The Singer

by Cathi Unsworth

  When we stepped outside, it was one of those bright, mild February days that holds out the promise of spring just when you have given up hope that winter will ever end. Crocus and narcissi were poking themselves out of the ground in people’s front gardens, reminding me of mother’s carefully tended plot and how pleased she always was with the first bulbs of the year.

  On Portobello Road, mobile phone shops and coffee bars were proliferating in just the same manner, pushing out the shops that had amused previous generations – the comix shop Fantastic Store, the goth boutique run by that tall, fit bird with long black hair that used to be next to the tattooists. I wondered what Steve Mullin would make of it all.

  It wasn’t long before I found out precisely.

  We found him in the big lounge room at the back of the Lonsdale, which had recently been made over from its original wooden tables and chairs into a lounging area with numerous ill-matching sofas and what appeared to be half a dead tree festooned with fairy lights hanging from the centre of the ceiling.

  Steve was standing with his back to us, pint in hand, examining a Pulp Fiction film poster. That was about as trendy as the Lonsdale got, thank Christ. It was about the only pub on Portobello that still was a pub, as opposed to a trendy Trustafarian bar.

  ‘Steven,’ said Gavin in a mock-grave tone.

  The guitarist wheeled round.

  I was quite shocked. Steve Mullin had not aged anywhere near as well has his former bass player. He always had had a battered look about him, but years of heavy drinking appeared to have taken a Mike Tyson-like toll on his face. All his features had coarsened; he had a double chin, a bulbous nose verging dangerously on the strawberry and eyes like slits with puffy lids. The unruly hair was still thick, dyed and spiked to attention, and he hadn’t changed his wardrobe much either, it was just that his stomach now hung over the belt of his black drainpipe jeans almost obscenely. He was obviously one of those guys who only put on weight in one place, and what a concentration there was there – he almost looked pregnant.

  ‘Fookin’ hell, Digger, I see you’ve not changed!’ he exclaimed. ‘Just as bastard well, everything else has round here. What’s happened to place? I just got chowed at by bastard Yanks for lightin’ up in a no smokin’ room – thought I’d got away from all that shite in LA.’

  He frowned incredulously.

  ‘You’ve been in La La Land too long, mate,’ Gavin replied.

  ‘Fookin’ right I have.’ Stevie put his pint down on a table and opened his arms. ‘How are you, any road?’

  Gavin stepped into a hearty embrace.

  ‘I’m good, mate, yourself?’

  ‘I’m fookin’ confused I am, like. I went in bank this mornin’ and the bloke behind the counter had a fookin’ mohican – he only looked about twelve year old an’ all. Is there some kind of punk revival I’ve missed out on?’

  ‘Nah, that’ll be the David Beckham fan club,’ said Gavin.

  ‘David Beckham?’ Steve almost spat the word out. ‘Fookin’ ’ell. I think I need another pint. What you havin’, Digger?’

  ‘I’ll join you in a pint. This is Eddie, by the way.’

  Steve looked at me for the first time. It was not a particularly friendly look.

  I stepped forward and reached out my hand. ‘Good to meet you,’ I offered, encouragingly.

  He belched loudly, then took my hand back and shook it with a grip that made me wince. ‘You’re the one writin’ book, are you?’ he said.

  ‘That’s right,’ I tried to keep a smile in place through gritted teeth.

  ‘You want a drink?’ His expression didn’t change.

  ‘I’ll get them,’ I offered.

  Steve nodded. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Get us that one with the comedy German on the taps. Not the strong one, the other one – Knackerblitzen or Eidelweiss or summat.’

  ‘Ayingerbrau,’ said Gavin. ‘I’ll have the same. We’ll get a table, Eddie. Looks like we’ve got the room to ourselves at least.’

  Hmmmm, I thought, that might be the only consolation of the day. No wonder Gavin had wanted me well briefed for this encounter. He obviously anticipated there could be trouble with this one. Still, I mused, as I handed the barman a tenner, I suppose I would be wary if I was Steve. I’d want to suss me out too. Probably the hostility would wear off after a few jars, once he realised how seriously I was taking the book.

  When the barman actually returned with some change I took it as a good omen.

  Gavin and Steve were huddled in the far corner away from the sofas, sitting opposite each other across a table. Steve was mid-anecdote, a fag blazing in one hand, the dregs of his previous pint in the other.

