Broken Music: A Memoir (26 page)

I am very excited to be walking up the gangplank with my guitar case; if only my dad could see me now, he’d be proud of me at last.

The ship is like an enormous floating city delineated by class, the upper decks used solely by the first-class passengers and the bridge officers; the lower decks, by second-class passengers, deckhands, maintenance staff, cooks, and cleaners; and below them the denizens of the immense engine room.

I have a small cabin in the bowels of the ship, with a single berth, no porthole, and plain metallic walls. There is a small man from the island of Goa in Southern India, named Michael, who will clean my room and do my washing. He tells me that P&O have a deal with the people of Goa, and that he’s saving up to buy a guesthouse back home, but that he and the other Goans aren’t
ever allowed abovedecks during the voyage. The entertainment staff, however, are able to move freely around the ship between the decks. Sometimes we’ll play dinner music for the captain’s guests and then finish off the evening farther down the ship, entertaining the second-class passengers.

Ronnie will be doing most of the singing, which is fine by me, as I don’t know a lot of cover material. I’m perfectly happy just to play the bass, although Ron does get irate when I mess up on one of his songs and accuses me of not taking the job seriously enough. I do take his point, but he is starting to sound like Captain Bligh.

We play about three times a day in different locations on the ship, carrying our own gear from the restaurants to the lounges, the ballrooms and the nightclubs. Between these spots I spend my time reading on some quiet part of the deck, whenever I can find one. I’ve decided to tackle Melville’s
Moby-Dick
, as it is suitably nautical and dense enough to last the whole voyage. I’ll read a paragraph and then gaze dreamily off the bow as the gray of the English Channel turns to the blue of the Bay of Biscay.

It is in this bay that we experience our first storm. The sea has been choppy all day, but by the evening we are in a full and dramatic ocean swell, the ship rolling from side to side and then pitching forward erratically. Luckily, I’ve never been prone to seasickness, but we are unfortunate enough to be playing our set in the ballroom at the stern of the boat, right above the propellors, where the pitching and rolling seems to be the worst. Ronnie’s drum kit is set up on a small carpet, and as we play, it proceeds to roll backward and forward over the smooth wooden floor with the motion of the ship, and from side to side. As I’m just standing, I can sway with the rocking ship, and Gerry’s piano is tied down, but poor Ronnie can hardly
control his drum kit as it careens around the stage. Whenever he reaches for the mike to sing, it is either swinging away from him or heading back toward him at speed and threatening to hit him full in the face, which is understandably turning from an embarrassed red to a bilious green. The fact that he can play at all in these circumstances is a tribute to his skill as a drummer, as well as a sailor. I’m just not sure how long any of us can keep this up. Every so often I’m sure I can hear the propellers below us ride above the surface of the ocean with a sickening angry roar. The last few intrepid souls attempting the fox-trot have since given up, and the dance floor is now empty.

The ship’s purser is peering at us from the corner of the room, a look of surly amusement on his face. He walks across the ballroom floor, seemingly unfazed by the horrendous pitching of the ship. It is uncanny. He is walking as if he were on dry land, and stands in front of us as relaxed as if he were standing in the middle of Oxford Street. It is this, as well as his rather smarmy grin, that starts me feeling a bit queasy.

“All right, you can stop now, nobody’s listening.”

He is just about to turn on his heel when he begins to stare at my feet.

“What are you wearing on your feet?”

I look down stupidly. “Tennis shoes, sir.”

His mouth assumes a malicious sneer that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Captain Ahab sighting his white nemesis, but seems oddly disproportionate on the ship’s purser in the face of a pair of tennis shoes.

“And why are we wearing those?” he asks, checking at the same time that the others are wearing their regulation black pumps.

“They’re more comfortable, sir.”

“I don’t give a stuff how comfortable they are. If I see you wearing them again onstage, you’ll be off the ship at Gibraltar.”

“Yes sir.”

He exits across the dance floor in the same eerie way he crossed it. Now Ronnie is glowering at me.

“I told you, you’re not taking this job seriously enough. Now he’s got it in for us.”

