Flying Saucer Rock & Roll

by Richard Blandford

  The Horned Gods hated us, naturally. Every time they saw any of us, they’d just nod and smirk. The mongers wouldn’t even get a nod. Once one of them, too young and stupid to know better, the lead guitarist I think, tried it on with Thomas, calling him ‘ginger’ or ‘specky-boy’ or something. Thomas just kneed him in the bollocks while the God-botherers were looking the other way at a stained-glass window or something, and said, ‘That’ll stop ’em dropping for another year,’ before walking off.

  I must admit, the Horned Gods did get their fair share of girls, even though they were younger than us. Having said that, a lot of the ones they got didn’t really have tits yet. But other than the fact our voices had broken, we had another advantage. At our end of the hall was a piano. And some of us could play the piano. Not too well, obviously, and you wouldn’t want to play too well because that would send out the message that you’d spent your childhood practising rather than going out playing football and stuff, but a few of the guys – Alex could, I think – knew how to play some chords, and ‘Axel F’ and stuff. And if you had someone playing the piano, then the girls would hang around. That was the strange law of the piano in the youth club.

  Things were going very well for us with the girls there. We all got off with somebody in the first few weeks, even Ben, for the first time probably. We’d all now worked out you could get off with them without even going out with them first. We felt this made us men. The God-botherers would just stand around looking worried, not quite sure if it was all right or not – whether to enforce the word of God or let the kids do their thing, man. Jase said he’d even felt a girl’s tits in the alley by the side of the church, or her norks, as we called them. Said they were spotty. But other kids were going further.

  We were all in the last year of school by then. But kids from the local sixth-form college started to come to the youth club as well. And Christ, that opened our eyes to stuff. Because these kids, who seemed about ten years older than us, rather than just the year they actually were, were blatantly doing it. Not there in the club, obviously. But the boys had girlfriends, and they’d be shagging, and everybody would know they were, and the boys would even talk about it and what it was like and stuff. We’d nod as if we knew what they were talking about, but they could see straight through us. I mean, some of the things they talked about I still don’t know what they are. And they’d even talk about the time they shagged such-and-such a girl who was now going out with someone else. It seemed such a power to have, to know what it’s like to shag someone else’s girlfriend And the girls, they were just so confident, so powerful, with their knowledge, their experience. They scared the shit out of us, but we were hypnotised by their aura, and that they had, and without shame, done it. And so what until then was just a pipe dream for all of us, something far away in time and space, had suddenly become frighteningly, excitingly real. Just out of reach, but still, very, very close. It could be us. It would be us. Had to be.

  Most of the older girls were metallers, of course, and some of the younger ones were too. A few of the younger ones were indie-kids and we ignored them, but a lot of them were suburban and bland, ripe for conversion to the metaller cause. None of them were goths, thank Christ. There were a few indie-kid boys, but they weren’t that much of a threat, except one, Damien, who the girls loved, with his floppy fringe and girly sensitive face. But then Thomas started a rumour that Damien had been caught bumming his dog and that put him in his place a bit. Thomas. He was in the centre of all of it, like a spider whose web we were all stuck in. He’d just reel everyone in, girls and boys, keeping the wrong people out and the right people in, with a single burst of nastiness or sarcasm, and the withholding of the same. And the girls would all want him, and he’d just laugh at them and then they’d want him all the more. Then he’d get off with them in the alleyway, and he’d be laughing at them again the next week. And we’d all be speaking his language, with its silly words to describe things, mostly negatively – ‘scrunty’, ‘wanger’, ‘flange’, ‘wankshaft’. You’d have conversations that went something like this:

  ‘There’s a bit of a flange on that dooferberry.’

  ‘Yeah, fucking wankshaft.’

  ‘Ah well, hang out with a girl with scrunty norks, you’re going to get totally wangered, aren’t you?’

  If any of those words were aimed in your direction, even though their precise meaning was unclear, there was really no point in bothering to turn up the following week. The trick was always to use those words about other people, and never give cause to have them used against you.

