Flying Saucer Rock & Roll

by Richard Blandford

  ‘Really?’ I said, as if waking from a dream. ‘Who?’

  ‘Spencer Macleavy!’ said Ben. ‘Thomas tried him out and he said he’s really great!’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I said. That meant nothing to me any more.

  ‘We’re going to have a practice this Thursday night.’

  ‘Where?’ We couldn’t really go round Neil’s.

  ‘Oh, Spencer knows a place.’

  The place in question was a warehouse on the outskirts of town. It was pretty close to the one where Thomas’s dad worked, and not that far away from the social club. It was an even more depressing sight than that fucking place from the outside, as our dads dropped us off for that first rehearsal. Spencer had cadged a ride down with Thomas. He got out first to unlock the enormous doors of the warehouse. He stepped inside, and one after another a series of lights could be seen coming on through the reinforced windows. Just like in the old days, we began hulking the gear into the building, players and dads alike. Spencer just stood by the door as we hauled in the heavy amps and drums. Inside it was a symphony in brown and grey, boxes stacked everywhere, and not a shred of joy in the place. You could lose your soul working somewhere like this, I thought; it’s worse than the newsagents.

  We brought in the final piece of equipment, the big heavy bass amp. Spencer still hadn’t lifted a finger. He was now slouched in a corner, chuckling to himself. ‘That’s the good thing about being the singer,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to carry anything.’

  We should have taken that as a warning sign and told him to fuck off. But we didn’t. Instead, we went ahead with the practice. In fact, we set up the mike for him and everything. Just that day, we’d managed to get our old mike off Neil, who had been looking after it during his tenure in the band. It wasn’t easy, as he’d goaded Ben into an argument over Jimi Hendrix being gay just before he eventually agreed to go home and fetch it for the next period, but we did it.

  After the usual twenty minutes of faffing about from Jase on the drum kit, Spencer finally got up from his crouching position and in a brief moment of calm asked, ‘All right, what are we gonna do, then?’

  What were we going to do? The old stuff? Neil’s songs? That felt very, very wrong to me, like desecrating a grave.

  ‘We haven’t written anything yet,’ said Thomas.

  ‘We just jam,’ said Ben.

  ‘What about my stuff?’ said Jase. ‘“Soul in Torment” anybody?’

  We all pretended we hadn’t heard him.

  ‘Do you know any Pistols?’ said Spencer.

  ‘Nah, not really,’ said Thomas.

  ‘Well, do you know “Johnny B. Goode”?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We can do that, but we’ll do it the Pistols way.’

  And we did. Well, we just played it the way we always played it, but Spencer sang it in a Johnny Rotten whine, complete with a word-perfect recreation of the can’t-be-arsed ad-libs that Rotten had come up with sixteen years earlier.

  We did that for what seemed like for ever. Then we just played some awful sludge that we made up on the spot, with Spencer whining vaguely anaxchic things over the top, like ‘Never trust a hippy!’ or ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated!’ or, most weirdly, ‘Love is two minutes and fifty-two seconds of squelching noises!’ It was awful really.

  But for some reason we kept coming back for more. Every week we wouldn’t know what to play. We’d suggest stuff to Spencer, but he’d shoot it down because whatever it was, he’d always say it was a love song, and there wasn’t room for love in Spencer’s musical world, just hate. Then Spencer would suggest something which fitted into his rather bleak world view, and he’d do it like he was Johnny Rotten. Invariably it would turn out there was a Sex Pistols version of that song already. Then we’d jam for a bit and more old punk slogans would have the cobwebs blown off them and turned into some excuse for lyrics, until it was time to go home, which got earlier and earlier every week.

  I hated every minute. I think we all did. It was as if we were putting ourselves through it as some sort of purgatory. Maybe if we did this, we thought, or at least I did, a little bit, we’d feel less bad about what had happened before. It didn’t work.

  By the fourth or fifth week, we’d accepted the inevitable and were working out the chords of Sex Pistols songs at home. Don’t get me wrong, I quite like the Sex Pistols, did even then, but I didn’t like them that much. I didn’t like them so much I wanted to play in what had become in effect a Sex Pistols tribute band. But still, that’s what we did, and come December, we had most of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols pretty much down, along with some non-album B-sides and the out-takes found on The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle soundtrack.

