by Tim Roux
“Yeah, what?”
“You look really lonely.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Your songs are really sad too.”
“Well, yeah, they are. That’s because I’m a happy-go-lucky type of guy and need some sort of balance in my life.”
She gave me the Spaniel-from-Zanzibar look. “I really love your stuff.”
“You’re young enough to be my daughter.”
“I’m looking for a father figure.”
“I could never have guessed.”
“Don’t you just want a friend?”
As it happened, I did. The hell-raising rock star act wasn’t making sense even to me. The limousine was looking more like a Williamson’s potatoes truck and the hangers-on were not exactly Pamela Des Barres, nor had they been with members of Franz Ferdinand or Keane the night before.
I did have friends. I have fantastic friends in Lesley, Jerry, Saskia and Martin who are fellow artists. We have supported each other over the years and I love them to bits. I also have friends from school and from the house we shared off the Anlaby Road but, yeah, I can always squeeze in one more, especially one who can’t get enough of me in a nice sort of way.
Jackie, Jade’s mum, refers to me as her very own Ralph McTell. In this game you are always being likened to somebody and most of the references I just don’t get. The Ralph McTell thing is a deliberate joke. Jackie’s mum, Jade’s nan, keeps harking back to George Formby. Luckily she isn’t deluded enough to think I am anything like him. I’m not fit even to lick his sandals according to Nan. Did George Formby really wear sandals? More likely golf shoes, or clogs. She’s a big Frank Sinatra fan too. As it happens, I do have something of the Frank Sinatra in me, except more in the future tense, as in “I’ll do it my way” rather than “I did it my way.” I wish I could afford to hire the guys to turn up to pubs and clubs before I get there and replace all the music being played with my stuff. It might help if I recorded some music videos sometime.
I don’t know what Jade eats in that bakery - pure sugar I would guess - because she comes home bouncing off the walls ready to go out. We live in Victoria Ave, so just around the corner from Newland Avenue which is the liveliest, trendiest part of Hull (hold your excitement), so I don’t have many excuses to stay at home but I wish we could give it a miss sometimes. Jade is beginning to make me feel like an irretrievably clapped-out old rocker who just wants to crash at home while his missus paints the town red. Still, I get to meet Jade’s friends and several of those are easy on the eye so once I have been dragged out of the house I become a bit more lively again.
The house where we live in Victoria Ave is one of those places where the door bell looks like it should come with a bell-hop. There are six flats in the building, which leaves us with a ground floor bed sit. It’s not a lot to show for fifteen years hard toil day and night. Jade has ambitions. The trouble is, however hard I try, I sell about 250 - 350 CDs a year, or £1,000 to you. The gigs pay better but they are harder and harder to get. The venues want artists who are young and happening (i.e. virtually free) rather than established no-hopers who demand a proper fee. So us veterans of the circuit have to sit around on the bench waiting for a substitution. At least we are reliable.
I record my music down the shed in the garden. I had to insist on there being a shed, so it took some time to find the right flat. I don’t have a lot of equipment and I am a bit of a technophobe, so most of my stuff is recorded with me playing acoustic guitar and harmonica, singing and whatever I can find to bash. I have to lay down one track at a time for a maximum of eight bars, so it takes forever. The bass track comes from the lower E string on my Ibanez. It doesn’t usually take me long to compose a song, typically around two-to-three hours to get the main shape, a couple of days to finalise the lyrics, and then another two-to-three hours to lay it down. Some songs are just plain elusive. I fiddle with them for years and they never come out quite right. I don’t know why I bother. It’s a bit like doing the crossword puzzle, I suppose. I have to complete it however long it takes. I just wish that I could achieve the perfect song at the end of it all but they always work out a bit mangled.
I am not the world’s greatest instrumentalist and my voice isn’t Caruso, but I pride myself on my tunes and even more on my lyrics. I am probably more of a story-teller than strictly a musician. I love stories, and I love to tell stories in my songs - vignettes, slices of life. Something like this:
There’s bandit neon flashing by the fag machine as a barmaid sneers at leering lads who’ve had her … in their dreams.
