I looked at his blockish handwriting, obviously written slowly and with effort. A whole page of lines, the shape resembling that of the poetry we were occasionally forced to dissect in English lessons. Nervously, I made it form words. I remember some of it, about half of it anyway. It went like this.
Feel the misery of searing pain
Burning through me like an evil flame
Nothing can ever save me from this
Not even the taste of your kiss
I’m a soul in torment
I’m a soul in torment
Unhappiness flowing like electrical current
I’m a soul in torment
As I read it, Thomas stuck his head over my shoulder.
‘Feel the misery of searing pain, burning through me like an evil flame,’ he read in a cruelly mocking voice. ‘Not up to your usual standard, Jase.’ Jase shrank further behind his guitar, as he turned deep red, bordering on purple.
‘Let’s see,’ said Ben. I passed the sheet over to him. He looked through it, mouthing the words to himself as he read. ‘I like it,’ he said when he got to the end. ‘I think we should do it.’
‘Well, I don’t,’ said Thomas.
‘Why not?’ asked Ben.
‘Cos it’s shit and it would be a waste of our time.’
‘I’d like to see you do better,’ said Ben.
‘I could do if I could be bothered,’ said Thomas.
‘Well, why don’t you then?’ said Jase.
‘I can’t be fucking bothered, can I?’ Thomas said, laughing.
‘Let’s put it to a vote,’ said Ben.
‘I vote that we don’t do it,’ said Thomas immediately.
‘I vote that we do,’ said Jase.
‘And me,’ said Ben.
Thomas turned to me. ‘So what do you want to do then, Chris?’ he said. His eyes told me what answer I was meant to give.
‘I think we should …’ I paused, partly for dramatic effect, partly because I’d started my sentence without really knowing what I was going to say. But ultimately my answer was, ‘… do it.’
‘Oh fucking hell,’ said Thomas.
‘OK, that’s settled, we’re doing it,’ said Ben.
Jase couldn’t contain his beaming smile at his triumph and the validation of baring his soul in torment. But what made me say yes? It’s not that I actually thought the song was that great. Though I wasn’t yet familiar with decent lyrics, I hadn’t heard any Dylan or anything, even then I knew that Jase’s weren’t that good. Not only that, but I could see the chords didn’t really hang together. Still, I knew this could be the start of something. This was a way towards being a band that people gave a shit about, instead of just being a bunch of teenagers covering Guns N’ Roses songs without any vocals.
Jase ran us through the chords one more time and we were ready to play. It wasn’t exactly challenging and we picked it up in a few goes. Ben had a lead part all worked out in practically five minutes. After half an hour, it was sounding pretty good. We were pleased with ourselves by the end of it, even Thomas, and no one was thoughtless enough to break the mood by pointing out that we had a whole set of lyrics with no one to sing them. After we’d played it about seven or eight times, we decided to give it a rest for a bit and went back to ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’.
Jase revealed other songs to us over the summer. Each time he got a little less shy about it, even daring to play his guitar in front of the drum kit rather than behind it. But though his confidence grew, he would never consider actually singing the melodies that were so clearly in his head. Always the chords, followed by the passing of the notebook. None of the songs were that good, and they were all on the themes of eternal pain and suffering, but we learned them anyway, to the point that by the end of the summer holidays we had a good half-dozen.
As we prepared to go back to school, we were getting quite cocky, even though we no longer had a place to rehearse, now that we couldn’t practise at Jase’s house on weekdays. So much so, in fact, that we wanted to present what we’d done to other people, play a gig of some sort. At least that was the discussion we were having as we packed up after our final practice of the summer, until Jase said the unsayable.
‘We need a singer.’
‘Oh fucking hell,’ said Thomas.
‘He’s right, we do,’ said Ben.
‘Yeah, I guess,’ I said, trying to stay neutral, as usual, or at least noncommittal.
‘Well, we’re not going to get one, are we? At least not one who’s not a total bender,’ said Thomas.
‘Yeah, well, we still need one,’ said Jase.
