Brothers of the Head

by Brian Aldiss

  Nick Sidney came into the bar, flushed in the face.

  ‘There you are. Now that that bloody old queer’s gone, perhaps you’ll do the job you came down here to do and go and look after those bloody freaks. Didn’t you hear the racket? They’ve been busting up the studio one more time.’

  ‘You’re an uncouth bastard, Nick,’ I said, as I walked past him.

  ‘And proud of it. How else would I survive with this shower?’

  After this exchange, I proceeded upstairs. The twins had been doing a certain amount of damage, nothing serious. They were objecting again to the way they were being treated. This anger against others turned, as it frequently did, into a fight with themselves. Barry was particularly frightening in his anger fits. His face became distorted. Even the third head, the one for which he had a secret name, took on a different appearance. The cheeks of its face flushed. I wondered if I would have noticed that detail in the general rumpus, had it not been for the conversation with Sir Allardyce.

  They had a method of dealing with Barry’s anger. Zak Bedderwick had provided Sidney with a Japanese-made stun gun, as I mentioned. I never understood how it worked, except that it was electronic; when you fired it against someone’s temples it switched the brain’s Alpha rhythms to Delta rhythms, thus changing the wave frequency so that the victim fell into a deep sleep. This handy instrument was used to put Barry out when he was causing trouble.

  This treatment became the rule throughout the whole success period of the Bang-Bang, especially on tour, when the stresses were particularly great. During the periods when Barry was unconscious I was able to talk to Tom. I grew very fond of him, despite Sir Allardyce’s warning. I feared the situation and would not have had anything happen to Tom; but it was not that alone which drew me.

  At the height of their success, after the Scandinavian tour, I was separated from the twins. I believe that I was a good influence on them, despite stories to the contrary. But some people, among them the lawyer, Henry Couling (a sort of self-appointed guardian to the twins, although he did nothing to help them), decided I was a cause for scandal in associating closely with both of the twins. Eventually Zak Bedderwick and Nick Sidney got rid of me. My feelings were bitter, although I knew how little personal feelings count in the pop industry.

  In respect to certain aspects of this matter, on which no doubt others will offer distorted versions of the truth, I would like to say only that the drugs in the case have been exaggerated by the media. They were Sidney’s idea in the first place. I came to use them reluctantly.

  As for the immorality charges, understanding people will realize that Tom and Barry needed love and sex just like anyone else, and suffered from deprivation. There was a jealousy between them, as between all brothers, but, in view of their physical inseparability, it was inevitable that any woman who came close to either of them would have to make what accommodation she could to both.

  I prefer not to be more explicit.

  3

  Excerpt from taped interview with Nickolas Sidney

  Interviewed by John James Loomis of the Canadian Broadcasting Authority.

  John James Loomis: Now if we might move to a more controversial area, Nick, concerning the part Laura Ashworth played in the Bang-Bang’s affairs.

  Nickolas Sidney: No, there was nothing controversial. You know what it is, you’re running a group, you’re running a group. It’s a business like any other, besides the Bang-Bang were, let’s face it, freaks so they were more unstable than most. Only to be expected. So we did everyone a favour trying to keep women away, specially a girl like Laura, known dynamite.

  J.J.L.: I have studied Laura’s report on her side of the matter. She begins very openly, and gives a full account of conversations held, what everyone said, so on. Then—

  N.S.: Yeah, well you know some people just can’t keep their mouths shut. We could have managed everything fine—

  J.J.L.: I was saying, Laura begins frankly, then suddenly there’s a point she sort of closes down. Suddenly there’s a funny sentence, like ‘Following this conversation, I proceeded to the studio to see the damage.’ Something of the sort. Conveys the impression she suddenly went impersonal and doesn’t wish to commit herself to what really went on.

  N.S.: Why should she? You’ve got to stick together, people will lie themselves blind. Look, I’ve got no kicks against Laura Ashworth—

  J.J.L.: Excuse me but you do sound prejudiced.

