Broken Music: A Memoir (35 page)

Confirming an old adage that “no act of kindness goes unpunished,” my bass gear is returned the next day with the speaker blown. A few weeks later Mark will find himself even further in my debt when, one afternoon, I drive my little blue Citroën up to Miles’s house in the leafy suburb of St. John’s Wood to pick up Stewart’s drums. Apart from my two guitars, my Citroën is my only prized possession. There is a stationary truck in the drive, so I park on the other side of the road.

Squeezing myself past the truck, I meet Mark and Harry, his tour manager, coming out of the front door looking suddenly very embarrassed to see me, Miles having just informed them that they’d wrecked my speaker cabinet. After a few mumbled apologies and an offer of some cash at an unspecified date in the future, they hurry off and climb into the waiting truck.

Moments after Miles greets me at the door, flanked by his two hideous and slobbering pet mastiffs, we hear the truck reversing down the drive and then an almighty crash. We run to the window, only to see the truck pulling away hurriedly and disappearing south toward Swiss Cottage and central London, leaving a little blue car on the other side of the road with its front end smashed like a child’s toy. They have clearly fled the scene in a panic, because as I find out later, Mark has neither a driving license nor any insurance to drive such a vehicle. Miles, who owns the truck, is aghast. After my own initial shock and a flash of righteous anger, I begin to laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

“There’s nothing funny, Miles, except that that’s my car, and Mark and Harry don’t know it yet.”

Miles puts his head in his hands. Mark and Harry will be staying out of my way for a while.

    Andy is now officially a member of the Police, as yet a quartet, when we are booked to play the Mont de Marsan Festival in southern France with the Clash, the Damned, and the Jam. We are pretty low on the bill, but the exposure, according Miles, will be good for us. Although not entirely committed to his brother’s band, Miles is taking more of an interest in us. We work hard, we don’t complain, and we are flexible enough to fit in with his plans when other bands let him down. But he is still not our manager.

It takes us two exhausting days to drive there in a big yellow bus, no doubt testing Andy’s resolve to slum it and be a foot soldier in this new invasion of the Continent. He proves himself to be more than equal to the task and makes an entertaining traveling companion. We arrive at the town’s bullring, road-weary and starving, but we play pretty well and go down a storm. Andy is definitely an asset, although there is some friction between him and Stewart, who maintains a need to prove to the rest of the world that he’s the fastest and most frenetic drummer on the bill, if not the planet.

The high spot of the evening are the Clash, who I love because they seem genuinely musical, employing simple chords and melodies played with clarity and economy. Captain Sensible of the Damned walks on in the middle of their set, drunk, uninvited, and wearing a bright-red beret. He drops a stink bomb behind Joe Strummer, who manfully continues singing, and then falls off the stage, painfully astride a scaffolding pole. He is hurriedly taken out of the bullring on a stretcher, singing “The Marseillaise.”

Back in London a few days later, Andy will give Stewart and me his final ultimatum, and I am given the painful job of telling Henry that he will no longer be part of the band. When I help him load his gear into his digs, we are both very sad, although Henry says that he suspected something like this would happen when Andy joined us.

“We had some really moments, Henry.”

“Yes, we did, my friend, some really moments.”

Henry and I would remain friends. He will continue to improve as a guitar player, and the next time I see him he will be the new guitarist with Wayne and the Electric Chairs, after Greg had finally gone off the deep end.

I pay a visit to Stewart and Sonja, who have moved out of the
palatial squat in Mayfair to a modest and tiny bedsit in Putney We sit nursing cups of coffee in the middle of the floor, surrounded by their possessions piled into makeshift stacks of records, books, Arab artifacts, and musical equipment. My friend is not his usual self Miles has convinced him that it was a terrible idea to sack Henry and this has sent Stewart into a terrible crisis of confidence. I remind Stewart we have a gig in two days in Birmingham and that he shouldn’t slash his wrists until we hear how we sound as a trio again. Still, I can’t help but be infected by this uncharacteristic mood of despondency that seems to have overtaken him after Henry’s departure.

