Broken Music: A Memoir (29 page)

Number 26 is an impressive eighteenth-century house with a
pillared portico. I peer into the entrance hall through the stained-glass panels of the front door, and press what I imagine to be the top-floor bell. The door buzzes and then mysteriously opens. I walk in and begin to mount the imposing, richly carpeted staircase to the fourth floor where the door is ajar, and I hear the sounds of dissonant music.

As I enter the dimly lit apartment I see a bearded man with long dark hair, sitting cross-legged and playing a Perspex bass connected to a tiny portable amplifier. I ascertain immediately that he is not very good and the sound is closer to the annoying buzz of an insect at a window than the normally sonorous tones of the instrument. He is seated in the center of what looks like some sort of eastern shrine and is totally oblivious of my presence, his eyes way back in his head, either in a meditative trance or stoned out of his gourd.

I begin to take in the rest of the room. There are many artifacts that seem to be Middle Eastern in origin, a hubbly-bubbly pipe, or narghile, Islamic tapestries, engraved brass plates, Arab swords and daggers, silk rugs and harem cushions. There is a faint smell of incense and patchouli oil. Through an open door in a room off to the side I see a strikingly pretty woman with long red hair. Her full lips seem to be held in a permanent and seductive pout as she distractedly plays a small guitar and hums softly to herself, as if she too is in an enclosed world of her own. She must be the source of the female voice on the phone but she also looks oddly familiar.

Whatever she’s playing has nothing whatever to do with the bass parts being played in the other room or the unrelated clatter of a drum kit emanating from the floor above. It is more than a little disconcerting.

Just then another female figure emerges from what I assume to be a kitchen. She is huge, with long dark hair and muscular legs atop
shiny high heels. She has enormous hands and they are pressed tightly to her ears as she brushes past me, almost knocking me back down the stairs. She is clearly unhappy with everyone in the flat and turns to glower at me menacingly, as I’m the only one taking any notice of her. My reflexive apology is rebuffed as she slams a bedroom door behind her. This is some strange place.

The red-haired girl gives me a languid smile through sleepy, half-closed eyes, which I take as permission to mount the stairs. I am intrigued by the physical surroundings and appalled by the cacophony, which is getting louder and louder. I enter the upstairs room, lit by a bare lightbulb suspended from the ceiling and full of what I assume to be furniture draped in ghostly white sheets. There are cardboard boxes blocking the windows, I suppose as makeshift soundproofing. The tall American is playing an enormous drum kit in the corner of the room. He smiles with the grim resolve of someone firing a machine gun as his long athletic arms thrash at the splashing ride cymbals and the snare drum cracks like an uncoiled whip. The hi-hat rocks from side to side on its metal fittings, while his right foot throbs like a road drill and shakes the entire room. If this is a percussive exhibition designed solely to impress me, then it works. Stewart Copeland has an easy animal grace as a drummer, and where Ronnie was all finesse and fussy technique, Stewart is an object lesson in sheer power. He plays for another sixteen bars before he launches himself across the tom-toms to greet me.

“Hi! How long have you been in town?” he asks, offering his large right hand and shaking mine vigorously.

“A couple of days,” I reply, trying to sound casual while recovering from the shaking I’ve been given.

“Grab that bass over there, let’s play”

“Won’t that disturb the people downstairs?” I ask.

“Nah, that’s my brother Ian and Sonja. They won’t mind.”

I realize now that the redheaded girl downstairs is Sonja Kristina, the singer of Curved Air, the beautiful ingenue who fronted the seminal art rock band of the early seventies. I’d seen them supporting the Who years before. Electric violins and guitars playing psychedelic pop, folk rock and bombastic slabs of Vivaldi tagged on, I supposed, to demonstrate that the band had all been to music college. But Sonja was a real beauty, otherworldy and unattainable, and I make a mental note to check her out on the way downstairs.

“And your brother’s a bass player?” I ask, wanting to know as much about the terrain here as I can before embarking on any journey.

Stewart catches my drift immediately. “Oh no, no, he’s an agent, but he likes to play for fun.” Then he adds confidentially, “He got back from Vietnam pretty weirded out. He’s only just come out of his shell.”

