by Liza Cody
To Karen, it seems emblematic. Life and death were in cahoots, producing something dangerous and symbolic. Almost like art, Karen thinks, because she is romantic about art.
She is in no danger, herself. She’s stuck behind her keyboards, way behind the three guitarists. There’s supposed to be a baby spotlight on her, but it isn’t working so she’s doing her thing, supporting the guys, almost invisible. Which, she thinks, is just as well. She’s getting some annoying feedback and between numbers she’s fiddling with the amps. If Inner Versions were a name band there’d be engineers and roadies to do it for her. If they were a name band she wouldn’t be using knackered amps. She’d have state-of-the-art hardware and someone to carry and maintain it for her.
She looks across at Flambo. He’s the only one who’s noticed her difficulty. The others aren’t listening. Flambo’s arms are shiny wet blurs. He’s whacking out a complicated pattern but he turns his head towards her and frowns. She gives him a despairing shrug. They are playing a number called ‘More and More’. It’s eight minutes and forty-five seconds long. Karen wishes it was three minutes long and called ‘Less and Less’. Then the set would be over and she could get help with her amps. But ‘More and More’ is one of their groove numbers and the Following are on their feet. She switches from the Roland to the Korg because the Korg feeds through a different amp. It’s the wrong voice and some of the extra sounds are missing but at least she can play without her ears being blitzed.
Flambo scowls ferociously. She tries to ignore him. In a minute there’ll be a thirty-two-bar drum break which will cheer him up and give him something else to think about. She doesn’t usually look forward to drum breaks, but now she can hardly wait. Dram’s lower E string has gone flat and that’s annoying her too.
For a moment she wishes she were at home eating chocolate and watching TV. With her qualifications she could teach music at a school, never have to get up in front of a live audience. Chocolate and TV. Chocolate to rot the teeth, TV to rot the mind. No hard-edged, glittering ambition, no knife-edged teeter between success and failure. At the moment she would give up anything for the chance to sit at home in the dark and not be judged in public. At the moment she thinks ‘More And More’ is trite and repetitive. She doesn’t want to play it here, with everyone listening and watching. It doesn’t represent her. It’s just a long, loud, pointless wank.
To make matters worse, out there, somewhere behind the lights, behind the Following, is Birdie Walker. To Karen, Birdie Walker is a woman who knows. What does she know? Karen can’t say, but it has something to do with how to be a woman – something alien and dangerous, to do with glamour, collective desire, spells. She has been somewhere Karen has never been and isn’t sure she wants to go. She has been the woman every man wanted and every woman wanted to be. She has had the men every woman wanted and every man wanted to be. She was close to the music everyone wanted to make. She was close to unbelievable success and tragedy.
No unbelievable anything for me, Karen thinks dimly, standing there in a nothing club in Maidenhead, about to endure another one of Flambo’s thirty-two-bar drum solos. She wants to switch off the Korg and go home. Switch off and fuck off.
Four bars into the drum break, without even thinking about it, Karen hits a button. The LCD screen on top of the keyboard flashes ‘harpsi’, and Karen begins to play a left-hand pattern which runs counter to the drum pattern. Down low, fast, staccato, the harpsi voice sounds like someone grunting – uh-uh-uhn-erh.
Flambo is so surprised he nearly falls out of his pattern. He throws Karen a look of pure hatred. He grits his teeth, steadies and sticks with it.
The next twenty-eight bars are like a skirmish in a war. Flambo digs in behind his battery. Karen flashes in and out with guerrilla raids. She assaults his steady, heavy barrage with a light, sharp, almost Cuban cross-rhythm.
Sweat flies from Flambo’s hair. Karen looks up and sees Corky grinning at her. Corky enjoys friction. She closes her eyes and concentrates.
Afterwards, Flambo says, ‘What the fuck do you think you’re playing at? Don’t you ever do that again.’
Karen says nothing. She walks offstage and threads her way through the Following at the bar. She’s frightened and elated.
She feels as if she has blurted out the first thing to come into her head – it might be inane or obscene. She doesn’t know. One thing is certain though – there will be a very nasty row when Flambo gets her home. By the time it’s over, she may not have a home. Or a band.
