by Tim Roux
This could be rock ‘n’ roll
by
Tim Roux
ISBN: 1470075741
EAN: 978-1470075743
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
‘This could be rock ‘n’ roll’ is published by Taylor Street Publishing LLC, who can be contacted at:
http://www.taylorstreetbooks.com
http://ninwriters.ning.com
The songs ascribed to the fictional character ‘Jake Pembleton’ were written by Joe Solo and their lyrics remain his copyright with the exception of the lyrics to the song ‘(Just like) El Cid’s Bloomers’ which were written by Tim Roux. Joe Solo’s music can be found at: http://www.joesolo.co.uk.
This book quotes extracts from the work of several other writers and poets which is included with their kind permission. The copyright in each of these extracts remains with the respective original artists.
The remainder of ‘This could be rock ‘n’ roll’ is the copyright of Tim Roux, 2012.
Most of the characters in this book are fictional. The only real-life person to play an significant part in this tale is Nick Quantrill who really is a crime fiction writer based in Hull. However, the activities ascribed to him, other than his writing, have never in fact taken place and are consequently fictional. Nick plays a role in this book as a cameo character by his own kind permission. You can contact Nick at http://www.hullcrimefiction.co.uk.
Chapter 1
The stages I appear on are usually small - local pubs or folk clubs that feature one or two artists over the weekend or on special nights. I have been doing this for fifteen years so I recognise many faces time and time again, and I usually get to have a drink or two with the other act although I never drink alcohol before a gig.
I have seen people get up there so drunk they can barely stand and make complete arses of themselves. I have seen people get up there so drunk they can barely stand and be absolutely incredible before passing out mid-act, mid-chord, or vomiting all over the audience. Tommy Hartley used to be famous for that. The audience used to come to lay bets on how long he would last. In his time, he was the biggest draw in the area until he made the mistake of playing the Beverley Festival in the same frame of mind, fell off the stage and broke his neck. He is still alive but he is also paralysed from the neck down. About the only thing he can do now is to knock back the alcohol and hope for the resultant poisoning to carry him away. I go to visit him every now and again, but I doubt that either of us gets much out of it. Duty, I suppose.
I have done local festivals too - Howden, Beverley, Cottingham, Filey, Driffield, the beach at Scarborough, but I am most often to be seen at a place like this, the Bay Horse in Pickering. About twenty-five people are here tonight. I recognise about a third of them. Denise, Rache, Dizzy, Sam, Paula and Chris, they are here again, my most loyal of fans. Jade is here too. She always comes along with me. She doesn’t trust me with the women. She was a groupie when I picked her up. If it can happen to her, she thinks ….. Denise and gang know all that. They tease her rotten, always asking me to take my shirt off if I am hot and whether I am up for some fun afterwards. Jade often scowls throughout my whole performance, flashing daggers at them. They love it. It is probably why they still turn up.
“Hello, girls,” I bow to them in a courtly gesture as I move to my seat.
They squeal at me. “Jake, Jake, let it be me.”
“No, let it be me.”
“Don’t you dare look at Rache. She’s just a slag.”
“Quiet, girls,” I say.
“Oooooh.”
[chord]
“Good evening, everybody.”
Smiles of welcome from individuals in the audience. Jade is watching my groupie collection from the other side of the room with a wary look on her face. Give her thirty years and she’ll be Nora Batty.
[chord]
When I get on stage I have a routine to settle me down. Even though I have been doing this for fifteen years and even though this is a modest venue, I still get extremely nervous before a set. Audiences can be unpredictable and so can the equipment, or even me. I was at the Bridlington Folk Club, I played one chord, and my top E string snapped. I had to spend five minutes rigging up a new one and tuning it in. The audience forgave me but it was definitely getting bored and restless which was rushing me so that it took me even longer to get myself fixed. Sometimes my voice doesn’t lock in immediately either. I slide all around the notes for a few bars sounding like I am tone deaf.
[chord]
Me and Billy the Kid
We’ve got nothing in common, no,
Him being an outlaw
Me being a fool ……
The voice is in tune, thank God, but slightly croaky. That’ll go. Bit thin too, tonight. I must have been talking too much during the day.
He rode the hill country
West of Loreto
He knew of freedom
Me only rules
It takes a couple of minutes for the audience and me to get used to each other again. This is a familiar crowd so nothing much is going to go wrong, but it is always the same. We have to settle back into our acquaintance. It’s the same with friends, mostly.
But I’d love to stand beside him
With my back to the border
The odds stacked against us
For making our stand
Me with my six-string
Slung over my shoulder
Him with them six guns
Held in his hands.
I always carry a pint on with me and pretend to drink it. If my voice is croaky like now, I do take a quick swig. You don’t get drunk on a quick swig. The crowd likes it. It makes me a regular sort of guy.
