Broken Music: A Memoir (28 page)

Phil goes to pay his respects to the rest of the band, leaving the American with me. I can’t help feeling that he’s sizing me up. He says that he was very impressed by what he saw tonight and if I should be in London anytime soon to give him a call. I’m flattered but notice that he doesn’t pay the same compliment to the other members of the band. I put his number in my pocket, then he and Phil disappear into the night. As we pack up, the band ask me who the tall guy was and I tell them, but I don’t mention the phone number he gave me. I don’t really know why, I just have a selfish instinct that I shouldn’t.

When we get back Frances is feeding the baby and after Gerry has crawled off to bed I tell her about the tall American and I show her the phone number. She tells me it’s a Mayfair number, and must be a pretty swanky address. I write it carefully in my diary as if it’s a mysterious cipher to be decoded.

The following week, my best man, Keith, will marry Pat, his childhood sweetheart, and now it is my turn to be his best man. With typical foresight he has organized his stag night two days before the wedding and, apart from the location—the Ford Arms in Byker—I have only one memory of the evening: playing the piano blind, from a supine position on the floor, with my nose pressed to the pedals and my arms stretched above me. I’m told it was rather a successful effort, but then no one else in the room was sober either, and I have never managed the feat since.

Last Exit will play their final gigs in Newcastle in January of 1977, in the bar of the University Theatre. It is a bittersweet triumph, the culmination of two years of creative effort, rehearsing, arranging, songwriting, arguing, falling out, making up, saving on food and clothes so that we could buy equipment, and then the backbreaking
labor of humping it in and out of vans, up and down stairways, hoisting it onto stages, setting it up, breaking it down, repairing it when it didn’t work, driving all over the north of England, sleepless nights back and forward time and again to London for no money, and all for two hours of playing and singing and trying to convince people that we had a chance, that we could be contenders, asking people to be part of the dream that we could make it. We realize that tonight is the end of an era for us, we have taken this dream as far as it can go in this environment, and either we go on to greater things or we die. It is early evening; the theater bar is empty as we set up our equipment against the back wall beneath large black-and-white stills of the current production. David Rudkin’s
Sons of Light
is playing in the main house.

There is some tension among us, although unspoken as we busy ourselves with wires and plugs, string changes and the tuning of drum heads. It is Terry’s night off from the pantomime, and although he has another six weeks of the run to complete before he is free, the understanding is that when it is over he will come to London along with Ronnie so that we can take our adventure to the next stage. The uneasiness that Gerry and I share is that neither of us can quite believe that this will ever happen, as if our elders are merely humoring us in our fantasies, but unwilling to shoot us down in flames, hoping perhaps that we’ll come to our senses, realize that we are onto a good thing here, plump for security, and forget our dreams of moving away to make it.

And so, although Gerry and I have come tonight to bid farewell to our friends and supporters, Ronnie and Terry are hoping that we’ll be convinced to stay. Once the gear is set up, the four of us sit in the corner of the bar nursing our beers and our private dreams as a crowd gradually assembles around us. There is a palpable air of expectancy; it is going to be a big night regardless of what happens at
the end of it. Everyone turns up, and as the room fills to capacity it becomes impossible to greet everyone. I catch sight of my brother at the far end of the bar giving me one of his sardonic, silent toasts, ever supportive but always tempered with a gentle mockery. My brother loves me—of that I have no doubt, he doesn’t need to verbalize it, never has, and probably never will—but the fact that he is here tonight means more to me than a thousand words.

It is time to take the stage. I test the microphone, tapping it nervously to bring the room to order. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I begin tentatively and perhaps a little formally, but nonetheless needing to make some kind of clarifying statement. “Tonight is a special night for us, and sadly it’s probably our last gig here for a long time. We’re off to London tomorrow, to see if we can make a go of it in the smoke.” There are a few derisory cheers, encouraging whistles, and not a few glasses raised in our honor. I can’t help but notice that Ron and Terry are staring blankly at the walls.

We begin our set. “The Tokyo Blues” as usual gets the room moving, and after a few numbers the applause builds and builds and you just know that it’s going to be a great night. Perhaps for Ron and Terry, the better we go down the more likely it is that we’ll be convinced to stay put, but for Gerry and me the mood in the room seems to be willing us on to greater things, telling us we can do it, as if the fans too have a stake in our journey south. It really is the most heartening feeling to be supported in your madness this way, and I’m absolutely determined that I will neither let these people or myself down.

We leave a cheering, stamping crowd, ebullient and raucous, yelling and yelling for more and unwilling to let us leave the stage. The two opposing parties in the band could each claim victory in this ambiguity, but discretion seems to be the sensible course.

“Great gig!” says Ron as he unscrews the nuts at the top of his cymbal stands.

“Great gig, Ron.” I nod in agreement, but nothing else is said.

The next day the local television station offers us a spot on the evening news to say good-bye to the area. We play my suitably ironic song, “Don’t Give Up Your Daytime Job.” This is our first TV performance and I’m so nervous I forget the second verse, so I sing the first one twice, and recover nicely for the third.

When it’s over I say good-bye to the band, and that I’ll see them as soon as they can make it down. Gerry gives me one of his direct gazes, while Ron and Terry shuffle awkwardly, but I’m already halfway to London in my head and nothing can stop me now.

