Rock and Hard Places

by Andrew Mueller

  “You could stop whining and give us a hand with this amplifier,” says Barton.

  Further introductions are effected once we’ve loaded up and repaired to a nearby pub to await one of the photographers—Andy Willsher of the NME—who is marooned on a train somewhere outside Euston. China Drum are a heavily Hüsker Dü-influenced punk trio from Newcastle: Adam Lee (drums and vocals), Bill McQueen (guitar) and Dave McQueen (bass). At the end of their last European tour, they explain, they’d fetched up in the Italian city of Trieste. Scanning a map of the continent in search of interesting-sounding places to play next time out, they’d hit upon Bosnia. The war in that country had just been ended by NATO’s airstrikes and the subsequent Dayton Peace Accord, and China Drum reckoned, if they were quick, they could be the first British band to play post-ceasefire Sarajevo.

  Once the link with the MoD had broken down, China Drum had turned for help to London-based aid organisation The Serious Road Trip. The Serious Road Trip had become a minor legend during the Bosnian war, ferrying food and medicine through the worst of the fighting in garishly painted Land Rovers and yellow Bedford trucks decorated with murals of cartoon characters. They had also taken clowns and other circus performers on tour in Bosnia and run music and painting therapy courses for children; copiously dreadlocked New Zealander Max Reeves of this fine organisation is the other photographer joining us.

  The twin entertainments in the Caledonian Road pub we’ve picked on are watching former Pogues singer Shane MacGowan subsiding into unconsciousness at the next table, and the domestic travails of two other customers, a married couple who alternate moody silences with eruptions of screaming, and occasionally stumble outside to continue the debate with their fists, before coming back in as if for the first time. It seems to be a regular performance; they are regarded with surreal indifference by the pub’s other clientele.

  “I like a spot of cabaret with dinner,” says Adam.

  We finally leave, with all aboard, two hours overdue, but we make a late ferry from Dover to Calais, and are on the road in Europe by three the next morning.

  AS THE SUN comes up over Belgium, I’m sitting up front alongside Andy Matthews, the driver who came with the truck. I have not yet spoken to Andy, but I already suspect that he is the single most rock’n’roll man on earth. The blond mohawk, the sunglasses and the earrings are a good start, but where most veteran roadies will have tour t-shirts and caps, Andy has tattoos: “Yazoo: Crew” engraved on his left upper arm, and “Lenny Kravitz: Crew” on his ribs, visible beneath his torn t-shirt.

  Heading towards the morning’s first coffee stop, Andy reaches over and takes a small leather case out of the glove compartment in front of me. He opens it to reveal a syringe and some phials of clear liquid. Keeping the wheel steady with his knees, he fills the syringe and injects himself calmly in the stomach. Suddenly, I feel strangely very awake.

  I realise, I tell him, that this seems a funny thing to say to someone on first acquaintance, but I really hope that he’s diabetic.

  “No,” he grins. “I’m a crack fiend.”

  Ask a silly question.

  Dave peers into the front cabin from behind the curtain. “Can we,” he asks, “stop at Mademoiselle Le Miggins’ croissant shop?”

  This is the journey’s first deployment of authentic tour-ese, that weird, reductive dialect spoken by otherwise intelligent people who find themselves shut in a small moving space with a bunch of other otherwise intelligent people and doing something fundamentally stupid, like taking a rock’n’roll band on tour. Mrs. Miggins’ Pie Shop is a fixture of the popular television comedy Blackadder, and the popular television comedy Blackadder is a fixture on every tour bus in the world. No matter who the band, no matter where they travel, almost all tour bus conversations consist of verbatim or bastardised quotes from television sitcoms: Dave, accordingly, has cunningly regionalised Mrs. Miggins to suit our surroundings.

  “No problem,” says Andy.

  The drive across Belgium towards the Rhine is so transcendentally tedious that I become almost nostalgic for those school holidays when I’d travel by bus from Sydney to visit my grandparents in Adelaide, across twenty-eight hours of untidy scrub-country and deserts as vast and featureless as UB40’s back catalogue. To a landscape as relentlessly, heart-breakingly boring as this, there can only be one response.