I nod politely, remembering the psychonaut downstairs and wondering how he must have been when he was in his shell.

I pick up the bass, unsure if this is a jam session or an audition, or perhaps both.

“And what about the other lady?” My curiosity is getting the better of me.

“That’s George. Don’t ask,” says my new friend, rolling his eyes. “What shall we do?”

“What you were playing when I came in sounded pretty good to me,” I reply as I plug in the bass and tune it up.

He starts at a blistering pace, so I just settle myself behind the engine and wonder where this ride will take me. Off we go, riffing and pumping with his machine gun intensity, the bass weaving like a python through a jungle of rhythm and splashing cymbals.

Even at this very early moment of our relationship, it is clear that there is something going on, some chemistry, some understanding, some recognition, a rapport and a tension between the amphetamine pulse of his kick drum and the shifting, rolling ground of the bass. It is like two dancers finding a sudden and unexpected harmony in the glide of their steps, or the sexual rhythms of natural lovers, or the synchronized strokes of a rowing team in the flow of a fast river. Such rapport is not common, and I realize very quickly that this guy is the most exciting drummer I’ve ever worked with, almost too exciting. I also realize that tempos will be abandoned as easily as loose baggage on that runaway train, and whatever music I shall manage to make with this whirlwind, it will not be gentle or easy, it will be a wild ride to hell and back.

We play for over an hour and finish the session flushed and embarrassed like spent lovers, exhausted, exhilarated, and neither of us quite sure what to do next. He talks to me about Hendrix and Cream and how he has always had a hankering to play in a three-piece band. How the interplay between a trio and the added responsibility for each musician is a challenge he relishes. That less is more. That real art thrives in conditions of limitation, demanding improvisation, innovation, and creative problem-solving. He talks in the same scattershot way as he plays the drums, telling me how he’s been galvanized by the punk scene, how these unschooled musicians have thrown out finesse and technique for the sake of raw undiluted energy, that he wants to be part of it, and that it will sweep everything aside like a tidal wave. I do not point out to him that his current band is the style antithesis of this movement, a band that personifies arch-hippiedom, and that the beautiful Sonja Kristina with her long red hair is the poster girl for the old regime. And he in turn politely doesn’t mention that the band I’m in is a
bunch of provincial “musos” so far off the style scale so as not to register at all.

If there is something disingenuous about the two of us forming a punk band (for this is the unspoken subtext for everything that we have discussed so far), there is also something deliciously subversive about it. Flying a flag of convenience while the doors of the fortress that is the music business have been torn open would suit my purpose and method as much as it would his. Stewart wants to call the band the Police. I hate the name, but I say nothing. He plays me a couple of songs he has written, recorded roughly on a home tape recorder, tailored musically and lyrically to fit the new dispensation, and while they seem generic and vacuous, what excites me is his energy, his brash Yankee spirit of “can-do.” He shows me a feature about himself in
Sounds
. There is a picture of him behind his enormous kit and below it a letter ostensibly from a fan asking, “Who is this brilliant new drummer with Curved Air and what equipment does he use?” There follows a CV and the specs on his Tama kit.

“Do you know who wrote that letter?” he asks me rhetorically, and before I can even shrug he answers himself, smiling like a big greedy cat. “I did. It got my picture in the paper. It’ll also get me a free kit from Tama.”

I am both appalled and fascinated by this blatant and unashamed self-promotion, but it has clearly worked, I couldn’t argue with that. I was witnessing for the first time what I would later come to recognize, when I got to know the rest of the Copeland clan, as a family trait. Those boys could promote, and I as much as anyone would profit from their efforts. By coincidence, Stewart’s letter ran in the same issue of
Sounds
in which Phil Sutcliffe had written about Last Exit. That article is called “Making It” and takes up three pages in the middle of the paper. It is well written and well meaning, but the headline is clearly ironic in that the story outlines the impossible
odds stacked against even good provincial bands trying to gain a foothold in the music industry. Next to the explosive Semtex of Stewart’s self-promotion we looked like sodden fireworks after a damp bonfire night.

So here is a conundrum for me. An amazing drummer, whose dynamism is in no way limited to his musical abilities, but with an artistic agenda that I can only half subscribe to, compared with allegiance to a band who I’m not even sure is committed to coming to London and whose chances of making it seem increasingly nonexistent.

