Flying Saucer Rock & Roll

by Richard Blandford

  ‘Yeah, well, I’ll get back to you on that one. Right, see you.’

  Thomas took a left. I went right and headed for the lavs. I tracked down Ben as soon as I could and told him about the opportunity.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ he said, grumpily. ‘Why would we want to play with those cunts? They play fucking gay indie music.’

  ‘No they don’t,’ I said. ‘They play hard rock. OK, it’s not metal, and some of it’s shit, like INXS, but it’s something. We can always make them play the music we like once we’re properly in the band.’

  ‘Yeah, I s’pose,’ he said, quietly, miserably, but with an air of resignation that signalled he was about to say yes. ‘OK then, I’ll fucking do it. But I’m not sticking with it if it’s shit.’

  ‘Course,’ I said. ‘I won’t either. It’ll be our band anyway.’

  ‘Better bloody be,’ he said, and though I could tell he didn’t want to, and he definitely didn’t want me to see it, he smiled.

  9

  What did we get up to at that first rehearsal? I don’t know, I think there’s a tape somewhere. Jase used to tape everything we did. Not just the songs, but all the talking and messing about as well. I’d like to hear it sometime, if he’s still got it, and all the others. But we don’t know each other any more, so I doubt I’ll ever get to. It’s funny, I was never really introduced to Jase, he was just there waiting for us in the music room, beating seven shades of shit out of the brass band drums, until Thomas made him stop by holding his cymbals while he tried to hit them. Turns out that was the only way to shut him up. I don’t think we even spoke to each other until the next rehearsal.

  Me and Ben got there after school. We had the room until the caretaker locked everything up at five. Thomas and Jase were there already; Thomas eyed up Ben with suspicion. ‘All right,’ he said, more a statement than a greeting. Ben just grunted back.

  Jase was banging on the drums. Steady, not flashy. Not too difficult, maybe not that talented, but solid, good. As I said, I never really talked to him at that first rehearsal. Thomas talked to him, or more to the point ordered him to do things, usually without result. I talked to Thomas. Ben did not talk to Thomas or Jase. I talked to Ben. And that’s the way it worked at first.

  It’s weird, even though a band was exactly what we’d been fantasising about for ages, neither me nor Ben got that excited about the first rehearsal. I mean, we should have been, we desperately wanted a band, and I’d gone as far as trying to engage Thomas Depper in friendly conversation to get in. But in between then and the first rehearsal, my enthusiasm had ebbed to the point where it almost seemed a bit of a chore, getting all my stuff up to the school and everything. I don’t know what it was, maybe we just knew this was not really it. Wherever we were trying to get to, it wasn’t going to be achieved in that music hut playing INXS covers. The key lay elsewhere. The key lay in the very place we could not look. Still, we had fun. Just more low-key fun than the ecstasy of group interplay we’d anticipated.

  What song did we do? Well, we didn’t do anything properly as none of us sang, but we did ‘Need You Tonight’, which didn’t make Ben very happy, ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’, ‘Johnny B. Goode’. I only knew it from Back To The Future. Each one about seven times or something.

  Were we any good? No, we were rubbish. I was struggling to get the hang of the chords Thomas had scribbled down for me, and even though they’d been playing together for ages, Thomas wasn’t really clicking into Jason’s drum patterns. Well, when I say we weren’t any good, as a band we weren’t, we were all over the place, but Ben, Ben was something else. He’d never played any of these songs before, and had hardly ever heard them, but by ear, he could pretty much replicate the riffs and general feel of the solos. I mean, it wasn’t perfect, he fumbled changes like the rest of us and played the odd clanger of a wrong note. But he always recovered. Ben was good, all right. Although he didn’t say anything, I could tell by the way he looked at him that Thomas had noticed just how good he was.

  So that was our first practice, although what we were practising for hadn’t really been discussed. In fact, very little was said. Just the odd bit of direction from Thomas to me, direction and abuse from Thomas to Jase, and no attempt at direction at all in regard to Ben. It wasn’t a momentous occasion; it didn’t feel like we were making history; it was what it was, a start. But when the practice was over, and we were making a small and half-hearted effort to return the music room to normality, something else happened.

