The Singer

by Cathi Unsworth

  ‘Yeah?’ I leaned closer to my source, hanging on every utterance. ‘How come?’

  ‘They used to do things like turn up, play one number, have a fight with the audience and leave.’

  ‘Wow,’ my jaw dropped open.

  ‘And you gotta remember, the audience in those days really wanted a fight. It was all factions, and they’d all turn up at the same gig. Punks hated pyschobillies, psychobillies hated rockers, rockers hated everyone and goths were just in there for a punch bag.’ He chortled at the memory.

  ‘But Vince Smith, he was a big bastard, about six foot three. And the guitarist, Steve Mullin, he was a big bastard too. Very stylish with it. It was like Smith was Lee Marvin and Mullin was Robert Mitchum, but they came from Hull which made them even harder. Yeeeesss,’ his eyes were far away, savouring the memories.

  It pushed all the right buttons with me. Lee Marvin. Robert Mitchum. Blood Truth.

  ‘So they were, in fact, the Wild Bunch?’ I joked.

  ‘Fuckin’ right,’ Granger nodded. ‘About as far away as you can imagine from the bunch of wankers onstage tonight.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I drained my bottle and stabbed a straw at the remains of the ice in my margarita, aware it was my round next and wondering if the dollars in my pocket would hold up to it. ‘I can’t help thinking I was born in the wrong time…’

  Granger’s eyebrows shot up quizzically.

  ‘Why d’you say that?’

  ‘Well, you’ve just spent the whole evening pointing out why it was better twenty years ago than it is now. I’m twenty-nine and the wildest thing I’ve ever seen is my grandmother loose at the January sales. If wankers like Coldharbour are the alternative choice then I don’t think there’s gonna be another John Lydon… or another Vincent Smith.’

  ‘Touché!’ Gavin laughed.

  As if in agreement, someone put ‘Cretin Hop’ by The Ramones onto the jukebox.

  I staggered towards the bar in search of more margaritas, the germ of an idea already forming in my brain.

  Back across the ocean, through another sea of time in old videotape and second-hand memory.

  That idea more certain now I had seen the video.

  I was picturing a big hardback book jacket. Black and white frontispiece; one of Gavin’s classic shots from the eighties. Maybe the one he had shown me earlier of Smith with his head flung back, veins bulging on his neck, hair a mane of jagged black points. Big black letters spelling out:

  VINCENT SMITH – THE LOST BOY

  BY ED BRACKNELL

  WITH PHOTOGRAPHS BY GAVIN GRANGER

  I was even beginning to anticipate some coverline quotes as I drifted towards alcoholic slumber.

  ‘Where rock biography meets investigative journalism and blows the lid off popular culture’ –Time Out

  ‘Bracknell goes back to where history got off and brings back to life a forgotten icon of the twentieth century’ – The Times

  ‘A riot all of his own’ – The Face

  That kind of thing.

  Before long, I was snoring, an insistent bassline throbbing in my head.

  3

  Dance to a Different Song

  May 1977

  ‘Where are you from, Lynton? An’ how did you end up in a shithole like Hull?’

  Lynton sat on the end of Stevie’s bed, trying to take everything in. Stevie’s house was unlike anything he’d ever encountered before.

  For a start, he lived on Hessle Road, Hezzle Road as the locals said it. Near the wasteland where the gypsies camped and a pub patrolled by surly Teddy Boys, who smoked roll-ups and gobbed onto the pavement like it marked their territory.

  Which in effect, it did.

  As they had walked down the streets towards Hessle Road earlier this evening, Lynton had become aware that the word ‘fishwife’ did actually describe a proper Hull sub-species. Pinning out their endless washing in their front yards, they continually screeched to their offspring and each other, fags clamped in the side of pink lipsticked mouths, hair in rollers under nylon hairnets, sleeves rolled up on arms the size of hams. They looked like miners in drag. Some of them even had tattoos, ships anchors, love hearts, etched in blue ink on corned-beef flesh.

  The youngest of their offspring – those not yet capable of passing themselves off in the pub – combined football and kicking the shit out of each other into a kind of game to be played in the middle of the road. Monkey boots and bright orange balls scuffling over the tarmac, screams and insults flung into the air to the encouragement of the constantly baying mongrels running amongst them.

