Greatest Hits

by Laura Barnett

  I told you I wouldn’t

  But that was a lie

  For I want my freedom

  And rules are not mine

  Ahhhhhh

  They’re not mine they’re not mine they’re not mine

  * * *

  RELEASED 10 September 1973

  RECORDED July 1973 at Château d’Anjou Studios, France

  GENRE Folk rock / soft rock / pop

  LABEL Phoenix Records

  WRITER(S) Cass Wheeler

  PRODUCER(S) Martin Hartford

  ENGINEER(S) Luc Giraud

  A Wednesday in February, damp and bone-cold, smelling of woodsmoke and mulching earth.

  Cass made her way downstairs, wrapped in the oversized cardigan Serena had knitted her for Christmas, and set the kettle to boil. The kitchen was freezing. She stood by the stove, warming her hands beside the flame, debating whether to slip another coin into the gas meter: it ate money in winter, so they were rationing its use.

  She could hear Ivor moving around upstairs: the creak and give of the loose floorboard on the landing as he crossed to the bathroom; the sudden gush and gurgle of toilet and basin. A low guttural rattle coming from behind Hugh’s closed door (he was a terrible snorer—they often had to poke him awake in the van) and the intermittent bark of the neighbour’s Alsatian.

  The high-pitched whistle of the kettle; the rush and hiss of boiling water as she poured it into two mugs. And then the telephone, squealing from its perch in the hallway. She let it ring, reaching for the milk, then stepped quickly through with a mug in her hand, placing the receiver to her ear.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello. Is that Cass Wheeler, by any chance?”

  A man’s voice, a stranger’s: softly spoken, educated, betraying only the faintest trace of flat London vowels.

  “Yes. That’s me. Who’s calling?”

  His name was Martin Hartford. He was a producer at a label called Phoenix—a division of Lieberman Records, he explained, which he had established for new artists working, as he put it, “in the intriguing hinterland between folk, rock, and blues.”

  An image struck her—a flat, desert landscape, sand and barbed wire—and would lodge itself in her memory for some time.

  “Jonah Hills passed me your tape a few weeks ago, before he went back to the States,” Martin said. “I liked it—I liked it a lot, in fact—but I wanted to see you guys live. I’ve been busy, so it took me some time to get round to it. But I did see you, last night. And do you know what?” He paused, as if waiting for Cass to supply an answer, but she did not. “Well, you blew me away. I’d have told you that myself, but I couldn’t stay.”

  “You saw us last night? At the Avenue?” Cass was buying time: she’d heard Martin perfectly clearly, and with each word she could feel the excitement rising inside her, ready to explode and swallow speech. Beneath it, the certainty, cool and bright and true, that this was the moment she had been waiting for, the moment after which nothing would ever be quite the same.

  The creaking complaint of the loose floorboard. She looked up, saw Ivor standing on the stairs, drawing a jumper on over his shirt.

  “Who is it?” he mouthed down to her, and she put a finger to her lips.

  “I did,” Martin was saying, “and it was some gig. I mean, the songs are great, but your performance, too . . . Well, I haven’t seen anything like that in a long time. Ever, maybe. Not from a . . . well, to put it bluntly, a woman. Not on this side of the Atlantic, anyway. There’s something about you, Cass, something that makes people stop and listen. So many seek it, I can tell you, but so few truly have it.”

  The excitement, now, was loud as the roar of the sea inside a shell; the leap and rush of waves, forming and breaking, forming and breaking.

  Martin cleared his throat. “So I was wondering, Cass, whether you might be interested in coming to meet me. Have a chat.”

  Cass leant back against the wall, the mug unsteady in her hand. She glanced up at Ivor, crouching bent-kneed on the stairs. His brown-green eyes, in the half-light, seemed almost black, the irises swallowed by the dark discs of his pupils. It was not only whisky he and the others had celebrated with the previous night: they’d slipped off together backstage to the men’s toilets, returned glassy, euphoric, carrying that faint sweet, lingering scent of burnt sugar. They had asked her to join them, but something—a wordless impulse that she couldn’t disobey; the instinctive reluctance to lose herself—made her refuse.

