by Brian Aldiss
I walked through room after room, ward after ward, all deathly quiet. No healing would ever take place here. There was no way in which one penny of the investment could be retrieved. Only the termites would benefit.
When I flew back from Nairobi, it was to find that the Bang-Bang had taken off and their first single was already in the charts.
I walk left, I walk right,
I waste no sleeping on the night –
It’s two by two, the light the dark
Just like animals in the Ark
Because I’ll tell ya
Tell ya
I’m a Two-Way Romeo
Hatched right under that Gemini sign
Magic number Sixty-Nine
We’re two in one and all in all
Shoot double-barrelled wherewithal …
Girls cumma my house, I let ’em in,
I say Wait, I say Begin –
At first it’s strange but then it lives
They grow to love the alternatives
’N’ then they’ll tell ya
Tell ya
I’m a Two-Way Romeo
Bang-Bang
A Two-Way Thru-Way New-Way Romeo1
Looking back, one is astonished to recall the fury which accompanied the success of this execrable song. On their first Northern tour, the Howe twins appeared as support to another of Zak’s groups. Their gig, as I understand the term to be, was closed down in Sunderland for reasons of indecency; with Zak’s financial backing, the manager of the Sunderland club contested this decision in the courts, and the affair was given some publicity. From then on, a trail of accusations of indecency and innuendo followed like exhaust fumes in the wake of the Bang-Bang’s speeding career.
A question was soon raised in the Houses of Parliament. National debate followed, to the strains of that tuneless song. Should the physiologically deprived make capital of their deprivation? Was it fair to themselves and their public?
We can see now why the Bang-Bang was difficult to take. At the time, much of the discussion centred on whether their songs and performances were good or bad; in fact, the question of art hardly entered into the matter. The question of morality was a good deal more pressing (but the British public is well accustomed to confusing art with morality).
Two overlapping areas of morality served to make the Bang-Bang hot news. The Bang-Bang were Siamese twins and therefore represented a deformity (for libel reasons, the word ‘freak’ was rarely used in public); should deformity be exploited in this way – indeed, was it being exploited?
And – this was the more painful area – should deformed people be allowed to flaunt their sexuality? The deformed, the handicapped, were supposed to keep quiet about their natural desires. There was enough material here to keep the pot of virtuous sentiment, seasoned with prurient interest, a-boiling for a long while.
Self-appointed guardians of the country’s moral fibre claimed that sexuality and music were being debased, that national sensitivities would suffer. Then a Liberal Member of Parliament went on television to state that, in his humble opinion, it was all to the good that minorities such as Siamese twins should have their voice; and moreover that his family (although not he himself) had greatly enjoyed the energy of the Bang-Bang, as well as the pagan innocence of their songs. He considered them good-looking young men. He did not see anything unpleasant in deformity, and looked forward to the day when greater enlightenment brought multiple sclerosis olympics and similar events.
This speech was so widely reported, with further photographs of the Bang-Bang and other deformed people who had immediately sought to cash in on the Bang-Bang’s success, that it drove out the news of two more African states, including Kanzani, being overtaken by Communist coups.
Debated, photographed, interviewed, booked solid, the Bang-Bang rose immediately from strength to strength.
Imitating their rough Norfolk accents became a national pastime among the young. Deformity became chic. Fake Siamese twins became the rage. Singing amputees appeared on the Palladium bill.
It was stardust from then on for the Howe twins: the usual vulgar story of success. Talk of wrecked hotel rooms, hysterical female fans, drink, and strong-arm bodyguards eager to do their stuff, only added to the excitement. The triumphal tours made in this country were transferred to the United States with even greater success, then to Europe, then to other parts of the globe. There was the special Concorde flight to Kuwait, the launching of Bang-Bang magazines, a raft of golden discs and, inevitably, the constant flow of money and more money, unstaunchable, like blood pouring down a drain.
