Goodnight Steve McQueen (5 page)

“Yeah, we rehearse at Broken Lives. Buster Bloodvessel used to rehearse there, as it goes. You know where it is, right?”

I had no idea.

“Yeah, ‘course I do. I mean, who doesn’t? See you Tuesday, then.”

“Nice one, mate, see you Tuesday.”

Vince went back to the West Ham game they’d conceded three goals to Tottenham Hotspur in the time we’d been on the phone and I spent the rest of the weekend learning all the songs off Searching For The Young Soul Rebels and desperately trying to find someone, anyone, who’d actually heard of Broken Lives.

The thing that struck me most when I first walked in was the smell. The whole place stank of damp and rot and blokes that didn’t wash and I remember a thin stream of condensation running down the back wall which was collecting in a small puddle on the carpet under the sound desk. Actually, that’s not strictly true. You couldn’t really call what was on those floors carpet. It looked like someone had been down to the local PDSA, collected up all the dead hamsters, beaten their corpses to a bloody pulp and brought back the resulting mess and flattened it out into a sort of a rug. Code Red were sitting on it. Vince was rolling a gigantic spliff.

“You must be Danny, right?”

“Yeah. You Vince?” “S right. This is Woolfy and Allen, bass and drums. I’m lead and vocals. I write all the songs.”

I looked at Woolfy and Allen. They looked hard. They were wearing exactly the same clothes as Vince: black donkey jacket, secondhand Levi’s and monkey boots, and even though it was sweatier than Big Daddy’s underpants in there, they all had woollen hats pulled down low over their eyes.

The whole of Code Red were staring at me by now, and it was becoming clear that I’d got my own outfit very wrong indeed. After lengthy consideration including a rather fetching dungaree, beret moment I’d finally gone with my favourite Saturday night ensemble: flouncy Mr. Byrite shirt, loose jeans held up with a red nylon soul-boy belt, and a secondhand army jacket that I’d bought in Camden Market that was my absolute pride and joy. The whole outfit was nicely topped off with a pair of black Adidas trainers, white socks and a ludicrous Phil Oakey-style fringe that hung down to my chin in a vain attempt to cover my dreadful acne. It’s a wonder they didn’t decide to beat the crap out of me there and then.

“Nice haircut,” said Vince, passing me the spliff. “Very Flock of fucking Seagulls.”

And then he suggested that we all have a jam.

Not having ever jammed before I was a little unsure what I was supposed to do. Vince said I could plug into his spare amp and Woolfy said I should just join in when I felt comfortable. I soon got the hang of it. It turned out jamming just meant playing pretty much anything you wanted with no regard whatsoever for what anyone else in the room was doing. It was brutal, Allen whacking the heads of the rehearsal room drum kit like he was the bastard seed of John Bonham, Woolfy playing slap bass on his fret less five-string and Vince squeezing earsplitting feedback out of his Marshall amp and grunting unintelligibly into the battered mike.

I loved it.

Every once in a while Vince would bark some chord change or other over the PA and every fifteen minutes or so the jam would inexplicably break down and this would be the cue to spark up another spliff and hold a detailed debrief about the jam.

“Yeah, nice one, Woolfy, liked what you was doing in the middle eight there, when you was sliding up the neck and hitting the G to my D. Nice one. Rockin’.”

And then it would start all over again: everyone turning his own instrument up so that it was louder than everyone else’s, everyone lost in some private reverie of his own, and it wasn’t until Flob, the rehearsal room manager, stuck his head round the door and told us that we only had half an hour left that I realised no one had actually spoken to me for the last hour and a half.

“Does anyone fancy playing a song?” I said when it was time for the next spliff break.

“What, like a cover, you mean?” said Allen, itching his balls with his drumstick.

“Yeah, we could do something off Searching For The Young Soul Rebels. I mean, we could do “Geno” or something.”

And so we did. We played “Geno’ and “Burn It Down’ and “Love Part One’ and before we knew it Flob’s bald head was back round the door telling us it was time to sling our hook. “And don’t forget,” he said, laying down some fresh mousetraps next to the wall, ‘that’s fifty quid you lot owe me. You’re gonna have to settle up next time … I ain’t letting you in here again unless you settle your tab.”

