Greatest Hits

by Laura Barnett

  Cass looked at her, and blushed. “Well. I wouldn’t quite put it like that.”

  Harriet—voluptuous, green-eyed, her long blonde hair shot through with paler strands of grey—said, “Why not? Be bold, Cass. Grasp this opportunity with both hands. It’s going to be a wild ride.”

  She laughed. Harriet’s mood was infectious; Cass took a turn around the room, arms spread wide, feeling loose-limbed, feather-light. “I hope so. It still doesn’t feel quite real.”

  They moved in a week later. Alan hired a van and two enormous, silent men to carry their belongings. “I’m here to make your life easier,” he’d explained when she’d protested that they were perfectly capable of handling the move themselves. Ivor seemed quite content to take a back seat, placing their most treasured possessions—their guitars, amps, and turntable; their stacks of records and notebooks; the box containing Margaret’s letters and photographs—in the back of the Morris Minor, and otherwise letting the removal men get on with it.

  A relationship was developing between Ivor and Alan that could not quite be called friendship but which lay somewhere between mutual tolerance and respect. Ivor had been impressed by Alan’s handling of Angus—it would be years before they actually found out how Alan had warned him off by threatening to inform a friend in the drug squad about exactly how many varieties of narcotics were passing daily through Angus’s flat—and Alan esteemed Ivor’s skill as a guitarist. And Cass, for her part, could already see that Alan was living up to the promise he had made her: he was calm and level-headed, mature beyond his years (despite his boyish appearance), standing between her and the messy practicalities of work and life.

  That night, among the suitcases and crates, they threw their first party. Tealights on saucers; greasy packages from the chippy on the Broadway; beer and whisky and wine, and records on the turntable—Tea for the Tillerman, After the Gold Rush, Led Zeppelin III, The Summer Never Ends—giving way, after nightfall, to an impromptu jam: Ivor on guitar, Cass on the upright piano, the new drummer, Graham, banging away on the side of a crate.

  Flickering darkness; glint of beer-bottles and the lit tips of joints. Everyone smiling, clapping, joining in, and above them all, Cass’s voice, rising high and pure, as if framing a question they had not, until this moment, known how to ask, but were now waiting, longing, for her to answer.

  Cass woke early in those days, even when they’d gone to sleep with the dawn.

  Bread and jam in the little kitchen, overlooking Mr. Dennis’s garden. She watched him sometimes as she drank her coffee, the tonsured globe of his head bobbing up and down among his roses and his dahlias; a trug in his hand, and his low, tuneless murmur drifting up to her open window.

  The fine spring was slipping into summer, and she remembers those mornings as always bright, doused with sunshine. The house faced east and the front windows admitted such an abundance of light that she was often dazzled by it. She would sit at her piano, or with her guitar, and close her eyes, watching the fractured afterimages of the sun’s brightness dance against her shuttered lids; feeling, in some strange, fanciful way, that those patterns—shifting, glowing, in a perpetual state of frantic rearrangement—were representations of the chords and melodies that came pouring from her hands.

  She was writing with an ease and profligacy that she had never experienced before—not in John’s office at Atterley, not in their bedroom at Savernake Road. Ivor would join her after rising from their bed sometime towards the middle of the morning. A whole song could appear, from first chaotic chord to full, measured structure, in the space of an hour; and then they would play it back to each other, over and over again, hardly daring to believe it could be as good, as true, as they instinctively felt it to be.

  It was not always so, of course—there were still hours of frayed nerves and short tempers when a song simply refused to reveal itself. But these, back then, were fewer than the moments in which their hands moved in unison over guitar or keys. Then, Cass felt as close to Ivor as she could ever imagine being to anyone. Theirs, she told herself, was an understanding that transcended the petty niceties of domesticity. There, in the music room, was the truth of what they were to each other: a truth beyond jealousy, or fidelity, or any of the strictures imposed by normal society—by all those who didn’t know how it was to create, together, something that had never before existed; to dredge a thing up from the brackish depths of the mind, and polish it until it shone. To make music, and with it, flush away the disquieting uncertainties of silence.

