The Singer

by Cathi Unsworth

  The band obviously loved the cunt; they had taken him on the road with them all over the place, providing lots of riotous copy involving copious drinking, bar fights and mad Americans trying to kill Vince for taking the piss out of Elvis. But happily, the one article that really interested me wasn’t by him. It was in Sounds, from February 1979, and it was written by a guy called Ray Spencer.

  It was called ‘The Way of the Weird’ and what immediately grabbed my attention was the big, black and white picture that had obviously been taken in the squat that Kevin had told me about. It looked like the band had dragged some old car seats off a breaker’s yard and into their front room. Vince, naturally, was sitting in the centre of the disembodied back seat, his feet up on a tea chest, alongside an overflowing pub ashtray with SKOL written around the edge of it and a load of empty bottles. Vince, completely dressed in black and wearing a big pair of Robot creepers, appeared to be toasting the photographer with a chipped mug. To his left, Steve lounged sideways, playing an unplugged white guitar, his hat pulled down over his eyes; to his right Lynton followed the pose with his bass, a cigarette hanging coolly from the corner of his mouth. Standing behind them all, Kevin raised his drumsticks as if he were about to start playing his bandmates’ heads. If they were having a bad time of it in that squat, this picture certainly didn’t show it.

  ‘We’re a long way from Hull now, Toto,’ laughs big Steve Mullin, guitarist from the North’s most sh** kicking beast of a band, Blood Truth, went the first sentence.

  Newly signed to Exile, this band have already conquered the savage lands north of Watford, spending nearly two years riding their wheels of steel to the remotest, most punk-starved corners of our isles. A string of 45s on the Hull-based Dawsongs label lighted their trail, culminating with November’s incendiary King of Nothing EP, which finally set the south aflame. A savage, nihilistic anthem delivered by a six-foot-four, raven-haired punk possessed like an old Testament preacher, who has a penchant for fighting with his own audience, backed up by a bunch of hoodlums who wouldn’t look out of place in a Peckinpah movie. No wonder Tony Stevens wanted their names in blood.

  He duly got those signatures in January and wasted no time shipping his charges down to Ladbroke Grove, where they have been holed up in his X World studios, feverishly working on the first album proper and marvelling at the atmosphere of their new neighbourhood.

  ‘We’re walking in the footsteps of The Clash here,’ continues Mullin, enthusiasm spilling visibly from his lips. ‘The Slits live round the corner. We’re five minutes from Shepherd’s Bush, where half of the Pistols come from. It feels like we’re in some kind of movie. I can’t quite believe it’s real, to be honest.’

  With his red-raw fusion of Steve Jones sonics to mangled mad rockabilly guitar (think Link Wray’s Bollocks), founder-member Mullin is the heart of the band. He comes across as both joker and protector, a big bad brother to softly spoken bassist Lynton Powell and drummer Kevin Holme. In turn, the modest Blood Truth rhythm section are the reason this band sounds so very different from the rest of the post-Pistols pack. The heavy, heady, swampy beats laid down by Powell and Holme have more in common with Captain Beefheart or Screamin’ Jay Hawkins than the work of any of their immediate peers. Perhaps part of this otherness stems from the fact that Powell was, in his own words ‘the only black kid in Hull’, growing up with adoptive white parents and only an extensive jazz collection for company.

  ‘Jazz was the original punk,’ Powell points out, ‘made in big cities by very angry young men. Be-bop in the fifties probably sounded like the Pistols did in ’77 – like a call to arms, an alarm clock going off in people’s heads. Jazz might just be some old Grandad thing to most people now, but it has definitely marked what we do and I certainly wouldn’t call our music easy listening.’

  The focus for all this seething intensity, however, is Vince Smith. The brilliant frontman is just as intimidating as you’d expect. When Sounds arrives on the doorstep of Blood Truth’s house this morning, he opens the door in a lurid yellow skinny-rib Elvis T-shirt and still more eye-watering pink-and-yellow striped Y-fronts, seemingly oblivious to the sub-zero temperatures both outside and in. Showing us into the kitchen, he invites us to join him in a bracing breakfast cup of Thunderbird, a local delicacy he has just discovered, much to his delight. A ream of paper is scattered across the Formica-topped table, covered in spidery scrawl. Smith reveals he has been up writing lyrics for new songs since six.

