At nine o’clock I started phoning. Nobody was out of bed.
‘We need a meeting,’ I told them.
‘Can’t it wait until the next practice?’ they all replied.
‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s really important. Something’s come up that could make us.’
They all wanted to know what it was. I refused to tell them. I said they needed to hear it as a group. Finally I got everybody to agree to meet round Jase’s.
I picked up Ben in the car. ‘So what’s this all about then?’ he asked again.
‘All I can say is, it’s time for you to move out of your parents’ house at last.’
He looked as if someone had told him he had to eat shit off a plate.
‘Right, what’s the wankering point of this?’ said Thomas, as we met up in Jase’s living room. He still hadn’t learned to speak normally.
I sat backwards on my chair and faced the others. Looking at them, I could see the effect that wasted time had already had. Ben had a pot belly from all the takeaways he’d wolfed down while lying on the big puffy sofa at his parents’. Thomas’s hairline was beginning to recede, his curly hair cut short now, revealing the loss all the more. Even Jase, who had always been in excellent shape, was beginning to look a bit stocky.
‘Guys, we’re going to have to move to London.’
Their mouths dropped open.
‘Why?’ said Thomas, with a venom I hadn’t heard for some years. He’d become quite sedate of late.
‘Because we’re achieving nothing here! We’re playing the same venues to the same people. The people who need to hear us aren’t hearing us. We need to be there, right at the heart of things, where the A&R men are. We need to be making a demo in a good-quality studio, and getting people to listen to it. Don’t you get it? We’re wasting our time. We’ve got to go out and make it happen!’
There was silence.
‘I’m not moving to London,’ said Jase.
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t want to. Why would I? I’m happy where I am. I like my job, money’s coming in and I’ve got a flat with my girlfriend. We’re actually talking of trying for a baby next year. Why should I leave?’
‘Because of the band!’
‘I was only ever doing it for fun, Chris.’
‘You fucking liar!’ I screamed. ‘You’ve always wanted it to work, right from the beginning.’
‘I never said that.’
‘Well, fuck you then. We can get a new drummer. London’s full of them.’
‘I’m not going to London.’ This time it was Thomas who spoke.
‘What? You’ve got nothing! You’re the man who repairs the vending machine in the office! You have got absolutely nothing to lose. You gave up the chance to do anything else for the band! What’s the point of not seeing it through?’
‘I’m not going to London,’ he said simply.
‘What about you, Ben?’ I twisted my chair round to face him. ‘Are you happy on the bins? Are you happy living with your parents? Does being a lazy slob really make you happy?’
He thought about it for a full half-minute. I knew he couldn’t pull the girlfriend card on me because he hadn’t had one since last year. He’d gone out for a bit with this girl called Claire, who was a lazy slob like him, and they used to spend all their time together lying in their own filth at his parents’. Then she got tired of being broke so she found someone with money to leech off. It tore him apart, I could tell, but he never expressed it except for his guitar solos, which got too angry for our West Coast harmony sound for a few weeks.
The silence pressed down on me as I became aware that my face must have turned very red.
‘I’ll go with you,’ he said. It was barely audible.
‘What?’
‘I’ll go with you,’ he enunciated sarcastically.
‘OK, fine, we’ll do it. Us two. We’re really going to do it!’
I stood up quickly. The chair went flying.
‘Come on, Ben,’ I said. ‘We’ve got plans to make.’
Ben looked like he wanted to stay and drink Jase’s beer, but I motioned for him to follow me.
We sat in the car. I was having trouble breathing.
‘I can’t go to London,’ Ben said.
I felt as if I’d just been kicked in the throat.
‘You are fucking kidding me.’
‘No, I can’t go to London. It’s too big. I couldn’t handle it.’
‘You just said, not five minutes ago, that you would. So you’re fucking wimping out on me too!’ I slammed the dashboard. It fucking hurt.
‘No, that’s not what I’m saying. I just can’t go to London, that’s all.’