  ‘Billy kept goin’ on about this haunted corner, that he couldn’t play in there ’cos the vibes, man, were like really deadly for his mojo,’ he was saying, switching from Yorkshire into LA-speak midway through. ‘Well you know, there’s quite a few legends about places in Hollywood bein’ haunted – Grauman’s Chinese Theatre for one, fookin’ Chateau Marmot for another, anywhere these bastard actors have popped they clogs. ’Cos you know what they’re like, they can’t go on without an audience even when they’re dead.’

  I put Steve’s new pint in front of him and he picked it up with a grunt that could have been ‘ta’ and carried straight on with his story.

  ‘So, after about a month of this shite, I found out from drummer, it weren’t a bastard ghost he were worried about at all. It was this fookin’ sound booth where one of them poodlehaired glam metal wankers used to go an’ shag ’is groupies. Once I found that out, I were like, respect to you, mate, I wouldn’t want to touch it with a plastic one either.’

  Gavin roared with laughter. I sat down beside him, wondering whether to get my tape recorder out of my bag or to let a couple of drinks go by first.

  ‘Cheers, Eddie,’ he picked up his pint and clinked it against mine.

  Steve looked over resentfully.

  ‘Yeah, cheers,’ he said, then turned his eyes back to Gavin. ‘How’s your mate Mick, Digger? Where’s he got to these days?’

  It carried on like this for another two hours. He must have sunk six pints before he even needed to go to the bog, by which time I was steaming.

  ‘Should I just go home and forget about this?’ I asked Gavin, once his mate was safely out of earshot.

  ‘No, no,’ he put a hand on my arm. ‘Just stay cool, mate, he’s just sussing you out, he’s always like this when he meets new people.’

  ‘Well, I wish you’d warned me.’

  ‘Well, if I had done, you might have felt even more awkward. I just made sure you knew your shit, ’cos if he tries to test you out about what songs you like, which he will in probably another pint’s time, you’ve gotta be able to impress him. But honestly, mate, everyone goes through this, it’s the initiation ceremony.’

  He tipped me a wink. ‘They did it to Mick as well. Him and Vince, it was fuckin’ carnage. But I promise you, after you’ve survived a night on the piss with Steve, you’ll have a mate for life.’

  That made me feel a bit better, but not much. ‘What’s with all this Digger shit anyway?’ I asked.

  ‘Mate, that’s how he thinks Australians speak. I think he got it from The Paul Hogan Show in the early eighties. He used to call Mick the Great White Wino.’

  I couldn’t help but laugh at that. Obviously there was a very funny guy lurking underneath that obnoxious exterior. I just had to be patient and wait for him to out himself.

  Only Steve came out of the bogs in a bullish mood, swaggering across the room and coming to a halt beside us to stand, rearranging his bollocks in his too-tight jeans. ‘I fancy a walk,’ he announced. ‘Let’s go and see what manner of cunts have taken over the rest of this place. See if there’s owt left I even recognise.’

  Steve’s idea of a walkabout was to mosey from one pub to another, staring at amazement as he entered each refurbished pile and spouting loudly of his disgust at the transformation. Predictably, hi
s outrage reached its apex when we entered The Lounge and he saw the faux Warhol screenprint of Joe Strummer.

  ‘I’ve seen it fookin’ all now,’ he said, stopping dead in front of it.

  By this point, I’d just about had enough. At the start of our odyssey, he’d run into an old acquaintance, a huge Rasta, inside the Portobello Gold. In his delight to talk to the guy, he’d ignored both Gavin and me for the best part of an hour, which I had started to see as a blessing. But his reassurance that there was still human life in W11 took a turn for the worse when he saw the pub he referred to as Finches, but to the rest of the world The Duke of Wellington, was crawling with American tourists. He stormed straight out of there into the bar across the way and belched loudly in the barman’s face when he asked if sir would like to try today’s special Mojitos at two for the price of one. Taking gleeful delight that the Electric Cinema had been transformed into a playground for the glitterati, he’d stuck a foot to deliberately trip up a semi-famous TV actor who was mincing his way in there, sending him flying into a table full of shocked Yummy Mummies. By the time we’d reached The Lounge it was nearly six o’clock and the whole afternoon had been akin to minding a gigantic toddler with Tourette’s and Attention Deficit Disorder.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘you used to get a better class of cunt in here in your day.’