‘Fucking who, though?’ said Thomas.
‘I have to say I can’t think of anybody,’ I said.
‘Neither can I,’ muttered Bent
‘Chris, what about your friend, the one who did the talent show?’ asked Jase.
‘Fuck no,’ said Thomas. Ben shook his head and looked down. Christ, Neil in the band was the last thing I wanted.
‘Ah, I don’t think Neil would really be right for us,’ I said.
‘But he’s the only person any of us know who’s not afraid to sing in public,’ said Jase. ‘And as well as that, he can play the harmonica.’
‘He didn’t sing, he screamed,’ cried Thomas, ‘and made a right tit of himself. And I don’t think he knows one end of a harmonica from his arse.’
‘Well, I didn’t think he made a tit of himself,’ said Jase. ‘I think he’d do OK.’
‘Yeah, might do,’ said Ben.
‘I just don’t know if he’d be right for what we’re trying to do,’ I said.
‘No, he won’t be,’ Thomas said, ‘but … we’ll give him a try, I suppose. And if he’s shit like I know he’s going to be, we can have a fucking laugh at him.’
And so it was agreed that I should ask Neil if he would be our singer. Which I did, later that day. It was awkward, of course, having not spoken to him all summer, but for the good of the band and all, I picked up the phone, dialled that number I knew off by heart and asked his mum, who was mad, if I could speak to him.
‘It’s Chris, is it?’ she said. ‘Lovely to hear from you again!’ She started laughing hysterically at absolutely nothing and went to fetch Neil.
I heard the sound of him bounding down the stairs like a herd of gazelles, before picking up the receiver in the hallway. ‘Hi, Chris,’ he said, what I took to be fake nonchalance not quite covering his excitement.
‘Yeah, hi. Listen, Neil, the reason I’m phoning is that, well, you know that I’m in this band? Well, the thing is, I was wondering if … We need a singer, and the only person we could think of who would do it is you.’
‘Wow, I don’t know really. Yeah, OK.’
‘You’ll do it?’
‘Yeah, it’ll be fun. Don’t know if I’m really what you’re looking for, though.’
‘Um, well, we’ll see. We’re still looking for a new place to practise now we’re back in school, but we’ll give you a ring when we’ve found somewhere, yeah?’
‘OK, bye then.’ In the typical phone manner of Neil, the line had gone dead. My heart sank. Now Neil was actually in the band. It was a nightmare come true.
11
Neil was a problem, not just because he couldn’t sing, but because I had so much to lose. That summer had been glorious. Me and Ben had both made it onto the verge. Ben was cagey about telling me how he’d got up there at first, but eventually I dragged it out of him that he had been helping Thomas learn to play proper six-string guitar. He’d earned the rare pleasure of going round Thomas’s house a couple of times to do so and this, it seems, had given him a magical pass onto the verge. I got up there because of a girl, just before school broke up for summer.
One lunchtime, I was walking across the playground to the football field, when I heard someone call, ‘Oi! Mush!’ One of Thomas’s friends was beckoning me from the verge. I went over.
‘Didn’t you go out with that Karen bird a year or so ago?�
� he said.
‘Yeah,’ I said.
‘Give us her phone number,’ he said.
‘Well, I don’t know if I still have it, but I’ll look for it.’
‘Yeah, do that.’
‘Ask nicely, or you don’t get,’ I said.
‘Fuck off,’ he said.
‘Right, no number then.’
‘OK, OK,’ he said. ‘But if you could bring it in tomorrow that’d be wicked.’
‘We’ll see.’
I knew that Thomas and Ben could see me from their position several feet away, but they said nothing. I felt Ben’s discomfort, knowing he wanted to say hello, but that it wouldn’t be a good idea with Thomas watching him. Ah, the mysterious etiquette of the grass verge. With no more business there, I went back to my mates from basketball in the playground.
