The Dwarves of Death

by Jonathan Coe

  When we finally got going, I began to relax very slightly. The experience of being on a bus had a comforting familiarity and normality to it, so that the horrible thing I had witnessed less than twenty minutes ago began to seem almost absurd. The world I was in – the world of half-empty London buses on a Saturday evening, carrying young, smartly dressed people off to parties and clubs and cinemas – didn’t seem to admit of anything as fantastic as the spectacle of two screeching dwarves bashing a man to death. It was stupid. It was crazy.

  Stupid and crazy… and yet this was familiar, too. Dwarves and death. Why did it strike a chord – where had I come across these words recently? And then I remembered. It went back to a conversation we had had, the four of us, on the morning we recorded our demo tape.

  Was this just coincidence, or had I actually stumbled upon a clue?

  Solo

  did I really walk all this way just to hear you say

  ‘oh I don’t want to go out tonight’

  MORRISSEY,

  I Don’t Owe You Anything

  It had been a fine feeling to wake up on Tuesday morning and know that I didn’t have to go into work. Even though we had to be at the studio for ten o’clock, this still meant an extra hour in bed. There was no sound from Tina’s room. This was a relief, too. For the last few nights, strange noises had been emerging from behind her door: muffled cries and grunts, suggestive of physical exertions which I preferred not to speculate about. The toilet kept flushing as well. But I had been lying awake when she came back in from work the night before, and it had sounded as though she was on her own.

  There were no notes for me in the kitchen. I took my toast into the sitting-room, watched Breakfast Time with the sound turned down and decided to catch up on the latest messages on the answering machine. I had come back quite late myself last night and hadn’t got around to listening to them yet.

  There were four messages. One of them was from Madeline: she said that she couldn’t see me tonight after all and could we make it Thursday instead? I was disappointed, of course, and also a little puzzled. She was always telling me that she had no social life apart from her evenings with me. Perhaps she was ill or something.

  The other three messages were all from Pedro. They had each been left at different stages of the evening and together they made up quite a little narrative. The first one was relatively coherent and the only thing you could hear on it was his voice. He must have been calling from his flat.

  ‘Hello, Tina, my little breast of chicken, my little piece of fur. Listen, I will be a bit later than my usual this evening because I am taking the night off and going with some friends to paint the town. But I will still come and see you because I couldn’t do without you for a single night of my life. Expect to feel my key in your lock before dawn, then, my love. Adios.’

  For the next message he was speaking from a call-box: he was slightly louder and there were some voices and some music in the background. His speech was starting to sound slurred.

  ‘Hi, Teeny-babes, we’re having a great time here, and I’m just ringing to say… Hope I can make it tonight… I still want to come… Maybe I’ll be pretty late but I hope you’ll still be wearing something nice like that thing I bought you. You know, that cost me a lot of money and it’s not every shop that will sell you something like that, and I’m sure if you had another go at it you could fit – ’

  The pips went and the message ended.

  The last one seemed to have been left a few hours later. This time the voices in the background were both male and female, and the music, although it was louder, was now slow and sensual.

  ‘Hi, Tina, we’re having quite a time here, we’re all higher than a kite and it would be just great if you could come over and join us because we have some great people here, all really good friends of mine, and we could do some great things here if we had a girl like you here, so please come over and bring some things over with you because I…’

  This time his voice was just cut off without any explanation, and the tape stopped with a click. He hadn’t left an address for Tina to go and find him. Her door remained ominously shut.

  *

  Vincent was in a particularly cheerful mood when we arrived at the studio that morning. His favourite customers were using one of the rehearsal rooms: not us, of course, but an all-female band called The Vicious Circles. He was, I need hardly tell you, one of those typical music-business technicians who specialize in making the lives of female musicians a misery. When I arrived, one of The Vicious Circles was standing at his desk complaining that she couldn’t get her amplifier to work.

  ‘Do you think you could come and look at it?’ she was saying.

  ‘Look at it? I’ll do more than come and look at it for you, darling. I’ll bring my plug along and stick it in, if you like.’

  He was wearing a T-shirt on which a picture of an enormous red rooster was accompanied by the words, ‘Nothing like a nice big cock to wake you up in the morning’.

  ‘Look, I’m only asking you to come and give me a hand.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind giving you a hand, darling. A hand’ll do nicely to start with. Har, har, har!’

  ‘I’ll go and do it myself,’ she said, turning.

  ‘Anything else wrong, is there, darling? You wouldn’t like me to have a look at your fuzz box, would you? Har, har, har!’

  She was about to go back downstairs, when two small children suddenly appeared through the front door, wearing matching anoraks. Immediately, all Vincent’s joviality evaporated and he stared at them in horror and fury. For several seconds he was speechless; then he exploded.

  ‘Kids! What the fucking hell are two bloody kids doing in here? Get them out! Go on, piss off!’

  The woman ran over to her children and gathered them in her arms reproachfully.

  ‘Look, I thought I told you to stay in the car.’

  ‘It’s boring,’ said the eldest.

  ‘Are these yours?’ Vincent asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This isn’t a fucking kindergarten, you know. Who said you could bring your kids here?’