  After lunch each day, Cass and Ivor threw their things into the Morris Minor, and drove over to the studio. Martin liked to start the sessions at two, and end whenever they were all too tired to stand, which was usually far into the night.

  It was a nondescript-looking place on a corner of Willesden High Road: a plate-glass shopfront, obscured by plastic Vene­tian blinds; two flats above (the building was soundproofed, but still, God knew how the tenants got any sleep), with the studios spread across the ground floor and basement. They were in the smallest, studio three: a gloomy, subterranean chamber, the walls of the live room studded with fabric-covered panels, and the sound in the tiny vocal-booth deadened, echoless.

  “It’s like a coffin in here,” Cass said the first time Martin showed them around.

  Martin threw her a look—half irritated, half amused. “Well, you’d better get used to it. You’ll be spending a lot of time in there.”

  There was a green room, too—larger, more comfortable, with sofas that had seen better days, a small fridge, and ashtrays that never seemed to be emptied. Here they congregated in the breaks that Martin and Sean, the engineer, permitted them: Ivor and Cass and Alan and Kit, the bassist, and Graham, the drummer, and whichever other bands were in that night. Three long-haired guys from Milton Keynes who had yet to settle on a name for their group but were unfailingly generous with their drugs. Hawkwind, several of whose members lived not far from Martin in Ladbroke Grove. A psychedelic four-piece from Crouch End whose priapic lead singer would, one night towards the end of their sessions, follow Cass into the ladies’ toilet, and require considerable force to be disabused of the notion that she was interested in “travelling to the moon with me, man—to the moon and back!”

  Sean, the engineer, was shy with Cass at first: he could never quite meet her eye, and blushed like a schoolboy when she spoke to him. But as the weeks passed, he grew more comfortable with her, especially after a joint or three.

  It was Sean who, very late one night, came up, unwittingly, with a name for her debut album. Cass, exhausted, was returning from the ladies’. (The Crouch End group were elsewhere that night.) She’d splashed water on her face to revive herself, spreading blackish traces of mascara across her cheeks, and had left the room without looking in the mirror. As she’d pushed open the green-room door, Sean had looked up and said, “Good God—look at the state she’s in.”

  She’d laughed, along with everyone else, then returned to the ladies’ to dab at her face with a tissue. There, under the stark glare of the strip-light, she’d considered her reflection—unbrushed hair; skin blotchy, sallow; dark shadows deepening the hollows around her eyes. Sean’s words slipped back into her mind—The state she’s in—and she thought, Yes. That’s perfect. That’s it.

  Those were long, tiring, windowless afternoons, slipping into long, tiring, windowless nights; but she remembers them now as being cast under the pale, pure light of innocence. They were so young, all of them, even Martin. Play-acting, really; chasing a dream; refusing to be cowed by doubt or inexperience.

  In the vocal-booth, under headphones, she was as deaf and self-contained as a deep-sea diver drawn gradually underwater: as she sang, there was nothing but the vibration of her voice, the swelling of ribcage and lung.

  The wooden walls of the booth held her, close and intimate, as the microphone drew her secrets from her; and through the glass, the men played on, each o
f them watching her, the connection between the four of them intense, tangible, stretching out until the final bar of the song.

  Back on the road again. Motorway tarmac, lacquered by rain. Sunsets pegging out their colours over road bridges and water towers. Car-parks and dressing-rooms and sound-checks and the rough, bitter tang of Players cigarettes.

  Alan had acquired a van: the old one, with its dubious cargo of mattresses, had belonged to Angus. This was a custom Transit with built-in seats, a table, and straps to prevent the instruments from toppling over and damaging anyone—or, perhaps even more importantly, sustaining damage.

  Cass still preferred to ride up front, beside Alan and Martin, and her memories of those countless journeys are mainly sensory now: the cool lick of the breeze on her face through the open window; the radio’s tinny rattle and whine; the chatter of the men drifting through the metal grille that separated front from back.

