Broken Music: A Memoir (19 page)

The ruse worked. In future, whenever the landlady turned up for the monthly rent Gerry and I would be out, and I’d leave the rent with Jim and Stef upstairs, promising via hurriedly scribbled notes that I’d see her next month, which, naturally, I never did. Gerry and I must have lived there for over two years and the landlady, whose
memory I now confuse with her near-doppelgänger Mrs. Thatcher, never even knew he existed. Of course, she never saw Megan again either.

Our narrow hall was always filled with equipment: Gerry’s Hammond organ, his Fender Rhodes, my bass cabinets and amplifiers, assorted mike stands, and whatever pieces of PA systems wed begged, borrowed, or stolen. Gerry and I lived in pseudo wedded bliss, seriously falling out only once, as I remember, when I resorted to my mother’s habit of throwing plates. The rivalry between us was intense, never over women as one might expect, but in our mutual quest to write new material for the band and entertain our growing audience at the Gosforth. Each of us would try to come up with at least a song per week. I always felt it was a little easier for me to write songs because Gerry didn’t sing, and I could write things that were tailored for my voice, whereas Gerry could only hope that I would do justice to his compositions. We wrote in all styles and the fads and fashions that engaged our interest, often highly derivative but no different from anyone learning a craft, by imitating and shameless borrowing, even from each other. Gerry could flesh out even the crudest of my musical ideas so they would be presentable to the elders at the next rehearsal, but week by week by sheer and persistent dint of numbers my songs began to find their way into the band’s pad more often than Gerry’s.

It would be disingenuous to pretend that what became an increasingly uneven competition did not cause friction between us. It did. But to Gerry’s credit, this didn’t distract him from the band’s mission. Gerry and I believed the band could make it, whoever wrote the songs. The other two may have been humoring us to a certain extent, as they never offered up any material themselves, but the band slowly began to get a reputation and the upstairs room at the
Gosforth Hotel would become packed to the gunnels every Wednesday night. We would split the door takings at a pound per head, half of which went into a kitty to buy equipment while the other half would cover expenses. It was hardly a living wage but we supplemented our incomes with other bands and club work at the weekends.

    In the late summer of 1974, I receive a mysterious telephone call from a nun. Sister Ruth, now a headmistress at a school in Cramlington, a mining village north of Newcastle, had taught my youngest sister, Anita, who had been a virtual paragon of academic virtue from her first day at school until achieving a very impressive M.A. in English from Leeds University. The head, having seen my name on a list of those who had qualified to teach that year, called to ask if I was related to the aforementioned paragon. Upon hearing that I am in fact a very close relative, she invites me to the school for an interview. This development has taken me totally by surprise. I am somewhat flattered to be head-hunted in this way, even though it has more to do with my sister’s prowess than my own. Up to that moment, I’ve had no intention of going further in the teaching profession. Then a quick glance at the dwindling balance in my current account and the unlikely prospect of a recording contract appearing miraculously out of nowhere catalyzes me into finding a decent tie, a sports jacket, and a clean shirt so that I could turn up for my interview at St. Paul’s First School. I try to get out early the next morning before Gerry catches me, but to no avail.

“Where the hell are you going looking like that?” The first cigarette of the day is already burning in his hand, and his hair, while never neat, looks as if it has been ironed asymmetrically by a demented Dadaist. He is wearing an appalling floral dressing gown
that would have looked too camp on Noël Coward, and an ancient pair of faded tartan slippers with a hole over the left toe. He is, in short, a sight, and he of all people is questioning my appearance. However, having been caught on the back foot, I decide honesty is now the best policy.

“I’m going to get a job.”

He gives me one of his looks, as if appraising my chances, inhaling casually on his cigarette.

“Good luck!” he says, with an infuriating and unmistakable sarcasm, as he heads for the bathroom in a cloud of blue smoke, chuckling to himself like some sort of Mephistopheles.