  It was a little slice of heaven, that youth club. If ever I’ve wanted to get back to simpler times, I think that’s where I’ve wanted to go back to. It was our little paradise. And that’s what, all those years ago, me and Ben were trying to protect, up in his bedroom, listening to AC/DC. Our place in the sun, right there in that church hall in Quireley. Such a little thing, but at the time it might as well have been the whole world. Within a few months we’d lose it, and find other worlds, but would any of them be as bright or as wonderful? Sometimes I doubt it.

  15

  I think it was about November when everything began to change. We didn’t see the signs at first. One thing that shook it all up was when Freddie Mercury died of AIDS. Now obviously we never listened to Queen because it was poofters’ music. Even though it was meant to be rock and some of it sounded a bit like things we liked, like AC/DC, he was so obviously a bender that we just couldn’t be doing with it. And you couldn’t even forget it when you were just listening to it and not looking at him, because it was right there in the music, with all the opera and high voices and stuff. Only monger metallers listened to Queen. We all thought it was pretty funny when he died, Ben especially. ‘Arse bandit got what he fucking deserved,’ I remember him saying.

  Only problem was, all the girls loved him, well a lot of them did. And they weren’t having any of our talk of it being ‘only right’. No, they demanded we respect his memory, and we had to listen to his bloody music all that Friday at the youth club, and keep quiet about it. This was a compromise for us, for some more than others. I could see Ben was on the verge of exploding all evening. But what some of the more enterprising of us realised was that the girls might need some comfort in their time of distress, so we held them as they rocked gently to the pre-recorded cassette of Greatest Hits II on a portable player, singing along to ‘The Show Must Go On’ with tears rolling down their faces, smudging all their make-up. Then we got off with them in the alleyway. Well, Ben didn’t. He ended up kicking the sponge football with the mongers that week.

  Another thing that happened, and turned out to be more important really, was when ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ came out. You see, the thing was, we liked it. Now, we shouldn’t have done, because it was an indie record in our eyes. It wasn’t proper rock or metal. But even though it wasn’t ‘rock’, it did ‘rock’, in that stupid Bill and Ted sense of the word that we never really used. Our attitude was always free of irony. Of course, not only did we like it, but so did the indie-kids, who liked it more than us. It was one of ‘their’ records. And perhaps more importantly, a load of the girls liked it as well. And the girls found themselves liking the boys who liked the record. Suddenly indie-kids other than Damien were getting attention. And Damien was getting so much attention it was ridiculous. Even though Thomas made up another story about someone walking in on Damien as he was getting his dog to lick his cock, it didn’t make any difference.

  Things really began to deteriorate when it became known that Nirvana were not a one-off, that there was a whole movement called ‘grunge’ built up around them, with its own style of music and fashion. Then the indie-kids started dressing up grunge. And the girls loved it. Then the girls started to dress grunge too: dreadlocks, checked lumberjack shirts and stripy jumpers with holes in and what have you. Doc Martens boots and fairy dresses. We were beginning to feel like yesterday’s men. Soon the church hall had three poles. Us at one
end with our fucking piano, the Horned Gods at the other, and indie-kid grungers in the middle. More specifically, they lined up along the right-hand wall while the mongers still shuffled about with their sponge football on the left.

  We looked to Thomas to lead us. He did not let us down, but at the time it seemed almost like a betrayal.

  Thomas bought a lumberjack shirt. Pale blue and black. When he walked in, on the last Friday before the Christmas break, we could not speak. We just stood at the piano, gawping. ‘What’s the fucking problem?’ he snapped, only too aware all eyes were on him. He eyeballed us back through his jam jars. None of us could ever have told him what the problem was.

  ‘All right, Tom,’ said Jase. Jase, not being a metaller, had bought his own red and white lumberjack shirt some weeks previously.

  ‘All right,’ said Thomas. ‘Someone dead?’