‘So what are you saying, then?’ I said through clenched teeth. I felt anger rise within me like it had never done before.
‘We don’t need to go to London. We can go to Brighton. Loads of people are moving there from London now. Loads of music people. The London scene’s dead, now Britpop’s over. We can do just as well in Brighton. It’s smaller, better for us. We’d just disappear in London.’
He was right. We would.
‘So you’ll really do it then,’ I said, ‘you’ll come to Brighton with me?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Are you sad this is all over?’
‘Nah, not really. I always thought the songs were shit. Waste of my time playing my guitar over them.’
‘You could have mentioned that sooner.’
‘Yeah, s’pose.’
I started the car. I looked up for a second, and saw Thomas glowering out of the window. And then I drove off.
7
It was tough starting again in Brighton. We signed up with the local branch of my agency, and it found us both work, but it was intermittent at first, a bit here, a bit there. Also, Ben didn’t come across very well because of his attitude, so they were reluctant to send him to some places. All we could afford was a studio flat, so we were both sleeping in the same room. It wasn’t exactly sexy, and Ben’s habits were appalling. I constantly had to have a go at him about leaving his dirty clothes lying about, and it’s not as if he washed that often or anything. And getting him to do any household chores, you can forget it. He’d either not do them at all, however much I asked, or do them so badly I had to do them again myself anyway. You could go on at him about it until the cows came home, but he’d just sit on the second-hand sofa smoking a roll-up and shrug. He was a total slob. Never again. On the plus side, our poverty was reducing the size of his pot belly, now he couldn’t afford a constant diet of takeaways, and he began to look a little more like a rock star again.
Getting a new band going was even harder than paying the rent. We’d place adverts in music shops and hold auditions in rehearsal rooms, which in itself would cost a bomb. We’d decided we were only going to go for people who were just right, good musicians with good attitudes, but the only people who turned up were either useless, or wankers, or bass players into jazz-funk.
Sometimes we’d answer ads ourselves. We were well aware that although we could both play and sing, neither of us had ever been much cop at writing songs, so we needed to hook up with people who could generate material. Problem was, there were very few bands looking for two guitarists. And whoever was writing the songs was generally playing rhythm guitar already. They just needed a lead. I marvelled at how long it was taking Ben to realise I was dead weight. He was a brilliant guitar player. He could have joined the best band in Brighton if he wanted. If he just got rid of me. But I don’t think he wanted to. I was his final comfort zone. His parents were gone, the dole was gone, Sholeham was gone. There was just me left.
This went on for months. The work picked up in the autumn, so our finances got better, but every audition, every wanted ad answered, led nowhere. The flat began to get cold. The bills went up. This wasn’t working.
Brighton was not our city. We could never seem to click into its rhythm. We’d been there before years ago, on a trip to the North La
ines with the band to get some new stage-wear, but we’d been panicked by the bustle in the crowded narrow streets and all the narcissistic preening, and retreated to Top Man in the high street in fright. Now we were living here it was just the same. Everybody was a star, or looked like one. Everybody was doing something amazing, or acting like they were. We were nothing. We were going under. Soon those narrow streets would swallow us and bury us, and the carnival would go on above our forgotten heads.
It was a November night, and a mist had fallen. The mist was our failure, it seemed. We were leaving our too-cold flat to spend money we did not have on drinks we did not want. It was a noisy pub, where everybody shouted about how great they were over a punk jukebox. But we had to go there. It was a musicians’ pub, a place to make contacts.
