Carnforth's Creation (17 page)

At six, Roy’s helicopter would circle the park, with announcements over the public address to make sure
everyone
knew. Then longer intervals between the support bands’ sets, anticipatory screams, tension. But Roy dining at ease with Lord Carnforth, while Matthew filmed. (Good to
intercut
this with footage in the park.) Other musts for Matthew: the helicopter landing on the tennis courts, his reception, autograph signing for children of members of the staff, while the thousands waited.

When Paul found Matthew, half-an-hour after the gates had opened, he was filming in the medical tent, questioning the doctor. Apart from faintings, and crushings, what were the problems he expected? Nothing much. What about drugs? Anything so far? Just one bad trip: LSD; a couple of amphetamine o/ds. What else might he get? The doctor shrugged. Mandrax, nembutol maybe. Usually coke and cannabis didn’t cause problems. Paul walked into shot. ‘Boy is it wild out there, fighting in the mud, gatecrashing, heroin outselling hot-dogs …’

Outside, Matthew suggested he might be unwise to count his chickens. By inviting a wide range of bands, protest and folk-rock, along with teeny-bopper pullers, he’d got himself one hell of a mixed audience. Hippies with their gentle ‘back
to nature’ cult-line, weren’t the only ones who fancied a day in the country. The Hell’s Angel/Rocker faction loved nothing better than a burn-up actually ending somewhere; they also loved nothing less than hippies. What had so far struck him, Matthew confided, was the low proportion of thirteen to fifteen year old girls, who’d set the tone of Roy’s tour and guaranteed its success.

Shortly after two o’clock, black clouds began to roll in from the west, and, more ominous, Paul learned that about two dozen forged tickets had been presented at the gate. Since they had been professionally produced, and failed only in respect of a five, instead of six, figure coding number, the obvious implication was that many more had been printed. More bothering still: most of the holders had so far turned out to be East End leather boys, a species most unlikely to take no for an answer with good grace. Hurrying to the gates, Paul was at least able to reflect that the early morning rush had not developed into a stampede; the ticketless evidently calculating that unless able to be at the site before ten, they’d do best to spare themselves the journey. Even so, he was worried long before he caught his first glimpse of ugly confrontation. With just over forty thousand already in the park, and well over six hours till Roy was due to perform his first set, the few thousand remaining venue tickets were going to have to go a long way. If numerous, the forgeries would bring mathematical mayhem to a situation already critically stretched.

The fights and scuffles Paul witnessed outside were vicious but produced no serious injuries (or none requiring use of any of the three ambulances on site). The police, no less alarmed than Paul by the dud tickets and what they might presage, made a handful of exemplary arrests. Peace was restored, but not without a price. The carnival atmosphere was ebbing; kids assembled to celebrate love, togetherness, and rock, had seen authority cracking down, and most of them, having no idea why, were inclined to fear the worst. Another depressant: though no rain was falling, the clouds were thickening, and the sun looked to have made its last
appearance. The flimsy clothes many had set out in on a warm morning, were plainly going to give enjoyment a rough run later in the day.

Paul left the gate just after seeing a girl screaming and writhing on the grass; rumour had it that isolated pushers were hawking acid laced with speed. But, as he was soon to realize, the occasional victim of a bad trip wasn’t going to affect the general mood of the vast crowd to anything like the extent of a griping minority, growing by the hour, that’d been forced to pay twice. In many cases the choice would now lie between eating and drinking during the concert, or keeping the cash for a coach or train ticket home. Hitching wouldn’t get everyone away.

Relations between the hippy and rocker sections didn’t seem too bad when Paul left the park bound for the estate office, meaning to phone the lodge for up-to-date news on the current rate of arrivals. No worries were entertained about running out of printed tickets; if this happened, as looked likely, they would simply go on taking money. The one thing out of the question now would be to stick to a numbers limit add to the growing company of forged ticket holders
roaming
around outside the park walls. Nothing the police could do about them, Paul was told. They’d been dispersed from the gates and that was that. To let anyone in without paying had been ruled out from the start; now it would be a sure recipe for a riot by the twice-paid fraternity. And if the crowd of ticketless persons grew unmanageably large, disaster might still be averted if Roy was grabbing the audience’s attention when they were finally let in. His security chief’s guess that this moment of truth would arrive sooner, rather than later, persuaded Paul that Roy’s arrival would have to be
advanced
. Unhappily, efforts to contact the singer failed. All that could be said with certainty was that he would be at the Battersea heliport by a quarter to five.

