by James Young
We stopped at the lights on Princess Park Way.
‘Will you just look at that?’ Demetrius tutted in commiseration and pointed to a twisted, crippled figure standing by the kerb.
The figure began to jerk and twist himself across the road, twitching and grimacing. His chin was tucked to one side and his right arm kept making a peculiar, arc-like, bowing motion.
‘What right have we to self-pity …’ asked Demetrius as the cripple dragged himself past our car, ‘ … when there are poor suffering bastards like that in our very midst, wandering and lost?’
‘Yeh,’ said Echo, opening his one good eye to review the pitiful tableau, ‘ … an’ I’ve got ’is violin.’
March–April ’82:
CHILDREN OF THE POPPY
Echo had an itch. He scratched his arm until the skin was red and raw and his crown of thorns tattoo seemed to weep blood.
We were outside his place, blocking the pavement with old black flight-cases.
‘So Jim – Jimmy – James … ’ow come yer packin yer axe, as they say, in this neck o’ the woods? I wouldn’t have thought rock’n’roll was exactly your button, old bean.’
‘Job,’ I said. ‘I need a job.’
‘I thought they decided on’oo wuz the Sons of Learnin’ an’ ’oo wuz the Children of Toil first day of infants school.’
‘Then we’re doomed,’ I said.
He sniffed, his raw amphetamine-eroded nostrils flaring slightly. ‘Can’t see the attraction for yer.’ He nodded at the clapped-out van and the flight-cases with the fading names of long-defunct groups stencilled in grey on the side.
A major pop group might employ a fleet of fierce articulated trucks loaded with lighting, sound equipment, stage sets, wardrobe, merchandising, even a few instruments – indeed the whole panoply of hardware that goes with the raw vitality of the people’s music. Ours was a small affair. The glamour went no further than Nico.
Quite how Demetrius had managed to persuade her that it was necessary she perform with a group, I couldn’t work out. But none of us would have been going anywhere if it were not for his persistence and her gullibility. Without us she would be able to travel in comfort and earn more money. It didn’t make sense.
‘She’s not so thick as yer think, Jim – Jimmy. Don’t forget, she’s got the songs – what’ve you got?’
Perhaps Nico knew she was better when she sang alone. Maybe she wanted the spotlight to ease up on her for a while. Who could tell? She seemed so knowing and so credulous at the same time that it permanently wrong-footed you. You never knew where she was or where you stood in relation to her. Most of the time she disdained even to speak so there was no point trying to figure it out. We were here, that was all. The job was to load up this Mister Whippy van with Echo’s broken-down junk and pretend to be something.
Demetrius must have got the truck from someone who owed him one. The seats were the kind of thing you get on public transport, the bare minimum in terms of comfort. Plastic and metal. No head-rests. We had to travel two thousand miles there and back in this. Nico hadn’t seen it yet; I just knew she was going to tear into Demetrius when she clapped eyes on it. The mind that child warning was still visible beneath the thin coat of pale blue paint. On the side was written, in lean-to letters to suggest velocity, ‘r & o van hire salford’. The suspension sank with an ominous jolt each time we threw a case in the back.
After five minutes we stopped for another fag.
‘But yer must’ave some ulterior motive for climbin’ aboard The Good Ship Nico? Lemmesee … it’s not the rock’n’roll cos yer know too many chords, an’ it can’t be the drugs cos yer’ve always got yer train fare’ome …’
‘It must be the sex then.’
‘Good grief … yer can’t be serious. Sex? This is a junkie group. Yer do this when yer can’t do anythin’ else.’
‘Then we’re both free to pursue our separate interests,’ I concluded.
Toby struggled up the path putting all his weight behind the massive flight-case that housed his drum kit. Echo and I watched him anxiously.
‘Don’t just fookin’ stare … give us a bit of shoulder.’
We shoved the reluctant crate up Echo’s garden path, the silly little castors getting stuck in every dip and hollow. Finally we reached the back of the truck. We needed a ramp. The thing was impossible to lift. We needed proper men.