  N.S.: I’m not against anyone in this world. I’ve managed football teams in my time, live and let live I say. She was a good girl and nice-looking too, even if she did kind of stir things up. She kept them occupied, the Bang-Bang I mean. But the things she did, I’m no toffee-nose, right, but she wouldn’t want to tell it, spell it all out, couldn’t expect her to. We knew what was going on, but you wouldn’t want me to say it either, not over TV, a family show, we all knew about it, I know the way things are. Everyone says they were musical geniuses, so what if they were kooky as well, let’s leave it at that. It’s all over now, isn’t it?

  J.J.L.: Then perhaps we might talk about the drugs aspect, and the Japanese stun gun.

  N.S.: Okay, we had a violence problem. Barry was the dangerous one. Tom was quiet enough. You know what I mean. So we had to calm him down, Barry. The stun gun’s harmless. There isn’t a strait-jacket made that would fit Siamese twins, so we gave him sweet dreams instead.

  J.J.L.: My understanding is that the stun gun is a development of the EEG, the electro-encephalograph, capable of switching the brain’s activity from about ten cycles to one cycle per second, thus thrusting the victim into deep sleep. It’s an illegal instrument in the West.

  N.S.: About that … It never hurt him. See, if you injected Barry with something to lay him out, they’d both be out cold because their blood circulation circulated between them, see what I mean. We had to do something before he bust up the joint, what do you expect us to do? You know what Laura called me? An uncouth something. But I was the guy who got in close. Twice I had a black eye. He laid me out cold. He was possessed when he took off that Barry, real bonkers. He laid me out cold. She got some sort of a hold over them, okay, I let her borrow the gun occasionally – she put him out cold with it when it suited her purpose.

  J.J.L.: An emotional hold over them?

  N.S.: You know what I mean. Sex. That was all she was after. Put Barry out cold, have it off with Tom.

  J.J.L.: And on the occasion when Barry regained consciousness while that was happening, there was presumably another row until she accommodated him as well?

  N.S.: Look, I don’t want to stir things up. Let sleeping dogs lie. Your guess is as good as mine.

  J.J.L.: But you are making certain imputations against Laura Ashworth. It couldn’t be, Nick, that this is prejudice speaking and that she was not guilty of such behaviour? There are rumours that in Dervish’s day Laura was the victim of a mass-rape in which your name was involved. She hardly sounds the Lady Dracula type to me.

  N.S.: Look, I don’t want to … Look, who’s stirring things … I said she was a sweet girl, din’ I? What’s past’s past, that’s my motto, and I s’pose that Paul Day’s been shooting off his mouth again, Jesus. It doesn’t matter now, does it? We’re talking about history. It wasn’t my job to stand outside their bedroom door like a bloody sentry, was it? I didn’t want to know. I was their manager, not a wet nurse, don’t forget.

  J.J.L.: You had your orders from Zak?

  N.S.: Zak was the boss. Same as Couling the lawyer said, our business is music, not morals. We aren’t a bunch of kids who—

  J.J.L.: Nevertheless, you feel defensive, understandably in view of what—

  N.S.: You keep putting words into my head, things that were never there. I liked the boys and I liked Laura and I was only doing my job. I made them, I’m proud to say. Look, it’s just we had a lot of crap all along, everyone exaggerating everything. It’s all in the past, isn’t it? You seem to forget we’re talking about the greatest suc
cess story the world has ever known.

  Excerpt copyright © 1985 canadian broadcasting authority.

  4

  Zak Bedderwick’s narrative

  We built the Bang-Bang into a great success story. Inevitably, some of us sustained bruises on the way, but that does not take away from what we achieved. Scandal still circulates about the names of Laura Ashworth and the Howe twins – inevitably, since from the start the public insisted on regarding the twins as sexual objects. My intention here is briefly to try to show how what happened between the young people involved was natural and perhaps inevitable, and how it contributed to the art of the Bang-Bang. I am not a music critic in any sense. I shall just point out what is there to be read in the lyrics as they developed.

