I looked at Chris and Ronny, and I knew they were feeling the same as me—that something was about to happen. I
don’t think any of us knew what it was, but we knew it was there. We could feel it all around us—the charge in the air, the power, the spark…the thrill of a ticking bomb.
And now it was about to go off.
The DJ was fading out the record, the houselights were going down, and the stage was dimming to darkness. Just for a moment, the room was silent and black.
Then the DJ said, “Ladies and gentlemen…The Katies.”
And all at once the stage erupted in a blaze of light, the drums kicked off with a whip-crack beat, and then we all piled in with a deafening blast of guitars.
God, it was good.
It was
incredible.
I don’t know why or how, but everything just came together—the sound, the energy, the music, the lights…It all just fused to a gut-wrenching
perfection.
We’d never played so good. We were awesome. We were that good, I almost wished I was out there on the dance floor myself. The crowd were going mental. I mean, we were killing them, knocking them dead. They couldn’t get enough of us. It was unbelievable. The sound was suddenly flawless—raw and loud and clear—and the songs had never sounded better: tight and fast, full of power, fresh, electric, exciting. We were
hot,
and we knew it—me and Ronny thumping out the backbeat, solid as a rock; Chris ripping the hell out of his guitar; Jason singing and dancing and screaming like a god…
For the first three songs, I just kept my head down and played. It was hot under the lights, and I was soon drenched in sweat. It was flooding out of me, streaming
from my skin, and as it poured out I could feel all the sickness and crap I’d been feeling before pouring out with it, until all that was left was the primitive thrill of the music, pumping away inside me. And that didn’t
need
any feelings or thoughts. I could sense the crowd without seeing them. I could feel them moving to the music, getting off on it, getting into it. I could hear the applause and the cheering. I was vaguely aware that the crowd was getting bigger all the time, but when I finally looked up, at the end of the third song, I was shocked to see that the club was nearly full. The dance floor was packed. All the tables were taken. People were coming in from the bar, trying to find somewhere to stand. Even the Bluntslide guys had come out to watch us.
It was amazing.
While Jason introduced the next song, I shielded my eyes from the lights and scanned the faces in the crowd. It was hard to pick out any details in the darkness, but I was pretty sure that Candy wasn’t there. I kept looking, though, and when I heard someone call out my name, I thought for a moment I’d found her. At a corner table, at the back, waving a hand…then I realized it was Gina. She was all dolled up for the night and I suppose the familiarity of her face confused me for a second…or maybe I was trying a bit
too
hard to see Candy? I don’t know. Anyway, when I realized it wasn’t Candy, my heart sank for a second, but then Gina smiled and whooped, and Mike—who was sitting beside her—grinned and raised his fist and the sinking feeling disappeared.
It was good to see them.
Not as good as seeing Candy…
But then, you can’t have everything, can you?
“You ready, Joe?” Jason said.
I nodded, wiping the sweat from my strings.
Jason lit a cigarette and turned back to the crowd. “OK,” he said into the microphone. “This one’s called…‘Girl on Fire.’”
I hit the opening rockabilly riff, thumping it out hard and fast, and then the drums and guitars came crashing in and we were off again, tearing the house down.
Half an hour later, when we came to the closing number, the atmosphere inside the club was almost too good to be true. The whole place was jam-packed, a seething mass of noise and sweat and dancing bodies, and no one wanted the show to stop, least of all us. But we didn’t have any choice. It was Bluntslide’s gig, not ours, and we’d agreed with them on a forty-five-minute set. Anything over that and they’d be seriously pissed off. Mind you, it didn’t really matter because we only had enough songs for forty-five minutes, anyway.
Up until then, we’d always played a Lou Reed number to close the set—a song called “Sweet Jane.” It’s a bit old-fashioned, but it’s got a really nice riff to it and we play it a lot faster than the original and we really mash it up at the end…so it’s a pretty good song to finish on.
That night, though, just as we were getting ready to start “Sweet Jane,” Jason called us all over to the drum kit and suggested we do something different.
“Like what?” said Chris. “We haven’t
got
anything else.”