She sees the A&R man waiting, so she turns and ducks into the cloakroom. Elation shrivels. She slips into an empty cubicle and locks the door. There’s wet tissue on the floor. Some sad woman has scrawled the words ‘He beats me’ on the wall. Underneath, someone even sadder has written, ‘Do you like it?’
Karen grabs a fistful of bog paper and blows her nose. She doesn’t want to cry, but there’s a hot ache behind her eyes. Life is spent hiding your feelings in tiny, smelly places.
‘Sick,’ Karen says out loud. She waits till she thinks there’s no one around and then she leaves the cubicle to wash her hands.
There is a woman leaning casually against the door; gold blonde hair, black Levis, a man’s jacket.
‘Oh shit,’ says Karen, ‘you’re Birdie.’ And instantly, she’s positive the Cuban cross-rhythm was inane. Inane is all she’s capable of tonight. Or ever.
She says, ‘Don’t worry, I’m giving it all up. I don’t want it. I can’t do it.’
Birdie says, ‘Wash your face. Don’t let them see you cry.’
Birdie says, ‘If you want to give up, by all means give up. But don’t do it from a position of weakness.’
Birdie says, ‘Don’t run away. Flounce.’
Birdie says, ‘Never flounce without lipstick.’ She adds, ‘Lipstick is a metaphor.’ And Karen starts to laugh.
She borrows Birdie’s lipstick. Birdie backcombs her hair into an aggressive, tousled mass. Karen stares into the mirror and watches her own dim image morph into lioness.
‘What’re you thinking?’ says Birdie.
‘ “Hebeatsme”,’ saysKaren.’ “Do you like it?” It’sonthebogwall.’
‘I saw,’ says Birdie. She chants, ‘He beats me. Do you like it?’ Call and response.
Karen: ‘Lipstick is a metaphor.’
Birdie: ‘I saw it on the bathroom wall.’
‘Way to go,’ says Birdie. ‘Your first bog wall song.’
‘The guys won’t do anything with lipstick in it. Except maybe “Paint lipstick on your nipples.”’
‘Banal,’ says Birdie.
‘Yeah,’ says Karen, who has never painted lipstick on her nipples. She may be in a band but suburban repression still has her chained to her parents’ garden gate.
‘OK?’ says Birdie, and they leave the cloakroom and go to the bar.
‘She fucking seduced you,’ Flambo says later. ‘I know her type: divide and conquer. You let her walk all over you.’
‘She can seduce me any day of the week,’ murmurs Sapper. ‘Is she gay?’
‘Banal,’ says Karen.
‘I dunno,’ says Dram. ‘I reckon she could swing whatever way suited her. There’s something fleurs-du-mal there.’
Karen does not go home with Flambo. For once, she takes the initiative and a taxi she can’t really afford. She disappears without explanation.
‘Watch it,’ Corky says to Flambo. ‘You could lose your grip. And your block vote.’
Corky is excited. He sniffs change on the wind like a hound scents a fox. In the politics of the band, the block vote, Flambo and Karen together, gives Flambo more power than Corky thinks he should have. If Flambo lost his grip and Karen’s vote was up for grabs, Corky might grab her.
He doesn’t exactly want her, he’s never seen her as anything but an extension of Flambo, but she has more music theory than the rest of them put together and he needs someone to shape his ideas. At the moment it’s Flambo’s ideas she’s shaping.
&
nbsp; It doesn’t occur to Corky that Karen might have ideas of her own. Rock’n’roll, after all, is a dick thing – a young dick thing – and Corky is a young dick. He has ideas but no imagination.
He says, ‘Hey guys, what d’you call a drummer who’s just broken up with his girlfriend?’
‘Homeless,’ says Dram.
‘A wanker,’ says Sapper.
‘Ha-fucking-ha,’ says Flambo. ‘Here’s one for you – what do you call a sad fuck who hangs around with musicians?’
‘What?’
‘A bass player,’ says Flambo. ‘Thank you and good night.’ He wishes he could walk away like Karen, but at the moment he’s driving the van with all the gear and the others squeezed in around him. It’s another thing he plans to criticise Karen for – she walked off without helping to load the van.
