Here Comes Everybody

by James Fearnley

  ‘Well,’ I found myself saying, knowing that I was missing the point, ‘if you can’t get to sleep.’

  ‘But I see things,’ he said. ‘You know, see things.’

  ‘Like DTs?’ I said, fascinated. I hadn’t met anyone who had had DTs.

  ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘Yeah, I suppose.’

  I expected Shane to wheeze out a laugh of self-deprecation – the cackle which blew even the dimmest ember of irony into combustion. That night, though, he sounded scared. He told me that his mind kept going round and round at night and he couldn’t stop it.

  I felt bad for his restlessness. He seemed carried by a relentless current which never just deposited him on the beach of his flat on Cromer Street, but sucked him back and rolled him up and down there too. It was an energy I envied, though it scared me.

  *

  I lost interest in going to auditions. I was short of money too. I sold my guitar and my amp. The guy who bought it pointed out that because the screw holes in the body didn’t match up with those in the scratch plate, the guitar wasn’t an original Telecaster. With the amp thrown in, I took as much as I’d originally paid for the guitar. I was angry to have deluded myself.

  I saw Debsey intermittently. In June, Sensible’s ‘Happy Talk’ had spent two weeks at No. 1. Its success and that of its follow-up, ‘Wot!’, swept Dolly Mixture into a cycle of promotion. She spent a lot of the time away filming videos, making appearances on Top of the Pops and doing Dolly Mixture’s own gigs.

  Each morning I obeyed the sign I’d stuck on my bedroom wall which read: ‘GET UP’. I made tea. I had an ex-office IBM typewriter. It was a brute and ten times the weight of the Olivetti I had been pecking away on in my cubicle at No. 32 Burton Street. I jammed the table into the corner against the momentum of the carriage return. With Roget’s Thesaurus and the Oxford English Dictionary on the table next to me, my mug of tea, smoke twisting from a cigarette balanced on the edge of my ashtray, I hammered at the keyboard. In the afternoons I’d read or cycle round the city. In the evenings, I’d go out drinking with Howard and maybe Shane, or stay in and listen to the radio. Once a week I went to a writing workshop at the City Literary Institute in Holborn.

  On an afternoon at the end of August, Debsey was away in Norwich with Sensible. Between the thwacks of my IBM, I became aware of a knocking on the door.

  I opened to Jem. He had had no idea which flat was mine and had eventually been directed to it by the sound of the typewriter at the end of my hallway.

  He was carrying a plastic carrier bag with him. He put it down in the living room. I hadn’t seen him in the year and a half since we had been evicted from the house on Burton Street. At first it was awkward welcoming him into my living room, until it occurred to me that Jem had helped me get the flat in the first place. I showed him round.

  While I made a cup of tea in the galley kitchen, he leant on the door jamb and told me that he had been playing music with Shane, both of them on guitar, with Shane singing. They had been busking in Finsbury Park tube station and had auditioned, unsuccessfully, for a pitch at the newly refurbished Covent Garden Market. I asked him what kind of music.

  ‘Well, it’s quite interesting really,’ he said, with almost professorial detachment. ‘It’s folk music, but then sort of punky.’

  He left the kitchen and went into the living room. In a moment or two he came back with the plastic carrier bag.

  ‘I’ve brought this,’ he said. ‘Shane thought he remembered that you could play the piano.’

  He wiggled a white-painted accordion out.

  ‘We want you to learn how to play it,’ he said.

  I was dismissive about the idea of being in a band again. I was writing now. I had a flat to myself. I was twenty-seven. Nonetheless, I thought playing the accordion with Jem and Shane might be a welcome distraction.

  ‘If it gets in the way of my writing . . .’ I said. He said he understood.

  ‘Only,’ he added, ‘in a couple of weeks, we have a gig.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  He left my flat with a handshake. I went off to clear up the tea things. I listened to his tread down the corridor.