  She began to draw again—to carry a sketchpad, curl up with her shoeless feet tucked neatly under her thighs, and fill pages with scattered images, both observed and imagined: the emphatic set of Alan’s profile at the wheel; Martin, rolling a joint; Ivor, looking down at his guitar, hair half covering his face. She was one of them, and yet, through those long hours on the road, she still felt remote, set apart—and on stage, too, there had been a shifting, a minute recalibration of space. Ivor stood to her left, Kit to her right, but the front of the stage—that lonely square-foot—was hers now, and hers was the name announced as they stepped out from the wings.

  A new routine was evolving. Alan would draw up in the van outside the Muswell Hill flat around lunchtime, and they’d stop for tea, or something stronger, on the road. (It was Ivor, now, who passed round the pills, or slipped into a back room with a candle and a twist of silver foil, though only Martin, Graham, and Kit usually joined him.) These journeys were defined, for Cass, by a growing sense of unease. She was quiet, watching the road, slipping deeper inside herself; the sight of the first sign announcing whichever town was their destination for the night—Ipswich, Bristol, Sheffield, Carlisle—was enough to quicken her pulse and cause her breath to catch in her throat.

  One night, before a support slot for Black Sabbath and Freedom at Birmingham Town Hall, the feeling came to a head. Her nerves (she saw them as a group of formless shadows) seemed to loom so large above her that she became convinced she couldn’t step out on stage—that if she tried to, the shadows would run after her, and consume her whole.

  “Ivor,” she whispered in the dressing-room, drawing him apart from the others. “I don’t think I can do this. I don’t think I can go on.”

  He looked down at her—those green-brown eyes; the hard angles and planes of his face. He cupped a hand to her chin, as he’d done the first night they’d met, in the hallway at Atterley. His grip was firm—not a caress, but an act of balancing, the grip placed to the tiller of a listing ship.

  “Course you can, Cassie,” he said, his eyes fixed firmly on hers. “You’re amazing out there. You know you are. You’re born to it. It’s as natural to you as breathing.”

  She held his gaze, allowed it to steady her. As natural as breathing. Gradually, her breath came slower; her heart resumed its regular, metronomic beat. And a few moments later, they were stepping out on stage, hand in hand, carried by the inexorable momentum of the music.

  “You need a character,” Kate said one afternoon soon after that.

  She was just back from a film shoot in Rome, tanned, grown sleek on pasta and ice cream; they were on her Covent Garden terrace, drinking limoncello out of teacups. “Someone you become on stage. Someone bigger and braver than you are.”

  Cass considered this. “An alter ego, you mean?”

  Kate screwed her eyes up against the light. “Yes, if you like.”

  “How on earth do I do that? I’m no actress, Kate.”

  “Costume.” Kate’s eyes remained closed; she was easy, relaxed. “We need to find you a costume.”

  An idea slipped into Cass’s mind.

  “Cornelia,” she said, and Kate opened her eyes. “Bingo.”

  They drove down to Oxford Street in Kate’s red bubble car, both a little drunk. Cornelia was framed in the doorway when they arrived—trim pastel-blue suit, string of pearls, neat white hair—turning the shop sign to “closed.” Daphne and a new girl—blonde, hardly out of her teens—were gathering up their jackets and handbags, preparing to leave. Through the glass, Cornelia stared at them, her mouth widening in surprise.

  “Darling girls,” she said, opening the door, her former anger with Cass apparently forgotten. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  They stayed in the shop until long after it had grown dark. Cornelia opened another of her special-occasion bottles of champagne, and brought out the trunk she kept in the storeroom. Inside were the vintage gowns she’d picked up over the years in flea-markets and house sales, and kept aside for the rare modern bride who preferred not to be married in white. A late-Victorian confection, bodice frothing with pink chiffon; a nineteen twenties bias-cut slip of oyster satin; a neat twin-piece suit from the forties, in lemon-yellow shot silk.

  Cass stood in the dressing-room where she had busied herself around so many other women—around Irene, that last afternoon, tucking and pinning—slipping dress after dress over her head. The last she tried was from the thirties: long-skirted, sleeves reaching demurely to her wrists; a dark green lace shift over a chartreuse slip of butter-soft silk.