Even in the grotesque annals of the rock industry, the Bang-Bang provided one of those fabulous stories which appeared too good to be true. Certainly it was too good to last. The celebrated film director, Saul Spielbaum, made a film with the Bang-Bang and Laura Ashworth (inevitably called Two-Way Romeo), with surrealist trappings; execrated by the critics, its takings exceeding such previous legends of the cinema as Close Encounters, the James Bond films, Jaws and The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter.
Into this story, as sticky with success as a treacle tart, the question of art scarcely seems to enter. The Bang-Bang sang no better and no worse than many other young ruffians who have made a fortune with a microphone, a glittering suit and a few rudimentary pelvic gestures. Their music was technically indistinguishable from other music of the period. But they were unique. They did appear to be ‘two in one and all in all’.
Always behind the brouhaha pulsed a vein of morbid curiosity. It ran through the youngest fan as through the commentators and culture experts who used the example of the Bang-Bang to spice up their own theories. For the Bang-Bang was not a solo singer; nor was it a pop group; it was Siamese twins. And the twins’ first and most perennial song – as Zak Bedderwick had calculated – provoked the ever-interesting question: what was their sex life like?
2
Laura Ashworth’s report
Having suffered from years of snide innuendo, I will open my contribution to this book by declaring that my attitude towards Tom and Barry was non-exploitative. It started non-exploitative and it stayed that way. They were in an exploitative situation and everyone got all tangled up in it. So much fame just drives you out of your mind. The pressures are too great. After our first USA tour, Tom and Barry and I ran away one day, and we found a field full of big white daisies. We just rolled in them. The boys began a fight over something, but I stopped them. We were so happy that we started singing. I picked some daisies. Tom said he would buy me the whole field. Barry said he would buy it, he would pay more. They started betting how much they would pay for the field, how they would build a dome over it and have daisies grow there all year long. At first we were laughing.
Then they said how good it would be to convey the field everywhere on tour with us. They discussed how it could be done, how much money it would take. I suddenly felt the field was not real any more. It had turned into a status symbol, an item of cash flow, another cause of rancour between the brothers. I did not want the field and, even if I did, I would never see it again. Even if I saw it again, I could never be free in it again. I got up and walked back to our helicopter. They followed and we never said another word until we were far away.
Well, it is impossible to be free and very difficult to be happy. I had a trendy sociologist friend – had being the operative word, because fame loses you friends faster than failure – who wrote about us. He took the easy line that the Bang-Bang were victims of capitalist society. It was the sort of thing my father would have said. It was a fashionable, superficial, smarty-pants thing to say. The truth was that we were victims of society’s pent-up secret wishes. The capitalist world has no monopoly on pent-up secret wishes. Everyone everywhere suffers from shortage of opportunity to fulfil their whole selves: it’s just that we’re allowed to grumble about the situation. That was what made Tom and Barry so madly attractive – they were like one person with double capacity.
Enough p
hilosophy. Before I go into us, I will start with an outline of myself, the kind of girl I am, right or wrong, and what made me that way.
I was the only girl in a family with four brothers. They were all older than I. My mother died when I was in my teens. Funnily enough, I know I should miss her a great deal but somehow I hardly recall her. I do recall the vicarage where we lived, though. I suppose it was dark and awful, but I loved it. The rooms were like jungles. I was a little wild beast.
During mother’s long illness, I grew closer to father, especially as my brothers left home. Father was vicar of a poor London parish south of the river. He was always working. He never relaxed. Something drove him. He was always ‘kind’ in a hasty way, rather as if my brothers and I were favoured members of the parish.
Mother was a hard worker too. Vicars’ wives were chosen for work capacity, not virtuosity in bed or anything like that. She and father brought me up as rather a bluestocking. This sounds madly old-fashioned and eccentric but we had no television panel, and mother used to read aloud to me and my brothers. Once she read all of Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man, which is quite an anti-religious book. And father sat in the corner, writing, writing, at his bureau, with his back to the light. He wrote gothic fantasies under the name of Nikola McLaren. Some of them are good. I re-read Nightingale Summer recently and quite enjoyed it. In fact, I wept a bit because I thought that I as a little girl had served as the model for the girl in the book who is kidnapped by the gipsies.