  “Well, yes,” she said, “I don’t see why we couldn’t come in. When were you thinking? I’ll get the band together. Ivor lives here, with me. And so does Hugh, the drummer. But I’ll need to call Danny. He’s the bassist. But of course you must know that already . . .” She faltered, aware that she was babbling.

  “Yes, I do know that, and today would be wonderful, if you’re free.” There was a brief, pregnant pause. “But, Cass . . . I wondered, actually, whether you might come in alone. It’s you I’d like to speak to first, if that’s all right. Just you.”

  “Just me?” she repeated dumbly. “But we’re a band. I can’t see why . . .”

  Ivor, on the stairs, did not lift his gaze from her face. She talked on into the telephone, and he looked away, got to his feet, and went back upstairs.

  After the meeting, she emerged, blinking, onto Tottenham Court Road. The day was still dull and cold, and the clouds had gathered, threatening rain; she drew her coat more tightly around her, pulled her scarf up over her chin.

  It was a quarter past three. In the blank-faced buildings overhead, office-workers were clattering away at typewriters, or standing up from their desks to boil the kettle for another cup of tea. Shop-girls were dawdling at counters; white-costumed chefs were sitting on fire-escapes, cupping cigarettes between curled palms; neatly dressed women were stepping briskly into taxis. A few paces ahead of Cass, a man in a filthy blue anorak, fastened with a length of string, was making slow, juddering progress towards her, talking softly to himself; and a group of tourists in raincoats were striding purposefully towards Oxford Street, cameras dangling from their necks. As they passed, Cass heard one of the women say something to another—a clipped, brisk language that she thought might be German—and then her friend’s incomprehensible reply.

  She walked north, towards Goodge Street, with only a vague sense of where she was going, seeking the comforting solidity of the pavement beneath her feet. Outside Whitefield Chapel, she stopped, reached into her pocket for her cigarettes, then stood smoking, stamping her feet against the cold.

  “A unique talent,” Martin had said, as the other men—they had all been men, with the exception of the secretary who’d brought in the tea—had nodded. The era of the “singer-songwriter.” (They said the word so, between invisible quote marks, as if trying it on for size.) Confessional songs: frank, emotive, honest. Carole King. Joni Mitchell. Did she own Tapestry? Ladies of the Canyon? Yes. And did she like them? Of course she did. Those women were good. They were more than good, in fact—they were real artists—and so, these men felt, was she. And she might, just might, be what intelligent British music fans were looking for—women, above all, and more and more of the record-buying public were women. Did she realise that? Not girls—not those teenyboppers who’d hoarded their pocket money for 45s, massing outside Beatles concerts, screaming so loudly nobody could catch a damn note. Had she been one of them? Yes, without the screaming: she’d always hated the screaming. Five nodding heads. Well, like her, those girls were women now, with their own money to spend, their own record-players spinning in their bedsits and living-rooms. And they needed an artist who would take their own lives, their own dreams and ambitions and failed love affairs, and reflect them back, help them understand themselves anew.

  Five pairs of eyes, boring holes into her skull. What did she think? Surely she could see how much stronger—how much freer—she would be up there
on her own, her name on the bill, the band there to support her, rather than trying to claim the glory for themselves?

  Glory. She didn’t like that word. She didn’t see her music in those terms.

  In what terms, then, did she see it?

  Songs. Fragments of time, caught in three, four, six beats to a bar. These melodies that appeared in her mind, tugged at her sleeve, refused to let go. The moments, on the stage, when there no longer seemed to be any distance between herself and the band and the strangers down there on the floor.

  More nodding. That was how they knew she was the real thing. It was the music that mattered to her. They could see it; they could feel it when she sang. That was what made it special. But didn’t she want to share that music with as many people as possible? Was she happy playing to dozens of people, when they could put her in front of hundreds, even thousands?

  But Ivor. Ivor, Ivor, Ivor.

