The curtains parted. The show opened with some kids jumping over a vaulting horse or something. After that some first-year spazzers did a shit comedy routine about a farmer, then came the spoons player, and some other stuff which, luckily, has slipped from my mind. But with each act, my unease deepened. It was like when a storm is on its way. You can feel it in the wind. Then it was the deputy head again. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘are you ready to rock? Are you ready to roll? Are you ready to go oooba-joooba-joooba?’ Everyone laughed. ‘Are you ready for … the Horned Gods?’ Was that Thomas Depper’s lot? I waited for the riff to ‘Need You Tonight’ to ring out, played slightly below competence level. The curtain opened. A guitar riff. But not the clean, crisp, funky riff of ‘Need You Tonight’. This one was dirty. Not too familiar, but I knew it. Then it clicked: ‘Foxey Lady’. And there, onstage, were a bunch of little kids. Really little, from the first year. A full band, drums, two guitars, bass, and really decent equipment. Shit, I thought, no one knew about them, no one. What the hell was this? I mean, they looked the part, sort of. Their hair was still just about school-regulation length, but half of them had it tied back in tiny ponytails. And they wore proper metaller denim and band T-shirts, although it was all very clean. But still, they were good, very good. So good it hurt. Until one of them started singing.
You know you’re a cute little heart-breaker. Foxey!
You know you’re a sweet little love-maker. Foxey!
It wasn’t that he was bad, just that his voice hadn’t broken. And not only that, but two of the other kids were going ‘Foxey, foxey lady’ in similarly high-pitched tones. Ben and I looked at each other and smirked. As long as they were doing something wrong, it just about made it bearable.
Not that anyone else cared. Everyone’s attention had been wandering during the shit farmer sketch and the other stuff, but this got them. Obviously no one could stand up and rock out, that wasn’t allowed, and no one would want to with the whole school there, but quite a few heads were bobbing. This was the biggest sign of enjoyment allowable with all the teachers in the school prowling down the rows, looking for the first sign of trouble to stamp on. The lead guitarist copied the solo pretty damn well. He was probably as good as Ben, or nearly.
And then it was over. There was an enormous round of applause, along with the strange mixed cheer of broken and unbroken voices, like the cheer you used to get on Crackerjack. Even the kids from the other side of town were cheering, and they all hated rock music. Shit, I thought. Shit. Shit. Shit. Not only were they doing it, they were great, and they were younger than me. I had a lot of catching up to do.
‘What do you think?’ I said to Ben.
‘Fucking rubbish,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ I said.
Some spaz kid came out and read some humorous poetry he’d written and got jeered. The teachers snapped ‘Quiet!’ up and down the hall. I zoned out for a bit, still thinking about those kids. They’d made me forget about Thomas Depper’s lot, and not only that, they’d made me forget about Neil.
Then the deputy head came back on. ‘And now we have, well, some more music, I suppose,’ he said, embarrassed, almost murmuring, before quickly disappearing offstage, as if not wanting to be caught at the scene of a crime.
Neil walked out. I felt sick. He was the only kid performing to whom it hadn’t occurred to change out of his school uniform. Hadn’t even got his equipment set up, and had to wheel his synthesiser on an old TV stand to where he could find a plug, which was right on the lip of the stage, a long way from the curtain. People were already sniggering. The teachers weren’t seeing fit to hush them either.
He asked someone for a microphone, and one, complete with stand, was stretched to him from behind the curtain. He fumbled about trying to get it at the right height, but couldn’t quite manage it, finally leaving it at chest level, where it had stuck and now refused to move. He took a harmonica from his pocket, and stooping down into the microphone, began to blow in and out of it, making a hee-haw noise like a siren. As he did so, he twiddled with the knobs on the synthesiser with his other hand, which began to emit a low rumble through the PA that made the light-fittings rattle. Then he started to, well, sing, I guess you’d call it.
‘I’m your receiver, your golden retriever, the only believer …’
I’d never heard him sing before. His voice was like a honk, and refused to settle on any note in particular while it made unpredictable jumps up and down the scale, never quite hitting whatever was presumably intended. It was a horrible sound. Boys were putting their hands over their ears as the synthesiser rumble got louder and harsher in tone as he turned the knobs, finally resulting in a sheer white noise that he seemed quite pleased with. He played his harmonica again, the same siren pattern, before singing some more: ‘Night light, beat band, try to scale my wall …’
It was all nonsense, obviously made up off the top of his head.
Then he started screaming. A high, intense scream, like a woman’s, straight out of a horror movies. It just went on and on. Mixed with the high frequencies coming from the synthesiser, it was actually becoming unbearable. People had stopped laughing now. They were just in pain and upset.
Finally, the deputy headmaster took matters in his own hands and motioned to the kids working the PA to kill the sound. The synthesiser cut out, but the screaming carried on. The deputy head tapped him on the shoulder, but Neil just wouldn’t give him his attention. In the end, he had to literally pull him off stage, his legs flailing. There was a round of applause. It was for the deputy head.
‘Right, ah, and now for something completely different,’ said the deputy head when he came back on. There was some very nervous laughter. Meanwhile, you could hear Neil having a coughing fit offstage, a result, no doubt, of all the screaming.
