The Edge

by Jamie Collinson

  Falconz’ music was a strange, sickly blend of soppy emotiveness and sugary euphoria, concocted with bland synths and wooden, electronic drums. Each song featured, half submerged in these other elements, an uninterrupted, masturbatory guitar solo, played by the band’s male member – Bret – with the utmost sincerity. It was, Adam reflected, gazing into the middle distance and trying to look enraptured, all one big sense of release from a tension that hadn’t existed in the first place. A constant gushing of big chords, noodling guitar and rigid beats, topped with ear-scratching, sped-up vocals that brought to mind a lovesick cartoon chipmunk.

  Listening to Falconz was a bit like spending a long time, sober, with someone who was very high on ecstasy: pleasant enough at moments, but ultimately utterly mind-numbing.

  The playback lasted thirty minutes. Afterwards, Adam’s ears were ringing.

  They all clustered around Roger, sipping mineral water and uttering superlatives. Monica, the radio promoter, was the first to leave the room.

  ‘Hey Adam,’ Roger said, taking him aside.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I think she’s gonna need some more work.’ He gazed at Adam meaningfully.

  ‘Right,’ Adam said. ‘I’ll, ah, talk to her.’

  ‘Good man,’ Roger said. ‘The show will knock her out. But we gotta be sure, man. Everyone working this record has to believe.’

  His mad eyes lasered into Adam’s.

  * * *

  ‘Everybody listen up,’ the tour manager boomed as he entered the dressing room. ‘Be in Ryan’s world at 10.05. NO LATER. That’s 10.05. Thank you.’

  ‘What’s Ryan’s world?’ Adam asked an assistant.

  ‘Oh, he means get their earpieces in. Ryan runs all comms from that point on.’

  In the warren of rooms and tunnels backstage, there was a hive of activity. Falconz themselves, along with Roger, hadn’t yet appeared from their private inner dressing room. That was fine by Adam. He was perfectly content drinking beers from one of the coolers dotted about, chatting to the many technical staff, or the members of a Denver gospel choir who’d been roped in to provide backing vocals. It was, he reflected, all a very long way from punky little gigs in sweaty east London venues. Was he mad to have preferred those?

  But Red Rocks, he had to admit, was an impressive place. Nestled between monumental outcrops of crags and cliffs of rock that was, true to its name, a ruddy clayish colour, it sat at an elevation of six thousand feet. It seemed improbable that a venue like it could ever be opened now, in the modern era of chronic health and safety. On the way up from the city, Adam had seen a storm blow over, forked lightning spearing down from the sky. Luckily for Falconz, it had disappeared almost as suddenly as it materialized. Apparently, lightning within two miles meant an instant shutdown.

  The backstage area was carved out of the rock itself, the walls formed from it; long, curved spurs reaching out across the floor. It was like something from a Star Trek episode, Adam thought. Kirk and Spock in an alien concert venue, enjoying some interplanetary culture before everything inevitably went pear-shaped and they wound up back on the Enterprise.

  In the centre of this backstage warren was a wide, flat wall, covered in small plaques, one each for every artist who’d played there. Adam paused in front of this, sipping a can of beer, reading. Stravinsky. The Beatles. Neil Young. U2. Depeche Mode in their Violator heyday. God, what he’d have given to beam back to any of those.

  Somewhere around the corner from where he stood, voices were raised in greeting, and the air seemed to take on the heightened electrical charge that always surrounded successful musicians. Adam turned, preparing his smile as the two members of Falconz, Roger a step or so behind them, turned the corner and came into view.

  Clad in black jeans, Adidas trainers and t-shirts, both of them were beaming. Bret – stocky, sleeve-tattooed and dark-haired – and Marissa – a petite woman with short blonde hair and a fleshy, instantly likeable face.

  ‘Fuck yeah!’ Bret, the more vocal of the pair, raised his hands and grinned. ‘So glad you made it, man.’

  ‘What’s up?’ Marissa said, and gestured for Adam to lean down and kiss her on the cheek.

  Adam hugged them both, while Roger looked on from behind them, his arms crossed over his chest.

  ‘When’d you get in, man?’ Bret asked.