“Yeah, we have,” Jason said, looking at me. “Joe’s song…the one we’ve been working on—‘Candy.’”
Chris shook his head. “No, it’s not ready yet…we’ve only played it a couple of times—”
“It’s
perfect,
” said Jason. “It’ll murder them…
and
it’s ours.” He looked at me again. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know. I suppose…”
He looked at Ronny. “You OK with it?”
Ronny nodded.
Chris said, “I’m not sure, Jase. Let’s stick with what we know…”
But Jason had already made up his mind. He said to me, “Give Chris the bass, you take the guitar part—OK?”
“Yeah…all right. What about the words? Can you remember them?”
He grinned at me. “I don’t have to. It’s your song—you sing it.” And with that he went back to the microphone, apologized for the delay, and started to introduce the song.
Chris, meanwhile, was giving me a shitty look. I didn’t really blame him. It was the last song of a great set, and he wanted to end it doing what he did best—playing the guitar. And now I was stealing his thunder. If I was him, I know I wouldn’t have liked it. But Jason was right—“Candy”
was
a brilliant song to end on. And it
was
one of ours. And I could play the guitar part better than Chris. Not because I was better than him, because I wasn’t. Chris was a genius. He could play anything. But “Candy” was a really simple song and it needed a really simple sound and Chris was just too
good
to be simple. “Candy” was a blues song—it was made of empty spaces. And, unlike me, Chris was just too good to leave the spaces alone.
“I’m sorry—” I started to tell him.
“It’s OK,” he said, unstrapping his guitar and passing it over. He still didn’t look too happy about it, but he didn’t look
too
sulky, either. I think he knew it was the right thing to do.
With a slight nod of his head, he said, “Let’s make it good.”
I nodded back, gave him my bass, and we both went back to the front of the stage.
Jason introduced me, then stepped aside to let me have the microphone. As I adjusted the mike and strummed a few chords on the guitar, I started feeling really weird. I’d never sung onstage before. I’d never been pushed to the front. I’d never had so many people looking at me. And I didn’t know what it was I was feeling. It was like a mixture of fear and some kind of wondrous discovery. A sense of—
This is it, Joe, this is your time and your place, right here, right now.
I knew I couldn’t think about it, though. If I started to think, I’d freeze on the spot. So I just started playing. Quietly at first, just gently stroking the chords, finding the feel and the rhythm…then gradually I started building things up, strumming more confidently…and the harmonies rang out across the room, slow and spiky and edgy, and then the bass came in, beefing things up, and the drums, and Jason’s guitar started wailing in the background, and I could hear the melody in my head, calling out to be sung, and I raised my head to the microphone…
And that’s when I saw Candy.
She was standing right at the front, just as she said she would. No more than a few meters away from me, looking up, her eyes fixed on mine, her face a picture of pure delight. She was dressed to kill in skintight jeans and a short black T-shirt, her arms tied with leather laces, her hair spiked up, her eyes painted black. She looked fantastic.
My breath caught in my throat for a moment, then a wave of energy surged through me, and I opened my mouth and started to sing:
The girl at the station,
The girl with the smile,
The moment’s temptation,
To stay for a while…
Simple words for a simple song. And, somehow, I didn’t feel embarrassed singing them. I should have, I suppose, seeing as the girl in question was right there in front of me. But, for some weird reason, I didn’t. Maybe it was because I wasn’t actually looking at her while I sang. In fact, I wasn’t looking at anything. My eyes were closed to the song. The music, the words, the trancelike rhythm, rising through the dark to the echo-sweet swirl of the chorus:
Candy, your eyes
Take me away,
Take me away,
Take me away…
I don’t know what the words mean, if they mean anything. They just came to me the night I first met her, when I was sitting at home, strumming the guitar. They were the words of the moment, and that’s all the song was about, really—a moment.
As the chorus finished, I stepped back from the microphone to concentrate on the guitar part that brought us back to the verse again. It was one of my favorite bits of
the whole song, a really nice little guitar break. Dead easy to play, but it sounded great.