But, of course, when he gets home, the flat is dark and silent. He sits. He waits. His grievances breed like rodents. Karen has fucked up. Karen is a fuck-up. She isn’t even pretty. Where does she think she gets off – acting like a bleeding girl? She always helps hump the gear. Carry your own bags, Karen, open your own doors. If you want to play with the boys, don’t expect any special treatment. That’s the arrangement. And speaking of arrangements, what the fuck was that harpsi riff? Who told her she could do that? Arrangements are Flambo’s thing. He’s the one who knows what InnerVersions should sound like. He’s the man who makes the decisions.
Flambo drinks from the neck of a cheap wine bottle. Clumsily, he rolls a joint. A guy’s got to come down after a gig. Normally, Karen would roll the joint with her fast little fingers. Good with her hands, our Karen.
Flambo stirs restlessly. He has after-gig jitters and no one to soothe him with bacon and eggs. Restlessness segues into scratchy irritability, and from there it changes tempo and becomes randy anger. He watches the door and waits. He imagines Karen in a bath with Birdie; they are soaping each other. Later they sprawl in his bed doing a sixty-niner. This is going to be good. But first he unzips his fly and pisses on them. They like that. Oh yes they do.
But Flambo does not have fast little fingers and, unlike Karen, he isn’t good with his hands. So, afterwards, he feels almost as raw and empty as he did before. He sleeps in his chair, facing the door, head lolling.
Karen, at her parents’ house, goes to sleep in her old bedroom, under her old Wonder Woman duvet, and here she dreams one of her fear-of-failure dreams. She dreams that she is on stage with a superstar who might or might not be Sting. She is playing the Korg, but it is perched on top of an upright acoustic piano. She can’t reach without stretching. As she plays, the Korg starts to heat up and melt. It drips and oozes down on to the acoustic piano until there is nothing left of it to play. The superstar who might or might not be Sting watches contemptuously. ‘Stir it with a wooden spoon,’ he says, ‘or stay out of my kitchen.’ Karen looks down at her hands and sees that she is trying to play a large pot of soup.
Sometimes, late at night, when she looks at the linear beauty of a piano keyboard, she thinks of the clean, logical progression of semitones which walk, step by step, ineluctably from low A in the bass across seven octaves to high C. Cool reason and symmetry. Each scale doing the same thing yet feeling so different to the fingers. The relationship of chords, inevitable, bound together in groups by a chain made of numbers. It’s all too perfect. It excludes her. She can’t imagine who invented this ultimate music machine. A mathematical genius? An acoustition? A nerd? She doesn’t think it could possibly have been a musician.
She imagines the kind of musician she knows rolling a spliff one night and saying, ‘Yeah. I think what we need is a machine which will render the precise tonal relationship between eighty-eight notes at the touch of a finger. Yeah – but I can’t get my head around it tonight, man.’
Now, here she is, playing a computer which looks like a piano keyboard but which can sound like a horn, a violin, a clavichord, marimbas, percussion or raindrops. It can remember sequences. It can split. It can do just about anything short of climb on a table and dance. In fact, it can do more than Karen can think of to tell it to do.
And here is InnerVersions in a scraggy little rehearsal room in Fulham. They are fooling around with a number called ‘Howl’. Birdie Walker looks up from her notes and says, ‘Drop in a minor chord there.’
Flambo says, ‘Fuck off, you can’t because …’
Karen drops in the relative minor and it sounds right. It leaves more space for the lyrics which were always too dense. And Karen wonders, ‘It’s obvious. Why didn’t I think of that?’
But she didn’t. Birdie did.
Birdie takes Karen to a voice coach, which alarms the shit out of Sapper and Dram.
Birdie takes Karen to a terrifyingly cool hairdresser in Mayfair, which alarms the shit out of Flambo.
‘What’s she doing to you?’ he says. ‘More to the point – why? Are you being groomed for fucking stardom? Is that your game? Because if it is, I’m telling you right now, this ain’t a girl band. Never was, never will be.’
Corky says, ‘We need a bit of colour.’
‘Then Sapper can dress up like a drag queen for all I care. He’s the singer.’