  ‘You what?’ he snapped, his bloodshot eyes blazing. ‘You calling Joe Strummer a cunt?’

  ‘No,’ I said simply. ‘I’m calling you one.’

  And I stared him back full in the eye, the look I had spent hours learning from Paulie Sorvino in Goodfellas.

  I was so full of adrenalin then that my hands had involuntarily bunched up into fists and I was fully prepared to swing for the bastard and fuck the consequences. But then Steve’s snarl turned into a wide grin and the glint in his eye suddenly made about twenty years drop away from his face.

  ‘I wondered how long it’d tek you to realise,’ he said.

  ‘You tested him sorely,’ said Gavin.

  ‘Aye,’ nodded Steve, ‘but he’s finally passed.’

  ‘You cunts!’ I exclaimed. ‘You’re both fucking cunts!’

  ‘That’s right, Eddie,’ Steve said proudly. ‘We’re all bastard cunts together, which is just as well, like, ’cos we seem to have found the centre of the cunt universe here.’

  He surveyed the rest of the room disdainfully. ‘Right, well, Digger, I think I’ve had enough of trendy Portobello Road now. What say we go to off licence, get us selves a nice bottle of Jack and repair to your humble abode?’

  ‘I’d say that was just about the most civilized idea I’ve heard all day.’

  ‘Then fookin’ lay on, McDigger, let’s get out of here.’

  Steve’s story after that was long in the telling. From the first Sex Pistols record he ever nicked in Sidney Scarborough’s record shop in Hull to the final showdown at the Lyceum Ballroom, he recalled it all with profane humour and astonishing honesty. Gavin, God bless him, kept us going, nipping out for another bottle of Jack, packets of fags and four-packs of lagers from the dirty offie on the Grove; even supplying blank tapes when I ran out. The birds were twittering the dawn chorus by the time we got to the end.

  ‘I were just so fookin’ angry,’ Steve told me, referring to the band’s fateful last night together. ‘I felt like, he weren’t just content to fookin’ ditch us for some dozy bint, but he wanted to fookin’ destroy us all in process. So, the whole way through that last gig we done, that triumphant Lyceum gig as you call it, I was thinkin’ about how I were gonna kill him – and I seriously was, and probably would’ve done if old Stevens wasn’t there to protect his investment.

  ‘See, what no bastard realised about that gig was that Kevin, right, Kevin had nearly had his fookin’ arms broken by the cunt, our fookin’ drummer, he’d only just got enough strength back in ’im to fookin’ play by then. And Lynton, fuck knows how he even stayed upright, let alone made a coherent noise, ’cos the rest of us might have been on a stage in London but his brain were on fookin’ Mars.

  ‘And Vince is there, poncing away, doin’ all his fookin’ “I’m a bad arse” shit and all the kids are lappin’ it up, but little do they know, he’s gonna get on a fookin’ aeroplane to swan off with Gloria Vanderbilt straight after show, leavin’ us lot a load of geriatric fookin’ old wrecks headed straight for knackers’ yard. After all’s we’d been through, how far we’d come, that were how he thought it were goin’ to end. So I thought, no, you cunt, that’s not how it’s goin’ to end, it’s goin’ to end with my big, fuck-off, steel-capped boots walking right up your bastard neck. I grabbed hold of ’im just as we come off stage and if Stevens hadn’t had his little Richardsons army with ’im this story probably would have come to an even more tragic ending.’

  Steve paused, gazed up at the ceiling, and reached for another sip of Jack. ‘Trouble was, though, at end of day, I fookin’ loved the guy. Not to sound gay about it or owt, but the truth was, I couldn’t handle fact he’d dumped me for a fookin’ bird. Took me years to get over that, it did. By which time it was all too late, of course. Now there’s no way I’m gonna make amends to him in this life.’ He shook his head grimly.

  ‘What would you say to him if he walked through this door right now?’ I asked.

  Steve stuck out his bottom lip and shook his head. ‘I’d say, “Where the fook have you been, you cunt?” No I wouldn’t. I’d say, “I’m fookin’ sorry. Sorry for how it finished, how I behaved, and most of all, how I let you just walk off into sunset without raisin’ a finger to help you when the woman you loved was dead.”’