There’s a bulldog with a pool cue on a picture on the wall.
And I wonder what I’m doing here at all.
Some walking tattoo stamps on my shoe then says: “Sorry mate”
You know the sort who’d need rohypnol just to get a date.
And I’m staring at my mobile wishing telesales would call.
And I wonder what I’m doing here at all.
Let’s get metaphysical and question why we’re here.
Cos it cannot be the company and I wouldn’t chance the beer.
You know this fog of smoke is second hand, but it’s fresher than the jokes.
It’s just like someone grabbed hold of my past and rammed it in my spokes.
The thump-thump jukebox pumping out that idle pop.
And just like anyone with any sense I’m wishing it would stop.
It’s another faceless one-hit-wonder’s name I can’t recall,
Let’s take a baseball bat to Simon Cowell now once and for all,
Because his so-called bloody music’s got me crawling up the wall,
And I wonder what I’m doing here at all.
Do I have hate? Yeah, I have hate and it isn’t buried very deep neither. I don’t really know why. My parents are great, the usual arguments and jockeying for power and individuality but that’s all. Nothing terrible has ever happened to me, no life-scarring tragedies, no being kissed by Steve Crum as a baby. But it just strikes me that I am surrounded by injustice from the derivative, manipulative crap that makes it to platinum to the brutal lives some folks have to lead because some bastard is exploiting them. So, I carry my soap box around with me and I rant at will. Cathy’s parents never got that. Ranting is what lunatics and working class people do, there only being a mere hair’s breadth between them. You wouldn’t think that Cathy’s dad’s family was digging turnips in Holderness only a couple of generations back or that Cathy’s mum was a factory worker down at Hawker Siddeley’s. Tossers. Yeah, that’s the sort of thing that gets me - class traitors and they’ve got fuck-all class if you ask me.
People criticise me for being the Billy Bragg of the East Riding. I take it as a compliment. At least Billy writes about something, and I try to too. Why would anybody want to write about nothing just to get the cash till jingling? How empty is that? Besides, who wants to be rich? What do you do with it? You’ve got the press at you all the time hoping that you get cancer or book into The Priory or get caught shagging Madonna in Birmingham New Street or something. Everything is a hoo-ha. Your kids need bodyguards and you need a PR agent. You sit in your fifty room mansion discussing the servant problem and whether ‘peak oil’ is a myth or not, and Lady Jake Pembleton thinks that her party is ruined because her blancmange wobbled too much or her soufflé flopped. Yeah, right, I would rather be in a bedsit down Victoria Ave with a real life and a smashing sexy girl who nearly gives me a heart attack every time she steps out of the shower.
Actually, Jade nearly gives me a heart attack quite a lot one way or another. Her attitude to life powering straight off the National Grid is the first reason. Her utter devotion to me to the point of asphyxiation is another. And then there is the question of when she opens her mouth. With her friends, she sounds just right and I come over like Prince Charles or Andrew Lloyd Webber or somebody. But when she is with my friends, she sort of squeaks like a little girl and embarrasses me. I can see Mike and Stoker and Kevin and N
ancy sitting there thinking “he’s only with her because he’s desperate for a shag now that he and Cathy have broken up and nobody else will have him and his pathetic adolescent lifestyle”, but it isn’t like that at all. Jade really does have her head screwed on. It’s just that she’s only nineteen and all of my local friends are in their thirties and accountants or office workers with children and a mortgage and here am I, I’ve never grown up. I pretend to flog houses by day and at night I play at being Elton John or something. Shouldn’t I just grow out of it?
