Idolism

by Marcus Herzig

  The problems with Tholen started about five seconds after we had signed the contract. Suddenly he came up with all sorts of crazy ideas, like composing new songs for us instead of just rearranging classical pieces. He also wanted to give us a complete makeover and a whole new image. He presented us with a set of new outfits, things that a 50-year-old fart like him thought were ‘hip’. They were the worst outfits I have ever seen in my entire life, and I do watch T-Vox, which means I’ve seen some pretty awful stuff. For me he had purple satin jacket that had feathers growing out of its breast pocket. Feathers! I was looking like a prostitute walking Sesame Street.

  To top it all, Tholen suggested that we changed the lyrics to most of our songs. He wanted some more lovey-dovey bullshit instead of all the depressing, meaningful emo lyrics that were Julian’s specialty. Tholen said nobody wanted to hear pop songs about how bleak and cruel the world was. That’s what people watched the evening news for. He thought our songs should be more cheerful and about beautiful topics like love and summer holidays and first kisses. Because that supposedly was what teenage girls were ready to spend their pocket money on.

  So yeah, Tholen presented us with this whole bunch of awful ideas. He basically wanted to get rid of every single thing about us that had made us famous, and turn us into a sugary sweet plastic pop band. Except there was one thing he didn’t reckon with. And that was Julian. After Tholen had finished his little presentation of all these great new ideas, he looked at us and said, “So what do you think, guys?”

  Julian just shook his head. “No.”

  “No? What do you mean, ‘no’?”

  “No,” Julian repeated.

  “You must excuse our terrible accents, sire,” I said. “Where we come from, no means the opposite of yes. I think Julian doesn’t like your ideas. Neither do I, by the way. Not that anyone cares.”

  Julian looked at me and said, “I do.”

  “Thank you.”

  “We don’t want this,” Julian said to Tholen. “This is not us. This is not me. I cannot sing about love and first kisses because I only love my mum, and I don’t want to kiss anyone. I cannot wear your sparkly costumes, because I’m not a clown. I like my school uniform because it symbolizes being part of a group of people that have become a group for the sole purpose of learning and advancing themselves. I’m going to keep wearing my school uniform.”

  Tummy leaned over to Tholen and whispered, “It’s kind of his fetish. He never wears anything else, even on Sundays.”

  Tholen pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “And we’re not going to compose our own songs or use songs newly composed by other people,” Julian continued. “Why would we want to do that? There are so many great old copyright-free tunes around that most people only know from toilet cleaner commercials. We don’t need new songs. We want to give people a new perspective on old things. There is nothing new anyway. Everything’s been done before. The future is just another variation on the past. Save the money you were going to spend on songwriters and give it to charity. If you write me a new tune today, you have no way of knowing whether people will like it or not. What if they don’t like it? Then I’ve wasted precious lyrics on a song that nobody wants to hear. I want to rely on tunes that have proven to be popular with audiences for one or two hundred years. They are guaranteed to make people listen.”

  “But ...” Tholen wanted to interrupt, but Julian wouldn’t let him.

  “Let me finish, please. You saw us perform. You knew what you were going to get when you signed us. I appreciate your ideas and suggestions, but we cannot do these things. We have to be who we are. We are not somebody else, nor do we want to be. Do we guys?”

  Julian looked around, and we all shook our heads and said, “No, we don’t.”

  Tholen looked at every single one of us. You could see how pissed off he was. I guess he wasn’t used to people telling him that his ideas sucked. For a moment I thought he was going to throw a hissy fit. But then he just said, “Okay, fine,” got up and stomped out of the room.

  The Gospel According to Tummy – 8

  Rock’n’roll!

  We signed a record deal with Thorex, the label of the biggest music producer in the known universe, how awesome is that? Well, it was very awesome, at least at the beginning. We spent the next ten days at Abbey Road to record our first album Original Sin, and after that, Tholen booked us on every freaking gig he could get his hands on, and he could get his hands on pretty much everything he wanted. For the next couple of weeks we were travelling all over the country, north to south, east to west. We played small venues, we played big venues. They were all sold out. We appeared on morning news shows, we appeared on lunchtime news shows, we appeared on the evening news. And we sort of became regulars on Inside Momoko. It was a daily programme, and we appeared on it twice, sometimes three times a week. We were all over the place all the time.

  When I returned home after two weeks on the road and I asked me sister jokingly, “Did you miss me?” she just rolled her eyes and said, “What are you talking about? I see you more often than when you used to live here.”

  We loved our new life. I mean, I loved it, and I can only speak for meself. What was not to be loved? I mean from me own perspective? Every day and every night we were playing in front of thousands of screaming fangirls, and I just kept looking at them, thinking, Sorry, girls, but I’m already taken.

