by Jonathan Coe
‘Sure. They’re the…’
‘…the graphic equalizers, right.’
‘27-band, eh? Wow.’
‘The whole rig’s powered by C Audio amps, right? It’s a four-way system with Brook Siren crossovers. They’ve all got compression drivers and there’s even an extra cab with a 24-inch sub-woofer. So how the fuck can you be getting a muddy sound out of that lot?’
‘Beats me,’ I said, smiling desperately. ‘Perhaps we forgot to switch it on.’
He ignored this remark.
‘Anyway, you guys must have tried just about every bloody room we’ve got.’
‘Not quite,’ I said. ‘We’ve never used Studio B.’ I got up and walked over to his desk, so that I could see the diary in which he recorded all his bookings. ‘Maybe we should try Studio B. Is anyone using it tonight?’
‘Probably’ he said. ‘It’s very popular, Studio B.’
I tried to look at the diary but he suddenly leant over it, hiding it from view.
‘Why does Chester never book us into Studio B?’ I asked. ‘What’s so special about it?’
‘We’ve been kitting it out,’ he said. ‘Putting a new PA in. It’s not quite ready yet.’
I can’t deny that I had been intrigued by this question for some time. Somewhere in the building – I’m not sure where – was a heavy black door with a big capital B on it. So far as I knew, no band had ever been allowed to use this room, and Vincent was always coming up with contradictory stories about why it wasn’t available. Sometimes it was booked up for the next three weeks, sometimes it was being re-fitted, sometimes it was being used for storage. Sometimes he would give elaborate accounts of the new equipment he was installing there; other times, he would go tight-lipped at the very mention of it.
‘We’re not taking any more bookings for Studio B at the moment,’ he said, snapping the diary shut. ‘You’ll be the first to know when we are.’
I was about to question him further, when we were interrupted by the arrival of Harry, our bass player and lead vocalist. The next few minutes were taken up with getting our instruments out of storage, testing the mikes and starting to set up.
We were in the smallest of the studios, and the one with the lowest roof. Harry, in fact, could barely stand up straight. I can’t think of much to tell you about Harry, except that he was about the most normal and easy-going member of the band. He was an averagely good bass player and an averagely good singer. He played because he enjoyed it, and didn’t have any great ambitions to be a pop star, or any difficult personal hang-ups. This was where he differed from the other two, who arrived together, about ten minutes later.
Martin was an insurance clerk by day and a guitar hero by night. He earned about four times as much as the rest of us (not that this is saying much), and everything he could save out of his income was spent on musical equipment. He had a hand-carved guitar and he would change the strings before every rehearsal. Sometimes he would change them between numbers. His amplifier, which was taller than he was, was worth more than the rest of our equipment put together. It had an absurd control panel which was a blaze of coloured lights and digital displays, and it was kept permanently in store because the four of us were incapable of carrying it anywhere. Lambeth Council could have re-housed half a dozen disadvantaged families in it. All of which would have been fine, if Martin had been a good guitarist; but the fact was that he only knew about five chords and had never managed to improvise a solo in his life. What he lacked in musical ability he made up in technical perfectionism. At one of our gigs, it had once taken him thirty-seven minutes to tune up. He kept us all permanently on a knife-edge because it only needed some tiny, barely detectable flaw in the sound we were getting for him to explode into one of his tantrums. Once, when we were playing in a pub in Leytonstone and had some feedback problems with the vocals, he stormed off stage and was later found to have locked himself in the boot of his car. He had crew-cut hair and an intense expression and he always wore a tie. I never saw him without one.