  It needed straps. The only thing to hand was my dad’s old scholars’ tie which I knotted round the metal fittings. I hoisted it up. It was lighter than I expected. I laughed at the gimcrackery of it, the fact that it was made mostly of wood and cardboard and held together by pins. It was basically a harmonica with keys attached. Opening the bellows revealed gold, bookbinders’ edging, white cardboard, tucks of amber leather where the cardboard folded and the bright metal corners of the vanes. The grille was brazen filigree with tarnished wire cloth underneath. I loved the tawdry pearloid plastic of the keys. I made a five-finger chord and dragged it open. The sound was luscious. It had the sonority of a mouth organ deepened by the wood and the bellows. It was succulent with vibration as the double voicing of the reeds got going, a slight dissonance undulating between them as the air passed through. That afternoon, the presentiment of a common destiny passed between the accordion and me.

  Six

  Shane cackled at the formality with which Jem and I reintroduced ourselves at our practice the following week. Because both of us came from ‘oop nawth’, as Shane liked to put it, he delighted in imagining there was some latent rivalry between us.

  I felt a kinship with Jem from the beginning. For a start, our initials coincided and, based on a lenient geography, and despite my brother’s chestnut that anyone who lived south of Stockport was a Cockney, we did both think of ourselves as ‘northerners’. Jem was from Stoke-on-Trent. I was from suburban Manchester. Both of us were products of a distinctly middle-class upbringing. Jem’s grammar school education mirrored my boarding school one. Though my father was the son of a provincial industry captain, and Jem’s dad the son of Bessarabian Jews who set up shop in Chapel Market in Islington, our fathers were both domineering men with a deal of influence. Jem’s father was a university professor. Mine was the managing director of a building company in the North West. Yet another intersection in my and Jem’s Venn diagram consisted of the fact that Jem’s mum happened to be acquainted, through the Cheshire Liberal Party, with my Aunty Pat.

  To show off what I’d accomplished in the week since Jem had come round to my flat, I pulled the accordion out of the laundry bag, hoisted it up, worked the straps over my shoulders and played for both of them. I’d figured out the chords of ‘Abide with Me’, with a churchy accompaniment of rising thirds on the bass buttons.

  ‘See? I told you!’ Shane said to Jem. ‘He’s a fucking genius.’

  I loved music and reckoned myself good at it. I didn’t have perfect pitch but I could hear harmonic ratios and interference beats. I knew from O-Level Physics about the propagation of sound, longitudinal waves, rarefaction and compression, about resonance and reverberation. I enjoyed knowing about Pythagorean intervals and the properties of a vibrating string. There wasn’t an instrument I couldn’t get something out of. When it came to learning the accordion, I had an idea how I wanted it to sound.

  We started on a couple of the songs Jem and Shane had been working on. They were simple enough, though Shane’s clumsiness with the guitar confused me at first. He stopped and started, his fingers clamping down on first one chord, then another. ‘Streams of Whiskey’ – a song Shane had written – had just three chords which followed a fairly obvious progression. ‘The Old Main Drag’ – another of Shane’s – was a different matter, forever revolving round the tonic in a pattern that at first I couldn’t get. The last song we tried, written by Brendan Behan, was called ‘The Auld Triangle’. It contained an awkward shift from A seventh to a C which flummoxed my fingers on the bass buttons.

  When I made simple arpeggios of the chords of ‘Streams of Whiskey’, Shane cried out, ‘Yeah, yeah! Alpine!’

  At the end of the night, as I stowed the accordion back in the plastic bag, Shane asked me if I was into being in a band.

  ‘Sure,’ I s
aid. ‘But if it’s going to take up too much time I’m going to have to knock it on the head.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m writing a book,’ I said. Shane patted the tabletop, thinking.

  ‘Yeah, well, we’re all writing books,’ he said.

  Shane had a tape he and Jem had recorded so that I could learn the songs at home. He slid it off the top of the table to hand it to me, but spent the next few moments tapping and tapping the cassette tape, first on the heel of his hand, then on his knee, wafting it between his mucky fingers. When he finally handed it over to me, it was with a gesture of such flippancy that I instantly knew how proud he was of the songs on it.

  There were twelve songs, including a couple of instrumentals. They had such titles as ‘The Clobberer’, ‘The Battle of Brisbane’, ‘Connemara Let’s Go’, ‘Poor Paddy on the Railway’, ‘The Humours of Whiskey’, ‘Kitty’, ‘The Dark Streets of London’ and ‘The Boys from the County Hell’. The recording was full of stops and starts. Both Shane and Jem sounded self-conscious, to the point of inaudibility on Jem’s part, and peremptoriness on Shane’s. Shane’s singing was different from what I had been used to in the Nips. He no longer delivered the words with derision towards whoever might be listening, but with a sneer in the direction of his presumption to record the songs in the first place.