The rain started while the second support group was playing, and caused a major electrical failure, which took almost an hour to put right. Fitful drizzle increased to a regular downpour, which lasted long enough to fill the beer
tents to twice their intended capacity, and to increase
alcoholic
consumption in proportion. Outside, a couple of
weirdos
had taken off their clothes and were dancing
somnabulistically
in the rain. A girl absent-mindedly stripped, and drifted, more than danced, between the men. One held her briefly, then the other for longer. Paul saw nothing erotic in this disconnected dream-sequence, but it seemed to infect a group of watching ton-up boys with a deadly mix of lust and contempt.

‘Fuckin’ freaks, really inter the universe,’ Paul heard one sneer.

‘Won’t get inter you,’ another shouted at the girl.

‘Wha’s long and cool and …

As a generator throbbed into action, like a kick-started bike, a leather-lad lunged forward and kicked one of the naked hippies in the groin. As he doubled-up another rocker smashed him in the face with a broken billiard-cue. The victim staggered back, spitting blood, while the girl was grabbed and fumbled. Paul moved too late to stop her being shoved to the ground, and was lucky others in the crowd leapt in too.

Laying into anything in leather, he put together three or four telling punches; one landing on a cheekbone with enough force to crack a knuckle bone in his right hand (though for several hours he thought it only bruised). A blow on the back of the head stunned him for a few seconds, but by then the fight was over; the arrival of three
truncheon-swinging
security men putting it beyond doubt. Paul was holding his head when he heard a girl’s voice, ‘Man, that was really cool … I mean, did they want a fight.’ He looked up and saw a pair of wet breasts and a pale vacant face. ‘Swat happens when kids start gulping reds with too much beer.’ Paul examined his hand and suggested she put her clothes on; swaying closer, she said, ‘Like we could uh really swing … cos I know when it’s gonna be a bust and when it’s gonna swing … and we’d be …’ A pink-brown nipple, bunched and wrinkled in the cold, moved in on his eyeline. Turning sharply, he saw something else thrusting his way. Closely
followed by the bulky anoraks of its attendants, Matthew’s film-camera poked through an opening in the sodden crowd. Hand-held, it moved like an uncertain robot-eye, until the cameraman spotted the naked male body being eased on to a stretcher by two St John’s ambulancemen. Close by lay the ton-up boy Paul had caught with his bone-crunching hook.

The crowd’s focus of interest shifted from the fallen to the film crew. No need for Matthew to ask what had happened, a youth in a kaftan dripping blue dye down his yellow hipsters, began babbling to the camera as if addressing an old friend, ‘Bad vibes from the beginning when the fuzz got heavy … like it was a party till the rip-off started; kids who’d paid good bread being squeezed for more, and the food so goddam over the top pricewise …’ Paul got up, still shaky on his legs. Another voice: ‘The sound system’s all fucked up. We came for a concert …’ A third: ‘Once it turns paranoid, man, nothing’s gonna cool it …’

‘Hey, people, people,’ began Paul, ‘you want it wrapped up and sanitized?’ The camera panned round on him. ‘You want the spontaneity squeezed out? So why not watch the movie in an armchair?’

‘You fuckin’ bastard,’ groaned the injured rocker, heaving himself into a kneeling position.

‘So rock’s about violence for some,’ went on Paul, getting some friendly laughs. ‘It’s about peace ‘n’ love for others … but what it’s
not
is cotton-wool blandness.’

‘Gotta be memorable,’ echoed an unseen convert, as Paul moved off unsteadily. As he passed the entrance to the beer tent, a youth reeled out, leaned against one of the guy-ropes and vomited.

‘Okay, sit tight, stay cool, we have sound for you now,’ Paul heard booming out from the stage amps. And cool they’d stay, he thought, unless the rain let up. The ground underfoot, already cut-up by the contractors’ lorries, was turning into a bog. It occurred to him that the weather might send home the hordes outside, but the next moment he’d forgotten this cause for celebration. Where had the beauty of the morning gone? The colours and the optimism? Paradise
Lost, all right; light-hearted Breughel rapidly turning into Bacon crossed with Bosch. Cold, wet; clothes clinging to them; aeons away from hearing Rory, and light years further from home, the crowd had taken on the look of sullen children, drifting from tent to tent, looking for trouble to make up for whatever else they’d lost. But
at
last
… music. Paul headed for the house in search of dry clothes, brandy to dull the aching of his hand, and a telephone to speed Roy’s coming.

