by Nick Earls
After about six weeks of nothing getting back to New York but bad stories, we had a surprise visit from a few of the senior people at the music company. They turned up with boxloads of Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and played it as though they just happened to be in the neigh bourhood and thought they might as well drop in.
‘Mind if we listen to some of what you’ve been doing?’ one of them said after his second decaf skinny latte, as if it was an afterthought.
We played a few tracks and they listened studiously, and without moving. When they love you, you get some middle-aged-guy-type music-appreciation movements – the nodding head, the tapping foot, sometimes more – but they weren’t giving us any of that.
‘We haven’t heard the single yet?’ It was somewhere between a statement and a question, and it came from the one of the three I had met before. His name was Karl. He was a vice president of something.
‘We’re not about singles,’ Derek said.
And Karl said, ‘I know that. But is there a big song? You owe a lot to one big song, remember. Still Water, Iris, Drops of Jupiter – those songs make bands. They sell albums, they book out arenas, commercial radio plays them until they’ve put your grandchildren through college. We’re budgeting for six million units with this album, but a big song could take it past twelve.’
‘No pressure though,’ Paul, our drummer, said, and Karl said, ‘That’s right,’ and smiled. How many times had he, or someone like him, had the same conversation with the Goo Goo Dolls in the years after Iris had worked its big-song magic for them? He dusted doughnut sugar from his hand and asked where the bathroom was.
‘I thought they were all big songs,’ Derek said quietly and only to me, once they had left.
The last strand of that conversation unwound that evening in Frankfurt, almost a year later, when Derek took the call from our New York manager saying that he had had a meeting with Karl, and they were cutting us loose.
We ordered another round of beers in tall half-litre glasses, and not a lot was said. The beer was cloudy and slightly sweet, and I could taste bananas and citrus and cloves. Around us people ate fat sausages and schnitzels. We were under an umbrella – an orange umbrella emblazoned with the Schoefferhofer name in a Germanic script, with three ancient-looking gold medals above it – but the sun had gone and the wind rushed in as a huge barge loaded with rusty scrap metal pushed by. Three of us – Derek, Darren and I – had been part of Butterfish since before the first US deal. Paul was from Melbourne and had joined after the first album. Then we added Ben – from Cambridge, Massachusetts – just in time for the This is Spinal Tap remake that was Written in Sand, Written in Sea. The five of us sat awkwardly around a small wooden table for four, each of us trying not to take up an entire side and look like the alpha male. Each of us alone with his own complex arrangement of thoughts about what was going on, what might happen next. For Ben, it may have been as simple as wanting to get the hell out and hoping that the cheque would clear.
We walked along the riverbank where people had been lazing in the evening sun but were now wrapping up against the chill that had blown in, and we bought kebabs from a small white boat called the Istanbul. The others drank late that night and, no doubt, skirted around a morose deconstruction of our grand and soon to be public failure. I couldn’t face it, and I went to my room. It felt as if several years of tiredness had caught me in a rush and tackled me hard.
I was up early the next morning, and I saw there was a market on the iron bridge. I almost bought a threeeuro belt from a guy with a stall a metre wide that sold only belts, and all for three euros each. I remembered that I had kept the same crappy belt for years, saving money in case my career fell over and, in the moment of reaching for my wallet and then not buying the new belt, I realised that that was what had happened the evening before. My career had fallen over, without a sound, and I had met it with a beer-fuzzed brain and some ambivalence. Anger, relief, a sense of shame. A sense that some of the noise in my head might be about to go.
There was to be no fourth album, and the band broke up before I finished the song that may one day be known as The Light that Guides You Home. It had a chorus and one long verse, so it felt only halfway to being a song, and its bridge was problematic. Those were its shortcomings in structural terms. I also didn’t really know what it was about, where it was heading. It was entirely true to life, in that sense at least. I walked away from the iron bridge market with the money to buy all the belts in Frankfurt, but I didn’t feel rich, or even safe, and I had no clear idea about how to live a rich person’s life, or any other. I had seen affluent lives and they didn’t feel like me. For a while, nothing did.
We tore ourselves apart with Written in Sand, Written in Sea. We even argued about the comma in the title. Derek actually called it elegant. I was the one who ended up shouting, ‘No one buys albums with commas in the title.’ I had no evidence for that, of course. Not until we released the album anyway. ‘Tore apart’ is unjustly dramatic. We snapped like perished elastic, tamely and definitively. We wore out. Our best new ideas, our friendships, everything – we wore it all out.
So, it was over now. Derek was famously out of control and the others were, respectively, in Sydney, on tour with a side-project band, and last heard of back in his old bedroom at his parents’ house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Where, presumably, he woke up every morning, took a look at the wallpaper he knew best and wondered for at least a second or two if his whole Butterfish experience might have been no more than a bad dream with an Australian accent.
Since all the songs were Frick/Holland, I was still riding high on my share of the royalties. Still Water alone had clocked up US radio airplays in the hundreds of thousands, and had featured in two movies, a TV series and advertisements in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, South Africa and Belgium, mostly promoting still water (no imagination required there). It was a steady earner as an iTunes download, and its chorus was a ringtone for which people around the world regularly handed over money. My grandchildren would thank me, if I ended up being smart with it.