  “Monners!” cries Adam, producing the travel Monopoly kit from his bag. “Who’s in?”

  This could end in tears. Mine, if I don’t win. Theirs, if I do. With a mixture of skill, cunning and taking it far more seriously than anyone else, I win the first two games. After which everyone gangs up on me.

  “We’re in Germany,” announces Phil, as I try to stage a comeback with assets totalling £20, Pentonville Road and a station. “Don’t mention the war.”

  The inevitable collective hum-along of “The Dambusters March” follows.

  “Can we stop at Frau von Miggins’ sausage shop?” asks someone.

  There are a great many beautiful and historic palaces along the road that joins Cologne, Frankfurt and Munich. “Look,” someone will occasionally say, “there’s another kraut castle.” This rarely registers with the majority of the expedition, who are degenerating rapidly, engrossed in interminable travel Monopoly death matches (“Right, no buying on the first two laps, all fine money to be collected at Free Parking, no rent on a double, except triple rent if it’s a double four, you can have more than one hotel on a property and you have to move backwards on a seven . . . who’s in?”) or in the Carry On films which are being loaded into the video player. In a lull between Monopoly and puerile movies, several exquisite architectural confections are ignored while China Drum, all card-carrying volunteers in Newcastle United’s Toon Army, lead a stirring twenty-minute singalong of “Thank you very much for the six points, Sunderland, thank you very much, thank you very very very much.”

  A few hours short of Munich, we are pulled over by a motorcycle policeman. Andy, who is now nearly fifteen hours in the saddle, has apparently been overdoing it.

  “Everyone in the back keep quiet,” he hisses, as the cop approaches. “I can talk my way out of this.”

  It all goes terribly school excursion. The strain of keeping a straight face causes several of us to water at the eyes. Dave cracks first.

  “For you, Englander,” he says, quietly, “zer tour iz over.”

  The passenger compartment erupts.

  “You vill pay for your inzolence.”

  We get a ticket.

  Some miracle of record company largesse has provided rooms at the Hilton in Munich. Any flat surface would have done. A flat surface with a mattress and sheets and a neatly wrapped chocolate on the pillow is as welcome a sight as could be imagined.

  THE CUSTOMS OFFICIAL at the Austrian border looks like all customs officials at all borders, which is to say he looks like his dog’s died and he can’t sell the kennel.

  “Pliz ver are yoo goink?” he wants to know

  Bosnia and Herzegovina, we tell him.

  “Vot iz zer purpoz ov your vizeet?”

  We tell him that, as well. He regards us with an expression that suggests he thinks we’re probably taking the piss but he can’t be bothered with us at this time of morning. He waves us through.

  We pull in at Fraulein Migginsheim’s sauerkraut shop. This is a motorway service station owned by someone with a serious garden gnome fetish. Dozens of the little ceramic chaps are congregated on the forecourt by the café. While we’re taking pictures of each other sitting amid the tiny red-hatted elves, Adam appears from the gear storage area at the back of our truck with a triumphant expression.

  “You can’t take a team photograph without this,” he says. He’s found the football. I feel that this cannot be good news, and I am swiftly proved right. Adam hoofs the ball into the car park. “Right,” he says. “I’ll be Alan Shearer, like.” Within minutes, we are re-enacting key moments from the 1996 European Championships for an audience of
bewildered Austrian truck drivers. We stop only because nobody wants to be Scotland.

  Back aboard, cabin fever is setting in. We have now watched every episode of Blackadder ever made, one series of Absolutely Fabulous, more than enough Carry On, and a bid to put Fawlty Towers on is shouted down when someone observes, correctly, that there’s no point, so many times have all present seen it. Already, indeed, any mildly controversial opinion advanced by anyone, on any subject, is greeted with a rousing chorus of “No! I won’t have that! There’s a place in Eastbourne!” delivered in the style of Ballard Berkeley’s doddering Major. By lunchtime, A Place in Eastbourne is an early contender for the title of China Drum’s next album.

