Flying Saucer Rock & Roll

by Richard Blandford

  Ben felt otherwise.

  ‘There’s no fucking point,’ he said. ‘We’re nowhere near ready.’

  ‘We could get ready,’ I argued, ‘if we just practised.’

  ‘No we couldn’t. Anyway, we’d look stupid, playing on those bloody school guitars.’

  ‘Well, so what? People would still see how good we are.’

  ‘I’m not doing it, Chris.’

  ‘Well, maybe I’ll do it by myself then.’

  ‘OK, your funeral.’

  I didn’t, of course. I’d never have gone onstage without Ben. I barely had the confidence to play in front of my family.

  Not long after Ben and I had this conversation, Neil came bounding up to me with some news. Outside the science block, just coming out of a lesson. Mild, grey day.

  ‘Chris, guess what!’ he said.

  ‘Dunno, what? You’ve finally kissed a girl.’

  ‘No, better. I’ve entered the talent show!’

  ‘Ah, OK. Doing what exactly?’

  ‘I’m going to be playing the synthesiser, an old one without a keyboard or anything, just knobs you turn to make a sound. I found it at the back of the cupboard in the music room. No one’s used it in years. And I’m going to be singing!’

  ‘At the same time?’

  ‘Yeah!’

  ‘That sounds … interesting.’

  ‘Yeah, and I’ve decided not to prepare anything. I’m just going to make it up as I go along.’

  God help us. ‘Right. Listen, Neil, are you sure that sort of thing’s right for the school talent show?’

  He looked puzzled. ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

  ‘Well, people might not like it.’

  ‘So? That’s not the point.’

  ‘Well, what is the point, if no one likes it?’

  ‘Just doing it. Doing it is the point.’

  ‘Yeah, but why, though?’

  ‘If I could tell you that I wouldn’t be doing it.’

  I didn’t get it, and that’s what I told him. In fact, I told him that he was talking crap and he was going to make himself look stupid and I’d be embarrassed to be seen with him afterwards. That seemed to hurt, but I felt he needed to be hurt for his own good. But also I felt jealous because his balls were a hundred times bigger than mine.

  6

  I could tell Ben was worried, although he was trying hard to hide it.

  ‘There’s a band playing the talent show,’ he said.

  Shit. It should have been us. We both knew it.

  ‘Oh right,’ I said, as if it didn’t matter. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Dunno. Think they’re in the top set.’

  At our school, years were divided into sets: upper, middle and lower. I was in the middle set, where it was safe. Best place to be. Not too clever and not too divvy.

  ‘Are they a proper band, with a drummer and stuff?’

  ‘Yeah. They play crappy indie rubbish, though.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I heard them practising in the music room.’

  ‘Did you go in?’

  ‘No, but you could hear them outside for miles.’

  The bell rang and we went to our respective lessons. Ben was in the lower set. Not that he was thick, I think he just couldn’t be bothered to try any harder. Neil was in the upper set this year; he’d moved up and I didn’t have lessons with him any more. My homework suffered as a consequence.

  About a week later, I was playing football on the sports field at lunchtime, getting my trousers muddy, when I saw Ben waving at me from the playground. I kicked the ball towards the goal, hit a jumper and held up my hand to pause the game.

  ‘That band are playing,’ said Ben as I got closer to him. ‘Do you want to go and check them out?’

  ‘Yeah, why not,’ I replied.

  ‘Hurry up, Hurry!’ someone shouted.

  That’s my surname, ‘Hurry’. Nothing better than being blessed with a comedy surname at a boys’ school. Even the teachers had fun with it when they did the register. ‘Hurry.’

  ‘Pre—’

  ‘Hurry up, Hurry, are you here or not?’

  ‘Pre—’

  ‘Quickly, boy, quickly! Hurry!’

  And so on.

  I shook my head and went to collect my jumper. The game had carried on without me anyway.

  We made our way to the music room, which was a prefab hut on metal stilts isolated from the rest of the school at the other end of the playground. Every so often someone would kick their ball underneath it and have to crawl among the rusty crap that was dumped there to fetch it. A small crowd of boys were huddled around it now, all black jumpers, white shirts, grey trousers. Spiky bog-brush hair. Yellow and black ties with the thin part showing, the kipper tucked away.

