by Tom Cox
‘No. I probably wouldn’t.’
‘Go on then . . .’
‘Just let me think for a moment . . .’
REALLY FUNNY (REPRISE AGAIN BUT A BIT LONGER)
‘IT WAS REALLY funny. There was Raf and me, and we were standing outside class, waiting for this kid, Jeff, who was supposed to be lending Raf his homework to copy, and this girl Carly walked past and this piece of paper dropped out of her bag. Raf picked it up and it was, like, this love letter . . . No. Hold on.’
‘What?’
‘That story’s a bit shit.’
‘Sounded quite interesting to me.’
‘No. It’s, er . . . I better not tell you that. Let me think of another. Hold on a moment . . .
‘Okay. I know. It was dead funny. Me, Raf and these two mates of ours, Zed and Nic, were in central London one day and we decided to ride the Circle Line all the way round for a laugh. Anyway, that got a bit boring after a while, and there was this, like, really tall building in Kensington, and Raf decided . . . No, I can’t believe I’m telling you this. It’s so stupid.’
‘No. Carry on. Please.’
‘Well, yeah, anyway, we got out at, like, Kensington High Street and Raf suddenly went under this, like, skyscraper and started looking up and shouting, “Colin, don’t do it! It’s not worth it!”, then Zed joined in and these people started to crowd round to see what’s going on – like, as if there’s this bloke going to jump off the building or something.’
‘What, in London? I didn’t think they’d have cared.’
‘No, there were, like, about twelve or twenty or something, all looking. And while me and Zed and Nic carried on shouting, Raf got his guitar out.’
‘He had his guitar with him?’
‘Yeah. I meant to say that. He’d just been to his lesson before we met him. So, anyway, he just starts, like, busking, playing this American Hi-Fi song, which I, like, hate, but it’s okay ’cos it’s so funny, and all these people suddenly start watching, and me and Zed and Nic are pissing ourselves laughing. But then Raf starts singing this other song, which is made up from the lyrics of this love letter we found.’
‘So that story you started to tell first is really part of this story?’
‘Yeah, I suppose. I shouldn’t tell you what was in the letter, but it was so funny – all these really dorky lyrics about this girl’s fluffy sweater and stuff. We kind of joined in on percussion and this woman – she was, like, really old, probably a librarian or something – said to Raf that he was going to be at the top of the charts one day.’
‘Wow. But I guess Raf’s not that bothered about being at the top of the charts, is he?’
‘Not really. Well, maybe the metal charts.’
‘And what happened next?’
‘That was kind of it. All these people sort of walked away. It was so funny, though. I dunno. I suppose it was more of a visual thing.’
‘No. It sounds like fun. I can’t believe you got away with it. Did anyone ask you who Colin was?’
‘No. They all realised we were joking pretty quickly. I suppose it was a bit of a crap story. Maybe I should have written it down, ’cos I missed a few parts out.’
‘Maybe. It sometimes helps. What about the song that Raf made up? Is that in Goat Punishment’s set now?’
‘Yeah. Kind of. We called it “Soppy Geek (The Skyscraper Song)”.’
‘Talking Heads once made an album called More Songs About Buildings And Food. Maybe Goat Punishment could make one called More Songs About Buildings And Geeks.’
‘Mmm. Er. Maybe. Who are Talking Heads?’
THE DEEP
IF YOU’RE SENTIENT and heading into Hull, it won’t be long before you hear about The Deep. Most likely, you’ll see it advertised on a car sticker, or you’ll stop at a petrol station and a compassionate cashier, clocking that you’re an out-of-towner, will nod knowingly at you and point you in its direction. If not, you’re sure to be offered a flyer for it in a restaurant or shop, or spot one of its road signs, which, from the Humber Bridge onwards, seem to dominate every roundabout and junction, overshadowing other, less significant signposts such as ‘City Centre’, ‘Railway Station’ and ‘Hospital’. Peter and I were pretty sure The Deep was something to do with fish, but beyond that we were more or less stumped.
‘Perhaps it’s the world’s biggest fish and chip shop,’ suggested Peter.
‘I suppose people do eat a lot of fish and chips up here,’ I agreed.
