Broken Music: A Memoir (36 page)

My elder sister, Angela, is now married and in a home of her own, and I wonder if her leaving and my exodus to London has disturbed the delicate balance of détente in the house. My youngest sister is still at school and now the only dependent remaining. My brother, who works the milk rounds with my father and whom I’ve been closer to than anyone in my family and is my greatest supporter, has
now adopted the air of someone getting on with the real business of life, and not “gadding” after pie-in-the-sky notions of stardom and the high life. He is the responsible heir to the family business, while I seem to have squandered my “fancy” education and my hard-won local celebrity on nothing more than a whim.

On Christmas morning, more tension. My mother has bought Joe a plastic trundle racing car and despite my dad’s attempts to sit him astride the thing and push him around the room, the shiny crinkly wrapping paper is far more compelling. Frances is given a revolting synthetic green waistcoat that somehow makes her look like a Christmas tree. In a less-charged atmosphere we could have just had a good laugh, but our smiles are unnaturally rictus-like, neither of us wanting to seem ungrateful but still desperately uncomfortable.

I never wear jewelry and my mother knows this, but inside the ostentatiously wrapped box she gives me is a gold-plated identity bracelet. It is gangster-ugly, garish, heavy and uninscribed, and if there is some hidden semiotic meaning in the blankness of the ornament, it can only be unconscious. Perhaps she thinks I have yet to define myself since I have broken away from home, that I don’t know who I am anymore, or perhaps that we no longer know each other. She may not be wrong, but this message will reach me when it is too late. There is a terrible sadness in a kind gift that is unappreciated, unwanted, and misunderstood.

Frances has to return to London for a TV job, and I have a gig. My mother kindly agrees to look after Joe over the New Year holiday. I will pick him up in a week because I have to return, oddly enough, for a Last Exit reunion.

    Ronnie has been pestering Gerry and me for the last six months to come and do a Christmas gig for the fans at home. He has booked
the bar of the University Theatre and it’s a sellout. Gerry, who has been doing pretty well with gigging and the odd tour, has the same mixed feelings about the reunion as I do, running the full gamut of emotions between dread and sentimental nostalgia, but we finally agreed and now that it’s a fait accompli we are both quietly pleased.

We have a rehearsal in Wallsend at the arts center, the converted Victorian school where my mother was educated. She must have sat in this very hall as a little girl in her pretty cotton dresses and her white socks, her fair hair tied in bunches, dreaming wide-eyed of her future beyond the war and of the dashing prince who would rescue her.

The old band is a little rusty, but the rehearsal goes well. We are all pleased to see each other. Ronnie and Terry haven’t changed a bit since we saw them last, and I wonder if they feel the same about us. We select about fifteen numbers from the old pad, and after we blow off the cobwebs and refresh our memory of the arrangements, we soon get up to speed.

The following night the theater bar is crammed with hundreds of people, just like at our farewell concert of a year ago. It is an amazing turnout, and surprisingly touching, as everyone I’ve ever known seems to be there. My brother, Phil Sutcliffe, et al. Gerry and I had thought we’d be taking a huge risk, that maybe no one would turn up and we’d end up feeling foolish with egg on our faces. But this is staggering. We are way over the limit as far as the fire regulations go, but everyone is smiling, packed like sardines, and happy to see us back.
This
is the warm glow of “home.”

Phil Sutcliffe introduces us, the room erupts, and we can’t seem to put a foot wrong. I’d thought I might have trouble remembering some of the lyrics after a whole year, but the audience seems to be singing every last syllable with me at the top of their voices.

I imagine that surfing must feel something like this, carried effortlessly on a joyful wave of emotion and memory We play until we can play no more, with some admittedly overly inebriated souls unwilling to leave and begging us to keep the band together.

I don’t think Ronnie and Terry really expect us to give up our London dreams, but something has been resolved between us. We have closed the chapter on a high, and whatever loose ends were left after the confusion of a year ago seem to have been neatly tied.

