Broken Music: A Memoir (23 page)

At the time, I believed that I could escape the legacy of my family by force of will, or by the forward momentum of my ambitions, and Frances would be key to this transformation. I certainly didn’t want to imagine that what had been seeded in me by my parents couldn’t be left behind.

    The year 1975 will end on both a good and bad note. Phil Sutcliffe will choose us as one of the bands likely to make it in the coming year. PICKED TO CLICK IN 76 runs the headline, and there among a dozen other hopefuls is our name: Last Exit. The bad news is that John Hedley, my boyhood hero and mentor, has left the band to take a job at Sunderland Empire. The fact that he’s playing in the pit
band for
Puss in Boots
only adds absurdity to this bitterly disappointing development.

Here we are, picked out of untold thousands to succeed by an important national magazine and our lead guitarist has joined a pantomime. Unbelievable. I can’t blame John. The money is too good and Last Exit hardly provides a living wage for a man with a mortgage and car payments to meet. Still, I’m devastated and fearful that the bubble has burst and the dream that we’d so carefully maintained over the past year seems to be over.

It is Gerry who pulls me out of my despondency. Where I am heartbroken and utterly at a loss, he is furious, and determined that this setback, far from being fatal to our enterprise, is actually an opportunity. We have our residency at the Gosforth, and tonight we shall play as a trio. “And we’ll succeed if it fucking kills us.”

I have played many memorable gigs in my career as a musician, but often the most memorable shows were performed in conditions that were less than perfect, or even adverse, conditions where you felt you had to play for your life, or you had to improvise around some unexpected limitation.

Playing as a trio with Last Exit would prepare me for my subsequent role in the Police. By playing as a trio I would learn the value of space and clarity between musical frequencies, which larger bands can’t help but fill. Being limited to just three instruments helps this learning process, where each has more work to do and more responsibility. It also helps to remember those who have gone before you, trios like Hendrix’s and Cream. Because to do that is to be reminded of the principle, the central act of faith in the catechism of small bands, that “less is more.”

Playing as a trio that night was a dogged and bloody-minded triumph that certainly thrilled the audience, and it may have taught
me that to survive in this business longer than five minutes I would need to be tough, resilient, and adaptive.

We will remain as a trio for a couple of months, but the guitar at this time is the prime inspiration for my songwriting and many of those parts don’t transpose well to the piano.

I have no desire to play the guitar parts myself, as I don’t want to give up my role as the bass player, and so we decide after some serious deliberation to recruit a new member.

Not wanting to beg John to return after his theater run, Gerry and I set about finding a replacement. We settle on Terry Ellis, a well-respected jazz guitarist ten years older than Gerry and me but more than able to cope with our aspirations to become not only a successful act but a serious musical outfit, able to play in any style. While Terry certainly fits that bill, his inclusion in the band definitely draws us closer to the adult jazz market and away from rock and roll. Where John had been a wild man who could play jazz if he wanted to, Terry is quiet and studious and only indulgent of rock and roll. He reawakens my own interest in the classical guitar. I have hopes that the band will adapt to the delicacy of his style and that he will adapt to ours, and that together our music will become a hybrid of youthful passion and cool sophistication. And the dream will continue.

Frances’s TV series has ended, and while still looking for another acting job she effectively becomes our manager, turning her efforts into a whirlwind of activity on our behalf. She calls every major record company in London and arranges meetings with their A and R departments. Armed with a new and improved Last Exit tape, she uses her engaging charm and considerable presence to get through the doors of Island Records, Chrysalis, Pye, Charisma, Virgin, EMI, A&M, Arista, Decca, as well as publishing companies and booking agents, while also sending tapes to pubs
and clubs around the metropolis that have live music. It is a mammoth task, which she does alone and unpaid, even as she is still going for meetings and auditions on her own behalf. When I speak with her from Newcastle on the phone, she seems galvanized and resolute and enjoying the challenge. Why would a successful young actress devote herself to a band that lives three hundred miles away?