  Yes. Ivor Tait. They wrote well together, and they could see there was chemistry between them. She’d need a lead guitarist, anyway, and he was good. Not Clapton good—not yet, anyway—but good enough. Danny and Hugh—if she didn’t mind them speaking plainly—well, they were nothing to write home about. There were scores of session drummers and bassists in London. They’d audition some. Get her in the studio. Get her talking to the press. Get her out there.

  So. It was a lot to take in, they knew. Did she want some time to think it over?

  She did. She had shaken their hands, taken the lift downstairs, and stepped outside.

  Now, her cigarette had dwindled to a stub, and her gloveless hands felt stiff. Across the damp pavement, the man in the dirty blue anorak was inching back towards her, staring intently at the ground.

  “Cracks, cracks,” he was muttering. “Mustn’t step on the cracks.”

  There was something about the man’s face—some firmchinned air of dignity, despite the dirt, the delirium, the unwashed smell rising from his clothes—that reminded her of her father. She saw Francis in her mind, hard-faced in his tidy little flat. The way he had spoken to her, so cruel, so unfamiliar. Some pipe-dream of being a singer. Don’t think I don’t know what sort of woman you are.

  She hadn’t been back to Worthing since that disastrous afternoon, though Lily said Francis kept asking when she was coming back. She knew she was being stubborn, but something had altered in her; some connection had frayed.

  Lily was impatient with her. The doctors, she reminded Cass, were now calling it dementia: Francis, at sixty-six, was still relatively young, but they could find no other diagnosis. His mind was clouding, and quickly: all that intelligence, that knowledge of scripture, literature, history, fading away. Lily said that he probably hadn’t known what he was saying. Oh, but Cass knew that he had: he’d seen her mother in her, and in that moment, as Cass poured his tea, he’d hated them both, and he had wanted her to know it.

  “Well, all I can say is that it’s a shame,” was Lily’s reply, “when you’re all he has left in the world. You’ll regret it one day, Cass. I know you will.”

  Cass had thought of Margaret, then, over in Canada, still sending her cards and letters twice a year: her birthday, Christmas. Last Christmas Day, grown sentimental on the generous measures of brandy Uncle John had poured after pudding, Cass had finally written back: I’m writing music now. I’m living in Gospel Oak, in a beautiful Victorian house with a big garden filled with long grass. I’m in love with an amazing, talented man named Ivor Tait.

  I don’t need you, she had hidden between the lines. I don’t need you now, and I never did.

  Margaret’s reply had arrived early in the New Year. I can’t tell you how happy we are to have finally heard from you. Josephine is almost eight now—she’s growing up so fast—and she’s always asking about her sister in London. Write to us again, won’t you, Maria, and tell us more?

  How would it be now, she thought, to go home and compose another letter back? She’d write, Tell Josephine I’ve signed a record deal. Tell Josephine her big sister is “the real thing.” Tell Josephine that plain old Maria Wheeler is dead and gone.

  And Ivor, waiting for her at Savernake Road—he’d refused, at first, to let her attend the meeting alone: had insisted on coming with her, until she’d stalked out in a huff, letting the front door slam—what was she to say to him? There were, it seemed, no words; and yet, somehow, she must find them. For she already knew that she would not walk away from this; that inside her, there was steel, and ice, and the unignorable voice of her ambition. Take this, that voice was saying. Take this chance, and hang the consequences. You can do this. You must do this.

  The man in the blue anorak was level with her now. He looked up, met her gaze. His eyes were startling blue pools in the dirt-rimmed crevasses of his face.

  “Cracks,” he said gently. “Mind you don’t step on the cracks, now, love.”

  “No,” she said. “Thank you. I won’t.”

  She was expecting many things of Ivor: coldness, fury, even violence. He had never been violent towards her, but she sensed in him—in the often frenzied rhythm of their love-making; in that moment, behind the Newcastle club, when rage had overcome him, his face seeming transformed, entirely other—the capacity to be so. And that knowledge, in some bone-deep way that Cass had not yet fully acknowledged to herself, filled her with an uncomfortable feeling of inevitability. Margaret’s hand whipping against her skin. Her own childish brown eyes staring back at herself in the vicarage hallway. The anger that had welled up in Cass then, fervent and hot, and that she knew lay inside Ivor, too, as it had lain inside his father, and his father’s father, back up through the shifting generations. He had not had to say much about his childhood for her to understand its pattern, and its legacy.

