Broken Music: A Memoir (31 page)

“Listen to me, Stewart,” he would shout in his nasal drawl just
loud enough to be within earshot in the corridor outside his office. “Gene October is the real deal. He can’t sing for shit but he’s got that street thing. He’s a real punk. You got this guy in the band, whatsis name, Smig? He’s a goddamn jazz singer.”

“His name’s Sting,” Stewart would reply huffily.

“Yeah, yeah!” Miles would say, waving his younger brother away.

Once Miles had heard our single he got a little more excited, although not excited enough to offer to manage us as yet, but Stewart was allowed to use the phones at Dryden Chambers to further his cause, albeit as a poor relation.

    Ian, the middle brother, agent, amateur bass player, and Vietnam veteran, had become over those first few months my favorite Copeland. Less fanatically driven than the other two to succeed, he had the easygoing, relaxed philosophy of a man who’d been under fire and survived, as if the violence that he’d witnessed and taken part in during his service in the U.S. infantry had given him a broader perspective on the important things of life. Very little seemed to faze him; his agreeable humor became a constant that could be relied on as a counter to the often hysterical rantings of his siblings. He would call me Leroy, just as he called everyone else Leroy For the sake of consistency he even called himself Leroy I would seek out the pleasure of his company more often than the others and listen to his self-deprecating, humorous, and often terrifying stories of his Vietnam experience.

“Shit, Leroy, I was a radio operator in the infantry just before Tet. First time we were ordered out on patrol, the entire platoon had just dropped acid. We were shitting ourselves. I think we just went around the perimeter of the camp until it was time to go back in. Fuck knows what would have happened if we’d been attacked.

“Bravest thing I ever did was to go AWOL one night to visit a
Vietnamese whorehouse with my buddy Leroy The Viet Cong used the same place, and we had to slip out the back door when they arrived at the front. Those girls said nothing though; money is money”

Despite his modesty Ian had left Vietnam as a sergeant with a Bronze Star and four campaign medals and would have gone back for a second tour if he hadn’t been framed in a bungled drug bust while on leave in London. If the charges against him had stuck, he would then have been court-martialed by the U.S. Army and most likely incarcerated for a long time. As it was, he was proved innocent, and the delays in the trial made certain that he would not make his second tour of that ravaged country. This probably saved his life.

Ian would eventually become my agent. Many years later I would perform in what had been Saigon and is now Ho Chi Minh City, and Ian would join me to revisit the scenes of so much death and destruction and his coming-of-age.

My fate for the next twenty-five years would become inextricably linked to these three brothers, so much so that they would become yet another dysfunctional surrogate for my own family, with the usual blessings and a few perennial curses.

    I don’t think we have a snowball’s chance in hell but there is an apartment being advertised in the
Evening Standard
as “Own your own for thirty pounds a week,” with the address just around the corner from where we are staying in Leinster Square in Bayswater. In its centrality and glamour, Bayswater has become an essential ingredient in our vague and rather hopeful recipe for success. We make the call and go to see the unfinished flats the following night.

An entire block has been taken over by a housing association and
is being refurbished for owner occupation within a few months. There are six basements available, each with a large living room, a bedroom, and a kitchen. It is a nice fantasy but I can’t believe they will accept us, and what would we use for furniture? Apart from the wicker armchair we brought down from Newcastle, we have nothing.

I stand in the empty basement without windows or doors, and only a concrete floor, but in my mind’s eye I can see how wonderful it would look with carpets and curtains, with an armchair and a sofa, an open fireplace and a few books. Also, the idea of living below the level of the street excites me greatly, as if it were a dugout or a cave from which we could plan our invasion of the city yet feel protected and safe in our own space. Frances tells me that most of the prospective homeowners seem to be actors. In other words, they are no more respectable than we are. We put in an application, and wait.

