I was surprised how well Spider knew the songs. It turned out that he and Shane were already in a band called the Millwall Chainsaws, both of them singing. They had played a gig at Richard Strange’s club Cabaret Futura. They had played Irish songs and as a joke had called themselves – I remembered Shane mentioning to me – the New Republicans, another band name Spider had come up with. British squaddies in the audience that night had pelted them with chips.
Anchored by the microphone and its stand to the side of the stage, I was grateful to be on the periphery one moment, the next, hot with embarrassment to wear so conspicuous an instrument as an accordion. When it came to playing, I found myself caught up with the intricacy of it, conscious of the angle my arms needed to adopt for the height of the keys, the angle my head had to strike both to see and to hear what I was doing, making sure that the grille of the accordion stayed close to the microphone. Everything was going on, literally, under my nose.
I heard Shane’s guitar-playing to be much more erratic than in rehearsal. John’s drumming seemed full of false starts and reiterations. By far the greatest disturbance was Spider.
The occasion of our first gig had clearly gone to his head. It seemed to have transformed him into a ranting, anachronistic ersatz punk, snarling a succession of grotesquely affected ejaculations of what sounded like punk slogans and otherwise screaming his head off.
The only calmative influence was Jem, who stood next to me, four-square, dependable, though cautious and aloof. I looked across at him. He was staring agape out into the crowd.
Beyond him stood Shane, singing, his eyes half-closed. Whether or not he knew it, he had set the microphone at such a height to require him to sing up and out. It implied a larger audience than the one we had. His charisma was undeniable. His carriage, his contours, the attitude he copped, from which he did not break, were simultaneously authentic and artful.
Seven
After our first gig, helped by Shane’s renown not just in the music world but in and around Hillview Estate, shows came up: at the 101 Club on Clapham Road, the 100 Club on Oxford Street and the offer of a residency at the Pindar of Wakefield. Shamed by his performance earlier in the month, Spider had started teaching himself to play the tin whistle. There was a pressing need to rehearse.
I turned up at the Norfolk Arms. We had been forewarned that Shane had found us a bass player, an Irish girl he’d met at a club and who had stridden into the record shop he worked in, offering to play bass. As I came through from the bar with my pint, she was in the vault, leaning against the mantelpiece. She was a lank, lean, surly, black-jacketed waif, her hair backcombed into black candyfloss which she twisted around her barrow-boy gloved fingers, encouraging a jet skein to fall over her shy but febrile eyes. She was beautiful.
‘You must be Cait the bass player,’ I said.
‘No,’ she answered – in the loveliest of voices, soft and singing, with a trace of an Irish accent. ‘I’m just Cait.’
There was an atmosphere of sang-froid in the parlour of the Norfolk Arms, a watchful embarrassment among us which caused us to regard our new bass player askance. I wondered if she was conscious that Shane might have breezed her into the band because he fancied her. I didn’t really care who joined the band. My attitude, as I had reminded Shane and Jem and Spider, was that I was writing a novel and that if the band threatened to obstruct its progress I would quit. My lack of commitment seemed to afford me some charity towards Cait.
‘I can’t believe this,’ she said, covering her mouth with her fingertips. Indicating Shane, she said: ‘I’ve been a fan of this cunt for years.’
‘How old are you?’ I asked.
‘Seventeen,’ she said. The previous Tuesday had been my twenty-eighth birthday. I felt sorry for her, and at the same time relieved. In a couple of weeks, when Shane tired of her, I assumed she would be gone.
Up in Rick Trevan’s back room, the situation was awkward. It turned out that Cait hadn’t much idea how to play bass. Shane took her under his wing. With a solicitousness that was comical, he tried to teach her the bass notes for the songs. The process soon fell foul of his ineptitude and Cait became even more confused as to what she was supposed to do. Jem was no help. I wondered if Shane’s foisting on us a girl he had picked up at a club in the past week prevented Jem from stepping up to assist. I ended up teaching Cait the notes to the songs, lifting my eyebrows at the approach of a chord change, and, if she missed it, pulling harder on the accordion to bring her back into line.