And that was that. The moment I mentioned my Saturday job savings (66 pounds and 72, pence) I was in. The moment I agreed to cut my hair, buy a donkey jacket, wear a bobble hat (sans bobble), lend Code Red fifty quid and split the cost of rehearsals four ways, I was in.

Vince didn’t seem to care that I was only sixteen, and I didn’t care that Code Red were the worst band I’d heard in my entire life. I’d passed my first ever audition. I was over the moon.

Vince told me later I was the only one who’d bothered replying to the ad.

“Hey, Vince,” I say, reaching out for Matty’s packet of cheese and onion, ‘do you ever wonder what happened to Woolfy and Allen from Code Red?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No, don’t have to, I know what happened to them.”

“What?” I say, suddenly fascinated. “I mean, how come?”

“I thought I told you, I ran into Woolfy at The Monarch a couple of Christmases ago. He works there now, he does front-of-house sound, does a bit of touring as well.”

“Really? What about Allen?”

“Not sure. Last thing Woolfy heard he was driving a minicab somewhere over in Elephant and Castle.”

Of course he was. What else would he be doing?

By rights, Vince and I should both be driving mini cabs by now. It’s what failed musicians do. They hang up their guitars, go to work on their bum crack and hightail it to the nearest illegal cab rank that will have them. They might not have completely given up on their dreams of making it no musician completely gives up on his dreams of making it but most are savvy enough to know when it’s time to give up and call it quits.

For instance: a decade and a half of serial failure is a good time to call it quits; realising that you’re ten years older than most of the people who’d want to buy your records is a good time to call it quits; finding out that the bass player from your very first band is ferrying Special Brew drunks up and down the Old Kent Road in a clapped-out, C-reg,

champagne Vauxhall Nova is a very good time indeed, to call it quits.

Alison is right. We should have given up years ago. And if it hadn’t been for another band stealing our record deal from underneath our very noses, we probably would have.

Vince and I share a dream that dates back a long way: Christmas 1987 to be specific. It was a Friday night. Code Red had long since bitten the dust and one year and two lineup changes later we’d finally discovered what we thought was the winning formula and christened it Agent Orange.

Everything was falling into place: my acne had given up trying to eat its way through my cheeks, Vince had begun writing songs with actual choruses and, spurred on by our first positive review in the national music press, his voice had blossomed like a newly watered cactus.

We were breaking our backs in those days, humping our gear up and down the country in Vince’s white Escort van, playing in small venues to smaller crowds, but the gigs were filling up with every new one we did. We began to get ourselves a following. Out of nowhere, people began comparing us (favourably) to The Wonder Stuff, and we suddenly had managers queuing round the block to represent us.

More and more people were coming down to the shows. We were being offered bigger fees and better slots and the whole thing finally came to a head with one infamous gig at The Town and Country Club in Kentish Town.

It was packed to the rafters. The whole place was heaving with punters and publishers and record company A’n’Rs, and I remember Vince saying to me before we went on that he thought this was it, that this was going to be the one. We all did.

The band played out of its skin that night. The crowd were with us the whole way, pogoing and body-surfing and cheering us on like some kind of returning army, and I can

still remember every word from the TIME review that ran the following week. It was so gushing I was almost too embarrassed to read it. Almost.

I’ve never been able to work out exactly what went wrong. I just remember the guy from Polydor coming backstage and telling us that we were the best band he’d seen all year. The following week we heard he’d signed The Wonder Stuff.

After that it was like we were damaged goods. Everybody had been down to see us but nobody had taken the bait. Every time our manager phoned up another company or sent out another demo the response was always the same. Our moment had passed. We were yesterday’s news.

We ran into the Polydor bloke at The Camden Palace a couple of months later and he told us it had been a very close call. Fifty-fifty, he’d said. Between them and us. I’ll never know if he was telling the truth, but I sometimes think it was coming so close that ruined us. We never got over it. I remember me and Vince sitting on a burnt-out car in the middle of Wanstead Flats, pissed out of our skulls on Jack and Coke and me telling him that we had to go on, that it was just bad luck, that we’d still make it one way or another. It was our right, I said.

Twelve years on and there’s still a small part of us that believes it.

