DAILY MAIL
Anger Over Toten Herzen Misidentification
I am not a vampire, says Susan Buckley of Milton Keynes
A retired headmistress from Milton Keynes has expressed outrage after being wrongly identified as a member of the seventies rock band Toten Herzen. Sixty two year old Susan Buckley has seen her home become a campsite for the local press, goths, heavy metal fans and a devil worshipper from Italy.
The confusion began after Mrs Buckley was mistaken for the Toten Herzen guitarist Susan Bekker. A tip off to the Daily Mirror's Catch the Vampires campaign led to her detached home on the outskirts of Milton Keynes being besieged by dozens of people.
"They started turning up last Tuesday. I can only think someone must have tipped them off after I bought a cd in Sainsburys. If I was a vampire would I be shopping in Sainsburys at eleven in the morning?"
Mrs Buckley initially began making cups of tea for the first visitors, but as the numbers swelled she was forced to call the police. A spokesman for Thames Valley Police said they can't do anything because the visitors are all on the public highway and not causing an obstruction.
"I don't play the guitar, I've never been in a rock band and I'm certainly not a vampire." Mrs Buckley also observed the fact that the press contingency was the worst behaved and had made friends with the devil worshipper from Italy. "He's called Mauro and works for Starbucks. He's quite a gentleman, but I don't agree with his beliefs."
The Daily Mirror has asked for the visitors to Mrs Buckley's house to leave her alone, but when a reporter from the Mail arrived yesterday there were still over twenty people camped out on the pavement.
"Of course she's gonna deny who she is," said eighteen year old goth Mary Ann Bloom from Luton. "If I had her history I'd deny it as well."
9 (May)
The police had blocked the road bringing the traffic out of Rotterdam to a crawl. The blue lights of emergency vehicles were multiplied in the raindrops across the windscreen forming flashing constellations before the wipers flicked them away. But back they came, again and again. There was an accident somewhere and a victim hidden in the confusion of hi-vis clothing. Bad night to have an accident, thought Jan Moencker. Bad timing too. He needed to get going, to get a result, but someone somewhere was conspiring against him.
He was in the passenger seat of Rob Wallet's car being taken to a farmhouse a few kilometres east of the centre of Rotterdam, located in a hideously black countryside, which late at night was made all the more forbidding by the rain. Either side of the road there was nothing, no indication of life or where it might again emerge. Wallet had picked him up from his hotel near Central Station and was now taking him out into the void to meet the band. They had spoken a couple of times by phone and Moencker had insisted Sony might be ready to speak to them, but there was a snag that had to be sorted out first. "Did EMI give you a reason for not signing them?" asked Moencker as the accident scene rolled by. There was some activity behind the ambulance, nothing that could be identified.
"It'll be a motorbike," said Wallet.
"Uh?"
"The accident. I bet it's someone come off their bike."
"Oh, right."
"EMI? No, nothing at all. I don't think I went about it the right way to be honest. I knew a guy there and thought I'd try to get an introduction, but when I met up with him he just said he couldn't get any interest from anyone who mattered. I was a bit too eager, I think. Didn't plan properly, just went at it. Then I knew I wasn't far from the Sanatorium Treatment office so went over there and wished I hadn't, to be honest. Spoke to a twenty year old so-called executive who asked me to put thirty thousand on the table before he'd even invite me in. He could have been the building's caretaker for all I know. It's been a long time since I've felt as old as I did when I was in there."
"You're wasting your time with EMI anyway. They'll be gone in eighteen months. No use if you're planning to last longer than that." Moencker relaxed into his seat as the traffic passed the last ambulance and was waved off by a soaking wet policeman. A hundred metres farther on were three more officers stood around a prone motorbike, buckled and scratched, lying on its side like a dead two wheeled animal.
"You were right," said Moencker. "You see a lot of these accidents do you?"
"Call it insight," said Wallet. He put his foot down and accelerated into a wall of darkness.