It is an odd trio who walk into Newcastle’s Central Station next morning: Gerry and I muffled in our overcoats with a suitcase each, and Joe, asleep, openmouthed in his pushchair, wearing a silver snowsuit that makes him look like an exhausted astronaut. It is depressingly cold and damp. The minute hand on the enormous station clock suspended high above the platform shudders to a halt at eight-thirty We hurry out of the wind and into the warmth of the coffee bar to join the other frozen souls waiting to make their way south. As we sit nursing our two plastic cups of tea, some wag at the jukebox selects “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” by the Animals. Everyone seems to get the joke, as if we are all exiles from the land of disenchanted irony and bound to the uncertainty of the future. The record is well over ten years old and I can only imagine it is still there because it’s played often. The same grim song, the same grim gag.

The train is full but we manage to find two empty seats opposite an elderly couple who remain silent for the entire journey. There is condensation on the windows and the smell and heat of damp woolen garments. The train seems to stop at every station and the journey is long and tedious. Joe, now awake, is terrorizing the taciturn couple who seem impervious to his normally infectious charm. He throws his plastic blocks at them. I apologize. He spins and slides
like a break-dancer on the table. They must rescue their teacups. Again I apologize. Now with his gummy grin he ambushes other passengers as they pass by. More and more apologies, until he performs his coup de grâce, his new phrase. Repeatedly dropping his teddy on the floor he deliberately, clearly, and unmistakably shouts his latest mantra, “Oh fuck!”

Gerry groans and goes to sleep against the window, or at least he pretends to, as snowy fields and telegraph poles race past us and the couple glower and tut-tut at my delinquent son and his irresponsible father.

    Surrey Sound Recording Studios is situated on the upper floor of an old converted dairy in Leatherhead, and while certainly no more salubrious than Pathway or any of the other studios I’ve worked in, it is spacious, homely, and inexpensive. Its owner is a medical doctor named Nigel Gray, and the studio, having started out as a hobby, has now become an abiding passion for him, so much so that he wants to give up the medical profession entirely and make a living solely as an engineer and producer.

By this time Miles Copeland has agreed to help us, or at least to release our first album on his burgeoning Illegal label. While still not entirely convinced—we are still the poor relations—he does need to increase the volume of product in his company to be taken seriously again in the business. Miles has always had a predatory instinct for any kind of bargain, and recognizes in Nigel Gray’s ambition an opportunity to make a deal. As Nigel has no track record as a producer, Miles will offer him a coproduction credit in exchange for an extremely favorable studio rate. We will complete our first album in ten days and for less than fifteen hundred pounds, which even by the standards of the day is remarkably fast and extremely cheap. If
we were to inherit a reputation for frugality, then the legend surely began with this deal, and the fact that we would use secondhand tape that we’d found lying around in Miles’s garage, dubbing over the recorded efforts of one of his previous bands like unrepentant cuckoos in a borrowed nest.

Nigel is only a little older than Stewart and me but in his shy manners, neatly parted school haircut, and painfully straight clothes, he seems far more like an eccentric country doctor than someone at home among the bohemian jumble of the studio. I half-expect to see a stethoscope dangling from the pocket of his tweed jacket, but he is nonetheless a thoroughly adept engineer and can navigate the studio’s complex electronic anatomy as skillfully as a surgeon slicing layers of tissue from an etherized patient.

We are all thrilled to be making an album, particularly me, as I’ve never gotten this far before, and as Stewart points out rather sullenly, I seem to have written almost all of the material. He had used two of his songs on the first single, and since Andy joined the band due democratic process had marginalized the rest. As the Police was Stewart’s creation in the first place, he is understandably peeved. However, while I’m obviously the novice in terms of recording, I have been writing songs for over ten years, and while few if any were masterpieces I feel they have attained at least some level of craftsmanship. Songwriting for the other two is a relatively new and unfamiliar skill. I can do nothing but shrug at Stewart’s uncharacteristic sullenness, not wanting to apologize for being prolific, although I can sense that this issue will be the cause of some serious problems in the future.

