‘Um,’ said Ken, his hand rubbing his chin. ‘Um. That’s all I can say really. Um.’
I tried again, but it just got more scrapy and clanging the more I stabbed at it.
‘No, what you want to do is only hit the bottom three strings. And you really need to push down with your ring finger on those two strings so you get a good sound. You’ll need to learn how to do that with the other finger as well. Pass it back here and I’ll show you why.’ I did what I was told, and Ken played a riff I would later learn was ‘Smoke on the Water’.
Ken went on to play us lots of different things on the guitar, most of which I didn’t recognise, except some Iron Maiden stuff. Ben knew most of it, though. As well as riffs, Ken could solo too, although nowhere near as well as Joe Satriani or Kirk Hammett of Metallica. Watching him play was my first experience of that strange fascination you get watching someone messing about on an instrument, riffs mutating into other riffs, songs half-started, songs abandoned halfway. It made me nervous too. Was this the same song as before? Or a different one? Was I expected to know?
After a while, Ken stood up and stretched and said, ‘Right, I’ve got to shoot off soon, so you two had better scarper.’ He shooed us downstairs while he got on with whatever he was up to in that tip of a bedroom.
I would learn later that he didn’t live there at all – he had a girlfriend and a little boy who he lived with on the other side of town. That was his old bedroom, which he used for storage, a place to keep all the electronic junk he liked to fiddle with. At some point I would hear about his musical journey: a hard rock and prog kid in the seventies, a brief flirtation with punk, then a switch to heavy metal when he grew dissatisfied with punk’s low level of musicianship. Apart from heavy metal, he also liked music that made him laugh, like the songs from Monty Python and Spitting Image, ‘Star Trekkin’, ‘The Winker’s Song’ by Ivor Biggun. He’d been a bit of a social misfit during his twenties, hence the room full of posters and clippings, but at some point in the last few years had got his act together, finally moving out of his parents’ house at the age of thirty-one. He’d given a lot of his old records from the seventies to Ben, which explained Ben’s thorough knowledge of music made several years before he was born.
It was still a while before I was expected home, so Ben suggested we watch the second Young Ones tape. But I wasn’t finding it as funny as before. Maybe because even the funniest things wear thin after three hours, but mostly because I was hacked off I couldn’t play that fucking chord and had ended up looking so useless in front of Ben and Ken. That might also explain why suddenly, and without reason, I kicked my leg out and sent a half-full glass of lemonade across the room, soaking the carpet in froth.
‘You stupid monger!’ Ben snapped at me. I couldn’t argue with him on this one.
‘Benjamin, don’t talk to your friends like that,’ his mum said, running into the room, still in her dressing gown. ‘What’s happened? Oh dear.’
‘I’m really, really sorry,’ I said, doubling up in embarrassment.
‘That’s OK,’ she said. ‘Could have happened to anybody.’
‘Yeah, if they’re a spastic,’ said Ben.
‘Benjamin, do not use words like that!’ said his mum.
She fetched a cloth and bent over to clean it. As she did so – and there was no way I could avoid it – I saw down her dressing gown and caught a glimpse of most of her tit. It felt funny, nearly seeing my first real-life tit, a combination of excitement over the fact of it, and disgust at the strange crépe-paper quality of the skin of the middle-aged breast and the blueness of the veins. That night, I would try and talk myself into believing I had seen a nipple, but I knew I hadn’t.
Ben looked at me when she’d left the room, his voice covered by the sound of the TV and the washing machine. ‘You looked at my mum’s tits,’ he said.
‘No I didn’t,’ I said, now feeling terrible at not only defiling the loveliness of this proletarian home with spilt lemonade, but also being caught trying to catch a sneaky eyeful of my host’s knockers.
‘You did,’ said Ben.
I had to think quick. ‘Well, if I did, so did you.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘You must have been looking to know I was looking. Which means you’re a dirty pervert, cos you just stared at your own mum’s tits.’