Sometimes I wonder why anybody ever comes to see me, especially when they have copped me so often before. Perhaps it is not me they are here for tonight although they are listening attentively enough. Lesley is on after me and she not only writes great folky, country & western sorts of songs but she is a lot better looking than I am as well and still quite fit for her thirty-six years.
Jerry is over there too. He is a real pro on stage. He has great rapport with the audience, swopping one-liners and insults. He certainly knows how to work an audience. Mind you, he has about forty years’ experience.
I love it up here. Once I have settled in after the first few bars I feel like I’m at home in a way that I never do at home. It is like I am marrying the audience, it feels that euphoric.
Me and Billy the Kid
We’ve got nothing in common, no,
He lived his whole life in 21 years.
Me I got older
The whole world on my shoulders,
He bit the dust
And I tasted the tears.
Jade is watching me now. I wonder what is going through her mind. Does it all still sound fresh to her? Does she relive when she first saw me, or does she look at me thinking “Jake and Billy the Kid, yeah. Never grew up, neither of them.”
Actually, it’s all going really well between Jade and me most of the time. Obviously we have our moments when things blow up, but it is certainly much more peaceful than with Cathy. Well, what wouldn’t be? And Jade really does dig my stuff. She even sings it around the house which is more than I do. I am usually working on something new. Ideas hurl themselves at me all the time. It is a question of finding a way to capture them when I am in the middle of driving between appointments and most often when I am standing around waiting for the viewers to decide where they should put t
heir second wardrobe.
Yeah, you’ve guessed it. I am an estate agent by day, a rebel with integrity by night.
But I’d love to stand beside him
With my back to the border
The odds stacked against us
For making our stand
Me with my six-string
Slung over my shoulder
Him with them six guns
Held in his hands, yeah.
[harmonica solo]
But I’ll never stand beside him
With my back to the border
So I found my own way
Of making that stand
Not shot in the back
In some New Mexican sunset,
I took my chances
In a rock ‘n’ roll band.
Well, that last line is a bit of licence. I’ve never been in a rock ‘n’ roll band but I like to fantasise about it sometimes, and it sounds good, doesn’t it, more romantic than being a strum-along folky? Besides, nearly all of my heroes are rockers - Joe Strummer, Ian Dury, Otis Redding, John Lennon - all dead, come to think of it. No wonder I want to be up there with Billy the Kid.
When I’m singing the songs that I’ve been performing for years, my mind does tend to wander off. I sometimes wonder what I’m actually singing. What if I am voicing my thoughts not the lyrics? I am sure that I would soon recognise the surprise on people’s faces if I did. Some of these guys know the words better than I do. Later in the set, I get them singing both verse and chorus and they are word-perfect. Some of them sing better than I do too.
“OK. Thank you. This is a new one. I hope that you’ll like it.”
I shouldn’t really do new ones live. The audience invariably doesn’t like it if they have never heard it before, but I shove in a couple early on just for myself really. After that I stick to the tried-and-tested ones. I don’t really have a closing number. I haven’t managed to pen an anthem or a signature tune. It’s a weakness. It’s an ambition.
Lesley has ‘Jitterbug’. God, I remember when I first heard that. We were making out. Lesley and I had a thing going in the early days. Luckily, Jade doesn’t know anything about that. She can’t have been more than ten at the time - Jade that is. Lesley was my sort of age, as she still is of course. We were both sure that we were on the way up and we quite fancied each other and were revelling in our impending breaks which we were absolutely sure were just around the corner. Perhaps we were merely clinging onto each other. Whatever. Anyway, Lesley does sing around the house and especially when she is making love. There she was on top of me when she suddenly burst into ‘Jitterbug’ which, as you can imagine if you have never heard it, has a frantic seven-eight beat. It was a real ball crusher. I think things dropped off me that night, sheered off. I certainly had bruises.
“What do you think?” she asked me when I was concentrating hard on hanging in there and not dying of my wounds. “I’m not doing it justice. I’ll play it to you properly when we’ve finished.” She then switched to ‘Love Eyes’, glory be, and everything ended happily.
Anyway, ‘Jitterbug’ is definitely her anthem and I cannot hear it without thinking of that night. I don’t think that we were in love but I came close before we broke up acrimoniously after several bouts of accusing each other of nicking each other’s songs. We didn’t even talk to each other after that for about five years. However, she did communicate with me. She wrote ‘Jug Ears’ about me where she publicised quite a few scenes from our private lives. Everybody knew who it was about and waited for me to retaliate but I never did. My songs are not a medium for revenge.
So what do I write about? Well, there is a lot of stuff about having my back to the wall, some other stuff about being on the road, then mostly news items, things that catch my eye, experiences I have had. I don’t do many love songs. I feel that there are more important things for me to be writing about, which may be a sad reflection on me, I don’t know. I wrote one for Jade the other day, but it isn’t very good so I haven’t played it to her yet. She’d be flattered that I wrote it, but you can’t compose a mediocre song for the woman you are living with, so either I rescue it somehow or I shall have to think up another one. I want to offer Jade one soon. She does deserve it and she would certainly be chuffed, but I cannot chase songs. They come to me or not at all, and with love songs it is usually not at all.