At the end of the rehearsal, we went back down to the Norfolk Arms for closing time. We stood around by the fireplace. I found myself talking with Cait. As if to remind me and everyone around her of her age, her punk ethos and her status as the only girl in the group, something I said caused her to punch me in the stomach, so unexpectedly and with such force that the blow sent me to my knees.
The first gig she played with us was with King Kurt at the 101 Club. At rehearsals during the week, she stood on the bed, her head up in the ceiling corner, and smacked the notes out on her bass, driving the pick onto the strings, her pale fingers stretching for the next note. There was a want of caution about her that made me embarrassed on her account, but which nonetheless fascinated me.
On stage, too, she played her bass with swagger. We hadn’t wanted to go on after King Kurt but lost the toss. King Kurt had a reputation for mess. When it came time for our set, the plastic sheeting which covered the backline amps was dribbling with flour-paste and the stage littered with rabbit and chicken entrails. Cait stood tall, her head erect, her hair black, stiffened with backcombing. She swung the neck of her bass back and forth and alternately shot out looks of malevolence into the half-empty room or down onto the mat of giblets and paste on the floor.
We finished our set. Most of the audience left. I had packed away my accordion and was standing at the back of the room with a drink when Cait came up to the centre microphone. To the delight of a couple of guys who were still sitting at a table at the front, Cait propped her hand onto her waist and launched into a couple of Irish rebel songs. Though it wandered sharp, her voice was lovely. It had a natural, sultry vibrato – I struggled to place where I might have heard it before, until it came to me that it was in Marilyn Monroe’s ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’. The vibrato and the intonation of Cait’s voice was innocent and unaffected, and her eyes dusky and insolent with the adolescent embarrassment of knowing how well she could sing, and how much she craved the attention. When she finished singing, the two guys at the table down the front fell to whistling and shouting. Cait threw up two fingers in their direction and sashayed up the room.
With gigs coming up we tried to rehearse every other night. Shane’s attendance was unpredictable. One weekend, we learnt that he’d gone off to his parents’ house in Tunbridge Wells to get his laundry done. As it had been in the Nips, the condition he was in when he did manage to make it to rehearsal was unpredictable too. He was either drunk and argumentative, or meek and apologetic. I knew Jem to have visited him to talk about what we were supposed to be doing, how important rehearsals were. The effects of his exhortations were short-lived, but I had the feeling Jem would prevail.
Spider’s attendance at rehearsal was just as unreliable. When he showed up, he ranted at length about scrapes he’d got himself into. He pitched into debates with Shane about someone or other they knew, somewhere or other they had been, which had had some comical dénouement or other. Frequently he’d give out about his girlfriend Anya, a brittle girl I’d come across a couple of times. Jem had also let Spider know how unacceptable his performance at the Pindar of Wakefield had been, how much he had disapproved of his absence at rehearsals.
Shane and Spider delayed count-ins and interrupted them when they were under way, by eruptions of coughing fits and laryngeal explosions from Shane. Their sallies seemed to go on for ever. I folded my hands on the top of the accordion and waited for them to finish, ready to balance my roll-up on the edge of the
ashtray if it looked like we were going to begin a song.
Occasionally Spider would argue, and inexhaustibly, about how fast a particular song should be or should have been.
‘Drivel without a pause,’ I said.
‘Oh!’ Spider said, in mock injury.
When he got round to playing, Spider snapped his leg to the beat and played with his eyes closed, elbows out wide. He was a fidgety player. For glissandi, he slid his ring finger over a hole on his whistle up to the second knuckle and lifted it off with the precision of a tea-taster. He was fearless when it came to taking on such ornaments as I’d heard on the Potts and Moloney record, though they sometimes ended in warbles. Vibrato and intonation were elusive. After a song, he would flick the whistle as if to clear an obstruction from the mouthpiece.
‘Fuck!’ he’d say.
The other instrument Spider played was a metal beer tray which he bashed against his head.
