The Singer

by Cathi Unsworth

  Mother was all over me at Christmas, parading me to the ceaseless round of old biddies that dropped by for mince pies and sherry as if I’d already won the Booker Prize. Louise stayed on the sofa, exchanging knowing glances with my father, but both she and Mother seemed to be making more of an effort to be cordial than I’d ever seen before. And when we got the hell out of Guildford for new year, Lou was even happy for me to invite over Granger, along with some of her workmates, to see in the New Year with good food and wine and all the promise of the work we were about to embark on.

  We stood watching fireworks explode above the gothic towers of St Pancras Station from our window over Camden Road, all of us linking arms and attempting ‘Auld Lang Syne’ while cracking up with laughter, toasting each other with champagne.

  ‘Here comes the biggie,’ Gavin winked as he knocked his glass against mine. ‘2002. Somethin’ tells me, this is gonna be our year!’

  Louise was leaning against me, smiling her cat smile, almost purring. ‘That’s right, Gavin,’ she nodded. ‘The year Eddie is going to take me on to better things.’ She said it semi-sarcastically, but there was humour underneath her tone and almost a touch of pride, I thought.

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ Granger raised his glass again.

  ‘To better things,’ he said.

  ‘To better things,’ we chorused as our glasses clashed and the bubbles rose up their stems and the sky was full of stardust and coloured lights.

  Just like my dreams.

  7

  Heart Attack Machine

  August 1977

  It was one sticky hot evening in August when Stevie heard the news. He was due at practice, in Lynton’s dad’s garage by sixthirty. But now it was pressing seven and his brother Connor still wouldn’t let him out of the pub.

  ‘Just ’old your ’osses, our kid. You’re gonna like this, believe me,’ Connor plonked another half of Tetleys down on the already sodden beer mat in front of his brother, while Stevie fidgeted with his hair, his cigarettes, and his hang-nails impatiently.

  Inside the King’s Head on Hessle, you could see the dust swirling in the shaft of sunlight from the open pub door, just the way the cloudy beer swum down from the tap. It was over 70 degrees outside, and still Connor insisted on skulking down in the snug, where he had command of the jukebox, the dartboard and a view of the entire room.

  Stevie’s brain was churning. Five weeks they’d been getting the band together, scraping and shaping the frameworks for songs. Lynton’s dad had let them have the garage, he was so grateful to see his son finally settling in with local folk. They lived in a big house on the Avenues, far enough away for Kevin to be safe from Dunton’s prying eyes. And with the kit that Stevie had promised him, the speccy twat was finally coming into his own.

  Lynton, who was after all the expert, said Kevin could play. Stevie realised it straight away. It weren’t just a question of technique, it were more like, he could swing. And Lynton, with the bass his parents had got him second-hand, twanged along with him, mastering the notes with seemingly apparent ease, scratching the beginnings of a deep, menacing rumble.

  Stevie could keep up with them, just. The more he practised, the bigger the noise he could get out of the Holner, which he’d painted with a Union Flag to match the ‘God Save The Queen’ cover. It wasn’t quite the Jones sound he was after, though. The way it came out was more fractured, nervy. It suited the sound they were making.

  In fact, the tentatively titled Dead City even startled themselves at the way they intuitively worked together. It was almost like the music they were hatching had already been lurking there, somewhere in the atmosphere, waiting for them to grab hold of it.

  Only trouble was, none of them could sing. The other two had naturally assumed Stevie would take that role, but two things went against him. One, he still found it too hard to remember his chord sequences and sing at the same time. Two, he sounded like a foghorn.

  Kevin claimed he couldn’t sing either, and Stevie didn’t make him prove it. Only cunts like Genesis had singing drummers anyway. And Lynton…Well, Stevie suspected that he could, but he didn’t want to. Lynton wanted to be in the background. He was too thoughtful and shy to stand up front.

  What were they gonna do about it was what Stevie was wondering, as the reason for his imprisonment in the King’s Head came bowling through the bar.

  Terry Gough and Barry Hill were two lads in thick with Connor. Like Stevie’s brother, they dressed like Teddy Boys, with thick, greased-back hair that they were always running combs through, lurid coloured drape suits and thick-soled brothel creepers.