  Of course I couldn’t say that out loud in interviews or anything. Momoko wanted to keep our relationship secret because of the whole media circus that would ensue if we made our love public, and also because of the delicate fact that I was 17 and she was 22. Legally speaking she was a child molester, but what the hell, being molested by her was the bloody best thing that had ever happened to me in me entire life. I hated that we couldn’t walk through the park hand in hand, I hated that we couldn’t kiss on the red carpet at a movie premiere, I hated that we could never show our love in public. But all the things we did in private made up for all that ten times over. So yeah, me life was heaven for a couple of weeks that summer, but it wouldn’t be me life if things had just stayed like that and we’d lived happily ever after. Before long everything had to fall apart and come crumbling down on me, on the band, on Momoko. And it all started with a bloody football match.

  The Gospel According to Michael – 8

  For a couple of weeks Tholen booked us on everything. We did music shows, we did game shows, we did chat shows, we did kids shows. We did everything. It was almost surreal. And then, when we thought we’d done it all, he got us the gig of a lifetime. A Beatles-at-Shea-Stadium type of gig, only even shorter and even more spectacular. Five minutes in front of 90,000 people and another 15 million in front of the telly.

  In the week when Jerusalem first topped the UK singles charts and a few days before the release of our album Original Sin, Tholen called us to his office.

  “Guys,” he said, “we’re on a roll here, and we’re going to milk this cow as much as we can. I have another gig for you.”

  Ginger moaned. “Seriously? Are you trying to burn us or something? We haven’t had a day off in two weeks!”

  “Don’t worry darling. This gig won’t be until Wednesday next week, the day before the album release, and it’ll last only five minutes. Julian, how is your German?”

  “Sehr gut,” Julian said. In the last two years he had been taking German, French, and Spanish classes at school, and he was an A* student in all of them.

  “Excellent!” Tholen rejoiced. “You’ll be playing both national anthems at next week’s World Cup qualifier between England and Germany at Wembley Stadium.”

  “Rock’n’roll!”

  We were excited. Ginger had a point, we had been on the road for two weeks straight and we had all been looking forward to having a couple of days off, but this gig was still a week away and it would last only a few minutes, so we happily agreed.

  “Here’s the sheet music,” Tholen said and handed us a bunch of pap
ers. Then he started rummaging about in his desk drawer. “Wait, I had the lyrics somewhere.”

  “That’s all right,” Julian said. “I can look them up.”

  “All right then. Off you go. Rehearse your songs. This is going to be the highlight of your still very young career, and on the eve of your album release at that. Fifteen million TV viewers! In terms of advertising it doesn’t get much better than that.”

  Tholen was ecstatic, and it was difficult not to be affected by that. So off we went and did as we were told. We rearranged both anthems Puerity-style, and Julian memorized the lyrics of the German anthem (he already knew the lyrics to God Save the Queen, obviously).

  On the day of the match, Tholen picked us up in his limo and took us to Wembley where we met up with Tummy’s dad. After the school anniversary and Education Secretary Gardener’s resignation three days later, Mr Lewis had been reassigned within the party apparatus. Before we went out onto the pitch, he personally introduced us to the Prime Minister and the German chancellor to make sure that they would both remember our faces when we kicked off one of the biggest diplomatic scandals in post-war Europe.

  I first noticed that something was going terribly wrong when two lines into the German anthem, the German players, who were standing just a few metres in front of us, looked at each other shrugging their shoulders, and the five or six thousand German fans joined their English counterparts and started booing their own anthem. There was nothing we could do, though, and I didn’t even have much time to think about it, because as soon as we were done with the German anthem, we started playing God Save the Queen. That one went perfectly well, just as expected. We played it, 80,000 people sang along with Julian, and when it was over, a deafening cheer went through the stadium. It was so loud that we didn’t hear a word of what our literally red-faced manager was shouting at us as he led us off the pitch and into the Wembley catacombs.

  He took us to a sound proof room somewhere in the vaults of Wembley, and it was a good thing, too, that the room was sound proof. Tholen closed the door behind us, pinched the bridge of his nose and took three deep breaths before he finally opened his mouth.

  “ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR BLOODY MIND?”

  Ginger, Tummy, and I exchanged bewildered looks. We had no idea what was going on.

  He turned to Julian. “Where did you get those lyrics?”

  Julian scratched his head. “You mean Good Save the …”

  “No! The German lyrics! The risen-from-ruins crap!”

  “Um.” Julian shrugged. “Wikipedia, I think.”

  “Oh, Wikipedia, you think. And did you by any chance happen to read the article that came with those lyrics?”

  “Why?”

  “Why? WHY? Because you just sang the national anthem of the former socialist dictatorship of East Germany in front of 15 million people, and probably another 20 million in Germany, that’s why!”

  “Oh,” Julian said.

  “Yes, oh!” Tholen found a rubbish bin and kicked it across the room. “How could you be so bloody stupid?”

  Ginger hissed. Julian didn’t like being called stupid, and I was expecting him to defend himself passionately, to say something, anything. But he just stood there with a subtle smile on his face.