  We’d look forward to each rehearsal with less and less enthusiasm, knowing that we were demeaning ourselves, and knowing that we had once been part of something a lot more special. ‘I wish we were still playing with Neil,’ said Jase finally in the smoking shed one lunchtime.

  None of us could stand Spencer. Not only was he lazy, unimaginative and a total parasite, constantly cadging fags, lifts and lager off people, without ever providing anything in return, but he wasn’t even good company. One week, he pissed nearly all of us off when we were having a five-minute break between recreating side one and side two of Never Mind the Bollocks. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘what do your dads do?’

  He looked at me first. ‘Uh, he works for an insurance company,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, thought so,’ he said, ‘middle class. Bourgeois. You’ll be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.’

  ‘Cheers,’ I said.

  ‘What about you, Ben?’

  ‘He’s a taxi driver,’ said Ben.

  ‘Good man,’ said Spencer. ‘Good working-class occupation. Real proper job.’

  ‘Hang about!’ I said. ‘His dad earns far more than mine does! Ben doesn’t even have to go out to work! I do!’

  ‘Bloody right, he shouldn’t go to work,’ said Spencer. ‘Working’s for tossers.’

  ‘But you just said that it was great that his dad was a taxi driver. You can’t have it both ways!’

  ‘I fucking well can,’ he said. ‘Taxi drivers are fantastic, but compared to people who don’t work, they’re tossers. The under-class, mate, that’s where it’s all going to happen.’

  By the end of the conversation it was established that Jase and I didn’t deserve to live, but that after the revolution Ben and Thomas would be treated like royalty because their dads were manual labourers. Not that Thomas’s dad was really, but he worked in the vicinity of some heavy boxes, so that made him OK. Compared to Spencer’s, Neil’s arguments actually seemed to make sense.

  I think the final straw came when Spencer wanted us to learn ‘Friggin’ in the Riggin’’, some dirty comedy song the Sex Pistols did after Johnny Rotten had left. Me and Ben listened to the tape Spencer had done us round Ben’s house one afternoon. It had to end.

  Not long after that, in the final week before the Christmas holidays, me, Thomas and Jase walked down Birch Tree Avenue, the distinctly suburban-looking street where Spencer lived with his mum and dad and sister, in a large four-bedroom house with garage and sizeable front and back gardens. We made our way up the long, winding path through the front lawn and between the gnomes, into the porch and to the front door. I pressed the doorbell, and it played ‘Greensleeves’. A balding man in a red V-neck jumper, shirt and tie opened the door.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he said, as if he was a butler or something.

  ‘Could we speak to Spencer, please?’

  ‘Just a moment.’

  He trudged upstairs. ‘Spencer? Spencer?” he called, the plum in his mouth almost getting in the way of his words. ‘There are some young men to see you.’

  The sound of bondage trousers clinking made its way down the stairs, closely followed by Spencer himself.

  ‘Hi, guys,’ he said, ‘what’s happening?’

  For so
me reason, I was the spokesman. Pissed me off a bit. Especially as Ben didn’t even bother showing.

  ‘Spencer,’ I said, ‘well, there’s no easy way for me to say this, so I’m just going to say it. We don’t want to be in a band with you any more. Sorry.’

  Suddenly Spencer was a five-year-old boy looking back at us. His eyes went watery. ‘Merry fucking Christmas,’ he blubbed, and slammed the door.

  3

  By the following September, we had played our first gig, as just the four of us. A lot had happened in that year, mostly involving our cocks. Thomas had broken up with Jenny, then got back together again, then broken up, and got back together, and so on, several times. Usually the pattern would be that one of them would declare the relationship finished because they were pissed off with the other one, then Jenny would immediately be seen out with another guy, usually someone several years older, which is quite creepy looking back on it now, then go out of her way to stick her tongue down his throat in public, and let him shag her senseless for a fortnight, even up the arse on a couple of occasions, rumour has it. Then she’d get back together with Thomas, until the next crisis, and they’d have loud make-up sex for a week. People said you could hear her in the street, but I don’t know if that’s true. Her dad’s liberal policy on letting her have boyfriends stay over must have been stretched to the limit, though. Poor guy. That must mess with your head, listening to that.

