I waited twenty minutes. Then I couldn’t stand it any longer. “I’m taking her coat and going out looking for her. I’ll not have her freeze to death.”
We walked up the hill then went in separate directions. Nick said she was going to check in the King William IV, a gay pub. I stuck my head inside the Horse and Groom, but Melissa wasn’t in there nursing a pint. I ran toward the Heath in a panic, not knowing how I was going to find her. My green, leopard-print sneakers with the bondage straps splashed through heaps of fallen rain that seemed like so many tiny, abandoned silver shields and arrows left by a fleeing army. At least that’s how I pictured it.
I saw a figure up ahead, blurry in the rain. “Melissa? Is that you?” As I came closer, I saw that it was. “Are you mad?” I flung her coat at her, and she put it on. The rain buttered my hair flat against my head, and I wiped water from my eyes. “Oh, Melissa.” I put my hands on her face. She bent down and kissed me. I was surprised because I thought she’d be pissed off at me for coming after her. I threw my arms around her in spite of my achy shoulder. I licked the rain off her neck, and we kissed. Her mouth was warm, but she shivered. Her bright-red hooded sweatshirt that said “Joe Strummer 1952–2002” and had a picture of Joe Strummer in black against a black star was soaked completely through. “Come home,” I said. And I sang to her from the song “Morning Rain” by the Mancunian band I Am Kloot, “‘I’m the morning rain. / It’s me again, / I won’t go away.’”
TRACK 53 I’m Partial to Your Abracadabra
I saw online that the Angelic Upstarts had just played a historic gig in South Shields and wondered if there was any way I could get Melissa to see them. I emailed the band through their website and explained I had a friend who loved their music but wouldn’t go to any of their shows because of their use of a pig’s head to represent police brutality. Gaz Stoker, the bass player who also played with Red London and Red Alert, wrote back to me. He explained that Mensi, the vocalist, got the pig’s head at an abattoir and that they didn’t have a pig slaughtered especially for them. It was strictly for sending an anti-police message. But I knew Melissa couldn’t tolerate seeing them kick a pig’s head about like it was a football.
“That was a lovely thought anyway,” Melissa said when I told her. We were downstairs listening to CDs. Melissa had introduced me to the Argies, an Argentinian punk band she loved who’d been around for over twenty years and were like the Clash in Spanish, and two Clash-influenced Japanese punk bands called the Star Club and the Strummers.
Now I put on the official live Clash release From Here to Eternity. “You know this part?” I played “City of the Dead,” waiting while Joe and Mick harmonized at the end of the first verse, “and I wished I could be like you / Soho river drinking me down.” “I always sing it as, ‘and I went down to be like you,’” I said. “I sang it to the people in my head to promise them I’d always be there. That I’d never let them down. I guess I’m singin’ it to you.”
My favorite version of “City of the Dead” was from the Agora in Cleveland, Ohio, on February 14, 1979. It had the best harmonies and the most expansive lead guitar by Mick Jones. I got it off a bloke flogging cassettes on the side of the road between the Camden Town tube and Camden Lock in 1980. I bought a bunch of Clash, Jam, and Pretenders tapes from him. He let me listen to the quality on his Walkman. That’s how we did it then, before CDs and the Internet. Melissa had a copy of the same concert, with slightly better audio, from an online Clash site.
Melissa had gone out to the shops when Nick came in. Because Melissa had been honest with her about the rape, I decided I would tell Nick the truth about what had brought me to London in the first place. We sat on her bed.
“So that’s why you followed me that night,” Nick said after I’d told her how I thought I’d recognized her as one of my voices. “And thank God you did.”
“I needed to find out who you were,” I said. “I wanted to know you. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Mind? You probably saved my life that night. And it did feel like divine fucking providence when you suddenly appeared on that shite lit’le street sputtering inaccurate British idioms,” Nick laughed.
“You remember that?”
