by Simon Avery
There had been Mariaka Kallós, the Prima ballerina assoluta; once the étoile of the Paris Opera Ballet, and later its director. On her 90th birthday, she told Krisztina how she had several times danced with Rudolph Nureyev after he defected to the West, how despite an intolerance for celebrities, she had socialised with Gore Vidal, Andy Warhol and Jackie Kennedy Onassis.
Mariaka’s song had lead Krisztina all across the city in pursuit of it. It had the echo of Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor. By the time she tracked down Mariaka, the old woman was on her death bed and delusional. Krisztina had bluffed her way past family members and was in the next room when the ballerina’s end came. She rushed home to record the song; it took a week to construct the enormous musical architecture of Mariaka’s life. It ran to eight minutes and later would form the centrepiece of the album.
There was the gangster from the café near the hotel; by the time Krisztina had located him, two men were walking away after putting a stiletto blade between his eyes. The song had started in the morning, and by the end of the night she had it recorded. Over a hypnotic multitracked beat, Krisztina constructed a pitch black narrative, aided with a buzzing and skeletal guitar, a throbbing bass.
Then there was the woman on the run from an abusive husband; and the man who lived on the edge of a lake with a house full of clocks; the boy on the streets reduced to selling his body for money; the Russian man who might have been a refugee from the Cold War… They broke her heart and she took the stories of their lives, and from the fading bars of their final breath she made them into music.
5
There was a foggy halo of cigarette smoke in the room. The music was sinuous, hypnotic, narcotic. She wound her way through the audience, stopping to run her hand over the shoulders and through the hair of the men she passed. She trailed a feather boa in her wake. The spotlight tracked her steps. When she finally reached the stage, she stepped up to the microphone and began to sing. Jacques Brel: ‘Marieke’. Her bosom heaved from her corset. Her fishnets were torn in places. She tottered in red high heels. There was a bottle of claret on a table beside her and a crystal glass, a cigarette smouldering in an ashtray. Krisztina realised she was a little bit in love with the woman: that tired and wonderful voice, scratchy and broken with cigarettes and booze. She progressed from Brel to Weill and Brecht: ‘Pirate Jenny’ and ‘Mack the Knife’.
Krisztina watched the show from a dark corner of the club and studied the Russian gangsters propping up the bar at the back of the room and muttering into their phones; the drunks roaring their approval on the periphery; the rich men and women near the stage, sipping champagne and trading feathery kisses on each others’ faces. These days every little detail was meat for the feast.
The woman’s name was Camille Darling. Krisztina heard her song as clearly as the one she was singing. Both were laments of a kind. She’d lived the long and colourful life of a chanteuse; she yearned and beseeched with her outstretched hands to the darkness on the edges of the stage and of her life; she smeared her makeup across her face, she flailed away from the microphone and the spotlight which finally found her with the bottle of wine. She drank it straight from the bottle, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, further smearing the lipstick across her cheeks. Later she lurched into the audience and prowled in the darkness, wrapped the feather boa around a young man’s neck, then her legs around his waist so that she straddled him, crooned ‘Falling in Love Again’ to him, covering his neck in kisses.
Krisztina heard the song between the songs, felt the woman’s life story constructing itself around the words: an Irish father – a drinker, a womaniser, an ex-military man gone to seed; a mother who had aristocracy roots in the Hasburg Dynasty. They’d been forced away from France while little Camille was about to turn five and wearing a hip brace to correct developmental dysplasia. It was a childhood of poverty, living in the slums of Pest, teased by the children until her hip was fixed. After that she spent her life running: away from school; away from her parents at the age of thirteen to live with a man twice her age; away from him at the age of twenty when he grew abusive; and away finally to the place of her birth – Paris. There she learned how to dance at the Folies Bergère and how to perform in plays written by Jean Genet and in bit parts in several Truffaut movies.
Krisztina didn’t see it all; some of it she realised would be occluded until mortality came calling at Camille Darling’s door. But drink had been a constant companion all these years; drink with friends and lovers, and then, when they had all fallen away, drink with strangers and enemies alike. There had been lovers too, of course; Krisztina saw their faces at the edge of the light that Camille leaned towards. They were gone now, she suspected. Only the drink remained. The drink was faithful; it asked for nothing, it never judged.
Krisztina saw the other woman as she cast her attention around the room during the interval. The gangsters dispersed as the audience rolled like a tide toward the bar, leaving the little tables with their fringed lamps empty, save for a scattered few. The woman on the other side of the room was no more than a strikingly beautiful face in the shadows as people went to and fro; she lingered for a moment then moved on, stopping instead at the man in the porcelain mask at the back at the room. He was watching her as her eyes came to rest on him. He didn’t look away. Krisztina entertained the notion of rising and confronting him, but couldn’t will her legs to do her bidding. She looked away, but felt her attention returning to him.