The ship continues to roll for the rest of the evening and I spend a fitful night in my cabin, dreaming about the
Pequod
and the white tennis shoes.

The storm has abated by morning and I take a brisk walk around the main deck. I like being at sea. I like the perpetual forward motion, the idea that a journey might never come to an end. The air is getting warmer as we head south, and I think of Frances back in England. She’s given up a lot to marry someone like me. I think about the baby growing inside her, and I wonder what it will be like. I wonder what kind of father I’ll be. I don’t want to have the same relationship with my son as I had with my father, but he was trapped—yes, that’s the key. If I never allow myself to be trapped like him, then everything will turn out differently. But then I begin to wonder if I’m crazy. I just have to keep moving, that’s all, like this ship.

I’m awoken from my reveries by the sight of Gerry heading toward me. He looks worried. “Ronnie’s really pissed off with you,” he says, tugging anxiously at his cigarette.

“I know he is,” I reply.

“The purser just asked to see him in his office, we’ve been taken out of the ballroom tonight. He wants us to play in the crew’s mess.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Ronnie seems to think that it’s some kind of punishment.”

“Why?”

“Dunno.”

That night, with the western coast of Spain twinkling on the port side, we carry our gear down to the lower and lower decks, and then farther down as the staircases narrow, where there is no natural light, past fearsome bulkhead doors at the end of long steel corridors, until we finally emerge into the noisy, suffocating hell of the engine room. We are suspended on a swaying gantry above six massive turbines, built by Parson’s of Newcastle, with the combined power of eighty thousand horses. There is something ridiculously incongruous about carrying a piano through a ship’s engine room, the images and the technologies simply don’t gel. We are strangers in an alien land. The stokers below us stare up with expressionless, sweat-stained faces as we struggle ludicrously with the upright piano on the narrow and precarious bridge. On the other side is where the crew’s quarters are situated, and their mess is a dingy common room with a tiny stage at the far end. There is a card school of Goans at one table, a couple of guys playing dice, a darts game. Everyone stops to stare as we fall into the room with the piano. There are a few seconds of silence and some tension, and then on cue they resume their games as if we didn’t exist.

“Nice,” says Gerry, managing some irony while looking around in the gloom of a bare lightbulb strung from the low iron ceiling.

“We’ve played far worse clubs in Sunderland,” I remind him.

We deposit the piano then make the return trip for the drums, back through the engine room, through the bulkheads and the long corridors, staircase after staircase until we reach the bracing air of the upper decks.

By now, the crew’s mess has undergone something of a transformation. The bare lightbulb has been replaced by a mirrored disco ball, and while the room is still dingy, a few scattered lamps glowing red and blue give the place something of a festive air, like a grotto.
The Goans are still playing cards as we tune up, not interested in us at all, but the rest of the crew are beginning to arrive. They arrange themselves around the edges of the room nursing drinks, and I notice there are quite a few women among them. At least I think they’re women, the room is so dark.

We start with a little instrumental, to break the ice, a jazz waltz called “Way Down East” by Larry Adler. It’s Gerry’s feature and I’ve always liked it. The music coaxes a few couples to the dance floor in front of the stage. It is only now that I realize the women I’d been so pleased to see earlier all have tattoos, and enormous biceps, and muscular thighs sprouting incongruously from Chinese dresses with dragon motifs, slit to the groin, and stockinged legs teetering on enormous stilettos. There are blondes and brunettes, the odd redhead in full makeup, false eyelashes, extravagant earrings, and full red lips.

Ronnie looks as if he has been expecting this all along and displays a kind of smug stoicism as he delicately applies the brushes to his snare drum like a pompous chef whisking an egg. He’s still pissed off with me. He thinks it’s my fault we’re down here and not entertaining the captain’s table in the first-class restaurant.

