Wonderkid

by Wesley Stace

  The Bishop, while full of admiration for his pupil’s gusto, was happiest wading in the shallows. Slade’s nonsense was literary, a construct in opposition to sense, always on the threshold of knowledge. Blake’s church was broader, more catholic even than the Monsignor’s. He viewed all poetry, all literature, through this prism. Auden, Bishop (Elizabeth), Empson, Smith (Alexander)—failed nonsense poets all. They didn’t have the nerve for it. What a waste! Beckett was the honorable exception: even his prose was nonsense poetry. And Joyce had it in him; he could throw a little nonsense around with the best of them. Bits of Finnegan’s Wake read like Lear’s letters. He thought of a name for the dissertation: ’king Lear.

  Nonsense was for adults, but children got it. It was pure pleasure, an embarrassment to academia. It put the id in kids’ literature. Children dream without restraint, as Dr. Seuss once said, and Nonsense made kids of adults. Into the fold came John Lennon, In His Own Write, and the works of Spike Milligan, the true heir to Blake and Lear; and, though Blake was somewhat reluctant, Hilaire Belloc, anti-Semitism and all. The Bishop was thrilled, despite feeling himself dragged into slightly deeper waters of Dylanology and Lennonism than he had imagined, and began to speak at head table of a dissertation “with potential” by a “most promising” student. He imported into his smoky rooms a visiting Oxford don, desperately hard-of-hearing, to elucidate the links between Lear and Carroll and the works of John Taylor, the water poet. “Sit down, both of you,” chortled the Oxford don, “and don’t speak a word till I’ve finished.” When tea and scones were served, it was like they were acting out the Mad Hatter’s tea party with Blake as the sleepy dormouse.

  He was, it goes without saying, not always at his most alert during these tutorials. Blake allotted a portion of his student grant to the various herbs and chemicals that might enhance his enjoyment of, and enlighten his attitude towards, nonsense, music, and anything else he fell over. He was not alone: such beneficial substances were the currency of the college bars, freely available to anyone with money. Thus it was during an acid trip, after a late-night horror film at the arts cinema, that he came up with his most inevitably bad idea. The first bad idea had been to watch it on acid: a slasher movie, the true bloody-humored brutality of which had been severely misrepresented in the program précis (that he himself had written). It had been around the time that a decapitated corpse held its own severed head above the body of a screaming woman, tied to a hospital operating table, and attempted cunnilingus with her, that Blake wondered whether the acid had been prudent. As he walked home across the green, watching (to his satisfaction) the earth shift underfoot like a million squiggling worms, it dawned on him: the real lack of nerve was his own. When he got home, he smoked a joint, put aside a Beckett essay (due the next morning) and began to write the dissertation that would win him his first.

  The fateful idea—formally interesting, philosophically unique, academically suicidal—was to write his dissertation about nonsense in the form of nonsense. The Bishop pleaded with him, prayed: all that research, all those modern ideas—what a waste, what a waste. The Bishop would help if only a compromise could be reached: perhaps some illustrative nonsense passages, representing the subconscious resurfacing, weaving in and out of a dissertation, structured around the four monoliths of nonsense: Lear, Carroll, Milligan, and Dylan. Blake, however, had convinced himself: “Take care of the sounds, and the sense will take care of itself,” he quoted Carroll (though in fact Carroll had said the precise opposite.)

  All was lost. The Bishop, with a rueful smile, wished Blake well, reiterated what a pleasure it had been meeting with him so regularly, and assured him that he should reconsider or regret it the rest of his life. Blake left wondering whether all the Bishop required was an “ideal child-friend” to take him by the hand, row him out on to the lake, and then wave goodbye.

  Blake left Cambridge without a degree: the dissertation was, unusually, ruled “unmarkable,” thus nullifying other fairly good results across his exams. He hadn’t completed the course. Neither his advisor nor his father could prevail upon him to take a substitute exam, and so, rather than becoming an academic or a top man at the BBC, he came home and, after a sufficiency of lolling around, took twin jobs as a primary school teacher by day and cinema usher by night.