  “Get out!” Tholen finally said. “The limo will take you home while I start sorting out this bloody mess. Julian, expect me to pick you up at 5:30 in the morning. We need to get on the morning shows and talk our way out of this.”

  “What about us?” Tummy asked.

  “What the hell would I need you for?” Tholen said. “No, just Julian. You guys at least managed to play the right tune.”

  We didn’t talk much on the way home. None of us knew what to say, I suppose. I wouldn’t say we felt guilty, though. None of us, apart from Julian, spoke any German, nor were we too familiar with Germany’s post-war history. We had rehearsed the German anthem a couple of times before Wembley, and it had sounded German enough. We just assumed that Julian knew what he was doing, and the longer I thought about it, the harder I found it to believe that he didn’t. Julian simply didn’t make stupid mistakes like that, so after the limo had dropped off Ginger and Tummy, I looked at him and said, “You did that on purpose, didn’t you?”

  Julian didn’t say anything. He just winked at me and smiled.

  The Gospel According to Ginger – 8

  At around 7:20 the next morning I woke up to the surreal sight of Tholen and Julian sitting on the BBC Breakfast sofa. After the presenters Charlie and Louise reminded people of what had happened at Wembley the night before, they turned to their guests.

  “So tell us what happened,” Louise said.

  “A terrible mistake happened,” Tholen said. “Somewhere along the line there must have been a mix up with the lyrics, and we would like to offer our sincerest apologies to the German players and fans—to the German people, in fact—for causing any offence.”

  “That is not what happened,” Julian said. He didn’t look at Tholen or at the presenters. He just stared at the floor as he kept talking. “There was no mix up. When you offered us the gig last week you gave us the sheet music, but you didn’t have the lyrics, so I said I’d look them up. That’s what I did.”

  “But you obviously picked the wrong ones,” Charlie said. “Didn’t you?”

  Julian shook his head. “I’m not stupid. I knew what I was doing.”

  “What are you talking about?” Tholen asked under his breath, but the microphones picked it up.

  “I looked at both sets of lyrics, and I decided to pick the one that best represented Germany. It’s a modern, open country, but their official anthem is naff and dated, and even most Germans don’t quite understand the lyrics because of the archaic language. I thought they deserved better. The lyrics I sang are more accessible, more inspiring and more modern.”

  “But that is not your decision to make, is it?” Charlie said. “Ultimately the Germans have to decide what anthem they want.”

  “And I think what’s a bit problematic here,” Louise added, “is the fact that those lyrics, the lyrics you sang, used to represent a communist dictatorship.”

  “That is actually not exactly true,” Julian replied. “Those lyrics did not ‘represent’ East Germany, they were merely used—abused, in fact—by East Germany to make their system look like something that it never was. You can’t blame that on the lyrics. Risen from Ruins aspires to peace, prosperity, and happiness for all. I can’t see anything wrong with that. Bad people sometimes do or say good things. That doesn’t automatically make those good things bad. The Germans know that, they’re not stupid. They still quite happily use the autobahns that were built by Hitler, and …”

  And that’s when Tholen grabbed Julian’s arm and dragged him out of the studio.

  “That was Julian Monk with some very controversial remarks there,” Louise said. “He does have a point, though, when he says that good things aren’t automatically bad just because they’re done by bad people.”

  “However,” Charlie replied, “you can’t just go and change a country’s national anthem to something you like better. That doesn’t seem appropriate. But anyway, the time now 7:26, here are today’s headlines.”

  I turned off the TV and pulled the bed cover over my head.

  Half an hour later—I was just having breakfast—my mobile rang. It was Michael.

  “Did you see it?” he asked.

  “Oh, you mean our manager on BBC Breakfast? Yeah, I’ve seen it. But who the hell was that bloke sitting next to him?”

  “I know, right?” Michael said.

  “What’s going on, Michael? I mean with Julian. What’s happening with him?”

  “I don’t know. But speaking of Julian, he just called.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said that after their appearance on BBC Breakfast, Tholen cancelled all other interviews for today. Or rather, he decided to do them alone, to do some damage control. He sent Julian home.”

/>   “Maybe better this way.”

  “I don’t know. Have you checked our Twitter? We’re getting hundreds of messages, and they’re all rather supportive. The media are pretty mad at us right now because Julian pissed off the Germans, but our fans don’t seem to give a damn. Anyway, Julian is not happy with the fact that Tholen wants to spend the whole day on TV speaking for us, and he thinks we should still do Inside Momoko tonight as planned, even if Tholen told us to stay away.”

  “So what do you think?” I asked.

  “Well, I sort of understand where he’s coming from. Momoko likes us. She’s on our side. She’s probably the only journalist out there right now who’s not out to kill us and who’d let us tell the story from our perspective. So I’m thinking maybe we should take the opportunity.”