‘Do you think that’s a fish on the sign or a dolphin?’ asked Peter.
‘Perhaps it’s a dolphin. Maybe we can go and see dolphins and throw balls at them and stuff.’
‘No. Actually, that looks more like a fish, now I come to think of it.’
‘Mmm. But if it’s a fish and chip shop, why didn’t they draw a chip on the sign as well?’
‘Mmm. I dunno.’
‘I suppose a chip’s quite an ambiguous thing to draw. You could quite easily mistake it for, I dunno, a very small fencepost or something.’
‘Or one of those very thin pencil erasers you sometimes get.’
‘Hmm. Whatever it looked like, I’m sure it would taste better than Circulus’s chips.’
‘Yeah. Like, way.’
‘Anyway, I think people up here are more into having gravy with their chips than fish.’
‘But you couldn’t really draw gravy, could you? What would that look like?’
‘An amoeba?’
In the end, it took Jim Eldon to shed some light on the issue. ‘The Deep?’ chuckled Jim. ‘I’ll tell you what The Deep is. The Deep’s a very good place for struggling musicians to make money. Everyone knows about The Deep around here. World’s biggest submarium. A bit like an aquarium, but bigger.’
‘And, er, sub-er?’ I asked.
‘Oh, very much so. I suggest you take a trip there later today. Well worth a visit while you’re here.’
The Deep’s queues were always long, but when they got even longer than normal, the management would sometimes ask Jim to play maritime songs to entertain the punters as they gazed out towards the murky North Sea. His knowledge of local folk music was gargantuan. But local folk music wasn’t all that Jim played or studied, by a long, long way. Sometimes he’d adapt Elvis songs using just his violin. Other times he’d head down to a local pub with a group of friends and sit in a corner reinterpreting hard house and drum’n’bass – ‘y’know, what d’ya call it, bangin’ music?’ – using the popular instruments of the nineteenth century. When it came to eclecticism, he made Beck seem about as adventurous as Status Quo.
I was somewhat ashamed, heading into our encounter, about how little research I’d done on Jim. My entire basis for meeting him boiled down to the tenuous fact that many years ago I’d heard him perform an amusing, fiddle-only version of Bruce Springsteen’s air-punching rock anthem ‘Dancing In The Dark’ on Andy Kershaw’s radio show. I knew next to nothing about his background, his dress sense, his personality, or the music he’d made in the intervening decade. Instinct and experience alone – the sort of instinct and experience that tells you that middle-aged men with fiddles tend to go hand-in-hand with good anecdotes – told me that he could provide a useful chapter of Peter’s education, if not a hugely comfortable one. Sometimes it seemed that, despite everything I’d taught him, Peter’s musical parameters still stretched only as far as the space between AC/DC and Slipknot. I knew how he felt, of course: in my late teens, I’d possibly been even narrower. During the Eighties my dad had listened to Jim Eldon types – or Croaky Weirdos, as I used to think of them – and I’d done my best to refuse to acknowledge their existence. Then, when I’d finally matured enough to appreciate them, it had been too late: my dad had moved on to something even less fashionable. I wasn’t Peter’s dad – scary, sometimes, how often I had to remind myself of this – but I could see him making the same mistake. I wasn’t totally convinced it was a mistake – blocking too much out is, in a way, just as important a p
art of a music lover’s evolution as letting too much in – but I wanted to get a better, closer insight into the workings of his teenage dogma, and by extension into the workings of my teenage dogma. Plonking him in a room together with Jim seemed like a good start.
Still, I had my misgivings about the experiment. Several weeks before, when I’d first spoken to him on the telephone, Jim had seemed jumpy and suspicious, and wanted reassurance that I didn’t want a ‘straight’ interview. He spoke in a thick Yorkshire accent, paused for long periods, constructed verbal sentences more painstakingly than many people construct written ones, and explained he was worried about being ‘represented’ accurately, but calmed down slightly when I stressed the informal nature of the encounter and asked if he could play us some songs. He said he did a lot of work in schools, and seemed to like the idea, at least, of passing on his musical knowledge to a minor. But I detected an edginess in his voice and, as the Hull trip drew nearer, I began, once again, to fret on Peter’s behalf. I’d arranged this leg of our adventure back in early spring, at a time when, having only met him once, I still knew him only as Jenny’s intractable son – another tiny piece of the irritating, amorphous adolescent mass that made my outdoor life a tiny bit less wholesome. Since then, though, something unforeseen had happened: I’d grown to enjoy his company. Much as it dented my pride to admit it, I no longer had the desire to put him in the middle of awkward, hard-boiled adult conversations that would test his fourteen-year-old attention span – no matter how interested I was in the results. Moreover, I was starting to have less interest in putting me in the middle of them.
