Broken Music: A Memoir (22 page)

The Spanish papers next morning are very kind to us and there’s a good shot of us on the front page. On the strength of this we are offered another week in nearby Bilbao. I am so thrilled that I attempt in my jubilation to pick up the promoter, who must weigh close to three hundred pounds. Seconds later I’m in excruciating pain. Something in my lower back has clicked into spasm.

I spend the four-hour drive to the Basque capital bracing myself against every bump in the road and cursing my own stupidity. Gerry is his usual sympathetic self, reminding me that we have a gig tonight in the city and we have to be as good as we were in San Sebastian. I try to concentrate on the rolling blue of the mountains in the distance as our little convoy heads west. Despite the pain, part of me just wants to keep going, driving from town to town, from gig to gig, never knowing what will happen next, and this seems the perfect antidote to the sedentary, settled life that could easily trap me if I let it.
It is probably the vision of this journey into the unknown that infects me with a wanderlust that will keep me on the road for twenty-five years.

By the time we have set up our equipment in the little club I can barely stand up straight. Strapping a Fender bass to my left shoulder almost causes me to double up in agony. I really don’t want to let the band down, nor do I want to disappoint the promoter, who is putting us up in his large apartment. He is a large man, as I said, and feels partially responsible for my predicament. He owns the club in Bilbao, as well as a bookshop, and is something of a political figure. There is a dark political undercurrent throughout the region at this time, and we are made aware of this without understanding the historical and cultural complexities of the problem. The locals talk about the civil war and bombing of Guernica as if it were yesterday, and Franco’s civil guard are perceived to be almost an occupying force by many of the population. The horrendous violence of later years is yet to erupt and there is an uneasy feeling when politics are discussed, but we are treated with the utmost courtesy and hospitality.

The promoter’s wife, realizing I’m in a lot of pain, offers me two Valium. The band must play in one hour, but I’m desperate for relief, and one hour later, when I walk on the stage I’m indeed feeling much better—until I open my mouth to sing. The audience looks stunned at first and then somewhat bemused, as if the English band they’ve come to watch is introducing some strange new art form. I find to my horror that I have absolutely no control over the pitch of any note I sing. My voice involuntarily soars and swoops and dives like a demented police siren, turning the melodies into a roller-coaster ride of ludicrous glissandos and atonal cacophony. Some of the discerning members of the audience have their hands over their ears, others are laughing, while some earnest types seem to be taking
it seriously. I turn to the band, but their dark expressions indicate that they are neither amused nor remotely sympathetic. “It’s the drugs,” I mouth hopelessly between verses. We manage to get to the end of the disastrous song and Ronnie will take over the singing for the rest of the evening. I am horribly embarrassed and skulk off to bed as soon as our somewhat truncated show is finished.

Some days later, as part of a Basque festival, there is a big open-air show near the beach, where we will regain our previous form despite playing through a massive thunder and lightning storm under a hastily constructed and totally useless stage covering. The heavens open after the first three numbers, accompanied by the most spectacular lightning forking and splitting the sky in a huge arc over the surrounding hills. We all get absolutely soaked to our skins, as does the audience, who seem to enjoy the community spirit of this shared catastrophe like crazed dancers in a monsoon. We have no choice but to carry on playing, for to abandon the show would seem, in the context of all this wildness, ungracious and cowardly, although I am well aware of how dangerous wet electronic equipment is when the gods decide that you will be the perfect conduit to ground a million volts. I had been electrocuted onstage a couple of years before, backing a singing comic in a nightclub, and counted myself lucky to be alive. I have an abiding memory of the audience laughing as I was thrown onto the floor, thinking it was all part of the act. It wasn’t.

Since that incident I’ve come to consider singing as a form of prayer, and tonight I find myself singing to the sky with a pleading intensity and focus that eventually seems to placate the gods, and by the end of the show the storm abates into the rumbling distance. We have been spared, but our gear sits on the stage forlornly dripping under acres of useless tarpaulin. Now, for the first time, it actually
looks like camping equipment, drowned under a sea of woes. We can’t afford to replace it and we just pray that it will dry out by the time it gets back to England.