It is pouring with rain when I get home, and Joe is ill. He feels like a furnace and his little heart is beating like a time bomb. We call for a doctor, who arrives an hour later, under an umbrella. He is an elegant black man in wire-rimmed glasses and a tailored suit, with a refined English accent. Frances and I are embarrassed first by the lack of carpets and furniture in our flat and then to our horror realize that one of the neighbors has given Joe a golliwog, which sits accusingly, like a voodoo fetish, in the corner of the cot with our sick child. The rain is drumming a tattoo on the concrete of the yard outside the window. The doctor graciously ignores the ridiculous dolly and tells us our son needs medication, and that we should try to keep him cool. He writes a prescription and tells us that the nearest chemist open at this time of night is in Piccadilly.

I drive to Piccadilly in the pouring rain to find a massive queue at the chemist, a single assistant behind the counter, and half of London ill and in need of medicine. I get back home an hour later and the antibiotics seem to work and Joe settles down for a peaceful night, despite the rain drumming on the window. I don’t sleep a
wink as I turn our situation over and over in my head, the responsibilities of the family weighing heavily on me: how are we going to survive, how are we to keep up the payments on this flat, will Frances find a job, and what the hell is going to happen to the band?

By next morning the rain has stopped and Joe is fine. The radio tells us that last night was the wettest in fifteen years and that Elvis Presley was found dead at his home in Memphis.

    Rebecca’s is a small nightclub/discotheque in the center of Birmingham. Driving into town we are heartened to see many fly posters on the walls, suggesting that the promoters have done enough to pull in a crowd for what in our minds is a crucial Rubicon. We will either cross it successfully or our fragile enterprise will be swept downstream in a chaos of despondency and abandoned dreams. We know that everything is at stake tonight and we badly need a boost for our morale. Andy walks onstage knowing that should we fail, the band that he’s risked his reputation for will almost certainly fold. Stewart and I peer out of the dressing room at the growing crowd in the club with the grim thousand-yard stares of the condemned.

We walk onstage, the lights come up, and out of sheer desperation, panic, and I suppose character we somehow manage to kick off the shackles of self-doubt and despondency and within the first eight bars of the first tune begin to play with the unrelenting power of a ten-ton hammer. Stewart and I are pumping eight to the bar like a churning turbine in an engine room, while Andy releases broadside after broadside of shimmering guitar riffs. And my voice is soaring over it all like a raucous, predatory bird. The crowd, at first tentative, begins to go crazy. There is total mayhem, as if the audience is complicit in our need to make this one a great gig. We walk
off after three encores, destroying the drums as we wade through the audience on the way to the dressing room, and knowing at last something rare has been uncovered here, that the deeper we dig the greater the prize. I know, perhaps for the first time, that I have found a flagship for my songs. We will prevail. It will take time, but now I’m certain of it.

    Galvanized by Andy’s presence I start writing again like in the old days with Last Exit, prolific and joyful. It is in this period, between the end of August and Christmas of 1977, that I will write most of the songs for our first album, often salvaging fragments of songs I’d written for my old band and morphing them to new chords and melodies. The new songs are more direct, more economic than their old incarnations, but balanced with a subtlety that the band hadn’t explored before. “So Lonely” shamelessly pasted old Last Exit lyrics onto the chord changes of Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry,” the lilting rhythm of the verses separated by monolithic slabs of straight rock and roll. This kind of musical juxtaposition amused the hell out of me, and that we could achieve it effortlessly just added to the irony of a song about misery being sung so joyously.

Very few of the new bands had the finesse to be able to play reggae, with its complex rhythmic counterpoint that seems to turn traditional pop drumming on its head. This, and the predominance of the bass in the music, allowed Stewart and me to explore subtle areas of interplay that were rarely touched on by less experienced outfits. To create a hybrid using the drag-race horsepower of rock and roll and welding it seamlessly to the rolling stock of reggae music would make for an interesting journey, especially now that the post-punk landscape was beginning to look like a war
zone to some people. That war zone looked like nothing less than an opportunity to us.