My father’s fantasies helped to pay for my further education. I can see I owe him a lot, but I wonder if he was not too negative to be called a good man. He believed in all the things that intelligent middle-class people believed in during the sixties. He believed in equality between the sexes (practically forcing me to join Women’s Lib, which I loathed), in cutting government defence spending, in the abolition of all colour bars and racial discrimination (he almost coerced me into the arms of any black who wandered into the vicarage), better and more education for the poorer classes, unlimited assistance for all the scroungers of our society, vast aid programmes for the Third World, severing of diplomatic relations with South Africa (but not a word against the Soviet Union). And so on. From which you will gather that my father was also for the abolition of private cars, non-returnable bottles, beer cans, plastics of all sorts, meat-eating, tobacco, advertising, and almost all forms of alcohol, wine excepted – in short, almost anything that helps an ordinary citizen lead something less than a dog’s life.
As you will readily understand, in politics my father was a watered-down Marxist. I only once saw him in a genuine rage, when someone called him ‘a bloody left-wing intellectual’. He preferred to think of himself as ‘practising liberalism with a small “I”, as he once put it – ‘not unlike our Lord himself’.
My father claimed to believe that the working classes had never had a chance – a chance for what he never went on to specify. He was also intensely patriotic, so much so that it influenced what taste he had in music. He once published a pamphlet on John Earle, a seventeenth-century bishop in whom he took an interest. The improving conversations which went along with our frugal vicarage meals in my childhood centred round the three Deadly E’s, as I thought of them, Engels, Elgar and Earle.
Despite this dreary catalogue of virtues, I did love my father. I loved him in a sort of angry, admiring, pitying despair. He believed all that he believed in simply because that was what it was fashionable to believe. Or rather because that was what people in his class had believed a few years earlier. I can still blush with shame when I recall how he conducted a service one Sunday wearing jeans. Poor father! I used to argue savagely with him – simply because I hoped that he might by argument come to believe in his heart what he really only professed to believe. It seemed to me that in his heart there was no belief at all.
‘You’ll see how things are in the world when you are older, my dear. And that will be time enough,’ he would say.
‘Father, you are as sheltered from the world by your beliefs as I am.’
‘My parish is to me a microcosm of the world. Its errors and aspirations are the world’s.’
‘You know nothing about your parish, nothing—’
‘I can’t let you say that, Laura,’ my mother would interrupt. ‘Your dear father has dedicated his life to the poor of this down-trodden stretch of London for over twenty years—’
‘Oh, I know, mother, but you, neither of you see what you call the poor as they really are. It’s all theory with you. Theory is everything to you. You don’t give a bugger about the actual people.’
‘Now, my dear child, you mustn’t allow yourself to talk like that. You’ll only regret it later.’
I felt even his patience with me was insincere; now, now, I’m much less sure of everything.
But it was true that he understood nothing about other people. Perhaps that was why he wrote fantasies (of which of course he was ashamed). He did live and work with ‘the poor of the parish’, but they knew how to protect themselves from this sort of cant. I knew those people. I played with them, I went into their homes.
Most of them didn’t care a scrap for anything beyond their own families, their own cronies, their own selves, their own wage packet. They elbowed their way through life independent of all theories. I admired them for that – and hated them for it. I was working through psychology and psychoanalysis, those King Rat’s palaces of theory.
Year after year, through my childhood and growing-up, father laboured in what he sometimes referred to as his vineyard, never understanding why he did not make contact with his flock.
He had sense enough to perceive that he had failed, that Ma Jones and Shamus O’Leary did not give a hoot about the plight of the workers in poor oppressed Panama or the starving multitudes in Bangladesh. What he could not understand was that he himself had never felt the bite of real Christianity. I was a Christian once, and it hurt too much. I gave it up. I saw my father was preaching hogwash. I hated him then.