‘It’s a traditional Irish instrument,’ Shane explained.
‘What are we doing?’ Spider beseeched once, looking to be on the verge of stamping his feet, his whistle clenched in his fist, tendons showing white under the skin of his wrist.
‘We’re knocking on the door of silence and awaiting an answer,’ I said.
One evening, Shane was so late that we sent Spider to go and find him. Spider came back empty-handed and volunteered to sing in Shane’s place. He knew the words to all the songs we were doing. We had been working on ‘The Auld Triangle’. Spider closed his eyes and sang the entirety of it in a key several steps distant from the one in which we were playing it.
We said nothing. We didn’t look at one another. None of us had the courage to stop playing and suggest getting on with one of the instrumentals we could better have spent our time practising.
Jem was dogged and patient. He stood squarely in the room, his feet at ten to two, his sleeves rolled up, the banjo hanging from his symmetrically angled shoulders. The chaos in the room glanced off him like arrows against a testudo, as he moved inexorably forward to get the next song done.
I lent Shane my guitar. The one he had, he’d either lost or it had been stolen. Whenever he picked mine up to play, I winced. It wasn’t a particularly good or expensive guitar, but since selling my Telecaster it was the only one I had. He made a bear garden of putting the guitar on, distracted as he was by his cigarette smouldering in the ashtray or by his can of Tennent’s, working the strap over his shoulder, pulling on the cigarette, dropping his guitar pick, not realising that the strap had become detached from its button on the bottom of the guitar and letting the instrument fall, to slam it between his arm and his thigh to stop it dropping to the ground. Whenever he set it down, he was incapable of doing so without banging it against the chair that was in the room or against the chest of drawers.
After a couple of weeks, Shane brought my guitar to rehearsal with a V-shaped hole in the front of it.
‘My door fell on it!’ he said.
‘Your door fell on it?’
‘My door doesn’t have any fucking hinges!’ he spat. ‘Yeah?’ he added, in such a way that I felt foolish to have expected it to.
At rehearsals and at gigs I was the one to tune everything. I gestured to Jem to bring his drone string into alignment, either by means of the palm of my hand uppermost, edging him up, or palm downmost, urging him down, then, the closer he got to bringing the strings in unison, making a pincer of my fingers, closing the gap between my fingertips, then slicing the air to signify that the banjo was in tune. Shane was worse. He twisted the machine-heads with savage wrenches, raising the out-of-tune string past accordance and then, after I had shouted, ‘Down! Down!’, screwing the machine-heads in the opposite direction. With a deal of begrudging fuss Shane gave up the guitar for me to tune.
Cait wanted no help when it came to tuning her bass. She tuned it only when it was absolutely necessary – and with an obduracy that suffered no interruption.
Spider’s tuning was complicated. Hot water needed running over the mouthpiece to soften the glue which held it to the tube before we could twist it free. Spider would blow a few notes, look at me defencelessly, twist the mouthpiece and blow again. The note was never true, but we’d fix it afterwards with gaffer tape anyway.
As rehearsals went on, Shane seemed convinced that C and F and G were all the chords you needed to make music. Relative minors he didn’t know. It was rare that we came across one. Now and again a melody would jar against the chord structure he brought to bear on it. I suggested an alternative chord progression.
‘What!?’ he cried. ‘No! It doesn’t go like that!’
We went round the song again and again. Each time the problematic section came up, the chords ground against the melody. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut any longer.
‘If we went from F to G here,’ I said, ‘instead of G to F.’
He tried it out, scrubbing through the chords, with his head down, bent over the guitar, staring at his fingers. He looked up angrily.
‘Yeah!’ he said. ‘Yeah! It’s supposed to go that way!’
*
Maybe it was the fact that she was the only girl, the youngest and the most recent addition to the band which conferred on Cait a right to cut crap. Maybe it was the disparity between her and our ages which gave her the licence to disdain us as pusillanimous when it came to the matter of decision-making, of taking the bull by the horns.
John’s lack of talent had come up in conversation, but that was only ever as far as we got, only ever as far as we wanted to go. We were reluctant to swinge.
