Wonderkid
Page 4
“Spoken word.” As so often with Greg, you knew what he meant. “There’s a live review coming in Sounds,” he added in mitigation, though he knew there was every chance they wouldn’t be mentioned.
Greg went to the trouble of ringing up Fintan the agent, who was also the Trevors’ agent, who rang up the Trevors’ manager, who said he’d mention it to the Trevors’ road manager. And, blow me down, the next day, the guitar roadie, previously the most aggressive of the aggressors, asked Jack if his guitar was set up right: “Want me to have a look at it?”
Jack’s first reaction was: “Of course!” Green though he was, he knew this would mean a debt he would later have to pay, but he simply couldn’t resist the thought of this horrible hellhound having to grapple with his touchy Strat, so he said “yeah, thanks mate.” That night they got an actual dressing room and an actual soundcheck, and their actual gig actually went better. Jack and Blake had learned a lesson: “Always complain and always get your manager to do it for you.”
The good life lasted two nights until the Trevors were spectacularly late for a show, and word came that the Wunderkinds should play longer, a lot longer, to keep the audience drinking. This was impossible; their repertoire was about four and a half minutes greater than their set. Jack decided they should stop before they really embarrassed themselves and the Trevors’ guitar tech went ballistic: “I fucking set up your guitar, you arsehole,” snarled the roadie, at which point Jack pulled a scrap of paper from his back pocket, scribbled in the certain knowledge that it would later be required, and handed it to the roadie. It read: “I was wondering how long you’d take to call that favor in.” The roadie threw a punch, which would have hurt had it landed, and that was that as far as backstage détente.
The band got paid, it was a mostly terrible experience, and everyone was relieved when it was finally over. Except the Trevors, who, on the final night, emerged from the billowing smoke of their dressing room to say how sorry they were the Wunderkids were off and what a good time they’d had hanging. Nazis.
The tour might have seemed worthwhile if there had been a triumphant return but the band never played a local show that felt remotely like a hometown event. London, where Jack and Blake said they were from (though they lived just off the edge of the Tube map), didn’t offer that.
They had ceased to hand out copies of In Wunderland with any enthusiasm after a fanzine described it as being of “bewilderingly unlistenable quality”: a lack of proper demos represented an insurmountable obstacle to a record deal. The producer, the studio, the engineer: every step of this process became strategically important, the subject of endless debate. Greg had many historical anecdotes at his fingertips to illuminate each decision.
Everything arranged at tedious length, they found themselves in distant Twickenham at the Greenhouse, a bucolic sounding studio that turned out to be a lock-up in a gray Stalinist edifice that may or may not have once been the location of, or had some connection to, a greenhouse. In its grubby control room, acoustic foam baffling peeling from every wall, they were badly patronized by an aged engineer. They were attempting to record and mix five songs in two days, having no idea whether they should all play at the same time, or record just the drums and bass, and then overdub. Everyone suddenly knew all about it and had a different point of view.
“Well, let’s see how tight you are,” said the engineer, before concluding: “You’re what I call live-tight, which isn’t really tight-tight.”
“Is he going to use the expression ‘just a cunt hair’?” whispered Blake. “If he actually says ‘just a cunt hair,’ I’m walking out.”
“He’ll do that just before he puts all those brightly colored patch cables on his head and pretends to be a Rasta,” said a twin, who had been in studios with another of his bands.
In fact neither happened, but even the calming influence of Greg couldn’t ease the tension.
“Could you turn the bass up?” asked the bassist.
“The drums seem a little quiet,” said the drummer.
“Guys,” said Jack. “Even though we’re all, in a way, spending our money on this demo tape equally, that doesn’t mean that we have to be equally loud in the mix.”
“I just wondered if I could hear a little more of me,” said the bassist.
“Who’s producing this record?” demanded the grumpy engineer, brandishing a revolting pipe of Balkan Sobranie. It seemed impossible that he’d heard any rock music, let alone made any, yet he’d come highly recommended.
“Jack is,” shouted Blake.