Meanwhile, the news from Last Exit is not good. It is now plainly evident that Ronnie and Terry have no intention of moving to London. I wonder if Gerry too is prevaricating, and write an impassioned letter pledging my allegiance to the band, but qualifying that my allegiance is to the band that decided they would come to London and try to make it, not the band that stayed at home. Only Gerry responds. He will come down and stay with some friends in south London and see how he fares. It is then I admit I’ve been working with Stewart and that I’m a semireluctant front man in a punk band. I can hear the unspoken disgust in the static on the line from Newcastle, but he’s coming down anyway. It seems as if Last Exit have finally lived up to their name.

Back at the Police headquarters in Green Street things are getting a little fraught. The Copelands are trying to fend off the bailiffs, and it looks as if the swanky address is slipping from their grasp, but we
will continue to rehearse there until the last moment. Henry by this time is driving Stewart and me around the bend. We spend hours trying to teach him parts that are beyond him. Sweet as he is, he is no substitute for a real musician, and I don’t feel that we have enough time to wait for him to become one. In fact, at this moment in time the idea of the Police making it is just as fanciful as it was for Last Exit. If anything, it is more fanciful. At least Last Exit could play.

It is Miles who will come to our rescue, in what I will come to recognize as his own inimitable fashion. There is always another agenda with Miles, and it is usually about cutting costs.

    After the explosion of new British bands transformed the scene here, Miles, ever the empire builder, decided to import a slew of bands from New York. Bands like Johnny Thunder and the Heart-breakers, Wayne County and the Electric Chairs, and Cherry Vanilla. Cherry Vanilla had been a part of the Andy Warhol scene in the late sixties, and later she became David Bowie’s publicist. She arrived in England with bright copper hair, an Italian-American guitarist named Louis, a camp Puerto Rican pianist named Zecca, and a manager named Max. Max was soft-spoken for a manager, with fluffy gray hair and professorial spectacles, refined, quietly gay, and utterly devoted to Cherry. Cherry and Louis were an item although she was a decade older. They had left their drummer and bass player back in New York after Miles had told them that there was a perfectly adequate rhythm section already here, i.e., Stewart and myself. The money saved on airfares and hotel rooms was crucial for Miles.

Stewart will agree to become the drummer for Cherry Vanilla (volunteering my services on bass), providing the Police can be the support act. This arrangement seems mutually agreeable to everyone.
Stewart and I will be perfectly happy to play two sets a night, we can pool gear and travel costs, and we might even make a bit of money.

An intensive period of rehearsal begins. We spend all day learning Cherry’s set while trying to drag Henry through ours until the early hours of the morning. We are overworked and exhausted, but thrilled to be working. Louis and Zecca are fine musicians, well schooled and utterly professional. Cherry, who—to quote one of her own songs—says she’s from Manhattan but comes from Queens, is full of delightful contradictions. When you meet her she seems like a shy Catholic girl fresh out of the convent, while her stage act is an outrageous burlesque of bumps and grinds and saucy lyrics delivered in the kind of lascivious Mae West drawl that wouldn’t seem out of place on a predatory hooker. Her stage costume is a pair of tight black slacks stretched over a shapely derriere and a tank top with the words
Lick Me
written above her ample bosom in luminous rhinestones. I feel a little superfluous, but not too unhappy to be shunted into the background, very much the way I used to feel when I had to accompany strippers in the clubs up north.

The opening number of Cherry’s set is actually a swing-four jazz tune with a walking bass line, and that is guaranteed to confuse if not outrage the militant punks at the Roxy. I am intrigued, and for the first time since I’ve moved to London I feel as if I’m playing real music, even if it’s only in a burlesque show masquerading as some kind of “new wave” sensation.

The Police now have about ten songs, all, apart from “Landlord,” penned by Stewart, as I haven’t felt confident or enthusiastic enough to contribute much more, but these ten supercharged ditties are played at such a furious pace that the whole set lasts only ten minutes, and that’s with an encore. But it is ten exhausting minutes with
me caterwauling at the top of my range over Henry’s approximations of the chords and the undigested panic of Stewart’s drumming. He is a superb drummer and quite capable of driving a small power station with his energy, but he just needs to relax more. Every song is a hell-bent race for the coda, and he plays as if he wants to propel the drums not only to the front of the bandstand but out into the audience all the way to the back of the club. I’m plagued by persistent doubts that the whole thing is just not musical enough, but Stewart has no such qualms. For him it’s all about excitement, and of course I will hang on to his coattails for as long as I can, for there is in reality no other game in town for me.