  That was when the band got going.

  While Blake had been paddling on the shore of academia, Jack had become a printer and a part-time carpenter.

  Carpentry was a ridiculous day job for a musician, proximity-of-sharp-blade-to-finger-wise. Mind you, it stood you in good stead for making guitars, and, if you lost your fingers, as you almost certainly would, you had Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi as the Satanic Patron Saint of your recovery. On his last day working at a sheet metal factory, Iommi, aged seventeen, lost the tips of two or three fingers on his right hand, before discovering that via the canny deployment of thimbles, he could play again. And he didn’t sound too bad, did he? And what about Django Reinhardt? Didn’t half of his fingers get melted, so that he played those crazy solos with just two? He only used the burned ones for barre chords. And Mark Knopfler only ever used a finger and a thumb for his guitar solos: he could have done the decent thing and cut the other three off, out of solidarity. He didn’t need them. Who’d have noticed?

  Blake had grown a foolhardy (though fundamentally ironic) goatee with a curlicue moustache. Thus, their first post-Brutles lineup was a duo called The Walrus and the Carpenter—the band name still preceded the music. Jack had many tunes, all surprisingly simple given his sometimes proggy taste in virtuosic solos, and Blake had lyrics and a few melodies. They jammed these ingredients into the mixer and found that somehow, despite their vastly differing influences, Jack’s riffage and Blake’s verbal noodling blended nicely, if fluffed up with a bouncy tune. It was as though this was precisely what they’d been planning throughout their separation. But they were never going to be a duo. They needed bass and drums.

  Watch With Mother was the next project, the name taken from the BBC afternoon kids’ show that had aired stop-motion classics since the dawn of the Radio Times: Andy Pandy, Flower Pot Men, and The Woodentops, all in themselves perfectly operable band names, and the last of which was already taken by an operative band. Ads were duly posted in the NME and other papers of record to attract the attention of an “ill-humored and naughty rhythm section. Must hate the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and all good music.”

  And, wonder of wonders, the twins materialized. Jack and Blake liked them before they’d even played a note, at their very first drink, though they could never tell them apart. “When did you guys first meet?” someone had once asked them in all innocence. “In the fucking womb!” shouted the slightly noisier of the two. The twins weren’t that good, but it looked like they were. Any rhythm section seems tight if the bassist and the drummer are identical. They absolutely wouldn’t dress the same, though—that was out of question. And they didn’t like the name Watch With Mother either. On this, as far as Blake and Jack were concerned, there was the possibility of negotiation. So with their first gig looming, they sat in the pub and proposed fifty different names, all rejected.

  “Okay, then,” said Blake in pique, “What name do you two wunderkinds want?”

  “Eh!” said Tweedletim. “What about Wunderkinds?”

  “Yeah!” said Tweedletom. “What about Wunderkinds?”

  “It’s great,” said Jack.

  “It’s so great that there’s probably another Wunderkinds. There are probably twenty other Wunderkinds,” said Blake.

  “Yeah,” said Jack, “but that doesn’t matter, we’ll just throw an umlaut in somewhere. Is there an umlaut in Wunderkinds?” No one had the faintest idea. “It doesn’t really matter. Dad’ll know.”

  “Well, it’s an interesting legal issue: how different does a band name have to be? Could we call ourselves the Rolling Stonés with just an acute on the final e?” No one was that interested except Blake. “How about the Direcritics?” But everyon
e was sold on Wunderkinds.

  “Well, let’s put an umlaut over the i . . .” said Jack.

  “And another over the U?” said a twin.

  “And if there’s one of those,” said Blake. “We’ll just call ourselves Der Wunderkinds and have done with it.”

  As if by miracle, everyone was in agreement. They toasted the new name.

  “Wunderful,” said Jack.