The day came when something went wrong. Just one more small discouragement. He said that people did not look up to him any more. He went upstairs to see mother in her sick-bed. I stood downstairs in the hall and listened to him weeping on the other side of her closed door. I felt so ashamed, loitering among the plastic macs and anoraks. After lunch, which he missed, father came down pale and shaky and pushed his bicycle out of the porch. He cycled off to see his bishop and throw in his ministry.
Of course, he still had to stick around with theology because he knew nothing else. He got a staff job in a Midlands theological college. It meant the final break-up of our family, because the vicarage had to go (they demolished it and the next incumbent had a trendy flat above Hair Flair in the new shopping centre). I know father bitterly regretted all that, yet I did not care what he felt at the time. He was always so ‘kind’ to me, whatever that means. Kindness was another of his theories.
That was a desperate sort of period. Everything fell apart. While father was busy renouncing his ministry, mother died. I had been nursing her while working for my exams. I used to get up at six every morning, under the firm impression that everyone in vicarages always got up at six every morning. None of my brothers was much help – only one of them even lived in London.
The night that mother died, father was out, chairing a damned Save the Sick committee. I left her where she lay and went out into the street. I just felt ghastly, blank, sick.
A few metres down the street, I bumped into Ricky Hayes. Ricky was a young Jamaican, one of father’s lost sheep. A bastard but with a great sense of fun – something as rare as the crown jewels in our household. I seized on him, begged him to buy me a drink – I never had any money – and then make love to me. So he did, so he did. Nobody exploited anybody, and everybody was happy. I desperately needed what he had got.
And instead of losing interest afterwards, Ricky, who had a lot of girls, kindly took me along to see Chris Dervish and the Noise. He kn
ew the drummer. It was great, and not a bit like life at the vicarage. The din was intoxicating.
Dervish was not so well known then. Ricky took me backstage afterwards to say hello to Chris. Ricky was sexy but Dervish was just psychotic. He started to make demands of me then, right in front of the others. That also was not like life in the vicarage, but I didn’t knock it on that account. Though I could see what a mixed-up guy Dervish was.
That story the papers kept repeating about my meeting Dervish when he was in prison was untrue. Reporters just crib off old press cuttings. Chris was so wild, so frightened under everything. He was longing for a nice quiet open prison like Parkhurst, where he landed up after his Middle East adventure.
I felt protective towards Chris, even when he was exploiting me for all he was worth. He was younger than me. I wept and wept when he drowned himself in the reservoir. I would probably have killed myself too, if it had not been for an old friend of mine at the clinic where I worked. (He was a man called Charlie Rickards, and I was never married to him, as some reporters claimed.)
Yet it wasn’t really Chris who turned me on. The music did that. I just dug rock. The past ceased to exist for me, and the future, when Chris was up there playing. Maybe it was the amplification, or the sexual ranting, or the whole atmosphere of demented licence. I don’t know what it was. I just know it wasn’t one fucking bit like the vicarage. I was gone.
The whole ethos of pop is classless working-class. It’s naïve and uncritical and inarticulate. Nobody knows what they are doing but sometimes they feel what they are doing. And sometimes they do it right. Way behind it lies black jazz and that too came from another sort of ‘free jungle’, as Dervish once described it. There’s a feeling of native tribes, of ritualization – something much more powerful than words and music.
All that I felt – oh, yes, I felt it, and at first all I wanted to do was to hear the sounds and get laid. But my upbringing saw to it that a divided part of myself also enjoyed the feeling that I was rejecting good taste and the whole dreary Christian-Imperial tradition dying a death elsewhere in the country. No phoney ‘kindness’ here, just genuine raw feeling. Maybe much of it looked vile from outside, and it was often hard to take, but in its reality it seemed pure to me. At least at first. Some bad things happened to me at Humbleden in Dervish’s day which it is better should remain buried.