  ‘Want to hear some?’he offers and proceeds to recite in a booming baritone, waving his mug of wine around as he does so. It feels like being collared by a belligerent drunk on the night bus home, and we nod along approvingly, hoping he wouldn’t be reaching for the carving knife to further his point, until we are saved by the arrival of a dishevelled but genial Steve Mullin.

  Obviously, Smith’s stage persona is not an invention.

  ‘That were one of his tests,’ Steve tells me later. ‘Vince likes to see how people react by generally acting like a maniac when he first meets them. But he’s all right really. Once you get to know him, like.’

  Indeed, when Smith returns from upstairs for the photoshoot, dressed from head to foot in black, he is witty and charming and stays that way for the rest of the day. The band enjoy mucking around for the shots, proudly describing how they acquired their ‘sofa’ from a breaker’s yard under the Westway.

  ‘Tony Stevens wanted us to do a promo shoot up there,’ says Stevie, referring to their label boss. ‘Reckons we’re warriors of the future apocalypse, like. Either that or he couldn’t stretch to buyin’ us any more furniture.’

  All finished, the band lead us down to the bus stop to catch a lift to Exile’s HQ in Shepherd’s Bush. Fellow passengers give us a wide berth; one elderly West Indian woman actually crosses herself as Vince saunters past oblivious, muttering oaths under her breath as if she’d just encountered Old Nick himself.

  Once at X World, a soundproof extension on the back of Exile’s end-of-terrace office, we get to hear what will become the band’s first album proper. Ten tracks have already been laid down, the lyrics Vince was working on are for the last two without a vocal and he’s keen to try out the one he’s most pleased with, ‘The Old Man of King’s Town’. Sounds gets an impromptu performance of the work-in-progress.

  Vince tries out his lyrics in the booth, while Steve, Lynton and Kevin sit with us to watch him. The singer is as possessed in this sterile, soundproof room as he is in front of a seething crowd, and stamps his feet, rocks backwards and forwards and literally writhes as he spills the new words out in a ferocious, guttural roar. The music that had already been constructed is a slow, shivering, sweating funk, slashed with red shivers of Mullin’s guitar.

  It’s difficult to make out the lyrics, there’s a repeated line about: ‘Running you down/Out of town’ and the song ends on a demented flourish with Vince pretending to shoot up the booth, shouting: ‘Bang! Bang! Bang! Shoot you down!’

  Then the singer takes a bow and announces: ‘That was for Don.’ He looks me straight in the eye as he does so.

  Don Dawson was the band’s first manager. I take it this is who he is referring to.

  I ask the other three about it. Kevin and Lynton nervously duck the question. Stevie is less evasive. ‘Yeah, well, he tried to give us some hassle for signing with Exile, took it out on Vince mainly, so that’s what you get.’

  What kind of hassle?

  The guitarist shakes his head. ‘Nowt we can’t handle.’

  Smith joins us, clearly delighted with himself. ‘Don’t forget to write that in your feature,’ he tells me. ‘Don Dawson’s the King of Nothing now.’

  I put the feature down. I really was going to have to find Don Dawson and I knew I’d have to go it alone there – unless Kevin ever bloody called me back. So that was one trip to Gay Paris, another to Grimy Old Hull. Blood Truth truly were a journalist’s dream.

  But first, I had to meet with a surviving member of the band. With
shy, softly-spoken Lynton Powell.

  Lynton had been true to his word, fixing up some time for Gavin and me, a couple of days after he returned from his soundtrack job in LA. The bassist had moved a bit further around west London since his days in the squat, but not that much. To Latimer Road, where he had a studio set in a big, converted mews courtyard.