  Terry and Barry were the source of Kevin’s drumkit, and the black drape suit that Lynton wore in homage to Rotten. They worked as roadies-cum-bouncers for local entrepreneur Don Dawson, who ran a handful of pubs and clubs in Hull and Doncaster.

  Stevie had been helping them out on and off a lot that summer and it really had opened his eyes. Barry and Terry had a lot of scams going with the man who employed them and acquiring brand new bits of kit was one of the bonuses they could collect for a job well done. Poncy bands from down south and the longhaired record company men that came with them never had much of a mind to complain about missing items to folk like Don Dawson.

  All Stevie had to do to get Kevin’s drumkit was do a couple of nights’ humping for Terry and Barry. He did all the loading in and out, the gaffa-taping of equipment to the stage and that, while they sat around reading Knave and Fiesta and combing their hair. Fair play, thought Stevie, being backstage at any gig was a newfound thrill for him any road. Despite their constant piss-taking of his hairstyle, Terry and Barry liked Stevie too. Even said they’d keep an eye out for a white custom Les Paul.

  ‘’Ere ’e is!’ bellowed Terry, who obviously modelled himself on Rory Storme, with bleached blond hair and metal tips on his Western shirt collar. ‘The lad ’imself.’ He clasped hands with Connor, then looked down at Stevie. ‘’Ow dy’er fancy doin’ a spot of work for us tomorrow? Special, like?’

  ‘How so?’ Stevie only had to look at the glances exchanged by the roadies and his brother to know they were up to something.

  ‘Oh, it’s something you’ll like all right,’ Barry, darker and smaller with a bumbfluff moustache he was trying to cultivate into something more stylish, lit up from his Zippo and his eyes twinkled in the flame. ‘Up in Donny.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Stevie was getting impatient. ‘What is it?’

  ‘SPOTS’, said Terry, as if he were stupid.

  ‘Whaddaya mean, spots?’ Stevie looked from leering face to face.

  Terry took his time saying it, enjoying the impact of every word. ‘Not spots like on yer face, Stevie, though you should know. SPOTS. Sex. Pistols. On. Tour. Secretly.’

  Stevie’s gob fell open. ‘You what?’

  ‘Callin’ theirselves The Tax Exiles for this one,’ Barry, the fount of all knowledge, nodded. ‘At Exile Club, Donny. Tomorrow night. We’ve gotta be more like bouncers for this one, so we thought you might want to help hump gear. But, you know, if you’ve got owt else to do…’

  ‘Can I bring a mate?’ Stevie was on his feet, head already sprinting away down Hessle Road.

  ‘What d’yer reckon, Barry?’

  ‘Go on, you might need extra hands.’

  ‘Well there won’t be owt extra cash,’ Terry’s eyebrows raised.

  ‘Don’t matter. Go on, let us bring us mate.’

  The two Teds looked at his imploring face and burst out laughing.

  ‘All right Stevie. Just meet us outside here tomorrow. Five o’clock sharp.’

  ‘Yes!’ Stevie’s punch hit the air.

  So here they were in Donny, pulling up in a pub car park in the back of Terry and Barry’s Transit. Stevie and Lynton sat on an old mattress covered in dog-eared porn mags and copies of the Sun. The whole way down they’d been listening to Elvis, eight days after the King had left the building for the last time, dropping off his throne in Jubilee year.

&
nbsp; To say they were nervous would be an understatement. Nerves crackled with excitement and something else churned in Lynton’s guts. Something connected to the way those Teds had looked at him when they first saw him. The whispered comments and laughter. Then they’d referred to him as Chuck Berry for the rest of the journey.

  Now they were sliding out of the van, towards the back of the pub, where an extension had been built to house a small stage and dressing room. Usually, it served small-time pub bands, local comedians, talent contests. Tonight would be something different.

  Don Dawson met them at the back door. A big bloke, like you had to be in his line of business, hard as granite, but softened up to the untrained eye with all the trappings of Northern nouveau riche. The oiled hair swept back off his low forehead with some fancy pomade. The sharp Italian-style suit. The cloud of aftershave. The gold rings on every finger.

  Dawson had seen something different from most blokes his age in the coming of punk. He’d seen young people turning up to see these snotty-nosed, foul-mouthed yobs like they’d never turn up for local comedians and talent nights. He’d been around the clubs investigating, keeping abreast of the local trends, across the Pennines to Manchester, on up to Newcastle and back again and he’d read all the signs. He’d smelled the cash from chaos.