“I thought you were daft,” Nick gave me a playful shove, “fannying about, falling over that motor.” We both started giggling, and I shoved her back. “I thought to meself, oh no, this daft cunt is gonna get us both killed. You daft, silly plank.” Nick grabbed me and shook me affectionately. Then she threw her arms around me as I dissolved in paroxysms of laughter.
When Melissa returned, I was sitting at the computer downloading Oasis concerts. Nick had gone out clubbing with some mates, but I wanted an early night. Melissa came up behind me and put her hands on my shoulders. “Oh my God,” she said, leaning her head down next to mine and peering at the computer screen, “Oasis? And bloody hell, what’s this? Pictures of Oasis? You’re saving Oasis bloody pictures on my hard drive?”
“I can’t help it,” I said. “I love them.”
“You love them?”
“I love Liam and Noel.”
Melissa looked over my shoulder at the Oasis website I was on, and read a quotation from Liam Gallagher out loud. “‘My songs are the best fucking songs in the world—I write the best fucking songs in the world.’ Lovely.”
“I know they’re arrogant bastards, but they play and sing so sweet.”
I played her “Better Man,” “Born on a Different Cloud” and “Stop Crying Your Heart Out” from a favorite concert in Finsbury Park, July 7, 2002 with brilliant sound quality. And I played her the electric version of “Don’t Go Away” from a 1997 concert in Manchester, even though that song is a rip-off of the Real People song “Feel the Pain.” I played her “Slide Away,” “Morning Glory,” “Rockin’ Chair” and “I Hope, I Think, I Know.”
“Influenced by the Beatles much?” Melissa asked.
“Can you think of anyone better?” I played her a stinging live version of “D’you Know What I Mean?” The lyrics, “All my people right here, right now,” had always made me think of the people in my head. My people. I put on an early mix of “Better Man,” following that with covers of the Jam’s “Carnation” and the Who’s “My Generation.” Then I played a song Noel sang that always moved me, “Shout It Out.” Finally I put on the song that had made me start listening to Oasis in the first place, a bootleg version of Noel Gallagher singing “Live Forever” by himself with an acoustic guitar.
Melissa sighed. “It’s beautiful. I can’t deny it.”
I stood up and put my arms around her waist. “Remember that night we watched the horror video and I annoyed you by asking if you were sleeping with Martin?”
“Me? Annoyed? I don’t get annoyed,” Melissa laughed.
“I was lying next to you, and in my head I heard Liam singing ‘Songbird.’ The lines ‘A man can never dream these kind of things / especially when she came and spread her wings’ really got to me. I thought of the magnitude of the gift getting to be with you would be, and I just hoped he appreciated you.”
“That’s so sweet.” Melissa touched my face. “I’m sorry I made it hard for you.”
I rocked Melissa in my arms and put my head on her shoulder. “Well, all I was asking you to do was change your entire life.”
We listened to “Live Forever” again. During the last chorus, instead of singing “Maybe you’re the same as me, / we see things they’ll never see,” Noel sang, “Maybe you’re the same as me, / you take two sugars in your tea, / you and I are gonna live forever.”
And Melissa shouted, “Maybe you’re the same as me, you take six sugars in your tea!”
TRACK 54 When Angels Die
The soreness in my shoulder had dwindled to a dull ache, and I was playing guitar again. I dipped the large headstock of my Super-Sonic, swinging it around as I played “Working for the Jihad.” I w
as using the Super-Sonic as my backup guitar and had a custom pickguard made for it out of the same pattern as the Fender pink-paisley guitars. The design was bright pink and green on a silver-sparkle background. When I put it on my guitar, it looked psychedelic and overwhelmingly glorious.
“I’m glad to see you playing again. I missed that.” Melissa was curled up on the settee reading a medical journal.
Putting down my guitar, I signed onto eBay to relax and scrolled through photos of blue, solid-body electric guitars. I had an obsession with them and felt I could be trusted just to look. But I accidentally fell in love with a Lake Placid blue “Partscaster” Strat, a Mexican Standard Strat body with a vibrant finish, tortoiseshell pickguard, black pickup covers, black control knobs, Protone rosewood neck from Korea, no wear on the frets, individual tuners and pickups from a left-handed guitar. Instinctively I knew it was meant for me, so my immediate impulse was to buy it. But I didn’t have enough money.