In calculating royalties for a record, the writer of the song gets as much as the performer. Consequently, if we are successful I would receive a far greater percentage of any royalties earned for most of
the songs on the new record, dwarfing by comparison whatever would be left for my colleagues. This would admittedly render our already fragile democracy somewhat tenuous, until either they were to contribute more songs, or we could come to a mutual agreement whereby they would share in more of the spoils. The latter is what I eventually agree to, giving Andy and Stewart a percentage of my publishing royalties that will keep them sweet while not reducing too much my incentive to write hits. This agreement will resolve the issue in the short term, but the problem will fester, continuing to dog the relationships within the group and in fact be the reason for its ultimate demise.

We lay down the basic tracks for the album in the first few days.

“So Lonely”: a revamped Last Exit number, reupholstered in the color and pace of the current vogue.

“Dead End Job”: based on Stewart’s riff and a couple of lines provided by his brother Ian, where I’d been employed in enough cul de sacs in my life to lend the song a certain authenticity, with Andy reading employment ads from the
Leatherhead Advertiser
in the background.

“Landlord”: inspired by the Southgate incident and my anguished hunt to find a home for my family.

“Born in the Fifties”: the first stanza, a fragment of my childhood.
(“My mother cried when President Kennedy died/ She said ‘it was the communists’/But I knew better”)
I was a grassy knoll theorist even then.

“Peanuts”: one of Stewart’s tunes for which I penned the lyrics, inspired by a former hero, Rod Stewart, and my judgment of his extracurricular exploits in the tabloids, never thinking for a moment that I would suffer the same distorted perceptions at their hands a few years later.

“Would You Be My Girl?”: a repetitive one-line riff to which Andy offered a piece of doggerel about a blow-up doll.

“Hole in My Life”: another song of misery paraded and dressed up in Saturday clothes.

And “Roxanne.” While originally written as a jazz-tinged bossa nova, the song will evolve into a hybrid tango through the trial-and-error of the band process. It is Stewart who suggests stressing the second beat of each bar on the bass and bass drum, giving the song its lopsided Argentinian gait. It is also Stewart who forces me to rethink the original melody, asking me to add more of the angular and unpredictable qualities that had attracted him to my voice in the first place.

After I complete the multitracked vocals of the chorus, we realize that we have stumbled onto something unique, but our confidence is somewhat restrained because of the romantic albeit tortured nature of the subject. I have already had to defend the lyrics of “Next to You” as a displaced love song in a preferred landscape of posturing anger and aggression. Miles, years in front of the parody, “Spinal Tap,” already wants to call the album
Police Brutality
and envisions us dressed up as cops interrogating some scantily clad female on the cover. The others, to my horror, seem reasonably amenable to this ludicrous folly, but I am already planning sabotage and sedition. But it is in this climate that we will play the album to Miles, who is still not officially our manager.

He seems reasonably impressed by our efforts, although we hold back on playing him “Roxanne,” afraid the song’s defection from any style mandate will alienate him from the project. It is only after he has heard everything else that Stewart suggests we play it. I shuffle uncomfortably, and offer a few token caveats that the song is a little strange, all the while praying that my instinct about it will be confirmed
and steer us away from the disaster I see looming in Miles’s imagination. I wait anxiously as the song begins. An atonal piano cluster played by my backside on an upright behind the microphone, a nervous laugh, and then the chop-chop of the chords underpinned by the awkward rhythm of the tango. Miles remains unsmiling, his body rigid, his foot stubbornly still as I begin wailing in the keening, strident tenor that will provoke Elvis Costello to want to “clip” me around the ear. This isn’t going well. I can barely look at anyone, so palpable is the tension in the room. It seems to take an age to reach the final coda. My eyes are fixed firmly on the floor in a silence pregnant with doubt, for if Miles sways the consensus away from this song I know my days in the band will be numbered on one hand.

I finally look up to see that the back of Miles’s neck and the lobes of his ears are bright red. I brace myself for the worst of his anger and derision and prepare to make a sullen retreat. He draws a long breath, shaking his head.

“It’s a goddamn classic, it’s a fuckin’ smash.”

He moves as if to kiss me and I instinctively recoil, sinking into abashed, gratified modesty. I receive copious slaps, as if I am one of his pet mastiffs.