Krisztina had been backstage already. This was her fourth evening at the club; the first night she’d followed Camille Darling through the snow to this ramshackle place and taken her place in the audience. On the second night, Krisztina had slipped backstage and tried several doors until she came to the dressing room that Darling currently made her refuge. There were clothes cast off and slung across a couch that had seen better days, makeup and perfume and masks and fascinators strewn around the dressing table mirror. Krisztina had lingered at the photographs attached to the mirror, stolen moments from a life she was starting to know fragments of: a faded black and white picture of a father holding a daughter in a steel brace; a woman in the background looking away at the fields surrounding Saint-Denis in France; a picture of Camille backstage at the Folies Bergère, with her feet up on a chair as a flurry of women changed clothes behind her; another of herself and a lover at a café in Montmartre; of a child running through a courtyard; an old woman in a cloud of cigarette smoke wearing only a towel… They were fragments, discoloured by time, like coins in the pockets of a forgotten suit. Krisztina saw the stories connected to some of these photos; others as yet eluded her. She’d known then that she’d return here one of these nights soon, drawn by the woman’s final breaths. She could hear her song. It was getting louder and louder every night, and every night the performance was getting looser and more ragged.
It was tonight. Krisztina was certain. Camille Darling raged through the second half of her set. Her voice cracked during ‘Je ne sais pas’; with tears in her eyes, she fell to her knees and crooned to the stage during ‘Hymne à l’amour’; lay down on her back and sang ‘Si tu n’étais pas là’ to the spotlight. As she finished, the spotlight went out and the stage went dark. The audience rose, applauding, stamping their feet. Krisztina got up too, went up on her toes and craned her neck to look for Camille rising, but she wasn’t close enough to the stage to locate her. The band had disappeared behind the red velvet curtains, leaving the instruments and the empty bottles of wine behind. While Krisztina gathered her coat and her bag, she glanced across to the back of the room where the man in the porcelain mask had stood, and was unsurprised to see that his spot had already been vacated. Gone too was the other solitary woman in the audience.
Krisztina used the crowd to conceal her departure backstage. She was careful not to be spotted, but the room was still dark and the crowd still on its feet, either applauding or gathering their things in preparation to leave. No one saw her slip beyond the curtains and away d
own the bare brick corridor.
She heard the song clearly again, and then the words:
If you live your life after 2 a.m.
Sooner or later
You see the light go from everyone’s eyes
Krisztina hurried past a row of half open doors. She glimpsed the musicians pulling on heavy coats and lighting cigarettes, passing a bottle of vodka around, pressing their instruments into hard cases and closing the clasps. No one noticed her. Still, she moved quickly and quietly as more of the song revealed itself to her:
When your beauty wanes
And the lovers fade
When they all gradually forget your name
You’re the only one left to blame
The door was ajar and Krisztina closed her hand around the handle, pushed. There were clouds of cigarette smoke in the air already, the odour of tobacco, sweat and perfume. There were wine bottles stacked up in a crate by the door. The red feather boa had been abandoned and lay coiled on the bare floor beside the dressing table. Her heels had been kicked off, tossed into the corner of the room.
Krisztina knew something was wrong.
She saw Camille Darling in her seat. She was facing the mirror and she was still wearing her stiff black corset and fishnets, but her arms and legs were flung out: she looked like a stiff mannequin forced into a sitting position. Krisztina pushed the door open and stepped inside and then she saw the other woman. It was the woman she had seen sitting across the other side of the club during the interval. She was a little older than Krisztina: there were threads of grey creeping into the roots of her hair, but she was quite beautiful; her hips were full and her waist slim. Her cheekbones were high and perfect, her lips cherry red. But her eyes were dead. They chilled Krisztina, froze her in her tracks. There was nothing there, no history, no future; no stories to tell. There was blood on her hands. She was standing in the corner of the room rubbing at them with a white handkerchief. It was spotted with red now.
Krisztina’s attention drifted from the woman with dead eyes to Camille Darling. She stepped to the side and she saw the knife in her chest. There was blood bubbling from the wound, turning her whalebone corset red. Her eyes were open, her face paralysed in a spasm of fear. Krisztina stared at her reflection in the mirror. She was too late. The knife was lodged in her heart. She had been murdered.
But this wasn’t how she was supposed to die.
She realised then that the song was no longer here. It had gone entirely.
She glanced back at the woman, aware now that every little movement had too much gravity attached to it. She was too scared to step away, or to administer to the singer, even if it was too late. The absence of the song was clouding her judgement.
“Who are you?” she asked finally, desperation making her voice ragged. “What are you doing here?”
The woman finished with the handkerchief and folded it calmly, placed it into her coat pocket. The blood was still crusted under her fingernails. She looked at Krisztina for a moment, and then moved very quickly from the corner of the room like a cornered spider. She didn’t stop. She pushed Krisztina aside and kept moving. And then she was gone, away down the corridor, her heels echoing on the bare stone. Krisztina heard the fire door clatter open, and then squeal as it closed.
She’d circled this song for days. She’d heard it reveal itself to her nightly. And now it was gone, as if stolen. But how? Krisztina had played her part, but now she was standing over Camille Darling’s corpse and her song was gone, the story of her life extinguished not by a stroke but by a knife in her heart.