Melissa, finished with her article, stood behind me. She slid her reading glasses down her nose and peered over the top of them at the computer. “That’s lovely.”
I bid what I could afford, but my bid was rejected as being too low.
Nick came by around teatime to tell me I had to stop waiting for a band to come along. She put an acoustic guitar in my hands and said, “Think of yourself as The Indigo Girl.”
I rehearsed my songs on the acoustic guitar and figured out ways to sing them solo that still incorporated some of my harmonic ideas. At the first pub I played in, the audience consisted of two white women in their fifties with enormous, bleached-blond hair. They wore tiny black dresses and go-go boots. Once I pulled out the chair and sat down with my guitar in my lap, I felt okay. I adjusted one microphone for my guitar and one for my vocals. I liked the way my guitar and voice came out sounding big. I hadn’t let Melissa accompany me because I was too nervous, but Nick stood at the back of the pub, nodding her head in approval while I played. It felt different from busking, more on purpose, more intense.
About two weeks later, a box addressed to Melissa arrived. When she came home she said, “Open it. It’s for you.”
“For me?” I hopped up and down. There was another more slender box inside the first one, and it had the Fender logo on it. I pulled out a black Fender gig bag. “Oh my God,” I said.
“Go on,” Melissa said, smiling at me.
I unzipped the bag, and inside was my guitar in totally riveting, almost shocking, blue.
Melissa said, “It’s bloody gorgeous.”
“But how?” I picked up the guitar and held it in my lap. The smooth body curved into me just right.
“I knew how much you wanted that guitar. So I bought it for you.”
“How much?”
“One hundred and twenty-five pounds.”
“That’s good. But—”
“Because I wanted to.” Melissa put her arms around me and kissed the top of my head. “And because I could.”
The neck was fast and perfect for my hands. “Playing a guitar with a great neck is like touching a beautiful woman,” I said. “This plays better than those Strats that cost a bomb.” And that night, I moved all three electric guitars, the Gibson SG, Super-Sonic, and Partscaster, into the bedroom.
At my second gig, I played in a pub to one person with his back to me playing darts. Finally I coaxed Nick, who had a Mick-Jones-like singing voice, into learning the harmonies to my songs. I taught her the rest of the bass lines she didn’t know, and she picked them up quickly. “Shite, you’re a natural,” I praised her. She developed her own melodic, Pete-Farndon-early-Pretenders-esque bass style.
We started performing songs together on both acoustic and electric guitar. It was reassuring to look over at Nick, her shaggy dark hair in her face, while I played. She swung the cream-colored bass around and paced the stage in her red-and-black T-shirt that said, “Anyone Can Be a Sex Pistol but You’re All Too Fucking Lazy.” I amped in the sampler for the beats, reminding myself that Echo and the Bunnymen had started out with a drum machine and Ann and Nancy Wilson had used one on their solo tour.
I loved doing my old song “Automatic Rifle Dance” with her. I’d written a melodic, beautiful bass line for it and a wild electric-guitar lead. And I wallowed in the harmonies when Nick was singing with me.
Get ready get ready get ready get ready
get ready see you in paradise
I’ve found everyone but Abu Nidal
Hamas, Hezbollah, the IRA
Loyalist Paramilitary, USA
when there’s a bomb in Portadown
get out of town
when bricks fly thick through the Belfast sky
hug the ground.
We put up ads for a drummer in music shops and live-music venues. Sometimes we played under different names, like Sudanese Pharmacy, Baghdad Triage, It’s Raining Bastards, the Water Boarders, Hen and Radio Teeth. We had as much fun coming up with band names as we did writing lyrics together. It was heaven playing music with my best mate.
“We’re in a band,” I said to Nick. “That’s the same as being married.”
Nick smiled. “But not in a heterosexual way.”
“No, of course not. Don’t take anything I say heterosexually.”
