Broken Music: A Memoir (38 page)

    A day or two later, Frances and Joe have returned from Manchester for a break, but our time together will be marred by some sadness. I will take the dog for his last trip to the vet. He’s been breathing with difficulty since the morning and looking very unhappy.

The vet looks at me ominously as she listens to the poor dog’s heart. “I’ll give him an injection, but he’s old. If he doesn’t respond, I don’t think there’s much hope.”

My own heart sinks and we take a taxi back home, where I break
the news to Frances. The injection doesn’t seem to have any effect and his condition steadily gets worse. It is now eleven in the evening, we ring the vet, and she tells us to come round. One of the neighbors looks after the baby and we take the dog into the hated office for the last time.

He has the strangest look in his eyes as he looks unflinchingly at his mistress of fourteen years. He seems to be saying, “You can leave now. I know I’m dying. It’s okay.” Frances hugs him tenderly to her chest, bravely maintaining her composure, but when we leave the office to walk home she is inconsolable.

It takes a long time to get over our bereavement. I have a recurring dream of hearing a familiar scrabbling at the front door in the middle of the night, and when I get up to open the door, there he is as large as life. “Turdy, where’ve you been?” I say. And that’s when I wake up.

    By June the weather in London is balmy, the plane trees that line the Bayswater Road loom like massive green giants above the lines of traffic and the sweltering pedestrians in their shirtsleeves and thin cotton dresses. The city is buzzing with a kind of languid optimism and I’m thinking that perhaps such weather could last forever. On just such a morning, we will get a surprise call from my dad. He’s phoning from Victoria bus station in the center of London.

“What are you doing there, Dad?”

“I just got back from Germany and I’m coming over for breakfast. I’ll tell you all about it.”

A black cab pulls up outside and a pair of rather dapper suede loafers appears at the top of the basement steps, followed by my old man carrying a shopping bag in one hand and shielding his eyes with another as he peers into the window.

He allows me to hug him, and then I hold him at arm’s length to get a better look. I haven’t seen him since Christmas. He is smiling, and a bit thinner, and he seems younger too although there is a wistfulness around the eyes and a slight tinge of red. Frances cooks him a hearty breakfast and he dandles Joe on his knee while forking scrambled eggs and bacon rashers into his mouth and giving an account of his adventures all at the same time.

He tells us he’s been doing a favor for a friend of his. The friend owns a coach tour business in Newcastle and had asked him to check out a hotel that he was thinking of using in Rimegen, which was near to where Ernie had been stationed after the war. Reading between the lines, I suspect that the friend had seen that my dad desperately needed to get out of the house, and knowing him to be too proud to accept a free holiday, had given him the task as a cover for a much-needed break. The trip had clearly worked wonders, bringing some of the pep back into his step and the playful mischief in his grin. I wonder if he’d managed to look up some of the girlfriends he’d known back when. I don’t pry, but after allowing him to regale us with his adventures, I feel that it’s time to draw him back to the real issues.

“Have you heard from Mam?”

“No, son, I haven’t, but I hear they’re having a tough time.”

He doesn’t mention Alan’s name, but there is no triumph in his voice. He looks suddenly grim and long-suffering and it is clear, as always, that he still loves her, despite everything that has happened.

I tell him that I haven’t heard from my mother either, failing to mention the bitter correspondence we’d shared, as if even that was a further act of betrayal.

I am clearly as confused as he is.

When breakfast is over, he looks at his watch and tells us that he has to get the bus back to Newcastle because my brother has been
holding the fort for a week now. I beg him to stay. “You can sleep on the couch,” I say, somehow knowing that he won’t, but it’s worth a try.

“Oh no, I’ve got to get back. Poor Philip’s doing two rounds while I’m away.” He kisses Frances and the baby, gives me a brusque handshake, and then he’s gone.

My father too will only have a decade of his life remaining. The seeds of the cancers that will kill both my parents have already been propagated from the dark strain of unhappiness and frustration that had grown between them like a malignant flower.