We walked in. We got about two feet inside before the heave of bodies stopped us going any further. So we just stood there for a while, waiting to summon up the willpower to push our way to the bar. Then I saw him. Sitting, nursing a pint alone in an alcove, was Bernie Chessington. His cheekbones were unmistakable. He’d been big a couple of years ago, at the height of Britpop. His band, Chessington’s World of Dementia, had had a couple of hits, notably one called ‘London Nights’ which was an awful song about a cockney prostitute or something. But by ’97, tastes had moved on. Melody Maker had slated their last album, saying, ‘If you like this then you’ve never had sex and you smell of wee.’ I’m not kidding, that was the review. And there he was, his hair longer, his face puffier and his nose redder. I’m not entirely sure he knew exactly where he was, but there he was. He was alone, and nobody was bothering him. In ’98 nobody wanted to be reminded of ’96. But despite this, and despite his dishevelled state, somehow you could tell he was a star, or had been once, an awareness that he was the most important person in the room, any room. It was all in the posture, the stillness. He didn’t need to move. The world moved for him. Or used to.
‘You know who that is, don’t you?’ said Ben, needlessly mumbling in my ear.
‘Yeah, I do. Let’s go and talk to him.’
‘I don’t think he wants to be bothered.’
‘Well, if he doesn’t, he can always say. Let’s go.’
Ben grumbled something and followed me as I pushed through the crowd. About five minutes later we finally made it.
‘Hi there,’ I said, as his eyes tried to focus on the vague forms in front of him. ‘Are you Bernie Chessington?’
‘Yeah, I am.’ His speech was slurred in some horrible approximation of Keith Richards, deliberately or not, I couldn’t tell.
‘Hi, I’m Chris. I’m a great fan of your work.’ I wasn’t, I hated it, but it would be no use telling him that. ‘This is Ben.’
‘Hi guys,’ he said, waving.
‘So, is it true that Chessington’s World of Dementia have broken up, then?’
‘Listen, Chessington was me. The band was whoever I chose to work with at any moment in time. But yeah, I’m not currently operating under that nom de plume.’
‘So, do you live here now, then?’
‘Thinking about it, thinking about it. London’s just so …’
We waited for him to finish his sentence, until it became clear he never would.
‘We’ve just moved down here, actually,’ I said. ‘We’re trying to start a band.’
His eyebrows raised and his misty eyes widened. ‘Really?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Then you might be just the sort of chaps I’m looking for. What instruments do you play?’
‘I play rhythm guitar, Ben plays lead.’
‘Excellent. Fantastic. Brilliant.’ He reached in his pocket looking for something. He failed to find it.
‘Would either of you gentlemen happen to have a pen?’
‘Yeah, sure.’ I handed him a biro and prayed it would work.
He tore off a side of a cigarette packet and wrote on the back.
‘Can you get to this address for four o’clock tomorrow?’
‘Yeah, no problem.’ This was a lie. We both had work. We’d have to call in sick, I could see Ben was about to make a fuss, but I kicked him in the leg to silence him.
‘OK, if you can get to these rehearsal rooms with your instruments, we’ll try out a few things. You never know, Chessington phase II could start tomorrow!’
We both shook his hand and left him to slip back into his fog.
‘We’ve got to get back home now!’ I said.
Back at the flat, we frantically tried to work out the chords to ‘London Nights’. Neither of us could even remember how it went, other than the chorus of ‘She’s such a sight on those London nights, dirty in a miniskirt, glamour in the headlights’. Like I said, it was shit. But even though we hated it, just to have this opportunity open up was more exciting than anything we'd experienced since we started playing. Our hearts were thumping faster than they’d ever thumped before. This was it. It was going to happen for us, we just knew it. When everything seemed hopeless, our fortunes had turned around. We were on the verge of becoming professional and successful musicians.
After half an hour we gave up trying to remember it. We simply couldn’t. ‘Bollocks,’ I said. ‘OK, first thing tomorrow, we’re pulling a sickle and we’re going record shopping.’
And that's what we did. Nine o’clock, and we were at the nearest independent record shop in the North Laines. Not only did we buy both Chessington's World of Dementia albums, but all their singles just in case Bernie wanted us to play some obscure B-sides. From nine thirty onwards, we listened to each song twice, frantically working out the chords, running through it once and moving on to the next one. Fortunately, they were not that hard, as they were all on pretty much the same chord progressions. We’d got them all done by half two. For the next hour we played ‘London Nights’ and the B-side to the last, unsuccessful single nearly ten times each. Then we headed for the rehearsal studio.
