by Tom Cox
‘And he’s in your band?’
‘Yeah. He’s in Goat Punishment. It’s kind of his band, really. He writes the songs.’
‘You write your own songs? That’s pretty impressive.’
‘We do a few covers. There’s this song by American Hi-Fi that I really hate, but the rest of the band like it. We do “Lithium” by Nirvana, too.’
‘It’s weird that you like Nirvana, ’cos I’m – what? – thirteen years older than you, and most of the people I knew when I was growing up liked them too. I saw them play once, you know.’
‘No way. Really?’
‘Mmm. I could never really understand what all the fuss was about, to be honest. Although it was always a good excuse to push people over when they played them at my local student night.’
‘I don’t know. They’re just really . . .’
‘I always preferred Smashing Pumpkins. But I hate them now.’
‘. . . intense.’
‘So have you done any gigs yet?’
‘Sort of, but only at school. There’s this thing at school they have every month, which was called Folk Night. Last time it was really funny, ’cos there was all this mulled wine, for all the parents who had come to watch, and everyone kept stealing it, and all the glasses were shaking and stuff on the table ’cos we were playing so loud when we did “Lithium”, even though it was unplugged.’
‘You said it was called Folk Night.’
‘Yeah, they changed it ’cos we complained.’
‘You don’t like folk?’
‘Well, kind of, but it’s not that. It’s just not really what anyone plays.’
‘So what is the night called now?’
‘Axe Demons.’
TIGHTS
‘NOW. JUST A warning. He’s going to be coming around that corner in a minute, and he’s going to be dressed slightly strangely.’
‘Like, how? What do you mean, “strangely”?’
‘Well, he’s going to be wearing purple tights, for a start.’
‘What, just purple tights?’
‘Well, no. I imagine he’ll have a kilt on as well, or an extremely long cape. Maybe a broadsword, too.’
‘But how do you know his tights will be purple?’
‘He just told me on the phone. That’s what he said: “I’ll be the one in the purple tights.”’
‘And what did you say?’
‘I said, “Er . . . cool.” What else do you say at moments like that?’
‘Here he is.’
‘You say, “Here he is”?’
‘No. I mean, I think this is him. Look – those are quite purple.’
‘Oh, right. Yeah. They are. It must be. Okay. Oh . . . Oh.’
MR ED
THERE ARE TWO important things to remember when socialising in a refined coffee house in a historic coastal town with a man kitted out authentically as a member of Robin Hood’s Merry Men. One: don’t let him get his banjo out. And two: if he waves his axe around, cut the conversation short.
For close to twenty minutes now, I’d had one eye on the ladies sitting to the left of our table in the Hastings branch of Costa Coffee, and I’m pretty sure Peter had too. Obviously these were respectable women, perhaps in their late forties, possibly called Jan and Gloria, impeccably dressed without being showy, probably with steady, long-serving jobs in the beauty department of John Lewis or Debenhams. All they wanted, you could see, was to have a quiet mocha, compare new curtains and grouse about the respective shortcomings of their daughters’ fiancés. And I had to give them credit: they were doing very well at getting on with it. But you could tell the scene to their immediate right was beginning to bother them, the little indignant explosions going off in their heads one by one: who was the bearded, grey-haired man, and why was he dressed like a Knight of the Round Table? What on earth was he doing hanging out with the younger man with the fluffy sideburns and the Fleetwood Mac t-shirt? And what relation were the two of them to the bored-looking boy with the dark clothes and the peculiar chains hanging off his trousers?
It was the axe that finally did it. In his defence, Ed wasn’t intending to do any harm by unsheathing it and holding it in the air for me and Peter to see. It wasn’t even a very big axe – about a foot and a half long, at the most. Nevertheless, he didn’t really make any attempt to disguise it. It was clearly too much for Jan and Gloria. Grabbing their coats quickly, but making sure to straighten their chairs, they headed for the door, emitting just-audible wibbling noises.
Ed didn’t even seem to notice. He was talking about tapeworm.