  This may be the place to admit that I may have been a little unfair to Laura Ashworth in the past. We have to be wary of permanent or semi-permanent female hangers-on because of their possible disruptive influence on our groups. But Laura was more victim than vamp or vampire, of that I am now convinced. In ways which I shall indicate, she served as vital catalyst in the success of the Bang-Bang. (I must add that because of an unstable home background she was somewhat unstable herself and some of her public utterances should be disregarded. For instance, the Bedderwick Walker organization did not dismiss her; she simply ran away from an emotional situation she could not resolve, following the Scandinavian tour.)

  The other vital element in that emotional equation was Paul Day, our songwriter. He and Laura were deeply involved with each other. As can be seen from the lyrics.

  Day was an undersized youth who grew up in a Northern town and was drumming with various groups by the age of fifteen. By the time he joined Gibraltar as drummer/guitarist, he had had songs published. He became chief songwriter for the Bang-Bang, and played guitar with them.

  On and off-stage Day presented great contrasts. Off-stage, it was difficult to get a word out of him; he would slink by without speaking if he could. Get him on the platform and a different persona took over. He then became a great extrovert personality; his inspired performances were highly regarded. To my personal regret, he has since left our organization and gone solo. The last I heard of him, he was working in the southern United States.

  To my mind, Day’s silences reflected an interior dilemma. He came from a broken home and had been wounded in the process. This led him to regard the Howe twins with sympathy from the start. Whereas they suffered from ostracism by the other members of the group.

  I would like to clear Nick Sidney’s name. He’s a nice man and I could not do without him. But the Bang-Bang were very difficult and it was hardly surprising that they got him down at times.

  The twins grew friendly with Paul Day. A strong bond formed between them. Day’s songs reflect increasingly the way in which their tormented inner feelings awoke a response in his own mind.

  It was noticeable that Day resorted to sci-fi imagery to express the division he and the Howe twins experienced between themselves and ‘ordinary’ life. A fairly early song, ‘Year By Year the Evil Gains’, appropriates the title of an actual SF story:2

  City against city, town against town,

  Song against silences,

  My body against my brains

  As the entropic suns sail down –

  Year by year the evil gains.

  Later, sci-fi imagery helps express an attractive sense of distance, as in the immediately popular ‘How’s the Weather in Your World’, which has now become something of a standard:

  Our heads are together on the pillow –

  How’s the weather in your world?

  The same year yielded ‘In the Midst of Life’, where the same sense of a tranquil alienation is conveyed:

  And when you turn to me

  Silence falls into a green darkness

  And the light devours

  Cities, skies, your eyes.

  Less successful was ‘On Tomorrow’s Avenues’, where the lyricism again conveys alienation, and the too-determinedly surrealist ‘The Thunder of Daffodils Underfoot’. There is also ‘Anyone’s World’, where the use of the unexpected number ‘four’ points to some actual experience; had the subject matter of the lyrics been stolen out of psychoanalytic textbooks, as one critic unkindly suggested,3 we should expect the number to be two or three or even seven:

  In anyone’s world Four is the most

  Time’s under glass People are mirrors

  The idea that we can at best hope to experience no more than four people or character types, however numerous our acquaintances, is interesting. But it may be that the lyric is talking more directly of a small world containing only Tom, Barry, Paul Day, and – who was the fourth member? No doubt the fourth member was Laura Ashworth. The ambiguity in this song may not be deliberate, but Day was soon employing such devices with intent. Even the driving song, ‘Valley of the Chateau’, conceals a pun (The Valley of the Shadow of Death) made the more sinister by its being unstated – though pointed to by the rhyme-scheme.

  Valley of the Chateau

  Valley of the Chateau

  Valley of the Sacred Chateau –

  Where none of us can take a breath

  The mood of the earlier songs is generally that of a child’s fairy story. Where there is a menace, the central character is immune to it through his innocence. ‘Two-Way Romeo’ is an obvious exception to this rule, but that song was commissioned and written before Day had met the Howe twins. It is only a concoction. The recipe was mine.