  The next week we rehearsed with the whole band, which turned out to be just ourselves – and John Hasler. Hasler apparently had been the original drummer for the Invaders, the band which had eventually become Madness. Knowing Hasler’s history with Shane, it puzzled me that he should be in our group. We met in the public bar in the Norfolk Arms, a tiny room with a painted Victorian fireplace and mantelshelf. It had been a while since I’d seen John’s boyish face, his fair hair reminiscent of Tintin. I nodded a greeting. He nodded back. We had a couple of pints and then went up to the flat Jem now shared with a guy called Rick in Whidborne Buildings.

  Hillview Estate – the four late-Victorian tenement blocks of Midhope, Lucas and Whidborne Buildings, East and West – was SCH’s flagship. Hillview Estate as a whole must have been home to three hundred people or more. The buildings dominated Cromer Street from the Boot public house to the council estates on the far side of Loxham Street. They exuded an abiding and embattled sense of community and seemed to be a repository of Camden’s counterculture.

  The walls of Whidborne Buildings were streaked white with effluent from the waste-water hoppers high up the wall. Drab curtains hung in a couple of the windows, blankets in a couple more. A solitary window box provided a feeble flicker of colour.

  An archway opened into the central well, a dingy cistern overlooked by the ranks of grimy windows and the landings on the stairwells, each railed across with iron. A polychromatic section of wall brightened the murk a little. A bin dump lurked under corrugated iron at one end of the courtyard. Bicycles were tethered at the other, by the stone steps up to Cromer Street.

  Jem and Rick Trevan lived at No. 142. It was a tenebrous flat, though vivid swatches of fabric hanging over the walls relieved the dinginess. The table in Jem’s room was strewn with stuff – tiny plastic trumpets, pens, moneyboxes, key rings, tin cans, photographs of the clock of St Pancras Station and a stack of battery-operated clock movements. Leaning against the wall, there was a painting of a figure, naked, curled over with its arse in the air and a bunch of flowers sprouting out between its buttocks. As we went down the corridor to the back bedroom where we were going to rehearse, we passed another room. Under a lamp, furiously pressing out snakeskin badges from a machine with a lever, sat Jem’s rangy, ginger-haired flatmate, Rick Trevan.

  ‘Wotcha,’ he said.

  In the back bedroom John set up by the window. I squeezed up against the wall, behind the chest of drawers. Jem stood in the middle of the room. Shane stood up near the door, out of the light.

  With the exception of Shane, we were all learning our instruments from scratch. Though Jem, I knew from living in Burton Street, could play guitar, the banjo was new to him. I watched him as he played. His eyes were sightless with concentration. His lips grimaced spasmodically in time to the chord changes. His mouth would form a taut line across his face, relax into a silent ‘oooh’, then abruptly suck in a snatch of air.

  John Hasler bent over the two drums he had – for simplicity’s sake a tom-tom and a snare. When he went about hitting them, he drew his face into an expression of judiciousness.

  Shane clutched his guitar pick in his fist and scrubbed at the strings, angling his head this way and that. The fingers of his left hand would grope about looking for the next chord. By the time his fingers had found it, the chord had often passed and they had to move on in search of the next one. When he sang, he lifted his head up and closed his eyes. He’d suck in air between his teeth and wet his flaking lips from time to time. In the slow songs his voice was sonorous and heartfelt. In the fast ones, it was derisive.

  I had difficulty remembering which song was which. I had practised up in my flat, pacing about my front room, listening to Shane and Jem’s tape, going over the songs, trying to get them to stick. They wouldn’t. Because they all seemed to start in G or D, I ended up not being able to tell them apart. I wouldn’t know what the song was until it started.

  *

  After the first rehearsal, we didn’t get together for a week. I practised against my tape up in my flat. As the date came closer, we rehearsed a couple of consecutive nights. The weekend before the gig, we spent both Saturday and Sunday in Rick Trevan’s cramped back bedroom.