She heard other footsteps then, and the voices of the other musicians in the corridor. Soon they’d arrive at the door to say their farewells as they always did. Perhaps they were used to finding the singer passed out on the couch. They’d laugh about it, then throw a blanket over her and leave. Krisztina had to get out before the murder was discovered and pinned on her.
She left Camille Darling and escaped into the corridor, into the cold night. Who was the woman? She’d encountered murders before – the gangster that inspired the song ‘Stiletto’ was testament to that – but the story of the singer’s life been taken before Krisztina could lay her hands on it, and taken it seemed by the fugitive stranger.
Evidently, someone shared her gift.
6
Interview for Wire magazine by Dave Cook
John Merriwether
Behind the Bleed
After a string of number one hits and five seminal albums in his adopted Britain in the sixties when he had it all – the voice, the looks, the stardom – John Merriwether chose to walk away and disappear into a forty year exile. Now, at 69 years of age, one of the most enigmatic figures in rock history is back with The Bleed.
But anyone expecting a return to the sweeping, swooning sadness of those sixties albums may well be disappointed. The Bleed is dense, terrifying, and discordant, an evocation of anxiety and horror as shards of orchestral noise are ripped and pasted into the nightmare landscapes of these songs. It’s the sound of a doomed man sailing into an uncharted part of the world.
Indeed, two years ago, Merriwether was diagnosed with terminal cancer, inspiring his return to writing and recording with The Bleed. It seems that the road John Merriwether has chosen to travel knows no way back. Dave Cook goes in search of the reclusive Californian, who now resides outside of Budapest.
Dave Cook: Well, I have to ask. Forty years. Where have you been?
John Merriwether: Oh, you know. Drinking. Travelling. Hanging around. And just lately, dying. [Laughs]
DC: There were a multitude of rumours in 1970 when you disappeared: mental breakdown, suicide attempts, alcoholism, emigrating. Any or all of the above?
JM: Oh, well, you know, kind of an amalgamation of all of those. The last couple of records I put out in the sixties were commercial failures. The public had lost interest in what I had to offer them.
DC: You did put out a couple of albums after that, didn’t you?
JM: [Laughs] Yeah, but I don’t think anyone heard them. People really didn’t want to touch me after that. I became a leper at my record company. They said I had to be more commercial if I wanted any kind of future there. So I ended up rounding out my contract by putting out two bad albums of covers – you know, middle-of-the-road crap. That was my mistake. I should have listened harder to myself. It was bad faith on my part. I fell into a depression but I felt like I had to stay in the game somehow. And when I couldn’t stay in the game, well, you know … a whole hell of a lot of drinking ensued. [Laughs]
DC: Was it your cancer diagnosis which prompted your sudden urge to make a new record?
JM: Pretty much. That and the feeling of having wasted all those years. It’s really that cut and dried. After the diagnosis I knew time was running out and I started writing. It just came tumbling out. There’s a line on the new record: ‘Art leads you back to the person you were after the world took you away from yourself’. It’s true. The music had been waiting all that time.
DC: Even though this new record is a tough listen, there’s a sense that back in the sixties those five records that you cut were equally as challenging in their way.
JM: I guess they were challenging to an extent. They certainly weren’t as extreme as The Bleed; otherwise no one would have bought them. There certainly was a European sensibility to them, of course – I was watching Bergman and Fellini and all those art-house types, and that bled through into the music and words. But those records swung and rocked a bit. The new record doesn’t have anything recognisably approaching a time signature or a ‘hook’. But yeah, I guess you could go back to that young guy and you could see the seeds he was planting that took root for this record. [Laughs] Forty-odd years later…
DC: I’ve heard you refer to the ‘shaved down’ arrangements and that you abandoned melodic arrangements for textural and sonic effect. What pulled you in that direction?
JM: Maybe it was the diagnosis, but the words dictated the music
, you know? They suggested that shaved down kind of vibe. Big blocks of sound and then silence. But some of the words had been gestating for years, you know? I was just waiting for them to make sense to me.
DC: Some of the early reviews have pointed to the unrelenting horror and misery of The Bleed, but I get a strong vein of humour running through the record, a kind of existential absurdity…
JM: I’m glad you got that. It’s all about balance in the end. I hate to keep coming back to it, but my diagnosis kind of crystallised a lot of what I was thinking about during the genesis of this record. I have a lot of regrets about the last forty years. In that time I moved to Budapest to get married and had a daughter, then two years later it was all over. I stayed in Hungary, but I didn’t see much of my daughter Krisztina, and I deeply regret all that lost time. Her mother died ten years ago and I never really made amends for the way I treated her. I was a mess back then. I was a mean drunk, a bad husband, an even worse father… So yeah, a lot of regrets. But then I started to write and I found my way into the music and it excited me. It felt like I was one of those early explorers back when we didn’t know what was out there. My dad was a cartographer. Maybe it’s in the blood. Maybe it’s not for me to claim, but I felt like I was starting again, like I did in the sixties and there’s all this new territory for me to explore and map out. [Laughs] And of course, then my doctor tells me I’ve got two, three years, tops. You have to see the humour in that…