  No one was, but we were all in shock and facing impending bereavement. As one, we knew that we were not true metallers any more. Things had changed with one shirt.

  In fact, this was as much Neil’s doing as it was Nirvana’s. We’d been rehearsing round his house most Saturdays since October, and Neil had put his own distinctive stamp on all our material, both Jase’s songs and the covers. For example, ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ now went ‘SWEET child! SWEET child! S-S-S-SWEET child o’ mi-mi-mi-mi-HI-hine!’ And ‘Johnny B. Goode’ went ‘Go! Go! G-G-G-go-o-o-a-a-ah-johnny-ah-a-agh!’ like water going down a plughole. They were pretty much unrecognisable from the originals. The only way you could identify them was from the guitar riffs. He’d throw in a bit of harmonica too, which he still hadn’t learned how to play. Fortunately his excessive vocal style didn’t leave too much room for this, although Ben didn’t like it at all as it filled up the time meant for his guitar solos. One day Neil’s harmonica went missing. We never found it.

  Much to my surprise, the guys were warming to Neil as a person. Of course, they found a lot of the things he said and did pretty spazzy, but they didn’t hold it against him that much. Even when he did do something really stupid, like drop a plate of sandwiches or something, sure, they’d take the piss out of him, but it wasn’t followed by the unremitting abuse that you’d come to expect from Thomas, or even the more snide stuff you got from Ben. Somehow, Neil had charmed them. Maybe it was the way everything seemed to bounce off him. He didn’t take it to heart and crawl away to die like your average monger. He just carried right on, singing the songs in his own strange way. I still hated it, and I don’t know if Ben was ever too keen on it, but Thomas and Jase were really into it. Maybe it was because they were more rock than metal, they were more susceptible.

  He’d even begun to widen their musical tastes a bit, making them compilation tapes of things he thought they should listen to. First, he went for really basic, obvious stuff, like the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Kinks and the Who, but before long he’d even got them listening to groups like the Velvet Underground, although they were a bit suspicious about that at first because some of it was so obviously gay. But crucially, that didn’t stop them listening to it, and they even ended up liking it later on. That was a turning point, I think. Another was that REM broke big that year, and Neil had been listening to them for ages. Thomas and Jase decided that they were good and were quite excited to find that Neil had their entire back catalogue. Neil pushed them further and further from their original hard rock position, to the point that the lumberjack shirt shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

  So, as far as the band was concerned, things were going pretty well, it seemed, even though we still weren’t anywhere near doing proper metal. Then something crazy happened. The day after the last Friday at the youth club before the Christmas break, just as we were packing up at our Saturday rehearsal, Jase was talking about the youth club, and what a bunch of wankers the Horned Gods were, and how Damien had bummed his dog and got it to lick his cock, when he said, out of the blue, ‘You should come, Neil – you’d like it.’

  Ben and I looked at him, silently saying ‘No’ with all the facial muscles we could work. Thomas looked out of the side of his glasses, his eyes slits, unreadable.

  ‘Yeah, I’d like that,’ said Neil. ‘Do you have to dress up for it or anything?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Jase.

  ‘I mean, do you have to wear a tie or a jacket? It’s a club, isn’t it?’ said Neil.

  ‘It’s not that type of club, Neil,’ I said through gritted teeth, marvelling at the series of associations that had led him from the simplicity and obviousness of a youth club to some gentlemen’s drinking club from the 1930s or something. I really didn’t know if he was being serious or not.

  What I did know was that I wasn’t happy about it, not one bit. I said as much to Ben afterwards, but it seemed that he’d gone as soft as Thomas and Jase, pretty much. ‘Well, he can come if he wants to,’ Ben said. ‘It’ll be a laugh, won’t it?’

  ‘He’ll just make a tit out of himself and embarrass us!’ I said. ‘He’ll hardly be a hit with the girls, will he?’

  ‘S’pose,’ said Ben. ‘Don’t really care, to be honest.’

