peaceful moments on Rotten was the following morning. Cal and I had worked right through; Charlie and Jon woke up early. There was a fatigue slumped over our world like a Welsh raincloud. Jon found me alone in the mobile and struggled to a guilty smile.

  ‘Play me “Wonderful Moment”, Frank,’ he said softly.

  I rewound the tape and played the song back, easing up the fader on the bass channel to let Cal’s freshly recorded line cut through. Jon smiled again. This time a beam.

  ‘It sounds OK. What have you done with it?’

  ‘It’s all this little box, ‘ I said patting the briefcase shaped effects unit which sat next to the mixing desk. ‘We gated the sound and added some chorus.’

  Jon played a lazy air-guitar along with the bass line. He looked pleased with himself. I found myself yawning and unable to stop.

  ‘You boys need revitalising,’ Wesley said and bundled us, mostly barefoot and hardly dressed, into the back of the van and drove us to a waterfall we’d passed on the way up. It was about two hundred yards from the road, the water cascading with a sweep and a rush and a crash over rocks smoothed and greened by its unrelenting. We stood by the back of the van like reluctant workmen smoking, coughing.

  ‘Don’t worry about “Wonderful Moment”, Jon,’ Cal began. ‘I’ve redone the bass part myself.’

  Jon looked at first Cal and then at me. ‘Was that necessary?’ he asked, enunciating with a plodding precision.

  ‘It was if we want to get to the States this side of the millenium.’

  Jon set off up the hill, stamping his cigarette into the grass. Charlie was shaking his head and half-laughing in that nervous, frightened way kids at school had when they saw a thalidomide child. Ahead of us the Go-Karts bass guitarist was removing his T-shirt and tossing it to the ground like a footballer substituted.

  ‘Was that necessary?’ I asked Cal.

  I set off after Jon again, catching up with him where the spume from the waterfall first caught your face. I took him by the hand and pulled both of us in. The water cut through your skin like a rain of tiny knives. It was foaming white with rushing and danced over your nose and mouth with a nimble numbness. Clean, clean water. I swallowed again and again. The water was spewing from Jon’s mouth like his first solid food. I think he was trying to yell but the water was too quick for him. I pulled him up the rocks to where it pumped thicker and quicker still. We slipped on the slimy green and stumbled, both falling back so that we were sitting opposite each other, bare feet nearly touching. We kicked at each other, splashed from the rock pools and puddles but these efforts were like a child’s spit in this pounding shower of silver. Beneath its continuous crackling cadence you might just have been able to hear us both laughing.

  Like I said, recording at the village of Portmeirion was a smart move by the boys. Previously we’d made the pop columns of the newspapers but this catapulted us onto the feature pages: ‘Looking After Number One’, ran The Mirror, ‘Punk rockers visit the location of 60’s egg-head psycho-thriller’; ‘Playing By Numbers’, said The Guardian, ‘Could The Go-Karts be the first rock band with a sense of cultural history?’; ‘Making More Than A Penny Farthing’, reported The Financial Times.

  The album came out in time for Christmas in 1978 went to number one for weeks.

  24

  Beech Park, the present day

  Do you ever play Desert Island Discs with yourself? You know the idea, choose the X records and Y books you’d want above all others. I’ve been on the real Desert Island Discs so I don’t have to play that one. Nowadays I prefer Desert Island Life. This has a material component - imagine you have just one suitcase to take to the island: what would you put it in it? - but I prefer the immaterial: which bits of your life would you keep and which would you consign to the celestial dustbin? I play this game lying in bed when I can’t sleep.

  The fun part is that you then have to reconstruct your life without that bit: how would it have been? Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I remove my marriage to Wendy. I usually find myself in a gutter somewhere around the age of 25.

  This morning I am playing Desert Island Life when Wendy wakes me. ‘What?’ I say.

  It is unusual for her to do this - she normally sneaks off to work without a word. She thinks I am sleeping but usually I am not. Sometimes she’s out before six. Then I remember that she’s not going to work today.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘After nine.’