  “I always wanted to be in a band called the Something-or-others,” said Tom. Blake thought back to Replicants. You had to have an article, and it had to be definite. Not having one was pretentious and spelled trouble. Look at Talking Heads; they were so pissed off that they went to the trouble of calling an album The Name of this Band is Talking Heads, like they were telling you off for getting it wrong.

  The Wunderkinds

  The Wunderkïnds

  The Wüñdêrkïnds

  Der Wunderkinds

  They’d finesse it later. Point was: they had a name. With all those accents, an eye-popping logo couldn’t be far behind.

  And the Wunderkinds needed a singer with a great name too. Not James Lewis. Or Jimmy Lewis. He’d work on it.

  Their future manager, Greg, saw them playing bottom of the bill at a Miner’s Strike benefit in Shepherd’s Bush. Blake couldn’t care less about politics, but you could always get on a Miner’s Strike benefit. He made a joke, which went over badly (because no one understood it and then he tried to explain it) about how he’d thought it was a Minor’s Strike. But they played well.

  One might have supposed Greg liked their unfocused raw energy, their songs, or even their trousers (like Leggy Mountbatten in the Rutles movie), but what appealed to him was the concept of a rhythm section composed of twins. He had himself been a bass player, and it made him nostalgic for a twin brother he had never known. He ended up rubbing shoulders with a woman, and as they talked through the band’s brief set, he noticed that his pretended vulture-like circling of this potential “baby act” (as though he had far larger, more successful clients on his roster) was proving somewhat lubricious to her. You could always tell a band by the average age and sexual appetites of the females they attracted. (This was a judgment he had to radically reevaluate after the Wunderkinds’ first flush of success.) He’d always be grateful to the band for that night’s leg-over.

  So at first it was the twins, and then foreplay, but Greg woke the next morning with one of the songs on repeat in his head and a scratch on his back, a wincing reminder of the pleasures of the previous evening. And there she was, even now, dressing in silhouette against his white curtains. He didn’t have white curtains. Oh yeah, they were in a hotel. He winced again, trying to remember if he’d put his credit card down. Maybe she was paying.

  Greg had a history working for some of the more eccentric labels in the distant 1970s, and many good stories to match. It’s fair to say he was on his last go round. He was decent, music was turning cutthroat, and he didn’t want much to do with it. But he saw something in the Wunderkinds, and as he listened to the Primary School teaching university graduate telling him about the band at the pub the next night, he fell for the whole thing: Blake, the band, the virtuoso brother, the vision, even the name.

  “Wunderkinds. What’s that then, German?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Brilliant, man.”

  Greg liked to stand at a bar, sipping a pint, talking to whomever would listen, listening to anyone who’d talk. He was a man without a man’s skin, hair thinning now, once a pretty boy. His skin was so soft, he said, because he’d never told a lie—and this you believed, though it was the first of many exaggerations. Part of his charm was his boyishness—he was scared stiff of foreign words, or long English ones, and their pronunciation eluded him. He’d plump for his own, stick with it, and, bizarrely, people around him would adopt it, too.

  Blake loved everything about Greg: his good vibe, his imperturbability, his default mode of friendship towards all, his “bring ’em all in” attitude. He represented something real, something unironic, something beyond the pained political correctness of the union bar. There was nothing evil about the way Greg referred to a woman bending over as “a nice place to park your bike.” He was a bit like the monsignor: there were eternal verities; nothing was relative. You had to believe in things, and do what you believed in—that was the only way. Greg hadn’t quite grasped that no one else was doing it that way anymore. Blake also loved Greg’s mime show—everything came with a visual reference. Ironing, writing, talking on the phone, drying your hair—one hand was always showing you what he meant. Jack used to do a mean impression of Greg ironing and then answering the phone and burning his ear. Best were Greg’s Malapropisms, his catchphrases. Blake used more than one of them in a song, and kept a notebook called Sugar on Everything: Thoughts of Our Manager.

  With Greg in charge, the band was well represented. Blake vowed that they’d always be represented by people who effortlessly understood, from the core of their very being, what the Wunderkinds stood for. That vow lasted all of a year.