  Only when they noticed Lynton, they seemed to freeze. One bain stood with his finger stuck mid-nostril, jaw swinging open like it was on a hinge. He carried on staring with dead eyes, drool flowing unconcernedly from the corner of a mouth crusted with orange baked bean stains.

  He made Lynton want to throw up. He tried to look away, down at the pavement, painfully aware of their prods and whispers. The Hessle Road juniors weighing up whether to make a comment. They had never seen a black person before and were, for the moment, more curious than aggressive. What kept their gobs shut was the fact the stranger was accompanied by one of the Mad Mullin family.

  Five brothers, three of them big and a dad who was a legend for skippering ships on ramming raids against the Icelanders during the Cod Wars of ’75 and ’76. A local hero, the hardest of the hard.

  Stevie clocked their stares too and stared them back like his Da would.

  Yet: ‘Gollywog!’ squeaked a high-pitched voice.

  Stevie stopped in his tracks, slowly began to crack his knuckles. ‘Did I hear a skate gob?’ he asked.

  That was enough for now. Monkey boots running away up the Hezzle Road, trailing mumbles and stifled laughter behind them.

  Lynton looked at the ground, his cheeks burning, feeling real fear and not wanting to show it. Wishing, not for the first time, that he had a formula for turning invisible.

  Stevie’s house was an end-of-terrace. Like all the others, washing hung in the front yard, kids’ trikes, scooters and a Space Hopper lay strewn haphazardly across the path. But unlike the fishwives’ houses, the front gate had been recently painted, and flowers did grow in what little earth there was.

  To Lynton’s relief, Steve’s mum didn’t look like a miner in drag.

  She still had five of her children living with her, Stevie being the oldest, little Gracie at four the youngest. Not to mention the dogs, the cats and whatever other creatures her children could coax or steal home with them. Her husband was out on trawlers most of the time, down the pub the rest of it, only stopping home to drop off the spoils of another catch, try for another addition to the family.

  Despite all this, she still managed to look slim and blonde and about twenty-five, still managed to always be smiling as she grappled with the endless stream of traffic through her kitchen. She had welcomed Lynton with the same beatific smile she used on her whole family, offered him a supper of cabbage, bacon and mash. Only the broad delivery of her Hull accent clashed with the delicacy of her features.

  ‘It’s all right, Ma, we had us chips on the way home,’ Stevie was eager to get upstairs and away from the mess and madness that unravelled around his younger siblings at mealtime.

  But Lynton felt embarrassed that he’d had those chips when she had been cooking. He wouldn’t have treated his own mum that way. And she wasn’t even his real mum.

  He smiled and said lamely: ‘Sorry, Mrs Mullin.’

  ‘Don’t you worry, love,’ she smiled back at him, ‘I’ve plenty more mouths need feeding. It never stops round here.’

  Stevie’s bedroom was small and cramped, smelt of stale biscuits and ripe socks. A heavy old wardrobe and chest of drawers took up most of the space, narrow single bed shunted into a corner. Stevie had only got a room of his own when his brother Connor had moved out to get married last spring. He was inordinately proud of the improvements he’d made since then. A small Dansette record player leaned
against the wall beneath the window, beside it, a stack of albums and singles. The curtains were permanently closed and Stevie had pinned a Jolly Roger flag over the top of them. Small glimpses of luridly patterned carpet were just visible between the piles of discarded clothes and music papers.

  But what really struck Lynton were the walls. Every inch of them covered in pictures of four very strange young men, all ripped out of newspapers and the music press. A big banner tacked to the ceiling, a gigantic A surrounded by an even bigger O, looked to be home-made, Airfix paint on bedsheet. Lynton’s eyes traversed the newsprint gallery.

  The same figure leapt out at him each time. He had orange hair and staring eyes, was wrapped in what looked like a straitjacket with DESTROY and a swastika on the front of it.

  He looked like he came from another planet.

  ‘S-sorry,’ he realised he’d been spoken to. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said,’ Stevie pulled off his school tie and hurled it into a dark corner, started scrunching up his hair in the wardrobe mirror, ‘where do you come from? Originally, like. ’Cos it ain’t from anywhere round here.’