  She was not, however, expecting Ivor’s silence.

  “I see,” he said. They were sitting at the table in the kitchen, where, just a few hours earlier, she’d made their morning coffee. Already, it seemed transformed, as if all of it—the scuffed, freestanding cabinets, not changed since before the war; the tattered Pink Floyd poster Bob had picked up at Kensington Market; the washing-up stacked in the sink, with its days-old layers of congealed grease—were a stage set designed for other people, living other lives.

  She watched his face; he seemed not so much angry, or jealous, or even disappointed, as thoughtful. “Well? What do you think? What should we do?”

  Ivor did not reply. He looked back at her for a long moment, his head on one side, as if taking the measure of her for the first time. And then he leant forward, placed a hand, gently, on her arm, and got to his feet.

  “Where are you going?” she said. But he just squeezed her arm, withdrew his hand, and left the room.

  She got up to follow him. “Ivor! You can’t just ignore me . . . Talk to me. Tell me what you’re thinking. I need to let them know . . .” Her voice was a shrill, plaintive whine, and he did not turn back. She pursued him outside, down the garden path, onto the street.

  “Ivor!” she called, but still he didn’t turn, and a woman passing with a pram looked round to offer her a censorious glare.

  “Ivor,” Cass said again, more quietly, but he was a good few yards away now, a hunched figure in a green velvet jacket that was too light for the weather, his hands thrust deep inside his pockets.

  She broke her news to the others in the dressing-room that night, just before the show: her offer from Phoenix Records, and her concern for Ivor, who had not come home.

  “Right. That’s that, then, isn’t it?” Danny hissed, his usual affability dissolving. “You’re selling us down the river. No, actually, you’re selling yourself down the river, and leaving us on the bloody bank.”

  “Danny.” She placed a hand on his arm, but he threw it off. “I haven’t made up my mind yet. I’d like to talk to you all about it. Calmly, you know? Make a decision as a band.”

  “Well, Lady C.”
Hugh was heavy-lidded, dreamily stoned. “Trouble is, it’s not really our decision to make, is it?” He licked his lips, drew his tongue along the shaft of a fresh joint. “Now, I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve dragged my arse down here, so I’m bloody well going to do the show. Ivor’ll be here. He’ll have been off licking his wounds. And personally, I don’t blame him.”

  Angus, fortunately, wasn’t there that night. (She was dreading telling him about Martin and Phoenix almost as much as she’d dreaded telling Ivor.) And Hugh was proved right—in the seconds before they were due on stage, Ivor appeared, wet-haired and stinking of whisky.

  “Where’ve you been?” Cass asked him as they stepped out into the corridor, but he stalked ahead without saying a word.

  On stage, Ivor did not turn to her once, and he missed several of his cues—deliberately, Cass suspected, as he was usually precise in his timing. As she sang, she could sense her concern for him—for his hurt pride, for the blow Martin’s offer must inevitably deal to his own ambitions—beginning to fade, replaced by a fast-burning, blue-flamed sense of outrage. This was her success, her opportunity—and one that included him, too; she’d done all she could to ensure that there would still be room for him—yet Ivor wasn’t happy for her in the least. He was acting like a spoilt, selfish child, and she was damned if she was going to indulge him.

  At the set’s end, Cass bowed to the applause, and then strode quickly off stage. By the time the others appeared in the dressing-room, she’d already stowed her guitar in its case, and was buttoning her coat.

  “You should really mess with our heads like that before every show, Cass,” Danny said. “Oh, whoops—there probably won’t be a next time, will there?”

  She gave him a sharp look. “Danny, I’m sorry. But I argued for you, all right? I did my best.”

  He shrugged. “Wasn’t worth much, then, was it?”