  There was a clatter of drums coming from inside. This wasn’t uncommon, as the school brass band drummer often filled time before rehearsals with his interminable solos, but this was different. It was a solid, unfussy rock beat, clearly recognisable as proper music, and if you put your hand on the wooden banister of the stairs leading to the door, you could feel its pulse. Every so often a deep bass note would resonate like a sonic boom, sending a ripple of excitement through the gathering. Then a loud buzzing, followed by a feedback squeal that made some of the spazzy kids put their fingers in their ears. And after that a bluesy twiddle on the top strings of the guitar. For a few minutes, drums, bass and guitar were playing at the same time, although not together. The guitar and bass stopped. But the drums carried on. ‘Shut it!’ someone was screaming, again and again, until the drums very slowly died away in a series of cymbal crashes. ‘OK, a one, a two, a one two three four,’ a muffled nasal voice counted. And the music started.

  It was hard to make out at first, the playing wasn’t very tight, and mostly all you could hear was the drums, but gradually something recognisable emerged. Although very rough around the edges, it was, undeniably, ‘Need You Tonight’ by INXS. Hardly indie, but Ben was even more militant than me in some things back then. There were no vocals, just that funk-rock tiff, repeated over and over again, admittedly devoid of any of the funkiness it might have once possessed. Bluntly, it wasn’t very good, and that cheered me up a bit, but it didn’t really matter. The fact was, they were doing it, and I wasn’t. Plus, they already had an audience, eager to listen to them lumpenly and endlessly play that one riff. It should have been me. Should be me. One day one day.

  ‘Good, aren’t they?’ said a spazzer, bopping his head.

  ‘Shit,’ said Ben, ‘utter fucking bollocks. Why can’t they play some Motörhead? “Ace of Spades” or “Overkill” or something?’

  ‘Well, I think they’re good,’ said the spaz kid, ‘but then I like INXS.’

  ‘INXS are indie bollocks,’ Ben scowied.

  ‘INXS aren’t indie,’ said the kid. ‘They’re a rock band.’

  ‘They’re fucking not! They’re fucking poofter indie music. Rock’s what Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath do, not fucking music for queers.’

  The kid shook his head and left it. Rather than coming across as a hard nut, Ben was just embarrassing. This was something I had discovered over the last few months. No one could stay scared of him for long; he always ended up looking more tragic than hard. Even the spazzers weren’t scared of him; you could see them grinning and giggling. Now, back then I was no gay lover, although I knew fuck all about them really, except for those two they had in EastEnders, and I don’t have a problem with them now obviously. But even I knew that there was something a mite extreme in Ben’s attitude that was far from appealing, and for that minute it was worse than being out with Neil. But metallers didn’t break ranks over such things, at least not at our school in those days, so I just stood there nodding in agreement, like a total idiot.

  Still, Ben had left a bad taste in my mouth, and that may be why I found myself climbing those wooden steps, and pressing my face to the square mesh of the reinforced glass of the door and looking in. I couldn�
��t see much, they didn’t have the light on, but I recognised the guitar player as being one of the kids who had dropped out of the lessons after the first week. On the drums was a large boy, large in a muscular sense, that is, not fat, who I’d seen about the playground but didn’t know. And on bass, well … you could hardly not know who Thomas Depper was. He stood out a mile in the playground. Blind as a bat, but he was no speccy monger who was going to have his glasses stepped on. And yes, he was curly and ginger, but this was no freckleface to be bundled behind the bike sheds. Because you didn’t mess with Thomas Depper. He buzzed with a dangerous energy that kept any potential predator away. His reputation for apparently random acts of cruelty, both verbal and physical, preceded him. He’d been dragged up in assembly several times for fighting, but he’d never been caught or punished for most of the things he’d done. There are boys, grown men now, who still bear the scars of what he did back in those days. And not just spazzers either, but pretty savvy lads. Depper had a chip on his shoulder about something, all right, although exactly what wasn’t clear. Perhaps his dad used to slap him about, or maybe he was a spoilt mummy’s boy gone rotten. I never really found out. I’m not sure if anybody knew what the problem was. Maybe Jase did, I don’t know. Jase was the drummer. But I’ll talk more about him later.