“And Melissa won’t mind?”
“No,” I said. “We have an open relationship that includes you.”
After one of our sparsely attended pub gigs, a woman approached us as we were packing up our gear and asked if we needed a drummer. Nick was rolling up the guitar and bass cords while I was unplugging my effects pedals and putting them in a case. I looked up and Nick walked over. The woman looked about twenty-five, with black curls bleached to a burnt orange and dyed purple and a pierced nose.
“I’m Adele.” She shook our hands soberly. “I saw your advert a while back and decided to check you out.”
I pulled the black-and-white ACT UP bandana out of my back pocket and wiped my sweaty hair.
“I like your songs. Kind of feminist, yeah? Political lyrics. I’m into that. Poly Styrene is kind of my muse, like,” Adele named the front-woman for X-Ray Spex. “She’s kind of my archetype, you know. The archetypal feminist punk. She’s also of mixed race. Like me. Somali and British.”
“I don’t know what your sexuality is, right?” Nick said. “But we’re a lesbian band. Do you have a problem with that?”
“I’m bisexual.” Adele had smooth, dark skin and high cheekbones. “I don’t care what you do in bed. Are you two—?” she gestured, asking if we were a couple, and Nick shook her head. “As long as personal drama stays at a minimum in the band, I honestly don’t give a fuck.”
Adele lived in Brixton but kept her drum kit at her mum’s house in Islington because she didn’t have room for it in her one-room flat. We arranged for Adele to bring over her snare drum and hi-hat cymbals to Melissa’s flat the following day just to give us a taste of what she could do.
“If we play anywhere that doesn’t have a PA system and have to bring our own amps, we’re fucked,” Nick said above the noise of the tube train as we rode home. “Your Vox amp alone will barely fit in Melissa’s car. The instruments won’t fit at all with us in it. We’ll have to hire a van.”
By the time we reached the flat, Melissa was asleep. I knew she had an early start the next morning, so Nick and I took our tea and biscuits into her room. We sat up on Nick’s bed half the night talking about our show, speculating about Adele and working on some song ideas. I ended up falling asleep right there beside her.
In the afternoon, Nick and I waited for Adele to come, listening to a southern California punk band called the Scarred because Nick liked the female drummer. Adele showed up in her mum’s car with her drum and cymbals. She put a silencer on her snare and a mute on her hi-hat so she wouldn’t make too much noise.
We were playing in the
sitting room, me on acoustic guitar and Nick with the bass turned down low. Adele smacked her snare drum and cymbals, banging out the beat to a new song I’d just written and wanted to try out called “Pour.”
“It’s a top fucking tune, that,” Nick said when we finished. “Is it about Melissa?”
Just then Meilssa walked in and I blushed. I kissed Melissa and introduced her to Adele. Melissa went into the kitchen to get something to eat. She sat and listened to us for a while then went upstairs.
Adele was a good drummer and we quickly decided to take her on. She had the finesse of Chad Channing from the first Nirvana album. I’d always loved that album best. She could hit hard but was also delicate, and I thought she’d work well with my music. She was versatile and could play in different styles. We made plans to meet up in Islington later that week. Adele said we could practice temporarily in her mum’s garage until we sorted out a proper place to rehearse.
When it got a bit late and I thought Melissa might be trying to sleep, we ended up drinking multiple cups of tea and discussing how to get a rehearsal space where we could play at full volume with the entire drum kit. Adele used to have a place in Camden Town with her old band, Menstrual Palace. Just like the Clash, I thought. This is a dream. This is my dream.
“You coming, mate?” Nick called from the door. She and Adele were going to continue their discussion of favorite tunes and rehearsal opportunities down the pub.
“Naw, you go on, mate. I’m going to spend some time with Melissa.”
“Alright, luv. Be back later.” She helped Adele carry her gear out to the car.
I washed up, brushed my teeth, and went into the bedroom. Melissa was reading Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. I thought she’d like it because of the way Gertrude Stein talks about all the painters she knew, like Picasso and Matisse, and their paintings. I got in next to her.
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