The rain stopped shortly after five, and so did the flow of beer, but with plenty of sweet red wine still available the loss was not considered serious. As shafts of watery sunshine filtered through the clouds, a helicopter dipped down, circled the park and disappeared, without anyone being the wiser why.

Ducking down under the rotor blades, and holding in place a velvet cap, matching his red cape, Roy splashed across the tennis court. Ignoring the children thrusting autograph books, he asked irritably where Matthew was. Paul filled him in on the difficulties: over seventy thousand in the park; the gardens sealed off; no direct access except by the main gates, which were choked by two thousand
no-hopers.
‘But the bouncers have got radios?’ screeched Roy. ‘Yer told me so. They can tell ’im to get over here.’

‘You think Mattv can ride in on a radio wave?’

‘So how do
I
get in there? With half-a-dozen heavies tryin’ to push past that many freaked-out kids?’

‘Through the home farm in a truck.’

‘That’s a great entrance, man.’

‘Suggest another,’ snapped Paul, as another deep throb from his hand made his head swim.

‘Okay, okay,’ placated Roy, taking a pen thrust at him and absently starting to sign his name on anything held out.

Nat Fleischmann, the top PR at Stella, and Jim Heffernan from Exodus’s A & R department, who had flown in with Roy, came up to question Paul. ‘Aw, piss off,’ Roy told them, after they had reacted badly to news of the forgeries.

‘You’ve gotta get Matthew outer the park,’ he insisted,
grabbing Paul’s undamaged hand. ‘I screwed it with him … I know that; which is why I’m gonna do everything you said to get us out. Dinner together, keepin’ em waiting, and any buddy-buddy stuff that’s goin’ ter help yer.’

Paul told him about the build-up outside the gates, the mood in the park, the fights, the dope, the disillusion. ‘We can’t wait till dark for you to go on, Roy.’

Roy stared at him in amazement. ‘You’d better be joking? Can’t let a few spaced-out kids spoil it all … you had some great ideas, man.’

‘And my latest is you hit that stage as soon as I can get you there.’ Paul indicated a Bedford truck backing towards the court. When he caught hold of Roy’s cape, he pulled away leaving it in his hands.

‘You think I’ll let Mat make a creep of me nationwide? Like what’s he doing now? Shooting aggro and hassles … right? Shove me on now, and we’re playing his game. We’ll look like panicky kids ourselves.’ He moved towards Paul, almost pleading, ‘You were right from day one; we gotta stand by our image; gotta go through with it. Christ, man, I used to envy your guts.’

‘Listen, you little jerk,’ cut in Heffernan. ‘You gotta hundred thousand punters out there who made you what you are and if they get hurt cos you kept stalling you can bet your ass you’ll get …’

‘Get nothing you Irish nurd. What harm did rioting do the Stones in the States?’

‘They sell on violence,’ shouted Fleishmann, ‘you’re the “getting clever” kid … so tell us what’s cool or clever about smashed skulls?’

Roy walked towards the helicopter. ‘These things go down nice and low; let’s do a body count before we get into this kinda blackmail.’ When no one answered, he sat down on the soaking grass. ‘I stay here till someone nabs that fucking film crew and gets it over to shoot me gettin’ outa that chopper.’

Thick-headed with too much brandy on an empty stomach, Paul told him to get up. Roy shook his head. ‘Made
your own myth,’ he murmured, ‘couldn’t hack it if you screw it up now.’

Paul told him again, Roy stayed sitting.

*

Dinner as originally planned; candle-lit formality. Glinting silver against polished oak, and through the leaded
window-panes
the light-towers glowing as dusk came on. Wearing his stage make-up, and a black and gold costume out-doing anything worn by Holbein’s statesmen, Roy eyed Matthew’s camera and smiled at Paul. So this was where he had to take it on, and lead. The poor sod could hardly eat, with his hand puffed up almost twice its size. Through the windows he could hear music and the rumble of the crowd. He took a mouthful of pheasant, grouse or whatever. ‘Wonder what’s on
their
menu,’ he said, jerking his head towards the window. ‘Know what we ought to’ve fixed? A big screen so they could watch us noshing.’ Nothing from Paul. ‘Know what sticks in my head? When you said James Dean didn’t belong to the same world the Beatles took over. Blew my mind. From rebel misfit to flip self-confidence in one teen-generation. Gotta hit the mood spot on before it shifts.’