  You see, while we tidied up, Ben had rested his guitar, which was out of its case, against a table that had been moved to the side of the rooms. Thomas, either not seeing or not caring, it was impossible to tell, decided to move the table back to where it came from. The guitar fell face first onto the floor. It was a horrible sound, that thud of wood on floorboard, which was, incidentally, coated in trumpeters’ spit from the brass band practice earlier that day. A thud and a tinny jangle of unamplified strings. Ben leaped with his grasshopper legs across the room in a panic. ‘You fucking monger,’ he snapped, as he held his guitar closely, looking for any damage.

  Thomas Depper just stood there, his gaze fixed firmly on Ben. ‘I’m going to make you sorry you said that,’ he said.

  Ben looked up at him. Their eyes locked. Neither of them said or did anything else. They just looked at each other. Little did we know how much was being determined in that meeting of wills. Ben’s eyes were seething, but ultimately his gaze was weak. Because for all his surliness, he wasn’t mean, he was merely grumpy. But Depper, Depper was mean, really mean. Behind those jam jars, there was something that would sting you, you could see it clearly then. He had venom in his eyes, and Ben was no match. He looked down at his guitar, and pretended that the chip in the body wasn’t there, and just mumbled, ‘Well, it looks OK.’

  We went our separate ways. Jase and Thomas, who had permission to leave his amp in the band instrument cupboard, cycled away, while I waited with Ben for his dad to pick us up in his taxi. But before any of us went anywhere, we all agreed to meet again, same time next week. Which we did, and then most weeks after that, when the brass band wasn’t doing extra practice after school for a concert. Our repertoire never got much bigger, and we never got much better, except for Ben, and there was really no hope of catching up with him. He didn’t even seem to want to be in the group that much, but he kept on turning up anyway. Privately he used to tell me that all we played was ‘soft-rock bollocks’. He’d moved on from calling it ‘indie’, but it was still ‘fucking poofs’ music’. As for me, it wasn’t really what I wanted either. But I couldn’t quite envisage what that was precisely, as it was becoming pretty clear I was never going to be Joe Satriani. So, like Ben, I just kept on turning up, really because it was the only show in town. And besides, even though it wasn’t my thing, I honestly quite enjoyed it. So did Ben secretly, I think. Still, I’m sure we both felt the pinch of the gap between our dreams and the hard reality. We both knew we should be more excited than we were. In any case, group relations weren’t improving much at first, which put a downer on developing any team spirit. I tried to talk to Jase, but he didn’t seem that interested. Thomas and Ben talked civilly, just about, for a few seconds every week. But really, our strange rules of communication didn’t get broken very often.

  I think it was the week before the Easter break. Ben was at my house one day, at the weekend, I expect. We were listening to records and working out guitar parts when he said, out of the blue, ‘I was, uh, round Thomas’s the other day.’

  I tried not to sound surprised, but how could I not be? ‘Really?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah.’ He carried on fiddling at a speed that was completely beyond me.

  ‘What were you up to?’

  ‘Oh nothing, really, just listening to music and stuff. Why’d you ask?’

  ‘No reason.’ For the same reason you mentioned it, Ben. To establish where we both stood now.

  In the days before we broke up, it was all change in
the playground. Coming out of a CDT lesson, I saw Ben with Thomas and his gang on the grassy verge. All of a sudden, Ben was in the inner circle, it seemed. Even though I’d been asked to be in his band, Thomas had always managed to maintain a distance, which meant it would never have occurred to me to ever stand up there like I was his mate. But there Ben was, up there, with Thomas and Jason. I didn’t feel confident enough to go up and say hello.

  To my surprise, it was Jase who ended up coming to me. I was playing football with the cool kids I chose to call my mates when it happened.

  ‘Chris,’ he said, tapping me on the arm.

  ‘Hi, Jase,’ I said, hoping the ball wouldn’t come down my end in a hurry. Couldn’t these musicians ever understand that you’re not meant to just drop out of a game of footy like this? Made me look a right spaz.

