The skull grinned sheepishly.
Marlon jumped into his dad’s arms.
Gateshead Festival, Saltwell Park, Still Rocking the Boat, stardate 23rd July
text, Joe Muldur; photography, Jeff Scully
The weird thing about the far north is it doesn’t get dark. The other weird thing is that apparently and somewhat eccentrically none of the most famous native rock musicians at this festival is going up on stage, they’re all too tired or some pathetic excuse, and can think of nothing better to do than wander around aimlessly, rubbernecking the crowd like a bunch of poncey journalists. Well, we’re tired too, but that’s not going to stop us waylaying England’s darlings, asking them stupid questions and namedropping about it. We are not fucking quitters. Encountering Aoxomoxoa in the backstage carpark, we took him severely to task over the lack of any Few input: but (levitating about three metres into the air and gently settling, cross-legged, on the shining bonnet of our rival organ’s arctic safari jeep) he would do nothing but kvetch about the price of some item of personal decor that a certain Marlon Williams has been trying to chisel out of his unspeakably stingy and puritanical dad. Fully expecting to be killed, skinned and eaten, in no particular order, by big-biceped dikey DARK fans tanked up on newkie brown and that bad old cannabis resin, we ventured into the arena, where we signally failed to score any of the legendary solids, but ran into Ax, and very politely asked him when we could expect the Chosen to perform. ‘I’m not talking to you fuckers,’ sez the great man. ‘You think I’ve forgotten the way you wankers always took the part of that shite Aoxomoxoa and printed his bastard disgusting puerile letters well I have not and you can go and fuck yourselves,’ We pointed out, taking editorial responsibility, that ‘we’ would have been happy to print Mr Preston’s disgusting letters, were he not above such things. ‘Didn’t you hear me,’ he replied, ‘I said fuck off and fuck yourselves. Oh, and have you seen Sage anywhere. I need him to hold Fiorinda down, so I can brush her hair. She hasn’t let anyone touch it for a week and it is a disgrace.’ Holding the nation’s glamour puss down while her boyfriend makes her scream and bite sounded like a good gig to us, but we’re a bit scared of Fiorinda, so we directed him to the carpark and off he wended, clutching his little black Denman* (*a kind of hairbrush). About ten pm the sun was still coyly refusing to go down on the horizon. Netherlander ladies Dalkon Shield (or something?) offered matronising congratulations from the stage, in embarrassingly good English, on us not having massacred too many Boat People, and got soundly canned for their insolence. We gave up on the lineup and repaired to the dance tent, where we discovered Fiorinda, lying around doing nothing in the company of some strange Bavarians, and asked her does she think Ax will ever, *ever* forgive us for calling him Captain Sensible that time. ‘I shouldn’t think so.’ was her callous response. ‘You could try giving him a whole lot of money. That sometimes works.’
‘Hi rockstar.’
‘Hi, other rockstar. Where’s Marlon?’
‘Asleep in the van. Where’s Fio?’
‘Asleep… They’ve got no stamina, the youth of today.’
It was about three am. The arena was still gently hopping, the cool northern darkness laced with music and light, smoke and flame, colour and moving bodies. They fell into step together. ‘How was the Western Front?’
‘Oooh, quiet. Dunno why you’re asking me. I was hardly there, I spent the whole time schmoozing with the generals. You’ll have to ask my shadow.’
‘Where are you heading now?’
‘Nowhere special. You?’
‘Somewhere where I don’t have to talk fucking Desperanto no more.’
‘They all speak English, Ax. It is de rigeur.’
‘I know, but I am too proud to let ’em. I have to give them my useless rock tour German, and worse Dutch, and have them be embarrassingly polite about it. Let’s see if the backstage bar’s still open.’
The next day the weather cut up rough again. Two ancient car transporters failed to make the mouth of the Tyne, and spent the day wallowing out at sea. Attempts to helicopter-lift the most vulnerable passengers had to be abandoned. The ships were foundering. It was decided (they’d given up their radio silence) that they would try to beach themselves at South Shields.