  I go to leap out of bed but Wendy stops me with an open palm.

  ‘Don’t worry, the kids have gone to school. Anyway, they’re big enough to get their own breakfast.’

  It is certainly true that since I gave Philip that one thing he wanted - a place at the College - he seems to have suddenly grown up. My morning presence has become largely symbolic. My mother, by contrast, seems to have shed an age or two since the death of my father and her morning presence is very real indeed - she often stops by on her way to or from Keep Fit For the Over 60s, Water Aerobics, nine holes at the Royal Blackheath or Aunty Anne’s. She insists on being her sister in law’s primary carer even though we could afford some help. She says it’s the principle of the thing. I don’t argue with her. ‘Why break the habit of a lifetime?’ Wendy says. Today Mum and Wendy are going shopping. I have been detailed to pick them up later which means I will have to drive for the first time in ages. My mother initiated this yesterday morning.

  ‘Of course, Frankie can pick us up.’

  ‘But I don’t drive.’

  ‘Don’t drive, no, but you can bloody drive.’ She was deliberately mimicking my father.

  I don’t know how she knew this. My wife must have let it slip. Wendy had taught me in France. Lesson One: circumnavigating the Place De La Concorde. ‘But we’ll be killed,’ I had protested. ‘So what,’ she had replied. It was less than a week after Cal’s funeral.

  I even tried my usual ploy of claiming not to have a licence - implying its removal for some rock’n’roll like misdemeanour. My mother snorted. ‘Of course, you have a licence.’

  ‘It’s true that I can drive but I don’t like it,’ I explained.

  ‘Like it, smike it,’ said my Mum, ‘you can do it for your mother and your wife.’ So that was that.

  Suddenly Wendy stops speaking. I look up at her and then, following the direction of her surprised expression, turn over in the bed. In the open doorway is my mother. It takes me a moment to recognise her. I could be witnessing one of my own fantastical rewrites from Desert Island Life. Sure, she appears an inch or so taller and her hair a shade or two darker since my father passed on but I’ve noticed that before. It is the coat she is wearing. The coat is the cashmere I bought her after Rotten In Denmark went to number one.

  I remember the morning I gave it to her like I remember yesterday. It was a Sunday lunchtime. I had had it gift wrapped, ribbons and bows the lot but my father must have opened the cans instantly he heard the door being unlo
cked because as I came into the living room holding this great, glittering gift, there he was offering me a glass of beer. To take it I had to put the package down on the pouffe where, amid the grunts of introduction, it was forgotten. ‘It’s your favourite, son,’ my Mum was saying and running through the menu before I remembered. In total, the parcel had sat there in its Sunday best for ten minutes and neither had remarked upon it. When she tried the coat on, my Mum looked delighted. ‘Fancy,’ said my father, between sips and I’d not seen her in it since.

  ‘I thought you’d given that to Oxfam,’ I say.

  My mother looks at her watch and frowns. ‘Time for us to go, Wendy. Frank must be wanting to get up.’

  I hear them talking down in the kitchen, arming themselves with substantial holdalls and heavyweight credit cards. ‘Buy yourself a hat to go with it,’ I shout as they go out the door.

  If I get up I’ll only worry about the work I’m not doing so I roll over and try to doze, safe from the expectant cyclops stare of the word-processor. But I don’t sleep, do I, you know that already. The family bed is big enough to hold a small tea dance and I try every inch of it but I can’t get comfortable, can barely close my eyes. I taste the tea Wendy has left for me but it’s cold now and I’m not safe.

  I’m still playing Desert Island Life, you see. My case is half-packed and here I am wrestling with a non-Wendy scenario which may not consign me to the gutter. Jody Clarke is her name - the nearest I ever came to an affair. You’ll remember her. She did back-up vocals on ‘Stolen Moments’ before having a couple of big soul hits of her own. She lives in Los Angeles now where she’s trying to break into films. You may have seen her. She had a line in the last Bruce Willis movie. Could make it too - she’s got the brass neck and balls for it. I’m lying on my back now and trying to relax. Loosen the shoulders, drop the arms.