‘Tapeworm’ is what Ed The Troubadour calls the thugs who make his job a living nightmare – the people who verbally and physically abuse him while he busks, the people who set fire to his Reliant Robin shortly after he arrived in Hastings. But Tapeworm, for Ed, can also be a catch-all term for the disease of modern man. Occasionally, as he sat with Peter and me in Costa Coffee, he pointed to young men – dead-eyed young men, admittedly, but young men who ultimately looked fairly harmless – who were passing by the window. ‘Look,’ he muttered. ‘Tapeworm. Grrr.’
For Ed, it all came down to hair. ‘Everything was better before everyone started cutting their hair off,’ he told us. ‘People, I mean, and music. I think hair’s a very spiritual thing. Now look at them all. They all look the same. Tapeworm.’
Ed told us he hadn’t cut his hair since the late Sixties. He had the appearance of a silver lion. He looked good for his age (he was fifty-five), but said he didn’t feel it. He felt white-hot pain throbbing from his foot, meaning he could only work for two or three hours per day. He didn’t like Hastings and felt trapped: he could never make any money here, but didn’t really know where else to go.
I’d interviewed quite a few buskers in the past, and most of them had heard of Ed. There were stories galore: about him busking on Christmas Day; about disturbed residents pouring buckets of water on his head; about him threatening to put superglue in the locks of the same disturbed residents’ cars; about him trying to get folk bands to put him up for the night; about him turning up uninvited to the premier of a documentary about the life of Sam Phillips from Sun Records, only to be manhandled to the floor by bouncers, then rescued by the documentary’s subject and lavished with a front-row seat. He was a mythical figure in country, rock and roll and folk circles: a modern-day minstrel of no fixed abode who felt that he had been fleeced when, in their search for a soundtrack composer, the producers of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy had overlooked him in favour of Enya. My own experience of his music had been limited to two olde English ballads he’d played at Nashville Babylon, a regular Sunday afternoon country rock get-together in Camden. Both songs had stood distinctly apart from the warped Americana that the crowd had heard from other performers that afternoon, yet in that setting the concept of Ed had seemed almost normal (he could have been dressing the way he did ironically, or for a dare, or seriously – it didn’t matter; it was London). Now it seemed less normal. And Hastings quite clearly thought so.
I’d lied to Peter in the build-up to meeting Ed, giving him the impression that getting together with him would be an out-and-out fun thing, when only a small part of me believed it. A bigger part of me sensed that this would be one of the harshest parts of Peter’s education – a stark lesson in the downside of the rock and roll existence. Ed’s life, by all accounts, had been somewhat tragic, and rarely more so than in the last few months. In truth, I was here for two reasons: not simply on behalf of Peter, but also on behalf of Big Steve, organiser of Nashville Babylon and lead singer of the alternative country band The Arlenes, who was worried about Ed and wanted me to talk him into returning to London.
The way Ed told it, the trouble had all started towards the end of last year, when police had broken down the door of his room in the West End hostel he was staying in. Exactly why they’d broken in wasn’t quite made clear – not to Peter and me, and not to Ed by the sound of it. But Ed had been thoroughly spooked. He’d
packed his few possessions – tights, the armour that he’d bought from an antique clothing shop in Nottingham, the cloaks that he’d made for himself, some tapes, a dozen or so medieval weapons – into his Reliant Robin and taken off, with no aim other than to see where he ended up.
‘Cool!’ I enthused to Ed. ‘That’s kind of what me and Peter are doing. Just rolling along. Trying not to let the sound of our wheels drive us crazy.’
Ed appraised us silently, apparently not thinking it was cool at all. He continued the story.
‘I slept in the car for a while,’ he said. ‘You’d be surprised how comfortable those things are. Then I found a place up the road from here.’
Earlier, on the phone, he had invited us up to the ‘place up the road from here’, and I’d politely skirted the issue. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see his bedsit: I did, very much. But Ed had talked about ‘snails on the floor’ and ‘tapeworms’ living in the flat below and I was worried about Peter. Sure, I wanted to show him a heart-rending aspect of the musical existence and give him a crazy adventure, but I didn’t want to scare the living daylights out of him.
I looked across at my young companion now, wondering if I’d made the right decision. He was picking at his lip, not giving the impression that he had any living daylights to scare.
