Between shows, Jasper, Dean and I worked on new material at our hotels and on planes, and at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles and Turk Street Studios in San Francisco. We egged each other on. I’d think, Well, if Jasper’s got tubular bells on ‘Timepiece’, then I’ll damn well get a sitar for ‘What’s Inside What’s Inside’. I remember Dean, during the session we recorded ‘I’m A Stranger Here Myself’, telling me, ‘Okay, Holloway – I’ll meet your dulcimer and raise you a harpsichord – and in five/four time. Match that!’ Of course, the results could have been disastrous, but during our American sessions an esprit de corps spurred us all on to work in unison to make our mad ideas succeed. Griff’s role cannot be overstated. He followed where the music led and kept the rhythms purring once he got there. A band is a band because it is greater than the sum of its parts. Otherwise, why bother? By the morning of 12 October 1968, Jasper and I had laid down the bones of two new songs each, while a song Dean had written for a soundtrack expanded, like fractals, into a three-part unfinished masterpiece.
Once upon a time in the sixties, masters were stored on magnetic reel-to-reels. If these were lost or damaged, the music stored on them was irretrievably gone. Less than forty-eight hours after Dean’s death, while we were still in San Francisco awaiting the coroner’s report, Turk Street Studios burned to the ground and Levon had to tell us that the tapes from our sessions had melted in the fire. There was no hard-drive back-up, no memory sticks, no cloud. We felt that Dean had been taken from us a second time. We felt Utopia Avenue was well and truly cursed.
We flew back to London with an urn containing Dean’s ashes a few days later. The plan was to scatter them from a pier a few miles downstream from Gravesend, where Dean’s father had taught him to fish, in a low-key ceremony with just a few friends and family. As Dean used to say, however, ‘There are no secrets in Gravesend’, and over a thousand people turned up – including, thankfully, some off-duty coppers who kept the crowds away from the elderly wooden jetty. As Dean’s brother, father and grandmother emptied the urn onto the water, Jasper played ‘Roll Away The Stone’ on an amplified acoustic guitar. A thousand voices joined in. As the final note died, Jasper threw the guitar into the river. The Thames carried it and Dean’s ashes out to sea.
Is the soul a real thing? I wondered then as I wonder now. Are the unscientific majority right? Does some essence of Dean persist somehow, somewhere? Or is the notion of the soul a placebo, a comfort-blanket, a blindfold we use to spare ourselves the full awfulness of the cold, hard truth that when we die we stop? Is Dean, in fact, as gone, as utterly gone, as a gusty autumn morning on the Thames estuary fifty-one years ago? All I know is, I don’t know – and so the answer is, ‘Maybe’. I’ll take that ‘Maybe’, however. I prefer it to ‘Definitely not’. There’s solace in ‘Maybe’.
Levon left Moonwhale and returned to Toronto to head up Atlantic’s new Canadian office. Griff returned to the jazz circuit before moving to LA in 1972 where he established himself as a go-to session and tour drummer. I released my first solo album, Driftway to Astercote in 1970. Jasper, to the dismay of his fans, retired from music and vanished into the wild blue yonder. For a few years my only contact with him was through enigmatic postcards sent from places not known for postcards. Our next face-to-face encounter was in 1976 at a Greek restaurant in New York, where he was completing a doctorate in psychology. Thereafter, Dr de Zoet would appear at my door once a year, stay for a day or two, swap stories, listen to my works-in-progress and leave. He still played the guitar for pleasure and his virtuosity was undimmed, but he resisted all attempts to lure him back into the studio. He used to shrug and say, ‘I’ve already done that. Why do it again?’
The music of Utopia Avenue outlasted the band, in a curious, up-and-down way. Dean’s death brought him even more fame than his false imprisonment, and both Paradise and Stuff of Life went gold and sold solidly for three or four years. The pages of the calendar flickered by, and glam, prog rock, disco and punk each took turns to consign all that had gone before to the bargain bins of history – including that curious psychedelic-folk-rock moment that Utopia Avenue embodied for a few months in 1967 and 1968. Moonwhale Music was bought by EMI, which filleted its small-but-perfectly-formed catalogue, and the little office at the top of the stairs in Denmark Street became a photo-library. By the mid-seventies, it was increasingly rare to find ‘Utopia Avenue’ nestled between James Taylor and the Who in record racks. Another new decade arrived, and to teenagers brought up on New Order, Duran Duran and the Eurythmics, Utopia Avenue’s songs sounded like musical antiques from an earlier age.