The mist of the night before had turned into pissing rain. It was an absolutely miserable day. But we were so excited, the rain barely registered in our minds as we walked down the steep street of seaside townhouses painted the colours of Neapolitan ice cream. We were going to play with a proper musician, someone who’d been on telly, sold some records. This was really going to happen.
By the time we got to the rehearsal rooms, we were soaked to the skin. We walked into the reception, dripping waterfalls onto the cigarette—burnt carpet. From a desk plastered in ‘musicians wanted’ and gig posters, a bald man with tattoos and piercings eyed us through the metal in his face.
‘Hi, lads,’ he said. ‘What can I do you for?’
‘Do you know which room we could find Bernie Chessington?’ It felt amazing just to say the name of a successful musician out loud, with the implication we were associated with him. ‘He’ll be expecting us.’
‘Hang on a minute,’ he said. He looked in a book, running his finger down a column. ‘No, sorry, Bernie hasn’t booked a room for today.’
‘Are you sure? I think he has.’
‘No, nothing here, sorry. He came in here about a month ago, but we haven’t heard from him since.’
I turned to Ben. His face was even glummer than normal. ‘Why don’t we wait? He might turn up.’
‘S’pose.’
We waited an hour and a half in the reception room. No Bernie.
‘He’s not coming, is he?’ said Ben, finally.
‘No, I guess not.’
We sadly picked up our guitars and went outside into the pissing rain. It fell on my face and into my eyes and my mouth. I stood there not moving, letting the misery it so neatly represented fill my every available orifice.
‘I give up,’ I said. ‘I’ve had enough.’
And we went back to our flat and, accepting an IOU, I sold my guitar to Ben.
8
That was two years ago. As soon as the contract was up on our flat, I got myself out of Brighton. I just couldn’t hack it. I also couldn’t face going back to S
holeham. My failure would have hung over me everywhere I went. So I moved up the coast to a little town called Southwick, just because it was quiet, and I could still get into Brighton if I needed to. The agency found me in a job in the area, working in the back room of a wholesalers. It was very similar to the warehouse we rehearsed in that one time with Spencer, and I was right, working in a place like that would do something to your soul. I was stuck with some old middle-aged guy who was really common and stank of fags and had tattoos and everything. He used to be a driver, but he’d been put in the back room because of his health. I think he thought I was some sort of idiot. We didn’t get on that well. We just didn’t understand what the other was trying to say half the time. Not only that, but he had a habit of illustrating the most mundane thing with a line from a song. Like he’d need a particular form and he’d go, ‘I’ll tell you what I want, what I really, really want. I really, really wanna G-11 form.’ Or he’d sing something by Queen. There was a Queen song for every occasion. If we’d got an order out on time, he’d sing ‘Weeee are the champeeons, my friiieends …’ When he’d finished a bit of paperwork, it was ‘And another one gone, and another one gone, mother one bites the dust-ah!’ The most inventive one was when he put the kettle on, he’d go, ‘I want to make tea, I want to maaake teeeaa …’
I had a new girlfriend for a while called Julie, or Jools, as she insisted on being called. We met in a charity shop, thumbing through the records. She was a couple of years older than me. Not entirely sure what she saw in me, but we hit it off. Jools had quite a good job in marketing, and she’d take me to these parties where young men about the same age as me would all stand around in their designer glasses talking about their music collections. I could have joined in if I wanted to, but I really didn’t. They’d just be going, ‘Have you heard such and such?’ and the other would go, ‘Yeah I have, have you heard thingumabob?’ And the first guy would go, ‘No I haven’t.’ And then the other would say, ‘You should check them out. If you like such—and—such, you’ll love thingumabob.’ And it would just go on and on like that, like kids swapping football cards in the playground or something. Or worse, us metaller kids back at school doing each other tapes and wanting them back by Monday. It meant as little to me as the bloke at work singing his Queen songs.
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