Demetrius appeared. ‘The shape of the legs is unimportant – but a finely turned ankle, that’s the thing, n’est-ce pas, gentle-men?’ He was towing an overstuffed leatherette suitcase on runners with a stick attachment – the kind of thing old ladies have. Under his right arm he carried a Bullworker. He dropped the Bullworker onto Toby’s flight-case and parked his suitcase alongside.
‘It’s somehow deeply satisfying to see the working classes lathering up a good sweat. Like shire horses. I exempt you of course from this, James, though for some unaccountable reason you wish to align yourself with the lower orders.’ He sniffed his Vick inhaler. ‘Breasts and buttocks for them, eh?’ He nodded at Toby and Echo. ‘But the ankle, the asterisk, the footnote to the sonnet that is woman …’
‘Get that fookin’ bag of shag-mags an’ dirty drawers away from my gear … Now!’ Echo snapped.
‘You want to know why you people will never be anything?’ said Demetrius, snatching his bag. ‘Can’t take a joke.’
‘Want ter know why yer’ll always’ave dirty underwear?’ said Echo, ‘’Cos yer shit yerself when someone looks yer in the eye.’
The stand-off was broken only when Mercy, Echo’s youngest, came up to us. She was about seven. Beautiful. Skin a soft golden colour. She was carrying a bunch of lily-of-the-valley, which she gave to Toby.
‘Thank you, my little dear.’ Toby bent down and kissed her on the forehead.
There was something other-worldly about the child, but anyone who spent their days playing among gravestones would be that way. She had power. The little girl could even subdue Demetrius, and he was an angry mountain in whose shadows the natives trembled. Or so he liked to think.
After we’d finished Toby, Echo and myself stared at the van, loaded to the gunwhales with crap. Demetrius was indoors being fed by Echo’s wife.
‘The suspension’s gone – before Faticus Omnivorus has even sat in it,’ Echo sneered.
We crawled across town, Demetrius at the wheel. We had to pick up Nico and Raincoat the sound engineer. Echo kept his head down and his hat over his face, so none of his friends would recognise him.
The van chugged into Sunnyview Crescent. Echo grabbed Toby’s lily-of-the-valley and hopped out. ‘I’ll get her.’
‘Creep!’ said Demetrius.
We waited.
‘Purra tape on,’ said Toby.
Demetrius rattled through the pile in the glove-compartment. None of them had names or titles. How was anyone supposed to know? He chose one of his own: A Golden Hour of Conway Twitty.
I began to feel nervous. Strangely, it had never really hit me before that we were illegal. I started to make a mental list of the possibilities: possession of controlled substances; dubious credit cards; unsafe vehicle; illegally parked; loitering. Not forgetting crimes against good taste.
They came out, Good Queen Bess and Raleigh. Echo was staggering in front, carrying the harmonium like a relic of state. Nico had on a pair of aviator shades. It wasn’t sunny and she wasn’t smiling. She reached the gate and stared expressionlessly at the van, then looked back at Echo and shook her head.
Echo staggered, shell-shocked, in no-man’s-land, still cradling the harmonium. He looked at her and he looked at the van, then turned and followed Nico back to the house. The door slammed shut.
Demetrius wasn’t ready for this. It was the first time he’d been out of the country since he was a kid. This was his chance to break the grip of a fear that had been holding him in for years. It wasn’t Nico. It wasn’t us. It certainly wasn’t the music. For him it really was an adventure. An adventure of
the heart. Like falling in love, it contained the same terror and exhilaration. No one was going to spoil his romance.
His fist pounded the dashboard. He looked over at the silent, shuttered house. ‘That malignant little earworm, he’s eaten into her soft mind already.’
He jumped out of the van, held on to his trilby, staggered a little at the hard shock of the ground, then straightened himself up for action. Manager/Parent/Suitor – this would test all three.
Echo drove us back to Demetrius’s office. This time we walked up as there was no ‘Dr’ Demetrius to command respect. Tommy the Lift just spat on the floor and swigged at the bottle of Jameson’s he kept under his stool.
The office was strangely full of activity. There was a guy on one phone talking to his record company. In the other room were two small women. One was pretty beneath the attitude armour. The other was pure testosterone. She might have made a good pitprop. They were both using the other phone, fixing up a show where they came in dressed entirely in animal entrails. It was some kind of statement. It was hard to find a good tune anywhere.