Some kids came on and break-danced to EMF’s ‘Unbelievable’. They were all wearing baseball caps and cycling shorts, and were careful to avoid Neil’s synthesiser, which still sat confrontationally on the lip of the stage. But no one was paying attention. Everyone was still recovering from Neil. Despite the teachers’ best efforts, we were all either mumbling or laughing about it, although the laughter was still nervous. Something very disturbing had just happened to all of us, and although no one would admit it, it could not be hidden. And me, right then, I knew. Neil was on to something. There was something in all of that which was important. Something I needed to confront. He’d opened a door in me, and invited me to look inside. And through that door, I would finally see the secret, I would discover the meaning of Neil. And once I’d seen it, I would never be the same again. And maybe for that reason, I chose not to look. If only I’d had the guts to take a peek, maybe I wouldn’t have fallen through that door, head first, all those years later.
Perhaps others were wrestling with something similar, or maybe they were just feeling the after-effects of an encounter with the weird. I don’t know. All I know is, when Thomas Depper and his friends came out and played their lumpy instrumental version of ‘Need You Tonight’, most failed to notice, and no one really cared, not even me and Ben. Neil had stolen the show.
Not that he won it. That would have been madness. That accolade went to the little kids who played ‘Foxey Lady’.
8
As expected, there was considerable fallout in the wake of the talent show. Firstly, the ‘Foxey Lady’ kids – or the Horned Gods as they called themselves, which was a 2000 AD reference, as pointed out by Ben, obviously disgruntled that they were into his special thing – became instant school celebrities, which was very unusual for little kids. It went to their heads pretty quickly, because by the time I got round to talking to a couple of them a few days later, they were arrogant little shits.
I made a point of crossing the playground to talk to them, one the singer and rhythm guitar player, dark, nearly black hair, the other, the lad guitarist, fairer-headed, both metaller centre partings, both of them way shorter than me. It’s funny, in that moment I wasn’t chec
king out the competition, I was genuinely star-struck. I wanted a piece of them.
‘All right,’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ one of them said, a look of amused condescension on both their faces. It said to me that I had one chance of proving myself worthy of their attention, and that I was already boring them slightly.
‘You were good at the talent show the other day,’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ they said.
‘It was good that you won,’ I said.
‘Yeah, it was,’ they said.
‘I can play guitar too,’ I said. ‘Well, a bit anyway.’
‘Yeah?’ they said. ‘Big deal.’
‘Do you like Joe Satriani?’ I asked.
‘No, of course not,’ they replied, smirking.
‘Well, I think he’s good,’ I said.
‘Yeah, so?’
‘Well, I’ll see you around then,’ I said.
‘Hope not,’ they said, and made wanker gestures to each other as I walked away.
Over the next few days they alienated their entire fan base in a similar manner.
There were even fewer good vibes being sent out by the losers. I swear this is true, the break-dancers staged a sit-in in the deputy head’s office in protest at their defeat, doing back-spins on his desk to an audience that had assembled outside, peeking their heads through the window. They got weeks of detention for it, but they simply break-danced their way through it, to the delight of the other assorted troublemakers. In the end it was cancelled, as it was just providing them with a platform.
Similarly, Thomas Depper was not best pleased. I bumped into him in the toilets, using the long communal urinal that never quite managed to contain all the boys’ piss that passed through it.
‘Don’t look at my cock, you queer,’ he snapped as he caught me in his peripheral vision.
‘All right, Thomas,’ I said.
‘I was until you turned up.’
‘You did all right at the talent show.’
‘No I didn’t. Well, I was all right, but my band was fucking rubbish. Last time I play with those two spastics.’
He zipped himself up and made his way to the door without washing his hands. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t either, as I wanted to keep up with him.
‘I play guitar,’ I said, ‘a bit anyway.’
‘Do you?’ he said, sounding almost as bored as the Horned Gods.
‘Yeah, maybe we could get together sometime and jam or something?’
‘Yeah, maybe. Probably not, though.’
He walked out without saying goodbye, but, and this made me tingle inside, he held the door open long enough for me to catch hold of it before it swung shut. With Thomas Depper, this was an act of some significance.
But what of the real star of the talent show, Neil? I didn’t know all the details at the time, because like half the school I would cross the playground in the opposite direction rather than get anywhere near him, but what I later found out was this. Immediately after the end of the talent show, the deputy head had practically dragged Neil to his office, where he demanded to know what the hell he thought he was playing at. When Neil told him that it didn’t matter what he himself thought he was playing at, it was everybody else’s idea of what he was playing at that counted, the deputy told him not to act all smart and superior with him and gave him indefinite detention. But before Neil could attend his first session, he was saved by a furious intercession on his behalf by Miss Millachip, his art teacher. You know the sort, middle-aged hippy, beads, lots of hand-dyed orange and purple, probably a lesbian. Apparently, when she overheard the deputy head boasting about the punishment he’d doled out in the staff room, she ripped him apart on the spot, and could be heard right into the canteen, bellowing away in her posh north London accent, voice lowered by years of herbal cigarette smoking. She informed the deputy head that Neil was working in the confrontational tradition of performance art, an internationally recognised and celebrated art form, and just because it did not fit into his small-minded idea of what constituted worthy forms of expression this was no justification for punishing Neil. To do so, she declared, was nothing more than cultural fascism.
