by Jim Pollard
Below me, the heavy oak door swung open and the head appeared in the doorway. ‘Next,’ he boomed like a sadistic dentist. His eyes skipped up the stairs two at a time and locked on mine. ‘Ah Dane,’ he said, turning on his military heels and disappearing back into the office. He said it the way he always said it, the way most people seemed to say it: as if he was spitting between the gap in his front teeth. My own feet fumbled beneath me and I almost fell down the stairs and through the door behind him.
Somehow he’d already managed to seat himself behind his desk and once again those eyes rose to peer at me from over the top of his spectacle rims. He was stroking his fountain pen. The leather writing surface in the centre of the desk upon which he rested his forearms was uncluttered; a file with my name on it lay untouched to one side. ‘So, Dane, you wish to do A-levels,’ he said as if it was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard.
‘I thought I...’
‘Did you now? Did you?’ He was slowly turning the pen in his fingers as if it were a majorette’s baton and he was practising a complicated manoeuvre.
‘I just thought... With my ordinary grades...’
‘Of course you can do A-levels.’ Some unfamiliar activity in the mouth region suggested he was trying a smile. ‘If you can’t I’m buggered if I can think of anyone who can.’ It broadened, almost to a chuckle.
He guessed I was taken aback and he was right. I’m not sure if it was the smiling or the remarks concerning buggering or simply the contents of what he said but taken aback is what I was. He gestured for me to sit down.
In front of his desk was a large green leather finished armchair with thick wooden arms. I expected it to make a farting noise like CJ’s in that sit-com about the bloke who fakes his own suicide. Reggie Perrin. It didn’t.
‘Dane,’ he said. ‘The only thing daft about you is your absurd lack of self-confidence. I don’t say this often but I am delighted to have you as a pupil in my sixth form and will give you my blessing for whichever subjects you care to select. And,’ this time he definitely smiled, ‘I am more than happy to repeat this information to you daily until such time as it finally sinks in.’ Somehow, as he was speaking, he had pulled the folder towards himself and opened it. His pen was poised. Clearly he had work to do.
‘Right, thank you, sir,’ my dry throat managed at the second time of asking. I rose. ‘I’ll, er, remember that.’ I took my leave with a strange loping movement that propelled me and my body towards the door while my eyes remained fixed on the head and his ready pen. The door handle was elusive. The headmaster was still smiling.
‘Dane,’ he said, eventually, pointing at my open file with the nib of his pen. ‘Which subjects would you like to study?’
That evening Cal had a driving lesson and I was walking home alone. Despite what the head had said I felt uneasy. Perhaps it was because it disrupted my world picture but I don’t think so. I kept thinking about Terry. The summer had definitely gone. The air seemed heavy and a brown pallor hung over Beech Park like a smell. Cars lined the streets as they had begun to line our conversations. The staccato of stops and starts and shunting gears, the whisper of noxious vapour like a bad memory, it reminded me of home.
In my bag I had more new exercise books than I had used in my entire school career hitherto. For English they gave you an exercise book for every book you studied - as if they expected you to write a book about the book. Through my holdall I could feel their dumbly demanding presence - ruled narrow feint with margin. Something was nagging and the following morning Jon and Cal were waiting, all chat and easy laughter with each other, when I walked into the common room.
The common room was already billeted with a series of discrete camps of the type children construct with bedroom furniture. Most had a hazy roof of cigarette smoke. Alone in the middle of the room were the two almost facing chairs at which Cal and Jonathan were seated. The two coffee cups and single ashtray at their feet sat up like little islets in an ocean of wooden flooring. The three of us surveyed the room like landlords inspecting chipboard conversions.
‘Well what do you think?’ asked Jonathan.
‘It’s a fucking mess,’ I said and I meant it. In my mind I could hear my mother in her wifely mode assessing the furniture. It might not have been new but there wasn’t a scratch on it. Look at it now. Ought to be ashamed...
‘No,’ said Jon. ‘This.’ He was referring to the bass guitar he had perched on his knee like a nephew.
‘It looks great,’ I said, prepared. ‘Let’s hear it.’