“I thought I was,” said the engineer.
Everyone looked at everyone else, and Greg said: “Well, yes, you are.”
Jack threw up his hands and left for the cigarette that he should have smoked in the control room, if only to combat the Balkan Sobranie. That was the end of the first day.
Only Blake and Jack returned. The five tracks were delivered mixed, and the engineer was paid a little more than they had intended. The credit read “Produced by the Wunderkinds at Greenhouse Studios, assisted by Bob Buddha Bryant.” Yet, despite the friction, everyone was happy, except the twins, who felt sonically underrepresented. The songs had the bounce that Blake wanted (“They’ve got the ginger!”); the guitars rang clearly without getting in the way of the words, which pleased Jack because “it wasn’t like a fucking poetry reading”; and the tracks sounded like they’d been recorded with the use of professional equipment, so Greg was over the moon. “Rock Around the Bed,” in particular, was a real success: angular and jerky, but infectious and straightforward too, all beneath a waterfall of bubbling Blakeisms. At Greg’s listening party, after the ritual toast of “Let’s run it up the flagpole and see who salutes!,” it was the sheer exuberance of the new recordings that made everyone smile—even the twins; Blake quacked repeatedly.
Handcrafted cover art negotiated, Blake’s elaborate ideas finally acceded to (despite his manager’s assurance that there was no better way to present demos than in a generic cassette cover with nothing but the band’s name and a phone number scrawled on it), the tape was immediately sent to the minuscule Wanted record label, old penniless comrades-in-arms who released practically anything Greg remembered to pass on.
The five new songs were recent experiments, rather than road-tested favorites. At the primary school, Blake liked nothing more than making up songs with the kids. He’d suggest a melody, write a line, and then let them make the rest up, waiting until they got stuck, listening for their loopy attempts at rhyme. He’d then transcribe it all, sculpt a little here and there and, bingo! A song! Most songwriters get accused of plagiarism once or twice (some notably more often), but there are a few school-kids out there who could have their day in court with Blake Lear. Tough to prove, but he loved to take the words right out of their mouths:
I like it when we’re going
I don’t like it when we stop
And you look like you have a new haircut on
There’s a bonus point for knowing
When the firefly lights up
You get a fresh shirt with a pink button
I was bored, but I perked up
I was bored, but I perked up
I was bored, but now I’m all worked up
I’m not bored anymore
I got some new fresh air for my nose!
It’s Blake, for sure; Blake and the children of James Lewis’s class at Arundale Primary School.
3
“What song is it you wanna hear?”
CHILDREN AND CARS ARE A HORRIFIC COMBINATION—THE CONFINED space, the boredom, the ease with which vomit seeps down a leather seam to the unknowable shadow beneath. Nowadays it’s more child-friendly: one kid’s playing Sushi Cat on your iPad and the other’s watching Baby Einstein on a decommissioned phone. There’s always a CD you can slide into the stereo, or maybe a satellite radio channel that specializes in “Family Music,” if things get really desperate.
The “nightmare car journey” is a g
enre unto itself, but it has a particularly outsized role in the Wonderkids’ origin myth. I heard this one many times, mostly told by the driver, but once by the passenger. He’s the real star of the show.
Nick Hedges is driving his son down to the West Country from the Baker Street offices of Endymion Records. Laurie, aged six, had spent a relentless Friday kicking his heels waiting for the head of Endymion to drag himself away from his work and spirit the boy down to their holiday cottage to rendezvous with his mother and brother for the weekend.
“We’ll be outta here shortly,” was Nick’s unpersuasive mantra. They weren’t.
The day fidgeted on. It didn’t take long for Laurie to tire of his father’s determined chair swiveling and phone flaunting, his commanding use of the intercom. Provided with no alternative, the boy dreamed up a game where he carried messages between his father and the secretary, but neither played along. His eyes lit on a pile of cassette cases on the bookshelf by the door, a Babel of C-60s, an Elephant’s Graveyard of demos that his father had been meaning to clear away. Nick had warned the cleaners off: it might not withstand even the lightest dusting. To his bored son, this tottering tower seemed full of dangerous potential. Unmonitored, ignored, he started to extricate the most obviously loose and structurally superfluous of the cassettes. This kept him occupied for a few blessed minutes, until his father, noticing, screamed: “LAURIE!” and Laurie started to cry.