    In my anxiety about the future, I’ve taken to praying. Whatever my doubts were as a child, I’d maintained a belief in this tenuous personal lifeline to the spiritual realm, having faith that when the chips were down I’d be forgiven and welcomed back into the fold as if my religious conundrums had been understood and allowed for. So whenever I wake up in the middle of the night and start to recite the rosary, I am comforted. Five decades of the rosary adds up to fifty Hail Marys, and although with repetition the words become meaningless, they begin to work like a soothing mantra for an anxious mind fraught with worries about our prospects as a family.

Since I was a child I’ve found it easier to conjure up the female deity in my imagination, one that the church was wise enough not to proscribe in the patriarchal, misogynistic purge that all but eradicated the worship of the goddess. Mary the Star of the Sea became my icon as a child, floating above the ocean in her blue veil, her head ringed by stars and tilted gently to one side, her eyes modestly downcast as if in thought. Her smile was delicate, Venusian, and held the promise of infinite patience and compassion. She was a being who
could intercede for me in the court of heaven. My favorite childhood hymn had ended:

In later life I would have a problem with the virgin birth, wondering, I hope not blasphemously, why having created the miraculous and sacred mechanism of sex, God would see fit to bypass it in order to send Christ into the world untainted by his own invention. It just seems like one miracle too many.

Nonetheless, I’m now praying on a nightly basis for no more than that God or the Goddess will keep us safe. Asking for a place of our own to live would have struck me as being too venal to be taken seriously in the celestial realms.

However, some sort of miracle does take place, because the housing association accepts our application to join the partnership, effectively giving us ownership of the basement flat at 28 Leinster Square. Frances and I are dancing for joy and I’m silently thanking the Virgin for her help. Now all we need is some money to pay the deposit, eleven hundred pounds, plus the first month’s payment. Frances’s father lends us five hundred, and my dad says he can lend us two hundred, but we have a couple of months before the flat will be ready, so we’ll just have to earn some money and start saving.

OUR FIRST GIG WITH CHERRY VANILLA TAKES PLACE IN Newport, Wales, at a shabby little nightclub called Alexander’s next to a railway line. There is a vicious March wind blowing newspapers down the narrow alley between the club and the embankment, as a coal train clanks noisily overhead. Inside, the club is cold, damp, and dingy, and there is a pungent smell of stale smoke and the sickly hop-infused stink of last week’s beer.

Stewart and I have driven cross-country with Chris, our roadie, in a Ford Transit van. We set up the gear and PA on a tiny stage covered in angry cigarette burns and sticky underfoot with spilled drinks and old sweat. We will play scores of these clubs up and down the country, with dressing rooms no bigger than toilets, covered in the self-aggrandizing graffiti and puerile obscenities of our fellow musicians, resentful that they’ve been lured into this circus of seedy glamour by the vague promise of the big time just a little farther down the road.

The rest of the band arrive as we finish the setup, and while the American visitors don’t seem all that impressed by the decor, they do not complain unduly. I get the impression that this is exactly the kind of place they play back home. They arrange themselves in the
dressing room while I dismantle my amplifier, which seems to be broken again. I remove each of the valves in turn, shake them gently next to my ear to make sure they’re okay, and then replace them so they are snug in their sockets. The ritual, for it is no more scientific than that, seems to work and the valves begin to glow a reassuring red. The club begins to fill up and the colored lights above the stage make a brave show at a kind of gaiety, veiling the squalor in the same kindly red glow as the valves in my amplifier. Everything’s going to be fine tonight.

The Police set begins at ten to eleven and is finished on the stroke of the hour. It blisters along at such a pace—no gaps between the songs, defying the audience to be critical or appreciative, as if we don’t give a fuck either way, and then we’re off before they know what’s hit them. When we burst into the dressing room we’re all laughing as if we’ve just pulled off a successful bank raid. Louis and Zecca are duly impressed, Louis particularly with my singing.