  ‘Well what else am I supposed to do with them while we practise? I can’t afford a minder.’

  ‘Get those kids out of here and lock them in your fucking car, and don’t bring them in here again.’

  ‘Come on,’ she said, taking them both by the hand. ‘Back to the car. I’ll keep coming out and seeing you, and I’ll bring you some sweets.’

  Vincent turned to me after they’d gone, apparently expecting to find me in sympathy with him.

  ‘Women with kids should stay at home and look after the little fuckers,’ he said. ‘They don’t know a tit from a tweeter anyway, this lot. Totally clueless.’

  ‘How’s Studio B coming along?’ I asked, anxious to change the subject.

  ‘Oh, you know, a bit of work still to do. You’ll be the first to know when it’s ready.’

  ‘How long’s it been out of action, now? Quite a few months, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, no, a few weeks, that’s all.’

  ‘That’s funny, because whenever I talk to the other bands who use this place, none of them have ever been in there, either. It seems to have been shut for as long as we can remember.’

  He put his face uncomfortably near mine and looked me squarely in the eye.

  ‘Do you mind if I give you some advice, Bilbo?’ he said. ‘Don’t ask so many questions. All right?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Come on then, we’ve got work to do.’

  Jake and Harry were already waiting for us in the studio; Martin presumably knew that we wouldn’t be needing him until later. Once inside the studio Vincent became quiet and efficient and began checking the mikes set up around the drum kit. Jake was looking nervous: he knew that his part was the first to be recorded, and that he’d have to get it right early on in the session. It wasn’t a particularly complex drum part, though, and besides having a click track to keep him in time,
I was going to provide a basic keyboard part so that he’d know where he was in the song.

  As soon as he started playing, though, I could tell that he hadn’t learnt the song properly. He had no real idea where the transitions were meant to come, and he was far too tentative about putting in fills. And, in spite of my pleas to the contrary, the pattern he was playing was a none-too-distant cousin of:

  After six or seven takes he was basically no better, just a little more polished and relaxed, so I thought we might as well cut our losses. As Jake sweated his way through the fade-out, I gave a thumbs-up to Vincent on the other side of the glass, and Harry was sent through to put down the bass line.

  We got an excellent take from Harry on his second go, by which time Martin had arrived. There followed a prolonged interval for re-stringing and tuning. Vincent gave him a brief lecture about the folly of putting new strings on just before a recording session, and I felt, for once, slightly grateful to the bad-tempered old bastard. Martin scowled and dithered over whether to use a thick or a thin plectrum. At first when he started playing, his chords seemed to bear no relation to the bass line: it transpired that he was playing them three frets too high. There was a minor seven which he kept playing as a major until it practically drove me mad with frustration. He attempted impossibly ambitious arpeggios where the song called for simple power chords. His B string kept going out of tune. By the time we had even a half-way decent take, it was getting on for one o’clock.

  ‘We’ll have to finish this this afternoon,’ said Vincent, gleefully. ‘It’ll cost you double, of course.’

  ‘You’ll have to speak to Chester about that,’ I said. Chester paid all our rehearsal and recording bills.

  We went to the pub across the road, a square, detached, concrete building calculated to depress the most flighty of spirits. Martin bought a round and we sat drinking it in morose silence, conscious that the morning had gone just as badly as we had all expected.

  ‘Catchy tune, that,’ said Jake eventually, having hummed a few bars of ‘Stranger in a Foreign Land’.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Harry. ‘It’s a nice one.’

  I resented these limp attempts to cheer me up.

  ‘Perhaps we should have recorded something a bit simpler,’ I said.

  ‘No, this is a good one to do,’ said Harry. ‘It’s direct, it’s tuneful.’

  ‘Not exactly chart material, though, is it?’ said Martin, sipping his beer and glowering. ‘It’s not what you’d call commercial.’

  ‘That’s such a bloody old-fashioned thing to say,’ said Jake. ‘That distinction just doesn’t exist any more. Anything can get into the charts these days, absolutely anything, as long as it’s properly marketed. That’s why they’re so full of shit.’ He took a mouthful of Guinness and closed his eyes. ‘God, I wish we were back in seventy-six.’

  ‘Why, what happened in seventy-six?’ asked Martin.

  Jake eyed him up to see if he was being serious.

  ‘You’ve heard of punk, have you?’

  ‘Punk? That was never twelve years ago, was it?’

  ‘It bloody was,’ said Harry. ‘Twelve years almost exactly. “Anarchy in the UK", released November the twenty-sixth, nineteen seventy-six. What a band, eh? What a band.’

  ‘The Damned, “New Rose". That came out then, too.’

  ‘No, that was earlier, about a month earlier.’

  ‘If you two are off wandering down Memory Lane again,’ I said, ‘I’m going to go for a walk or something.’

  They ignored me. Once they got going on this subject, Jake and Harry (who had both been in their teens during the late seventies) were unstoppable.

  ‘What about The Vibrators, eh? “We Vibrate".’

  ‘The Jam. The Buzzcocks. The Adverts. Siouxsie.’

