Broken Music: A Memoir (25 page)

The landlady, who really does look like Mrs. Thatcher, the current leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, is curious to see the property after so long, and thank God the place looks better than it did a few months ago. After inspection, she seems satisfied, and I am just about to get her out the front door, when Frances walks in from the newsagents and introduces herself as my wife. The landlady is confused, to say the least. Frances looks nothing like Megan, in fact they couldn’t look more different. Frances maintains a disarming smile, while the landlady looks from her to me with mounting puzzlement.

“She dyed her hair,” I offer by way of some explanation.

Now it is Frances’s turn to look puzzled. “No, I di—”

“See you next month then, Mrs. Thatch—er, see you then?” I hurry her across the step and manage to close the door before she can object and this incident gets out of hand. Frances is still looking at me strangely as through the new curtains I sight the landlady stopping in the path and turning, as if she’s considering coming back in.

Please, no
…

Thankfully, she changes her mind and turns to get into her car, still shaking her head and now looking, perplexed, at the front door. And then she is gone.

Gerry, who up until that point has been sleeping in, and doesn’t even officially live here, emerges in one of his dressing gowns with a scarf around his head. He looks like Marley’s ghost.

“Who was that?”

“Mrs. Thatcher.”

“Shite, I forgot.”

“So did I.”

Frances is still smiling, but it is also clear from her expression that she is looking for some sort of an explanation.

Gerry and I reply, in practiced unison, “Don’t ask!”

    We shall continue to be consumed by the torments of
Hellfire
until mid-June, but not until we have fallen out with the cast, who seem to think it’s our fault that they can’t keep in time with the music and have taken to stamping their feet, winged or booted, on the stage above our heads to demonstrate that we are playing out of time and not them. As we are being conducted by a musical director with a white stick and a metronome, there is nothing much we can do. Now that the cast have stopped speaking to us, and I’ve fallen out of love with the theater, this is indeed the last time I’ll work in the pit.

We resume our residency at the Gosforth on Wednesdays, with a new Monday night slot at the Newton Park Hotel. Andy Hudson has been something of a guardian angel and has gotten us some dates in the Newcastle Festival, the biggest of which is a support spot with Alan Price at the City Hall. Some honchos from London have promised to come and watch us strut our stuff. With Carol Wilson’s help, Frances has continued to rustle up interest among the record companies.

To be a local support act is akin to entering an old pre-democratic
subspecies of humanity that was thought to have died out with slavery. As a new member of this subspecies, your self-image is reduced to that of one belonging to a lower caste, a caste of untouchables, lowlifes, invisible men, and ciphers of minute significance. For the privilege of walking onto the big stage, however, there are few performers who haven’t suffered this humiliation at some point in their careers, willing to trade the denigration of their fragile egos for the vague promise of the spotlight and a few minutes of attention.

The harsh facts, though, are these: No one has paid to see you, and the devotion of those who have paid is generally exclusive to the star of the show. This singular devotion, while flattering to the star, will preclude any chance that they will be interested in watching or listening to the local support act. More likely they will be in the bar quaffing lager while you’re bleating your heartfelt songs to a cavernous and empty room.

As you now belong to the subspecies, you will rarely be ushered into the presence of the star, or even those close to him, but you will invariably have to deal with the roadies in his entourage in order for you to get your equipment on and off the stage as efficiently as possible. The roadies, generally “nasty, brutish, and short,” to quote Hobbes, know that they too are members of a lower caste, but not quite as low as yours, and this differential allows them to exercise that uniquely human characteristic of making your life even more of a misery than is theirs. I have seen equipment thrown carelessly from the stage and swept aside like so much refuse littering a street before a royal parade. I have heard words that I’d hitherto thought to be only apocryphal—“Get that shit out of here”—as the amplifier I’ve sweated and saved for is unceremoniously booted into the wings so that the Star’s pristine, hi-tech equipment can be gracefully wheeled into place. However, not unlike lowly officials in the medieval
church selling indulgences, it is in the granting of sound checks where these serfs can exercise their truly malicious power.