  I’d only ever spoken to Thomas Depper a couple of times, and he’d just looked at me with contempt, muttering insults under his breath, but then he did that to almost everybody. Strange thing was, he did have friends, a small bunch of kids like Jase who’d probably known him all his life and knew exactly where the boundaries were. They all used to hang about on the grass verge leading down to the playground from the fences that backed onto people’s gardens. No one else dared go anywhere near them when they were up there. And because he was so exclusive, it meant of course that actually getting to be his friend, or just getting away with not being insulted, seemed quite attractive, even though he himself plainly wasn’t. On a physical level, if he hadn’t been so mean, there’d have been nothing to distinguish him from your average spazzer. It was attitude, pure and simple. Mean, surly attitude that made half the school, I don’t know, fall in love with him, in a way. I don’t mean we were all gay, although maybe some of the boys were, who can say? But there was definitely a hold that he had, a fascination that everybody tuned into to some degree or other.

  I had been unaware that he had any musical interests up until this point, but the very fact he could play and apparently owned a bass guitar was remarkable, as none of the kids in school ever aspired to play or own a bass. Loads of kids wanted to play drums, but no one could ever persuade their parents to buy a kit. Everybody wanted a guitar, and there were just a few kids who had one, and some even had an amp, although usually just a practice one. But a bass? That was unheard of.

  The repeated tiff finally disintegrated into sustained drum rolls and guitar fiddling. The bass was not playing and I should have taken that as a sign of bad things to come. You see, I’d been stupid enough to break the cardinal rule of dealing with Thomas Depper. Never take your eyes off him. But he had his eyes on me. Too late, I saw those jam jars pointing my way. He laid his bass down, walked over and opened the door. I wonder to this day why it didn’t occur to me to move.

  ‘Yeah, what you fucking want?’ he snarled.

  ‘Uh, nothing, I was just watching, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, don’t, all right, you little twat. Now fuck off before I thump you one.’

  He gave me a prod in the chest, which to my surprise sent me back nearly a foot, and tumbling down the wooden steps. As he did so he caught sight of the assembled spaz kids. ‘And you lot can fuck off too!’

  Most of them took flight immediately, disappearing into the playground masses. Only the foolhardy few and Ben remained.

  ‘Well,’ I said, trying to hide the fact I was slightly shaken, ‘he seemed a nice chap, didn’t he?’

  ‘Bollocks did he,’ said Ben. ‘Fucking wanker. Probably a queer.’ As we walked off, drum clatter and guitar fiddle were again silenced with shouting and the sound of something being thrown, before the riff began again. I could still hear them playing it half an hour later when the whistle went.

  7

  The weeks leading up to the talent show dissolved in a soup of homework, basketball games and the usual playground stuff – five-a-side, bundles, throwing someone’s bag over the fence. Ben was good at the last one, and it actually gave the spazzers a reason to be wary of him, which was probably why he did it with such regularity, though usually to the same three or four boys. Every so often, the riff to ‘Need You Tonight’ would blast out of the music hut, and it gradually began to sound a bit less lumpy, but not by much. From time to time I’d see Thomas Depper in the playground, either playing footy with his circle, or carrying his bass and amp to or from his practice sessions. Sometimes he’d see me looking at him, and scowl.

  I even tried to strike up a conversation with him a couple of times. The first time, I’d barely even managed to say ‘Hello’ before I was cut short by his customary ‘Fuck off’, but the second time I was more lucky. Well, slightly anyway. ‘All right, Tom,’ I said, passing him after the home bell had rung.

  ‘Yeah, what?’

  ‘Oh, nothing much, I was just wondering how it’s going, with the practising and that.’

  ‘Fucking shit. I’m playing my bollocks off, but the other two can’t get anything right at all.’ I knew from listening that though he wasn’t as good as he said, his band-mates weren’t as bad either.

  The drummer had it down pretty much, I reckoned.

  ‘Sounds all right to me,’ I said. He granted. I continued, ‘So do you think you stand a chance, then?’

  ‘Chance of what?’ He had a way of saying the word ‘what’ that could destroy you. It was as if your very existence was a gross inconvenience to him, and if you had any sense you’d jump off a cliff just to avoid the possibility of ever being a nuisance again.