  Jase always had loads of girls. Some he went out with, some he just shagged on the floor of the bathroom at parties. And I’d finally done it. For ages, I’d almost lost interest I’d already seen sixteen come and go while still a virgin. But it didn’t bother me that much because there were loads of kids who still hadn’t lost it by the time they were seventeen and they were OK, they weren’t mongers. They were just a little more comfortable in themselves and had less to prove. Eighteen, though, that was just sad. But merely the thought of it brought back the bitter, sick taste of the summer, and, I don’t know, I think it was having to see Neil all the time, it was as if he was haunting me. I just couldn’t put my mind to it. Then sometime after my seventeenth birthday, I must have thought, fuck Neil. I mean, not fuck Neil, obviously, but forget about Neil. And fuck someone else.

  It was on a Venture Scouts camping weekend. Those things are meant to be about orienteering and stuff, but really they’re just an excuse for teenagers to shag in tents. They’re affiliated with churches and everything. Someone needs to tell the vicar, I think. It was with a girl called Kelly. I could have done better, I suppose, but I knew she was dirty. There was a story going round about how she had refereed a speed-wanking competition in a tent one night with three of the boys, not even cool boys, three mongers really. They were nearly at the finish line when she just started sucking one of them off and swallowed it! Then she did another one, but the poor last guy got too excited and just sprayed the tent wall with a big jet of his cum. That’s the story, anyway.

  So one night, after we’d downed cider round the campfire, I started getting off with Kelly and we went into her tent and we did it. It wasn’t that nice, partly because I was too desensitised from the alcohol to really feel anything, and the only noise she made was a single low grunt, but I definitely did it, it was definitely inside, pumping away, shrink-wrapped in a borrowed condom. Then I could feel the warm sensation of coming, and I just thought, ‘Thank fucking Christ for that.’ The next morning, when I came out of the tent, everybody was waiting, and gave me a big round of applause. I’d even had witnesses to verify this momentous occasion.

  The ironic thing was, a few weeks later I met Caroline, so I could easily have lost it to someone I actually cared about. Ah well, you can’t get too sad about that sort of thing. Meanwhile Ben wasn’t shagging anybody, even though he’d say he’d done it loads of times. He just couldn’t name names. He got a snog, though, I remember that.

  And it was probably our collective sexual adventures that finally got us over our phobia of singing, and our bizarre idea that it was in some way an inherently homosexual thing to be doing. Thomas and Jase had been writing songs together, and when they called me and Ben round one afternoon to hear them, it was quite a surprise to hear them not just play them, but sing them. And not just that, their singing wasn’t bad. Soon we were all in on the act, first me, and then Ben, who due to his lack of experience was probably the most worried that singing might reveal his latent homosexuality. But he needn’t have worried, because Ben was the best singer of the lot of us, and his voice was very manly.

  We’d found a new place to practise, some garage somewhere, and we had to pay for it, but we all had jobs except for Ben, who got wads of pocket money anyway. And we’d go there once a week, and we’d play. We only had the one mike and no PA, so we couldn’t do harmonies or anything, but we’d share the vocals between us, putting them through a guitar amp like we did with Neil. Even Jase sang while he played the drums. Ben was definitely the best singer, though. We’d have given him all the songs to sing if he didn’t grumble so much about having to do it. But he liked it secretly, I’m sure.

  Anyway, we’d been playing together steadily for a good few months throughout the spring, when Jase got talking to some guy behind the bar at the Falcon. The Falcon was the main student pub in Sholeham. We used to go there every Friday. We didn’t always get served, but sometimes we did, depending on who was behind the bar. If it was this guy Gerald, some university student, I think, then we always would, unless the landlord was lurking about. So Jase was talking to Gerald, and telling him about the band, and Gerald said we should play at the Falcon as they’d just got a live music licence. And suddenly we had a gig.