Ax got a call from Tyne and Wear police. They believed that the British Resistance Movement was planning some last-ditch violent protest against the Boat People. So Ax went with the cops to a house in Gateshead, a brick terraced house painted all over with Union Jacks, arriving casually and unnanounced for a chat with a bunch of suspected terrorists. He didn’t suppose this would achieve anything, but it’s always good to do the police a favour. The terrorists were a couple of defeated middle-aged blokes and three male teenagers, likewise. He sat with them in an upstairs room, a boy’s bedroom full of football posters, instant food cartons, model kits; smelling of socks and damp. They were thrilled, in their but I’m as good as you, mind Northern way, to meet Ax Preston. But he could hardly understand their accent, and getting them to talk would take a fuck of a lot more than one surprise celebrity visit. He knew afterwards he’d seen something in the room that bothered him, but he didn’t know what.
Gateshead Festival fought bravely to its conclusion, through the foul weather. The circus took off south, leaving Ax and the Chosen, Fiorinda and DARK behind. They’d meet again on Humberside, where the big final Rock the Boat event was due to be held in a few days’ time. The car transporters had managed to beach, with the help of the coastguard and the navy. DARK were booked to go down in the morning with governement aid workers, and greet the refugees for the media folk.
Everyone was staying in the Copthorne in Newcastle, clogging up the bathtub drains with Gateshead mud and a month’s accumulated general filth. The band ate breakfast together in the restaurant at an early hour: Fiorinda back in DARK mode, having left Ax warm, sleepy and just-fucked in that big soft bed. It had been very odd over the weekend, being with Ax and having DARK around at the same time.
Tom Okopie the bassist, inveterately rounded, was getting teased because he had managed to put on weight over the last weeks. Anxiety, said Tom. Nah, Tom, said the band. Admit it, you like fetid ancient butties and coagulated pizza. You are a tour-food perv. Cafren Free, rhythm guitar, with the limp blonde hair and milky skin, our English rose. Gauri the keyboards queen, Filomena the drummer. Tom and Cafren, Gauri and Fil, (this raw, rebel band is ludicrously domestic); Fiorinda and Charm…the odd couple. Cafren had confessed, over the weekend, that she thought she was pregnant. Charm was determined that Cafren simply had an upset stomach, Fiorinda said why don’t you do a test?
‘I don’t want to,’ said Cafren. ‘I want to be pregnant but I don’t want to know.’
Well, this makes perfect sense.
Their drivers arrived. They crossed the estuary; reached the Boat People welfare circus on the seafront at South Shields, and did some talking there for camera. The storm had blown itself out. The sun was bright, the sea glittering under a clear sky. The white strand looked magically empty, only missing the coconut palms, hohoho. But for a change it was genuinely warm. Cafren and Fiorinda got in the front of their vehicle, the coats and a heap of medical supplies in the back. Tom was in the next jeep with a couple of reporters, Charm and Gauri and Fil coming along behind. They bounced along track laid over the sand to the car transporters: lying there like dead whales, tethered by taut cable.
The regular army driver, ethnic Asian with a Midlands accent, wasn’t very sympathetic towards Boat People. He said he didn’t mind protecting them and he didn’t think they should have been turned away, but ‘they’re not immigrants, Fiorinda. Immigrants are different. These muckers don’t want to be here, they have no ties here, no plans, they’re just after—’
‘Any port in a storm,’ said Cafren, peeling windblown hair out of her mouth. It was warm, but breezy for an open-topped jeep ride.
‘Yeah, I hear you. They reckoned they got no choice. But—’
&
nbsp; The Chosen and their manager, the crews, media folk, ate a later breakfast in the Copthorne restaurant, a majestic view of the Tyne through the big windows (which, being at the back of the building, had escaped street-fighting damage). Ax, sitting with manager Kit Minnitt and the lovely Dian Buckley, noticed that he had a definite entourage going on. Should make Jordan happy he thought, without rancour. The brothers were getting on much better since Ax had been forced to depend on Jordan to get the Chosen through this tour, scratch up a guitarist when Ax was called away; generally run the band.
‘What’s your proudest achievement of the Rock the Boat tour?’
Ax did not approve of media folk at mealtimes, but it couldn’t be helped—
‘I’m very proud I haven’t had my drummer vomit on me—’
‘That’s unjustified, Ax,’ shouted Milly, from the next table. ‘I haven’t thrown up for weeks. It’s your fucking nephew’s fault anyway, not mine—’
What had they achieved? Disaster had seemed hideously likely. Militarised Islam on one side: Recalcitrant British Resistance on the other, in evil alliance with the Counterculture’s nihilists. The whole north country awash with leftover armaments from the Islamic campaign, and a mass of have-nots, genuinely threatened by the invasion, right on the spot. Had the country been about to collapse into civil war, until the situation was saved by rock and roll? We’ll never know, he thought. Like all of this, we’ll never know. Maybe we made a difference, maybe we didn’t.