  ‘A few hours ago,’ Adam replied.

  ‘Thanks so much for coming,’ Marissa said. ‘It really means a lot.’

  ‘Oh man,’ Adam said. ‘No way I was missing this. It’s such an honour to be here.’

  He felt queasy with his own dishonesty, as though he’d sipped something poisonous.

  ‘First time at Red Rocks, right?’ Bret asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Adam said.

  ‘Well,’ Marissa said, glancing down the corridor, ‘we’ll do our best to make sure it’s a special one.’

  ‘It’s going to be amazing,’ Adam said. Sentences like these came to him reflexively, backstage at shows. He was a fount of enthused cliché.

  ‘So, are you guys all set?’

  ‘Think so, man,’ Bret said. The pair looked at each other with a quick, nervous smile.

  ‘This place is something to live up to,’ Marissa added. ‘And we got a lot going on up there tonight.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve already met the choir,’ Adam said. ‘You guys will be brilliant, you always are.’

  ‘Thank you, Adam,’ Bret said.

  The pair of them looked at him gratefully, in a perfect example of the genuine charm that had won hearts and minds everywhere they went.

  Adam felt like an imposter, a fake. You were invited here, he thought. And you’re lying to their faces.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Break a leg. I can’t wait.’

  Bret slapped him on the back, and they hugged him again before disappearing into the centre of a group of serious-faced men and women wearing clip-on walkie-talkies or earpieces, calmly but firmly updating and instructing them, circling the pair in a small orbit of bodies.

  ‘All set?’ Roger asked Adam.

  ‘Yes indeed,’ Adam nodded.

  ‘Good man,’ the manager replied. ‘I’m watching from front of house. I’ll see you there.’

  Adam waited until Roger had disappeared around the corner, the corridor abruptly empty and silent. At his feet was a large white cooler. He raised its lid and stuffed two cans of beer into each jacket hip pocket, and stood. Fuck it, he thought, reopening the cooler, and shoved a fifth into the inner one. They were small cans, after all.

  25

  The show passed, slowly, in a blur of flashing lights, big-screen visuals and musical bombast. Generically ethnic dancers twirled on the screens, amid chopped-up, artificially enhanced images of waterfalls, mountains and forests. It was a sort of nature porn, Adam thought. Harnessing the wide appeal of the nature documentary, or the Apple screen saver, and marrying it to the bland excitement of a baseball match’s interval. Quite clever really.

  Behind him, a row of stony-faced technicians worked faders on various desks for lighting and sound. They reminded Adam of lizards, unmoving, heads extended towards the stage, eyes intent on it.

  At least Falconz’ was a coherent artistic universe. The music sounded as though it could soundtrack a Disney movie, forever stuck in the moment in which a small, native boy wanders into the forest for the first time, and, wide-eyed, is introduced to the animated animals who will become his friends. They even had a line of fire dancers, who emerged every now and again wearing different costumes and orgasmic expressions and spun their flaming sticks around like something from a Thai full moon party.

  The gospel choir was underused, and the black-clad singers did a good job of not looking bored for the long periods in which they stood onstage doing nothing. Bret and Marissa were raised on twin platforms, Marissa singing her heavily digitized, pitch-shifted vocals between bouts playing synths, twiddling knobs and leaping, waving her hands and occasionally bashing an electronic drum kit.

/>   Bret spent the entire show contorted over his space-age, angular guitar, eyes closed, thrashing his head and occasionally moshing as he tapped and bent the strings in his endless solos. His efforts were painfully at odds with the thin, bloodless sound the guitar produced. A long way back in the mix, it sounded as though it had been generated by a game console.

  But it scarcely mattered amid the general audiovisual onslaught. There was so much gear, so much pomp. So many people onstage. Christ, Adam thought. So American, somehow. It’s no wonder we couldn’t win the war without these fuckers.

  He kept his face aimed at the stage. Whenever Roger turned to look at him, he shook his head, doing his best stunned disbelief face. He was fairly sure Roger hadn’t counted the three beers he’d drunk before he’d escaped for a brief toilet break, or the two he’d finished subsequently.