Every so often, during a break in Ed’s monologue, I would try to get Peter involved in the conversation, by (if Ed talked about choral music) interjecting with ‘Peter’s mum and dad like choral music!’, or (if Ed talked about lutes) interjecting with ‘Peter got taught how to play the lute at his school!’ This would merely result in a small pause, or, at best, a grunt from Peter and an ‘Oh’ from Ed, before Ed resumed the monologue and Peter resumed playing with the small hunk of Eccles cake that was left on his plate. I was starting to get an inkling of how stepfathers feel when they’re trying to get kids from separate marriages to acknowledge one another’s existence. Peter was either genuinely bored or doing a great job of pretending to be nonchalant about the irregular nature of the situation. Ed’s radar, meanwhile, didn’t seem to pick up Peter at all. He was too busy telling his life story. Still, you couldn’t really blame him: it was an interesting one.
Since he started busking in the late Sixties, Ed told us, he had performed in eleven different countries and 250 different cities. He announced, proudly, that buskers had been the Queen Mother’s favourite form of entertainer. ‘Some of the richest people in the world!’ he said. I assumed he was talking figuratively. In the old, good days, he explained, he could easily earn £200 for a day’s work, but now he was lucky if he made an eighth of that. ‘Nobody cares in this place,’ he lamented, gesturing towards an obese woman in a baseball cap across the road who was walking a German shepherd, as if it was all her fault. ‘My foot hurts too much to do more than three or four hours at a time. And I wouldn’t busk at night. Too dangerous here.’ He always carries his weapons with him – a sword, a bow or an axe. ‘The police have confiscated them a few times, but they’ve always had to give them back. It’s part of ancient law, y’know: a busker is allowed to be armed.’
Ed was born in North East England but moved to Memphis in the mid-Sixties, and his drawn-out vowels reflect more of the latter. His wandering spirit had taken him from a cardboard box beneath the Brooklyn Bridge in New York all the way to the Robin Hood statue in Nottingham, which used to be one of his favourite places to play. I told him I spent the first twenty years of my life in Nottingham. ‘Do you know the story from the early Nineties about the busker who split his landlord’s head open with a broadsword?’ he asked me. I said I vaguely remembered something of the sort. ‘That was me!’ he said, bristling slightly. ‘He did kung-fu on me and I whacked him one. He got forty-five stitches. I got seven months in prison.’ Ed talked a lot about violence – the winos who’d attacked him while he busked, the drunken townies who’d tried to steal his instruments – and seemed to feel that the modern city high street was no place to hang out unarmed.
The best period of his life was in Memphis, where he met Elvis’s dad (‘lovely bloke’), refinished the guitar that The King used on his ’68 Comeback Tour, and, with his band The Jesters, cut some rocking demos for Sam Phillips of Sun Records. He recalled the day that Phillips asked him to sign to the label in that vivid way people reserve for the moments that have made or ruined them.
‘I’d been told by a friend that I shouldn’t do it, that I’d be signing my life away. I was stupid. I said no, and almost got into a punch-up with him [Phillips]. Biggest mistake of my life. Everything changed that day.’ A tear came into his eye as he said it, and I thought I saw a rare flicker of emotion from Peter. It was hard to know what to say, so I offered everyone another coffee.
Earlier, before we’d settled on the coffee house as a good place to sit down, Ed had suggested we get a drink at a pub across the road from the town square, but, having entered it, he’d looked around nervously, then led us out. ‘Tapeworm,’ he’d hissed, by way of explanation. Throughout our encounter, he maintained a strange combination of paranoid energy and stoned lethargy, which seemed to fit quite well with the conflicting mixture of hippy philosophy and macho hostility that made up his worldview. The sad thing was, he talked a lot of sense, between the bitterness. It was hard to imagine a right place for Ed in modern Britain, but it quite clearly wasn’t Hastings. Had he thought about going back to London? ‘Yeah, but it’s a question of getting the money together. And where would I go?’ Would he think about playing at Nashville Babylon again? ‘I don’t know. It depends on the price. Playing for nothing – that’s just a mug’s game for me these days.’