"So what do I need to know about these four?" said Moencker.
Wallet gathered himself and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. "Be honest with them. One thing I've learned is they don't like bullshit, don't like lies and liars. Susan is the decision maker, pretty much everything goes through her, so if you get her approval you're pretty much in. She can read people like a book so don't try to be clever with her. Dee Vincent reads books like a book. Never stops reading and talking, very mercurial, hard to get a straight answer out of her and I think sometimes it's a game she plays until she's ready to trust you. Rene is like a second opinion on everything. Susan has known him since childhood and trusts him more than anyone. I get the impression that he's like a, I don't know, a filter or a valve that keeps her on the straight, if you know what I mean."
"Not really."
"She can be very volatile. He's probably the only person who can make her see sense, but he's not always successful."
"There's always one member with a stronger personality than the rest."
"Don't get me wrong, she's not a tyrant, but she is the engine of the band. It was her decision to make the comeback."
"She say why?"
"Not in any way that I understood." Wallet looked at Moencker as if he had some insight, what the hell, he'd never heard of her a week ago.
"There are four of them?" said Moencker.
"Yeah," Wallet's hands gripped the wheel momentarily. "Elaine. All I can say is you'll have to make up you own mind about Elaine. She's scares the fuck out of me. Quiet. Hardly moves. I wouldn't like to be on the end of her temper. Then again, I don't think she needs an excuse to turn. Just step carefully around her."
"The mad bass player. It's all fitting a pattern."
"You've met bands like this before?"
"Quite a few."
Wallet turned to Moencker and grinned. "No you haven't."
Moencker received a text. He read it and put his phone away. "What exactly do they want from this reunion?"
"It's not a reunion because they never split up. It's a comeback. And what do they want out of it? I could only speculate. Maybe they got bored, maybe they need the money."
"That's the usual reason. And why are you here?"
Wallet entered that zone where the driver of a car is so deep in thought that it almost drives itself. "A sense of achievement. I want to achieve something in life. When you write about music, or anything for that matter, for as long as I have you start to get frustrated and want to be closer to it, part of it. You want to cross over from spectator to performer or at least part of the production and make it happen. The chance came my way and I took it. It was a risk, but I could see my life ahead of me and it looked like this road."
The car was taking them both along an illuminated strip of tarmac no more than twenty or thirty metres in length and beyond that there was nothing. An unbearable unknown gloom. When they did finally arrive at the farmhouse there was evidence of life, but it was extraterrestrial. The cloud was breaking up and glimpses of constellations normally dimmed by the latent light of the city were hanging like tiny beads of light filled raindrops, their patterns gradually emerging out of the background. That's where all the light had gone, up there, to illuminate those stars and nebulae and gas clouds, leaving this part of the earth as black as the deepest pit and as quiet as a tomb. Moencker wanted to do the deal and get away.
-
"But you need to understand that whatever I do I'm only a middle operator. There's a big team of people way above my head, some of whom I will never meet, who make the final decisions." Moencker was pr
esenting his case to the four members of the band who were gathered in a spacious living room in their farmhouse. Moencker had been surprised by the modern furniture and, more than that, the tidiness and order of the place. It wasn't the ransacked hovel that he expected four members of a 'notorious rock band' to inhabit. He didn't need to think hard about it; he'd never met a band like this. They politely shook his hand and when he spoke they quietly listened like a small class of schoolchildren. Susan Bekker sat in a large chair next to a table with an elaborate stainless steel candelabra and four golden flickering smoking candles. On a large l-shaped settee was Dee Vincent, cross legged, almost meditating, next to her was Rene van Voors, arms folded across his chest. And at right angles to them Elaine Daley, just as Wallet had described; her feet up, motionless as a sculpture, her eyes locked onto him all the time he was talking.