I tripped on my own front steps in the dark, and wondered why I hadn’t thought to leave a light on. I found the door handle by feel, and the keyhole beneath it. The issue of grandchildren seemed very theoretical, like particle physics, or those equations that cross blackboards with a spray of sigmas in their wakes. I had no future planned, yet. I had a bunch of Norwegians to coax through the white-knuckle ride of their first major international album, and I thought that would do for now.
On Friday I played a fierce half-hour of Space Invaders and then worked on a Splades song that I had been ignoring. I added bits, and then subtracted twice as much. D-verb, a Hammond-organ kind of keyboards sound. I had pulled off enough of the bells and whistles by late morning that I found myself recording an acoustic guitar track for its rawness rather than any other contribution it might make. I imagined a bar in a backwoods town, the drummer working the snare with brushes, and a guitar that had been carried across the country without much care. I recorded it to pick up every squeak of the fingering, and then wondered what Reason or Sample Tank might have for me when I went looking for the drums. I wanted leathery-faced old-guy brushwork that came with a battered hat and no teeth, and a sense of unshakeable rhythm that got built into the hands in the thirties.
No, wrong sound. Clever but wrong. My mind was on my father’s old blues records – very old blues records – and that wasn’t the way to take this. There was an element of it in the song, but just an element, and it was lurking in the background and meant to stay there. I threw most of Gunnar and Øivind’s work back in, but tried to be selective about it. They had a sound, and I should go with that.
‘What do you want? What do you want?’ How many times had I asked them that in Svolvær? Plenty. We needed an album they could live with until the last interview in the last country. We needed a couple of potential hits to keep the music-company people in London happy, but we needed to avoid quir
kiness, since there’s no maths quite as certain as quirky plus Scandin avian equals one-hit wonder. We needed to keep their sound intact but bring it across towards the international mainstream.
I was enjoying the puzzle that presented me, and not minding at all being the grizzled veteran of the business, the one who had been through the mill and had all his excitement worked out of him, only to see it replaced by anecdotes he no longer had the grace to tell. And I didn’t let Gunnar and Øivind know it, but they would eventually look on this as the best time – the last time they made a record almost for its own sake, full of promise and without the weight of expectations. Expectations existed, of course, but they had been calibrated in London and kept out of the heads of the Splades for now.
I brought up Øivind’s guitar part, which played all over my half-baked work of the morning.
Then movement caught my eye next door, through the bushes. I realised it was mid-afternoon and school was over for the week. I heard the sound of a body entering the pool in a clean dive, and some strokes being swum. Annaliese got out at the end near me, topless. She picked up a towel and patted herself dry. She was almost facing me, but she seemed to be looking off into the trees behind my studio, though not at anything in particular. She was wearing only a black bikini bottom, and standing in the one place where she would be almost completely visible. Then she spread the towel out across a banana lounge – I could just see the end of it – and she disappeared from view. All but her feet and calves, as she lay face down in the baking sun. The rest of her was gone.
The green lines marking the volume of Øivind’s guitar had tipped up into orange and then fallen away. The track had ended, and the only sound came from the airconditioning unit in the wall behind me. I told myself I couldn’t have seen what I had just seen, couldn’t have watched.
I wondered if it would be best to re-record the bass, once everything else was right.
‘It’s a big yard,’ Mark said as he looked it over. We both knew it was a big yard, but now it had to be put into words, with an appropriate sense of the burden it was about to place on him.
Despite the heat, he was wearing black shorts and a black T-shirt again, though the design had mostly flaked off this shirt, which hung like a sack. It might have once said Slayer or Stryker or something else that was almost certainly heavy metal, in a gothic font and inappropriately umlauted. He was leaning like an old hand on the mower he had clattered along the street from his house. He was wearing a black cap on which someone had had the word ‘dude’ embroidered, in black. The sun glinted from his ear nail.
‘Could be fifty bucks, I reckon,’ he said, with the gravitas of the large-animal vet who’s telling you the whole herd has to go. It’s hard news, but he knows you’re man enough to take it on the chin. ‘Plus ten for providing the mower and the petrol. So, sixty.’
I nodded, and tried to appear as though I was giving it the right amount of thought. I looked around, appraising the furthest mowable parts of the block.
‘And the price stays fixed regardless of fluctuations in the price of fuel, and you rake the grass once you’ve mowed it?’ I nearly mentioned the ten-day rolling-average oil price out of Singapore, but I would have laughed then. I already had to look away from the dude cap as it was.
‘All part of the service,’ he said, still cheerless.
He reached out a pale sweaty hand for me to shake, and the deal was done. I went back inside, and heard the mower squeak and rattle its way to a corner of the block near the road. With a couple of pulls of the cord, he had it started.
I was taking a day off, determined to take a full day off. I’d been squinting at the screen and hunched over like a monk for too many hours of the preceding few days, and I knew I wasn’t hearing anything the way I needed to.