‘Just shut it, all right.’ I let Ben get the last word, because I knew I’d won.
5
That evening the phone rang for me. It was Neil.
‘Hi, Chris,’ he said, enthusiastic as ever. ‘How was your family meal?’
‘Ah … it was OK, pretty boring. What’s up?’
‘Oh nothing, just thought I’d give you a ring.’
‘Right. So, um, how was your Dungeons and Dragons thing?’
‘Not that great, to be honest with you.’
‘No? Shame.’
‘Well, I spent ages creating my character, rolling the dice for my various strengths and things, then five minutes into the game I came across a troll and because I was new and hadn’t any special powers I was dead almost straight away. Scott and that lot survived because they’d accumulated loads of spells and protection and stuff over previous games. So I just had to sit there and watch them play for the next two hours. Pretty boring really.’
‘That’s a bit crap. Yeah, sorry I couldn’t make it. Not.’ Did I really say that then? Where’s that from? Wayne’s World. I think it was a bit before then. So I didn’t say it.
‘So,’ said Neil, ‘what are you up to tomorrow?’
‘Oh, homework, probably. Got a lot to catch up on.’
‘Have you done that thing for French yet?’
‘No, I don’t really get it.’
‘Well, I could come round and we could do it together if you like. I think I know how to do it.’
‘Ah, I’m not sure that – yeah, why not? Yeah, come round in the afternoon.’
‘One o’clock OK?’
‘Make it two. But yeah, come round. Listen, I’ve got to go, got stuff that needs doing, but I’ll see you tomorrow, yeah?’
‘OK, bye.’
Neil always ended phone conversations abruptly. As soon as the business of the call was finished, he saw no need for further pleasantries and just hung up.
To be honest, I don’t know if I’m remembering this sort of thing that well. I mean, the way I recall it, we always more or less talked like adults, but we couldn’t have done, could we? We were only thirteen. I must have filtered out so much: childish things we talked about, silly phrases we would have used, impressions of people on telly, little in-jokes, stupid noises probably. But if it was there, it’s mostly been edited away. Now pretty much only the barest of facts remain, and the underlying emotions of all these situations. You can never blot them out completely, I’ve discovered.
The strange thing is, after that evening, my memory skims over a whole period of time. Almost a year, in fact. There are hardly any threads that lead through there at all. Where has it all gone? Who knows why some things stick with you while other things, it’s as if they may as well never have happened. Maybe what gets remembered is remembered for a reason, even if the reason is not immediately clear. Maybe there’s a lesson in all our memories. Maybe.
So what can I remember about that year, other than World Cup ’90? Well I remember more trips to St Anne’s with Ben, some second-hand vinyl purchased and more visits to his home, with the occasional guitar-playing tip from Ken, either from the maestro himself or passed on via Ben. It wasn’t long before I’d got the hang of that initial powerchord shape, although I found an easier way of playing it, using my middle and ring finger instad of making a barre with just the ring. Ben said it wasn’t proper but it made the same sound so I didn’t see the problem. I think it was because it didn't hurt as much that Ben didn't like it. Besides that, I began to piece together a basic vocabulary of the guitar, some from Ken and Ben, some from the trusty Complete Guitar Player by Russ what
’shisname, which turned out to be not so bad after all, now I didn’t have to play from it within earshot of other schoolkids. At other times, I just tried to play what was on a record, and to my surprise got it right, more or less. I wasn’t actually that bad after a couple of months. Ben was better, though. Loads better. He could solo by the spring, it was ridiculous. Whereas I had to break everything down to work out how to do it, he just seemed to know how to without really trying. Or at least that's how it appeared. I’m sure he was practising like mad at home.
