Broken Music: A Memoir (24 page)

“What’s so funny?” I ask.

“I’m laughing that Carol would think we’d have such a thing as a fucking lawyer. I can’t even afford a pot to piss in, never mind a fucking lawyer. Who does she fucking think we are?”

I nod in solemn acknowledgment of Gerry’s ever-superior grasp of reality.

“I have a lawyer,” Ronnie pipes up rather pompously from the back of the van. Ronnie is now into his third Carlsberg Special. “I shall take the contract to him first thing Monday morning and have it looked over properly.”

“Shite!” says Gerry. “It’s just more money down the drain. Gizza beer, will ya?”

“It’s not shite,” replies Ronnie sullenly, “it’s just good business sense, something neither of you two have. What do you think, Terry?”

Terry, the other wise elder, is asleep like a child, his face pressed flat against the van window.

I’ve been driving for four hours now. We are approaching the end of the M1, about to commence the last hundred miles to Newcastle, when Terry wakes up.

“What do you think, Terry?”

“About what?”

“About the fucking contract.”

“I don’t know, what do you think, Sting?”

“Well, I was just imagining that in six years’ time, say, after we’ve sold millions of records all over the known world, that fifty-fifty deal will translate into millions and millions of pounds for Virgin Publishing, unearned, mind you, apart from a few donated hours in Pathway Studios. And we’ll have to sue Richard Branson in the high court, at great personal expense, in order to regain our most valuable copyrights.”

“Fuck off, Sting,” says Gerry, exasperated.

The argument will continue for much of the remaining journey, but we all end up agreeing that beggars can’t be choosers, no one else is going to look at us, and we’re lucky to have someone like Carol rooting for us in London. We agree to let Ronnie take the precious contract to his lawyer on the Monday following my wedding.

What Ronnie doesn’t tell us is that his lawyer has never seen a music business contract in his life, and while perfectly adept at the efficient conveyancing of deeds for house purchases, he has as much
experience arguing the points and percentages on a publishing deal as he has of the arcane legal complexities of canon law. When Ronnie brings the aforesaid contract to the attention of his legal genius, the latter looks at it curiously, shrugs, and claims that it looks okay to him. Now, aglow in the comfort and security of the best legal advice that twenty quid can buy, and fully satisfied that we are not being ripped off, we duly sign the fifty-fifty contract, and the rest will be court history.

    On the night before the wedding, we are having a small gathering in the lounge of the old Grand Hotel on the seafront. Frances’s family have booked rooms for the weekend: Joe Tomelty and his wife, Lena, and a few actor friends who have trained it up from London. Joe is seated in a big leather chair by the open fire. He is very much the old stager, leaning on his walking cane like a prop, ruddy-faced and cheerful, grinning widely under the shock of his white mane and with the same piercing dark eyes as his daughter. Lena is more reserved, a little shy even, and not in the least theatrical.

My own parents are on their best behavior, although they do seem ridiculously young, like juvenile actors playing older roles, and it strikes me that they’ve always seemed that way.

They are, of course, of a younger generation to Frances’s parents, but their posed approximation of stability seems sadly transparent to me.

My handsome brother, Phil, is watching all of this with the sardonic detachment of an Elizabethan rake at a pantomime, amused but hardly entertained. Does he doubt that I can make this work? He says nothing, nurses his beer and toasts me silently with one raised eyebrow and half a grin.

My best man will be Keith Gallagher. We have been drinking buddies for over ten years now. When he left school at fifteen he became
an apprentice at Parson’s, the huge engineering works in Byker, working himself up from the shop floor through night school to a degree in mechanical engineering. He is truly a self-made man and has long been my champion and arch-encourager of whatever musical talent I might possess. Keith has always believed in me, especially when nobody else did, and that is why he is my best man. As I’m the first person in our peer group to get married, he has put his faith in me again as some sort of pioneer.

Gerry and the band are there, and some of the guys from the Phoenix and the Big Band. We huddle around the piano and I sing a few songs for my bride-to-be, then I return alone to my parents’ house stone-cold sober.