  It was a strange kind of place, Latimer Road, a place where one world became another along the course of Oxford Gardens, a road which spanned Ladbroke Grove and began with the usual stucco mansions, set back from the road amid plenty of foliage. Only, after it crossed St Mark’s Road, it was as if a boundary had been reached and immediately, the scenery changed. The houses shrank, becoming modest rows of terraces, and the gentle edges of gardens disappeared into lines of big, thick beech trees, which probably looked very grand in summer. But in the pale, watery light of a February morning, they rose grey and leafless like frozen abstract dancers, their naked branches cut back to stark nubs.

  Big gates on our left hid Patrick Litchfield’s studios.

  ‘Amateur,’ smirked Gavin as we passed. I got the feeling we were walking away from sophisticated bohemia into suburbia. From where it all happened to where nothing ever did. There was no one else on this stretch of the road, no trendy Notting Hillbillies or Yah Trustafari, no gangs of feral kids on bikes. Roads like this always made me feel uneasy; like you could walk down them for ever looking at the neat little houses with their unblinking, netcurtained eyes, row after row of them, until you lost your soul in their drabness.

  I laughed too loudly at Gavin’s quip, tried to shake myself out of the strange feeling of unease the road engendered. I couldn’t help thinking about Pascal’s report and the notion of ‘disappearing’ yourself. This would be exactly the sort of place to do it. No one would ever want to look here.

  At the studios, the feeling dissolved. Behind the wrought iron gates that enclosed the blocks of buildings was a bustling little enclave, although the scene behind each plate-glass window was one of eerie repetition. Young men dressed to the latest Dazed & Confused dictates – semi-mohican hairstyles, Von Dutch shirts, low-slung jeans with big chunky chains hanging out of their arses and trainers shaped into cloven hooves. Plugged into their laptops over buckets of latté and beansprout ciabattas. No doubt some enterprising little Nigels with a sandwich cart made sure they were all supplied with the same provisions, just so no one felt left out. I was just glad I couldn’t hear the minimalist glitch music they were all undoubtedly listening to.

  Happily, Lynton’s studio had tinted windows that offered nothing but a reflection of the rest of the courtyard. Gavin pressed the bell and a woman’s voice answered warmly then buzzed us in.

  The door opened into a bright, cheerful reception, and a very beautiful black woman in a neat pinstriped suit and heels, hair coloured with streaks of red and braided up into artful coils, was reaching out a perfectly manicured hand to greet us.

  ‘Hi, I’m Shanice,’ she said, shaking us both with an immaculately cool grip. She had long lashes and red lips. ‘If you’d like to follow me, he’s just through here…’

  Through another door, into an open-plan studio, with a little lounging area to the right of it. On a bright orange sofa, Lynton Powell sat in a dark blue tonic suit, hair neatly cropped, a small goatee beard around an easy smile. He had filled out a bit from the pipecleaner skinniness of his younger years, the inevitable middle-age spread, but apart from that, Lynton had aged considerably better than anyone else I’d met so far.

  His eyes were friendly as he stood up to greet us.

  ‘Gavin, my man,’ he crossed the room in a couple of strides, clapped my companion firmly round the shoulders and then gripped his right fist in his own. Then he turned to me.

  ‘Eddie, right? Glad to meet you. Come on in, have a seat.’

  ‘Can I get you all coffee?’ asked the delightful Shanice from behind us.

  ‘That’d be good,’ nodded Gavin. ‘Black, no sugar, please.’

  ‘Yeah, same for me,’ I smiled at her, trying not to let my tongue hang out too much. She was confusing me. I didn’t even like my coffee black.

  Lynton ushered us onto the orange sofa, sat himself down on a red leather armchair facing us. He and Gavin made catching-up talk until Shanice had come back with a tray bearing a cafetiere, big, round coffee cups, a bowl of sugar lumps and a plate of biscuits. I let them get on with it until she had disappeared back into reception, dropping a couple of lumps into my cup in the hope it would make it taste acceptable.

  ‘So where d’you want to start?’ Lynton asked me. His voice was a melodious rumble, judging by the red pack he had placed on the table, the result of years of Marlboro abuse. His eyes were friendly, with no traces of sadness or suspicion.

  I glanced briefly down at my notes, took a deep breath and began.

