Broken Music: A Memoir (39 page)

My only worry now is that the dates of the filming run pretty close to the beginning of our forthcoming U.S. tour. Ian Copeland has by now cobbled together a string of East Coast dates by calling in favors and appealing to promoters with a taste for adventure and
sharing in the curious risk of an English band touring without a record company to support them. The club fees will cover our expenses, but no more. So, while being denied a ticker tape welcome or the keys to New York City, we will nonetheless be more than satisfied with the modest platform we’ve been given, and the rest will be up to us. But before that I have a movie to make, and the timing is going to be very tight.

The inertia of the summer will now give way to the frenzied activity of autumn and the following year, where so many of my dreams will materialize. I have been circling the periphery of this life for many months, but now I feel the whirlpool drawing me closer and closer, like an event horizon at the edge of a mysterious black hole. I am neither terrified nor repulsed by it. This is what I have been waiting for. Like a volunteer on the eve of a war, I want to be annihilated and yet somehow survive. This is a dangerous wish.

    We will leave for our tour of America at the end of October, but in the month before that,
Quadrophenia
will be filmed on location in Brighton. My character will be called Ace, and will have only a few lines in the screenplay. He is little more than a visual and, hopefully, iconic presence and has virtually no interplay with the other characters. It is a perfect role for a nonactor. I will be on the screen just long enough to make an impression, and not long enough to blow it.

My particular shooting schedule will have to be jimmied into a hectic calendar of radio and TV spots for the upcoming release of our next single, “I Can’t Stand Losing You,” and at last our album,
Outlandos D’Amour
. My birthday, in October of that year, will be particularly eventful.

I am woken at six-thirty in my hotel room in Brighton. It is still
dark outside and there isn’t enough hot water for a bird bath. I stagger along the seafront to the location, kick-started awake by a swill of acrid black coffee from a polystyrene cup. I climb into my character’s shark-skin suit, Italian loafers, and gray leather coat. After a bit of pampering in hair and makeup—my hair is now dyed platinum blond and sprayed with metallic paint to give it an otherworldly sheen—I report for duty on the set promptly at 8 o’clock. I confess to a slight anxiety about the time, as I have to be three hundred miles away in Manchester by this evening. The Police have a vitally important slot on
The Old Grey Whistle Test
, the most influential music show on television.

Today we are staging a riot between two rival gangs of “mods” and “rockers,” with the hapless Hampshire Constabulary caught between the two. (As historical background to the film’s parable of teenage alienation and disillusionment, we are reenacting a pitched battle that had taken place in the same location during the sixties.) I am sent onto the beach to practice throwing a beer crate around, so that I can use said crate to smash a shop window. As I’d been throwing metal crates around my father’s dairy for most of my childhood, I feel as if I was born to play this role.

In an hour’s time, the riot is in full swing. Police on horses are chasing us down one of the narrow side streets off the Brighton sea front, while another group of coppers on foot with police dogs and brandishing truncheons trap us from the other direction. The dogs have real teeth and some of the less professional extras are getting carried away with the action. There are real bottles and bricks flying around our heads. A hundred or so of us are now wedged in the narrow street against the prearranged shop window, where a convenient beer crate has been left for me to do my handiwork.

There is much pushing and jostling and an increasing sense of
genuine panic, as the assistant directors, shouting into electronic bullhorns, try to bring some order to the mounting chaos but only succeed in making matters worse. The whole situation seems to be dangerously out of control. Nonetheless, the cameras keep turning. Franc is watching from above, perched on a scaffold like the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, calm and inscrutable.

I know I’m now in the center of the frame. I manage to make enough space to swing the crate in a wide arc toward the window, and bingo, it smashes spectacularly into a million pieces. Girls are screaming, horses are rearing, the Alsatians are barking, and we make our escape in the ensuing mayhem, and all in one perfect take. The director shouts “Cut” and while most of us stop fighting there are still a few skirmishes continuing between the police and the non-professional extras.