The interview goes well despite Gerry’s sarcasm, and after it I find myself with the unexpected offer of a teaching post. This is, after all, what I’ve been training to do for four years, to take over a class and teach them everything from basic math to soccer. I do have to remind myself that this is still part of a long-term strategy to make it in the music business, even though from the outside it probably looks as if I’ve caved in, buckling under the weight of conformity. I’m preparing my defense to Gerry on the way home: I know that a teacher’s hours will still allow me the time to maintain my commitment to the band. Long holidays will allow us to travel farther afield. A teacher’s wage, while hardly substantial, will allow me to pay the rent until the band is really up and running. There is, of course, a certain amount of fantasy at work here, sustained partially by our burgeoning popularity as a local band. In reality, though, we have as much chance of winning the lottery as we have of being signed to a recording deal. Nonetheless we manage to sustain the fantasy while the fantasy sustains us.

    In September of that year I take up my position at St. Paul’s wearing the same jacket I wore for the interview. Sister Ruth introduces
me to the rest of the staff, a gaggle of middle-aged women in a fug of hot tea and cigarette smoke. A couple of them peer skeptically over their spectacles at me from the rustic warmth of their Fair Isle sweaters, their flat shoes, and their tweedy skirts. Their homeliness is in direct contrast to the stark severity of the sister’s wimple of white linen and her black cassock. She stands there erect and defiant like an exclamation mark in a field of dull prose, a missionary from a strange and distant culture, tolerated but hardly welcomed. There is clearly an uneasy truce at work here, just below the surface of civility. I immediately sense a tension in the room between the head and her lay staff, and I realize from old experience that if I choose to survive in a situation like this, then I will need to be circumspect as well as charming.

I wonder why I have been brought into this odd little tableau. The headmistress presents me to the others like some kind of awkward trophy, and their scrutiny, while certainly not unkind, is curious and guarded. I feel like a marine exhibit in the wrong tank. Have I been brought in to break up the hegemony of this group, a joker in the pile, a wild card and something of a creature? Am I here to be the head’s creature?

Perhaps I should have made a living as a spy. I say this because in my life, as I’ve described it so far, I would often feel that I was some kind of impostor, showing all the outward signs of conformity but holding on to a stubborn, persistent knowledge that I wasn’t showing my true colors. That, inside, I simply didn’t belong. Here I was masquerading as a teacher, just as I’d playacted being an altar boy, or a civil servant, or a student. I would maintain my cover for as long as possible and then it would all fall apart. Many years later I will frequently be asked if I somehow knew that I would succeed in my ambition to be a performer; I had no such prescience. It was just that nothing else I’d ever tried was going to work, I was merely treading
water, but as there is some degree of performance in the teacher’s craft, I didn’t feel as if I was entirely wasting my time, or the children’s for that matter.

There are thirty or so eight-year-olds in my class, boys and girls, the grandchildren of a coal-mining community that had been set adrift by the pit closures of the fifties and sixties, and whose parents had sought work on the new industrial estates dedicated to light engineering and office work. The unifying cohesion of a community linked almost exclusively to the mining of coal had all but disappeared, as had the colliers’ cottages, the tin baths, and the mountainous slag heaps that would burn continuously night and day. There are no more appalling respiratory diseases, no more black lung, no more mining disasters, collapsed underground tunnels, or gas explosions that could wrench the heart out of entire villages, where men and boys could be lowered into the shafts in the morning and hauled out as corpses in the evening, or when the fires had died down, if they were ever found at all. The town, like my own, has a long history of bleak heroism in the face of such conditions, and it is easy to imagine the faces of these children in front of me covered in nineteenth-century grime and working ten-hour shifts in the terrifying darkness.