  And so, with a manager, and some very basic recordings under their belt (muffled home demos collected on a cassette called In Wunderland, the Tenniel Tweedledum and Tweedledee illustration central on each one-of-a-kind decoupaged cover, their fat faces replaced by Jack’s and Blake’s), the Wunderkinds started to play clubs, to pay their dues, a part of the process that was of paramount importance to Greg, mainly because it excused every setback, as though someone somewhere was keeping score and the dues would finally be paid off.

  They were on their way up, without moving terribly quickly, or, for that matter, up. Greg kept spirits high, another of his talents. Jobs permitting—Jack was only able to take so much time off—they worked as they could. The goal was a support act for someone with their own audience, though bands were curiously unwilling to let you open unless you already had an audience of your own.

  The arrival of an agent seemed to push things in the right direction. All agents were Irish, and Fintan was no exception. He got them a tour of England supporting a band called the Trevors, whose show, all spiky post-punk posturing, wasn’t bad (though you felt for the microphones). The tour, however, was hell. The Trevors themselves were okay; it was the road crew, unleashed hounds of hell, pit bulls defending their masters and their territory.

  There was no chance, of course, of the Trevors striking their gear after soundcheck or sharing their equipment, so the Wunderkinds played their show nightly in a portion of stage roughly equivalent to a parking space, in front of an audience who, whether they wanted to pay attention or not, hardly could—the Trevors’ crew had been careful to use all the channels on the house board and the monitor desk. Not that the Wunderkinds could have soundchecked anyway, since their uberlords, through no great sense of malice on their part, would soundcheck for the maximum amount of time, until doors if necessary, endlessly running the same songs, and then, as they were slightly drunk, attempting turgid covers that always went unplayed, because forgotten, during the show. If one of their crew had thought to say: “Hey, don’t forget the support band, boys. They’ve come a long way,” the Trevors would have been offstage before you could say Smokey Robinson. The one night the Wunderkinds got a soundcheck, Blake said he couldn’t hear his voice in the monitor. The soundman laughed at him through the foldback, his own voice ringing clear as a bell: “Well, fucking sing louder then!”

  Backstage was just the same. There was no one to get the Wunderkinds their beer, or their drink tickets, or secure them a dressing room. The Trevors’ crew arrived earlier (mostly traveling overnight to do so, which perhaps accounted for their foul mood) and cordoned off areas rightfully theirs, generally amounting to the whole expanse of backstage. Dressing rooms varied in squalor, some no more than glorified storage rooms, appliance bone yards, others complete with a sofa and a mirror, everything beneath a thin covering of what Jack called “punk dust.” Once, the Wunderkinds were, literally, billeted a broom cupboard.

&n
bsp; “It’s a broom cupboard!” said Blake in a rare moment of public complaint. Harder men than he laughed. “We can’t even all fit at the same time.”

  They opted to use their van as a dressing room, which remained policy for the rest of the tour, so that they passed through the actual backstage only on their way to play. Whenever they bumped into the Trevors, it was all “Hey man! How are you doing?” very friendly and northern, as though they were all going to head out and get chips with brown sauce afterwards. The headliners were quite unaware that their road crew treated everything as a pissing contest.

  “They’re like Nazi fucking bureaucrats,” said Jack. “Get someone else to do the dirty work and pretend everything’s fine.”

  He rang Greg, who hadn’t been able to make the whole trip (partly for reasons of group finance, but also because he didn’t care to be away from home): “Man, we need a representative; we need a road manager or something; this is insane. We’re not getting our proper bite of the cherry here; we need our own pit bull.”

  “Just to pick up a hundred quid at the end of the night?”

  “Have you any idea what’s happening out here? Are you our manager?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then fucking manage!”

  “Look, Jack, I’ll get it done,” Greg said with exasperation. “Trust me.”

  “You promise?” Jack pushed. Greg had a habit of letting things slide.