Idolism

by Marcus Herzig

  “Right. Okay. Well, why not? We probably can’t make things any worse anyway.”

  “Yeah,” Michael said. “Let’s meet up at my place later and then go to the studio together. Julian wants to be there early so we can talk to Momoko before Tholen shows up.”

  “All right then.”

  We got to the studio late in the afternoon, about two hours before the show. Momoko sat down with us, and Julian told her exactly what had happened at Wembley and on BBC Breakfast that morning. She listened, she nodded, and like us she had no idea what the whole fuss was all about.

  “Nobody have humour anymore,” she said.

  Twenty minutes before we went on air, Tholen showed up at the studio. He wasn’t exactly pleased to see us there.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Before any of us got to stammer a reply, Momoko said, “I invite them on the show. To talk about album release. Originaru …”

  “Original Sin,” Tummy reminded her of the title.

  “Yes,” Momoko said and looked at Tummy with a strange, almost creepy smile on her face. “Originaru Sin.”

  “Now listen, guys,” Tholen said impatiently, “I think you might want to keep a very low profile in the next couple of days. What you pulled off at Wembley last night was despicable, immature, and childish. You don’t even begin to understand what kind of mess you’ve gotten yourselves—us—into. The Prime Minister called me at 3 a.m. and shouted at me. The bloody Prime Minister! Do you know why he called me? Because the German chancellor doesn’t have my phone number. So Mr Schmidtmüller, or whatever his bloody name is, called our Prime Minister who then called me to give me a proper licking. You guys have created a diplomatic and political mess that I had to spend all day rushing from one interview to the next to sort out.”

  “Well,” Michael said, “you didn’t do a very good job there, did you?”

  “Excuse me?!”

  “He’s right,” Julian said. “This morning I told people what happened, and you’ve spent the rest of the day talking out of your arse and repeating that fairy tale about some accidental mix-up with the lyrics. It was no accident. You know it, and the public knows it. Everything you did today was a complete waste of time.”

  “Oh was it?” Tholen asked belligerently. “Now listen to me, young man. I’ve been working my arse off today trying to protect you from a media machine that was out to tear you apart and feed you to the dogs, because that’s my fucking job!”

  “How very considerate of you, but if I need protection, I hire a bodyguard. Or better yet, I ask you to hire one for me. Your idea of protection seems to be making me look like a stupid little brat who can’t tell one set of lyrics from the other, and I don’t appreciate it. Your job is not to protect us, it’s to promote us. We’re more popular than The Beatles now, and that is no thanks to you. Now please excuse us while we go on Inside Momoko and talk about our album that was released today, which you managed to mention not even once in all your interviews.”

  “You’re not going anywhere near a TV camera,” Tholen said.

  “Yes, we are.”

  “No, you’re not. I’m shutting you down.”

  “You can’t do that!” I burst out before I even knew it.

  Tholen stepped up to me and spoke in a very low, almost threatening voice. “You have no idea what I can and cannot do, sweetheart. I can do whatever I want because I’m your bloody manager! I made you famous, and I can make you disappear overnight if you don’t get a grip on yourselves.”

  Momoko, who had been following the whole brawl in silence, cleared her throat.

  “Um, excuse me,” she said and bowed to Tholen ever so slightly, “but I think I made them famous. Was my camera team at school anniversary. You just standing in the way.”

  Tholen stared at her, speechless.

  “She’s right, actually,” Tummy said, grinning.

  “Okay, fine!” Tholen threw his arms up in the air, “Why don’t you let her be your bloody manager then?”

  “What a great idea,” I said. “Momoko, what do you think we should do?”

  After thinking about it for a moment, she said, “I think you come on my show and talk about album. And then maybe you go to Germany.”

  “What?!” Tholen put both his hands on his head.

  “Go to Germany,” Momoko repeated. “And play free concert for fans to apologize. In Japan, when you make mistake, apologize is very important.”