  ‘Ain’t that the truth,’ Lynton weighed up what to say next. His fingers worked at a thread on Stevie’s tartan bedspread. ‘My parents lived in London,’ he said eventually.

  ‘How d’you end up here then?’

  Lynton’s eyes in Stevie’s mirror looked like burning coals. ‘’Cos they didn’t want me,’ he said bluntly. ‘She was one of them “gymslip mothers” you read about. Irish, I think. And he was some Rude Boy from Jamaica. Paddies and nignogs stick together, yeah? Well, not back then they didn’t. I don’t remember either of them. Soon as I was born, I got given to someone else, a white family with a nice house in Essex. We just moved here ’cos my dad’s got his self a job at Hull University in September what pays more than the one he had before. I don’t think they realised I would be the only black kid in the whole of the city, otherwise we might have stayed were we was. In Essex, it ain’t such a big thing. But that’s how I come to live in this shithole.’

  ‘Oh,’ Stevie staring back through the mirror. ‘I’m sorry, mate,’ his voice was gentle. ‘I didn’t mean to stir up bad memories.’

  Lynton looking fierce again, not wanting Stevie to see him looking sad.

  ‘I just knew it must be weird for you here,’ Stevie went on. ‘Surrounded by white, lardy Yorkshire cunts. Must be like some kind of bastard nightmare.’

  Again, just the way Stevie phrased things made his companion laugh out loud.

  ‘What do you think?’ Lynton chuckled his agreement. Then, seriously: ‘But to tell you the truth, I think I would feel weird anywhere.’

  Stevie met his eye, held the gaze for a heartbeat. ‘That’s right how I feel. I know our family’s got that reputation that we’re all mad bastards and it’s good, like, ’cos they leave you alone. But I’m not mad like they are. I don’t want to end up on some bastard trawler, freezing my bastard knackers off in middle of North Sea, for fuck all.’

  Both boys blinked at each other a moment longer. Then Lynton realised what Stevie had been rubbing into his hair the whole time they had been speaking.

  ‘Man!’ he exclaimed, clapping a hand over his mouth to try and stop from laughing. ‘Are you putting toothpaste in your hair?’

  Stevie’s face cracked open into a wide grin.

  ‘Yeah, I am an’ all. It’s how you get it into spikes.’

  Lynton couldn’t control his giggles any longer. Within seconds both of them were in hysterics, Lynton lying on the bed, Stevie leaning against the wardrobe, clutching his stomach. Only when they had exhausted themselves did Lynton weakly gesture towards the pictures on the wall. ‘Are these the Sex Pistols then?’

  ‘Aye,’ Stevie wiped tears out of his eyes, hauled himself onto the side of the bed.

  ‘Which one’s that?’ Lynton pointed at the alien.

  ‘That’s Johnny Rotten.’

  ‘This singer?’

  ‘Aye. He’s fuckin’ brilliant, he is. He don’t go on about girls or love or any of that shit stuff pop stars sing about. He sings about the IRA and the Queen and council estates, stuff like that. He don’t really sing, either…’ Stevie started delving into his pile of singles, pulled one out of a red and beige paper sleeve. ‘But don’t tek my word for it. You see what you think.’

  Stevie dropped the needle onto the vinyl and pulled his white guitar from on top of the wardrobe. The room filled with a roar like jet engines taking off. It almost knocked Lynton backwards. It took him a while to realise what he was actually listening to was guitar and drums and by the time he did an eerie voice was snaking over the top of it all: ‘Riiiiight. Naaaaaaaawwwwwww!’ it went and then dissolved into a maniacal cackle.

  Stevie, affecting an axe-slinger’s pose, was playing his ampless guitar along for all he was worth.

  ‘I am an anti-Christ!’ went the alien’s voice, ‘I am an anarcheist!’

  The music got louder and louder. Lynton felt like it was about to blow him out of the room. Stevie’s fingers flew up and down the neck of his cheap guitar, and he mouthed along to the words with his eyes locked shut.

  ‘’Cos I wanna beee-ah, Anarcheeeeeeeee!’

  It was like nothing else on earth, Stevie was right about that. And in amongst the sheet metal guitars and power-driving drums and the acidic voice of the alien, Lynton sensed something very powerful, taking shape and rising like a phoenix.