“Here is one of my few love songs.”
[chord]
The trees lose their leaves in September
In a carpet of yellow and gold
Under Christmas tree lights in December
We cuddled to keep out the cold.
We’d hide in the park there for hours
Where the bullies would leave us alone
You carved our names there “Now it’s ours” you said
And later let me walk you home.
Each night after school I would wait for you there
In the dark on that park bench in St. Martin’s Square.
I knew you were leaving for college
Yeah and I’d got a job down at Kirk’s
I envied you all of that knowledge
But you don’t need it down at the works.
On the night you left you said you’d miss me
And you promised that you’d always write
And then you leaned forward and kissed me
And disappeared out of my life.
Still late in the evening I’d wait for you there
In the dark on that park bench in St. Martin’s Square.
I read and re-read all your letters
From the other side of the divide
I knew the boys there would all be my betters
And that’s why I never replied.
I bet you thought that I forgot you
And it all seems so obvious now
How I wanted to say that I loved you then
Truth is I didn’t know how.
The trees still lose their leaves in December
In a carpet of yellow and gold
But the Christmas tree lights in December
Mean nothing with no-one to hold
And I know I should put you behind me
But I just can’t forget you and me
And if ever you come back to find me
There’s only one place that I’ll be.
And part of me always will wait for you there
In the dark on that park bench in St. Martin’s Square.
Chapter 2
Sue (in the song) may have got her college degree (I dunno, I never saw her again), but Jade hasn’t which is not to say that she is stupid because she’s not, although she works with her mam down Skelton’s bakery which doesn’t sound too bright.
Jade is springy all over - her hair, her body, the way that she is always bobbing up and down. Her mum, Jackie, is from Birmingham originally, which gives her a worse accent than even the ones around here and her dad was a hit-and-run sailor from Zanzibar who turned up for a few days in the docks offloading wood at Hollis’ and then disappeared off again leaving both of them behind. According to Jackie, he claimed to be a cousin of Freddy Mercury which is where Jade gets her appreciation for music from, according to her, although she thinks that I must have been an aberration (tee - lots of hees). You have to hold onto something, I suppose. In consequence, Jade is really dark with frizzy hair and a lovely bum. Her mum, on the other hand, looks like she worked with cordite in the Birmingham Small Arms factory and that her skin hasn’t recovered yet. Jade’s granddad did just that. Jackie is a lively one too. She never shuts up when she could be talking and ends each sentence in a gale of laughter. She really embarrasses Jade except that if Jade submits to working alongside her eight hours a day, she can’t find her that bad. We all find her a right old laugh. At least she isn’t stuck up like Cathy’s parents. Blimey, what a pair! They must be the last people in Kirkella to keep their ‘drawing room’ in their three-up three-down semi ‘for best’. If they stuck their arses in aspic, they
couldn’t be more Coronation Chicken, with serviettes naturally. I used to really hate going round there. It was straight out of ‘Keeping Up Appearances’, Hyacinth Bouquet and all that. They must have the smallest semi in Kirkella, but at least they cornered the postcode.
Jackie’s nothing like that. She lives down Willerby New Road and probably knows everyone in the whole street which is several miles long. I keep threatening to make her my manager. If she could just get everyone she knows to one of my concerts all at the same time, we could easily fill the Guild Hall, and maybe even the Albert Hall. We could book a special Pullman to get us all down there.
I hooked up with Jade about three months after Cathy and I finally broke up. I came back from a gig at the Black Swan Folk Club in York, totally knackered having caught the last train into town, and there were three suitcases neatly packed outside the front door. No note - message unambiguous. I banged on the front door but nobody replied. I started hammering on the windows. I thought that I would at least wake the kids up and that that would rile Cathy into letting me in for a screaming match, but there was no response at all. Cathy had upped and taken the kids to Kirkella for the night. I got a bit of a chuckle out of that when I heard about it, the thought of Cathy’s parents having to cope with Josh and Sam. Josh is seven and Sam(antha) is five and behaving like china dolls is not what they do best.
Jade approached me after a lively gig at the Forge Valley Inn at Scarborough where I was knocking back the pints, and started to quiz me about my lyrics - who was the old guy in ‘The Undefeated’ (was it Jerry?), what was the pub in ‘I Wonder’, who was the girl in ‘St. Martin’s Square’? I looked at this eighteen year old (or thereabouts) creature and carried on talking to Rache and Sam. She didn’t give up. She butted in. We ignored her. She asked a pile more questions. We ignored those too. She waited until I had finished ignoring her. Eventually I turned on her: