"I'm not getting through to you am I? What did I say to you before you met the band? Be honest with them."
"That's all a bit sentimental," added Lundqvist. "Does that still happen in the real world?"
"You said yourself, Jan, you sat in that chair and you said I will not fuck with you guys. And they trusted you."
Moencker needed to turn down the heating in his office. "And I also said to you and to them they would need to develop a thicker skin. And it sounds like they're throwing their toys out of the pram because they didn't like the sound of the guitars. Rob you have to persuade them to understand how the industry works now. This is not the stage to get picky about details. Wait until you're in the studio with the money in the bank. We're over the first hurdle, for god's sake don't throw it away at this stage."
"It's not just the guitars, Jan," said Wallet.
"What is it?" said Moencker falling into his chair. Eva Matheus's CD was still on his desk. He hadn't listened to it and couldn't find the enthusiasm to endure any more of her observations on loss and regret. Moencker already had that by the tonne.
"Come to the point, Rob," said Lundqvist. "It's getting late."
"We've started everything on the wrong foot, Jan. Sony have heard this demo and now they'll expect more of the same. And that's not us."
"Rob, Rob, you are getting not just a modern sound, but an effective modern sound," said Lundqvist. "Listen to Jan. It got the band through the door and he's sweated blood to get this song heard. Do you even know what you're talking about?"
"What I'm talking about, look, both of you," said Wallet, "if you take a swing at a golf ball and you start it off a few millimetres out it eventually veers off into the rough. . . . " Wallet went quiet.
"Well you're up there with the old rockers now, Rob," said Lundqvist laughing. "You know you guys couldn't be managed worse if Susan Bekker's mother was in charge."
"Martin," said Moencker, taking the silence as a warning, "I think it would be a good idea if you shut up for a moment."
"At last you've said something I agree with." Susan Bekker had taken the phone off Wallet. "I'll say this once. You made a promise to us that you'd let us hear the remix before it went away."
"Susan, it was a question of timing. I had to get the file to Todd Moonaj at Sony before he went on vacation. There was no point sending it to anyone else. They couldn't make a decision. He was going away for two weeks and I don't have two weeks, Susan. I really don't have two weeks, do you understand?" Moencker hurled Eva's disc at the far wall.
"Was this guy stood in line on the tarmac at the airport? The song is six minutes long; you couldn't send us that electronically so that we could hear it first? My belief is you didn't want us to hear it because you knew we'd stop it and you didn't want it stopping. My belief, Jan, is that you just want a result and any old shit will do so long as you get what you want."
"It's not like that, Susan. We're running against time here. It's nothing more sinister than that," said Moencker. He waited for a reply. "My job is always against the clock. What I'm doing for you is no different than anyone else. Trust me."
"And who the fuck is this other prick?" said Susan with a darkening tone of voice.
"Jan," Lundqvist was trying to get a word in.
"Just a moment, Martin. Susan, who do you mean?"
"Jan."
"This little pumped up piece of shit who did the remix? Was it his idea to make it sound like this or yours?"
"Susan, let's just leave things as they are and move on. I will make it up to you, I promise, you'll see how this works out. . . ."
"Jan!" Lundqvist was yelling.
"What?"
"Jan, Susan Bekker is standing right next me!"
"What? Susan, I thought you were in Rotterdam?"
"I don't care where you think I am. Let me tell you again because I hate it when I can't make myself clear to people. You broke your word. Fuck the guitars, it's the trust that's the big deal here. Ten years ago I wouldn't have given you a second chance for that, but I'm a little more tolerant these days. So make things right. Let Sony know that the demo was a mistake. You make it public that the leaked audio file is nothing to do with us, that we had no part in it, is unauthorised and does not have our approval. However you word it I'll leave it up to you, but you put things right, is that understood?"
"Yes," Moencker was listening to Susan, but he knew before she spoke what she wanted. It was almost a relief, whatever happened now, the meeting was on and he could sit back issuing take down notices to websites, whatever. The meeting was on. "Leave it with me. I'll contact Rob when I've spoken to the people at Sony okay?"