Just as we’d turned up at rehearsal one afternoon, without warning, Cait lit into John with a ferocity that made us blench.
‘I don’t understand what the fuck you’re doing in this fucking band,’ she said. ‘You can’t play for shit. Why don’t you just fuck off?’
John looked at us, from one to the other.
‘Go on, fuck off!’ Cait said.
John looked at her with a panicked smile of disbelief, then, cowed and beaten, he left.
We stood around in the room for a moment or two in horror at what she’d done. Spider broke the silence with a sputter of laughter, his hand covering his mouth, his forehead pleated in disbelief. We all laughed, not so much at John’s pathetic figure skulking out of Rick Trevan’s flat, but from embarrassment at the intimacy Cait seemed to have forced on us by her violence and impulsiveness.
It crossed my mind that Cait’s fury at John – the man who had deprived Shane of his virtual namesake in the Nips – might have been evidence of her wanting to prove her love for Shane. Up until that moment, there had been scant indication of Cait’s feelings. She and Shane turned up at rehearsals independently of one another. At no time was I aware of any familiarity, private joke or secret look that passed between them.
Shane must have had some idea of Cait’s feelings for him. In the days following, he told me a joke: a woman’s paramour had become so besotted that, when she confessed to being bothered to distraction by her lapdog, saying, ‘Oh, sometimes I do wish that damn dog were dead!’, her suitor took the dog away and shot it. After the telling, Shane wheezed himself empty of air.
We set about finding another drummer. There was a guy Shane and Jem knew who lived in Whidborne Buildings but who played in another band and had said he wasn’t interested. We tried a couple of other drummers. Neither of them lasted more than an afternoon or evening. None of them understood what we were doing and none of us seemed to be able to put what it was we wanted into words. One of these drummers played a gig with us at Dingwalls the January following John Hasler’s sacking. The drummer was so inept, the gig so bad, that it ended with Jem driving his forehead against the wall in frustration.
We hunkered down with the aim of pre-empting what seemed to be drummers’ partiality for unnecessary dynamics and being seated when they played. I loved the idea that we all stood to play and that a drummer should stand too and carry a stick in each hand with a drum for each �
� a floor-tom and a snare. The set-up connoted a quick getaway, implied nomadism. I relished the picture of us all having carried our gear down to our first gig at the Pindar of Wakefield.
For a few weeks we moved our rehearsals to the flat of a friend of Shane’s near Marble Arch. At Cathy MacMillan’s flat we set about simplifying the drum patterns to a matter of hitting a floor-tom on the onbeat, and the snare drum on the off – the marching beat, 2/2, the polka. We recorded the songs on cassette, to present to the next candidate for the job of drummer.
In March 1983, Andrew Ranken, the guy in Whidborne Buildings whom Jem and Shane had badgered to join the group, threw over his other band, the Operation, which, with his Fine Art degree course at Goldsmiths College, had been the reason he gave to Jem and Shane for his unavailability, and came to drum with us.
He brought his own drums: a turquoise cocktail drum – deep and booming – and snare drum. He tolerated us prohibiting him from sitting down to play. His presence was one of smouldering power. He stood at his drums with bare forearms. His hands were strong and they gripped the drumsticks with the thumb aligned and the stick snug in the heel of his hand. His fingernails were brutally smooth and hard. When he played, his body bent over the drums but his head stayed erect, his lips pressed together. Despite his face’s forbidding, granite-hewn, lurkingly angry aspect, beneath his stern eyebrows Andrew’s eyes were vulnerable, accentuated by dense eyelashes.
That he had been difficult to get, but had finally relented and turned up with his gear, seemed to imbue Andrew with a prerogative that was difficult to put your finger on. It depressed me whenever Andrew said he wasn’t available for a rehearsal or a gig. It wasn’t just because I had discovered a passion for what we were doing and a place in it, but mostly because his commitments reminded me that the novel I was supposed to be writing was dying of neglect.
Here Comes Everybody Page 6