If you hang on long enough, however, antiques can accrue a value they never had when new. The early nineties brought an unexpected revival of interest in the band. The Beastie Boys sampled ‘The Hook’ on their seminal LP Paul’s Boutique. Mark Hollis of Talk Talk cited Stuff of Life as a formative influence. Original vinyl copies of our singles and LPs were changing hands for serious sums of money – a market kept buoyant by legal issues that postponed the two albums’ CD release. Damon MacNish’s grunge version of ‘Smithereens’ became a Top Five hit in 1994. The biggest hit of my solo career, ‘Be My Religion’, followed in 1996, thanks to its use in a Volkswagen advert. (What can I say? I needed the money.)
Utopia Avenue reappeared in the record shops, piled high in the Nineties megastores. Nieces and nephews told me that we were being played in the artier college dorms. Teenagers appeared at my shows in growing numbers, asking for songs I hadn’t played since decimalisation. (Google it.) I remember turning down a request for ‘Prove It’ at Cambridge Folk Festival on the grounds that I doubted I still knew the words. A kid with tattoos and a mullet yelled back, ‘Don’t worry, Elf, we’ll sing ’em for you!’ They didn’t let me down. Then, in the early days of the internet, my nephew typed ‘Utopia Avenue’ into my new computer – and page after page scrolled up about the band. Views, opinions, trivia, chatrooms, fan clubs, reviews, set-lists of gigs we’d played, new images I’d never seen. Some of the photos moved me to tears, especially those of Dean.
In 2001, Levon – by this time an Oscar-nominated film producer – presented me with a high-quality bootleg of our Knowland Park show that he had obtained through, as he put it, ‘serendipity and the Dark Arts’. If I do say so myself, we sounded shit hot. The eight-song set included an in-progress version of Jasper’s track ‘Who Shall I Say Is Calling?’, lost in the Turk Street fire. Digger and I digitally remastered the entire album at Fungus Hut, and Ilex Records issued it. To everyone’s astonishment, our little vanity project – snappily titled Utopia Avenue Live at Knowland Park, 1968 – charted at thirty-nine on the first week and hovered in the Top Thirty for three months. When YouTube got up and running, snippets of interviews and TV shows the band had done began to pop up. (I still play our exchange with Henk Teuling on Dutch TV on gloomy days. Comedy gold.) In 2004, the year I turned sixty, Glastonbury invited me to play a set. My sister took me aside and told me, ‘Sorry, sis, but it’s time to stop deluding yourself and face the facts: you’re just not properly obscure any more …’
I will not deny this was all very gratifying, but while Utopia Avenue’s music was re-oxygenated, the band itself remained moribund. What was true in 1968 was true in the twenty-first century: without Dean, there could be no band. Promoters approached Jasper, Griff and me regularly to see if we had changed our minds. Even Dean’s son Arthur Craddock-Moss, a film and TV composer, had offers to take the ‘New Utopia Avenue’ on the road. Our answer was always the same: ‘We’ll only do it if Dean says yes.’
Fast-forward to August 2018. I was getting ready for bed when I heard a knock on my door. It was Jasper in a long black coat, like a man in a Bob Dylan song, clutching a battered guitar case. The following dialogue is a reconstruction, but reasonably accurate:
Jasper: I’ve got them.
Me: Nice to see you too, Jasper.
Jasper: Nice to see you, but I’ve got them.
Me: Got what?
Me: Our albums? I’ve got them too. So?
Jasper: No, Elf, our lost songs. The California sessions. On hard-drive. I’ve heard them. It’s us. Here.
Me: (Croak.)
My Wife: Evening, Jasper, come in – Elf, would you ever shut the door before every moth in the county joins the party?