The mood, with the reflective light catching the edges and corners of the furniture, was warm, welcoming and tranquil. It could almost have been the perfect place to live, a refuge from the incessant demands of his job, but Moencker couldn't shake off an insistent unease. The feeling of being suspended inside a gently glowing bubble surrounded by the infinity of nothingness outside the walls of the room made him twitch, occasionally shiver even though he wasn't cold. No one in the room joined him to drink. They had offered him slices of meats and cheeses, with mango pickle, fruit and chilli sauces, but they weren't hungry and ate nothing. He was relieved to be in a place of sanity and calm and unnerved by its abnormality. A threatening peace like a lull in some localised conflict. Wallet's words were never far away and Moencker told himself again he hadn't met a band like this before.
He continued to explain the structure of Sony, their aspirations and those of Todd Moonaj with his remit and expectations. "So, any questions?" he asked.
"This remix, you mentioned earlier," said Susan, "what exactly does that involve and what control do we have over that?"
"As I said, having listened to your back catalogue over and over again there are two issues: the quality of the original recordings is technically lower now than most home made demos. What people can do on their computers at home is better than the original sounds of your albums. The people at Sony will simply not listen to those original recordings. They want to hear what you're going to sound like if you walked into a recording studio right now and then they'll compare that to what everyone else sounds like."
"We don't want to sound like everyone else," said Dee.
"I don't mean that in terms of style, I mean the technical sound: the engineering, the mixing, the mastering. Will you sound as loud as other similar bands, does your producer understand what a modern audience expects to hear in the mix of a rock song."
"Think back to when you recorded Nocturn," said Rob, "how many tracks would you have on a song, typically?"
Susan pulled a 'don't know face.' Did anyone know? Could anyone remember?
"A dozen, maybe" said Elaine. "Depended on the song. Two or three on the drums, one on me," Rene nodded, "two or three on vocals if there were harmonies, two, maybe three on lead guitar, maybe one or two on rhythm guitar. The main melody in your solos, Susan, was usually recorded in mono and panned hard left and right. Sometime's Dee's rhythm guitar might fill in on a lead guitar track to fill the sound out, give it a little more dimension."
"Micky Redwall had us in and out of the studio as quick as possible to keep costs down," said Rene. "Lucky we could work as quickly as we did, but it never got complex. And we only played the instruments we had. There were no synthesizers or piano. A few bits of percussion now and again."
"Even so, two or three overdubs on lead guitar, a dozen tracks in total." said Moencker. "Evanescence, doing what you might be doing, used a hundred and fifty tracks on a single of theirs. What You Want. Over twenty tracks on drums, twenty for vocals."
They didn't look impressed. Susan was teasing a flame on one of the candles next to her, waving her index finger through the tiny playful fire. "Evanescence? Is that where you see us?"
"No, I'm not making any comparisons, I'm simply reminding you how far on production has moved, especially, from what you're saying, the production methods you had to work with. You have so much more available to you now and you need to demonstrate what you would do with all that production power." Moencker was mesmerised by Susan's trick of holding her finger in the flame as she listened.
"So what do you want us to do?" asked Rene. "Record something new for 2013?"
"No," said Moencker. "There isn't time for that. Better to take an original track, Rob told me you have the master tapes now, and remix it, bring the sound up to date. Fill it out. Let Sony hear the genuine Toten Herzen song, but with a twenty first century production quality."
"I'd like to think about this," said Susan looking at Wallet.
"It's your music," he replied. "You shouldn't rush things, but at the same time this is a real opportunity."
"True," said Moencker, "but also this isn't double glazing. There's no fourteen day cooling off period. I'd prefer to hear a decision tonight." For the first time in the evening he felt uncomfortable with the way Susan Bekker was now looking at him. He tried to sit back in his chair, but he was already sat back, he crossed his legs, scratched his chin, he should have shaved before coming out here, but there wasn't time.
"And we can trust you?" she finally said.