So, the next day, during morning break, I went over and I said hello to the bloke who wanted Karen’s number, but I didn’t give it to him straight away. I made him wait, and made him talk to me, which he did because he wanted the number obviously, but then some of the other boys were talking to me too. It wasn’t until about ten minutes before the bell went that the boy decided he’d waited long enough to ask for it, and I held off for another five before I finally stopped stalling and gave it to him. I didn’t go back there at lunch that day, but at break the next day I went up again, and no one told me to fuck off. Or more importantly, Thomas didn’t tell me to fuck off. I was there practically every break and lunch from then on, except when I was playing football, and I pretty much stopped doing that after a bit.
So I was now officially in Thomas’s circle of friends. I was allowed on the grass verge. Pretty soon I knew them quite well, although I’ve forgotten most of them now. I can remember a few faces, and some names, Ewan, Ashley, Alex, two Jameses. But really, not much else. I think I went round some of their houses a few times after the school term had finished. And we played football down the Fields too, but Thomas wasn’t really into football, so that was never a big thing. Still, we used to hang out together quite a lot over that summer holiday, all of us in the band and the others. Down on the Fields or outside the sports centre, spending time with girls for the first time properly. But as with everything else, it’s the band I remember most. It’s as if the band’s in Technicolor, with nearly every detail in focus, but everything else is in black and white, and vague, blurry even.
I remember that bloke did end up going out with Karen, although at first she was freaked out that he’d got her phone number. It meant I had to talk to her again, and it was quite funny watching her pretend to be pleased to see me even though she’d ignored me that time before. She was actually quite grumpy I’d given her phone number away, but she didn’t care really because she’d got a boyfriend out of it. She didn’t wear her grey tracksuit any more, though. That guy made her wear a denim jacket and stretch jeans and spike-heeled boots, the usual metaller girl outfit.
Well, she had to really, it was the gang uniform. I say gang, although we didn’t do anything like commit crimes or get into fights with rival gangs or anything. We just hung out together, a big blanket of black and blue on the green of the Fields. But still, we had a uniform. Even though Thomas was more hard rock than metal, and it was his gang, we still all had to wear metaller gear. It was what he wanted, for some reason, jeans, boots or trainers, stud wristbands and belts, skull buckles, that sort of thing. And if you could afford a leather jacket you had to have one, because it gave you automatic superiority over those who couldn’t and had to make do with denim. I wouldn’t have enough money to get a leather jacket for another year, so that put me pretty low on the totem pole that summer, I can tell you. Not that they were nasty to me or anything, but it was obvious me and Ben and the other denim-jacket boys weren’t on an equal footing with the leather boys. Not even being in the band helped us. Then later on, when Ben had his birthday in August, Ben’s supposedly working-class dad bought him a bloody great leather jacket and that left me right in the fucking cold, socially speaking.
Now here was the weird thing. Obviously, Thomas had a leather jacket; it wasn’t the coolest one in the world because he’d gone and drawn the INXS logo on the back of it, though no one was going to argue about that. But Jason didn’t have one – and he didn’t have a denim one either. He had a bloody townie Puffa jacket. He didn’t look like a metaller at all. And he didn’t even listen to metal. By rights he shouldn’t have been in the gang. But he’d known Thomas since they were three or something, so he was. But he didn’t give a crap. Didn’t even try to fit in, at least not in that way. He had balls, really, looking back on it.
That summer, the first summer of the gang, at least as far as I was concerned, was pretty innocent. We were too young to be out late. We’d play football sometimes, but mostly we’d just sit on the grass. I didn’t smoke – I didn’t want to die, whatever anyone said. But some of the other guys would, if they could get a shopkeeper to sell them any. Jason and Thomas smoked, and Ben did eventually. It was quite funny, Ben would always be wussy about things like that, even though he was trying to come across as a hard man. I mean, I wouldn’t smoke because I knew it was stupid, but Ben just didn’t because he thought he might get into trouble. It was only after he had the piss taken out of him about it that he started lighting up.