Jasper came in, and explained that a suitcase of twelve reel-to-reels from our sessions in LA and San Francisco had surfaced at a car-boot sale in Honolulu earlier in the year. How had they escaped the fire at Turk Street? Nobody knew. Was the tapes’ preservation due to accident, theft, misfiling or divine intervention? Anybody’s guess. How and when had the suitcase arrived in Hawaii? Another mystery.
One thing was known. A young man named Adam Murphy had acquired the tapes at a car-boot sale while honeymooning in Oahu. Adam, who blogs as ‘Heritage Audiophile’, possessed two items crucial to this story. One: a 1966 Grundig reel-to-reel player capable of playing the 1965 BASF and TDK tapes. Two: the nous to run the output through a digital converter on the very first playback, to ensure that the recordings would be safely captured for posterity if the fifty-year-old tapes disintegrated. At least half did exactly that. Let the record show that without Adam Murphy’s foresight you would not be reading these lines.
Once all the music was preserved, Heritage Audiophile set about identifying the artists. Soon after, Jasper received a call from a stranger with some rather special news …
Back in my kitchen, Jasper Bluetoothed his Mac to my speakers and clicked play and there we were: Dean, Jasper, Griff and me, aged twenty-three or -four, playing, singing, laying down tracks. ‘Temporal vertigo’ doesn’t come close. Here was my New York love song, ‘Chelsea Hotel #939’; Jasper’s bluesy psychodrama, ‘Timepiece’; and chunks of Dean’s musical trilogy, ‘The Narrow Road’. It’s not every day you hear your younger self play with a long-dead, long-missed bandmate, and I was reduced to emotional jelly.
Afterwards, Jasper, my wife and I sat around our table. Outside, owls hooted and foxes barked. Eventually, I was able to speak again. I asked, ‘Incredible, but what do we do with it?’
‘We make our third album,’ said Jasper.
We spent that weekend in my garden studio poring through the full nine hours. The material could be subdivided into ‘Mostly finished’, ‘Needs fleshing out’ and ‘Sketchy’. Sound quality was variable. The LA tapes had more hiss than the Turk Street sessions. Luckily, Dean hadn’t really got to work on ‘Narrow Road’ until San Francisco, so his irreplaceable vocals were sufficiently bright. The tracks sequenced themselves. Jasper’s and my two songs, conceived in and/or inspired by New York and the Chelsea Hotel, belonged on what vinyl lovers still think of as ‘side one’. Dean’s ‘Narrow Road’ trilogy, which started life as a possible soundtrack for an Anthony Hershey film that never saw the light of day, was an uninterruptible sequence. Its only logical home was ‘side two’. ‘I’m A Stranger Here Myself’ and ‘Eight Of Cups’ belonged between the ‘mostly finished’ and ‘needs fleshing out’ categories, while the third song – ‘The Narrow Road To The Far West’ – was a hypnotic but skeletal eight-minute bass track. We had planned to work on it the morning Dean was shot. As Jasper and I debated what to do with ‘The Narrow Road’, we hit a dilemma: was our job to make the album we would have made over the winter of 1968/9, had Dean lived? Or should we, instead, use the tapes as raw material for an album that Jasper and I wished to make now, in 2019? Were we purist restorers or postmodern creators?
Through trial and error, a guiding principle evolved. Jasper and I licensed ourselves to do whatever we wanted to do with the material, as long as we did not deploy post-1968 musical technology. Yes, then, to the mandolin on ‘Who Shall I Say Is Calling?’, and to Old Elf’s harmonies with Young Elf on ‘What’s Inside What’s Inside’. But no to sampling, auto-tune and rap (as if) and loops. I cheated only by programming my Fairlight to reproduce the sound of my old Hammond organ. Griff joined us for a few days to overlay percussion or replace his original drum-tracks where the sound was unsatisfactory. Arthur – old enough now to be his father’s father – filled in bass runs on Dean’s old Fender and laid down some blood-harmonies on ‘Eight Of Cups’. Levon joined us to fill a Levon-shaped hole in proceedings, and the photographer Mecca Rohmer, who shot our very first publicity snaps in March 1967, documented the brief resurrection of Utopia Avenue for posterity.