  Now Dawson was extending his businesses into the punk arena. He had a mind to start up a record company too. Tonight he intended to learn all he could from a money-spinning master – Malcolm McLaren.

  Dawson clocked the Teds and their mate Stevie, the latter of whom he was most interested in, representing as he did Dawson’s whole new demographic. Clocked the darkie too, but said nowt. Darkies didn’t irk Dawson the way they did most blokes his age either. Say what you like about them, their money was still green.

  ‘Right Terry, right Barry,’ he greeted the older men with handshakes, then turned his attention to the schoolboys. ‘Stevie,’ he recognised, ‘and this is?’

  ‘Lynton Powell,’ Lynton said huskily, meeting Dawson’s eyes for the briefest of moments.

  ‘We’ve told them they’re workin’ two for price of one,’ Terry said hastily, trying to explain Lynton away. ‘But that’s how eager these young folk are for their punk rock.’

  ‘Pleased to hear it,’ Dawson smiled beneficently. ‘Now then, let’s get started.’

  It wasn’t as glamorous as Stevie had hoped. The first job Dawson gave them was making sandwiches. Endless sandwiches from sliced white loaves, industrial-sized tubs of margarine, ham and pickle, cheese and coleslaw. They had to slice them into little triangles and pile them onto salvers, do the whole lot up with clingfilm, put them in the backstage room with a keg of ale and a load of cheap tins of lager.

  ‘Is this what Johnny Rotten really eats?’ Lynton frowned in wonder.

  The Pistols’ bus must have arrived by then, but there was no sign of their heroes. Just some roadies from London who had them doing the dirty work, humping the speakers and building the stack of amps, setting up the drumkit and gaffa-taping mic stands to the stage floor. All the shit stuff, the hard graft. Maybe the equipment came separate from the band.

  Then they saw a shock of red hair bobbing across the floor, a man in a garish tweed suit swooping into Dawson’s office.

  Stevie nudged Lynton in the ribs. ‘Malcolm,’ he hissed.

  Soon after that, one of the London roadies asked Stevie: ‘Do us a favour and take them sarnies out to the bus. They don’t want to come out ‘til it’s showtime. We’ll take care of the beer’

  ‘I bet you will,’ muttered Stevie, but a sudden pang of sheer joy hit him as he carried the salver across the car park to the big coach that was parked there. The blinds were down on all the windows, but it was them in there all right.

  The door whooshed open and Stevie walked up the steps.

  There stood Steve Jones, in a pair of white underpants and yellow socks.

  ‘Cheers, mate’ said Stevie’s hero, relieving him of his burden.

  Then the vision turned and shouted: ‘Grub’s up!’ before hurling a handful of Stevie and Lynton’s specially made bread triangles down the other end of the bus.

  Stevie walked backwards off the bus, awestruck.

  Now they were letting them in through the front door. Terry and Barry were front-of-stage security, the London roadies took care of equipment. All that remained for Stevie and Lynton to do now was watch the show.

  It seemed like the whole of the North was piling into the room, a constant stream of home-made punks with food-colouring in their hair and artfully ripped T-shirts. Some still looked more glam, with feather cuts and Ziggy make-up. Others still wore their Bay City Rollers tartan. Some of them – quite a lot of them – were even girls.

  ‘Lynton,’ noted Stevie seriously, ‘there must be every freak in Yorkshire in this room.’

  ‘Mmmm,’ Lynton nodded, ‘who would have thought there was so many?’

  Lynton was getting that feeling again. As the bodies in the room caused the temperature to rise and the condensation to start running down the walls, he could smell it in the hot, smoky air. Like the night in Stevie’s room when he first heard ‘Anarchy’, only magnified.

  Every freak in Yorkshire who could had got their hands on a ticket, inspired by the Pistols-led soap opera that had flashed across their screens all summer. The boat trip down the Thames on Jubilee Day and subsequent arrests had made the band Public Enemy Number One. Men wearing brown suits and handlebar moustaches queued up to spill their outrage from the studios of Nationwide, proclaiming that it would be better if Johnny Rotten was dead.

  Every freak in Yorkshire wanted a part of that.