By the time order has been restored they have found “a hair in the gate”—a piece of loose emulsion from the film—has ruined the take, so the whole scene has to be shot again. Resetting the window will take another hour, and more than a few extras have to seek treatment in the first-aid tent. In the meantime we shoot another scene where I drag a policeman from a charging horse and feign kicking him senseless in the middle of the street. I’m really enjoying this acting caper. There’s really nothing to it. In fact it’s not unlike a normal Saturday night in the Bigg Market in Newcastle. I give yet another smashing performance in front of the shop window, after which I’m hopelessly overpowered by three burly cops and thrown unceremoniously into the back of a waiting Black Maria.

It is already ten to four and here I am stuck between two genuinely blooded rockers and Phil Daniels, the brilliant, scrawny actor playing the lead in the film. Franc knows I have to get away but I wonder darkly if there isn’t a plot to keep me on the set. I pray that
there are no more holdups, or retakes, because I don’t have time. A record company car is waiting and ready to whisk me off to Gatwick Airport, but we have two more scenes to complete from the day’s schedule. I’ll never make it, except that the light is beginning to fail and Franc will be forced to reschedule the battle tomorrow morning.

I change out of my costume in the car as we race to the airport. The TV show is really an enormous break for us and I can’t afford to miss the plane. It starts to rain and we hit some traffic and the driver tells me anxiously that he’s not sure if we have enough petrol. I sink into the backseat, seething under my own personal black cloud, the rain drumming on the windscreen as we inch forward. We eventually get there with only seconds to spare. After pelting through the crowds in the airport I am the last person on the plane and we take off in the rain.

    It is still raining when we land in Manchester. Yet another car and driver are waiting to take me to the studio, where we have a sound check. The performance tonight is live. We have to play well. We have one hour before the show, and as I’m now rather into the otherworldly look, I go into makeup and ask if they have any silver metallic spray. The makeup girl digs a can out from one of the cupboards.

“Would you like me to do it?” she says.

“No,” I say, “I can do it myself.”

I take the can and direct it, from about six inches, at the top of my head. Nothing comes out. I try a second time. Nothing. I shake the canister, and it is clearly full. I press once more. Again nothing. I inspect the nozzle at close quarters, only an inch or two from my eyes, and like the fool I would claim my mother had never bred I press the button on the aerosol and spray the metallic paint straight
into my open eyes. It feels like two razor blades are turning in my sockets and I begin screaming like some kind of platinum Gloucester, straight out of
King Lear
.

By some fortunate miracle the eye hospital is next door to the BBC studios. They spray me with anesthetic and cheerfully tell me that I have chemical burns. Stewart lends me his sunglasses, which are enormously wide, but I can’t go on television looking as if I’m hemorrhaging from my eyeballs. From what I can see in the mirror, I look like a zombie.

We will be on the air for ten minutes, the longest ten minutes of my life so far. The outsize sunglasses keep slipping from the end of my nose, and as I have to keep both hands on the bass and sing at the same time, in order to keep the glasses from slipping to the floor I am forced to keep twitching my nose and flicking my head back as if I have an involuntary tic. I have been told subsequently that people assumed it was a stage affectation, like Elvis’s lip curl or the Beatles shaking their hair between choruses, and that the next day impressionable kids up and down the country were to be seen in oversize sunglasses, twitching and nodding their heads like mental patients with facial dementia.

After the show I catch the sleeper to Victoria and then drive to Brighton to be on the set at 7 A.M. Luckily all of the scenes that day are in long shot, so my Nosferatu eyeballs have a day to recover. A lot of the extras keep twitching at me. I’m not sure I like being famous, but I also recognize that our appearance on television has telescoped the band into the new and undiscovered land of other people’s awareness. There is a not-so-subtle change in the way strangers react around you, a distinct temperature change in any room that you walk into, which is neither friendly or necessarily hostile, just different. After a while I will come to regard this altered perception to be
as much a part of me as my eyes and ears. I will view the world, and the world will view me, through this distorting gauze, and nothing will remove it.