  “Come on, Cass,” Kate said through the drawn curtain. “Let’s see you.”

  She stepped out, and the dress moved with her, its fabric shimmering and settling with each step.

  “Well, darling,” Cornelia said, lifting her glass. “You are quite transformed.”

  The dressing-room mirror showed a woman, her long blonde hair loose across her shoulders, her brown eyes frank, focused. A woman who might command the attention of three hundred pairs of eyes; a woman in whose presence those ugly, hovering shadows might take fright, and flee.

  The woman stared at herself and smiled.

  The success of The State She’s In must, Cass can see now, have come as something of a surprise to everyone—even Alan and Martin.

  For all their talk, the label must have been expecting to grow her slowly; indeed, they talked in such terms, in meetings, as if she were a plant they had seeded, and must now carefully cultivate. After all, she was more Sandy Denny than Sandie Shaw; more Joni Mitchell than Dusty Springfield. Such artists needed time, care, the gradual accumulation of interest—press, radio, the attention of serious music fans; then, and only then, like ripples spreading across a pond, might come the triumphant slippage into the mainstream. And of course, some artists—Alan was careful to point this out to her—didn’t care to swim in that stream; were content to paddle away in a backwater, free to get on with making music in whichever way they chose, without the pressures that commercial success would inevitably bring.

  If pressed, Cass would have said that she saw herself in the latter camp: that the money mattered little to her (she knew she was luckier than some, as she had always had enough to get by); that what she really cared about was writing music. But this would not have been entirely true. Her ambition was rooting itself, growing, seeking out the light. The photograph on her bedroom wall at Atterley—the woman with her firm, uptilted chin. Sandy Denny, holding the audience rapt in that candlelit club. The way Cass felt when she stood on stage, before crowds of strangers—feeling their eyes on her, knowing no other moment than this. She wanted it. She craved it. She would make it hers. “I want to do it all,” she told Martin and the tableful of suited executives in the label’s offices on Tottenham Court Road. “I want to go the whole way.”

  She saw surprise flit across Martin’s face, and then transform itself, just as quickly, into respect. “I know you do,” he said. “And if you’re prepared to work hard, we belie
ve you can, and you will. But it might take time, Cass. It might take some time.”

  She did work hard. A live session for John Peel; an appearance on Top of the Pops, for which Cass wore her green lace dress and a pair of black lace-up boots she’d picked up on Petticoat Lane. “Biker suffragette chic,” Johnny called it: Lily had suggested him for the album-cover shoot, and he was already becoming a friend. During filming, six dancers wove around the stage between them in miniature fringed waistcoats and shorts. Kit and Graham were barely able to keep their attention on miming to the song: one of the dancers, a strong-featured, red-haired woman named Alison who was studying political science at King’s College, would later be persuaded to go home with Kit, and a year or so after that, became his wife.

  Interviews with Melody Maker, Sounds, the New Musical Express. One writer was sniffy, calling her “the phoney British answer to the new crop of full-blooded American female singer-songwriters, like some provincial branch of Marks & Spencer squaring up to Saks Fifth Avenue,” but Alan and Martin didn’t care. “Just be happy,” Martin said, “that he’s mentioned you at all.”

  A feature in the Daily Courier: tea and sticky buns in a Soho café close to the Phoenix offices with a journalist named Eva Taylor. She was a slight, dark-haired woman in her early thirties with whom Cass felt an instant, instinctive affinity—perhaps because she reminded Cass, faintly, of Lily.

  “A serious writer,” Alan said. “Should be a serious piece.”

  And it was: a double-page spread, with photograph—Cass sad-eyed and melancholic, stirring her tea with a metal spoon. The State She’s In, Eva Taylor wrote, was “full of intelligent, quick-witted, and frequently poetic observations about love lost and found; about joy and sadness. If we were waiting for a woman from our own turf to speak to us in the way that Joni Mitchell, Carole King, and Carly Simon are speaking to our cousins across the pond (and, of course, to many of us on this side of it, too), well, sisters, we’ve found her.”