  ‘May the seventh, nineteen seventy-seven. The London Rainbow. I was there. What a fucking brilliant night that was. The Clash, The Slits, The Jam and Subway Sect.’

  ‘X-Ray Spex, “Oh Bondage Up Yours". Great single.’

  ‘"Spiral Scratch".’

  ‘"Pretty Vacant".’

  ‘"Right to Work".’

  ‘"Get a Grip".’

  ‘Do you remember The Rezillos?’

  ‘Do you remember Alternative TV?’

  ‘Stiff Little Fingers.’

  ‘The Desperate Bicycles.’

  ‘XTC.’

  ‘999.’

  ‘Slaughter and the Dogs.’

  ‘What about The Dwarves of Death?’

  The flood of reminiscence stopped and Jake stared at Harry in surprise.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Dwarves of Death – they did that single, what was it called… “Black and Blue”.’

  ‘You’re making this up.’

  ‘No, you remember them, surely? I mean, it didn’t chart or anything, but they were a real cult band.’

  ‘I think you’re pulling my leg.’

  ‘No I’m not. They did two singles – “Black and Blue", and then another one, I can’t remember the name.’

  ‘Look, I was around at the time, right? I can remember the name of every band from the punk era. Stop taking the piss.’

  ‘I’m not. Honest. You must remember. There were four of them – they had this amazing girl singer with a really unpleasant voice – made Poly Styrene sound like Kiri Te Kanawa – and they had this guitarist and this bass player who were both dwarves. Brothers. That’s where they got the name.’

  ‘That’s only three,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Well, there was some other guy. The drummer or something.’

  ‘Sorry, Harry, I’m not buying it.’

  ‘Are you calling me a liar?’

  ‘I just don’t believe you, that’s all.’

  ‘Look, why don’t we ask Vincent?’ I said, thinking that we already had enough trouble on our hands without falling out over a stupid argument like this. ‘He’s always going on about how he was right there in the thick of it when punk happened. Ask him, he’d remember.’

  And so it was Vincent who settled the argument, after a fashion, with a curt ‘Nope, never heard of them’, when we got back into the studio. Harry began to sulk and Jake grinned in triumph. Then shordy afterwards, he and Martin left: their jobs were done and there was little point in them hanging around to watch the tedious process of me and Harry finishing the song off.

  We had recorded the drums in stereo, so now, with the drums and bass guitar all laid down, we only had four tracks left to complete the recording. We decided to put the vocal line down on one track and leave the other three free for keyboards. The real hook of the song was a recurring figure which should really have been played on the saxophone, but we didn’t know any saxophone players so we had to make do with a fairly convincing sample which Vincent had found for us. I recorded that, and a piano part, and added some strings, and then Harry had a go at the vocals:

  Now and then

  I wonder if I should have come here

  Real men

  Who’s going to ask me what I’ve done here?

  I search for buried treasure

  Precious gifts from out of Araby

  I know it’s now or never

  And when I’m down, will you carry me?

  I shook my head sadly as he sang these lines. I’ve always found it hard to write lyrics, and as Harry struggled to get the top B at the beginning of each phrase, these ones sounded more lame than ever. Then there was the chorus:

  And then I went away

  And I left behind the times

  And the place where she stayed

  Often lingers in my mind

  Wish I knew what you planned

  Feel your fingers in my hand

  I just hope I can stand –

  Stranger in a foreign land

  By five o’clock the recording was finished. We took an hour off to have some tea, then came back to do the mix-down. We listened to the finished version a couple of times and tried to feel good about it.

  �
�There you are, boys,’ said Vincent, presenting us with a reel of one-inch tape in a white cardboard box. ‘Your passport to success.’

  ‘Sarcastic bastard,’ said Harry, when he’d gone out of the room. He opened the box and looked at the tape. ‘I suppose we’d better get a few cassettes and make some copies of this, had we?’

  ‘Perhaps we’d better leave it a few days,’ I said, ‘and listen to it again.’

  Harry must have sensed the pessimism that this implied. He nodded understandingly.

  ‘I believe you,’ I added. ‘About that band.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Doesn’t matter really, does it?’

  ‘Look, I’ve got this friend, back in Sheffield. He knows everything about music. He’s a walking encyclopaedia. I’ll write and ask him – he’ll know.’

  ‘It’s no big deal. Really.’

  But I could see that it mattered to him, and I decided to do something about it that evening. Besides, I had been out of touch with Derek for far too long.

  *

  The tune of ‘Stranger in a Foreign Land’ was still dancing around my head as I waited for Madeline outside the Swiss Centre in Leicester Square on Thursday evening. I suppose when I wrote those words, ‘Wish I knew what you planned, Feel your fingers in my hand’, she had been at the back of my mind – where she always was, when she wasn’t at the front. The chords I had used were meant to have a bitter-sweet feel – alternating minor sevenths, a whole tone apart, a favourite mannerism of mine – but on the whole the piece was designed to sound optimistic and forward-looking, which was still how I tried to feel about the relationship: in the face, it has to be said, of much discouraging evidence.