It didn’t hurt for the future of the project, however, that a heavy proportion of the forty million seemed convinced that the so-called Rock and Roll Reich had saved everyone’s necks. Again.
But who was financing the British Resistance? Ax and Mohammad Zayid were near to proving that certain Islamic Yorkshire businessmen were involved, men who had access to those left over armaments, and no desire for a massive influx of destitute co-religionists. What to do about that investigation? Pursue it? Drop it? Sometimes the truth is going to do no one any good.
He poured himself another cup of coffee, and glanced at the tv screen showing DARK on the beach. Thinking about those defeated blokes in their back bedroom, pawns in the game… Suddenly he saw, the image jumping at him like a shape in a nightmare, that room again, and the thing that had worried him. A cracked plastic sports bag under the bed, glimpse of camo-cased hardware inside, one of the blokes pokes the bag out of sight with his foot, hopeless little tidying-up gesture… Mouth dry, heart thumping, he tried to convince himself he was mistaken. Okay, they’re idiots and they didn’t know the police were coming but how could they be so insane as to have that gear in plain sight?
But he knew—
‘Oh my God,’ he whispered. Dropped the cup, coffee everywhere. Grabbed his phone from his pocket—
‘Ax!’ cried Kit, ‘What’s the matter??’
‘They’ve mined the beach.’
Fuck’s sake, Fiorinda, answer me—
The rest of the circus was at Easton Friars, the derelict country house near Harrogate that had been barmy army HQ since the Islamic campaign. They were eating breakfast too, in a shabby salon overlooking the deer park. Rugrats all over the place. The Western tour had been infested with them. Roxane was by hirself in a corner, talking copy down the line: the insistent “you” in Sparrow Child…“your city”; “your wind”, “your walls”, clearly stands for her father, Rufus O’Niall as the man who owns the world, but also for the sick world, the world we’ve left behind… Boat People prefabs formed a vista with the fake gothic ruins, the beach at South Shields on the tv; Fiorinda getting into a jeep, smiling, tired and hollow eyed—
‘What was your best bit?’ Chip asked Verlaine.
They knew how serious things were. But the sun was shining, and (okay, only on the local, high street scale of the post-internet. Okay, purely due to the Ax effect), their album Correspondances was selling brilliantly.
‘Carlisle,’ decided Verlaine. ‘The climber-technos in the welding masks—’
‘What about Sage and the Irish persons at Platt Fields?’
In spite of Anne Marie and Smelly Hugh, the Western tour had been the one for the intelligentsia: Sage and the Heads (and Dilip before he crashed out) able to let their hair down for once, talking about Baudelaire and Brecht. Patroling the curfewed streets of Lancaster and Preston with Aoxomoxoa in barmy army officer mode, how cool. The thunderstorms for the two big outdoor gigs in Manchester. Pearl, Anne-Marie’s six year old, dumping her baby brother Jet in the pig pen on Heaton Park urban farm, to see if pigs really eat humans. Two hundred addled punters in a basement in Liverpool, getting the cortex-burn-out concentrated version of Bleeding Heart. Smelly Hugh and Anne-Marie debuting their new alt.folk band Rover at the other, massive, Liverpool gig—
Sage and George were playing with Sage’s shadow, to annoy Pearl. The real Aoxomoxoa eating toast, the hologram matching every gesture, mirror-image.
‘I don’t like it,’ said the evil child uncertainly; glowering. ‘It’s stupid.’
‘Oh well,’ said Sage. ‘If Pearl doesn’t like him, we’ll have to scrumple him up and throw him away. George, Sistine—’
The shadow rose, did a very elegant twirl and dropped into his Adam pose, reaching out a hand to the origin of his existence. Sage extended a masked finger, the shadow doubled over, writhed like a punctured balloon, and withered into nothing—
‘I DON’T LIKE THAT!’ yelled Ruby the toddler.
Pearl gave Sage a glare of disgust, and ran off through the french windows.
‘Sage,’ said Anne-Marie, ‘If you frighten my kids into nightmares again—’
‘Hahaha—’
‘How much do lemons cost?’ wondered Silver Wing, the eight year old.