Cardboard boxes were stacked high. I looked inside one. It was full of unpromoted promo-singles for Pete Shelley’s “Tiller Boys”.
‘Why does he keep all this stuff?’ I asked.
The pretty one shrugged. The pitprop said, ‘We’re here to make essential calls. What are you here for?’
‘I honestly don’t know … I thought I was doing a tour of Italy with Nico. But I haven’t got further than Didsbury.’
‘Oh, you’ve joined the good Doctor’s sick list have you?’ The pretty one smirked to the other: ‘They all follow the Big Quack around, like ducks in a line.’
‘Quack,’ said pretty.
‘Quack. Quack,’ said pitprop.
Toby and Echo looked at me from the other room, puzzled.
It was clear this was no longer Demetrius’s office. Who were these people? I pulled Echo to one side.
‘Who are they?’ I asked.
‘People with careers,’ he said.
Flying was the only way to be in Italy on time. It had made the most sense all along, but Demetrius was in favour of terra firma.
Raincoat
His eyes blinked, like a lizard. He had a smile like a lizard, totally insincere … maybe he would eat you. He would be smiling at you, summing up your calorific value as you chatted to him, a juicy buzzing fly. He always agreed with you so you never knew what he was really thinking.
Demetrius wanted all his friends involved. Jobs for the boys. All the way down the line. And the line stretched round the block to where someone’s wallet was unaccountably £10 lighter, or someone else needed a runner for a couple of grams. That was where you’d find Raincoat.
But he was so charming. Truly charming. He’d been a ladies’ hairdresser after he left school. He knew what women wanted. He shared their confidences and he got to know their tricks of the trade. He was a professional flirt. He could make a woman feel really good, adored.
In this way he would attach himself to strong professional women who might be feeling insecure about their femininity after a hard day breaking balls in the boardroom. He kept house for a smart young Irishwoman who ran a theatre company. She knew what he was really about but there was a kind of unspoken truce between them so long as he hoovered the house, fixed the dinner, called the plumber and performed prolonged oral sex on her every Friday night. This he was happy to do. It was a small inconvenience for a rent-free existence.
I recognised him before we were introduced. His name had flitted like a ghost through conversations. Nico was continually asking after him, probably because he knew exactly where to find what she was always looking for. Toby had known him for years. Echo, though, was uneasy about him … he’d lent him a microphone a few months back. Raincoat had promised to return it but Echo knew it had been traded in for dope. Echo kept a strict inventory of the junk in his cupboard. ‘Whenever I look at ’im, I don’t jus’ see a second’and Sinatra, I see the microphone on a stand.’
Raincoat was standing by the check-in desk at Ringway Airport. ‘We’ll get high, starry eyed.’ Like Demetrius, he was fond of a trilby but this one fitted, and had a beautiful red feather in the band. He had on a brown Donegal tweed suit with a yellow-checkered waistcoat and had his raincoat slung over one shoulder. He looked like an Irish bookie with Mafia aspirations. He looked good. But he’d left his soul a little too long under the dryer back at Vidal Sassoon’s.
Raincoat, Toby and Echo were off the plane like a shot the minute the rear cabin opened. They mingled with the holidaymakers. Nico brushed past me as if I was a complete stranger, leaving behind her a wake of duty-free scent to baffle the ‘sneefer’ dogs. As I grabbed my hand luggage from the overhead locker a steward from Club Class tapped me. Would I follow him? ‘Snow’ clung to his uniform.
Club Class had been transformed into the Christmas Experience. ‘Snow’ everywhere … small fragments of white styrofoam that had burst free from a pillow Demetrius had chewed and then ripped apart as the aircraft tear-dropped over Milan airport. He cowered in the corner of the cabin like a trapped beast. The last pair of Euro-execs were disembarking: ‘Drogisti,’ said one to the other, brushing the snow off his Armani lapels.
Demetrius was babbling a psycho peptalk: ‘It’s a matter of centring … Locating the Axial Body Meridian … tapping into the Kundalini …’
He breathed in deeply, yogically, on his Vick. Somewhere in the middle of Dr Demetrius was a thin hippy desperately signalling to be let out.