But I don’t want to sing tuneless, disaffected rants. I sing tender love songs. This is what I’m good at. But I also realize that there’s an opportunity in the chaos, and that I am perfectly able to morph, adapting what I do to suit the current climate without necessarily compromising the integrity of my songs. I can establish some sort of position, some kind of defensible space, and when the dust has settled, run my true colors up the mast.

Whether this medium-term strategy is identical to Stewart’s, I don’t yet know, but I’m willing to suppress my misgivings and attach myself to this new and dynamic energy, and see where it takes us. But before any of this can work, we will need another player, and Stewart will need to get a haircut, and quickly.

I return to my wife and baby in Battersea, my head spinning with ideas about music, loyalty, integrity, money, and more important, somewhere for us to live.

The next night Frances and I drive up to Southgate in north London to an address that the flat-hunting agency has given us. South-gate is a long way from the center of town, but by now we are getting a little desperate. Joe is asleep in the back and we’ve left the dog with Pip in Battersea in case they don’t accept animals. It is a freezing cold night with icy rain and sleet clinging to the windscreen and hapless
pedestrians being soaked by the wash of passing buses in the glare of brake lights and shop windows.

The flat is above a row of shops and the entrance is around the back. We find a parking space, and with the baby in his carry-cot we make our way slowly across the treacherous ice and up the stairs in the darkness. As Frances rings the bell apprehensively we are nervous and cold and our month-old baby looks so vulnerable. The door opens and we are flooded in a warm light, a haven from the icy wind and rain. We are wearing our best clothes and fixed smiles. I look for somewhere to put the baby.

The woman who ushers us in, who has been a tenant here for five years, is named Freddy. She has short black hair, slacks, and a man’s shirt. She seems to take to us immediately, especially Frances, and after a few cups of hot tea and a couple of shortcake biscuits, shows us around the flat. After Pip’s tiny living room the two-story maisonette seems enormous. There are five pleasant, spacious rooms looking out onto the High Street, and for sixteen quid a week, it is the nicest place we have seen. There would be room for Gerry if he wanted it, and the baby looks very comfortable.

Freddy asks what it is we do. She’s intrigued that Frances is an actress, but Carol Wilson has instructed me not to tell her I’m a musician, so I say that I’m a copyright executive for Virgin Music with a giddying bogus salary of five thousand pounds a year. This subterfuge seems to have worked successfully for other musicians trying to put a roof over their heads, and indeed Freddy says she will recommend us to the landlord tomorrow, and if we can send our salary details and a reference she can’t foresee any problems.

We emerge from the warmth into the foul weather of the night, relieved that we’ll have a place of our own, and fairly confident that we’ll manage to scrape the weekly rent from somewhere.

I do have to visit the social security office, though, and sign on the dole. Walking to the Lisson Grove dole on Wednesday afternoons will put me into the blackest of depressions. I hate signing on, queuing up in long straggling lines with hundreds of others like me, able-bodied but marginalized individuals made to feel utterly useless by an impersonal and dehumanizing bureaucracy. But like most of these others in the noisy hall, I really have no choice. We have a baby to feed, we have to find the money to pay the rent. There is no other way but to put myself through the system, ferrying coded forms from office to office to be stamped and filed. In my quest to become unique, I’ve become a statistic.

My papers have yet to arrive from Newcastle, and this makes me anxious that the undeclared pittance I get from the odd gig with Last Exit may have emerged as a piece of evidence against me. I stand in the queue every week expecting to be hauled into the office and given the third degree about my unemployment. The queue in front of me stretches like a winding snake from the grubby glass doors to a series of grilled windows, and beyond these windows, designed as if to protect someone from contamination, is a row of sallow, overworked civil servants, just as bored and indifferent to the situation as those on this side. In front of me a man is reading the
Daily Mirror
. The headline I can see reads, MOTHER OF NINE JAILED FOR SOCIAL SECURITY FIDDLE. As if she didn’t need it. I eventually get to the window, hand in my dole card, sign my name, and a giro check for 18.50 will be posted to whatever address I have given. I say thank you but I get no response from the man on the other side. At least I don’t have to go through this for another week.