  Spread across the hillside, surrounding the small pocket in which Roger, Adam and the other staff stood, eight thousand people danced, yelled and sang. Most of them seemed to be girls in their early twenties, with flowers in their hair and glitter on their faces. Largely white, healthy-looking and ecstatic. Here and there, muscular boyfriends were dotted about, sporting backwards baseball caps and basketball jerseys, some of them with the girls on their shoulders, arms aloft.

  It was all rather sexless, but that was no surprise. Adam had once found himself at a party full of twenty-two-year-olds around a visit to the Coachella festival. In the living room, the boys – who’d looked much like those here at the concert – had called each other ‘bro’ and racked long, fat lines of cocaine from enviable stashes, breaking off only to do shots. In the bedrooms, their girlfriends had gathered on the large, chintzy beds, dressed in oversized hoodies and jogging pants, staring at Facebook and gossiping about acquaintances who happened not to be present.

  There’d been no pairing off into bedrooms or kissing in the corners. Not even any flirting. None of the pregnant, charged atmosphere that Adam remembered from the house parties of his own youth.

  On the third, final day of the festival, three dead-eyed young men from Orange County had arrived, all of them in singlets, well muscled and with an air of affluence – a frightening little posse of USC kids. They brought with them a Tupperware box, with a giant rock of cocaine inside that Adam thought must have been approaching a kilo in weight.

  To be young in Southern California, he’d realized, was to be virtually a different species.

  He turned from the stage, taking in the jubilant crowd again. Was everything in music actually just taste and style? Was there no objective difference in value between Falconz and the bands he’d loved? Were the kids he’d become one with at the gigs of his youth, throwing themselves into the air or surging towards the stage and yelling with abandon, no better than these face-paint-wearing airheads? Had all those bands been, on some level, just as bad as this, and he simply blind to the fact?

  Adam felt, with a pang of loneliness, that he was the only person in this sea of happy humanity that considered himself to be in a sort of hell. It was as though he was trapped in an endless advert for a mobile phone brand. Forlornly, automatically, he searched his mind for the advert’s potential slogan. Make every day a journey? It would do.

  This is not what I wanted, he thought. Somewhere, without really meaning to, he’d sold out.

  After an hour and a quarter had passed, he could feel he was on the final stretch. The thought, and the onset of drunkenness, cheered him a little. A few more drinks, a bit of chatter, back to the hotel. Home, he thought. Oh God, take me home.

  He was wondering whether he could get away with another toilet break, and perhaps a slug of backstage whisky, when he felt a tap at his shoulder. He looked around to see Angelina, leaning over the railing above him.

  ‘Hey,’ she yelled, smiling. Her teeth, in the light from the stage, were glowing neon white, her skin shining with her trademark, glitter-infused face product. She looked younger than he’d remembered.

  ‘Hi,’ he shouted back.

  Roger glanced at him, frowned, and turned back to the show.

  Adam moved closer to the railing. Lonely as he was, he couldn’t help but be pleased to see her. A thin, pale security guard with a curly Afro was standing at a gate that allowed access from the public seating areas to the sealed-off section in which Adam and Roger stood. He glanced at Adam’s all-access pass, which dangled on a lanyard around his neck.

  Angelina and Adam leaned into each other, and she touched his head with hers as he moved closer.

  ‘How are you doing?’ he shouted into her ear.

  ‘Good,’ she yelled back.

  ‘Who are you with?’ he asked.

  ‘Just some friends.’ She gestured behind her. The pouty girl from the rooftop showcase was a few feet along one of the rows, watching him, and apparently accompanied by a sweating, dancing boy, who was intent on the stage.

  ‘Want to come back here?’ Adam asked her.

  ‘Yeah!’ Angelina said.

  Adam felt a further brightening at how pleased she was to see him.

  He turned, and tapped Roger on the shoulder. The manager nodded, upwards, with his chin.

  ‘Can I have another pass?’ Adam said. ‘My friend Angelina is here.’

  Roger frowned again. ‘Is she cool?’

  ‘Supercool,’ Adam assured him. ‘She’s a very successful Instagram poet.’

  ‘Oh shit,’ Roger said, peering at Angelina. ‘I know her. She takes those awesome photos in the desert.’