    The Spanish campaign over, proudly suntanned, worldly, seasoned, and full of stories both glorious and ignominious, I join Frances in London for the rest of the summer. These weeks in London will utterly galvanize me; it is as if the air itself is charged with energy. Sitting in the back of black cabs, I will stick my head out the window like a dog to take in more of this rarefied air, as if it will infect me with success. Frances thinks I’m an idiot, but I even love the stagnant air of the Underground as we wait for the train to take us to the West End, the tunnels lined with movie posters and buskers, beggars—so many people, so many stories. I drink it all in.

This time in the city will convince me beyond any doubt that the future for the band lies here, as does any realistic notion of my relationship with Frances being sustained. The two ideas have become inextricably linked, each fueling the other like two elements in an alchemical experiment, and London will be the magical alembic where our dreams will be joined and made real. In a dizzying whirlwind of love and novelty and excitement, Frances and I see everything there is to see, plays, musicals, classical concerts, art galleries, rock gigs in pubs and clubs, and I return to Newcastle with a determination to transplant the band as quickly as possible from the safety of our little pond in the north to the opportunities of the bigger pond in the south. We resume our residency at the Gosforth Hotel, and I begin my second year as a teacher, but now I have a goal. And I know the rest of my life will be shaped exclusively by the success or failure of this goal.

Much of our equipment was indeed destroyed in the Spanish
rain, so we begin to apportion some of our nightly fees to replacing it. We manage to raise the down payment on a new solid-state PA system and some new mikes. There is some debate as to whether I should be wholly responsible for this as well as my bass duties, as I’ve taken over most of the singing, but I’m growing in confidence and I lobby aggressively that this should not be the case, and seeing how determined I am, the others acquiesce.

We also need to capture the energy of the band on tape, so that we can hawk the material in London, so we can get gigs in London, so we can secure a record deal in London. All of the projections for the band’s future will be focused exclusively on the city whose name will become like a mantra on my lips. Gerry understands and supports my logic in this, but John and Ronnie grow silently skeptical. I can sense their resistance even when nothing is said. They have mortgages and a settled lifestyle, and I can at least acknowledge the reasons for their reticence, but if they imagine the big world is going to present itself in all of its glory at their doorsteps without them having to lift a finger, then their fantasy is more ludicrous than mine. We are a damned good band, but no one is going to notice us here, and I am now in no mood to be complacent, because not only do I have a goal but somewhere a clock is ticking.

    The local media are beginning to take notice. We are interviewed on BBC Radio Newcastle, and that winter, Phil Sutcliffe, who writes reviews for
Sounds
, a London music paper, will include us in a review of Osibisa, who we support one night at the Polytechnic. I remember my excitement at seeing our name honorably mentioned at the end of his article, and thinking, “There we are at last, a tiny microcosm in the body of the music business.” There is a definite
spring in my step as I walk from the newsagents back to the school for afternoon classes. Phil will prove a very influential character in the subsequent story of my life.

As I walk through the school gates I notice an unfamiliar car in the car park and a disheveled-looking man smoking and fidgeting nervously at the door of the school as if he’s afraid to enter. It’s my father. He looks like he hasn’t slept for days, or if he has, it’s been under a hedge or the back of his car. The curtains of the staff room are twitching. I don’t want the staff to see my dad in this state. There’s a half hour before class starts and I quickly usher him upstairs into my room, where he takes one of the small classroom chairs and lights up another cigarette. His eyes are red and he looks pitiably sad. He wants me to put him up for a while, until he can “sort himself out.” It is clear that the détente between him and my mother has broken down, and that he is seriously thinking of seeking a divorce. I believe he has come to ask my permission, although he doesn’t quite say so.

“Why now?” I ask. “What happened?”

He stares out the window looking miserably uncomfortable, as if he’s unwilling to say any more, but then blurts it out as if he’s spitting bile from his lungs: “I found some letters addressed to your mother.”