I glanced down at Candy. She was dancing now. All alone, her eyes closed, dancing for the sheer hell of it, moving like a dream. She looked so alive, like a child lost in time…
I could have played that song forever.
It had to come to an end, though, and when it finally did, following a thunderous roar of drums and guitars, the sudden ringing silence seemed to shock everyone. Just for a moment, no one moved, no one made a sound…and then, all at once, the whole place exploded, with everyone cheering and clapping and calling out for more and the vibration of their stomping feet echoing through the floor…
It was breathtaking.
An indescribable feeling.
As Jason said good night to the crowd and we switched off our amps and trooped off the stage, we all had the same dazed look on our faces—a blend of intoxication and pure fatigue. I was exhausted, mentally and physically drained. My ears were ringing; my fingers were bleeding; my clothes were soaked in sweat. I’d never felt better in my life.
I felt so good, I almost forgot about Candy.
I stopped and turned around and stepped back onto the stage. The houselights were on again, and when some of the still-cheering crowd spotted me, they thought we were coming back for an encore. The cheering got louder—“More, more, more!”—and I started feeling a little bit stupid. I don’t know why, but I suddenly felt as if I didn’t belong there anymore. It was really odd. I’d felt perfectly at home a few minutes ago—standing in the spotlight, singing and playing my heart out—but now the stage felt
so alien to me that I was scared to venture too far from the edges.
Until, that is, I saw what was happening.
At first I thought it was just another fight, and I wasn’t particularly worried about it. You get them all the time in places like The Black Room—drunken scuffles, a few punches, arguments that get out of hand. They don’t usually come to much. This one didn’t seem any worse than the rest—raised voices, a bit of pushing and shoving…I couldn’t really see very much as it was all going on at the back of the club, next to the doors, behind a crowd of onlookers. I wasn’t that interested, anyway. I just wanted to find Candy…ask her out for a drink or something…see what she thought of the gig…maybe introduce her to Gina and Mike. Or maybe not. I didn’t know. I just wanted to find her, that’s all.
She wasn’t down at the front of the stage anymore, so I was scanning the crowd, searching the room, looking out for her face…but so far I wasn’t having any luck.
I heard Jason calling out to me from the corridor. “Joe! Where are you? Come on, there’s some record company guys here. They want to talk to us. Joe!”
“Yeah,” I called back. “I won’t be a minute.”
I kept looking, searching the roomful of faces.
Come on, Candy…where
are
you?
Just then, the scuffle at the back of the club got louder again and my eyes were drawn to the noise. A gap had appeared in the crowd now, and I could see some of the people involved. The first person I recognized was one of the black guys I’d seen earlier in the pub. Then—with growing unease—I noticed another and another…and
another. They were
all
there. Half a dozen of them, standing in a semicircle with their backs to the door, facing down another black guy. This one had his back to me, so I couldn’t see his face…
But I knew who it was.
It was Mike.
I started moving to the front of the stage.
“Joe!” Jason called after me. “Come on, man…what are you
doing?
”
I ignored him, moving faster.
I could see Gina now. She was standing to one side, screaming at someone behind the six black guys. I couldn’t see who it was. One of the black guys made a move toward her and Mike stepped up and whacked him in the head. As he went down, two of the others started kicking at Mike, and I jumped off the stage and started pushing my way through the crowd.
It was hard going. Everyone was still buzzing from the show, and people kept grabbing me, telling me how much they’d enjoyed it, asking where we were playing next…
“Sorry,” I kept saying. “Excuse me, sorry, sorry…”
The noise from the doors had quieted now, and I didn’t like the sound of it. It was
too
quiet. I squeezed through a gap in the crowd and jumped on a chair to see what was happening…
And my legs went weak.
What was happening was Iggy.
Backing out of the door, dragging Candy with him, his passionless eyes covering the room like two loaded pistols…he looked like nothing and everything, all at once. Nothing—no life, no feelings, no fear. And everything—size, strength, the power of violence. He had
it all. The rest of his crew were watching his back, guarding his exit, but he didn’t need them. He didn’t
need
anything.