"Of course you can. It's in everyone's interest that we make the best impression we can to get that introduction to the process that'll bring you back. Once we've got this part out of the way and all the directors and managers and executives have made their financial decisions, we can get on with new material and planning concerts and production design. But we can't do anything until we've got their attention."
"You weren't there in 1973, Jan," said Dee looking at Rene. The drummer nodded.
"What happened in '73, what do you mean," said Moencker.
Rene explained. "Micky Redwall heard the band we were in and the band Dee and Elaine were in and pulled them both apart to create Toten Herzen. Wim Segers and Marco Jongbloed from After Sunset, our band, were promised their fare to get back to Holland. That was Redwall's deal. They agree to let Susan and me go and he pays for them to get home. He gave them petrol money to get to Felixstowe and when they arrived at the ferry terminal there were no tickets. He said it was a mix up, but they were stuck there for two days going through rubbish bins for food until the police caught up with them and they were deported. They got a bill once they got home and blamed us for it all."
"It took three years to persuade them it wasn't our fault," Susan said to the candle flame.
"We're very wary of promises, Jan," said Elaine. "We've been stung a lot of times. It's not happening any more."
Moencker surrendered to them. "I'm not going to fuck you guys, believe me."
"Damn right you're not," said Susan. "We'll go along with what you're recommending. We'll put our trust in you, but you have to come good on that."
"Let me give you one more piece of advice, please," said Moencker. "If you can't trust me the music industry today is going to eat you alive."
Wallet rolled his eyes.
"You need to develop a thicker skin than what I can see tonight. There's a lot of shit heading your way. I'm saying this because Rob told me you respect honesty. It's not going to be easy. This comeback is going to generate a lot of interest and a lot of comment. You need to be prepared for that. I'd like to say you should have the wisdom of age and all the experience you have, but I have to admit seeing four people who look as young as you do," he threw his hands in the air, "I'm finding it difficult to believe that you were in a band in the mid-nineteen seventies." He waited for an explanation. "Is there something you want to tell me?"
Susan snuffed out a single candle on the chair-side table. "You couldn't handle it, Jan. Let's wait until we know you a little better before we start going into all that."
"I'll need to know sooner or later," said Moencker.
"Don't worry, you will," said Dee smiling innocently. "We'll just have to hope you're ready for it."
-
On his way out of the farmhouse Jan Moencker would have stopped for a quick smoke, except he didn't smoke! Away from the living room - and he really did like that room, it was just a pity it was surrounded by the world's end - a short corridor linked the front hall to the kitchen and he noticed a dotted line of blood drops, maybe a metre in length. He jumped slightly as Rob Wallet caught up with him to take him back to his hotel. "Cut yourself shaving, Rob?" asked Moencker.
Wallet noticed the blood. "They're a clumsy bunch."
"You don't have a cigarette on you by any chance," said Moencker.
"Don't smoke. Never have."
"Me neither, but it's what I want more than anything in the world right now."
"They weren't that bad. Or did you experience something I hadn't warned you about?"
They stepped outside and the late night chill gripped Moencker a little too eagerly. "This whole thing, the vampire image," he said wondering if he should finish his sentence, "do they want to continue with that?"
"Whole vampire image," said Wallet. "What image? They never had an image, Jan. It was the press and Micky Redwall who concocted all that."
"Maybe, but it's been killed by so many tv programmes and novels. They might want to rethink how they market themselves otherwise they're going to find a nice little niche that nobody else knows about or cares about."
A satellite passed overhead. A tiny star, unblinking, travelling slowly in a perfect line, unmoved by the universe around it. "Sky's cleared after all that rain," said Wallet.
"Yeah. Are you not cold?" said Moencker waiting for Wallet to unlock the car.
"No. I'm English. If you can't get used to cold weather you'll be dead by the time you're five years old. See there, Pegasus, the big square of stars." Wallet was looking round for the rest of the cast. "Cassiopeia, still flaunting it. Shameless hussy."
We Are Toten Herzen (TotenUniverse Book 1) Page 5