The deputy head relented, not because he understood the argument, he was overheard referring to Miss Millachip as a ‘mad old bat’ not long afterwards, but more likely because he just wanted her to leave him alone. Anyway, the end result was, Neil was free. Scarily so, in fact, literally, he had become untouchable. All the kids either pretended not to see him, and darted in the opposite direction like I did, or nervously shouted ‘Loony!’ or ‘Freak!’ or stuff like ‘Know any good songs, Neil? Don’t fucking sing ’em.’ But really all we were doing was covering up how much he’d stirred everyone up. Christmas was round the corner, and I didn’t speak to Neil in the last days of the autumn term at all. He phoned my house several times, but I got Nicki, who always answered the telephone in the hall in those faroff, lost days of the pre-mobile teenager, to say I wasn’t in. I spent more time with Ben, both of us excited about our imminent Christmas gifts of electric guitars and amps. Of course, in the event, while Ben got a Fender Strat like his brother and a big fuck-off Marshall amp, my ostensibly socially higher parents could only stretch to a crappy pink Argos catalogue job, and a little practice amp. I made an effort to look pleased on Christmas morning, but truthfully I felt a bit shafted. I pledged to get an evening as well as morning paper round to save up enough to get a proper amp at least. I could always spray-paint the guitar black to disguise its crappiness. When I showed it to Ben he laughed and called it ‘shit’, which made me nervous as I’m pretty sure my dad, who was in the next room, could hear. I think it was round about this time that Ben went to his first concert, Motörhead at the Hammersmith Odeon. He went with Ken. He said they both went right down the front and it was mental, everyone was head-banging and you couldn’t move, you just got swept along with the way everyone else was going. He said that if you’d fallen over you’d have died, and that his ears were ringing for a week afterwards. I had asked my parents if I could go and they’d said no.
Back to school too soon, and the New Year brought in strange, invisible changes, like a cold wind that blew through us. I bumped into Thomas Depper again, this time on the stairs, his Head sports bag hitting me in the back as he pushed his way past me.
‘All right, Thomas,’ I said.
‘Oh fucking hell, not you again,’ he said, but not in a harsh way, and slowed from taking two steps at a time to let me catch up.
‘Have a good Christmas?’
‘Fucking shit, mate. What about you?’
‘Not bad, not bad. Got a guitar and amp actually, well, a practice amp anyway.’
‘Did you really? Well, I was meaning to talk to you about that sort of thing.’
‘Oh right.’
We reached the bottom of the stairs. He stopped before the swing doors and faced me.
‘Listen, I was wondering …’ His gaze began to wander, sometimes on me, sometimes around me, his eyes little balls bouncing around in the transparent containers of his glasses.
‘Yeah, you see, the thing is, I don’t want to play with those twats I was playing with any more, but I’ve got to keep the drummer cos no one else owns a kit, but, well, do you want to play guitar with us?’
‘Yeah, sure, that would be great.’ There was no real way I could express to him how amazingly happy he had just made me, in case he took it as a sign of weakness, but I was elated. This was simply the best thing ever. I suddenly had a proper, functioning band, and not only that, but Thomas Depper had effectively just asked me to be part of his circle, or at least a satellite of it. I don’t think he’d asked anyone before, not that I knew of, anyway. But, wait a minute, what about Ben? Weren’t we meant to be the band …
‘Um, Thomas, I’ve got a friend, who plays guitar too, really well. Maybe he could be in the band as well …’
‘Oh, fucking hell, not that lanky twat you hang around with.’
‘Y
eah, it is, sorry.’
‘Oh well, bring him along if you must. We can always kick him out later if he’s shit.’
‘OK, so when’s our first practice?’
‘Dunno, get back to you on that one. But we’ll go in the music hut after school sometime. Got to talk to the Queer about it.’
The Queer was the flamboyant music teacher, Mr Evans. Not in any way gay, but his taste in frilly shirts and velvet jackets and the bouffant quality of his hair were enough to mark him out as an object of ridicule. Even the staff thought he was fruity, and he was a constant thorn in their side, taking kids out of lessons for brass band and choir practice and afternoon concerts in old people’s homes. But he didn’t care what anyone thought, he really didn’t; all he cared about was the music.
‘OK,’ I said, ‘I’ll talk to my mate, Ben, and see what he says. But he should be OK with it. What type of music do you generally play, anyway?’
‘Oh,’ said Thomas, ‘stuff like Guns N’ Roses, Quireboys, INXS obviously, like to do some Def Leppard at some point. Hard rock mainly.’
‘Cool,’ I said. ‘What about Metallica, Iron Maiden, that sort of thing?’
‘We don’t really go that heavy, to tell you the truth. What about you?’
‘Yeah, I’m more into that sort of thing. But it doesn’t matter. I like the stuff you’re into too.’
Flying Saucer Rock & Roll Page 6