  We needed to get a set together. We were meant to play for an hour and a half because there was no support or anything, and there was no way we could fill that, so we just planned to play the same forty-five minutes of music twice. A lot of the songs we prepared were covers, which was right for a pub because you don’t want too much unfamiliar material. Did a few REM songs, a bit of Crowded House, I think, some Jimi Hendrix, which sounded great with Ben singing in his gruff voice and playing lead at the same time, just like Jimi did. Our own stuff was quite fast, so we didn’t think people would have that much of a problem with it. One song we were particularly hopeful for was called ‘The Age of Teenage Hysteria’. ‘We turn the page, enter the stage, feeling the rage, into the age of teenage hysteria,’ was the hook line. I think it might have been about the youth club, or the bonnie. Probably the best song we ever did, after Neil left. It sounded quite like the Undertones, looking back on it.

  So we played the gig. And it was fine. We called ourselves the Honey Trap. We’d have that name for the next four years. None of us knew what it meant. Jase had heard the phrase on TV and liked the sound of it. We weren’t nearly as nervous as before, I think because we really believed that our stuff was good. I mean, we all liked it. And it was easy to like. It was well played, and the singing was good. And people did like it. OK, we packed it out with our fxiends and our girlfriends and everything, but the locals in the pub liked it too, people who didn’t know who we were. Even Jenny approved. She made some snide remarks about Neil, pretty much along the lines of how much better we were without him. I think she’d got things the way she’d always wanted them. Yeah, the gig went very well, a lot better than you would imagine for a first gig – well, first gig proper, anyway. There was one weird thing, though. During the second half of the set, or the second time we played the one set we had, whichever way you want to look at it, I was looking out, and you couldn’t really see much except the bar, and there were quite a few people in the room, but I could have sworn I saw Neil at the back, standing by the stairs. He was just looking at us. He wasn’t with anyone or anything. And then when I looked again, I couldn’t see him. Once we’d finished I did a quick scout around the pub, but he wasn’t anywhere. I asked a few people if they’d seen him, they all said no, except for Damien. I could talk to him now, I didn’t give a shit about Hannah. Nobod
y saw her any more anyway. But Damien said he thought he’d seen Neil, but hadn’t had a chance to speak to him, and that was all. It was as if he’d appeared and disappeared like a ghost. I never thought to mention it to Neil when I saw him next, but it really did look like he was there.

  4

  And then, nothing happened. Or if anything happened, it was just the same things happening over and over again, which is only slightly better. But in the long run, it all adds up to a big load of nothing, pretty much. At least that’s how it feels looking back on it. I mean, obviously stuff happened, stuff always happens. But as we waded through all that little everyday stuff – the exams, the jobs, the relationships, the living – slowly, step by step, we screwed up.

  It started out all right at first. It seemed to, anyway. We got asked back to play the Falcon a lot, and by the time we were finishing our A-levels, coming to see us play there was a bit of a social event for the college kids. We had quite a few songs now, some of them pretty good. We always went down well, and Ben even finally got to do it. With a girl, I mean. He was going on about it for days afterwards, which was funny because he was meant to have done it loads of times already, so it shouldn’t have been that much of an event.

  And I’d met Caroline. Friend of a friend, not even at college. Worked in a shop, selling pens, nice ones, not biros. She was about a year older than me, and I wouldn’t say she was what I consider my type. Thin, not that stylish, not very well stacked. Not like the little doll girls with tits I’d gone for before. But I think that was why she made me feel good. I knew that she’d never take me to the dark place that going out with Hannah had led me to. She was a grown-up. Strong emotionally. Comforting. Comfortable.

  I don’t know, maybe I loved her back then. I probably did. But as time went on, she was always just there, and nothing seemed to happen to us. Things would never develop. Every day was pretty much the same. I’d go round hers week nights. She’d come round to see me at my parents’ at the weekend. Of course, we’d do things like go on holiday to Cornwall and stuff. And we’d hang out with friends down the pub and we’d go to a rock club every fortnight or so. But it didn’t take us long to get settled into our routine, and we were doing it for nearly four years. Only the band, and the vague notion that I was meant to be trying to get somewhere with it, stopped us from discussing seriously in those four years whether we should be having kids.