It was a blustery day in Hastings, oppressed by a low grey sky, and Peter and I found ourselves wandering around the town centre in a kind of daze as morning turned into afternoon, like survivors of our own mini-earthquake. Peter looked shivery and underdressed, with just the flimsiest of AC/DC tour t-shirts under his big leather jacket. We had no real reason to stay here – the record shops catered for neither my love of adult-oriented rock nor Peter’s yen for obscure Norwegian blood metal, the lone guitar shop we found was closed, and the unnaturally high quota of baseball caps and ‘Everything’s A Pound!’ stores was spiritually unsettling – but something unfathomable dictated that we didn’t quite feel ready to leave. As we’d watched Ed limp off up the street towards his snail-infested flat, cape flapping in the wind, we’d seen two teenage boys gesticulate and shout towards him from an adjacent street. The boys were roughly Peter’s age, and their comments – not quite loud enough for Ed or us to hear, but loud enough to convince the teenagers, in their minuscule minds, that they were doing something extremely brave – almost certainly didn’t relate to what a stylish fellow our busking friend was. It suddenly occurred to me that Ed might not have been wholly comfortable in Peter’s presence. Teenagers were probably the bane of his existence. I wondered about Peter, and how he would have behaved towards Ed on his own, or with his friends.
‘Were you unsettled by him?’ I enquired, as we strolled along the seafront.
‘Neh,’ said Peter. ‘Not really. I was a bit worried when he got the axe out. But that was sort of cool as well.’
‘But his stories must have made you a bit sad?’
‘Yeah, sort of. I dunno. But I thought he might have been making some stuff up. Like the women.’ Ed had talked about ‘girls’ a lot – how their quality differed from town to town – in the manner that you might expect of someone a third of his age. ‘He seemed to think he could pull anyone, which was weird, with him being so old and dressing like that. And the knife fights and that – I wasn’t sure if they were true. And some of the bad stuff – he seemed to have, like, brought it upon himself. I mean, it was obvious he should have signed to that record label.’
‘Yeah, but people were kind of naïve in the Sixties. They had lots of silly ideas about The Man, and sticking it to him. Ed was probably a bit like everyone else: he didn’t want to sell his soul to the devil. But while ever
yone else just pretended, Ed actually followed the whole thing through. And look where it left him.’
‘Yeah. Fighting Tapeworm.’
‘You didn’t fancy going to his flat then?’
‘Neh.’
To me, Ed was properly three-dimensional: hyper-real. Half of me wanted to drive him back to London, offer him a bed for the night and put out his records for him. The other half was slightly frightened of him. For days, even weeks after I met him, he was there, at the edge of my conscience. I wanted to write a book about him, a film. Yet I already felt guilty for exploiting him by using him as part of Peter’s education.
What I couldn’t quite gauge was how real he was to Peter. How would he describe Ed to his friends? As a mad old guy who thought he was Robin Hood, or as a fascinating relic? Would he even mention him to them? When he got back to his natural environment, would he see Ed in the same way as the fourteen-year-old me had seen Daft George, the man who had minced up and down the lane where my gran lived, reciting poetry while dressed in a kaftan and a hard hat? In other words: in a small-minded way which ignored the baggage of personal history? It was hard to tell.
Back in the car, as we trundled along the coast road behind what seemed like every one of South East England’s most wheezing, sluggish HGVs, Peter slipped into one of his stoical phases. That is to say, one of his even-more-stoic-than-normal phases. I liked to think he was chewing the morning’s experience over, adding it to his psychological armour. On the other hand, I worried that I’d done the wrong thing, let him see too much too early in his apprenticeship. During the journey down to Hastings, I’d felt we’d been finally getting to know each other, talking almost constantly – about his karate classes, about rock stars, about soft drinks, about Goat Punishment – but now we were silent. Earlier, we’d alternated between the boxless tapes that resided permanently in my car (Styx, Aerosmith, The Pretty Things, Sly And The Family Stone) and the ones Peter had brought in his rucksack (Puddle Of Mudd, AC/DC, Slipknot), but now the radio seemed to have somehow tuned itself to Classic FM without either of us noticing. The silence, punctured only by Peter crunching his fourth bag of McCoys in as many hours, was something cinematic and profound – pregnant with the understanding that when something was finally said, it would have to sum things up in the deepest manner imaginable. Normally, I would have broken it, but my pedagogical instinct told me it would have to be Peter’s job this time. So I waited patiently until, just as we approached Lewes, he finally turned around to speak, his face bustling with double-decker revelation.