  16

  My Love With a Knife

  April 1979

  Making that first demo had been the first time everything had started to make sense inside Sylvana’s head. Everything she had tried so hard to create, through all that drawing, dressmaking and writing, suddenly took on its perfect natural form and flowed out of her in one almighty rush. She could hardly believe that a stranger she had met by chance had finally set her free from the dark place in the back of her mind. The place her own mother had whisperingly consigned her to, and that she had half-believed was true – that terminal ward labelled ‘backwards’.

  For as long as Sylvana could remember, she had seen words as colours. When she was little, this made words just about the most wonderful things – especially when her Grandma Ola was telling her stories. But once she was old enough to try to start explaining this to other people, things had taken a distinctly downhill turn.

  Sylvana’s mother Glo was one of those ramrod straight, frighteningly coiffured women who couldn’t tolerate anything that was less than perfect. It was her mission in life to dress and deport herself better than any of the rivals she called her friends and she accomplished her aims with the steely precision of her role model, Wallis Simpson: ‘You can never be too thin or too rich.’

  Thankfully for Glo, her husband Ruben was always at the office, making the latter part of her mantra possible as avidly as she applied herself to the first. Grandma Ola used to tell Sylvana there were two miracles about her birth. The first was that Ruben found time between midnight and dawn to woo and win a wife; the second was that Glo found time to fit a baby in between her endless round of grapefruit diets, trips to the salon and shopping at Bloomingdales.

  It was Grandma Ola who had more or less single-handedly brought Sylvana up and it was she who had filled her head with the magic of storybooks, art, poetry and clothes.

  Just as well, because if it had been left to Glo, Sylvana’s whole life would have been one of well-heeled misery. Spent either lying on a couch trying to explain herself to a shrivelled-up old shrink or making midnight raids on the fridge to assuage the pains of the perpetual diet she was put on. School was as bad as home – there she was surrounded by a legion of miniature Glos, all preparing themselves to catch a good husband. ‘Dumpy’ and ‘Dopey’ was all she ever heard: two of the Seven Dwarves in one and not a Snow White in sight. Only Ola could reassure her that it was good to be different from the rest of those little ice maidens.

  Ola came from London, from the Commercial Road, where she’d worked in the rag trade for her father. Despite nearly a half century in America, she still spoke with a broad East End twang, her conversations pitted with Yiddish and Cockney colloquialisms. She’d met her American husband Maurice, or Mac as she always referred to him, by chance, schlepping up the Dilly one afternoon to eye the latest fashions on Regent Street. They’d fallen in love and sailed to the States on a Cunard liner, arriving just in time for the Wall Street Crash.

  But Ola and Mac were canny operators with a flair for design and a skill at conjuring money. Ola may have begun bringing up her four children in a cold-water tenement on the Lower East
Side but she finished up with a big house in an exclusive New Jersey suburb. Only poor Mac wore his heart out too soon. Ruben took over the business when he was scarcely twenty-one.

  Ola’s second son Manny had returned to the city of his mother’s birth, but she hadn’t been tempted to follow him. She didn’t want to leave poor Mac all on his own and what would there be for her there now anyway? Sylvana used to gaze at the black-and-white photos of them in their youth, looking to her so much like film stars, and understood perfectly.

  She might have been a disappointment to her mother, but Sylvana had Ola’s blood. She had always known she would find her dream in London. Yet it wasn’t until Robin had played her his music that she finally knew what her dream really was. It had come to her in a heliotropic rush: Mood Violet.

  After that, all the years of confusion, all the strange jumbled-up poetry she’d been keeping in her journals and in her head suddenly transformed itself into actual songs. The colours she had always seen in those words – the vivid violet and silver, crimson and gold – shaded in exactly to the music Robin and Allie had made.

  She finally realised the transformation was complete the day she saw her picture in Sounds, with the piece Donna’s boyfriend had written about the band. This time there was no sign of Dumpy and Dopey – it was a red-haired, fine-boned young woman who stared back at her with radiant green eyes. She looked almost as good as Ola had in her day.

  By then Sylvana had graduated her college course and her parents had expected her back in New Jersey pronto. But for the first time in her life, she had defied them. She never wanted to leave London now. Everything she had ever wanted was here.

  Her band, her friends, her love.