MILES IS SERIOUSLY CONSIDERING SENDING THE BAND TO tour the U.S. Brother Ian, who moved out to Georgia in the beginning of the year to start a new life, is now an agent with the Paragon Agency in Macon, Georgia. They book a number of southern boogie acts such as Molly Hatchett, but Ian has convinced them that the future of the business is the so-called English new wave. Squeeze are already there, playing small clubs, and by the end of the year we shall be there too. It is an unorthodox plan: the American record company has no interest in supporting us; we’ll have to do it on a shoestring, surviving on whatever gig fees we can muster, and I imagine expenses will more than account for any money we do make. But to tour America, regardless of the circumstances, is a dream for me and close to the myth that had informed my life since the Beatles’ triumph in the sixties. Just to go there and play would be enough. In the meantime I have to make some money.

    I had never trained as an actor, or had any desire to be one. I’d never even been in a school play, but I will be cast in small parts in three movies by the late summer of 1978, and I am intrigued enough by this unexpected development to enjoy the experience.

The first would be
The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle
, with the Sex Pistols. Pippa Markham had convinced me to meet the director, Julian Temple, who casts me as a member of a gay rock band called the Blow Waves who attempt to kidnap Paul Cook, the Pistols’ drummer. It is not a great cinematic moment, and as it happens, thankfully, the scene will be cut from the movie. I was grateful, however, for the 125 quid at the end of the day.

The second movie,
Radio On
, is more interesting. The director,
Time Out
critic Chris Petit, asks me to play a garage attendant obsessed with the tragic death of Eddie Cochran. My character works in a garage near to where the legendary American rock-and-roller was killed in a car crash on the way back to London after a gig in Bristol. I will sing “Three Steps to Heaven” in the movie while playing an old Gretsch guitar like Cochran’s and improvise a scene with the leading actor, David Beam.
Radio On
was produced by Wim Wenders and was well received by the art house critics but the public stayed away in droves.

Years later I will walk past Hampstead’s Everyman Theatre to see that there is a midnight screening
of Radio On
. Trudie’s never seen it, so I invite her for a night at the pictures. She used to go out with Peter O’Toole, who had once taken her to the same theater when there was a late-night screening of
Lawrence of Arabia
. Indulgent of such vanities, she graciously agrees to accompany me, while I point out that it’s not an Oscar-winning epic we are about to see, but a funky little road movie shot in black-and-white on a shoestring budget from the arts council. We arrive about five minutes into the movie to find the theater empty apart from two other people sitting at opposite edges of the empty rows.

“It’s a cult film,” I offer lamely.

“Clearly,” she says as we opt for a couple of seats near the front.

We follow the film’s tortured plot from a murder in London, a
noir drive through England’s shires with a couple of songs from me and Ian Dury thrown in as some kind of light relief from the rather central European gloom that pervades the film. This is no Ealing comedy.

At the end of the credits we turn to leave when I notice the other two members of the audience are pulling up the collars of their coats and turning their heads toward the wall as they hurry somewhat suspiciously toward the exit. From the shapes of their heads, their shifty gait, and the apparent guilt of their body language I have the distinct impression I know these characters.

“Chris?”

The man’s head ducks farther into his collar. Then I fix the other quarry.

“David?”

The game is up.

“Hello, Sting,” they reply in unison, resigned to the comic bathos of the situation. The only four people to turn up for the midnight screening of
Radio On
at Hampstead Everyman are the director, the leading man, and one of its cameo performers and his indulgent girlfriend.

The third movie will be
Quadrophenia
.

Some months earlier, Gerry and I meet in the Ship in Wardour Street intending to see Dire Straits at the Marquee, but it’s packed and we can’t get in, so we just sit and sup. Keith Moon walks into the bar looking exactly like Robert Newton in
Treasure Island
, a wild and piratical imp of a man. If he had been wearing a three-cornered hat, brandishing a cutlass, and had a parrot on his shoulder, we would have looked out of place, not him. He buys everyone within shotgun range a drink. As Gerry and I toast his health, we wonder at the sparkling wit and mischief in his eyes, but he will be dead within
a month after a night of legendary excess, and it is I who will play the bellboy in
Quadrophenia
, a character in Pete Townshend’s song cycle loosely based on Keith.