To walk onstage without having first checked your equipment is about as advisable as jumping out of a plane without having first checked your parachute. It needs to work. The sound levels need to be balanced and you need to be able to hear yourself as well as the other members of the band. This takes a little time.

The star’s equipment will have arrived at some point in the afternoon. The roadies will be ostentatiously tinkering with whatever seems to be the latest piece of technical wizardry to have arrived from the future. They will continue tinkering and posing with these scientific miracles until the Star deigns to arrive, to perform his or her sound check. The Star is invariably late, if he or she bothers to turn up at all, and the Hobbesian serfs will keep up the pretense of tinkering until minutes before the doors are supposed to open, leaving you little time to ascertain that your antediluvian technology is at least working. These are not the best circumstances in which to prepare for an important showcase intended to impress record companies.

In this case the star of the show, Alan Price, the keyboard alumnus of the Animals, has arrived and has commenced his sound check. He is dressed in an impeccable linen suit, cool and cosmopolitan and utterly unapproachable. He is, of course, a local man, raised in Jarrow, but hasn’t lived in the area for years. (If you can recall, it was his seat I inherited at the tax office.) Mr. Price is an excellent musician and he puts his band through its paces, changing a few arrangements, checking the monitors and the mikes, rehearsing a new number. We are waiting in the wings, patiently seated on our equipment, but time is marching on toward the opening of the doors. He runs through the new number once more and now there
seems to be a problem with his keyboard, which precipitates more tinkering until the band can begin again. Everyone is, of course, oblivious to our needs for the evening as the clock gains inevitably upon the hour. When they begin the number yet one more time, Gerry and I begin to shuffle on our careworn speaker cabinets, staring anxiously at our watches. The Hobbesian serfs are looking at us with a smug “can’t be helped” expression—“The master’s at work, he can’t be disturbed”—when I am witness to a sight I shall never forget.

Frances, who is up for the week from London, and has been seated in the hall watching Mr. Price rehearse, is now leaving her seat and striding purposefully with her long legs and high heels toward the stage. She is still not visibly pregnant, and is looking officiously at her watch as she mounts the stairs, a look that signals clearly that if the star’s minions so much as think of impeding her progress they will be making a terrible mistake. Gerry and I can’t believe what we are seeing, nor can the roadies. We are all openmouthed. She is certainly impressive, sophisticated, elegant, and not to be messed with. As she approaches the piano at the center of the stage, I watch as her face assumes an impermeable mask of confident charm, and when Mr. Price eventually looks up I can see that he is at first shocked and then not a little intrigued.

“What the fuck’s she doing?” asks Gerry under his breath.

I’m unable to answer, so fearful am I. Mr. Price is famously cantankerous. Even now he is trying to convince the muscles in his face to glower, but he can’t quite manage it, so powerful is Frances’s presence. She speaks to him quietly, out of earshot, and now pointing with authority at her watch and gesturing toward us at the side of the stage. Mr. Price is suddenly transformed from a glowering martinet into a compliant, eager schoolboy. He closes the piano lid and
tells the band to quit the stage so that the support act can have a sound check. The sullen roadies cover their precious equipment in black drapes while Gerry and I gleefully carry the Hammond onstage. We are almost dancing as we place it proudly in front of Mr. Price’s piano. Frances has now returned to her seat, and I mouth a grateful “Thank you, I love you” from the stage.

We play, as expected, to a virtually empty hall, but there are some record company types from Island Records, Virgin, and A&M sitting with Frances in the Royal Circle. We play extremely well and I ignore the empty seats and sing straight at the center of the spotlight, imagining a throng of seventy thousand, which is okay until the end of a number, when all that can be heard are a smattering of almost derisory hand claps.

We leave the stage feeling pleased that we have done our best, while the hall fills up for the main act. A few minutes later Frances arrives backstage with the record company people.