  We see Day being drawn gradually into a unique relationship with the twins and the girl, and learning to face it through his lyrics. He finds it threatening, as in ‘Valley of the Chateau’, and ‘Probability A’. Sometimes its grotesquery can be expressed as comedy, as in the ‘Serenade from a Cerise Satellite’, with its repeated line

  One girl three loves fifteen arms

  With the rocketing success of the Bang-Bang, the sexual imagery of their songs became much more open, for instance in ‘Year of the Quiet Lips’:

  smiling without speaking

  perfect giving perfect taking

  healing, feeling, sealing, mutely appealing

  haven for all comers stealing

  quiet sips my summer year is here

  year of the quiet lips

  Patently, it is no dumb girl being addressed. The driving vigour that marked Day’s performance on-stage becomes linked in the lyrics with a new outspokenness. Although the title ‘Girl Outside the City’ suggests isolation, both words and music speak of confidence:

  The girl outside the city

  Let it all flow by

  Let it all flow by

  She’s a part of me

  The typhoon’s eye

  The typhoon’s eye

  The air in the airport

  As we up and leave the city

  For the places where the pulse beats stronger

  Where the loving’s madder where the nights are longer

  Where she’s so much gladder

  Let it all flow by

  Let it all flow by

  Even in the period of the true love-songs, a note of reproach often sounds. Or it does on paper. What Day wrote tenderly, was belted out with contradictory ferocity. The performance gives us their version of the complex love affair.

  Oh you are all things to me

  Lover and vampire

  You keep three lovers happy

  A phoenix of their fire

  In this world I’m love’s tourist

  Another head is dreaming of your beauty

  Our love is a forest

  (from ‘Our Love is a Forest’)

  The line repeated in each verse, ‘You keep three lovers happy’, may seem like praise the first time; in repetition, it becomes more of a reproach. Even the freer moral code of our time has done nothing to extinguish jealousy.

  The phraseology of the songs becomes more complex, the ideas move away from the traditional enclosed world of calf-love. No doubt it was La
ura, with her more educated background and extensive reading, who influenced Day’s vocabulary and the terms in which he celebrated her. This is most noticeable in the later songs, and in particular in the best song he ever wrote, his one song which mentions Laura by name, ‘I was Never Deaf or Blind to her Music’ (see Appendix), with such lovely lines as ‘Time was, her alchemy was all upon me’.

  This magical song, which one critic referred to as ‘The Rhapsody in Blue of the Eighties’, was included in the Bang-Bang’s best record, ‘Big Lover’. Here the Bang-Bang set aside what many regard as their natural coarseness, particularly in the three sci-fi tracks which are also included in the Appendix to this volume, ‘Big Lover’, ‘Star-Time’, and ‘Bacterial Action’. These are by no means love songs. But they show Day rejoicing in the new perspectives which Laura brought to his life, and the new power of expression he found for them.

  After this peak, there seems to be a recession. The structure of the love affair was probably too unstable to last for long. ‘The Vocabulary of Touch’ has certain ingenuity, but the musical form reaches back to the conventions of the thirties for its closing lines:

  Wetness and heat and a tired kiss

  All verbs expended

  Your breasts your shoulders your eyelids closing

  The sentence ended

  Trouble developed on the Scandinavian tour. The Bang-Bang came to blows with Paul Day on stage. And as soon as they arrived back in England, Laura disappeared. My belief is that her Church of England upbringing had instilled strong feelings of guilt in her and she could endure the ménage à quatre no longer.

  On that unhappy tour, the Bang-Bang performed live, for the first and last time, ‘Passport to Another Planet’, which I regard as Paul Day’s farewell to Laura. A tired nostalgia is aimed at and achieved, despite ugly idiom in the first verse; in the last verse, isolation is again closing in on the singer.