"No, it's not okay. You won't be dealing with him any more, you deal directly with me."
"Fine. I'll be in touch."
"Goodnight."
Moencker put the phone down. The broken case of Eva's disc reflected the ceiling lights. Moencker looked around for a spare. He even had time to go to Eva's show, though he wasn't sure what he could tell her. No, he could tell her anything. Another artist spotted. Two in a month, chalk and cheese, the sublime and the ridiculous. Then he remembered Martin Lundqvist and rang his number, but it went straight to voicemail. The options were to stay here and let Lundqvist, a grown man, take care of himself. Or he could go round to his studio and walk in on god knows what! No, Moencker had his meeting. Time to go home.
-
To the east of Rotterdam, in the loneliest farmhouse on earth, Rob Wallet listened as Susan and Moencker hung up. So that was it then. He was out of the equation and without any evident responsibilities. Surplus. Redundant. Dee Vincent was the only person in the room standing; astonished at what she'd been listening to. She started to practice her golf swing.
"You know it's like when you take a five iron, but you mean to play a sand wedge and you hit that ball and it just comes off the heel and spins right and then you're looking around those lateral water hazards hoping that Peter fucking Alison hasn't run off with your ball in his mouth. You stupid fucker!"
She wasn't alone with an opinion. "Are we expected to let you handle the management responsibilities of this band," added Elaine with her eyes closed. "We are so so so fucking angry with all this shit and you start talking about a wayward golf shot?"
"I'm sorry. I talk in metaphors sometimes."
"I talk in metaphors sometimes," Dee mimicked. "Sounded more like a fucking allegory to me. You'd think a public schoolboy would know the difference. Useless bastard. You've been a freeloader since the day you knocked on our door. Susan should have left you in jail. Four critics would still be alive if it wasn't for you."
"Where did Susan go?" said Wallet.
-
Martin Lundqvist sat in the chair of the recording studio control room more carefully than he had ever done anything in his life. Susan Bekker walked in front of him. "Turn everything on, set everything up and then we're going to record the guitar parts until they're just how I want them."
Lundqvist obeyed.
"And if it takes us forever then that's how long it will take."
Lundqvist nodded. "Your guitar."
"What about it?"
"Where is it?"
"Oh, it's right here." She was holding it! A black Gibson Flying V. Susan rested the pointed ends of the body against Lundqvist's chair, pinning him in place. The headstock nuzzled tightly against her stomach. Without the blink of an eye, she grabbed the arms of the chair, impaled herself on the neck of the instrument and pulled her body along it until she was face to face with the petrified producer. She gasped, inhaled a long deep satisfying breath and laughed revealing razor canines licked with the teasing tip of her tongue. Lundqvist started crying.
"It sounds so much better when I tune it this way."
INDEPENDENT COMMENT - Andrew Parnell
A digital stake through the heart
It now seems that when Toten Herzen's comeback single Give Me Your Heart was leaked online the only people in the world who batted
an eyelid were the band. The backtracking by Sony's European A&R representative Jan Moencker was so hasty it's easy to assume that before a contract has even been signed a huge rift has opened up between the band and their would be (could be) record label.
'The band in no way endorse, approve or support this track; it's re-engineering, remixing, release and unauthorised uploading to social media sites was done without the band's consent. All four members are disappointed and extremely angry at this unfortunate episode.'
It's the 'extremely angry' bit that should have people worrying. Just ask Micky Redwall, Lenny Harper, Mike Gannon or even Martin Lundqvist, the producer of the single who has already been hospitalised after being subjected to noise levels in his Berlin recording studio, reportedly in excess of 160 decibels. Someone obviously made a mistake and by the sounds of it are now worried sick, but there is a lesson here that Toten Herzen must also learn, no matter how hard it may be to stomach.