In spite of my worries about pretending to authority, to knowledge, to enthusiasms that will hopefully inspire the students to teach themselves, I do enjoy reading to them resonant fantasies of escape and adventure,
The Iron Man
, by Ted Hughes,
Elidor
, by Alan Garner,
The Hobbit
, by J.R.R. Tolkien. I will play the guitar for them and we’ll learn folk songs, calypsos, Christmas carols, and I will encourage them to sing their favorite pop songs, from Gary Glitter, Suzi Quatro, Mud, et al., and I will recognize shy kindred souls who will be transformed by the act of performing. I borrow a pile of wind instruments from the Big Band and the kids and I have a riotous
time figuring out how to get a noise out of them. We create a festival of farts and squeaks, and room-shaking blasts mixed in with a little of the basic physics of sound, but not too much. There is a noisy anarchy in the class, and while I have no idea how much the children are actually learning they seem to enjoy my company, and I like theirs. We paint and we draw and I try to have as much fun with them as I possibly can. The head will often sit in on my classes and seems to be indulgent of my method, but I do have an inkling that some of the other teachers don’t altogether approve of the levels of noise emanating from 4B on the top floor.

Meanwhile, in the evenings, Last Exit are playing to packed houses. The barman is run off his feet every Wednesday night. There is a constant flow of pint glasses and empties being relayed across the room, there is laughter and applause, and just below the mist of the cigarette smoke I can see the pub manager’s Cheshire cat smile, the smile of a man who has just seen a marvelous invention of his work like a charm. Gerry and I add new songs and arrange a cover or two so that the crowd doesn’t see the same show week after week. There is considerable pressure on us to write new material, as it is virtually the same audience every week, but neither of us mind in the least. We both feel this is our true calling. I’m also beginning to realize that singing is the most exquisite joy. When I sing, I have total freedom to soar and swoop; it’s a little like being able to fly. Of course my band mates aren’t entirely convinced of my abilities, particularly Ronnie, who would prefer to sing everything himself, but I prevail because I’ve now written most of the original material and I’m improving week by week.

After school on Wednesdays I drive back to the flat, load Gerry’s electric piano and the PA system into the back of my car, and drive back up the A1 to Gosforth, then carry the gear up the stairs, set it
up, and return home to pick up my bass amp and speaker cabinet and make another journey north. It is backbreaking work that only visionaries or the insane would consider worth the effort, especially since we have to do the same thing in reverse after playing and singing for two hours. We’ll usually get home around midnight, and after we’ve stowed the gear in the passage I’ll start a fire on the old range, Gerry will break out a couple of cans of lager, and we’ll perform a postmortem on the entire gig. Which songs worked and which did not, who played well and who didn’t. We plot and we plan and we fantasize as we watch the glowing coals in the old fireplace until we can no longer stay awake.

The flat is full of old
Melody Makers
and the
New Musical Express
and
Sounds
, and we pore over the music press as if the keys to success are somehow encrypted in the record reviews, the tour dates, the album charts, the gossip of this magical and exclusive world. In the classified sections the small ads are of particular interest.
Wanted. Singer for heavy rock band. Recording deal, agency, management. Must have image and own PA for immediate work. No time wasters
. There is something tempting about the idea of simply walking into an established situation instead of having to build one yourself from the bottom up, but neither Gerry nor I ever answer these ads, assuming they’re all placed by dreamers like us. Besides, I’m always put off by the insistence on image—
must have image
. I don’t have an image. I don’t have long flowing hair, and I would look stupid in the girl’s clothes that seem to be de rigueur among pop’s current denizens like David Bowie and Marc Bolan. Gerry and I will not satisfy anyone’s fashion criteria for stardom. We look rough and unwashed. However, there have been a number of rather attractive females turning up at our gigs in the Gosforth Hotel, and although they have generally disappeared by the time we finish packing up, their numbers are increasing. I begin to practice piercing and hopefully smoldering glances from the stage
and, when I feel their eyes upon me, the studied pose of the serious poet tortured by the vicissitudes of life and love.

    One night Ewan Williams turns up at one of our gigs to see if we are interested in a six-week run for sixty quid a week—it is always sixty quid a week—playing for a new musical. Because
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
had been such a financial success for the University Theatre, the board of governors have decided that another hit musical will swell the coffers sufficiently for them to continue to sponsor serious theater in the area. (Serious theater being the kind that plays to half-empty houses, by playwrights like Ibsen and Strindberg and Chekhov.) Another lowbrow musical will help them fund their highbrow mandate.