“Sorry, Norm, sorry,” Nick told America. “My boy’s in the office, causing mayhem . . . I know, I know . . . animals and children, animals and children . . .”
Endymion had never been a Virgin or a Charisma or Harvest, nor was their logo as iconic as any of those, but the label had broken a number of household names, even if those bands had invariably moved on as soon as their initial contracts were up. In fact, in the case of their largest act, Endymion had simply forgotten to pick up the option. The first Nick had known about it was a letter from the band’s lawyer pointing this out and saying goodbye.
Even if these were no longer the glory years, the label had had real top-ten success, the evidence of which still glinted in the sunlight on the walls. These days, however, Nick was completely at the mercy of Norm Bloch (“The Unmerciful”), head of WBA, Endymion’s parent company. It sometimes seemed that the only thing he could do without Norm’s written consent was score Norm drugs.
Nick’s workday finally fizzled: London had given up for the weekend, New York was in Los Angeles, and Los Angeles was having a “Funky Friday” to entertain New York. On his reluctant way, two folders clamped beneath his chin as he shepherded Laurie out of the door, Nick took a last cursory glance at his office and, in an inspired gesture at spring-cleaning, decided to dump the entire collection of cassettes into a large Sainsbury’s bag. His execution was poor (a fair percentage fell to the floor, many shattering at the hinge), but obscured spines were visible for the first time in two years.
“About time. Let’s chuck this lot.”
His son, however, felt sentimental about the source of his brief distraction. He saw the possibility of a number of distinct structures to be built and then torn down noisily at his leisure, and he insisted his father bring the tapes. Nick, who just wanted his son to shut up, did.
The trip was a disaster. For the few moments Laurie wasn’t whining about the window being up, it rained. Nick’s back spasmed whenever he reached behind him to pick up something Laurie had dropped (often) or tried to foist upon him something he didn’t want. Suddenly it was blazing sun. Nick opened the sunroof, enjoying a moment’s silence until he looked in the rearview mirror as they sat immobile in traffic, to see his son squinting in the glare, sweating implausibly.
“Whose stupid idea was this?” he thought. He should have just stayed in town all weekend with his girlfriend.
When they finally hit the motorway, Laurie immediately wanted to stop, but Nick wanted to drive because they’d finally hit the motorway. He was soon met with a damp surprise, so they had to stop anyway. Laurie, pants and underwear removed, was reseated on a throne of Rolling Stones T-shirts Nick found in the boot, stuffed between boxes of promotional Converse. (He liked to impress people by casually asking their shoe size, then lobbing a pair of sneakers at them.) Nick had the presence of mind to dry the offending pieces of clothing outside, closing the window on them to keep them from flying away.
Back on the road, Laurie decided to recite a poem. His father, making mental notes on a deal memo, feigned interest, then found himself genuinely impressed by the sheer mental effort Laurie was putting into his performance.
“Great, mate,” he said.
“Well, it took eight miles, that’s something,” said Laurie woefully, eye on the odometer. “Know any poems, Dad?”
Nick did, but said he didn’t. Laurie retaliated by fiddling with the automatic window, which sent his clothes flying off onto the hard shoulder. They couldn’t very well reverse up the motorway. The alternative was for Nick to lose his temper, which he did, to which Laurie reacted with his most impressive bout of sobbing yet. Millie was going to be fucking thrilled when her son arrived, shivering, naked from the waist down. Nick tried to imagine every shop between their present location and their cottage, the Sirens. Nothing at this time of night. Wait! Rolling Stones tracksuit bottoms in the boot. The wrong size but they’d do.