‘I don’t think you can buy them up here, sweetheart,’ said her mother. ‘Why?’
‘I’m going to make traditional english lemonade and sell it to the refus.’
‘Silver, you can’t do that,’ Chip was shocked. ‘One gives things to refugees.’
‘Why not? They’ve got money. They’ve sold tons of Afghani shit.’
On the tv, three jeeps rolled across the sand—
BLAM!
Everyone jumped up—
As if they could run to help, as if they could pull out burning bodies.
Cafren was saying, lots of places in the United States are worse, more violent, more guns: and that’s the heart of empire, that’s where everything still works—
Fiorinda was saying, Caf, can you reach my jacket, I think I can hear my—
Then she was flying through the air, in an envelope of violent sound. She was tumbling, head over heels, sand driven into her eyes, in a ringing, singing whiteness. Landing, winded, something warm and sticky falling, spattering her, in her mouth, tasted like raw meat—
She was lying at the foot of a grassy dune. The jeep she’d been in was on its side, the one behind it was in smoking pieces. Cafren and the driver were sprawled, right out in the open. She jumped up and ran back to them, painful stitch in her side. She had not grasped, in her spinning head, what was going on. She thought they were under attack from the air. She grabbed Cafren and yelled Can you get up! Caf’s mouth working without a sound, the driver trying to yell something but no sound from him either. Cafren was able to stand. The driver had a big slice out of his leg which was bleeding like mad, but they could have helped him between them if he would stop struggling. Finally, she got it. Oh, we hit a mine. Big mine, maybe there’s more. Well, okay, we’ll do it on physical, back the way I came in. I didn’t blow up. Stop thinking, do it on physical, what Ax and Sage said, in circumstances that would often sound mad and scary unless you were in the habit of performing on stage—
So they got back to the grassy part. A roaring in her ears, she crouched in the brilliant sunshine with Cafren in her arms, staring at the wrecked jeeps, the third one behind, stranded out there motionless, with the rest of DARK: but where’s Tom??? Cafren sobbing without a sound, people come running, wha
t is this foul sticky goop all over me?
Oh shit, she thought. This is bad. We fucked up, we didn’t make it.
Then she was in a trailer hospital, in a cot bed in a little room with metal walls. She’d had her bruises dressed, and the bits of Tom washed off. It hurt to breathe, she’d cracked some ribs. She was wearing a hateful hospital gown, wishing she could pass out but the sedative they’d given her wasn’t working. Ax was there, she was telling him (it weighed on her terribly) about when she’d fucked Tom, back at the beginning with DARK, because it was her policy not to make a fuss, she would do it with anyone that saw the ribbon and still wanted sex, and she hadn’t known Cafren would mind. Why would anyone mind, it was only Fiorinda, stupid worthless kid. But Cafren had minded, and it had been between them ever since. Oh, why can’t I go back and not have done that? And where’s Sage? Why isn’t he here? She couldn’t understand why Ax wasn’t talking, not that she cared, she was too dizzy to care, as long as he would hold her.
The driver of the second jeep, and one of the reporters, had been thrown clear and had survived, badly hurt.
Bits of Tom in my mouth, oh dear, oh dear, can’t get rid of that—
‘Sage.’
‘Ax! Is she okay?’
‘She’s okay. She’s hurt but she’s okay. Tom Okopie’s dead—’
‘Yeah, and that reporter. We saw.’
‘Sage I have to go to fucking Cleethorpes, right now. Got to leave her. Can you get up here, soon as humanly possible—’
‘Ax, what is it you’re not telling me?’
‘Nothing serious.’
‘Then let me I talk to her.’
‘She…she can’t hear you, temporarily deafened by the blast. She’s sleeping. Just be here when she wakes up. Don’t leave her. She’s not in a good state.’
Gone. Sage had walked away from the table where barmy army officers were urgently discussing what had happened. He stared out through mullioned windows: relief still mixed with terror. He’d been waiting for Richard Kent to show up, ex British infantry major who was the barmies’ Chief of Staff. No way he was waiting any longer. Someone knocked on the Victorian-Gothic door: a timid sound, like one of the kids. Except that any of the kids in this circus would have marched straight in, knocking on doors a lost, archaic concept, Sanskrit to the lot of them. Along with the words no, and bedtime, and all stuff like that. Someone went to open it. Smelly Hugh stood there, diffident.
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