  He sensed freedom.

  The single clattered to its end with the sound of lacerated fretboards, crashing cymbols and the alien’s last, drawn-out command: ‘Deeestrroyyyyy!’

  Lyton got the shivers all down his spine. ‘Put it on again,’ he whispered.

  ‘You like it?’ Stevie was clearly proud as punch, standing legs apart with his guitar resting on his crotch, his hair stuck up with globules of Signal.

  ‘You want to start a band, don’t you?’ Lynton realised.

  ‘Yeah,’ Stevie nodded. ‘Yeah I fucking do. You want to join me?’

  Lynton’s eyes travelled from Stevie to the newsprint alien and his mad-looking eyes.

  We’re all aliens, he thought. We’re all in it together.

  ‘Yeah, man!’ he said defiantly. ‘Yeah, I fucking do too!’

  It was the first time he had ever said the word ‘fuck’. It sounded as liberating on his lips as the Pistols did to his ears.

  ‘You won’t need no trumpet for this though,’ he considered the situation quickly, ‘so I will play bass.’

  ‘Oh! D’you know how to do that an’ all?’

  ‘No – but I’m going to find out.’

  ‘What about Miles Davis though?’

  Lynton thought. Miles in his bag. So sure he would blow Stevie away with it. Now it felt old and out of place, another time, another man’s battle.

  This was the sound of the future.

  ‘What about him?’

  Stevie let out a whoop of delight, leapt up punching the air.

  ‘Anarcheeeee!’

  4

  Pump it Up

  November 2001

  It was after 4pm when I finally staggered up that wind tunnel of Camden Town tube, stomach keeping a tenuous hold on the fry-up Granger had cheerily provided, the couple of hairs of the dog at the Market Bar, the first cigarettes of the day.

  After four, and the sky already darkening. Bags of old men slouched around the Camden Road exit, holding up greasy palms for alms that were never going to come. Not even bothering to speak any more, just staring up with red, accusing eyes. Crumpled cans of Special Brew at their feet; the thirst that could never be slaked. More of them these days than ever, and there always was a wino army around here.

  Once you got past them, there were the drug dealers, skinny, rangy black kids slumped into oversized jeans, jabbering with each other and anyone that passed, as wired and aggressive as the winos were pathetic and old. More of them these days too; in fact, Camden now resembled King’s Cross with novel
ty yoof shop knobs on. The party days were long gone. It seemed more like a million years ago since we first moved here than ten. Days when the sun shone all summer, when the pubs were run by Irishmen with rock’n’roll 45s on the jukeboxes and musicians, not dealers, were hanging on every corner.

  It was after four and the lights blinking on up Camden Road, the last dribbles of pink fading into the grey sky. It was freezing too, the kind of cold that seeps into your bones, embalms you from the inside.

  I knew it would be cold in the flat too. I trudged past Sainsbury’s, past the queues for the bus overflowing onto the pavement. The other side of the road all second-hand and cut-price shops, the one last Irish bar that had been left given a Hoxton makeover six months ago and now standing empty. Someone had been shot there the night it opened and it had remained closed for business ever since.

  Past Camden Road station, idling the last few steps to my front door. The churning in my stomach combined with a feeling of dread. I looked up to our flat, first floor, above the fruit and veg shop. Blinds down. Dark panes reflected back nothing but the street lights.

  I breathed a sigh of relief, fumbled in my jacket pocket for the key. Even waved a cheery ‘Hello!’ to Ali in the shop as I opened the door, ever the urban gentleman, never the dirty stop out.

  Pressed the hall light on, ignored the pile of junk mail on the spindly table at the bottom of the stairs, creaked up to the flat. Inside it was colder than out. Spotlessly clean and ordered and empty.

  My eyes swept round the room anyway. It was minimalist, the way we both liked it. Well, Louise especially. Black Ikea furniture, stripped floorboards, aluminium blinds. Her concession to ostentation a bookcase full of thick titles, philosophy, sociology, fine art and old movies – still not sure which part of her studies I made up. My concession, the widescreen TV and DVD player. The reason the flat was so cold, I’d rather spend my money on toys like these than central heating.