Part of the answer must be that she believes we can make it, and if we don’t make it, or at least try to make it in London, then the relationship she and I have will be unlikely to survive the commuting distance between the two cities. And part must be that she loves me, and if it should go any further she doesn’t want to be stuck with a failed Geordie musician with a chip on his shoulder. Part of it must also be the joy of role-playing. Frances certainly isn’t the normal supplicant type that record companies are used to seeing cringe at the door, and if someone as impressive as she is believes in us, then we, the band, must have something to recommend us, even if the tapes don’t set the room alight. Some of the companies do become interested enough (probably more in her than us) to offer to send a representative to see us in Newcastle, or to see us if we play in London, or at the very least would be interested in hearing more demo tapes. Dave Dee, ex-policeman and formerly the singer with Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich, famous for such sixties’ classic hits as “Bend It” and “Zabadak,” was now an A and R man with Atlantic Records. He was interested enough in our tape to ask if he could hear more of our work.

Frances telephoned us with his address at Atlantic Records, telling us to send a cassette of our latest songs, and that she would then organize a further meeting. Gerry and I excitedly send off a cassette to London and a few days later receive an unexpected reply.

Gerry and I are too embarrassed to send another tape.

One of the agencies Frances sends a tape to is the Sherry/Copeland agency The latter name will come to play a large part in the rest of my life, but on this occasion we get no response.

    It is early evening and I am standing in the public phone box in Heaton Hall Road. I’ve just put the phone down after speaking with Frances, who is in London. I am staring at my image in the tiny square mirror above the receiver. I suddenly look older than my twenty-four years. She has just told me that in seven months from now I’m going to become a father, and if ever there was a time in my life to assess the reality of my feelings, then this was it. But I am too stunned and confused to be able to do so. I am still staring into the mirror, wondering how I should feel? In hindsight one of the most wonderful events of my life has been foretold, the birth of my first child, a miracle gifted to his mother and I, and yet at the time how could I have foreseen this? A smattering of rain has started to fall outside, but as I walk back to the house, nothing seems real anymore, my life, my ambition, the bricks on the wall, the slates on the roof, or the rain on the pavement. I am watching myself from a great distance, and I have nothing within me that I can recognize as an emotion.

I will drive to London as often as I can on weekends when there are no gigs, trying to sketch in the lines and colors of our possible future and then drive the three hundred miles north and manage to get back for the school bell at nine on Monday morning. I am torn between my dreams of escape and an impending reality that threatens either to entrap me or vault me into another unknown universe. But there is a stubborn streak of fatalism in me, a feeling that the die has been cast and that I will deal with whatever fate has in store for me. Frances, against her better judgment, eventually agrees to marry me, and now I have to make this work, I can’t lose courage now.

While a couple of record company reps do come and see us in Newcastle, whatever lures or bait we dangle in front of them in the way of songs, virtuosity, passion, and commitment, we don’t really get a bite. They sniff around us cursorily but nothing more. There is something else in the wind as well. Our push to be recognized in the big city will coincide with a sea change in the musical taste of the nation. This is a polemical and violent reaction to the moribund corporate pop music that has dominated most of the seventies, and is led by anarchic bands like the Sex Pistols, the Damned, and Eddie & the Hot Rods. These groups play aggressive, basic rock and roll, derivative of three-chord American thrash bands like the New York Dolls, the Stooges, and the Ramones. Last Exit, having just signed a quiet, “arty” jazz guitarist, are as far removed from this new movement as a party of country bumpkins hopelessly trying to make a belated splash in town while wearing last year’s clothes. While I’d trained myself out of an affinity with such music by always playing with older, more sophisticated musicians, the anger and the energy emanating from these groups is something I feel in my bones. The aggression in this music may be little more than pantomime faux,
but it is nonetheless effective in challenging the complacency that has up until this point hung like a shroud over the music business.