I will turn up at the Who’s office in Wardour Street without any real expectations, or for that matter very much enthusiasm for landing a part. I’m here because Pippa asked me to be. I don’t think I have a cat in hell’s chance, but I’ll go through the motions. In the year that I’d been dabbling in commercials, I had learned that giving an impression to prospective employers that you couldn’t care less whether you got the job or not, invariably and paradoxically meant that you were more likely to be given it, than someone who seemed desperate to work. It was nothing more than a gambler’s bluff and basic chancer’s psychology, but perhaps it also had something to do with the type of character I was being asked to play. Whether insouciant, cool, or plain arrogant, I would present myself intrinsically as that character from the moment I walked in the door until the moment I left, and I wouldn’t crack.

On one occasion, when an ad company panel auditioning me hear that I’m a musician, they ask me to sing a song and try to hand me a guitar. I tell them, “Fuck off!” and saunter out of the oak-paneled office with a look of such confident disdain and nerve that they immediately call my agent to hire me. I may not be an actor, but I can perform.

Knowing from experience that you often wait for hours at such meetings, I would always take a book to read, for as well as relieving the boredom of waiting it also created an impression of disinterested calm and was also a clear signal that you weren’t into making idle conversation with the other candidates. I’m a good two-thirds of the way through
The Glass Bead Game
, by Hermann Hesse, and seemingly engrossed in its enclosed and esoteric utopian world, when the
casting director ushers me into the adjacent office. I slip the book into my jacket pocket.

There are only two people in the room, the casting lady whom I’d done an ad for a few months before and the director, Franc Roddam.

Franc is in his early thirties but looks younger. He has the air of a man exhilarated by his success, and the confidence to have replaced the plebian K in the usual diminutive of his name with the patrician and more European C. His award-winning docudrama,
Dummy
, about a mentally challenged young girl, has recently catapulted him from the staid corridors of the BBC into the heady world of the movies.

I take a seat, and the usual game begins. They size you up: the way you’re dressed, the way you hold yourself, the angles of your face in the light. I know all of this, so I remain still and tolerate their scrutiny, staring back with the faintest irony in the slight upward turn at the edge of my mouth, but it’s only the suggestion of a smile and my eyes will give nothing away.

He sees the book sticking out of my pocket.

“What are you reading?”

He speaks in the clipped and carefully modulated tones of the middle class, but I immediately recognize a subtle shade within the precise enunciation of his question. It’s only a trace of a regional accent, faint but unmistakable, an accent not identical to my own, but very close. I now know more about him than he knows about me. The game continues.

“Hesse, Hermann Hesse,” I reply, handing him the dog-eared paperback as if it were a passport. He looks at it cursorily.

“He was a great traveler,” he says, turning the book in his hand. “Walked for years in the Himalayas. Did you ever read
Siddhartha?”

“No, I haven’t. What’s it about?”

I allow the slightest hint of Newcastle to color the conversational
tone in my question. He recognizes it and immediately we know each other. We are like two spies in a foreign land, with altered names and false papers, at first circumspect and wary, but speaking in the subtly coded language of our mutual exile. Now he can reciprocate.

“Oh it’s about two wanderers on a spiritual quest for the meaning of life. Very mystical,” he answers with just enough irony to get a smile out of me. “You’re from Newcastle?”

“I’m from Wallsend,” I say, knowing that this will have a deeper, more specific resonance to someone in the know. Wallsend is a tough place, where there are no genteel enclaves. I’ve wandered far from the expectations and mores of my upbringing, and so, I suspect, has he.

He tells me about his travels through Nepal and India. We talk books and music. We pointedly do not discuss the movie, and finally shake hands without the slightest acknowledgment that there is a job at stake or a significant career decision for both of us. We have observed the rules of engagement.

I know that they’re seeing half of London for this role, but somehow I know it’s mine. Pippa calls the next day to confirm this, but I even feign disinterest with her. I’m also not sure that Frances won’t feel that I’m beginning to invade her turf. I am cautious when I give her the news. Her support of me as a musician has been unstinting, but I don’t know how she’ll feel about any more-serious attempts at acting. Pippa is her friend, her agent. The ads were one thing, but this is a major movie. When I do tell her I’ve landed the role, she is of course delighted, and so am I in my quiet way.