October finds Stewart, Andy, and me in France with Wayne County, a revamped Henry, and the band, and now they also have a new drummer. Val the bass player tells me Chris tried to get back into England. This time he jumped the ferry but was caught swimming for shore and deported again. Poor bastard. While in Paris we play the Nashville Club, a seedy velveteen music hall in St. Germain, and are staying for a few nights in a flophouse behind the Gare St. Lazare. The entrance of our hotel is in a narrow and fetid alleyway off the main boulevard. In early evening it is flanked by the garish lights of a sex shop and a dimly lit secondhand bookstore. The alley is a pitch for about twenty women leaning in doorways, chain-smoking. In their shiny open raincoats, short skirts, cheap boots, and high-heeled shoes they watch the street with hooded eyes, like spies in a B movie. Some are young and pretty, and some are older, and some of them are very old, with facial expressions ranging from sullen to wry. Most of the commerce is centered on the slightly older women, as if the majority of the clients prefer experience and worldliness. The younger, prettier girls seem to do the least business, apparent innocence being only a minority preference, much as it is for the aging crones in the alley who seem as if they’ve been standing there for a thousand years.

In the dingy foyer of the hotel is an old poster from La Comédie Française, sadly peeling from the wall behind the desk.
Cyrano de Bergerac
, it proclaims, a play by Edmond Rostand. I will stand for a few moments to take in its fading gaiety. It is a laughing portrait of a man with an enormous nose and a plumed hat. He is a tragic clown whose misfortune is his honor. He is a man entrusted with a secret; an eloquent and dazzling wit who, having successfully wooed a
beautiful woman on behalf of a friend cannot reveal himself as the true author when his friend dies. He is a man who loves but is not loved, and the woman he loves but cannot reach is called Roxanne.

That night I will go to my room and write a song about a girl. I will call her Roxanne. I will conjure her unpaid from the street below the hotel and cloak her in the romance and the sadness of Rostand’s play, and her creation will change my life.

BY THE END OF THE YEAR, HAVING MANAGED TO PAY THE RENT on our new home, bought a carpet and some furniture, we are beginning to feel as if we are holding our own. Frances’s TV work is becoming more regular and is well paid. She has worked at the BBC, in a radio play of
The Passing Day
, ironically the play in which her father made his name in the West End of the early fifties. She has won a big role in a BBC production of a play with music called
Catchpenny Twist
, set on location in Northern Ireland. It is an important job for her as an actress and also for her spirits after this difficult year.

But I still have no regular income apart from the dole, and I’ve been trying to increase our coffers by doing some modeling with Pippa Markham’s help. I will get parts in commercials for Brutus Jeans and Triumph Bras, and I even rope Andy and Stewart in for a Wrigley’s Gum commercial directed by Tony Scott. In this way I find myself doing something I never would have anticipated, being paid purely on the strength of how I look. Hardly my finest moment, but all in all I am proud that we are at least keeping our heads above water and have even managed to return the money our parents lent us for the flat. I thought my father would have been more pleased than he was.

“We’ll you haven’t exactly set the world alight, have you?”

“It takes time, Dad.”

“But you’ve been down to the bones of your arse for over a year now, and with a wife and kid and all.”

“It’s getting better, Dad.”

“Oh aye?”

This last phrase is loaded with the sarcasm that I know provokes my mother into violent rages, but I don’t rise to the bait. It’s not worth arguing with him. He’s largely right and he’s unhappy.

Frances and I are spending Christmas with my family, and whatever warm glow the concept of “home” is supposed to engender, it is sadly missing. There is the usual background hum of quiet hysteria in the house, but percolating just below the surface of my mother’s pre-Christmas frenzy of shopping, decorations, and food, the mood is more like the stockpiling that goes on before a war. A war that seems likely to erupt at any minute.

While delighted to see Frances and the baby, my father is only barely civil to me, at pains to communicate that he thinks I’ve lost my mind and that I’m wasting my time in London. It’s almost as if any success or independence for me in the big city would be another nail in his coffin. In further spurious, niggly exchanges he tells me that London is a terrible place to bring up a kid and that it’s a nest of muggers, thieves, crooked lawyers, and sharp practices. I don’t point out that his arguments are ignorant, provincial folk tales, because I recognize that in his own curious way he’s telling me he misses me.