Meeting Jim marked a veritable step backwards in my personal relationship with Peter, although not, I hoped, in our working one. With the exception of our conversation with Ed The Troubadour, he’d never been quieter, never shifted more in his chair, never moved his eyes more nervously from side to side. There were moments of hardship in every great apprenticeship – Luke Skywalker being forced to hang out in a swamp with an ancient shrivelled dwarf in The Empire Strikes Back, Buffy The Vampire Slayer having to spend excessive amounts of time pondering ancient texts in a musty library with a repressed bibliophile – and this was his. I only hoped that he saw it that way as well. He should have done, since he claimed to have watched Star Wars 104 times since receiving the video for his seventh birthday.
I’d described Jim Eldon to Peter as having a ‘spiritual beard’. This was, in all honesty, pure guess-work. Face to face, he had more of a spiritual moustache. There was apparently nothing spiritual at all about the tattoos on his arms. Dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and slacks as jet black as his hair, he looked younger than his age, which he couldn’t remember exactly but knew was somewhere in the middle fifties. It was only when I looked more closely at his hair, his urgent watery eyes and the bric-a-brac in his house, that he began to remind me more of my grandparents’ generation than my parents’.
With every road seemingly steering us back towards The Deep, it had taken us a while to find his house, a mid-twentieth-century terrace surrounded by several hundred other identical mid-twentieth-century terraces. Then, almost as soon as we’d arrived and been introduced to his wife, Lynette, the phone had started to ring. Evidently, it was an important call – a local promoter wondering, at length, if Jim would like to play second on the bill to punk stalwart Reckless Eric at the Hull Adelphi. I didn’t mind; I was used to waiting around before interviews, but Peter was beginning to fiddle with his mobile phone. He might have had an unusual number of friends and an unusual number of computer gaming problems to solve, but today’s level of text-messaging was more redolent of an international crisis than a slight hitch in the early stages of Tomb Raider. Unlike me, he couldn’t even amuse himself by admiring Jim’s John Barleycorn wall hangings or flicking through his Mike Waterson albums. If he’d tattooed the words ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ on his forehead, his thought process couldn’t have been more blatant.
‘Yeah,’ Jim was saying into the mouthpiece. ‘The thing is, you see, I’m working on boats at the moment, but there’s some fellas on there I’d love to get together. This bloke Diggy. Sometimes he’ll just start to sing. This is what I’m trying to express to you.’
It was a relief to hear that Jim sounded just as apprehensive and convoluted talking to other people on the phone as he did talking to me. It was also a relief to hear he had friends called ‘Diggy’. Every minute or two, he’d mention his work on ‘boats’. What exactly did this entail? Was Jim a shipmate? A caterer? A fisherman? It occurred to me that he probably didn’t make a living exclusively from his songs, which he released autonomously via mail order. It also occurred to me that not many people making honest, organic music in the British Isles did any more. It was a depressing concept and I hoped that, somewhere between text messages, Peter was going to take it on board.
In reality, this was a fruitful period for Jim. His boat work, he explained when he came off the phone, involved entertaining the passengers of the Yorkshire Bell, a cruise ship that went back and forth between Hull and Whitby. He’d mix local, traditional numbers, like ‘Dogger Bank’ and ‘Oh What A Windy Night’, with universal favourites like ‘My Grandfather’s Clock’, along with the odd rock and roll classic. From the way he told it, he’d just get right up in the passengers’ faces, without any announcement. To demonstrate, he picked up his fiddle from the corner of the room and launched into a minimalist rendition of ‘Wooden Heart’, a folk song made famous by Elvis. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Peter flinch slightly, in the way that you might if you stumbled across someone a couple of generations above you getting naked.