  His voice sound strained and harsh.

  ‘But there’s no fookin’ point even speculating about that, is they? ’Cos he’s fookin’ dead now too, lyin’ in some cold earth, no cunt even knows where. All on ’is own. Just lyin’ there.’

  ‘All right, mate, all right, it’s not your fault,’ Gavin went to put his arm round Steve then, but Steve brushed him off, wagged a finger in his face.

  ‘You know, Digger, I allus thought that bitch was such a fookin’ liar and I know you did too. One night she said to Lynton that the reason her lyrics were so fookin’ in the clouds were because she could actually see different colours when she heard different words and sounds. Well that fookin’ proved to me she was a nutcase, amongst other things, that were really like, “Nurse! The screens!”

  ‘But then, like, there was this programme on BBC World, or whatever the cable thing is that you can get in the States. A whole programme about folk what see words as colours, numbers as colours, sounds as colours – a whole fookin’ load of ’em from all walks of life, none of them is makin’ this up. It’s a fookin’ real condition called synaethesia and they reckoned that somethin’ like one person in every hundred has got it. They even reckoned that was how language started in the first place, mebbe.’

  ‘So,’ Gavin shrugged, ‘that’s one thing she didn’t lie about. So what?’

  ‘No, you don’t get it,’ Steve looked really agitated now. ‘The thing were, Vince was allus goin’ on about what a fookin’ genius she were and we was all too busy hatin’ her guts to even listen to him. But what if he were right? All them people on that programme were fookin’ brainy, I’m tellin’ you. And it made me stop and think. What if I’d spent less time being a cunt to him and more time tryin’ to get on with her? It never would have turned out the way it did, don’t you see?’

  ‘Mate, you’re pissed,’ said Gavin. ‘That chick didn’t top herself because of you. You can’t blame yourself, especially not after all these years, just because you saw one documentary that maybe proves she wasn’t quite as insane as you thought she was. It still doesn’t change the fact she was completely unstable and would have done anything to get attention, including and especially wrecking the band. I think you need some sleep.’ He glanced down at his wristwatch. ‘I think we all fucking do.’

  Steve’s expression of anguish faded into weary resignation.


  ‘I think you could be right, Digger. You usually are. Scratch my last comments, Boswell,’ he said, waving an unsteady finger in my direction. ‘I’ll come back to you in mornin’.’

  And with that, he keeled over onto the sofa and began snoring loudly.

  Gently, Gavin removed the smouldering cigarette from between his fingers and stubbed it out.

  ‘Looks like your bed’s taken,’ he said to me. ‘You’d better come in with me – and you better not make the sort of noise that he does.’

  ‘OK,’ I nodded, rubbing my eyes. ‘It’ll make a change to sleep in a bed for once, even if it is with you.’

  ‘Eddie, has anyone ever told you what a charmer you are?’

  ‘Frequently,’ I sighed. ‘And one day someone will mean it.’

  18

  Join Hands

  August 1980

  Donna put the phone down with an expression of triumph.

  ‘You won’t believe this,’ she said, crossing fingers plated with silver rings and black nail varnish. ‘But “Cherry Coma” is number 15 and you’re wanted for this week’s Top of the Pops’.

  Donna had a bright red telephone to go with her redlacquered desk. Behind her, painted in bold black and white, was a geometric abstract mural designed and executed by two eager young students. It vaguely resembled the Rising Sun, for faux Japanese was her latest style obsession. Decorative orchids hung from the top of filing cabinets. The lampshade was a huge white paper moon. She had even piled her hair up and skewered it in place with chopsticks, although her kimono-style top, pencil skirt and winklepickers remained resolutely black.

  Donna fancied herself as a high-powered businesswoman now, and this, finally, was her crossover moment. After two and a half years, approaching four albums and two previous Top 20 singles, Mood Violet were headed for the real big time. A big red smile curled across her face.

  Not that their progress so far had been slow, she had to admit. They’d grown out of the toilet circuit by the end of the Ice-Tapped Vein tour in June of ’79. It had been a major success. Demand for tickets on their final night in London had reached such proportions that Donna had been forced to switch venues from the proposed Fulham Greyhound to the Electric Ballroom in Camden, a venue that held twice the punters, and still it was a sell-out.