So, I had read three newspapers in their entirety, slept through lunch and was starting on a slow-simmering curry while drinking the day’s first ice-cold Stella. The curry was a lamb rogan josh, with bay leaves and a stick of cinnamon and whole cardamom pods and cloves, and it worked out best with two hours or more on a low heat.
Mark pushed his way up and down one side of the house. I gave the spices a couple of minutes in ghee before adding the onion, then the garlic and ginger.
‘I’ll do yours if you’ll make that curry,’ Derek had said to me more than once when we’d been handed our updated interview schedules on the Supernature tour. And I’d hang out in my suite’s kitchenette, giving the pot an occasional stir while he served up identical anecdotes in interview after interview. Then someone labelled me enigmatic, and we got to do that a lot less. I was becoming a candidate for the ‘so how does it feel to be the quiet-but-fucked-up guy in the band?’ interview, and that’s best dealt with by cooking quicker meals and pulling your weight.
Mark methodically worked his way around without a break until all the grass was mown. I went out onto the back verandah to find him leaning on the rake under the shade of a tree near the studio.
I offered him a drink, and he said, ‘A beer’d be good.’ He was bright red in the face and his shirt was drenched with sweat and flecked with grass clippings. The dude cap was pushed back and wavy strands of hair were stuck across his forehead.
‘I’m not having that “special occasion” debate with you,’ I told him. ‘I was thinking of your hydration. Water, you know.’
‘I’m aware of it. Water, yeah.’ He put on some kind of smile then. ‘Water’d be good.’
I went inside, saw my own beer on the counter and felt like he’d brought out the mean old man in me. But, no, I couldn’t go giving out beers to fourteen-year-olds to avoid feeling old. I put the stubbie in the fridge and took out a jug of cold water.
Annaliese was walking around the side of the house as I opened the screen door. She saw me and stopped.
‘Hey, Curtis,’ she said. She was wearing oversized round sunglasses of the style favoured by people like Paris Hilton and Mischa Barton. They were almost half the size of her face. ‘Mark has to go home.’ She turned to look at him. ‘Dad’s on the phone.’
‘Really?’ he said without much interest. ‘Do I have to?’
‘Apparently.’
He gave the ground a scratch with the rake, but didn’t move.
‘Some school report,’ she said. ‘You’re being dysfunctional again.’
‘Oh, that,’ he said, as if it was old news. It probably was. He looked up at me. ‘I’ll come back and do the raking. If that’s okay. This might take a while.’
He leaned the rake against the tree, pulled off the dude cap and pushed his wet mat of hair away from his face. He smiled, as if set to be amused by the interrogation about to come his way, and the deadening monosyllabic replies I was sure he was going to offer.
‘Right, then,’ he said, and he walked off across the dry mown grass, in no particular hurry.
Annaliese made no move to follow him. She was dressed in a short skirt and a singlet top, and they didn’t quite manage to meet in the middle. I stood there with the jug of cold water and the glass.
‘How about a tour of the studio?’ she said.
‘The studio? Sure.’ I didn’t know what I had expected her to say, but that wasn’t it.
I left the jug and glass on the verandah table and walked down the steps. A tour of the studio. She was about to be underwhelmed. I noticed the closed curtains and realised the key was back in the house. I was practically standing at the door by then.
‘Pretend you didn’t see this,’ I told her, and I reached under the steel beam that ran beneath the front of the studio and found the spare key in its magnetised holder.
‘Who are you?’ she said, and laughed. ‘Maxwell Smart? You’ll show me the studio, but then you’ll have to kill me?’
The studio air felt trapped and stale and warm when I opened the door, so I turned the airconditioning on as I stepped inside. Annaliese pushed the door shut behind her and stood next to me, her sunglasses in her hand.
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‘It’s early days,’ I told her. ‘Still halfway between a granny flat and a big studio, massive mixing desk, the remnants of lines of coke on every horizontal surface.’ She either played it cool or thought I was serious, or thought the line was too stupid to acknowledge. Whichever way she took it, she said nothing. ‘Or in my case, the rings of forgotten coffee cups on every horizontal surface.’ With that I looked like either a wimp or someone with something to hide. Almost certainly the former.
Annaliese took in the array of mute machines and powerboards, and the musty odour that had been locked up here when I first arrived. In her mind, this room had been different. It looked like a bachelor loungeroom prior to its Queer Eye for the Straight Guy makeover. And I was playing the role of the slob with the grey ponytail and the food-spattered shirt who called it his little slice of a shambolic heaven. Then in would come Carson and the gang, and I’d be given a red raw screaming body wax and mocked and prodded into something fit to leave the house, maybe even bring a tear to the eye of my long-long-suffering girlfriend.
‘Right,’ Annaliese said. She had expected a place where magic happened, and there was none on offer. ‘What’s this?’
She had managed to pick the one frivolous purchase in the room.
‘Space Invaders,’ I told her. Or, to be more precise, an original circa 1978 Space Invaders console, refurbished and in full working order, sitting there low and sleek and black with its red knob and glass top. The perfect antidote for overthinking or boredom, or the times when every sound seemed like a big mistake.