It was black like Cal’s guitar and also a Fender. Fender Precision. I smiled. Never, it seemed, had an instrument been so inappropriately named. Jon’s fingers limped retardedly around the fretboard as he attempted a funereal version of ‘Money’ by Pink Floyd.
‘Cal just showed me,’ he explained, barely even sheepish. There was a faint ripple of applause from behind one heap of old gold foam cushions, a groaned cheer from behind another and unrestrained laughter from a third.
Jonathan had clearly never played in his life and already he was performing to a larger audience than I ever had. He was absolutely awful and it didn’t appear to bother him. He simply smiled back. I’ve never been inside the door of one but it seems to me that in prep schools they give you something priceless, something that otherwise you can spend a lifetime searching for. It’s self-belief. It’s balls. In our primary school they gave us a bottle of milk (one third of a pint) and a three-inch opaque grey drinking straw. At Cal and Jonathan’s school they served a cocktail of confidence which pupils slurped up with great red and white striped straws, dexterous, intelligent and at least a yard long like the Humphreys in that TV ad.
Jonathan’s general crappiness was compounded by the fact that his father had - naturally - bought him a long scale bass - the professional size, the most expensive size. It had a neck about half as long again as a regular six string guitar with a bright sheen finish that even the common room’s yellowing beams of frigid fluorescence could find. With the September sun already screaming in through the dust coated windows, I found it difficult, as the light caught the guitar, to look either of them in the face.
Jonathan had slim elegant fingers which with his light, still bony build made him a natural for most of the female leads in the school play. On the bass’s broad, fresh fingerboard and across its straight stark frets, they tripped and stuttered like stilettos on a polished dance floor.
‘There’s a little practise needed of course,’ he said.
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘Hear, fucking, hear,’ said an armchair.
Cal said, ‘Look, I need to get something Frankie. I’ve left it at home.’ He gestured towards the door. ‘Do you wanna...?’
I nodded.
‘So, Mr Pastorius,’ someone said as I followed Cal out of the door, ‘when is the Jonny and Calum brazen showband’s first jig to be, then?’
‘It will probably be around Christmas,’ Jon said without a flutter in his voice.
‘What have you forgotten?’ I asked Cal.
‘Only the most important thing,’ he said, clapping me on the back like a sports coach and shoving me down the stairs. ‘An instrument pour toi. We have to be a four-piece. All the best bands are four piece. The Beatles, the Who, Floyd, Zep...’
‘Paper Lace,’ I said.
‘Exactly. Lieutenant Pigeon, Kenny, the Rubettes...’
We strode from the sixth form block onto an autumn morning with dew on the grass, a nip in the air and the sun hanging low in the sky. The term block was something of a misnomer - it was actually an old house. We believed it was still standing by virtue of some planner’s oversight and, in order to disguise the error, had been incorporated into the school grounds. At that time, it looked like one of the slum dwellings they’d knocked down in the next street from me so as to build the Bevan Estate.
‘They�
��re getting close,’ my mother had said when the bulldozers moved in. ‘Too bloody close,’ replied my father, temporarily putting down his paper and adjourning to the bay window. Now the sixth form block has a preservation order on it.
What must have once been the garden path up to the house led behind the main body of the school and out into the playground.
‘Where we going?’ I asked as Cal turned across the school field towards the arts centre.
‘I’ve had a word with Blakey. He says you can borrow one.’
‘What?’
‘Blake says you can borrow a school guitar.’
‘Right. What is it?’ Most of the school guitars I’d seen were worse than Cal’s Dad’s.
‘One of those ones from Woolworth’s I’m afraid but it plays and you can share my amp. We’ll find someone to make you a fuzz box for their electronics project - that’ll sort it out.’
‘Right.’ When it came to sorting it out, Cal was right up there with them.
Mr Blake was tinkling away at the piano when we walked in: a jolly jungle of notes. I didn’t recognise the piece which was a pleasant surprise. I had assumed, on the basis of five years of school assemblies, that Blakey’s repertoire was limited to ‘Kumbaya’, ‘To Be A Pilgrim’ and a sprinkling of the less offensive carols.