Idyllic as it was, there was something eating away at us boys. Something we knew we had to deal with. An itch to be scratched. The girl itch. Girls, tits and shagging. Now, this is a thread I need to follow. So much of what would happen I know is tangled up in it. So much of the, well, pain, I guess. You see, we were fifteen, some of us were going to be sixteen soon, and we knew that any boy who wasn’t doing it at sixteen was a complete sad spastic. God help anyone who held on to their virginity after their seventeenth birthday. I wasn’t in as much shit as a few of the others because I wasn’t going to be sixteen until the following June, but some of those guys would be hitting it in September. Now, if we’d been less suburban, and come from Raneleigh Park or whatever, then we’d have probably done it loads already. But being from Quireley, well, I suppose there was a bit less pressure. Also, as we went to an all-boys school, we just came into contact with girls less, so in a way they weren’t so much of an issue. At the time, many of the boys still spent far more time thinking and talking about military hardware than they did about girls, because there were no girls around to tell them they were losers for being so interested in military hardware. But still, as the magical and dreaded sixteen appeared on the horizon, the whole girls, tits and shagging issue began to consume us all, that first summer, out there on the grass at the sports centre.
We’d all been wankers for years, of course. Two or three or maybe even four years, some of us. Ben was a real wanker, professional standard. Some boys lied and said they didn’t, and at the time I even believed them, but looking back on it, they must have been, mustn’t they? Or else it would just be shooting out in their sleep. But Ben didn’t lie about it. On the contrary, he was proud of his wanking prowess. He’d go on about it constantly.
How many times a week or even a day, how long he managed to hold it in, how quickly he managed to get it out. No one was really asking him about it, but he didn’t care. Once, as a kind of trophy, he brought his own spunk to school, in one of those plastic canisters rolls of film come in. It backfired, however, because instead of being impressed, everyone just thought it was hilarious and teased him, saying that his dad had wanked him off in the back of his taxi. Christ, he got grumpy about that one.
Me, I was a wanker too, of course. Not nearly on the scale of Ben, no one was, but, yeah, I was doing it. Usually in the bath. I mean, sometimes I’d do it and sometimes I wouldn’t. It wasn’t as if I just couldn’t help myself. And actually, though I did want to see a girl naked, I didn’t have that much of a desire to have sex with one. Well, I did in a way, but that’s because I knew I’d soon be expected to. But I didn’t have an urge to do it for its own sake, if you see what I mean. Maybe the
whole social pressure blocked out the physical aspect of it. Having said that, on balance, I would say I am, overall, a tit man. Yeah, I like tits.
With all this in mind, our main objective for that summer was to get girls and go as far as we could with them. Unfortunately, for the most part, we were naive enough to think that you had to go out with them before you could do anything. That probably hindered our progress a bit. But still, we attracted a lot of attention out there that summer. Word got around and girls would actually come to us. We were pretty good-looking for the most part and pretty cool, so why not? Like I said, I had two girlfriends that summer, and got to kiss both of them with tongues. Now, this was OK, because none of the other boys ever boasted of anything more than a feel of tit through clothing. Well, they did, but no one believed them. And besides, some boys – like Ben, most of the denim jacket lot except me and a couple of others, in fact – never got lucky at all, so two girlfriends meant I was safe. For the time being.
But the truth was that everyone would escape serious ridicule as long as Thomas Depper had yet to announce that he’d done it. He’d never actually said that he hadn’t done it, and he liked to keep an air of mystery about it all, but it was a fair bet that if he hadn’t said he’d done it, he hadn’t. He had a few girlfriends too that summer, and he was the first of us who worked out you could get off with girls without actually going out with them. That they really didn’t mind. Liked it even. He got his tongue down the throat of a couple of girls other boys had their eye on, which pissed them off a bit, but they weren’t going to say anything. Like mine, his relationships seemed to last about a fortnight, but back then a fortnight was a lifetime. Girls would usually break it off first, giving some deep complex reason they’d got off the telly. But we were never that sad about it. It just meant we were free to go after another girl who might actually let us cop a decent feel.
Flying Saucer Rock & Roll Page 8