  We stop for food in a small town in the hills. As we wander around the village delicatessen, an appalling sound rends the air, something like a misfiring tractor. It is China Drum’s tour manager, Stealth, laughing. In the refrigerator cabinet, he has found a locally-made yoghurt with the unfortunate, if undeniably evocative, name of Dïchmïlch. All of us, at this stage, think this is not only funny, but the funniest thing any of us have ever seen, heard, or in any way experienced. The poor shopkeeper now has an aisle blocked by eleven allegedly grown men, most in tears, several unable to stand up, having what must appear to be some sort of collective seizure.

  “Iz zer a problem?” he asks.

  There’s no answer to that.

  Travelling does this: you reach a point at which it dawns on you with crystal clarity that you are a fool, that through your own choice, you are not at home, comfortable and content, but out in the middle of nowhere, miserable, exhausted, bored and annoyed, and you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Often, provoked by an amusingly-named foreign snack food, you will do both. Then, it’s like yawning: one person starts, everyone else follows.

  There’s no stopping us now. Everything is hysterically, convulsingly funny. Trees. Roads. The Slovenian border. Hills. Rivers. Monopoly. The ritual that has developed for getting back onto the truck after getting off at a stop—on climbing aboard, you must now shout, “Morning, Fawlty!” to which everyone else on the bus replies, “Morning, Major!” to which you, in turn, enquire, “Have you seen my paper?” to which the bus choruses, “It’s under your arm,” whereupon you say, “Ah, so it is,” and sit down, and await the next person, who climbs on and shouts, “Morning, Fawlty!” et cetera et cetera.

  “The time has come,” intones Dave as solemnly as a hopelessly giggling man can manage, “for . . . Billy Duffy! Ian Astbury! Ladies and gentlemen . . . The Cult!”

  He loads the tape. The effect is devastating. The Cult’s collected videos would probably provoke a fair degree of mirth at a toddler’s funeral. In our current state, it’s like pumping the truck full of nitrous oxide. As the screen fills with Astbury preening and prancing through “Love Removal Machine” and “Wildflower” like some satin-wrapped heavy metal morris dancer, most of us can no longer breathe properly.

  “LOVE REMOVAL!”

  We sing along, punching the air on the downbeat.

  “LOVE REMOVAL MACHEE-EEE-INE!”

  Another running joke is born: at every stop from here on, someone will announce, unnecessarily, that they’re “just going to buy a Coke from the drinks MACHEE-EEE-INE,” or “getting some tabs from the cigarette MACHEE-EEE-INE.” Random exclamatory shrieks of “LAWD have MERCY!” also become popular.

  The guards at the Croatian border don’t delay us much—a surprise, given that customs officers generally react to the approach of musicians much like hungry lions do to an elderly wildebeest that has lost its way home, and that Croatian customs officers are hard work even by the standards of their profession. We make Karlovac by dinnertime. Adam has been reading the “Welcome To Croatia” leaflet we’ve been given at the border.

  “Can we stop at Mrs. Migginsovic’s cevapcici shop?” he asks.

  We find lodgings above a restaurant.

  THE MORNING DRIVE through Karlovac takes place in near total silence. Of the eleven of us on the bus, only myself and Max have spent any time in the former Yugoslavia. The rest would only have seen things like this on the news, or in films. Karlovac has taken a bit of a caning.

  The only things you can possibly say about the sight of a recently ruined neighbourhood, deserted by all life but weeds, are insufferably banal. A couple of people say them anyway, and nobody responds. I was in Karlovac about a year ago, and it looks now like it looked then, like it had just gone a dozen rounds with a much larger opponent. The sorry truth is that Karlovac, compared to many towns in the region, got off fairly lightly.

  My flesh starts crawling properly when we get to Slunj. I’ve been here before, as well, but it couldn’t look more different. A little less than a year ago, I came this way out of the Bosnian town of Cazin with two employees of Feed the Children—“Bill” and “Ted” from a previous visit, described elsewhere in this volume—with whom I’d just travelled to the Bihac Pocket in the days after Croatia’s offensive against the Serbian population of Krajina. Bill and Ted were giving me a lift back to Zagreb.