Then there was our drummer, Jake, a hardline existentialist with a black beret and gold-rimmed National Health glasses. Jake was still a student, doing a part-time degree in philosophy and literature at Birkbeck, I think. He practised in his room by using a copy of Being and Nothingness as a snare and all three volumes of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu as tom-toms. Like Martin, he had his limitations as a musician. He had a huge collection of records featuring some of the most technically adventurous drummers in history – Art Blakey, Elvin Jones, Tony Williams, Jack DeJohnette – but we never managed to teach him to play in any time signature other than 4/4, and he could hardly stray away from the bass drum and the snare without getting hopelessly confused. In fact this was the only drum pattern he knew:
Ask Jake to accompany you on a featherweight version of ‘The Girl From Ipanema’ and that’s the pattern he would have used, at top volume. He used to write songs for the band, too, but we never bothered to play any of them. Somehow his twin passions for metaphysics and pop music never cohered into a satisfactory whole. He would end up writing songs which combined the philosophical complexity of ‘Bat Out Of Hell’ with the raw rock’n’roll energy of Schopenhauer’s The World As Will and Representation. I liked Jake, on the whole, but found him infuriating. If he hadn’t been so intelligent I think he would have been one of the stupidest people I ever met in my life.
It was the first time we had all met up since our last, disastrous gig, so before starting to play we sat around for a while and chatted about it. Morale was low in The Alaska Factory, at this time. We’d been playing live for nearly a year now, and it was beginning to feel as though we hadn’t made an inch of progress. We still had the same hard-core following of about nine people, consisting mainly of relatives and girlfriends. (Madeline, incidentally, had never been to hear us play: in fact she had never even heard one of our tapes. She had never expressed any curiosity, and I didn’t feel strongly enough about our material – most of which was written by either Harry or Martin – to make her listen to any of it. For my part, I never talked about Madeline to the rest of the band. They knew her name and knew that she was my girlfriend, but they had never met her, and I was happy to keep it that way. It satisfied something in me to be leading two completely independent lives. I knew, too, that she wouldn’t have liked them; she wouldn’t have liked the tattiness of Thorn Bird Studios, either, or the places where we used to eat afterwards, or the venues where Chester used to arrange for us to play.) Our hold on the pathetically simple music we used to play remained as fragile as ever. It still wasn’t unknown for us to lose time completely in the middle of a twelve-bar blues. And the thing that we were all holding out for, that mirage, the holy grail which is the gleam in the eye of every aspiring band – a recording contract – seemed, as usual, to be utterly beyond our reach.
This evening, moreover, we had business to discuss, because we’d decided that we were going to record a new demo tape. We’d each arranged to take time off work and we’d booked into Room 2 for Tuesday morning, in four days’ time. Unusually, and largely because I had the support of Chester, I’d managed to persuade the others that we should record one of my pieces, an uplifting, danceable sort of number called ‘Stranger in a Foreign Land’ which was one of the latest things I’d written (Harry had helped me with the words). It called for one or two modest key changes and some shifts in dynamics that I wasn’t sure we would be able to handle, so we agreed to spend most of that night’s session practising it.
I gave Martin a chord sheet that I’d written out during my lunch break, and then turned to Jake.
‘I think – er – I think we want to give this a kind of Afro-Latin feel,’ I explained. ‘You know, lots of off-beats.’
‘Uh-huh,’ he said, nervously.
I looked to Harry for support.
‘Isn’t that right?’
He nodded. ‘Yeah, it’s…’ He begun to tap his feet and count silently to himself. ‘It wants to go, sort
of… chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga, chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga. Isn’t that the sort of thing?’
I frowned. ‘Well, I was thinking more in terms of… chuggachug chuggachug chuggachug chuggachug… You know, as if we had shakers or something.’
‘Well, why doesn’t Jake try those out, and see which fits?’
Jake looked at us, from one to the other, nodded, spat on his hands, picked up his heaviest sticks and launched straight into:
After a few bars I signalled to him to stop but he was enjoying himself too much, and before I could do anything Martin had joined in, hammering out the same two chords incessandy so that the whole thing started to sound like a grotesque parody of a Status Quo number.
‘All right, all right!’ I shouted and waved my arms and managed to get them to stop. ‘That sounded… just great, boys, but do you think we could get back to my song?’
‘That was your song,’ said Martin.
‘It was?’