“Why don’t we put on some of your music, Laurie?” asked Nick in desperation. There were tapes that he occasionally allowed his children to play: Sesame Street crap, some bloke who sang “clap your hands, here comes Charlie”-type Christian songs, and a few Disney cassettes rewound so often that parts sounded like they’d been recorded underwater. It was difficult to know which was worse, but there was no choice.
“No,” said Laurie, his misery definitive. “Mum took them in the car with Darren.”
“Well, I’ve got some music,” said his father unappealingly, before slapping himself on the forehead: “You fucking idiot!” His whole weekend had just gone up the spout: he’d put the CDs down on his desk when he was cleaning those stupid cassettes away. “Sorry, son. I forgot something.”
“Why don’t we listen to one of these tapes?” asked Laurie. There was one at the top of the Sainsbury’s bag with a picture of an old TV with some kids’ show on.
“What tapes? Oh, Christ. No. We’re not listening to that shit.”
God, he wanted a drink. He deserved a drink. Enough to leave Laurie sitting in the car with a bag of cheese’n’onion in the sure knowledge that the boy would then unavoidably mention this desertion to his mother? Yes. There was a little pub Nick had noticed many times just off the main road. He fantasized that it seemed welcoming.
“How do you fancy a Coke, Laurie?” he asked, as if out of the blue.
“Are you going to leave me in the car while you’re in a pub?” Laurie wasn’t a mind reader. It happened all the time.
“Would you like me to sit with you in the garden?” It might be worth it.
Laurie sighed. “Can I listen to the tapes?”
“Yeah, course you can, mate.” Suddenly his father was unusually cheerful. “And I’ve got some spare bottoms in the back you can wear.”
In the parking lot, Laurie scrabbled through the cassettes. The one he’d had his eye on had somehow sifted from the top of the heap, so he decided to lay them out on the tarmac as though he was having a car boot sale. His father emerged with Coke and crisps.
“You’re gonna have to pick those all up, you know. All of them.”
It was a sorry collection, but Laurie finally found the one he was looking for. Its cover, craftily handmade, distinguished it from the others, all beige inserts and typewriter font: someone had actually gone to the trouble of cutting out the front of the TV so, depending on how you folded the paper behind, it could broadcast different “channels,” one of which, bizarrely, was a naked woman and her private pieces. Laurie slotted it into the stereo.
He didn’t have the vocabulary, nor would he have felt the need to
explain, but the herky-jerky simplicity sang to him in a way that his dad’s cassettes rarely did. The chorus of the first song seemed to be “I’ve got a song stuck in my head, I’m gonna rock around the bed” over and over and over, and when his father reemerged, mood two pints less bitter, Laurie was three or four songs in, one called “Lucky Duck.” Nick liked nothing more than being able to leave somewhere the moment he wanted, a freedom his family had severely restricted, and when he saw that the tapes were already cleared away, that his son was sitting in the front with a seat belt on, Nick felt benign enough to let him stay there despite the safety hazard and dubious legality. And though there were at least two hours to go—they were about to be funneled off into the infinite twists and turns of country lanes, where the taking of a bend at over ten miles an hour without honking represented a calculated risk about which Nick felt considerably less anxious than usual—he let Laurie leave the cassette in.
“Oh, wind it back to the beginning, Dad.”
“Wouldn’t you rather . . .?”
“Wind it back!”
When they pulled into the Sirens’s driveway, the tape was still playing—they’d been through all five songs about ten times, even had something approaching a discussion, as Nick tried to understand what it was precisely that Laurie liked about it, and what it was precisely that he himself liked about it. Laurie was punching the air with abandon and even Nick was singing along:
I’m gonna rock around the bed
I’m gonna rock around the bed
I got a song stuck in my head
I’m gonna rock around the bed
And you can keep your peanut butter
And your whole wheat bread
I’ve got a song stuck in my head
I’m gonna rock around the bed.
Nick had his weekend’s work cut out for him—a terrific relief—and Rock Music for Kids, maybe even Kindie Music (though he did not yet know it as either of those things) was born.