  ‘Winning the talent show.’

  ‘We’d better bloody do.’

  ‘Well, I think you’re good.’

  ‘Yeah, I am.’

  ‘Well, all of you are, I meant.’

  ‘Yeah, except for that wanker on guitar and that other wanker on drums, we are.’

  ‘Your drummer’s OK.’

  ‘If you think that, you obviously know fuck all about music. Now you’ve got to piss off. I’ve things to do.’

  With that he walked off to the bike sheds. He passed me a minute later, cycling out of the school gates, his bass in its case strapped to his back, his sports bag hanging to one side and pulling him dangerously off-balance.

  And then pretty soon after that was the day of the talent show. Cold winter again, chill penetrating thin grey trousers. I saw Neil on the morning of the show, I think, maybe even the lunch break just before. I asked him if he was still going to do it, hoping against hope that he wasn’t.

  ‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

  ‘And you’re still playing the synthesiser and singing?’

  ‘And harmonica. I decided it needed something else.’

  ‘Since when have you known how to play the harmonica?’

  ‘Well, that depends what you mean by knowing how to play.’

  ‘Listen, Neil,’ I said, ‘I’m sure what you’re going to do is fine, but are you really convinced it’s right for the talent show? I mean, it’s not too late to drop out. It’s just I’m not sure anyone’s going to get it.’

  ‘Well, maybe they’re not meant to get it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Maybe them not getting it is part of the point. Maybe by showing them something they don’t get, I’m trying to tell them something.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘That what you know is not all there is.’

  ‘Yeah, well … who cares?’ I wasn’t going to get into a conceptual argument with Neil, partly because at that age I hadn’t learned how to, but mainly because I ju
st didn’t see the point of thinking like that. Total waste of time. Just got you laughed at and called a ponce.

  ‘I do,’ said Neil defiantly as I walked away to hang out with some less cerebral and therefore less embarrassing kids.

  When showtime finally arrived, they rounded up the whole school and sat us down in the hall – row upon row of seats, crammed too tightly together, from the closed dinner hatch right to the other end where the piano was. Youngest boys at the front, oldest at the back, a mile away. Together in tutor groups, we had little say in who we sat next to. I found myself sandwiched between two of the least spazzy of the spazzers I could manage under the circumstances. Fortunately, I was spared having to pay attention to them when a gruff voice behind me, only recently fully broken, mumbled, ‘All right, Chris.’ It was Ben. ‘Should be a laugh, shouldn’t it,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I replied. At least it would be that, I hoped, even though it was now clear it would mean the certain end of me and Neil’s friendship. Sitting there, I felt a tightness in my chest, partly because Thomas Depper’s band were about to steal my place in music history, but also because I was nervous about just how badly Neil was going to go down. I didn’t understand why he had to do this. More to the point, I didn’t understand why he had to do this to me. He was hurting me, and he didn’t seem to care. Fuck him.

  The mass babble of the whole school talking in unison continued for a few minutes. Then the deputy head appeared from behind the curtain on the stage that was normally used for assembly, brass band concerts and the end-of-year play. Shiny bald head and a gaze that said, We’re going to have a laugh, but don’t take the piss. ‘OK, lads, quiet now!’ he shouted, waving his arms at us. He would be the compere. He was well liked and a funny guy, or at least we all thought so at the time. Don’t know if he’d make me laugh now. Think I’d probably hate him.

  Once he’d got everybody’s attention, he told some jokes to get us warmed up, which I can’t remember at all. I think he nicked all his stuff off Frank Carson or people like that. I just recall the strange sense of unease created by a teacher seeking the approval of his pupils. Most of the time they went out of their way to make sure we weren’t entertained, so to have one working to keep us happy felt peculiar. I was bored already, even though I was laughing. Still the tightness in my chest. Then I remember he said something like this: ‘OK, gentlemen, on with the show. We have comedians, we have jugglers, we have break-dancing, we have two bands and we have one lad playing the spoons. And much, much more.’ The ‘much, much more’ was most likely Neil, but wait, did he say two bands? I turned round to Ben, and mouthed ‘Two?’ He shrugged his shoulders.