‘Ah, Frankie. Calum,’ he said, in his chummy way, as if we were old mates and equals. He was OK, Mr Blake. Unimaginative in his choice of hymns perhaps but a decent bloke - what my father would have called hard but fair. I’d only been in his class for those two weeks at the start of the first year but he still always said hello when we passed in the corridor and asked how I was getting on. In fact, once I’d left his class he treated me more like an Uncle might than a teacher: something I’d been particular grateful for during those first few months when secondary school seems like a Gestapo camp. Blake had a reputation as a strict bastard and my easy familiarity with him impressed my classmates.
‘So,’ he continued, sitting back and closing the lid. ‘Calum tells me you’re becoming a bit of Django Reinhardt?’
What was that? Rhyming slang for old fart? I looked at Cal. Blakey laughed. He was negotiating the room now - moving maracas and shakers, tidying the chime bars. ‘A bit before your time I suppose, Django Reinhardt - jazz guitarist. It’s all Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page now isn’t it?’
‘That sort of thing, sir, yes,’ I said.
‘Well, it’s not much but you’re welcome to it as long as you’re at the school,’ Blake said. He was rummaging in a cupboard. Piles of sheet-music tumbled out and then a wodge of pink examination papers tied up with string. He emerged with a red guitar, a bit dusty but, if the condition of the scratch-plate was anything to go by, not much used. It looked like the sort of thing that Pete Townsend used to smash on stage.
Blake ran his thumb along the fingerboard. ‘Of course, it needs playing in a bit.’
‘I’m sure that won’t be any problem,’ Cal said.
I was finding chords and strumming as we walked. It wasn’t easy as the guitar didn’t have a strap and my tie kept getting in the way.
I gave up, resorting to simply carrying the instrument. ‘So we’re doing a gig at Christmas?’
‘Jon would like to.’
‘Why not,’ I said, my hand beneath the curve in the instrument’s body, the neck pointing forwards and down like the beak of an ostrich searching for a little soft sand.
I sensed Cal turn his head and look at me. ‘We’ll write some songs,’ he said after a moment.
The bell was ringing now - the peal that punctuated our day - and suddenly, the headmaster, looking more like Batman than ever in what appeared to be a new, longer and even wider academic gown, overtook us. I wanted to talk to him, cleared my throat to, but he had gone.
18
The first practice of the still nameless band was scheduled for Sunday morning in Cal’s garage. He and I were to spend Saturday writing songs. On Friday night I turned down Jon’s offer of a lift to Scamps, our nearest nightclub where Terry and his new crowd - ‘gainfully employed, mate’ - were to celebrate his first pay packet. Instead I sat up in my bedroom writing lyrics.
I remember this seemed a symbolic, if not surprising, thing to be doing - not going to Terry’s first do as an adult. Don’t forget I’d known Terry the child longer than I’d known the others - we’d been at the same prefab primary school - but now I was choosing a different direction for my life, stating it and fixing it. Different people. A different type of people. I was opting for a future with the prep school boys, Cal and Jonathan.
Jonathan wasn’t going either. He was just offering lifts, enjoying being a car-owner. He particularly hated Scamps with its cheap neon flash and syn-drum disco, wall to wall with plastic glasses and plastic smiles. I think he expected to get beaten up every time he walked in there. With his accent and irritatingly polite self-assurance he probably wasn’t wrong. He was to spend the evening with Cal improving his still fragile bass technique. As for Charlie the drummer, well, he was practicing too in a manner of speaking, practicing hitting things - drums, beer, the dance-floor at Scamps, strutting soul boys.
I attempted a few lines on a kind of coming of age theme but they read like one of my discursive essays: lacking sparkle. Rock lyrics seemed to me to be about ‘breaking away’ from things, leaving them all behind on ‘highways’, or about injustices and exploitations. I racked my brains. Discounting those at the hands of my parents, the biggest injustice I could come up with had been perpetrated by Mr Duncan, the PE teacher, who deemed that my inability to produce a wet towel proved that I had not had a shower after games, and, in gross violation of local authority policy, clubbed me around the ear. (The truth was that Cal, who was in the shrimps rugby group and hence in the next door changing room, had borrowed my still-wringing towel having forgotten his.)