In this new climate it is difficult to get very much interest in our music, which the record companies seem to consider too sophisticated for the current taste. They are polite and appreciative, but it is clear that we are not what they are looking for. The only company to show a genuine interest is Virgin Publishing, part of Richard Branson’s burgeoning empire. Virgin’s publishing director, a petite blonde named Carol Wilson, loves “I Burn for You,” the delicate waltz I had written for Frances that has proved so popular with the audience at the Gosforth Hotel. The song is tender and romantic and may as well be a madrigal played on a lute, so distant is it from the current fashion for raucous anthems of disaffection. Despite this, Carol still wants us to come to London and record some songs with a view to signing us to a publishing deal, hopefully as a first step to securing the band a recording deal.

Needless to say we are over the moon. An expenses-paid trip to London, recording in a big studio, and just the simple compliment of being taken seriously by one more person in the big city is enough to set our heads spinning. The recording date is to take place four days before my wedding, as if in fateful confirmation of the twin symbiotic and romantic dreams that I had been nurturing for over a year now.

As it turns out, Pathway Studios in Islington, North London, is hardly the futurist palace of technology that we had imagined as we drove south on the M1 in the rented van. In fact it is not much better than the studio in Wallsend. Pathway is a tiny room somewhat smaller than the circumference it takes to swing a cat, with an even tinier control room. Sad scraps of soundproof paneling hang loosely from the walls and a filthy, threadbare carpet is patterned with food
stains and cigarette burns. We feel right at home immediately, and set to work laying down about ten tracks in an afternoon. We just play through the songs as if we are performing a live show, using none of the multitracking facilities to layer the sound. The music is raw and honest, but lacks any studio luster, density, or real power. The engineer looks a little bemused that we have managed to tackle so many songs in the limited time available, but in our proud, and I suppose provincial, way we want to demonstrate just how versatile we are. If we had been more experienced, we would have realized that versatility is not something the record industry values at all. What they are looking for is something singular and fresh. We don’t yet understand that versatility is a premium for nightclub bands and journeyman musicians, not pop acts.

The next day is one of mixed fortune. Carol, despite the sketchy nature of the demos, can hear the value in the songs, and she offers us a publishing deal. It is a fifty-fifty deal, wherein the publisher takes half of whatever royalties the songs generate. For example, when a record is sold, the royalty earned is split down the middle between the artist and the songwriter. The publisher then takes half the writer’s share. As we don’t have a recording deal at the time it all seems academic to us. We just want someone to help us out, and if it means signing away fifty percent of an improbable future, then so be it. We are told this is a standard contract, and as none of us has ever seen a publishing contract before, we look suitably grateful, hoping this is a significant step toward realizing our dream.

Carol takes us all to lunch to celebrate at a little restaurant in Notting Hill, just around the corner from the Virgin offices in Portobello Road. She tells us that she will take the demos across to the record company after lunch, and we all feel confident that with the publishing wing of the company supporting us, then perhaps the
recording wing will at least take us seriously, if not sign us up there and then. What we are naively hoping for is a big enough recording advance to allow us to move our whole operation to London, find affordable places to live, buy a van and some better equipment, and begin a new life dedicated solely to creating music. Only the record company can provide this; for their 50 percent share, the publishing arm is offering us free studio time at Pathway, but nothing else.

We return to the offices later in the afternoon, where Carol gives us the bad news. The record company has in fact turned us down. We are not the kind of thing they are looking for. Carol seems genuinely disappointed, but we are all pretty sanguine about it, as if we had half-expected it. Suddenly this had all seemed like too much to hope for. Carol promises that should we sign the publishing contract, she will continue to work on our behalf, and try to get us more gigs in London and encourage other record companies to listen to our demos. She also tells us to have our lawyer look at the contract before we sign it. On the long road back to Newcastle, we clutch the publishing contract as if it were some kind of trophy. As the countryside flashes behind us like the fleeting promise of our grandiose hopes, Gerry starts to laugh quietly.