  “That’s bloody insane!” Tholen said. “If you go to Germany now after butchering their national anthem, they’re going to tear you limb from limb!”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Michael said, looking at his mobile. “Our version of their anthem actually seems to be pretty popular with the Germs.”

  Tholen looked at him. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Well,” Michael said, “last night after Wembley, I put the MP3 in our web shop. After now 20 hours we’ve sold some 80,000 copies at 99p each, almost half of them to people with German IP addresses, so I guess they must quite like it.”

  Tholen stared at him. We all stared at him because we were stunned by the news. In the five weeks since the school anniversary we had already had pretty amazing sales through our website, about one song every minute. Now we were down to one every second.

  Tummy was the first to regain his speech.

  “How much is 99p times 80,000?” he asked.

  “Well,” Michael said, “we only get to keep 70% of the revenue, but that’s still some 55,000 quid.”

  “Rock’n’bloody roll!”

  Tholen was still staring at Michael. “Who told you to do that?”

  “Who told me to do what?”

  “Who told you to upload and sell that mutilated anthem?”

  “Oh I don’t know,” Michael said and scratched his head. “My common sense, I guess.”

  “And when were you going to tell me?”

  Michael shrugged. “Probably as soon as you were amenable enough to be talked to without blowing your top.”

  Tholen closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “I’ve spent all day apologizing on your behalf, and behind my back you just …”

  “Well,” Julian interrupted him, “who told you to do that?”

  “My common sense,” Tholen said stone-faced.

  I couldn’t resist quipping, “Our common sense obviously beats yours, mister.”

  Tholen rubbed his eyes and sighed.

  “So what do you say, Peter?” Julian asked.

  “What do I say about what?”

  “About Momoko’s idea. A free concert for our fans in Germany. Tap into a new market.”

  It was obvious that Tholen still wasn’t crazy about the idea, but for the most successful music producer in the world sales figures were something he simply couldn’t ignore.

  He sighed again and finally said, “Let me make a few phone calls.”

  “You do that then,” Julian said. “Meanwhile we go on the show and sell our album. How’s that for an idea?”

  Momoko smiled. “You be on in ten minute. I see you in studio.”

  “Bye!” Tummy said and waved as she left the room.

  “Now listen to me,” Tholen said. “If you want to go to Germany, you will do exactly as I say. You go out there with Momoko now and you talk about your album and nothing else, you understand? If you mention Wembley or Germany or that bloody anthem, then your trip to Germany is off. Have I made myself clear?”

  We all looked at each other and nodded.

  “Fair enough,” Julian said.

  The Gospel According to Tummy – 9

  The fallout from the Wembley scandal was huge. Tholen was officially furious because he had to deal with what he called a public relations nightmare. However, I think deep down inside he was somewhat pleased because it turned out to be a rather lucrative nightmare. On the day after Wembley, our album Original Sin was released, and on that first day alone it sold 248,000 copies. A total of mo
re than half a million in the first week. Original Sin became the fastest selling UK debut album of all time, breaking the record previously held by that Susan Boyle woman. I’m sure Tholen was very pleased by that, even if he didn’t show it.

  One person who wasn’t pleased at all and who did show it was me dad. He was absolutely furious. First we had embarrassed him in front of his boss at the school anniversary, now we had embarrassed him in front of his new boss at Wembley. And if I say we, then of course I mean Julian. I was just the bloody bassist, playing the right tune and all. But nobody could be bothered to make that subtle distinction. Julian was Puerity was us. Cling together, swing together, that’s how it went.

  Me dad hated me for everything that Julian had done. He wasn’t just angry, he hated me. If he’d been just angry, he would have shouted at me or hit me or grounded me. He didn’t do any of that. Instead he just ignored me. He just carried on as if nothing had happened. I tried to talk to him, but he said there was nothing to talk about. I said I was sorry, but he said there was nothing to be sorry about. I knew that he lied. I had seen him lie to me mum often enough to tell when he wasn’t being honest. He was so mad at me that he denied me the opportunity to apologize by pretending that everything was okay. It was the worst kind of punishment he could have come up with, and he knew it. I wish he’d just beaten me up instead.