We receive measured congratulations on our performance—enough, anyway, to make us feel that we haven’t failed.

“You’re definitely getting better,” says one. “Oh yes, definitely better,” says another. “Yup,” says the third.

Then there is an awkward silence, which continues a little too long, but nobody feels like breaking it. Everyone starts taking undue interest in things like shoelaces and posters on the wall, until the man from Island says, “Except”—we wait expectantly—“except you didn’t really get the audience going, did you?”

“You were the fucking audience!” says Gerry.

“Yes,” he replies absently, “I suppose we were.”

    There are only a few more weeks left at school when I tell the good Sister I’m leaving. She is a bit taken aback when I hand in my resignation, even though matters had become somewhat fraught
earlier in the term when the awful
Hellfire
matinees had clashed with my teaching commitments. She had indulged me over this, much to the irritation of the other staff, and perhaps she expected some form of loyalty from me in return. It had always struck me that there was something playfully childlike in her character, and that part of the tension between her and the staff, who were all married with children, was these fundamental differences of personality and life experience. She was far happier in the company of children, and I suppose to a large extent I fitted that description. I’d tried to explain to her over most of the last two years that I couldn’t see teaching as my life’s vocation and that it was music that was my passion, but she could never understand how music could be anything more than a hobby. She had been indulging my fantasies because she liked me, or because my eccentricities amused her, or made her feel less isolated. When she finally realizes that I’m serious about giving up my job, despite the fact that there is a baby on the way, she will play her final card. Shaking her head sadly, with the exasperation of someone who can’t make head nor tale of an argument, she offers this:

“But you’ll lose your pension.”

I look out the window across the playing fields at the vans and lorries heading south on the motorway and I’m silent for a while.

“I’m sorry, Sister, it’s what I want to do.”

I spend a great afternoon with the kids and at four drive back into Newcastle with all the windows open and singing at the top of my voice. My elevated mood is further enhanced by the news Ronnie gives us later that night at the band rehearsal. He’s managed to secure the band a job on a P&O cruise ship for the summer, and this will put some money in the coffers for the last big push toward London at the end of the year.

THE S.S.
ORIANA
WILL SET SAIL FROM SOUTHAMPTON ON THE seventeenth of July, which is fortuitously the day after I finish school, and we will be entertaining the passengers as the Ronnie Pearson Trio, and not as Last Exit. This, of course, is no career move. We will be playing covers, cocktail music, tea dances, and Old Time Night, which I suppose is the geriatric ballroom dancing that I’ve become so familiar with in my odd apprenticeship. The money, however, is exceptional, and Frances can see perfectly well that though we shall miss each other a great deal, since she is no longer working, her man will have to go to sea and bring home the family bacon. Because of the pregnancy she has gone from being a strict vegetarian to a rabid carnivore, so the bacon will come in handy. I am beginning to absorb the fact that we really are going to have a child, and it’s hard to keep anxiety for the future at bay. We plan to meet up in London when the job is over.

Ronnie has worked on these cruises many times, all over the world, and he warns us that we’ll have to be smartly attired and polite to the passengers. Gerry and I are wondering why he’s directing this warning at us. However, as we are now temporarily members of
the Ronnie Pearson Trio and not Last Exit, we promise to maintain his high standards.

“No, Cap’n, ye can keelhaul us or make us walk the plank, to be sure, but we won’t let thee down,” we cackle, touching our forelocks and crouching in mock deference.

Ronnie is singularly unimpressed by our Long John Silver impersonations and tells us that this is a serious job, for serious money.

“Aye-aye, Cap’n.”

So we pass our medicals and secure seaman’s cards, and become official members of the British Merchant Navy.

The
Oriana
was built in 1957. She is forty-two thousand tons, eight hundred feet long, and can accommodate over two thousand passengers. Her superstructure is painted a creamy off-white. She has sixteen floors, seventeen public rooms, eleven passenger decks, swimming pools, and a tennis court. She has over nine hundred crew members, including us.