Broken Music: A Memoir (33 page)

It is only the end of the tour but it seems like the end of the world.

The next day on the ferry from Zeebrugge back to England, Greg is nursing the mother of all hangovers. He is sitting on the upper deck of the rocking boat, his head in his hands, flanked by Wayne and Aleister.

“What are ya? Yarra freakin’ idiot.”

“Where we gonna find the dough for a new guitar? Huh? Tell me that. Ya freakin’ moron.”

“Ya spent every nickel we made on booze. Now look at us.”

Crowley spits theatrically into the wind and it dribbles down his leather jacket. “He’s a freakin’ moron.”

Greg suddenly makes a bolt for the rail and spews a yellow stream of his bilious demons over the side of the boat and into the English Channel.

“Freakin’ moron,” grumbles Aleister, as if in final judgment of the hapless Greg.

“Leave him alone,” says Wayne, watching the pathetic figure hunched over the railing. As he goes over to comfort him, I realize Wayne loves him, and that Greg will be cared for as he’s been cared for many times before. Aleister walks off in disgust, but not before fixing me with one of his evil unspoken curses.

Chris, the drummer, is on the other side of the boat watching the
coast of England loom out of the mist. It is freezing, but he is still wearing the pathetic summer clothes that he’s worn every day and every night onstage. As the port of Folkestone gets closer and closer he looks more and more anxious and fidgety.

“How’re you doing, Chris?”

“I’m okay. Just hoping they let me back in.”

“What if they don’t?”

“I don’t know. If they send me back to Hungary I’ll go to prison.”

He tries to light a cigarette but fails in the wind, and leaves the cigarette hanging, like a French movie star. “Maybe I should jump the ship and swim.”

“I don’t think you should do that, Chris. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

He shrugs and disappears below and I realize how fortunate I am.

When we land in Folkestone the immigration authorities keep the Americans in the party for six hours, checking work permits, searching their bags and their clothes, and generally making life unpleasant. The rest of us wait in the car park. We will wait a further four hours for Chris until we are told that he is being sent back to Zeebrugge on the night ferry. Poor guy. There’s nothing we can do, so we drive back to London in a black depression.

When I eventually get home to my wife and son, whom I hardly recognize because he’s grown so much, she asks me if I know someone called Deborah. I have a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.

“Yes, I do. Why?”

“Your mam called. She said that Deborah is dead.”

That night I lie awake and I watch my wife and child as they sleep in our tiny bedroom at the back of the flat in Bayswater. I’ve tried to sleep, and I’ve tried praying, but it’s no use, and I start to wonder at the terrifying strangeness of life. It’s as if I can see it for the first time, like the workings of a vast machine suddenly revealed behind
the opaque scrim of my meager understanding. How did I arrive here? My life until I met Frances seems to have been made up piecemeal, as if it were an aggregate of small choices and inconsequential decisions. And yet these small adjustments to the compass of my life have somehow led me to a momentous responsibility. I try to trace the pattern of my life back from this moment like an amnesiac attempting to remember how he could have arrived in such a place. I ponder that one small alteration, one tiny deviation in the course, would have set an entirely different set of wheels in motion in this complex machinery of fate. I’m a husband and a father, I live in a city far from my home, I am following a dream, and yet a girl I had loved, a girl that I easily could have married and led quite another life with, is now dead.

It is only a few days later that I will, for just a brief moment, imagine that I have seen a ghost.

The Housing Association to which we belong comprises almost the entire terrace on the eastern side of the leafy Bayswater Square, to the north of Hyde Park. There are six tall, white-painted houses of six floors split into thirty-six separate properties. All of the flats, apart from the six basements, look out across the street onto the verdant lawns of a private tree-filled garden in the center of the square.

Our flat, like all of the other basements in the square, is below the level of the pavement. We have a separate front door from the one that accesses the flats above, and unfortunately the only view we have from our windows is of a small yard with a stone staircase leading up to the street. We really don’t mind, the flats upstairs were far more expensive than Frances and I could afford, and the subterranean life seemed appropriate to our needs as well as our clandestine ambitions.