  Once Tony realised that things couldn’t and wouldn’t go on as ‘normal’ without Cal, he started to ignore us. He put out Wonderful Moments, that double live retrospective with the repackaged interviews with Cal. Inevitably there had been a lot of press shit after Cal died: like the furore about Elvis Presley and John Lennon all rolled into one. The Observer asked if Cal was the most significant teenager since Jimmy Dean. Melvyn Bragg did a TV profile of him. Tony milked it all dry. The album cover is a cut out of Cal with a kind of white aura around him. ‘Like radiation,’ Wendy says. He looks like a ghost or a kid in that Ready Brek advert. The picture is set against a photo-montage of significant events from the 1970s: Watergate, Lord Lucan, hot pants, Bangladesh, a lunar buggy on the Moon, Munich Olympics, withdrawal from Vietnam, Common Market, Thatcher, death of Mao, death of Presley, Muhammed Ali, even the Ayatollah. It is as if Cal in some way ranks alongside or is even responsible for these things rather than merely a chronicler of them. And just in case anybody should fail to notice to whom the cover design pays homage, The Beatles split is shown by a torn Sergeant Pepper cover held together with a safety-pin.

  He wasn’t wholly stupid, Tony. He didn’t come right out and say we were crap without Cal - he still had us under contract after all (or in jail as those nobs in the business say) - but by elevating Cal to some sort of deity he certainly implied it. I didn’t speak to him for five years.

  When I was ready to, I caught the bus up to Phonodisc carrying the master tape in a tatty Small Wonder Records carrier bag on my lap. We’d recorded part of it in my basement and gone into a local studio to do the overdubs - 12 tracks; all Dane/Carter originals - and we hadn’t asked Tony for a penny.

  Inevitably in reception I was asked to wait. ‘Sorry, no appointment, no can do,’ said a sulky assistant from beneath a sultry fringe. She reminded me of that woman in The Marquee. I leaned over and picked up the telephone.

  ‘Tell him it’s Frankie Dane,’ I said handing it to her.

  She was brainless, seventeen and listening to Peter Powell on the radio so it was no surprise that she hadn’t heard of me. She looked at me like I’d slapped her. ‘I’ll call security,’ she shouted.

  Suddenly the broad frosted glass doors behind her desk flew open and a black girl stumbled onto the reception carpet, her guitar in one hand and a portable amplifier in the other. A security guard was helping her out.

  ‘I’ll wait,’ I mumbled to the receptionist, stepping back.

  The black girl was livid. A patent black stiletto crumpled beneath her topple. ‘You tell me come and then you change yous mind. Who is he, some sort of fucking airhead? I had to take two trains and a bus, find a baby-sitter. Does he think he’s God? Pig thick white boy?’

  ‘I suggest you make another appointment,’ the security guard said softly. When he closed the door on her, it clicked shut and the blur of his suit could be seen receding down the corridor.

  I helped her to her feet but she paid no attention, continued to shout after the guard. ‘Well, fuck you, Mr Tony Beale. You ask hear me and you’re going to hear, damn you.’

  Then she plugged in her amplifier and proceeded with a windmill sweep of her arm to bash out power chords in the record company’s foyer. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She kicked off her remaining shoe. The sulky receptionist turned her radio up.

  The black girl, without stopping playing, spat at her - projecting her voice like an automatic weapon. ‘Turn that off, child.’

  Sulky obeyed and, over the chords, this woman with hair like a cascade of coffee began to sing. Her voice had the gospel singer’s depth and power to send it soaring over the amplified guitar yet it had a frail, vulnerable quality like a soft assault.