‘I think music embarrasses people,’ said Jim, laying his fiddle aside. ‘I mean, look, you were embarrassed there. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with it.’
Peter flinched again.
‘I think you’re right,’ I said. ‘I was embarrassed. But I still want you to play me another song.’
Jim didn’t like to sum up his music, and had more trouble doing so than anyone I’d ever met. His sentences would usually begin with the phrase ‘The thing is,’ then express very simple things in a needlessly complicated, stumbling manner; things that, when boiled down to their true essence, probably amounted to the folk equivalent of an indie bonus. What Jim seemed reluctant to express were opinions – about the state of folk music, about the youth of today, about Hull, about why the folk community went for his interpretation of ‘Dancing In The Dark’ in such a big way. It left me, as the instigator of this bizarre get-together, facing a dilemma: encourage more conversation and make Jim feel uncomfortable, or encourage more fiddle-playing and make Peter feel uncomfortable.
Where Ed The Troubadour had been outspoken, Jim was introverted, yet there was nothing unemotional or offhand about him. He looked you square in the eye when he spoke or sang, and, despite all his fuzzy prevaricating, I got the impression he was trying to answer my questions honestly. His advice to Peter was too tangled to relate in full here, but was undoubtedly sincere, and seemed to contain an intrinsically solid message about penetrating the bullshit topping of modern music to its emotional core. At one point, during a story about an elderly Italian lady on the Yorkshire Bell who’d described one of his songs as ‘like a tarantella’, tears filled his eyes and he left the room for thirty seconds, announcing, ‘I’m sorry . . . This means so much to me. I think I’m going to blub.’ It was hard not to be overwhelmed by the pathos, and for the first time all afternoon, Peter laid his mobile phone to one side, mid-text message.
Later, after much hesitation, Jim showed us the words to ‘I’m Agency’, a song he’d written about the myriad temping jobs he’d endured. The song was essentially just a list, containing everything from fruit-picking to toilet-cleaning – very much, I noted proudly, in the vein of ‘Rick Argues’ by Rick Argues. But in the end, this gesture probably said more than anything about Jim. In more than half a decade of turning up at strangers’ houses and asking them about their musical lives
, several taboos had been snapped: I’d been shown underwear, sex toys and kinky footwear. But I’d never once been exposed to a lyric book.
The problem with Jim, from Peter’s point of view, wasn’t that he wasn’t a nice bloke. He was. The problem wasn’t that he didn’t have a sense of humour. Anyone who tried to reinterpret ‘bangin’’ drum’n’bass with a fiddle had to have some sense of the ridiculous. The problem was that when you got close to his life, there was a very adult intensity to it – an intensity speckled with humour, certainly, but a very intense, complex humour that a teenage brain might refuse to administer. Peter had described Ed The Troubadour to his mates as ‘the Hobbit bloke with the axe’, but it was doubtful Jim could be reduced to such a simple soundbite, and ‘the bloke with the dyed hair, the loud shirt, the air of hardship and the strangely hesitant and stiff way of speaking’ didn’t have the same ring to it. ‘During adolescence, children are starting to think for themselves and make their own judgements,’ I’d read the previous night in Adolescence: The Survival Guide. I got the feeling, however, that Peter wouldn’t make a judgement about Jim at all; he’d simply block the whole experience out – even the sparse, juddering rendition of ‘Jailhouse Rock’ that Jim had performed to herald our departure. Later, though – maybe many, many years later – he’d remember it. Already, a back engine room of his brain had probably fed it into its hard drive. It was, after all, a unique experience. I certainly wasn’t going to forget it in a hurry, and, as I headed back towards The Deep, I attempted to sort my emotions into some semblance of order:
1. Guilt, for asking Jim too much.
2. More guilt, for exposing Peter to too much.
3. Elation, at having fulfilled my ambition to get lost on a council estate in Hull.
4. Gratification, at having experienced a private musical performance of a downright unusual and precious nature.
5. Impatience, at not having been to The Deep yet.