I’d gotten used to the lighthearted camp of the theater, enjoying the outrageous humor, the fun and genuine gaiety of the actors, but this is something different, something darker. Despite the feminine clothes and the makeup, these types look seriously tough. You wouldn’t want to cross any of them for fear of having your arms and legs broken. There is a couple in front of the stage who are beginning to worry me a little. He is dressed as an old-fashioned matelot, with a blue-and-white striped sweater, tight bell bottom trousers, and a white neckerchief. There is a lurid, painful-looking scar running from his nose, under his cheekbone, and all the way to his earlobe.
“She” is in a red satin Suzy Wong outfit, an auburn wig, nail varnish, black stockings, and red high-heeled shoes. They are slow dancing in front of me, and each time “she” turns, she pouts at me lasciviously with languid half-closed eyes and a flaring of her nostrils as if she’s trying to catch my scent. When her boyfriend turns he glares at me darkly from beneath a single black eyebrow, his scar glowing livid in a continuous line from the thin malice of his lips. They continue to turn, alternately offering me seduction and destruction, like a spinning Janus. One part of me thinks this may be a regular psychodrama they indulge in to get each other off, another part of me is preparing for a fight, when from the corner of my eye I recognize the purser and his greasy smile, obviously enjoying the spectacle from the back of the room. The rest of the band seem oblivious to my predicament. I ask Ronnie if I can sing the next number, he says yes, and we begin “Friend of Mine” by Bill Withers.

I’m singing because I’ve learned from experience that when I sing I become fearless, as if there is something in the act of giving voice to a song that makes me feel invincible. I also have a Fender bass in my hands, and should there be a fight, it is as good a weapon as it is an instrument. However, the uptempo song and the warm sentiment of the lyric seem to change the mood in the room. Everyone starts rocking, the moody lovers in the front seem to be having a good time at last. The Goans are still playing cards, but we definitely have the makings of a great Last Exit gig. The purser skulks back to the upper decks, and we have the best band night of the entire voyage.

Soon we are in the Mediterranean, heading due east past Gibraltar and the Pillars of Hercules, past the Balearic Islands, the south of Sicily, and then the Greek islands. I sit on my quiet corner of the
deck looking out at the fabled isles as if they’re floating in a trick of the falling light between the golden sea and the sky. I imagine Odysseus searching for his home, and his wife Penelope fighting off suitors and waiting patiently with her only son, Telemachus, but my reverie is suddenly broken by a loud announcement on the P.A. that there will be bingo in the second-class lounge at 7 P.M. prompt, followed by the Mysterious Madame Calypso, a female contortionist, and a one-eyed python.

Having had such a success in the crew’s mess as Last Exit, we are feeling a little more confident about giving it another go. The night before we dock at the Turkish port of Izmir, we are due to play in the large ballroom at the stern of the ship. There will be a mixed crowd there and enough young people for us to risk running our true colors up the mast. Ronnie can see the logic here and agrees to the change of plan.

The band’s playing is fresh, muscular, and unshackled. It’s not that we are playing with any more volume, it just seems that way. The crowd goes from bored indifference to genuine excitement, particularly among the younger crowd at the front of the stage and spreading out toward the back of the room. I feel in fine voice, having spent most of the voyage singing backup for Ronnie, with the result that I’m even more strident than usual. I’m beginning to feel invincible again, a quality I’ve heard described so many times as arrogance but is simply the joy of singing, and tonight I’m having a ball.

We play for forty minutes to much applause, but during the break the purser pays us another visit, bristling because I’m still wearing the hated tennis shoes. He gestures over to a group of dowagers at a large table under the crystal chandelier.

“You, Mr. Tennis Shoes, you will stop singing now,” he whispers menacingly. “You’re upsetting some of the lady passengers over
there.” And with this he transports the most obsequious, slimy grin across the ballroom to the flustered maiden aunts who are fanning themselves beneath the chandelier and nodding their assent.

We resume our former guise as a lounge act. The younger elements of the audience disappear and I quietly resolve that the next time I sing on a ship, I’ll own the fucking thing.

“ODYSSEUS” RETURNS AT THE END OF THE SUMMER AND “Penelope,” waiting on the Southampton dockside with a hired van, is now visibly with child. It has been one of the hottest English summers on record, and carrying all that extra weight can’t have been comfortable, but she looks splendid and so happy to see me. We drive back to London to stay with her friend Pippa in Battersea, and the next day we leave for Newcastle, this time determined that when we return to London in the new year, it will be for good, although how we are going to survive financially, I do not know.