  Then there was a cacophony of strangled language and the door opened again. A drunkard’s swaying gait, a double breasted suit, Tony nearly fell out. He was laughing like he was about to have a hernia. That snout of a nose locked into a snarl, those thin lips stretching and smacking and seeping spit. His eyes grabbed her like a fist. The security guard followed him out of the door and took up his position behind the receptionist.

  ‘What the fuck?’ said Tony, looking her up and down. ‘You see me when I want to see you, sweetheart, and you bring a tape. You got a tape? No you haven’t. So you go home. You get back ghetto. Comprendez?’ He was pushing her now, shoving her back against the sheet white wall, the guitar swung and her tights laddered against its machine heads. He had a hairy hand on her lapel.

  ‘You don’t even have the dots doll, do you?’ he began to taunt. ‘The dots? For you who don’t know shit that is the term what we who do know shit use for the fucking music - those fucking five little lines of magic. And do you have them? Kiss my arse you do. You don’t have anything do you?’ I couldn’t believe the security guard was just standing there allowing this. The receptionist and I at least had the good grace to look open-mouthed but he just stood there pretending not to notice. He was the same colour as the singer and in this situation as powerless.

  ‘You don’t have nothing.’ Tony’s hand dropped to the girl’s pencil skirt and pulled. ‘Do you have your fucking knickers on. Well, perhaps we can remedy that one baby doll.’

  I grabbed Tony’s hand and pulled it away from her skirt. I yelled his name into his ear, roaring like Cal at the climax of our set. He lumbered around, his hand leaving the girl and forming a clumsy fist. I caught hold of it as it sought my stomach. Then his forehead lurched forward as if he were going to nut me. Tony’s eyes dived, swam, surfaced and finally focussed on mine.

  ‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’ he bellowed.

  The security guard stepped out but didn’t intervene. He for one knew who I was.

  Tony swung his other arm and caught me around the side of the head, half a slap, half a punch. I stopped myself against the wall, not wanting to hit the ground. I felt sure Tony Beale was a kicker.

  ‘Tony,’ I said. ‘It’s Frankie Dane.’

  The security guard advanced another pace to ensure that I didn’t try to retaliate. Tony looked at me again and with
a totter and a cough, great uncle recognition finally staggered into his brain on broken crutches.

  ‘Frankie Dane,’ he said, pianissimo and again, with a lick of the lips, ‘Frankie Dane,’ forte. ‘Well, look what the slut’s dragged in, Frankie Dane. What is it, Frankie, wondering why the royalty cheques are getting smaller? Can’t keep Mrs Carter in the manner to which she’s become accustomed? Take some advice, you should try shagging her occasionally.’ He’d completely forgotten about the girl. She was sitting on her amplifier close to tears, deserving them, but not crying. He was edging me back towards the door, half pushing, then he stopped. ‘Or perhaps you’ve come to say thank you. Thank you Tony for giving some value to my otherwise pitiful existence. ‘ He took me by the hand as if to shake it. ‘Have you, Franklin?’ I was trying to reply but I was only taking in air. ‘Because let’s face it, you couldn’t cut it could you Frank, my boy. At the top of the cock-sucking tree you were and all you could fucking do was turn round and scream for your mummy. Carter dies. Well, he dies. And so you die too, Frankie. Jesus. Well, fucking lick my arse. Kids would kill for the opportunity you had.’

  Then he started laughing again and put his arm round my shoulder as if we were great friends. I wondered if he were really drunk at all. ‘Don’t fucking tell me you want to get back in the studio. Oh no, please I’ll piss my pants. You want to do a bollocking Christmas single.’

  ‘Not the studio, Tony. That won’t be necessary.’ I was trying to shake his arm, heavy as a dead conger, from my shoulder. I held the master tape up in the bag. ‘I’ve already recorded the album.’

  ‘Frankie, mate,’ said Tony, changing key, changing tone, changing direction. He was shuffling me back through the security door, his fingers dancing over the fingerboard for the entry code like a concert pianist’s. ‘Grand to see you. I’ve been meaning to call. How is Wendy?’