The promoters stepped through the automatic sliding doors. A girl and two guys. The men looked tough, but it was only fashion-tough. Beneath the stubble quivered career anxiety, inside the leather pants was soft pasta flab. Their eyes scanned the arrival lounge. They seemed to look through us, past us, around us, but never directly at us.
Nico stood there, slightly apart, an extra on life’s battlefield, in her black rags. You could read them. After they’d eliminated all the other possibilities, could this be her? The Bag-Lady of Rock’n’Roll.
‘Neeeeee-co!’ The girl strode forward, grinning manically. ‘Here, in Italia, at last.’
‘Are we late?’ Maybe Nico was joking. Behind the shades nobody knew. She wanted to go directly to the hotel. The promoter wanted to take her to a press meeting.
Nico had other plans. Other needs. ‘I need to freshen up.’ She stomped off to the hotel in her motorbike boots, the straps of which she never bothered to buckle. With Nico, you always heard her spurs first.
The promoters quickly consulted each other. The girl ran after Nico.
The guys introduced themselves. ‘Benedetto.’ ‘Pasquale … and that is Titz, as everyone call her.’
Echo MC’d for us.
‘Is there no one more?’ Pasquale asked.
‘He’s following on a bit later,’ said Echo.
I whispered to Raincoat, ‘Don’t you think we should wait?’ He pretended not to hear.
‘We also need ter “freshen up”,’ suggested Echo.
‘Nico … she’s blonde, no?’ asked Pasquale as we sat in Milan’s thrombosis of traffic.
‘Nah,’ said Echo, ‘yer thinkin’ of the Beach Boys.’
‘In the photos, she’s blonde,’ insisted Pasquale.
‘What photos?’ asked Echo.
‘In the Factory weeeth Andee Waaarhol and Velvette Onnergroun’.’
‘Now I’m with yer … yer thinkin’ of Nico from the Velvet Underground. Bit of a mix-up … we’ve brought yer Narco from the London Underground.’
Raincoat tried to friendly things up in a weird Esperanto all his own. ‘Ah, La Bella Italia … Cappuccino … La Dolce Vita …’ He racked his brain.
Benedetto picked up on the latter. ‘Eh, La Dolce Vita … Federico Fellini … Nico participo in quel film.’
‘Nico – yeh,’ continued Raincoat, keeping up the cunnilingua. ‘Nico populario in Italia?’
‘Boh!’ Benedetto shrugged.
‘Anch’io,’ said Benedetto.
Back at the hotel, the boys ripped open the pick-up plate on Echo’s guitar and carved out the smack.
I fled to my room and laid out my pyjamas.
Demetrius installed himself in the Bridal Suite. Nico was aghast: ‘Does he think someone will ma-a-ary him? The way he was on the plane … like a looonatic.’
I was scared. How many times had I been on stage? I counted, on one hand … two Barmitzvahs and a free-jazz jerk in Leeds. Nico was due to play a club in the north of Milan called Odyssea. Echo explained that the further out of town the venue, the uglier it is. I never went to clubs. Too loud. Too many people. A sea of piss in the gents. Echo and Toby reassured me that this was normal – people who played music rarely went to hear the stuff.
Then there were the songs. I still couldn’t remember how they went and we only had to do seven. Toby said he’d nod to me every time I had to change chords. ‘That’ll impress the music critic of the Milan Bugle,’ said Echo.
The tour bus tumbril picked us up at the hotel. Pasquale was at the wheel. The show was seven hours away but already I felt the game was up.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Echo. ‘You don’t count, they’re only interested in Nico, they want ter touch Death in drag.’
Demetrius sat in the front passenger seat. He loved the big screen. He had to devour everything. He’d showered himself in bonhomie and the hotel’s complimentary aftershave.
‘Jesus, you smell like a hooker’s haaandbag!’ shouted Nico, pinching her nose.
Pasquale jerked the bus to a stop.
‘I say, steady on there, driver!’ shouted Raincoat, unloading the last squirt of a shot into his naked buttock.
Pasquale helped me carry my keyboard into the club: