I go to my studio every day and sing along with the exercise tape Sandra has given me. Up and down scales I go, that’s all I want to do. Not songs, just work the muscle that is my voice. Even though I’m on my own I don’t sing very loud, I stand with my back pressed against the white wall and make a tiny sound. Each day I make myself step further away from the wall until I have the confidence to stand in the middle of the room and project my voice all the way across, no longer caring if anyone is in the studio downstairs or what they think of me. I remember back to my squat in Davis Road, to the neighbours telling me to stop playing guitar, that it was unbearable to listen to, and how I got better, used my idiosyncrasies, made a great album. If I could turn my guitar playing around back then, surely I can turn my voice around now.
With new Fender Telecoustic
20 A MATTER OF DEATH AND LIFE
2008
What has to die in your life for what you are creating to be born?
Deepak Chopra
Midnight. I get out of the car and look up at the full moon. I feel so isolated and lonely that I talk out loud to it. ‘All right, Moon? Who else are you shining on? Anyone like me? Someone who might love me one day? Someone I’ll love?’
I lug my guitar up the path, past the spiky plants. During the day my daughter and I play around in the garden, running in and out of the bushes pretending they’re monsters, but at night they can do serious damage to your eyes or face as they claw at you in the dark. I can hear the sea crashing relentlessly on the shingle beach.
The reason I’m walking up the path to my house at midnight with a guitar is that twice a week I drive three hours to a random pub and three hours back home again, to play two of my songs in public. I spend all my spare moments in the days leading up to one of these open-mike nights choosing the two songs I’ll play. Which ones can I play best? Which ones did I do last week? Which one first and which one second? When I’ve made my choice, I practise the two songs over and over again for days.
Before I leave the house, I always make sure my daughter and husband are fed, that she’s put to bed and I’ve done the washing up. My husband is furious that I’m going out and thinks of more jobs I have to do before I leave. I do them, but eventually I pick up my guitar and make a break for it.
Ruby, don’t take your guitar to town.
During the long journey to the pub, I try to warm up my voice. The voice I have absolutely no confidence in. The voice I’ve been embarrassed about since I was a child – hating it so much that when I had to read a passage from the Bible out loud in assembly in the last year of primary school, I couldn’t do it. I just stood there, my body paralysed, my hands gripping the lectern, my mouth opening and closing like a dying guppy, thinking, I can’t let them hear my voice, it’s so deep and ugly, like a boy’s. I was frozen with fear. Eventually a kind teacher led me away.
The next time I dared use my voice was in the Slits – ‘punk’ was supposed to be open-minded and DIY but it was actually rigid and unforgiving and Ari was always very critical of our voices.
Driving along the coast road, singing along to the exercise tape, my voice sounds reedy and thin, sharp or flat, god knows which. I practise the lyrics, trying to memorise them, I think it looks terrible to have a sheet of paper in front of you when you sing. How is anyone going to believe you when you’re reading from a script?
I steer the Audi into the car park of an ugly pebble-dashed building and manoeuvre into a space, turn off the engine and sit back in my seat. Do I really want to do this? It’s not too late. I can turn the engine back on, reverse out of this place and drive home. I don’t have to put myself through the humiliation. But for some reason, I do have to. It’s like I’ve been taken over by an alien: I have no say in the matter. I get out, pull my guitar case out of the boot, put it on my back and walk mechanically up to the saloon-bar door. Inside my chest I have a heavy, bruised, sick feeling, like I’m going to the gallows.
I sit on my own at a sturdy dark brown wooden table, with a glass of mineral water on a beer mat in front of me, and my foot on the guitar case so nobody nicks my guitar. I think about Vincent, how he’s probably swanning around in Cannes or at the Chateau Marmont in LA. The bar’s half empty, a couple of older guys with expensive guitars sit strumming in the shadows. A tall skinny man with a grey ponytail leans against the bar blowing some blues riffs out of his harmonica: they’ve obviously all been playing for years. I study the sticky orange-and-brown patterned carpet, so I don’t catch anyone’s eye.
I make numerous trips to the bathroom and wash my hands over and over again because they’re sweaty with nerves. I look into the mirror and a nice, decent woman looks back, clean hair, lipstick, jeans, T-shirt. Middle-class. What the fuck is she doing in this godforsaken place with an electric guitar? Why isn’t she at home with her husband and child, watching TV? Vacuuming? Tidying up?
I hear my name announced and run back into the pub lounge, grab my Squier (the Telecoustic’s not very good live) and step up onto the small stage in the corner of the room. The MC tries to be helpful. ‘You a folk singer, love? Joni Mitchell, that sort of thing? This is where you plug in. Do you know how to use a mike? Have you turned the volume up on your guitar? It sounds a bit too trebly, here, let me turn the treble down a bit for you.’ He leans over and twiddles the knob on my guitar. I let him. My hands are shaking so badly that everyone can see.
I start to play. There are no monitors, the speakers are pointing away from me. I can’t hear what I’m singing but I can hear what I’m playing from the amp directly behind me, and it’s terrible. I’m embarrassingly awful. I am shit. But the songs are good. I know I’m crap, but I know the songs are good. And I have to get them out there somehow. They are little creatures clamouring to be heard. I’m compelled to do this. Beyond logic, beyond failure, beyond self-consciousness. There’s an older lady with a tatty woollen bobble hat on, leaning on the bar, staring into her whisky. She doesn’t look up. The guy with the ponytail smirks with his friends. There’s always someone laughing, sniggering, tutting. I shake with passion as the songs pour out. I make loads of mistakes, I sing wildly out of tune, I can’t look up from my fingers or I will miss the guitar strings. Every second is excruciating for me and for the audience. Six minutes later it’s all over. The compère jumps up and asks for applause for Viviane. He says kindly that it takes a lot of guts to get up and perform your own songs, that at least I’m not doing what everyone else does and playing cover versions. I unplug the guitar and walk through the tables to my seat. No one looks at me.
Something strange starts happening as I keep playing the open mike circuit. At every pub one or two people come up to me as I’m leaving – a fisherman, a farmer, the barman, another musician, a cool-looking girl – and say, ‘You know what? You really touched me. I know what you meant with those words. You’re the best thing I’ve seen in here.’ And once, out in the middle of nowhere, ‘You ever heard of a band called the Slits? You remind me of them.’ These people help me to keep going. They see past my incompetence to the honesty of the material.
I reach the front door to my house and fumble about in my bag, looking for my keys. The outside lights are turned off. All the lights in the house are turned off too, my husband’s gone to bed. Once inside I don’t dare turn on a light, I feel so guilty and wrong for what I’m doing that I’m as quiet as possible. I clean my teeth in the kitchen because the electric toothbrush is too noisy. I undress in darkness by the side of our bed and slide in. I try not to think about the humiliation that I’ve just suffered performing to a bunch of guys who can play the blues. I’d love to sit up with a cup of herbal tea and a piece of toast and chat and laugh about my experiences with my husband but he’s pretending to be asleep. I feel so lonely lying next to him, in this beautiful white house.
The blackness outside the windows stretches away into infinity. Not even an owl hoots. The weight of the silence is suffocating. The marriage is suffocating. Sadness and shock press down on my c
hest. We’ve been together for seventeen years. We’ve been through so much. We’ve been faithful to each other. We’ve always had a good sex life. We were so very much in love. But here we are, like two little children cold and lost in the woods, curled up, facing away from each other, blaming each other, and making our lifelong fears of abandonment come true.
21 THE NEW SLITS
2008
All I want to be able to do is sing and play three songs to a consistent standard and never drop below it, no matter how tired I am or how bad the PA is. At the moment I veer between passable and absolutely atrocious and this aspiration seems unattainable to me.
Nelson has to get on with his own life, he can’t keep coming to open mikes with me, but the thought of going to these pubs on my own twice a week is terrifying. For a lone female to walk into a pub – truck stop-type places some of them – in the middle of nowhere is a pretty daunting thing to do, but to stand up and play and sing your own bonkers songs, when everyone else is doing covers of ‘Chasing Cars’, is beyond brave, it’s madness. To make sure I don’t give up and because she believes in me, my friend Traci gets the train from London every time I play. I pick her up at Brighton, Hastings or whichever station is near the pub I’m going to that night, and she sits with me before I go on and giggles with me once I’ve come off. She’s a true friend.
I’m getting bolder, trying out different songs, talking to the audience, making jokes. When I play at a pub in Lewes in East Sussex, a guy called Tom Muggeridge comes up to me afterwards and says he really likes my songs, will I play at a festival he’s organising at Lewes Arts Lab in a couple of months’ time? My first gig. I get a band together with Tom on bass and a drummer and violinist from Brighton that I’ve met on my travels. We rehearse a couple of times in a warehouse. A few things go wrong on the night, but it’s a huge step forward and a thought pops into my mind as I’m up on stage: I’m the singer. I’ve made that transition from guitarist to front person, a massive leap for anyone in a band; if you start on an instrument, you never quite believe you’ve got what it takes to be the front person.
I don’t take shit any more when I play. One night in front of a crowd of braying ponytailed old rockers I shout, ‘Anyone here ever taken heroin? Made a record?’ There’s a stunned silence. ‘Well I have, so shut the fuck up or go home and polish your guitar.’ (They all had perfect, mint-condition guitars that you just know were only taken out of their cases once a week, polished and then put back to bed.) This time I don’t take the inevitable ‘too much treble’ comment from the compère. ‘It’s meant to be uncomfortable,’ I tell him and turn the treble up even more; I hope it hurts their ears. I begin to enjoy the tension between what the audience expects from a nice-looking woman and what they get – angry words and edgy guitar playing.
After a year and a half of playing open mikes, I’m in a large soulless modern pub in Brighton with an outside barbecue and a cocktail bar. I pour my heart out in my first song but no one takes any notice, they talk and laugh and shout. I’ve had enough; what I do doesn’t work as background music. I change the words of my next song to ‘Fuck, bollocks, cunt, shit, piss, wank’ – and every other swear word I can think of – and repeat them over and over again until eventually the whole room goes quiet. When I have their attention I say, ‘Thank you and goodnight.’ That’s the last open mike I play.
The New Slits gig is looming, I’m not nervous; what I’ve been doing in pubs for the last year, with a handful of people two inches from my face, playing my own material solo, is much more frightening than being on stage with a band. We go to Spain. It’s such good fun to be with Ari and Tessa again, and to have the camaraderie of a band. When we arrive at the hotel, we all hang out in one room, lounging across the beds and talking. There’s no group of women in the world that I have ever felt more completely at one with than Ari, Tessa and Palmolive (I wish Palmolive was here in the hotel room now), not just because of our shared history, but because we are all the same kind of woman. Ari talks about the trouble she’s having in Jamaica, how there’s a rumour going around Kingston that she’s a CIA spy and because some people believe it, they’re out to kill her. I don’t know how she can bear the amount of pressure she is constantly under, and has been under since she was fourteen, all for looking a bit different and doing her own thing without compromising. She asks me to look at a lump on her breast, says it’s been there for about a year. She knows I’ve had cancer and hopes I can give her some advice and reassurance. I touch it lightly, it’s pretty big, the size of an almond. I have no idea if it’s just a cyst or if it’s a tumour; I tell her she must go to a doctor as soon as we get back to England. She says she doesn’t like England, she’ll have it looked at in Jamaica.