The answer is, yeah, I should, but I can’t because this bloody music keeps turning up and it will churn my guts if I don’t do something useful with it and when I have recorded it I am actually proud of what I do, and I wouldn’t be proud of being an accountant or an office worker, and I’m not proud at all of being an estate agent. And yet, I feel sometimes with my mates that if I introduced myself as an estate agent they would go “Yeah, right on,” but when I admit to being a folk singer they cringe into their chairs.
That’s why I like being with Lesley and the gang. They’re like me. They know what we do is important and they face all the same issues as I do. They make ends meet better or worse than I do, but none of them is a star or ever will be. If the public hasn’t caught on to what you do after fifteen years, let’s face it, it never will. It will take a bloody miracle (or a murder or AIDS) to make me into a household name and the same goes for them. We are going to be sitting in our bath chairs strumming away with our arthritic hands, croaking unintelligibly, recounting the glory days to our grandchildren who cannot stand the sour smell of us and who can’t wait to get away. That is the truth. But in our heads, success is still inches just around the corner for all of us, and if we only stand together we can all give each other a lift up.
And we certainly stand together. The music industry is a nasty business. A guitar is not nicknamed a ‘razor’ for nothing. If you cannot feel better about yourself, you can always make other people feel worse about themselves, that seems to be the motto. Then you have all the agents scrabbling away trying to get 15% of anything they can cobble together, the press which is just out for a story, the freeloaders and the stardust shoulder-rubbers. What a business! Shit, it makes breaking and entering look respectable. But our lot are not like that. We love each other and we support each other and we will not have a word said against each other. These guys are my real family. They are gold dust. And Jade fits in there too because she thinks and behaves the same way. For her, I really am an artist and a star, and she would kill anybody who denies it. She would kill anybody who ever shags me too.
Chapter 3
Harry calls around a lot, dragging Josh and Sam with him, although they probably don’t take much dragging. They still love me and they think Jade is cool, like a wild elder sister. The only problem is that there isn’t a lot for them to do here - no toys, no digital TV. Josh wants to mess around in the shed with my guitars and my recording equipment but I keep telling him that I need all that stuff intact for me to earn some money. He looks like he doesn’t really believe me and he is about right. It tears me apart not to see those two every bath time. Fuck Cathy. I just want to be with the kids.
Harry is Cathy’s boyfriend and he’s OK. Actually, he is better than OK. We get on pretty well given that he is rollicking my wife. He’s rich which will appeal to Cathy and even more to her parents who are no doubt hoping for an upgrade in their living accommodation as a result, but I’ll forgive him all that. You can’t help where you are born.
Harry’s people have a mansion in Ellerker, drive a Rolls Royce and some super-intelligent Mercedes, and go down to London about every weekend for a gala dinner. Believe it or not, Harry’s dad made all his money out of unblocking drains in emergencies. Yeah, he is a glorified plumber - very glorified. You see his vehicles all over Hull - Brakewell’s Emergency Sanitation. They charge £150 for a call-out and they invariably solve the problem within the hour. Not bad pay for an hour’s work, but they have the distinct advantage as plumbers go that you can actually get hold of them and that they reliably turn up within a couple of hours as you watch your ground floor disappearing under the flotsam of a swelling toilet bowl. Harry’s dad turns shit into gold, and now so does Harry - Cathy being just one example of note.
Harry himself is really down to earth although you instantly realise that his socks cost multiples of your entire wardrobe and he has a very cultivated accent having attended Uppingham Public School, wherever that is, before flunking Social Sciences at York. Still, he certainly knows how to have a good time and, more pertinently in this case, manages to give Cathy a good time too, although I am never quite sure what he gets out of it apart from playing sugar daddy to my two kids, which I don’t think he enjoys that much otherwise he wouldn’t be bringing them around here quite so often.
“Well, Jake, how’s it going?”
“Well, you know …..”
“Written any more songs recently?”
“Yeah, a few. Do you want to hear them?”
“Not particularly, thanks. We saw Maximo Park last night over in Sheffield. They were amazing.”
“Yeah, I quite like their stuff.” No I don’t, it’s crap, but you have to build bridges.