‘Those are the chords you’ve written here.’ He showed me the chord sheet. ‘E and F sharp, right?’
‘Well… nearly, Martin, nearly. You see, what we actually have here is an E minor nine, and an F sharp minor seven. You were playing major chords.’
‘Does it make much difference?’
‘Well, technically – yes. You see, they have different notes in them.’
‘I think we should keep things simple.’
‘Simplicity’s great, Martin, I’m all for simplicity. Don’t get me wrong. It’s just that what you were playing, from a – well, from a musical point of view, really – is completely different from what I wrote.’
He didn’t seem pleased by this criticism, and to express his annoyance he said, ‘I think I’d better tune up again.’
Knowing that this would take some time, I left him to it, and went to find the lavatory.
It was either on the first floor or the second floor – after you’d gone across all those little landings, and up and down so many stairs, it was impossible to be sure – and when I came to find my way back to our studio, I got lost again. Just as I thought I knew where I was going, the lights went off (they were on some kind of time switch) and I had to grope my way along a pitch black corridor. At the end of the corridor, I found myself up against a locked door. It was very quiet. I was about to turn back, when I suddenly thought that I had heard a voice. I could have sworn that I heard a voice shout something behind the door – but as if from a distance. I could tell that the voice (which was male) was shouting quite loud, although the noise was heavily muffled by the door. Then again, perhaps I was imagining it. I stood there for a few seconds, straining to hear more, and then a hand gripped my shoulder. At the same time, the lights came back on, and I found that I was standing outside the door to Studio B, with Vincent’s face pushed up close to mine.
‘Oy, Rumpelstiltsken!’ he said. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’
‘I was lost,’ I said.
‘Get away from there, will you? Your room’s bloody miles away. Come on, follow me.’
He tried the studio door, to make sure it was still locked, then led me away.
‘Sorry about this,’ I said. ‘It’s just that it’s hard to find your way around this place sometimes.’
‘You’ve been here often enough,’ he said; but he seemed to be making an effort to let his anger subside. ‘Anyway, how’s it going tonight? Getting plenty done, are you?’
‘We’re rehearsing this piece for Tuesday,’ I explained. ‘You know, that session you’re going to produce for us?’
The reminder seemed to cause him no particular pleasure. We weren’t keen on the thought of a whole day in the studio with Vincent, either, but he came with the price of the session, and none of us knew how to operate an 8-track desk ourselves. At least he was experienced, if his own stories were to be believed.
I rejoined the others and for the next couple of hours concentration was high and the rehearsal went fairly well. I forgot about the voices I thought I had heard behind the locked door of Studio B. By ten o’clock, ‘Stranger in a Foreign Land’ seemed to be shaping up nicely, and Harry was just about getting the hang of the rather wide-ranging vocal line, when all of a sudden Martin screamed ‘STOP!’ at the top of his voice, threw down his guitar, and stood there with his hands on his hips, listening intently. We watched him in fear.
‘Where’s that hiss coming from?’ he asked eventually.
‘What hiss?’
‘I can’t hear any hiss.’
‘The speakers are hissing. Can’t you hear it? It’s deafening!’
We listened for a while and then Harry said, in a conciliatory way, ‘Well, it’s not as if we need a perfect sound right now, this is only a rehearsal – ’
Martin stamped his foot and said, ‘God, this band is so technologically… illiterate! You’re all such bloody – ’ Then he stiffened again. ‘What’s that crackle?’
‘What crackle?’
‘I didn’t hear any crackle.’
‘Sorry, that was me,’ said Jake, who had opened a packet of crisps.
Harry made the mistake of laughing.
‘Right! That’s it!’ Martin shouted, and started unplugging his guitar and packing it away. ‘I don’t see why I should go on playing with a bunch of amateurs, who don’t even realize the importance of having a good sound. It’s like banging your head against a wall, playing in this band. There’s no professionalism, no commitment…’ He picked up his guitar case, made for the exit, and said, before departing and slamming the door, ‘Once and for all: I quit.’