At the venue we have a big dressing room, food is provided and there are monitors on the stage so we can hear ourselves, it’s all such a luxury to me. I love playing with the other musicians, I feel so much safer than I do when I’m solo. I feel a bit uncomfortable playing the songs though. The original Slits songs – although they stand the test of time musically – don’t resonate with me emotionally any more, not now I’m doing my own stuff. And the new songs, which are Jamaican-dancehall influenced, don’t resonate with me musically, even though they are really good. I can’t relate to the songs as a player, I’d rather be in the audience dancing to them and having a good time.
The next New Slits show is in Manchester. I take my daughter out of school so she can attend the concert, and I only need to look down from the stage at her in the front row, her eyes fixed on me with a look of such glowing pride, to know that I’ve done the right thing by her. If a mother or father ever gets to see such a look, just once in their lives, on their child’s face, they’ve as good as discovered the Holy Grail. During a dub section in the show, I play a couple of dissonant, abstract chords over the rhythm, but Ari runs over and shouts at me, ‘Stop playing! Stop playing!’ She hates it.
On the way back to London that night I look out of the car window at the motorway flashing past and decide I’m not going to play any more shows with the New Slits: I want to do my own thing. My little girl is curled up asleep with her head on my lap, I stroke her hair, I feel such love for her. I remember back to my love of the Slits twenty-five years ago, how devastated I was when it ended. I was like a dumped lover, I grieved for years but eventually I healed and hardened – not without scarring – because I had to. Ari made it impossible for the group to stay together, then years later she came back, like so many deserting lovers do; but for me, the time to make it work was then, not now.
Trace
22 FALLING APART
2009
You’re not an artist, you’re a wanker.
My husband
Husband issues an ultimatum, Give up the music or that’s it. I tell him he’s not asking me to choose between music and marriage, but life and death. So there is no choice. He thinks that by playing music I’m abandoning my family, welching on the deal (a deal that exists in his mind – I do the house stuff, he earns the money). I’m just a wanking, self-indulgent narcissist, a bad mother and a disappointing wife. He sounds like my father, ‘Don’t do it, don’t talk about it. Never mention it again.’ Except he goes a step further with ‘You’re useless, too old and what you’re doing is a waste of time.’ One afternoon, when a friend asks who I would like to be able to sing like and I answer, ‘Karen Carpenter,’ Husband guffaws with derision, spraying a mouthful of coffee across the table.
The two most important men in my life want me to deny who I am. As if it’s shameful. I can imagine a century ago they would have said, If you don’t stop, I’ll commit you to a lunatic asylum.
I keep trying to paint what I’m doing in a good light to my daughter, but Husband is taking away all her enthusiasm by turning my passion into negativity. I believe without a shadow of a doubt that I’m a good role model for her. To see your mother sit down and learn an instrument from scratch, write songs, and eventually be up on stage singing
them is a fantastic lesson in making a dream come true. But my husband, who is ten years younger than me, is a child of the eighties and he doesn’t believe in hippy-dippy dreams coming true, he believes in earning money. I’m not making money. I may never make money doing this. He and I come from ideologically different times; I don’t judge him for that. He doesn’t want to support me financially or emotionally in this endeavour, I get that too.
I do something very unmotherly now, even though it feels as though I’m losing my daughter for the second time (the first time was after the cancer): I don’t stop concentrating on my music. I collect her from school, I make dinner, I put her to bed – I don’t tidy up, I don’t have time – I’m present most of the time physically, but not mentally. To make this huge step I have to immerse myself in my work. Just like all artists (wankers) have to immerse themselves in their work, just like Husband has immersed himself in his work for the past sixteen years. He’s stayed up all night figuring something out on the computer, sometimes for weeks on end. The difference is – and it’s a big difference – that he was earning money for the family. I’m not. I’m getting back on my feet and I’m contributing to the family in other ways, but what I’m doing right now can’t be measured in pounds and pence, and he’s a pounds and pence kind of guy. I liked that about him.
Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. Page 30