  ‘That’s her,’ Adam said.

  Roger reached into an inner pocket and removed another laminated pass. Adam, with a perverse pride, could feel the manager’s interest perking. Professional, but sexual too, he realized. The Terminator, it seemed, was human after all.

  I’m impressing Roger, he thought. Why do I care about impressing Roger?

  Angelina bounced through the gate, jerking her head and shoulders to the swingless drums.

  ‘Hi!’ she yelled at Roger.

  Roger stooped down to her, shaking her hand. Adam was shocked to see him smiling widely, more pleasantly so when, instead of trying to win over this latest industry contact, she moved back to Adam, and began dancing very close in front of him. Every few seconds, her buttocks grazed his crotch, creating a warm, tingling sensation.

  Roger glanced back over his shoulder, twice, the smile having vanished but the interest very much alive.

  Angelina’s shoulders were bare and smooth. She wore skintight black jeans, a black vest top and patent ankle boots. The backdrop of Adam’s thoughts seemed to sink away, his mind tunnelling its focus. Before long, he had an erection.

  The show ended with fifteen confetti cannons blasting their contents out over the screaming, feverish audience. Like giant cumshots, Adam thought, light-headed with booze and pleasure at the ordeal’s end. He, Roger and Angelina all threw their hands in the air and clapped, Adam taking the opportunity to make some comedy anguished howls now that he knew there was enough sound to mask them.

  A photographer appeared onstage, and Bret and Marissa turned their backs on the audience and threw their arms around each other’s shoulders, the camera flashing, capturing the vast crowd of people behind them, a mass of heaving bodies between the iconic, jutting red crags.

  Then, all of a sudden, Adam was following Roger down the long, steep, graffitied tunnel to the dressing rooms, Angelina’s hand in his, warm and dry, his erection half subsided.

  His unformed thoughts were of a bit of harmless fun, the familiar mental mist blooming in his head, hiding the potential consequences comfortingly away. He had thrown himself into the drunken current of the night, to become as free and as lost as a twig in a stream. This giving over of himself was something he’d once loved – perhaps still did – and had certainly become automatic.

  In the largest of the dressing rooms, Marissa and Bret were whipping out earpieces and whooping. Adam hugged them both, hands pressed into their sweat-drenched backs, both of them apologiz
ing for their state as he did so.

  Somebody passed Marissa an iPad, the screen of which showed the picture taken from the stage.

  ‘Holy shit,’ she said, looking at it with misty eyes. ‘Tonight was really something.’

  Angelina was introduced, whisky and vodka were poured. Roger had become separated, drifting off in a discussion with the venue manager on the other side of the room.

  All around them stood affluent-looking, older-type hipsters. Men in black, designer versions of Thai fishermen’s trousers, hair tied into topknots above thick-rimmed transparent glasses. Women in leather and denim cut-offs and minimal vest tops. Pendants, Rolexes, oversized rings and angular tattoos abounded. These were the people making a living from their dreams.

  Monica, the radio lady, appeared more alive now. She stood towards the far wall of the cavern-room, laughing, throwing her blonde hair back and wearing a large black belt over her red dress.

  I should work on her, Adam thought. But I have no idea how. Anyway, the show seemed to have done the trick. He felt a mild sense of betrayal, as if she’d gone over to the other side. It was the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and he was the last, doomed human left alive. He decided to call Monica during the week, for form’s sake.

  And anyway, wasn’t he here, making the scene, doing his job? People greeted him, hugged and high-fived him. It always came as a shock to Adam to find himself, technically at least, one of the most important people in the room.

  Bret, in a pause between hugs and congratulations, glanced over at Adam, then at Marissa. A look came over his face – equal parts conspiracy and glee.

  ‘Yo,’ he said to Adam and Angelina. ‘Follow us.’

  The four of them slipped from the room, heading down the corridor, past the plaques and around the corner, where Bret paused. Marissa still had the iPad in her hand.

  ‘Hold up,’ Bret said, raising a hand and peering back around the wall of rock in the direction they’d come from. He turned to them, a mischievous grin lighting up his face.

  ‘I think we lost him,’ he said.

  ‘Who?’ Adam said.