“I drove past Wanstead Flats the other day,” I say, as if this is some kind of an accomplishment.

“That’s nice for you,” says Vince, indicating that it isn’t. “What d’you want to go out there for anyway? It’s a shithole.”

The was on the way to my mum’s. I just fancied it, I suppose. Don’t you ever get the urge to go back and take a look around?”

“No, mate,” he says, getting up and heading off to buy the next round of drinks. The can’t honestly say that I do.”

Vince shares none of the nostalgia I do for the stomping

grounds of our youth. He thinks suburbia has been romanticised to death. If you watched any of those seventies retrospectives on TV you’d imagine it was a place where everyone was forever listening to Slade and riding around on Space Hoppers and where the worst thing that could possibly happen to you was burning your tongue on the mince in your Findus Crispy Pancake.

Vince remembers it differently maybe because he’s a few years older than me. He remembers the power cuts and the three-day weeks; the “Love Thy’ neighbours with their ‘tut tut’ curtains; and the boredom and the conservatism and the feeling that the worst thing you could possibly do was stand out from the crowd. And Vince did: with his punk ethics and his natty clothes and his very own novelty disease that no one (least of all him) knew how to spell.

Vince is mildly dyslexic. He had enormous difficulty learning to read, and despite the fact that he was sharper than a Wilkinson’s sword, his classmates always treated him like he was a moron. They teased the crap out of him much like they did with me and my acne and by the time everyone finally realised why he was having so much trouble with his schoolwork it was too late.

“I didn’t stand a chance,” said Vince, pulling his copy of Don’t Stand Me Down out of its pristine sleeve and slipping it on to the turntable.

“What… you mean they didn’t even leave you alone once they’d found out what you had?”

“No, it was ‘orrible. Rob Hollings stuffed me head down the bogs and flushed it and when I comes up for air he says: “I want you to remember something, Vince Parker, jus coz you is dyslexic don’t meen you ain’t still a thick cunt.”

Vince got out as soon as he could. He bought himself a guitar, grew himself a six-inch, navy blue Mohican and left school on the eve of his sixteenth birthday without a single qualification to his name.

He always claims the dyslexia isn’t the real reason they bullied him, though. I remember sitting in his bedroom just after he’d told me about it: listening to Dexy’s and dabbing my gums with cheap speed and Vince insisting that my zits weren’t the real reason they picked on me either. They picked on us because we were ambitious; because we wanted out, because we had the vaguest suspicion that we might actually be better than everyone else instead of just being different from them. Vince says the moment you dare to show ambition in a place like that they turn you into an outsider.

Strange, really. Before I met Vince I’d always supposed it was the other way round.

“Oi,” says Vince, slopping another round of drinks on to the table and shooting me a wink. “Did any of you see that programme last night?”

“Which one?”

“The one about them tsunamis, them giant tidal waves that are going to take out the whole of the east coast of America.”

“Wow,” says Matty. “When’s that, then? When is it going to happen?”

“Thursday week, they reckon, somewhere around teatime, I think it was.”

“Christ, I mean shit… God, they must be shitting themselves. Fuck. What are they going to do?”

Vince starts to laugh, a deep guttural chuckle worthy of the late, great Sid James, and then he reaches over and starts patting Matty on the back.

“Only joking, mate. Only joking. It might not happen for thousands of years yet, might not even happen at all.”

Matty looks momentarily confused.

“Oh, right, I get it, you’re having me on again, aren’t you?”

“Yes, mate, I am. I am most definitely having you on.”

Matt Starky is the baby of our group. He’s only twenty four and he’s one of the most gullible people I’ve ever met. You can convince him of anything. Vince once told him that Lemmy from Motorhead had been born a girl and for a whole year, whenever Lemmy came up in some passing conversation, Matty would shake his head and say: “Poor Lemmy, what he must have been through, and you’d never

guess, I mean, you’d never think it to look at him, would you?”

He wasn’t even that bothered when he found out we’d been winding him up. He just sort of smiled and said: “Yeah, I always thought there was something fishy about that, what with him having those moles and everything. I mean, you don’t see many women with moles like that, do you?” After that we had a hell of a job persuading him that my real name was Steve McQueen.