Mr Duncan was never particularly interested in the truth anyway, regarding order and press-ups as more important. Terry reported how in Geography (the star-jumping sadists’s second subject) dough-head Duncan had insisted that the Bahamas was not a country but French for Barbados. When Terry produced the atlas to prove the contrary he was sent to stand outside the classroom for the remainder of the lesson.
They say Elvis Costello used to keep a little black book with the names of all those who had offended him - an aide-memoire to retribution. I suppose that’s the sort of thing you need to do when you come from Liverpool. But I don’t need a book. I can remember Duncan’s name.
I tried my hands at lyrics about breaking away from Beech Park - Gonna leave this dusty suburb and hit the road, that sort of thing - but they didn’t really work. I kept spinning off into cliché at the first bend. That’s how I started writing lyrics about the ordinary things, my ordinary life.
Everybody thinks ‘Wonderful Moment’ is about Wendy but it wasn’t. I wrote it that night and it was about Brenda Bagley, a cohort of Terry’s sister, whom I’d snogged briefly before expiring amongst the Party Fours at Cal’s birthday party the previous week-end. She had a face like a dangerous dog and a personality to match so I suppose there was a bit of poetic licence there but basically that was as it was. There’s a passion, a hunger in your soul when you’re 17 that’s called desperation if it’s still there at 25. It wasn’t very wonderful (although it did only last a moment) but Brenda Bagley wherever you are and whoever you’re under I salute you.
‘Rotten In Denmark’, later the title track of our first album and responsible for more of the bullshit about the Go-Karts than any other song, was also written that night. With my mother making her cocoa downstairs and my father’s television roaring, all canned laughter and packaged punches.
The headline on that New Rock Journal front cover, the issue that was changing hands for thirty quid just after Cal died, ‘Punk For The Thinking Man (or doll - natch, politicos)’, was based on those three magic words. Rotten In Denma
rk. Sure Cal and I were able to milk it - Hamlet was on the A-level syllabus - but it was never intended. Not by us. The song ‘Rotten in Denmark’ has nothing to do with Shakespeare. It was inspired by the 14 point headline to a small item in the corner of the an inside page of that Thursday’s NRJ about how Johnny Rotten, in the wake of the latest Punk versus Teds scuffle, was supposedly going to Copenhagen.
What we always liked about the song was that anybody could have written it. Simple chords, simple images. ‘Market fascist - Nobel prize.’ Up a fifth. ‘The Adverts’ Gary Gilmore’s eyes.’ Up another fifth - it’s pop by numbers. ‘The King is gone, Johnny Rotten in Denmark.’ Back to the tonic. ‘Where Paris chic is outside drains.’ Here we go again. ‘And Steven Biko dies in chains.’ The chorus took five minutes to write. ‘Rotten In Denmark - walk that mile and let me know’. Downstairs, the News At Ten chimed its own headlines and Andrew Gardner took up the news beat.
Admittedly the intro riff is a little more complicated but only a little. It’s just that fourth chord - the F#, the supertonic (chosen because we liked the name) - that makes it remotely interesting. Anybody could have written it. There’s been a lot of speculation about what the song is about and who exactly are all the people mentioned - a debate that has been complicated by uncertainty over whether it was Cal or me or both of us who actually wrote it. I’d love it to rage - I love this being Dane/Carter’s ‘You’re So Vain’, musos and anoraks squabbling over its meaning - but the truth I promised and at least this bit is easy to tell.
I wrote it. Apart from Cal, of course, only Wendy knew that before now. Even Charlie and Jon didn’t know. The Dane/Carter compact was tightly closed to all but the two of us. Wendy came up to me after the first proper Go-Karts gig, placed her hand on the body of the guitar which was still hanging around my neck, and asked me ‘I know you’re not supposed to say but “Rotten In Denmark” - just tell me who wrote that one?’ She still used to hide behind blusher and eye-liner then. ‘I promise I won’t tell.’ Her manicured hand. My cheap guitar with its Fender strap. Despite the rips and tears in my T-shirt and jeans, I had sweat pouring down my face. She dabbed it off with a powder puff. I told her.