In the 1970s, when the band first experienced success, they would have been unaware of the extent of people borrowing and copying their albums and singles. Ignorance is bliss, but with no way of knowing the scale of the copying they could happily carry on without seeing proof of the effect on their incomes. Not so today. Give Me Your Heart will have been listened to on Youtube and links from Facebook and Twitter. Bit torrents will be heading their way along cable lines as we speak and if they want to, the band will be able to see just how many times the song has been 'viewed', 'liked,' 'favourited' and downloaded. It may make grim reading that quantifies their anguish and puts accurate numbers to their sense of outrage.
And they'll just have to get used to it. They can probably expect to see twenty to thirty per cent of their material disappear through the darker regions of the internet without anyone paying a penny. Back in the 1970s if a bell at Toten Herzen's headquarters had rung every time one of their songs was copied the constant noise would have driven them mad. No doubt this one solitary episode will have set alarm bells ringing long before the first act of this comeback is about to begin.
15 (May)
The gods were always looking down on people, thought Rob Wallet as he sat back along the windscreen of the car gazing up at the head of Draco. They created humans to make themselves look good. That's confidence for you: impress your peers by surrounding yourself with losers. "You know, you look nothing like a woman sat in a chair," he drawled at Cassiopeia. "Queen of the couch potatoes. You could be anything." All of them for that matter. Hercules, let's cut to the chase, it's a giant swastika, whatever time of year you clock him; a celestial nazi. "Like this bastard here. Draco the Dragon. In the cold light of day you look more like a fucking tadpole." Pegasus looked nothing like any horse he'd ever seen. Oh, the old myths bigged that one up. Untouchable, unobtainable. "Re: a euphemism for stuck-up, arrogant. Or, wait, is it a metaphor . . . or an allegory. You still don't look like a fucking horse."
Wallet fiddled with the car keys. His original plan was to drive, drive anywhere, but whichever direction he chose would take him nowhere he wanted to go. Not even back home to pick up where he left off the previous year. His old career in journalism had been taking in water before finally sinking and his options now were the graveyard shifts of low paid work and a life of nocturnal secrecy, or stay here and be humiliated every waking moment. Overconfident, unrealistic and deceitful, like a one man myth he had acted out virtually every vice contained in that starry gallery circulating above him.
In the forty eight hours since the conference call with Moencker the offending track had gone, extinguished, taken down from the internet wherever it was found. But like any crime scene the evidence was still there: descriptions of it in blogs and online articles, broken links; digital DNA scattered all over the place. Wallet closed his eyes and spread his arms out across the top of the windscreen. His right hand brushed something fabric, leathery. It was Susan's jacket.
"Susan?"
"It's half past three in the morning," she said quietly.
"Where've you been?"
"Finishing off some work. Getting the guitar levels right. They're much louder now. I've had a few conversations with people, called in some favours." She leaned back against the wing of the car placing her silhouette across the constellations along the horizon. "I hope you still feel pretty shit about what's happened."
"I do. Even saying sorry makes it seem worse.
"Yeah, it does. Spare us the self pity. But you have to make any opportunity you can out of something like this so Moencker's got us a meeting and that will give us an insight into how these people work, how things are done, maybe introduce us to a real manager.
"So you're gonna meet with Sony?"
"Why not? We don't have to say yes. It's become apparent to me that everyone is using us to get what they want. And that includes you. It's always been like that, we can't expect it to be any different, but this time we can play the same game. We're not the enthusiastic kids being taken for a ride like we were the first time. We can use people to get what we want."
"And what do you want? I still don't understand why you agreed to all this."
Susan pushed herself off the car. "Get down off there. Hold my hand," she said. Wallet jumped off the bonnet and felt her fingers instantly wrap tightly around his as the stars began to dim.