But when some of the upstairs neighbors start lobbying to keep
their rubbish in the little yards in front of the basements, in effect reducing our already nonexistent view to a collective refuse site, there are rumblings of sedition belowstairs. We may live below the ground but that’s no reason for us to be treated like lower-class citizens.

When some of those who live upstairs begin unilaterally depositing their bags at our front door, I know that rebellion is our only hope. A meeting of the basement dwellers is called at number 32, and I am the first to arrive.

Descending the stone steps into the yard and peering through the window, I can see that the basement at number 32 is just like ours. I am met at the door by a tall sandy-haired man in his early thirties. His name is James, he is an actor, and he shares the flat with his girlfriend. They moved in a few weeks after us, but we have never met. James sits me down by the fireplace and asks if I would like a cup of tea. I tell him I’d love one and he makes his way to the kitchen at the back of the flat, leaving me in the sparsely furnished room. Looking round, I see that they are certainly no better off than we are, except that they do have a carpet. There is no glass yet in the doorframe leading to the kitchen corridor so I hear a muted conversation and the tinkling of female laughter. James returns. “Be here in a minute. The old girl’s just brewing up.

“So,” he continues in an actor’s baritone, “what do you think we should do about this rubbish situation?”

“Well, you know, I’ve been thinking about it and … and …!”

I have stopped talking because a young woman has just walked through the empty doorframe from the kitchen holding a pot of tea and some china cups. She is a stunning blonde in tight blue jeans and a powder-blue sweater. Her eyes are a pale, pale green, and across her left cheek is a whitened strip of scar tissue that curls like the violent memory of an animal claw around the socket of her left
eye. Strangely the scar in no way detracts from her beauty, because she looks to me like a kind of damaged angel. There is something else about her that has stunned me into silence. It is the shape of her mouth. I feel as if I am witnessing an apparition for she has the full lips and wide smile that are so like Deborah’s as to be uncanny. For a brief moment this strange tableau of the beautiful girl with the pirate’s scar and the ghostly smile seems to be frozen in time like a photograph and then burned into my memory.

It is James who breaks the spell between us, “Have you met Trudie?” he asks.

I would discover that Trudie Styler had run away from home as a teenager with a dream to become an actress. She had run, naively and instinctively to Stratford on Avon, the town of William Shakespeare’s birth and the home of the Royal Shakespeare Company. She knew no one who lived there and was forced on her first night in the strange town to knock on doors asking for shelter. She was taken in by a theatrical family called the Churches who would give her a bed for the night and later a job as nanny to their children. With their encouragement she would successfully apply to study drama at the Old Vic Theatre School in Bristol. She would graduate and work as an actress in television and theatre, eventually starring in an RSC production at the Warehouse theatre in London. Between jobs she would work as an MC in an Arab night club where she was known as “Angel.” The scar on her face was the result of a terrible accident when she was a small child: she’d been dragged down the street underneath a truck and escaped miraculously with her life, but needed over a hundred stitches in her face and head. No one had expected her to become a great beauty or a successful actress.

It would be three years before Trudie and I would become lovers, but our attraction to each other would not only be instant but
blatantly obvious to everyone around us. There was open childlike innocence about it at first, a joy and spontaneity in each other’s presence that was impossible to disguise, but as this infatuation became more and more intense I began to struggle with my true feelings. I did not want to re-enact my mother’s tortured conflict between romance and familial love but I was falling for the girl next door and a chasm was opening up beneath me.

    Stewart and I are becoming more and more joined at the hip. We seem to have a growing belief in each other and that we somehow share a common future. While not identical to the apprentice-mentor relationship I have had with Gerry, my relationship with Stewart is becoming increasingly important, and though this one isn’t growing at the expense of the older one, there is a renewed tension in my dealings with my old friend.

During our Holland tour, Gerry had moved to London and gotten a job playing organ in a topless bar in Soho. He’s making fifty pounds week (still a king’s ransom to me) and staying with some friends in south London until he can find a place of his own. When we return, I invite him round for an impromptu session with Stewart, hoping they’ll get on, and we have a good time jamming a few old Last Exit tunes and a few standards. When Gerry goes off to work I drop as many hints as I can to Stewart that he ought to add a keyboard player to his plan, to give us more versatility. But Stewart seems adamant that what he wants is a three-piece guitar trio, and any replacement for Henry would have to play guitar. History would prove him right.

