Brothers of the Head (7 page)

The other vital element in that emotional equation was Paul Day, our songwriter. He and Laura were deeply involved with each other. As can be seen from the lyrics.

Day was an undersized youth who grew up in a Northern town and was drumming with various groups by the age of fifteen. By the time he joined Gibraltar as drummer/guitarist, he had had songs published. He became chief songwriter for the Bang-Bang, and played guitar with them.

On and off-stage Day presented great contrasts. Off-stage, it was difficult to get a word out of him; he would slink by without speaking if he could. Get him on the platform and a different persona took over. He then became a great extrovert personality; his inspired performances were highly regarded. To my personal regret, he has since left our organization and gone solo. The last I heard of him, he was working in the southern United States.

To my mind, Day's silences reflected an interior dilemma. He came from a broken home and had been wounded in the process. This led him to regard the Howe twins with sympathy from the start. Whereas they suffered from ostracism by the other members of the group.

I would like to clear Nick Sidney's name. He's a nice man and I could not do without him. But the Bang-Bang were very difficult and it was hardly surprising that they got him down at times.

The twins grew friendly with Paul Day. A strong bond formed between them. Day's songs reflect increasingly the way in which their tormented inner feelings awoke a response in his own mind.

It was noticeable that Day resorted to sci-fi imagery to express the division he and the Howe twins experienced between themselves and ‘ordinary' life. A fairly early song, ‘Year By Year the Evil Gains', appropriates the title of an actual SF story:
²

City against city, town against town,

Song against silences,

My body against my brains

As the entropic suns sail down –

Year by year the evil gains.

Later, sci-fi imagery helps express an attractive sense of distance, as in the immediately popular ‘How's the Weather in Your World', which has now become something of a standard:

Our heads are together on the pillow –

How's the weather in your world?

The same year yielded ‘In the Midst of Life', where the same sense of a tranquil alienation is conveyed:

And when you turn to me

Silence falls into a green darkness

And the light devours

Cities, skies, your eyes.

Less successful was ‘On Tomorrow's Avenues', where the lyricism again conveys alienation, and the too-determinedly surrealist ‘The Thunder of Daffodils Underfoot'. There is also ‘Anyone's World', where the use of the unexpected number ‘four' points to some actual experience; had the subject matter of the lyrics been stolen out of psychoanalytic textbooks, as one critic unkindly suggested,
³
we should expect the number to be two or three or even seven:

In anyone's world
     
Four is the most

Time's under glass
     
People are mirrors

The idea that we can at best hope to experience no more than four people or character types, however numerous our acquaintances, is interesting. But it may be that the lyric is talking more directly of a small world containing only Tom, Barry, Paul Day, and – who was the fourth member? No doubt the fourth member was Laura Ashworth. The ambiguity in this song may not be deliberate, but Day was soon employing such devices with intent. Even the driving song, ‘Valley of the Chateau', conceals a pun (The Valley of the Shadow of Death) made the more sinister by its being unstated – though pointed to by the rhyme-scheme.

Valley of the Chateau

Valley of the Chateau

Valley of the Sacred Chateau –

Where none of us can take a breath

The mood of the earlier songs is generally that of a child's fairy story. Where there is a menace, the central character is immune to it through his innocence. ‘Two-Way Romeo' is an obvious exception to this rule, but that song was commissioned and written before Day had met the Howe twins. It is only a concoction. The recipe was mine.

We see Day being drawn gradually into a unique relationship with the twins and the girl, and learning to face it through his lyrics. He finds it threatening, as in ‘Valley of the Chateau', and ‘Probability A'. Sometimes its grotesquery can be expressed as comedy, as in the ‘Serenade from a Cerise Satellite', with its repeated line

One girl
     
three loves
     
fifteen arms

With the rocketing success of the Bang-Bang, the sexual imagery of their songs became much more open, for instance in ‘Year of the Quiet Lips':

smiling without speaking

perfect giving perfect taking

healing, feeling, sealing, mutely appealing

haven for all comers stealing

quiet sips my summer year is here

year of the quiet lips

Patently, it is no dumb girl being addressed. The driving vigour that marked Day's performance on-stage becomes linked in the lyrics with a new outspokenness. Although the title ‘Girl Outside the City' suggests isolation, both words and music speak of confidence:

The girl outside the city

Let it all flow by

Let it all flow by

She's a part of me

The typhoon's eye

The typhoon's eye

The air in the airport

As we up and leave the city

For the places where the pulse beats stronger

Where the loving's madder where the nights are longer

Where she's so much gladder

Let it all flow by

Let it all flow by

Even in the period of the true love-songs, a note of reproach often sounds. Or it does on paper. What Day wrote tenderly, was belted out with contradictory ferocity. The performance gives us their version of the complex love affair.

Oh you are all things to me

Lover and vampire

You keep three lovers happy

A phoenix of their fire

In this world I'm love's tourist

Another head is dreaming of your beauty

Our love is a forest

(from ‘Our Love is a Forest')

The line repeated in each verse, ‘You keep three lovers happy', may seem like praise the first time; in repetition, it becomes more of a reproach. Even the freer moral code of our time has done nothing to extinguish jealousy.

The phraseology of the songs becomes more complex, the ideas move away from the traditional enclosed world of calf-love. No doubt it was Laura, with her more educated background and extensive reading, who influenced Day's vocabulary and the terms in which he celebrated her. This is most noticeable in the later songs, and in particular in the best song he ever wrote, his one song which mentions Laura by name, ‘I was Never Deaf or Blind to her Music' (see Appendix), with such lovely lines as ‘Time was, her alchemy was all upon me'.