  The jukebox was playing The Stranglers, guttural grunts twirled around a fairground organ, a big, black, boot-crunching bass riff.

  The freaks were already pogoing to it, throwing themselves around at the front of stage. Boys and girls, bug-eyed, robotic, narcotic.

  Stevie and Lynton headed in the direction of the bar, more by the will of the crowd than by design. It seemed there were only seconds between the blur of hands passing across the tiny, sticky counter and the chance to gulp back a mouthful of the warm, watery fizz before there was another surge, back in the direction of the stage.

  ‘Fuckin’ hell,’ breathed Lynton.

  Johnny Rotten stood smiling at the centre of the stage.

  There was a sudden roar of feedback as Steve Jones plugged in.

  ‘Evening all,’ said Johnny.

  The first chiming chords of ’Anarchy in the UK’ roared out from beneath Jones’s fingers. The room moved as one. Like everything had been struck with an electrical charge and the separate entities that had formerly made up band, audience and bouncers had fused to make one giant Godzilla of a beast, a spiky-haired, pogoing punk-rock machine. A hundred fists punching the air, Johnny leaning into his mic and saying: ‘Riight! Naaaaaaa aaaoooooowwwwwww!’

  Stevie and Lynton were near the back of the beast, the wildly vibrating heads and arms in front of them obscuring their view. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter either that hands pressed on their shoulders, that elbows jammed into their sides, that all they got were fleeting glances of Johnny and Steve, of Sid Vicious, the new bassist, looking cool and wasted in his black leather trousers and permanent sneer. It didn’t matter that they had beer splashed all over them and their carefully elevated hair had wilted in the heat.

  What mattered was that they were here, in the eye of the hurricane.

  ‘Anarchy’ segued into ‘I Wanna Be Me’, segued into ‘Seventeen’. Stevie and Lynton slowly manoeuvered themselves forwards, as exhausted revellers fell away from the front and the rest pushed steadily forwards from behind.

  ‘New York’ was followed by ‘EMI’, Johnny’s taunt to the company that had just so spectacularly dropped them. Then Stevie’s new favourite, ‘Holidays in the Sun’. From where he was now he could stare directly at Jones. The guitarist was standing, legs apart, arms windmilling, playing the fattest, juiciest, mos
t searing riff he had ever heard. Stevie felt as if his head might blow clean off his shoulders.

  Then somebody broke away from the throng, staggered straight towards him.

  Tall and skinny with luminous white skin.

  Leather trousers and a head of thick, shining black hair.

  For a second Stevie thought Sid Vicious had jumped off the stage to come and inspect the audience. Then the figure barrelled into him with eyes out on stalks. Stevie instinctively caught hold of his shoulders, pulled him back upright.

  ‘You all right, mate?’ he asked, staring into bugged-out, redrimmed, pale blue eyes. He thought maybe the other fella was gonna faint. ‘Have some of this.’

  An eager hand grabbed for his pint, necked the dregs of it down in one long gulp. He had a ring on his middle finger, a big thick silver thing, with a fat blue eyeball set in the middle of it. Stevie watched it in fascination as the stranger knocked back his pint, threw the empty plastic glass to the floor, and swayed, catching his breath.

  ‘Ta, mate,’ he eventually drawled, wiping a hand across his mouth. ‘Thought I were a gonner there.’

  ‘Aye, it’s bastard hot in here.’

  ‘I’ll get you another’ the stranger’s face suddenly cracked into a smile, as blotches of red colour flushed back into his cheeks. ‘After, like.’ He nodded towards the stage, where the emaciated figure of Rotten now stood up on the monitors, steadying himself with a hand on the ceiling, ranting: ‘Now I’ve got a reason/Now I’ve got a reason/Now I’ve got a reason/The Berlin Wall...’

  And pushed his way back into the bodies. Stevie could see his slick black head making steady progress to the front.

  ‘Who was that?’ Lynton shouted.

  ‘Some nutcase,’ Stevie mused.

  ‘No Feelings’ was next, then ‘Problems’. His eyes fixed on his alien mentor, Lynton felt that he was having some kind of epiphany, that his life was changing for ever, from being in this room, with these people, right now. He felt like he was growing wings, that any minute they’d burst right out of his back and he’d be up and soaring.