    It is nighttime on the M1 south. In the car are Frances, myself, little Joe asleep in his carry-cot, and the dog. We have a couple of bags of clothes, two guitars, and a wicker rocking chair belonging to Frances, and this is all we have. We have no jobs, we have no house, we have hardly any money, but we are elated because this is what we have been planning for a year. I feel as if my real life is only now beginning and that everything before has been a kind of random apprenticeship for this moment. Every mile that passes takes me farther from the past, the confusion and isolation of my childhood, the emotional cul-de-sacs, the distractions and false starts, so that now as we head south, I can remake myself in this new world. I have this growing suspicion, though, that the band have no intention of following me. They will watch how I fare in the metropolis, certainly, but apart from Gerry I can’t see them slumming it, or taking a risk with their lives, uprooting themselves like this, and I don’t blame them. They’ve worked hard to achieve their security and they don’t have the guardian spirit and ally that I have in Frances. I ask
myself what making it really means. I know I want to make my living solely as a musician, but I also want to be recognized as someone unique, defined by my voice, by my abilities as a songwriter, to have the world know my songs and my melodies just as they had known and acknowledged the songs of the Beatles. I want to do this on my own terms, I want to be singular, and if that means being marginalized, then so be it. I will become stronger, and even if no one else knows who I am, I shall know myself.

My wife is asleep on my shoulder, the baby oblivious to the adventure and the dog no doubt wondering where in the hell we are going now, as the night falls around us and the commuter traffic disappears from the motorway.

PIPPA MARKHAM IS FRANCES’S CLOSEST FRIEND. THEY HAD been young actors together and now she has begun a new career as an agent. Pippa has kindly offered us her living room floor on Prince of Wales Drive in Battersea, a series of mansion blocks running along the south of the park. She lives on the top floor at the back of the building and so doesn’t have a view of the park, in fact she has no view at all, but the two-room flat is pleasant and tastefully decorated. We are grateful to be able to have a roof over our heads, taking over the sitting room until we can find a place of our own to rent.

The morning after our arrival I wake early, as usual, and after the baby has been fed I take him for a walk in his pram in bright January sunshine. There are seagulls wheeling in high arcs above our heads as we cross over the bridge to Chelsea, and their cries remind me of home. Joe is asleep, but I talk to him nonetheless. No one else seems to be up this early on a Sunday morning as we slowly make our way along Cheyne Walk.

There are beautiful Georgian houses set back from the road with what must be magnificent views of the Thames and Battersea Park beyond.

“Don’t worry, son, we’ll be okay, we’ll live in a house like that one day and we’ll be safe and happy”

But my son isn’t listening, he’s sleeping soundly and I’m just talking to myself, although I am curious to know how it feels to look out onto the river from the dark-paneled libraries and the art-filled drawing rooms. Are these people any happier than I am? Are their lives perfect and untroubled? I doubt it and I am neither envious nor sad, but I can’t help wondering where we are going to end up living.

The flat-hunting service in Kensington will cost fifteen pounds. Every morning at nine we call them and they give us a list of properties for rent in our price range (our price range being the lowest). It is exhausting and dispiriting work, trying to find somewhere to live when you don’t have much money and have a baby to feed. You spend hours driving across London only to find that the flat has already been let or that you would have to share your Dickensian accommodations with a family of rodents, and all the cars in the street are vandalized wrecks.

I am stuck in early evening traffic on Park Lane, returning to Battersea from another abortive search, this time in north London. I have the phone number that the American drummer gave me a month ago, and knowing that I’m in Mayfair, decide to turn left onto a side street and work up the courage to give him a call. There’s an empty phone box on the corner of Green Street, as well as a parking space, and I find the number scrawled in my diary in the light of a streetlamp. The phone rings and rings and I am anxious that he won’t remember me, or that he may be away on tour, but finally a sleepy female voice answers. I ask if Stewart is in, she asks me to hold on. It’s probably only a minute but seems far longer before she finally returns. “Who is it?” I tell her my name is Sting.

“Sting?” she says, I suppose incredulous that someone could have such a name.

“Yes, Sting, that’s my name.”

She tells me to hang on. Another long minute passes and then I hear what sounds like heavy footsteps hurtling down a flight of stairs probably three or four at a time.

It’s Stewart. “Hi, how are ya?” says the breathless voice on the other end.

“It’s Sting, the bass player from Newcastle,” I tell him, still not sure if he has a clue who I am.

“Where are ya? Are you in London?”

“Well, actually, I’m in Mayfair,” I admit, a little embarrassed; it would have been much cooler to call from Pippa’s flat instead of sounding like some homeless person on the street.

“Whereabouts?”

“I’m in a phone box on, er … Green Street.”

“No kidding, that’s where we are. Number 26, top floor. Come up.”

Now I am truly embarrassed. It will seem like I’ve been stalking him.

“Okay, then,” I say, looking up at the grand Georgian terraces towering darkly above the phosphorous light of the street lamp.

This all now seems like a terrible idea. I should just get back home to Frances and the baby. This is just another wild-goose chase. I’m wasting my time, and this guy is just being polite. Anyway, the band will be traveling down from Newcastle for a gig here in London next week, and this seems like I’m trawling for another one. I look down the dark street at the traffic heading south on Park Lane and wonder if I’m doing the right thing. Something steadies my nerves, as I make my way across the street toward the grand houses on the other side, trying to make out the door numbers in the gloom.