  ‘Yeah, just came over to say that we’re going to be rehearsing at my house over the holidays.’

  ‘At your house? Won’t your parents mind?’

  ‘No, not really. They’ll both be at work anyway.’

  ‘You must have very understanding neighbours.’

  ‘No, but fuck ’em. Tuesdays all right for you?’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’

  The next Tuesday I was round Jase’s house, deep in suburban territory, in his bedroom. Quite nice, tidy, flat-pack bed and table from Homebase. I remember it being different shades of blue. Anyway, we had to crouch in strange places to fit us all in with our amps and stuff. I was stuck between the bed and the wall, Ben was over by the door, Thomas was sat on the bed, complaining that he could feel the vibrations from the amps in his arse. It was funny, maybe because Ben was in his gang now, or maybe because he was in a different environment, but Thomas’s tone had changed. The way he talked was a lot less direct and cutting, and there was almost a sing-song quality to his voice. Not only that, but it was as if he spoke in his own language, with his own special words for things, which Jase seemed to understand and sometimes used himself. I suppose it was because they’d known each other so long. For instance, if he wanted someone to move out of his way while he lifted his amp, he’d say, ‘Schnoo, schnoo!’ Or, if he wanted Ben to have a dirty sound through his amp, he’d say, ‘Make it all gurgly-wurgly’, or if he wanted a clean one, ‘Shiny-winy’. It was weird, it should have been childish and embarrassing, but there was something almost magical about it all. As if knowing his language was an entry to something – a protected space. It gave you power.

  So we met at Jase’s a couple of times over the Easter break, and then back in the music but when school restarted. But not for long, because one day we didn’t bother to put the room back to normal for some reason, and Mr Evans went mental. It was terrifying and funny at the same time. He cornered Thomas, Jase and Ben the next morning on the grass verge, waving his arms in his velvet jacket and screaming his head off about us abusing his good nature. He was carrying his baton, even, and as I watched from the football pitch, I really thought he was going to throw it at them, like a Ninja dagger or something. And that was the end of that, no more music hut. We tried to put a brave face on it, and made fun of Mr Evans and called him a queer, and joked about how he liked to bum all the boys in his band, but it was no good really, it was a fucking blow. It meant we wouldn’t be able to play again until half-term, and then after that, not until summer. And that was the way it turned out. One practice at Jase’s, then not another for six weeks, which, when you’re fourteen, is for ever.

  Not that the band was the only thing occupying my time back then. Other things were happening too. I would have a couple more short-lived relationships with girls I didn’t really care that much about over the summer, more basketball, Scouts on Thursdays during term-time. Still, I never did get that evening paper round because it got in the way of too much else, and so it took me right until October to save up for a proper amp. My family bought their first CD player, which was exciting, but I couldn’t buy anything to listen to while I was saving, so the only thing to play on it was my mum’s Cat Stevens, which I hated. Metallica’s ‘black album’, officially known as just Metallica, came out at the end of the summer, and that was the first CD I bought, putting my amp purchase back by a couple of weeks or so. Me and Ben and other metallers used to listen to it over and over again. We even got Thomas and Jase into it. It was just so fucking great, ‘Enter Sandman’ and all. In fact, the only person I can remember not liking it was Neil. He said that the black cover was funny because it was just like the album in Spinal Tap. I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. But I didn’t care what Neil thought about anything by then. I hardly ever spoke to him, and I don’t think I saw him at all over the summer. His only friends now were total spazzers. Always talking about that Twin Peaks programme that was on back then that made no sense. In fact, Neil had slipped right down from lower-middle to the very bottom of the whole school hierarchy, if not virtually outside it completely. You could say he’d screamed his way out at the talent show. As for me, the band were my friends now. My real friends anyway.