Sapper doesn’t say anything. In the last few weeks he’s noticed that Karen is singing a lot more harmonies than Dram. He’s noticed that whereas Dram’s harmonies are there or thereabouts, Karen’s are accurate. It makes him think he should be more accurate with the melody line. It’s an unnerving thought because he’s already turned down the offer of a voice coach and cut himself off from a chance of immediate and quick improvement.
It seems as if two camps have formed, with Sapper and Dram supporting Flambo, while Karen and Corky support Birdie. Sapper is beginning to wonder if he chose the wrong camp.
To begin with it was obvious: Flambo is a mate, Flambo likes Sapper’s voice, and his ideas. Flambo is the drummer and he isn’t in competition with Sapper. That threat always came from Dram. But Flambo said it was creative to have artistic tension between singer and lead guitarist – look at Aerosmith, look at Oasis. There were a million examples. And Sapper agreed.
Now, though, Sapper is confused. Yesterday he had a sudden insight, and he is often confused by his own insight.
They were working on one of his songs – a song that neither he, Flambo nor Dram thought needed work. It just needed recording. But Birdie said it could do with a change of perspective.
Why? It’s a song called, ‘Won’t Go Home With You’, and it’s about a rude waitress. It’s based on a real-life encounter Sapper had with a woman in an Italian restaurant. In it he notices the smear of her lipstick and a scar on her hand. She puts him down but takes his money.
‘OK,’ Birdie says, ‘but the verse is too long and wordy. Cut to the chorus more quickly. Give the chorus a different voice.’
Sapper doesn’t want to, but Birdie keeps coming back to it. She fixates on the scarred hand.
‘It’s only a detail,’ Sapper says in exasperation. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It does to her,’ says Birdie.
Whose song is this? Sapper wants to say. Is it mine or yours? But he says, ‘Is it mine or the waitress’s?’
‘Both – if you want it to be interesting,’ she says. ‘Yours if you want it boring.’
So, reluctantly Sapper starts to work with Birdie and the chorus becomes the waitress telling the singer about the scar on her hand. She says, ‘Thirty-nine stitches, those sons of bitches, God how it hurt. They made me eat dirt. Don’t you ever tell Mama, Don’t cry.’
When Sapper sings it, Birdie gets him to growl in a mocking way. She puts the harmony a fifth above to give it a harsher sound. Karen isn’t around so Birdie sings it herself. What emerges is a tired, hurt woman who won’t take any crap from an attractive young man.
Sapper would never have written a song like that by himself. But when he listens to the playback he realises that the chorus now defines the song and that the song is dark and much stronger.
> The A&R man drops in and hears some of it. ‘Better,’ he says. ‘Way more punch. Could be a single.’
And Sapper feels proud.
‘I don’t think you guys understand what proper A&R is,’ the A&R man adds. ‘A&R is whatever it takes. And sometimes what it takes is a song doctor.’
And Sapper feels humiliated.
Proud. Humiliated. Confused.
The A&R man takes Birdie aside and Sapper watches their private conversation through an open door. He can’t hear what they’re saying but he’s sure they are talking about him and his song. He hopes Birdie isn’t reporting that he gave her a hard time, that he thought the song was perfect and didn’t want to work on it. His dim little insight is that there might be people around who know more about stuff than he does. Well, anyway, different stuff.
In fact, the A&R man is worried about his job. Dog Records has a new boss and the company is cutting some of his bands. Others have been in preproduction far too long. Is Dog edging him out? He thinks Birdie has friends in high places and perhaps she’ll put in a word for him.
Sapper, watching through the open door, sees Birdie pull her sweater down over her fingers as if her hands are cold. He can’t see her face but her pose is defensive. She looks like something out of an old French movie – the faulty strip lighting in the corridor is stammering and her hair flares in staccato bursts. The A&R man has more to say. Then he stoops and kisses her on both cheeks. He turns and walks away. Birdie, starring in an old French movie, remains. She doesn’t watch him go. She stands, head lowered, thinking.
When she returns to the rehearsal room, Sapper feels her absence more than her presence. During her talk with the A&R man she has become detached from Sapper and he misses the warmth.