Why ‘The Third Planet’? The project’s working title was The California Sessions, but when Arthur visited, he brought the notebook found in Dean’s pocket on the morning of his death. The final words, on a page of their own, read ‘The Third Planet’. We can only guess what caught Dean’s eye about this phrase, but they struck us all as an apt title for Utopia Avenue’s third and final LP.
Dean, the last words are yours.
Elf,
Kilcrannóg, 2020
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my family.
Thank you to Sam Amidon, Tom Barbash, Avideh Bashirrad, Nick Barley, Sally Beamish, Manuel Berri, Ray Blackwell of De Barras Bar & Folk Club in Clonakilty, Jess Bonet, Chris Brand, Craig Burgess, Kate Brunt, Evan Camfield, Gina Centrello, Louise Court, Harm Damsma, Louise Dennys, Walter Donohue, Benjamin Dreyer, Lorraine Dufficey, Barbara Fillon, Helen Flood, Jonny Geller, Evelyn Glennie, Ted Goossen, Roy Harper, Paul Harris, Viola Hayden, Stephen Housden, Kazuo Ishiguro and family, Hellen Jo (‘criminal/subliminal’), John Kelly, Trish Kerr and team at Kerr’s Bookshop in Clonakilty, Martin Kingston, Hari Kunzru, Tonya Ley, Dixie Linder, Nick Marston, Katie McGowan, Mrs McIntosh, Niek Miedema, Callum Mollison, Carrie Neill, Lawrence Norfolk and family, Alasdair Oliver, Hazel Orme, Marie Pantojan, Lidewijde Paris, Bridget Piekarz, Stan Rijven, Susan Spratt, Simon Sullivan, The Unthanks, Amanda Waters, Andy Ward, Charles Williams, John Wilson, Janet Wygal.
Thank you to the Pit.
Numerous details were extracted from many sources, but particularly helpful were Joe Boyd’s White Bicycles (Serpent’s Tail, 2007), and Simon Napier-Bell’s You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (Ebury Press, 2005) for the Lennon encounter.
Finally, thanks to my editor Carole Welch for superhuman patience in the face of multiple busted deadlines.
Lyrics quoted briefly in the novel are from the following songs:
‘Art for Arts Sake’ written by Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman; ‘House of the Rising Sun’ by Alan Price; ‘A Day in the Life’ by John Lennon and Paul McCartney; ‘Life’s Greatest Fool’ by Gene Clark; ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ by Dorothy Heyward, Du Bose Heyward, George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin; ‘Just Like a Woman’ and ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ by Bob Dylan; ‘Chelsea Hotel #2’ and ‘Who by Fire’ by Leonard Cohen; ‘I’ve Changed My Plea to Guilty’ by Steven Morrissey and Mark Edward Cascian Nevin; ‘Chelsea Morning’ by Joni Mitchell; ‘These Days’ by Jackson Browne; ‘The Partisan’ by Hy Zaret and Anna Marly; ‘Guinevere’ by David Crosby; and ‘Mercy Street’ by Peter Gabriel.
‘For Free’ by Joni Mitchell is overheard as a work in progress, so does not quite match the recorded version.
‘Have You Got It Yet?’ is an unfinished, unreleased Syd Barrett song/practical joke from 1967.
Music enthusiasts will spot the lyrical anachronisms but agree, I trust, that music is timeless.
Discover more David Mitchell …
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Table of Contents
Contents
About the Author
Also by David Mitchell
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Paradise Is the Road to Paradise: Side One Abandon Hope
A Raft And A River
Darkroom
Smithereens
Mona Lisa Sings The Blues
Paradise Is the Road to Paradise: Side Two Wedding Presence
Purple Flames
Unexpected
ly
The Prize
Stuff of Life: Side One The Hook
Last Supper
Builders
Prove It
Stuff of Life: Side Two Nightwatchman
Roll Away The Stone
Even The Bluebells
Sound Mind
Look Who It Isn’t
The Third Planet: Side One Chelsea Hotel #939
Who Shall I Say Is Calling?
What’s Inside What’s Inside
Timepiece
The Third Planet: Side Two I’m A Stranger Here Myself
Eight Of Cups
The Narrow Road To The Far West
Last Words
Acknowledgements
Utopia Avenue : A Novel Page 62