  ‘Well, if he bollocks it all up for us, don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

  ‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said, and picked up the last copy of 2000 AD he would ever buy from his bed.

  And so, on the first Friday after the Christmas break, the other side of the New Year, Neil came to the youth club for the first time. Jase had been hassling about it on the phone for a few days previously. It seemed he really wanted him to come along. Of course, Neil was already there when we arrived. In fact, he was there before anybody. One of the God-botherers found him waiting patiently by the door of the hall and had to let him in.

  ‘Hi there,’ he said, as we walked in. He was standing at the wrong end, where the Horned Gods would soon pitch themselves. A few mongers were hanging around their allotted wall, and some of our girls were waiting for us by the grand piano.

  ‘All right, Neil,’ I muttered. I really didn’t want this to be happening. Ben grunted. Thomas nodded.

  ‘All right!’ said Jase with enthusiasm. ‘How’s it going, Neil?’

  He beckoned Neil to join us at the correct end of the hall.

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Neil. ‘Are we allowed to play the piano?’

  ‘Yeah, of course,’ said Jase.

  ‘Oh, great!’ he said, lifting the lid and sitting down in a second, utterly unaware of the sexy teenage girls leaning up against it. They looked at him as if he were a new species, as yet unclassified.

  Then he started to play. Well, I say play. More like he just picked out notes at random, without any relationship to each other at all. I mean, it was horrendous, just awful. But the thing was, like his singing, however horrible it was, there was some undeniable logic to it. It did make some sort of sense. Not an enjoyable sense, but there definitely was one.

  The girls looked at each other, their mouths open and eyes rolling, that private form of communication that teenage girls always carry out in public. ‘Sad,’ one of them, Hannah, finally said to Jenny, another. But in a way it wasn’t a statement, more a question. Because Thomas was not far away, and he was fascinated, his face frozen in concentration as he watched Neil’s fingers.

  16

  ‘All right, Neil,’ said Thomas. Neil was opening the door for him at that week’s practice. ‘I’ve got something for you.’ Jase’s dad was lugging something out of the boot of his car. It was a keyboard.

  ‘Wow,’ said Neil, as it was brought into the house and dumped on the floor.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Thomas. ‘I thought you could have a go at playing this. It’s pretty old. They bought it for my dad’s social but no one could work out how to play it. Then they got a Casio with the drumbeats and they use that. But if you could do your spidery-widery playing on this, that would be splendid.’

  Neil ran his hands over all the various knobs and switches on it. ‘This is amazing,’ he said to him
self. ‘Roland Juno-6, analogue but polyphonic. Best of both worlds. Absolutely amazing.’

  ‘Yeah, we don’t have a stand for it, though,’ said Thomas. ‘You’ll have to play it on the floor, by the look of it.’

  ‘That’s OK.’

  ‘And we’ll have to put it through the bass amp. There’s two inputs on that, but it’ll probably distort.’

  ‘Will it?’ said Neil. ‘Oh good.’

  Thomas went to find a jack lead for Neil while Jase set up his drum kit. Me and Ben looked at Neil on the floor fiddling with his switches and levers. Then we looked at each other. I shook my head, Ben just shrugged his shoulders.

  Thomas handed one end of the jack lead to Neil, who plugged it into the back of the keyboard. Thomas plugged the other end into the bass amp.

  ‘OK, turn it on!’ said Thomas.

  Neil did so.

  ‘Right, play something!’ said Thomas.

  Neil pressed down all his fingers on the keyboard. At first, nothing happened. And then, suddenly, a harsh crackling sound emerged from the bass amp. It grew louder. You could feel it in your teeth. The tourist trinkets on the wall began to vibrate and the windows and the drums started to shake. And then the crackling turned into a zoooooom! that felt like a jet plane had just flown through your brain. With a tiny comedy blip! the sound ended. There was silence. Until a picture plate of the Alps fell from the wall and smashed against the fireplace.