-
"This is where I grew up," Susan said as a narrow street of high, dull brick terraced houses appeared around them like prison walls. Several storeys of irregular patterned windows and concealed balconies rolled away in four directions from the junction where they stood. Planted in the street were lines of malnourished trees, not much more than timber stakes, shivering naked as a brutal April wind ripped through their empty grey branches. "It was always so cold here, it never seemed to get any better. That apartment in front of you, on the first floor with the cream curtains, that's where I lived. It's where I grew up. Down there is the old Fish Market where I twisted an ankle. I had a day off school and spent the time in my bedroom listening to the Yardbirds and Jimi Hendrix for the first time. When I went to school the day after my teacher asked me what I'd done and I sang Hey Joe. The teacher wasn't amused. Nobody had a clue what I was talking about except Rene. He loved it. He couldn't believe there was someone else who liked that stuff. The Beatles, Stones, everyone had heard of them. But not this. Can you hear that." Susan pulled Wallet closer to the building and the muffled sound of a guitar was coming from the walls. "Jeff Beck," Susan whispered. "My mother had all the albums and just about everything Jimi played on before he made it on his own. The Isley Brothers, Curtis Knight, Lonnie Youngblood. People bringing singles back from Britain. My father didn't really take much notice. He was as square as a tulip field, but Rene thought this flat was Shangri-la. He listened to Mitch Mitchell and Ginger Baker, I was all ears for Jimi and Jeff and Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton. We wanted to be like that."
Susan and Renes' school was an uptight block watching over a wide street with unsmiling authority. Built with the same charmless brick as Susan's terrace, the school epitomised discipline and conformity. Devoid of decoration, every unit of its exterior seemed to be designed to contain expression and thought rather than encourage or celebrate it. "Rene and I used to walk home together wondering how long it would take to get to that level of skill. And even if you learned how to play the notes like that where do you get the emotion without living the way they did? Look at this place; what sort of emotion comes out of a place like this? What sort of music does it produce? We talked a lot of bullshit, but I never thought I'd be talking like that to a boy at my school. You know the Netherlands has produced more crimes against music than any other country on earth and even at that age it felt like I was the walking dead. No one to talk to about what I was really interested in. And Rene felt the same way."
The lower branches of a street tree framed a small cafe on the end of a concrete row of shops. An overflowing rubbish bin spewed its wrappers and newspapers across the pavement. A two stroke motorbike belch
ed out smoke and an echoing din, whilst cyclists struggled past on their clanking bikes. "We both got jobs. Nothing special. This is where we'd meet and talk. Rene was drinking Coke and I was wiping icing sugar off my lips when he suggested we form a band and do something more than listen to other people's music. He had two other guys lined up, Wim and Marco, who played guitar and bass and knew a bit about rock. I had my guitar and a half decent voice. Better than any of those three anyway, but Rene suggested Wim should sing and let me concentrate on playing lead. That's when life finally started to warm up."
Across a wide road lay the shell of the old Ahoy Arena. "November 10th 1967. We all came down here and saw Jimi Hendrix. My mother was with us, about twenty five years older, but as eager as we were to see him. We left the hall afterwards elated and crushed at the same time. We had to get on and do something, we didn't want to be just any old cover band pretending to be someone else. But we lived dull lives. We had nothing to draw on. Nothing to say. We were no different to our audience, we didn't offer them anything."
A succession of venues came and went. Neon lit doorways down narrow alleys, the reactionary posters of a trade union club stranded in the middle of a capacious car park with its solitary rusting Volkswagen, a youth club attached to a bland Protestant church, the anonymous entrance to a city centre bar and finally, lining up to remind Susan that she and the band were going nowhere, the upright brick walls of the school and its empty hall. Right back where they started. "We played here in front of twenty six people. I had a bigger audience when I sang Hey Joe."
From the expanse surrounding the Ahoy to the expanse of the river channel feeding Rotterdam's harbours and quays, Susan stopped to watch a container ship float through a dusky landscape dominated by sky. The dark water, flanked by a distant line of trees, flowed towards the toy cranes and model warehouses. A putrid yellow haze hung over the skyline from Rotterdam's latent light. Somewhere to the west, across the void, was a better future. "We had a bit of money from our jobs and what we didn't spend on equipment and printing posters we saved. We thought we could tour Holland, maybe find an audience in Amsterdam or Den Haag, Arnhem. When we felt ambitious we had plans to conquer Belgium. Belgium!
We Are Toten Herzen (TotenUniverse Book 1) Page 8