  After school ended, and the summer holidays began, we went back to practising at Jase’s during the day. But the funny thing was, at that first practice after the lay-off it didn’t feel quite right. We were all sitting there, waiting to get started, but none of us wanted to, we were embarrassed. The lay-off had made us self-conscious. Already, the fragile spell had been broken. ‘Are we going to play anything or what?’ said Thomas, but he didn’t look as if he could be bothered either. It seemed stupid all of a sudden, like when you wake up and know you’re too old for Star Wars figures. We weren’t saying anything to each other, but the same thoughts were going through our minds. What was the point of learning all these songs? Who were we ever going to play to? And nobody would say it, but it was what all of us had been thinking in the time out of action: what was the point of a band that played songs which didn’t have a singer? We could never just make instrumental music like Steve Vai or Joe Satriani because Thomas didn’t like instrumental music. He only liked songs. On the other hand, none of us wanted to sing, as there seemed to be something deeply homosexual about standing up in front of people and doing that. And the idea of bringing into the group anyone so bent that they’d want to do it wasn’t something any of us could stomach back then either. But a change of some kind had to be made. We all felt that.

  ‘Let’s just fucking play something,’ said Thomas, probably trying to justify in his mind having just lugged all his equipment down the road. ‘Right, “Sweet Child O’ Mine”, go.’

  We got through a verse and a half, badly and painfully, when Jase just stopped playing and threw his drumsticks at his feet. Thomas looked daggers at him and motioned to me and Ben to stop too.

  ‘What the fuck are you playing at?’ snarled Thomas.

  ‘I’ve written a song,’ said Jase.

  10

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I’ve written a song,’ said Jase.

  ‘That’s nice for you,’ said Thomas. ‘Now why did you stop fucking playing?’

  ‘I think we should play it,’ said Jase.

  ‘Play what?’ said Thomas.

  ‘My new song,’ said Jase.

  ‘Do you now?’ said Thomas.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What did you write it on?’ I asked.

  ‘His cock,’ sneered Thomas.

  ‘Guitar,’ said Jase.

  ‘Didn’t know you could play,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I can play chords.’

  ‘Yeah, fucking badly,’ said Thomas.

  ‘So what have you written, just chords?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, then adding in a barely audible voice, ‘and words.’

  ‘I’d like to hear it,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ said Thomas. ‘It’ll be fucking shit. I’ve heard his songs before. Crap, the lot of them.’

  ‘I want to hear it too,’ said Ben, out of nowhere. Bit of a surprise.

  Thomas, knowing that a king can only rule w
ith the consent of his subjects, and sensing that his power could one day slip if he didn’t give a little, raised his hands. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘play the fucking song. But I’m warning you, it’ll be a complete fucking waste of time.’

  Jase made us lift up our legs as he pulled out a hitherto concealed acoustic guitar from under the bed, where it was kept like a dirty secret, nestling next to his porn mags, most likely. He rested it on his knee as he hid behind his drum kit, a great big barrier between him and his audience. Then after several minutes of tuning away imaginary discordances, he started awkwardly forming chord shapes and strumming softly, stopping and starting, stalling for time, postponing the moment when he had to reveal his tormented soul as promised.

  ‘Just play if you’re fucking playing!’ shouted Thomas from the other side of the drum kit.

  Goaded, he began, in a manner of speaking. ‘OK, this is a sort of an intro,’ he mumbled, and played some minor chords, folk fingering, not barre, Am to Em I think, two bars each, probably about eight times in a row.

  ‘Fucking long intro,’ sniggered Thomas.

  ‘Yeah, well, there’ll be a guitar part over the top, so it won’t seem too long then,’ said Jase. ‘And then it goes into a verse, which goes like this.’

  I think there was quite an awkward leap to Emaj, then G, back to Am, then repeated. It didn’t make that much musical sense, even at the time I could see that, but it held together, just about.

  ‘And then it’s the chorus, which is the same as the intro, and you’ve heard that, so you don’t need me to play it.’ He turned his guitar upright and clutched it to himself, his face hidden behind the neck.

  ‘Right,’ said Thomas. ‘That’s it, is it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jase softly. ‘Well, there are words too.’

  ‘Really? And what might they be? Or do we have to fucking guess?’

  Jase got up and opened a drawer in his desk and took out a school notebook. In fact, I think it was his science rough book. He found a page at the back and looked as if he was going to give it to Thomas, but then he hesitated, before handing it to me, both of us stretching over the drum kit.