St. Paul’s is a simple parish church overlooking the banks of the river Tyne as it flows resolutely into the powerful and contradictory swells of the North Sea. Below the church stands the Collingwood Monument, dedicated to our local hero, the great Admiral Collingwood, who was Nelson’s second-in-command at the battle of Trafalgar. It is a fine, blustery, northern day with a mild southwesterly breeze blowing and the sky is an enormous dome of translucent blue. I can almost hear Nelson’s most famous admonition as Keith and I walk purposefully into the old churchyard: that England expects every man to do his duty; and so we will.

It is not a grand wedding, but the church looks pretty, decked out with spring flowers and shafts of midmorning sunlight filtering through the stained glass. I’m wearing a blue corduroy suit and a tie, and I’m nervously happy. Keith has the ring I bought in Portobello Market last weekend. I know it is secreted safely on his person because I made him check his pockets in the car, but somehow he looks even more nervous than I do, as if it were he entering this strange ritual and not me.

Gerry is playing the old organ at the back of the church, some
two-part inventions by J. S. Bach that he’s kindly and diligently been perfecting for a week or so. His feet are pedaling furiously to keep the bellows full, and like the proud musician he is, there’s a look of intense determination on his face that he won’t make any mistakes.

The church is a third full. Frances’s family and friends are on one side, mine on the other. As Keith and I walk down the aisle I see Buttons the dog at the end of the second row wearing an oversize blue velvet bow around his neck, looking utterly miserable, as if someone has stolen his bone. I give him what I think is a reassuring pat on the head, but he growls at me with quiet menace and is shushed by Lena.

My mother is already crying, though she smiles at me brokenly, her face swollen and shining with tears. My father just stares at the crucifix above the altar. My grandmother looks thrilled to be wearing her new hat, and old Tom just looks as if he’d rather be somewhere else. He’s made an effort, though; his hair is neatly parted and battened to his brow.

While Keith and I wait, I resolve that, just by sheer force of will, marriage for Frances and me will not turn out as it did for my parents. Gerry plows doggedly into another prelude, but it is dramatically foreshortened as the bride and her father appear at the doorway. Our errant organist improvises a stately march as they enter. Frances is wearing a simple white shift of cotton with delicate flowers in her dark hair, and her eyes are fixed on mine. Now everyone else has turned as well. My mother’s weeping enters a second stage of intensity. Lena gives her a thoughtful look across the aisle. Joe Tomelty is walking stoutly at his daughter’s side, beaming at everyone on either side of the aisle.

The priest keeps the ceremony light, and apart from Keith’s momentarily fumbling with the ring, it goes smoothly. Frances speaks
her vows with an actor’s assurance and I try to follow suit. It is done now. As we make our way down the aisle as husband and wife, Gerry can contain himself no longer and breaks into “The Tokyo Blues,” discomforting the devout among the celebrants but amusing the hell out of me.

We hold a small reception in a restaurant across the road and Joe makes a succinct, charming speech in his stage Irish: “They told me that if I should ever be making a public speech like this one, that I should stand up, speak up, and then shut up!” and with that, he promptly sits down again.

After a few embarrassed speeches and awkward best wishes from people unused to speaking in public, it is time to leave. Frances, the dog, and I climb into the car with everyone waving to us from the pavement as if we were setting off on an Atlantic voyage. We are actually driving sixty miles north to Bamburgh Castle. One night in a small hotel is all that we can manage in the way of a honeymoon, but our room overlooks the magnificent castle on its ancient volcanic crag between the flat gray sea and the sand dunes. It was built by the Saxon king Ida and is where Roman Polanski filmed
The Tragedy of Macbeth
, only a few miles south of the holy island of Lindisfarne. A fortress on a cliff top is a dramatic symbol of strength and resilience, as well as a violent history, and perhaps not the most romantic location to represent the beginning of a marriage, but it is an image that will stay with me, its ambiguity becoming clearer as the years pass. Bamburgh is also the birthplace of Grace Darling, another maritime hero, who risked her life in a small boat, rowing out in an appalling storm to rescue the surviving crew of a sailing ship that had foundered on the Longstone rocks south of the Farne Islands. The incident became a nineteenth-century cause célèbre and the young Grace the personification of female heroism. The tiny rowboat is still there in the museum and looks too frail to have survived
the elemental sea and the storm at its worst. This image too will stay with me.