There is so much unsaid between my father and me, years and years of mutual denial and obfuscation, of welcoming the blinkered darkness rather than negotiating with the truth. To begin at the beginning would be a long road all too painful and torturous to take. It seems as if it’s easier for him to pretend that my mother’s liaison is something new to both of us, as if he doesn’t want to admit that we’ve been living in the belly of a lie all these years.

He is desperately trying to maintain his pride as a man and a father
and a husband, and to acknowledge that his children have suffered too is beyond even his courage.

I acquiesce to his unvoiced pleading, as if I’ve learned to understand his silences as easily as a language, but I don’t ask him what is in the letters. I will not carry the charade any further than this. I offer my own silence as we watch the passing cars on the main road. He needs my help and support, but what is also clear from his anguish is that he still loves my mother, and that the rack over which he’s been stretched for so many years is finally about to break him. I hug him to my chest and try to tidy up his hair as if he is my child and I give him the keys to the flat. I watch him from my window, remembering the proud, courageous man that he was, and as he climbs like an invalid into his car and drives out of the school grounds, lonely and lost and shell-shocked, I wonder how on earth I can help him.

The novelty of entertaining my father as the new lodger turns out to be more fun than I would have expected. We go to the pub together and after a few drinks he starts to laugh a little, tell me stories about the old days.

“Did you know you were conceived in the Lake District?”

“No, Dad, I didn’t,” I reply, a little uneasily.

“Oh yes,” he continues. “Audrey and me used to drive over to Keswick for weekends, you know? Before we were married.”

He’s not actually winking at me, but the inference is clear nonetheless. I have no feelings either way about which side of the blanket I was conceived on, but I’m aware that my dad needs to take me to a place where he shared romance and adventure with my mother. In fact all his stories seem to circle around my mother, like birds circling a tower, the central tragedy of his life, that he’d loved her but that she’d loved someone else. I could have pointed out that
if he’d loved her more, or at least shown it, then things may have turned out differently, but even then I seem to know that life and love are too complex to be contained by simple formulae, and I allow him his nostalgia.

He will return home after a few days, hopefully refreshed, to resume the uneasy truce that has sustained throughout most of the cold war. I imagine his silences continuing and my mother’s frustration growing by the day, locked as they are in their melancholy dance to the scraping of a broken fiddle, sad and chronically out of tune.

My own relationship with my mother vacillates between anger and devotion in a wild arc that I feel powerless to control. Part of me wants to comfort her, while the zealot in me wants to shake her. It is this unresolved and largely unconscious anger toward her that I suppose will color and distort all of the relationships with the women in my life. My mother was the first mistress of my imagination and for that reason I am utterly devoted to her, but in my young mind she has also betrayed me. The archetype of the supposedly “fallen woman” conflated with that of the artistic muse is a complex, unconscious drama that will both inspire my work and more than often doom to failure whatever emotional commitments or promises I imagine I can keep.

My mother has still kept in touch with Deborah, who, she tells me, is working as a trainee assistant in a mental home. What my mother will keep from me in the months and years that follow is that Deborah will soon be hospitalized herself, suffering from severe clinical depression.

When I bring Frances home for the first time, I’m pleased that my mother is a little intimidated by her. And one of the reasons I’m attracted to Frances is that she and my mother couldn’t be more different.
My father, of course, adores Frances, but Audrey, while clearly impressed, is a little put out. Frances does not seem the type to be taken under one’s wing. She is not Deborah. She is very much a woman, and Audrey sees her role once again diminished. Frances has also just secured the lead in a TV series, which qualifies her, at least in our house, for some sort of godlike status. There is, of course, some danger in introducing a higher being to my charmingly mortal though dysfunctional parents, but I don’t really have any choice. Reinventing myself is tough enough without having to reinvent my parents, but Frances knows how to work a small room as well as a big one and she charms them into the agreeable good behavior expected of a supporting cast. I just don’t know how long this play will run. If I am going to build a lasting relationship with Frances it can’t be founded on the building codes bequeathed to me by my parents, because beneath the apparently pleasant surfaces of the family island there exists a massive, dangerous fault line that threatens constantly to shake the whole enterprise to the bottom of the sea.