As to Neil, yeah, I still let him come round and stuff, and not just because he was loads cleverer than me and could help me with my homework, although I guess that's the way it might have seemed sometimes. I still enjoyed his company, but I did manage to distance myself from him a bit – got him out of the habit of coming round every Friday anyway. But the time was coming, here at the dawn of my teenage years, when I would be expected to be seen hanging outside the gatcs of the nearby girls’ school. Indeed, soon, very soon, I would be expected to have a girlfriend. The pressure was already on. ‘Get a girlfriend, mate’ was entering the playground vocabulary as a put-down. I had never had a girlfriend, nor had any real desire to have one. I still didn’t, but what I did have was a need to be seen as part of the crowd. I estimated that not ever having had a girlfriend was going to seriously marginalise me within a year. Time was of the essence, and one way of ensuring my success was to position myself at the most advantageous point in the secondary-school social hierarchy. Having Neil as my best friend would not help me there.
This is the way things were at our school. Although real class differences were covered up by the levelling burr of our county accent, and really rich kids had been shipped off to the public school down the road, there was still a definite social hierarchy, although one in an inverse relation to economic privilege. At the very top were the kids who were cool. They obviously wouldn’t have called themselves cool, they’d have had their own word for it that you wouldn’t have learnt until it was too late and it was embarrassing to be caught saying it. I think the rest of us said ‘cool’, though. Sometimes it’s not cool to say ‘cool’, but I think it was cool when I was at school. Anyway, these kids always came in on the bus from areas on the other side of town I’d never been to, strange, forbidden places where everybody was cool – well, not cool but mega, or wicked, or champion or whatever their word for it was – and had great trainers. Tottern Park, Tottern Manor, Raneleigh Park. These kids usually listened to house, which was despised by us metallers because it required no skill, and could be made just by pressing a button on a computer. They were always either hard and ugly, and to be avoided, or good-looking and flash. They were all called Wayne, Shane or Dean. Great at football and running. Untouchable. Now, of course, I realise they were most probably shagging like bunny rabbits while the rest of us were still dreaming about one day touching a girl’s tit.
Down at the bottom of the heap were the spazzers. Politically incorrect to call them that these days, I know, but that’s how they were thought of, although Ben called them mongers. I would later learn that he’d got that off Ken, who’d got it from a record from his punk days, ‘Mongoloid’ by Devo. But whether it’s spazzer or monger, I hate to admit this, but I still get a guilty thrill out of saying it. If you went to an all-boys school, it doesn’t really leave you, it’s been encoded into your genes. Spaz. It just feels good saying it, I can’t deny that. And I know it’s wrong, but I’m going to use it, because if I don’t I won’t be telling you how it really was. Anyway, the Spazzers were Quireley all over. Weak and wet, terrible at sport, and likely to be accused of being gay most days, they stuck together, more for survival than out of any genuine affection. Generally unattractive, with moles, acne and corrected harelips, they’d be very good at maths, but not so good at science, as that involved holding things without dropping them. They were suburban and mollycoddled, the sickly children who in the olden days would never have made it to adulthood. Scott and his mates, the Dungeons and Dragons wizards, safely belonged in this category.
In between the high and the low, the cool and the spazzy, was the great bulging middle. Here the boys were somewhat anonymous, destined never to reach the heights of cool of the kids from the other side of town, across the Tottern River bridge, but generally not in too much danger of slipping into the Quireley spazzy zone. This was a diverse pool, in which you could find metallers and indie-kids, the extrovert and the quietly confident, the lesser-spazzed Quireley boy, as well as the Asian kids from St Anne’s, who were too academically driven to be as cool as the Tottern Parkers, but too street ever to be spazzy. Here in the middle, you’d probably never get to be best at football, but you’d never find yourself being too good at chess either.
And it was in the upper section of this middle that I sought to establish myself. I felt it was a realistic goal. Getting to know Ben helped. He was probably only middle of the middle, but helped my cause much better than Neil, who was lower-middle and in more and more danger of toppling right over into spazzland as his behaviour got weirder. Ben’s friends were mostly other metallers, who apart from a few spazzers were as a breed generally middle-middle or upper-middle.