  The gig Jem had told me about when he’d come to my flat was cancelled. A guy called Justin Ward who lived in Stanley Buildings – another SCH property between St Pancras and King’s Cross stations – replaced it with a gig at the Pindar of Wakefield on Gray’s Inn Road – more or less at the end of Shane’s street – for the 5th October. Jem had found someone to do the sound for us – a musician called Darryl Hunt whom both Shane and Jem knew from around King’s Cross.

  For the gig at the Pindar of Wakefield, Shane had invited his friend Spider to play with us. I didn’t know what instrument he played. I didn’t want to ask. I had met Spider when I was living at No. 32 Burton Street. I had come in after work to find Shane in the kitchen with a guy wearing a black windjammer and jeans, whose hair was dyed the colour of soot and buzzed into a box shape. I had nothing better to do, so I had sat in the filthy armchair and let myself be introduced. It wasn’t long before Spider and Shane started hurling insults at one another. The oaths were so barbarous that I knew they were pretending, but the vileness that came out of Spider’s mouth was prodigious, and Shane’s contumely, protean. I laughed, uneasily. In the end Shane had served up a show-stopper of such grossness that it had reduced Spider to helpless guffawing.

  We met up with Spider in the Norfolk Arms after one of our rehearsals. Again, Spider and Shane vied with one another, the pair of them trading cruelties, quotations and quips until they collapsed into helpless cackling. I was amazed at the references the two of them made – the ones I thought I recognised, at least: Shakespeare, Joyce, Flann O’Brien, Beckett. Spider, it seemed, had a virtually eidetic memory. His facility to quote, often at length, from books, films, television programmes was staggering and more often than not hilarious. His knowledge of history and geography seemed encyclopedic.

  ‘If we’re doing a gig,’ Spider said, ‘we need a name.’

  ‘The Men They Couldn’t Hang,’ Shane said.

  ‘The Noisy Boysies,’ Spider said.

  ‘The Black Velvet Underground.’

  ‘Pogue Mahone,’ said Spider.

  ‘Pogue Mahone! Ye-es! Fuck! Yeah!’ Shane said, slapping his head with the palm of his hand.

  ‘ “Pogue mahone! Acushla machree! It’s destroyed we are from this day! It’s destroyed we are surely!” ’ Spider said. ‘It’s from Ulysses. It means kiss my arse. Pogue Mahone!’

  ‘Pogue Mahone!’ Shane said.

  *

  Befo
re going down to the Pindar of Wakefield, with the exception of Spider whom we were going to meet there, we convened at Jem’s flat. We had all agreed to wear suits and shirts with buttons. When Shane came in, late, he stood in the hallway-cum-living room and took muster. He wore a black suit with narrow lapels and tapered trousers. He looked us all up and down. He scratched his head above his ear. His eyebrows plicated his forehead as if he was surprised not to catch someone out.

  We had all our instruments ready. They stood in the hallway in their cases. It was a short walk down Cromer Street to the Pindar of Wakefield. We were nervous. Just as we were about to leave, Shane stopped us.

  ‘Wait! Wait! Wait!’ he shouted. He had a hole in his shoe, on the upper, where the leather had split and the white of his sock was showing through. John went down to the corner shop for a bottle of Kiwi scuff cover. Shane hoisted his shoe up onto the seat of the chair, stretched his arms clear of the sleeves of his tight jacket, to apply the sponge to the sock showing in the hole. The way we presented ourselves, I knew then, was going to come up in the future.

  We descended the stairs. Instrument cases in hand, we walked down the dark street to the Pindar of Wakefield, four abreast, blocking off the road, in my mind’s eye like the Wild Bunch, our shadows cast behind us, fanning out over the surface of Cromer Street. We were pared down to essentials: suits, shirts with buttons, shoes, black instrument cases. Spider met us in a leather jacket and jeans, and with a stripe of red dye in his hair.

  The moment we started to play, I could feel myself losing grip of the purposefulness I had grimly enjoyed as we walked down Cromer Street. The shock of standing up in front of a small horde of the occupants of Hillview Estate and a couple of friends who had made the journey up from Kingston-upon-Thames – not to mention Debsey’s family who were all sitting in the far corner – shook every last melody and song structure from my mind. I had to shout out for Jem to remind me how most of the songs began.