He was gone, and there was a short silence. Then Jake put down his sticks, and began to take the drum kit apart.
‘Well, there we go,’ he sighed. ‘Another hour of studio time down the drain.’
None of us were unduly worried, because this was at least the fifteenth time that Martin had threatened to leave. Usually he would just turn up at the next rehearsal without saying anything about it. It wasn’t worth chasing after him: Harry lit up a cigarette, and I played through a few choruses of ‘Autumn Leaves’. The atmosphere in the studio was tired rather than tense.
‘Chester phoned up,’ Harry said, after a while.
I stopped playing.
‘Yes?’
‘He thinks it would be a good idea if we all got together and had a talk.’
‘Fine.’
‘Sunday lunchtime, at The White Goat.’
‘Fine.’
‘I’ll call Martin and tell him, shall I?’
Harry and Jake decided to go to the kebab shop, but I couldn’t face it. I got a bus back from Borough High Street and managed to persuade the driver to let me bring the keyboard on. The bus only took me to within half a mile of the flat, so I had to walk the rest of the way; with a few pauses for sitting down and getting my breath back, I was able to do it in about twenty minutes. I didn’t even meet any winos or kids this time, although there seemed to be some kind of trouble going on in the chip shop. These two blokes had got the owner up against the wall. It looked as if they were trying to rob the till or something. I didn’t feel like getting involved.
I arrived back at the flat and was about to turn the television on, thinking that there might be an Open University programme worth watching, when I noticed that the green light was flashing on our answering machine. There were no messages for me, though. It was Pedro again.
‘Hola, Tina, it’s only me, ringing to find out how are you feeling, my little dumpling. You know, you shouldn’t have upset me by crying like that and calling me names, especially names like that which I’m surprised to be known to a lady of your persuasion. Anyway, I hope you’re feeling better and I suppose I’m sorry about what happened last night, I suppose I got a little bit carried off, and I hope I didn’t hurt you or things like that. You know, in Spain, men and women, we do things like this all the time, but maybe you English ladies are a bit less uninhabited. Anyway, I’
ll come around tonight again, if you still want to see me, and maybe we can pick things up where we got off. OK?’
There was a long pause.
‘I’m sorry.’
The machine clicked off.
Middle Eight
Were you and he Lovers?
and would you say so if you were?
MORRISSEY,
Alsatian Cousin
Nobody, absolutely nobody who had any real choice in the matter, would choose to spend Sunday morning on a council estate in South East London. Waking up in the morning and staring at the damp patch in the ceiling of your bedroom, a brief vision passes through your mind of all the beautiful places in the world, all the different places where you could have found yourself, and you realize that somebody, somewhere, has seriously miscalculated. The sun is shining. It’s a fine, crisp, wintry morning. You have two options. You can either lie in bed all day, and try to forget where you are, or you can get up, and get out – it doesn’t matter where, just some place that doesn’t make you feel quite so suicidally depressed. All over the estate, people must be thinking these thoughts; in every single flat, there must be people planning their escape. You’d have thought, wouldn’t you, that there would be a mass exodus from the Herbert Estate every Sunday morning, that the streets would be thronged with desperate men, women and children making a concerted bid for freedom. But it doesn’t happen. Nobody moves. Everybody stays put. Do you know why?
Because there are no fucking buses, that’s why.
It’s not that there aren’t meant to be buses, of course. Somewhere, perhaps hidden away in some long-forgotten vault or archive, there must be a timetable telling you when and where these buses are supposed to run. There is even a little panel on the side of the bus-stop, where this timetable is supposed to be posted, although the timetable itself is never there. I think London Transport employs vandals specifically to tear down its timetables within seconds of putting them up, so that people have no idea when the buses are meant to run and can’t complain about them never appearing. Standing at a bus-stop on a Sunday morning is like going to church: it’s an act of faith, an expression of irrational belief in something which you dearly want to believe exists, even though you have never seen it with your own eyes.