    My mother has now returned home with my much relieved sister, unable to make ends meet with the meager earnings she and Alan were able to scrape together. They have returned home to their respective families, unable to sustain the dream of their escape. I can only imagine the humiliation my mother must have felt, but true to form and according to my sister’s account, she does not appear at the front door as a humbled and pathetic supplicant. She is far too proud to present herself that way, regardless of how she may feel inside. Her reappearance must be grandly theatrical and will be performed with such devastating and indeed admirable chutzpah that my dad and my brother merely stand aside openmouthed and disbelieving, too dumbfounded to either celebrate or complain. She storms into the house, dressed in her best coat, as if for a wedding. She throws open the kitchen door and lets out a shriek of outrage at the dust and grime that has settled like a pall over the house in the six months she has been gone—then proceeds to scrub the place from top to bottom, refusing to take off her hat and coat until she is satisfied that it is fit again for human habitation. She is magnificent and epic in her rage, and when I hear this story I can only fall in love with her all over again. My mother, in the immortal words of Eddie Cochran, is “something else.”

    The moon hangs like a big ripe cheese over Manhattan, and I’m sitting in the back of an enormous stretch limousine that Miles and Andy and Stewart have sent to pick me up from the airport. It is the
biggest car I’ve ever seen, and at first I think that it’s a camp joke, but crossing the East River as it shimmers in the moonlight beneath the massive ferrous skeleton of the 59
^th
Street Bridge, the fabled cityscape looming behind, I’m now not so sure. My first trip to New York will be the beginning of a lifelong love affair with a city that intoxicates me like no other, a city of the unbridled imagination, of giddy, vertiginous dreams, legendary rudeness, and the vertical drama of social mobility I’m in love. The limo navigates rain-filled cavities in the road and manhole covers spew columns of white steam from some dangerous Promethean underworld just below the surface of the streets. Even the seediness of the Bowery thrills me.

From the outside, CBGB’s, the famed New York club that spawned the Velvet Underground, Television, and the Talking Heads, looks like a cheap sideshow at a carnival. It’s Friday night and the bums lounging in adjacent doorways seem unconcerned, preening themselves absently as the limo pulls up outside. I announce myself at the door, guitar case in hand, and am ushered into the gloom by an unsmiling girl wearing too much mascara and the weight of the world on her shoulders. The club is long and narrow and about a third full. A handful of people from the record company have turned up, although Miles was warned by one of the VPs in the promotion department that we would be wasting our time and not to bring us at all, as we wouldn’t get any support. Miles coolly informed them that we wouldn’t need any. So the audience is made up entirely by the indigenous population of the club and a few company stalwarts intrigued by our nerve and unusual independence. We had paid our own way on Sir Freddy Laker’s airline offering a transatlantic crossing at sixty pounds a head.

The others have been in the city a day or two, and they’re buzzing with excitement. But if they’re buzzing, I must be levitating, exhausted, delirious with jet lag and the swooning novelty of the city.
Tonight I will give an out-of-body performance, yelling like a banshee, suspended above the stage like my own ghost, and the band playing with such ferocity that no one will be left in any doubt that we aren’t here for good reason. We will play two hour-long sets that night, and between shows I will seek out some food to sustain my energy. Just along side from the club is Phoebe’s, an all-night diner, virtually empty but for a few nightbirds. Glancing through the menu I calculate I have enough dollars to buy a salad and a coffee. When the salad arrives, I can hardly believe how enormous it is. I check that I haven’t ordered for a family, as I don’t want to be embarrassed, but no, this is a normal American portion, a “chef’s” salad. The coffee is hot and nourishing, and I watch the street with the rapt attention of someone watching a musical in Cinemascope. Every yellow cab is as mythic as a Cole Porter song, the skyline seems to have been written high like a clarinet above the architecture of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” and Duke Ellington’s subway rattles below the city all the way to Brooklyn and Coney Island.