This magical song, which one critic referred to as ‘The Rhapsody in Blue of the Eighties', was included in the Bang-Bang's best record, ‘Big Lover'. Here the Bang-Bang set aside what many regard as their natural coarseness, particularly in the three sci-fi tracks which are also included in the Appendix to this volume, ‘Big Lover', ‘Star-Time', and ‘Bacterial Action'. These are by no means love songs. But they show Day rejoicing in the new perspectives which Laura brought to his life, and the new power of expression he found for them.

After this peak, there seems to be a recession. The structure of the love affair was probably too unstable to last for long. ‘The Vocabulary of Touch' has certain ingenuity, but the musical form reaches back to the conventions of the thirties for its closing lines:

Wetness and heat and a tired kiss

All verbs expended

Your breasts     your shoulders     your eyelids closing

The sentence ended

Trouble developed on the Scandinavian tour. The Bang-Bang came to blows with Paul Day on stage. And as soon as they arrived back in England, Laura disappeared. My belief is that her Church of England upbringing had instilled strong feelings of guilt in her and she could endure the
ménage à quatre
no longer.

On that unhappy tour, the Bang-Bang performed live, for the first and last time, ‘Passport to Another Planet', which I regard as Paul Day's farewell to Laura. A tired nostalgia is aimed at and achieved, despite ugly idiom in the first verse; in the last verse, isolation is again closing in on the singer.

You in your torn peace sleeping

Come from a southern town

Let me wake you with a cup of coffee

Parting's going to bring us down

Now with your passport to another planet

You take your sex and sunlight away

Life's going to be mere imitation

Plastic lovers     cardboard day

You dress that burning body

And for the last time cling

Already there's a glass case closing over

The days when we had everything

There was a glass cage closing over the age of the Bang-Bang. They were a phenomenon that came and went in under three years. The Howe twins were finished with the disappearance of Laura. Barry had some kind of emotional breakdown which I am convinced was nothing to do with overuse of the stun gun. I engaged a special nurse to look after them at Humbleden, as well as persuading their elder sister, Roberta Howe, to be with them for some weeks. Paul Day patched up his quarrel with them and then announced to me that he was leaving to strike out on his own in the States.

The Bang-Bang's three-year contract with Bedderwick Walker expired; neither side sought to renew. It is always better to be a coward and live to fight another day. The life of novelty groups is always limited. The twins returned to Norfolk and the obscurity from which they came. When all the charges of exploitation are made, I remain convinced that I was their benefactor. And the public heard a lot of good pop music.

Which is what I'm in business for.

These accounts have covered the period of my brothers' lives during which they were world-famous. Much remains to be said concerning the later period of their obscurity. I am the one person with enough knowledge to fill in those missing months.

It was terrible dealing with them at Humbleden. When I arrived, poor Barry was exhausted enough to be bedridden, much to the frustration of Tom, who found himself tethered in one spot. I calmed him as best I could. He cried again, as he had many times, for a surgeon to set him free from his brother, although he knew that there was no operation which could spare the lives of both him and his brother.

‘Then set me free and let me live! I'm the normal one!' cried Tom.

I soothed them as I so often had before. Paul Day, the guitarist, a nice quiet boy, spent a lot of time with them, mostly playing cards.

The day after Tom's outburst, Barry had a similar fit of anger, calling his brother a murderer and betrayer and I know not what else besides. They had a terrible fight, each trying to tear apart from the other, and falling off the bed in their struggles. Paul called for Nick Sidney, who applied his gun to Barry's head. It was the first time I had seen this done, but at least it brought peace.

‘You'd better take us back home, Rob,' Tom said. ‘We're all finished up as far as any cooperation goes. All I want's to be quiet and peaceful by the sea.'

When Barry came to, he seemed almost in a stupor. He said nothing. He staggered over to their wash-basin and Tom neither helped nor hindered, like he was pretending he wasn't there. I looked on Barry washing himself as of old, when he and Tom were children, and I noticed how he still took care to wash the silent face beside his. Whereas he would never touch any part of his brother's body. (That I know, and state it here to settle certain rumours that have circulated; other lies I will also settle in due course.)

Next day, we left Humbleden. Funnily enough, when Nick and the others came out on the steps to wave us goodbye, both Tom and Barry wept. I went with them back to L'Estrange Head. I had pleaded with father to let us move to somewhere less deserted. He refused. The time now arrived for me to feel glad that he had done so, hoping that wild nature, with the proximity of open land and sea, would have a healing influence on my brothers. Unfortunately, that was not to be the case.

I was pleased that Paul Day accompanied us on the journey home. He proved Tom and Barry's best friend, after all that had happened to them and all they had done, yet he scarcely said a dozen words all journey. To think they were world-famous yet so isolated!

Paul would not come over to the Head with us, offering as an excuse that he had to be back in Humbleden that night. I drove him to the railway station at Deepdale Norton. I got out of the car with him while my brothers remained silent inside. Paul said goodbye to them quite formally, shaking both their hands.

Nobody was about. The station might have been closed. Before he turned to buy his ticket for the train, Paul spoke to me quite urgently, in a low voice.

He said, ‘I hope they'll be up to scratch soon. Something marvellous has died … I don't know … I want to tell you that your brothers and me had a good friend in Laura. I won't make no bones about it, she was a lover to all of us, a real prize girl and absolutely unorthodox how she carried on. That's why they were all against her, Nick and all …