“You should see if you could get some gigs as their warm-up act, Jake. I reckon they’ll be huge one day.”
I didn’t say that Harry ever made me feel good but I am convinced that his putdowns are all accidental. Besides, it bucks me up a bit that Cathy may get all that money, but that she will be stuck listening to old shit-for-brains for the rest of her life, and he’ll get worse with age. He’s half senile now. He must be to be going out with Cathy.
“How’s the sewage industry, Harry?”
“Well, you know. There’s never a shortage of the stuff, nor of people who insist on shoving Pampers and baby wipes down their toilets. Dad says that every time they spend £5 million advertising their brand they spend the same amount advertising us. We’ve just bought up a company in Plymouth to cover the West Country. It never stops.”
“So, are you travelling a lot, Harry?”
“Yeah, all the time. Five days a week.”
“What about Cathy?”
“She gets me weekends. She doesn’t seem to mind. She has her life too.” Yeah, giving me her own brand of frustrated shit during the week.
“Have you got any closer to marrying her, Harry?”
“We’re discussing it. We’ll probably go ahead and get hitched one day. Between you and me, I am having a few problems with my folks on that one. They have a thing about divorcees or to-be-divorcees. They think they cannot stick at anything, so if they give up on one husband, they will give up on the next one too. Dad says that he has worked shit hard to get his money and he is not shitting it all down the toilet again paying alimony on behalf of his son. Cathy seems dead keen, in fact she has been pestering me, but I reckon that Dad will disown me if I don’t play it smart so I am back-peddling at the moment. I know a meal ticket when I see one.” Not so shit-for-brains, but I know that. I just like slagging him off in my head sometimes. It makes me feel less inadequate and cuckolded. Cathy goes out of her way to make me feel both.
Harry’s dad is obviously no fool. He can see exactly what’s coming. If Cathy and her family have their way, they’ll end up lounging around his mansion while he and Mrs. Brakewell flee to the gamekeeper’s lodge for a bit of peace and quiet.
Jade is less enamoured of Harry and tends to find an excuse to go off somewhere until he is gone. She then comes back and plays with the kids. She is only twelve years older than Josh. She takes them off to the park or into town or whatever while I get on with writing the next ditty.
People (very few people) sometimes ask me how I write a song. They then usually forget to hang around for the answer which is that I don’t know, so perhaps it is not worth hanging around for anyway. It is the hesitation in my response that is the giveaway. They anticipate that my reply will be all wind and no spit, a
nd hasn’t been properly rehearsed.
Actually, it mostly starts with an idea for a story - what the song is going to be about. I drum up a few lines and see if I can use them as a structure to whip up a half-decent tune. Half-decent is indeed where it starts. There are only twelve notes in an octave, at least around Hull, and those twelve notes have spawned about a million songs so, to be honest, any set of notes will do. It’s what you do with them that matters - the sequencing, the chords, the duration, the silences, the hooks. These I add later. So I have some words forming, then I shape a riff around them, then I build on that riff to make it fuller and more interesting, then I work on the words, then I make sure that I have a couple of hooks in there, especially between the verse and the chorus, and finally I polish up the lyrics. I normally make a few changes during the recording session as well, get some inspiration as to some fancy runs or a surprise sound effect or two. To finish off, I tend to toss in the odd ‘yeah’ or a snarl or a laugh or something improvisational-sounding that isn’t written on the lyric sheet. Yeah, I write the lyrics. I never type them. Computers destroy poetry. It’s all in the feel of the paper.
There’s no such thing as a perfect life.
No perfect home. No perfect wife.
No perfect job. No perfect car.
No perfect grasp of who we are.
No perfect night. No perfect day.
No perfect place to hide away.
No perfect sea. No perfect sky.
No perfect truth. No perfect lie.
No perfect boy. No perfect girl.
No, we don’t live in a perfect world.
There ain’t no perfect song to sing.
There ain’t no perfect anything.