  Slunj was deserted that afternoon. Its largely ethnically Serb population had decamped about a week previously, rather than take their chances with the advancing Croatian army. There was some evidence of fighting—the occasional shot-away shopfront, the odd rocket-propelled-grenade hole punched through a wall, footpaths chewed up by tank tracks, buckled bridges on the outskirts of the city, blown by the fleeing inhabitants—but Slunj was mostly overwhelmingly silent. Our Landcruiser was the only traffic.

  As we drove through Slunj, devilment seized Bill. “Bugger this creeping about,” he said. “I’m going home.” As we drove through side streets at crawling speed, watching for mines on the road, he explained that his organisation had a house in Slunj, in which Bill had lived for much of the last couple of years. We found the house, opened the front door—very, very slowly—walked in and found ourselves face to face with half a dozen Croatian soldiers in the process of looting the place.

  Looking back, I have to say that Bill’s command of the situation was admirable. My own instincts, on the grounds that the blokes in khaki had guns and were less than sober, would have been to say, “Sorry to bother you, chaps, carry on, and let me know if you need a hand shifting anything—I’ll be outside chewing my fist and praying.” Not Bill. He strode up to the soldier nearest us, indicated the box of books and clothes the hapless private was removing, and said, “That’s all mine.” He took the box from the astonished soldier and gave it to me. “Put this in the truck, then come and help me with the rest.”

  Upstairs, in what had been Bill’s room, the windows were gone and there were bullets in the walls, one of which he souvenired with his pocketknife. We loaded more books, more clothes and other bits and pieces into more boxes and piled them into the Landcruiser. The soldiers, who regarded us throughout with a bafflement that suggested they thought we were some kind of slivovitz-induced mirage, said and did nothing to stop us.

  “Right,” Bill said, back in the car. “Let’s get out of here before they change their minds.”

  Slunj today is unrecognisable.

  “Seems quite a cheerful place,” someone says, and they’re right, it does. The streets bustle, the cafés are full, the bullet holes have been plastered over, the windows replaced. I just wonder how many of the people doing the bustling, coffee-drinking, plastering and glazing today lived here a year ago. Slunj, for centuries a mixed city of Serbs and Croats, is now liberally sprayed with Croat nationalist graffiti, and the Croatian checkerboard flies from every flagpole and many windows. Slunj has been ethnically cleansed to positively clinical standards.

  The Bosnian border is no problem—we are, surely, going to pay for this luck somewhere down the line. We pause at a petrol station south of Bihac for a kickabout, which evolves into another attempt to recreate the key moment from the England vs. Scotland game of Euro ’96. We get further this time, mostly because Max grudgingly agrees to be Garry MacAllister, and I decide I
can cope with the Colin Hendry role, on the grounds that it only involves standing still and gawping up into the sky like some woad-smeared peasant terrified by an eclipse, as Paul Gascoigne (played by Stealth) flicks the ball over me.

  It occurs to me to wonder why Stealth is called Stealth.

  “He was in a band himself,” explains Adam. “And it bombed.”

  Near Jajce, we pass a hill into which the word “TITO” has been mown in letters several storeys high. The homage is overgrown, but still readable. It was in Jajce, in 1943, that Josip Broz Tito was officially declared head of a new Yugoslavia according to a constitution drawn up by something grandly (and, all things since considered, ironically) called the Antifascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia. Part of this road through central Bosnia and Herzegovina passes through the entity known as Republika Srpska, the Serb-controlled portion of this effectively partitioned country. Under the terms of the Dayton Peace Accords, at least as we’ve been led to understand it, troops of the Bosnian Serb Army may stop vehicles and inspect passports, but no more. All the same, we’re happy to get through this stretch without seeing any.

  In the late afternoon, as we head through the hills towards Vitez, I’m sitting at the table in the rear, facing backwards, trying to read while keeping half an eye on the Monopoly game in progress. The mood on board has settled into wearied, silent torpor.

  The truck is rumbling up a gentle hill when Andy, in the driver’s seat behind me, yelps, “Jesus fucking Christ!” There’s a squealing of tyres and deafening crash from somewhere to my right. I look up from my book: we’ve stopped very abruptly, but everything inside the truck—bags, bottles, suitcases, guitars, the Monopoly set—is still moving, and most of it towards me. It all seems to happen very slowly and very quietly, and then very quickly and very noisily.