Another thing that helped was that I was quite good, although not excellent, at basketball. I was still good enough to make the team for my year, though, and got to spend time with some of the flash kids. Even though they must have sensed my inherent Quireleyness too much to let me get that close, just to have them know who I was and call me by my first name was enough. More than most middle kids could lay claim to.
Anyway, thanks to basketball, Ben, and my general ability to blend in, I managed to establish myself in what was probably the upper-middle-middle, maybe even verging on lower-upper-middle. As spring became summer, I received various invitations to play football on the fields with some pretty OK kids, and even got to hang out round their house and stuff at the weekend. I had escaped the curse of Neil, although I still saw him occasionally. And then, thanks to my clever social manoeuvring, in the last weeks of that summer term, all the hard work paid off. I got my first girlfriend.
It only lasted a couple of months, and we never did much more than hold hands and kiss with our mouths closed, but it served its purpose, which was, of course, to be known as one of the kids who’d had a girlfriend. Her name was Karen. She had blonde hair, blue eyes and a grey tracksuit. I remember very little else, except that I met her through hanging out with another of the good, but not excellent, basketball kids. It’s funny, isn’t it – I remember so much more about meeting Ben for the first time than I do her, but then in the long run Ben turned out to be more important, I guess. The same with Neil: I can remember nearly whole conversations we had, but I can barely remember anything I said to Karen, or anything she said to me, other than her telling me that we shouldn’t see each other any more because Paula Abdul was wrong, opposites don’t attract, but that I would always have a special place in her heart. A few months later I saw her in town and she pretended she didn’t recognise me.
But looking back, it’s the music I really remember. That was the summer I fell in love with Napalm Death and their thirty-five-second-long songs. If I ever hear thrash metal like that now, it still brings to mind endless summer days in suburbia, and the evening glow over Sholeham Fields. Ben played me a lot of his seventies metal, but it still didn’t register that much with me, not like the newer stuff. He’d always lend me far more albums than I could listen to, then ask for them back a few days afterwards. I’d usually have to lie about having listened to them.
Then summer became September, and the new term began. The return of homework and the nights drawing in made free time seem more valuable, to be devoted to something more fruitful than just football in the park or girls in tracksuits. Ben and I spent a lot of time playing together, me getting better gradually, Ben faster than seemed humanly possible. His abrasiveness was more or less gone now, towards me anyway. I’d worn him down, except for when he felt
threatened by something I said or did, which usually involved refusing to admit to the supremacy of Zep, Purple and Hendrix. I just thought Joe Satriani and Metallica were better. Steve Vai too now; in fact, I was feeling guilty about thinking he might be even better than Satriani.
It was around this time that we first started talking about the band. We didn’t have much of a plan, but at some now forgotten point in those autumn months, we stopped being two teenage boys learning guitar. We were the band. We were the only members of this band, and did not have any real instruments, equipment or material to play, but some great mental shift had subtly taken place, and a band we were. We’d both asked our parents for electric guitars and amps as joint Christmas and birthday presents for that year. Ben’s parents said yes, and ended up buying him a separate birthday present anyway. Mine said, ‘We’ll see.’
Christmas would come too late, however, for what I felt should be the band’s first gig – the school talent show. Held each year, the talent show gave students the chance to prove themselves either too cool for school, or too spazzy for living. Most of the acts were spaz acts, lone trumpet players, choirboy singers, comedy routines with no discernible jokes. They would be met with indifference, then abuse after the performance when no teachers were about. But also every year, some boys would distinguish themselves with something spectacular – break-dancing to Vanilla Ice, or a particularly lengthy and violent solo by the school brass band drummer. In my mind, the talent show was where the band would claim its place in music history legend, elevating us to the level of gods in the playground.
Flying Saucer Rock & Roll Page 4