I believe Gerry, on the other hand, is beginning to feel a little left out. While he is certainly not the kind of person to be jealous—I’m not sure he’d even want to be in these bands I’m playing
with—he’s the only one from Last Exit to have made the leap of faith to come to London, and I don’t want him to feel like I’ve abandoned him. It is Gerry, however, who will be the one to take the first step away.

He calls me the next day to tell me he’s been offered a tour as the musical director for Billy Ocean. I’m thrilled for him, but when he asks me if I want the bass seat I have to decline, even though it’s a hundred pounds a week plus expenses. If I can make that amount in a month with the Police I’ll be lucky, and while the money would obviously make us feel more secure, I’m not tempted in the least. Put it down to instinct. But this does mark a delineation of my partnership with Gerry, who will chart his own course from now on. I owe a great deal to him in many ways—he was my teacher, even though he would treat such a suggestion with contempt. We will remain friends up to the present time, and after many adventures of his own he will become a highly respected lecturer in a music college back home in Newcastle, and of course he’s still gigging.

But now I have really thrown my lot in with Stewart, and peripherally with his Machiavellian brother, Miles.

Then commences a period that can only be categorized as marking time. Cherry has recovered her voice and Max wants us to play a month of dates with her, culminating at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm with the Jam and the Stranglers. We play as far north as the Glasgow Apollo and as far south as Plymouth and Penzance and we go down well most nights, both with Cherry and as the Police, and although our set is getting longer and more accomplished, I feel we are treading water and that my creative energy is being lulled to sleep. It is interesting and probably only a coincidence that I will fall asleep at the wheel of the van, driving back from a gig in Stafford in
the Midlands, and almost succeed in terminating all of our careers prematurely.

It is the early hours of the morning and the others are asleep in the back. We are all exhausted. I have been driving the truck for a couple of hours and Henry is trying to keep me company in the front seat although he keeps nodding off against the side window. The others are asleep in the back. The motorway is empty, and we are cruising in the middle lane doing about eighty.

Henry stirs himself and becomes aware that I’m inching the truck slowly into the outside lane. As there is no traffic around us he can’t work out why I’m making such a maneuver, until he realizes with horror that I have my eyes closed. He screams at me, and I suddenly wake from a dream to see the road looming and the van heading for the central barrier. My own screams join with Henry’s for what seems like an eternity, as I try to wrench myself fully awake and we go into a mind-bending skid away from the barrier but heading with the terrifying screech of tires toward the embankment on the other side. The words
opposite lock
burn themselves into my brain and I turn the hurtling wagon into the skid, finding to my immense relief after a tire-burning hundred yards that we seem to be under control. I slow the van down and pull over to the hard shoulder. Everyone is awake now.

“What the fuck…?”

“I’m sorry, everybody, I fell asleep, Henry saved all of our lives.”

“Fuckeeng ’elle.
J’ai pensé un
really moment, yes?”

“Yes, Henry, that was a really moment.”

But Henry’s really moments as a member of the Police will be sadly numbered, for it is in the following period that Stewart and I will meet Andy Summers, a musician who will be hugely influential in our subsequent careers and the history of the Police.

* * *

    My publisher, Carol Wilson, has a boyfriend who is the former bass player of Gong, an Anglo-French, quintessential hippie band popular in the early seventies. (Steve Hillage, the guitarist, is probably the band’s most famous alumni.) Carol’s boyfriend is named Mike Howlett and he’s a very good musician, his music being closer in feel and sophistication to the ideals Last Exit had aspired to. Mike is interested in forming a band with us called Strontium 90. I do point out to him that having two bass players in a band is not standard practice, but we have a few rehearsals together and work out a few tandem parts where we don’t step on each other’s toes. Stewart comes one afternoon for a session and agrees to give it a punt, neither of us having anything to lose. Again I bring up the possibility of Gerry’s joining us, but Mike says he has another player in mind. So it will be in the small studio of Mike and Carol’s pleasant terraced house in Acton that we first meet Andy Summers.