  I tried to talk about it with the others. Ginger and Michael couldn’t see the problem.

  “If he says everything’s okay then everything is okay. Just accept it and move on,” is what they said.

  Julian—of course—was bit blunter. And more honest, I suppose. “He hates you. What are you gonna do about it?”

  “He hates me because of you!” I said in a mix of anger and despair.

  Julian shook his head. “Because of me you may have found out that he hates you, but I’m sure he’s hated you before.”

  That’s Julian Monk for you. Hurtful, but honest.

  I wasn’t sure that this kind of honesty was what I needed right now. I was feeling miserable, and all that me so-called friends, the only so-called friends I’d ever known, were doing was to either dismiss me misery or to reinforce it. I looked around Underground Zero, the place where I had spent so much time in the last couple of years, and I looked at me friends, me only friends. And I felt lonely; lonelier than I’d ever felt before.

  So I just got up and left without saying a word. Outside of Michael’s house about a dozen fans were waiting. They surrounded me when I got out and asked me a million questions. I don’t remember any of them, and I didn’t answer them. I just signed a couple of autographs and then I left. I didn’t go home. I didn’t know where I was going or where I was supposed to go. The night was dark and cold, and I felt like I was the only human left in the world. I certainly was, at that time, the only person left in me own world. Except …

  After wandering aimlessly through the night for two hours, I ended up in front of Momoko’s house. I hadn’t meant to go there, and I didn’t realize I was there until I actually stood on her doorstep. It was around midnight. There was still light in her bedroom on the first floor. I knocked on the door. Twice. After a while I heard her coming down the stairs. She opened the door in a silk dressing gown.

  “Tummy,” she said, visibly surprised. “What’s wrong?”

  I didn’t say anything. I just threw meself around her neck and started to cry.

  She led me to the living room and made me a cup of tea. We talked. I mean, I did. I told her everything. I told her how Julian, Ginger, and Michael were the only friends I’d ever known and the only people who had ever cared about me. I told her how this was the most exciting time of me life, and how I suddenly felt more miserable and more lonely than ever before. And I told her how me dad hated me and didn’t even have the guts to show it, to shout at me, to be angry at me, and to punish me.

  “You think you deserve to be punish?” Momoko asked.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I suppose. Me parents have always punished me for pretty much everything I ever did. And now me friends and I have completely ruined me dad’s career, and there’s nothing. Nothing but this subtle passive-aggressiveness. They say everything’s okay, but at the same time they won’t pass me the salt at the dinner table. It’s like they’ve finally stopped giving a damn.”

  Momoko looked at me, then at her beautiful fingernails, then at me again. “You like me to punish?”

  “What?!”

  Momoko jumped to her feet and slammed both her hands on the table. “I said: you like me to punish?!” She shouted it, and she sounded really angry. Also, the belt of her dressing gown had come undone and I could see that she didn’t wear a bra.

  I don’t know what I was thinking. I didn’t know what I was supposed to think. So I just said, “Yes, please.”

  * * *

  When I woke up the next morning, it took me a good minute to realize who I was or where I was or what had happened. Do you know those first few moments when you wake up and the last fragments of your dreams still linger in your mind? I love sleeping, but the part of it that I love the most is waking up, those few precious seconds when you don’t know who you are or where you are or what you are. All you know is that you are. You do exist. And nothing else matters. The birth of consciousness, the moment when awe strikes you because you’ve just become self-aware. You feel happy, and for a tiny little moment your happiness is all that matters. It’s the only reason to be alive, the only thing worth living for.

  And then it hits you like machine gun fire from all sides.

  Bam! Bam! Bam!