It feels different being married, as if we have suddenly become strangers again, shy with each other, a little afraid and tentative, where in the church in front of our families we had played our roles with such surety. We will spend the afternoon walking around the ancient churchyard, marveling at the ancient weathered gravestones among the lilac trees, calculating the lifetimes of the dead. Some lives had been cut tragically short, others lived well into old age, then there were couples who had died in the same year, one after the other, as if life was no longer worth living alone. Life seems so random, so temporary. We both realize that we are no longer playing games, and that marriage is a frightening commitment, and that we will have to be careful with each other. A cloud briefly obscures the sun, just as a chill northeasterly breeze picks up and shakes the blossoms from the lilac trees, and drives us inside.

I AM NOW RESOLUTE THAT THIS WILL BE MY FINAL TERM AS A schoolteacher, and the fact that we will be expecting our first child by the end of the year makes me even more determined to make the move to London. Would people less driven than Frances and I have reacted differently to the news of a child? Wouldn’t the normal reaction of a young couple have been toward safety and security, and having a roof over our heads? The pregnancy instead provokes the opposite reaction, a spur to movement, almost a call to arms, and whereas in the past the responsibility of fatherhood had terrified me, there now seemed a rightness in the timing that forces us to put our trust in fate, and summon our courage.

But we also know that the old clock is ticking and we will have to make the break this year or we will be stuck here forever.

In the meantime, the band are offered yet another bible-based rock musical at the University Theatre. This one is prophetically called
Hellfire
, which will soon become edited in the band’s shorthand to
Hell
. The subject matter is the perennial struggle between good and evil. There are the good angels and the bad angels. The good angels wear costumes of feathery, fluffy chic, showing lots of leg and winged ankles, while the bad angels wear a sort of celestial
biker chic, all chains and leather, again showing lots of leg and big black boots. The bad angels are charismatically led by one gay actor playing Lucifer, writhing around the stage like a pole dancer at every opportunity, trying I suppose to tempt the good guys into his version of what looks to me like a gay disco. However, the fact that the good angels are also led by a charismatic gay actor, writhing only slightly less lasciviously than his satanic counterpart, in his own version of heaven, seems to defeat any reasonable logic or the chance of any traditional moral purpose. God will be played by a six-foot-tall gay Nigerian named Chris, who sits above the action singing the words “I am, I am” in ominous tritones, often sadly flat. Why all this pseudoreligious claptrap needs to get in the way of a perfectly workable good disco/bad disco story, à la
Flash-dance
, I shall never know. Meanwhile, we are contracted for a six-week run, and while
Rock Nativity
may have proved itself to be no work of genius, we will remember it as if it were Verdi’s finest, compared to this fiasco.

After a week of rehearsals I realize, like a whore on her second night, that I am doing it solely for the money. My father had always warned me not to end up down the pit—of course he was talking about the coal mine, not the orchestra pit, or the pit of hell, although there are parallels. The money, of course, is not to be sniffed at. Once again sixty pounds a week added to the pittance I get as a teacher adds up to a decent wage, and with a child on the way, putting some money in the bank would seem prudent. Particularly as I shall be resigning very soon from the only steady job I have.

Frances has given up her flat in London and moved into bachelor chaos with Gerry and me, but the place is now looking much better from having a woman’s presence. I’ve painted our bedroom all white with a blue floor, Frances has bought new bed linens and curtains,
the flat has a newly scrubbed look, and we have started to replace the furniture that we had foolishly burned last winter when we ran out of coal. We do have one embarrassing encounter with the landlady who miraculously finds us home one Sunday morning for the first time in two years, as our lunchtime gig has been canceled. In fact it’s the first time I’ve seen the landlady since Megan and I pretended we were a married couple and got the place, having always left the rent upstairs with Jim and Stef.