  And within a second you remember everything. Everything you went to bed with is still there, and you know it won’t just go away. Climate change is still happening, you’re still suspended from school, your dad still hates you, your friends still don’t care, and you’re still fat. And just when you’ve realized that your life still sucks, and that you’re in really deep shit because you’ve ruined your dad’s career, and because you’ve spent the night away from home and your parents are probably sick with fear, and they’ve probably called the police to look for you, it suddenly strikes you that these are all petty problems compared with what you’ve gotten yourself into now. Because right there in the doorway stands Momoko Suzuki, a 22-year-old TV celebrity, one of the most famous and most loved faces of the nation, and you’ve probably ruined her career too by effectively turning her into a child molester. You should just get out of bed, take a shower, and then kill yourself.

  “Ohayo gozaimasu, Tummy-chan,” she said. That had to be a good sign, because it was Japanese and meant ‘Good morning, little Tummy’. At least she didn’t say, ‘Get the fuck out of my bed, and make sure nobody sees you on the way out’. Not that I’d have understood that if she’d said it in Japanese.

  “Ohayo gozaimasu, Momo-chan,” I replied.

  Momoko sat down on the bed, tucked her long brown hair behind her beautiful ears, and smiled at me.

  “You like breakfast?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sure. Breakfast would be nice.”

  She swung her leg around and sat down on me belly like a rider on a horse. Then she opened her dressing gown, took both her boobs in her hands and asked, “You like milk for breakfast?”

  I’m asking you, how is a 17-year-old boy supposed to deal with that type of thing? I had no idea, so oops, we did it again. It’s what rock stars do. They wake up in the morning, and before they even have breakfast they have sex with their girlfriend. I was living the life of a rock star. It was all sex and drugs and Rock’n’roll, with the drugs of me choice being adrenaline and testosterone.

  And this is where the story could—or should—have ended as far as I was concerned. You know, they had seven children and 49 grandchildren, and they lived happily ever after. That would have been perfectly fine with me. But it’s obviously not what happened.

  When we were finally having breakfast, I made the tactical mistake of switching me mobile back on. I had 28 new
text messages and 15 voice mails, but before I even had the time to check any of them, the phone started to ring.

  It was me mum.

  “Thomas!” she barked at me. “Where the hell are you?!”

  “I’m with a friend,” I said. “I’ll be home soon. Bye.”

  I pressed the disconnect button. The phone rang again after just a few seconds. This time it was Ginger.

  “Tummy! Where the hell are you?!”

  “Wow,” I said. “You sound exactly like me mum.”

  “I know,” she replied. “Because that crazy woman keeps calling and driving everyone insane. I told her you spent the night at Michael’s and that you’re still asleep. You might want to keep that story in mind when you get home to get your suitcase.”

  “Me suitcase?”

  “Yes, you suitcase. We’re going on a trip. Our flight leaves in three hours, so you better hurry and roll your arse over here. Where are you anyway?”

  “I’m with a friend,” I said.

  “You don’t have any friends. Your only friends are here with me.”

  “Never mind, I’m on me way. Where are we going anyway?”

  “Deutschland,” she said. “Time to say sorry to the Germs.”

  The Gospel According to Ginger – 9

  When we arrived in Berlin that afternoon, Momoko and her camera team were already waiting for us at the airport. I don’t know how they did it. Peter Tholen didn’t know how they did it either, but at that point he didn’t care. We had come to Berlin to play a concert for the Germs in order to apologize for the political mayhem Julian had created at Wembley, and to have a T-Vox camera team there who could report our diplomatic efforts back to the UK seemed like a good idea to him, so he couldn’t care less about how Momoko had even found out about it. The man was a public relations genius, and as long as he could use the media for his own purposes, he didn’t ask any questions. In fact, in a quick little chat at the airport he even told Momoko the exact time and place of our gig, so that when we arrived at the Brandenburg Gate for our concert in the evening, Momoko, Cameraron, and Audiomike were again already waiting for us. And they weren’t the only ones. There were about 5,000 people there when we got on that stage right in front of the Brandenburg Gate, most of them in their mid to late teens. The stage was part of a music festival that was supposed to start the next day, and we were allowed to use it because Tholen was well connected even in the German music scene, so all he had to do was pull a few strings.