Authors: Phil Rickman
Lee Gibson certainly hadn't been. What Moira most remembered
about Lee were sneers and resentment. Resentment when it became clear that he
was never going to be a full member of the band, for reasons he couldn't, at
first, get his head around.
Sneers when he did get his head
around them.
Seeing him here, Tuesday morning, just before nine-thirty,
setting up his kit like in the old days, this was downright
bizarre.
Especially when you considered who
Lee was nowadays.
'You're looking like you just saw a ghost.' Lee flicked at a
cymbal. 'Not that that would faze you too much, as I recall.'
Looking down the studio from the mixing desk, you'd think the
drummer was the most important guy here. He was the only one didn't have a
booth; the drums were out there on the studio floor, at the farthest end, near
the rear door. In this studio, they seemed to take up nearly a quarter of the
floor space.
'You do still see ghosts, I take it,' Lee said.
For a millionaire superstar, he didn't look that much
different. Back in 'eighty, when most guys were having regular haircuts, Lee
Gibson, ten years too young to have been one, was looking like a hippie. He'd always
suited long hair, anyway, with that hook nosed pirate's face. Now there was
designer stubble; Lee's face had grown into that.
'You're looking good, though,' Lee said, like this was a major
surprise, like he'd expected she'd be some kind of wizened crone by now.
Moira came in and shut the door. This early, she thought she'd
have had the place to herself. Last night the whole band and Prof had gone out
to the paddock behind the Abbey where TMM had set up a couple of Portakabins
and a caravan, with two cooks and two technical guys working shifts. When the studio
had been launched fifteen years ago, all this was inside the building,
extending into the outhouses and barns. But those buildings were in a pretty
bad state now. Case said, and needed major refurbishment.
The band had stayed in the Portakabin-canteen for several
hours until close to midnight, putting off a return to the Abbey.
In the end it was OK, not a bad
night, if a wee bit cold in the third-floor tower room. She'd awoken a couple
of times, sensing waves of need from Dave in the room below and choosing to ignore
them.
No complications at this stage, OK.
The return of Lee Gibson, now
the
Lee Gibson. What kind of complication was this?
'How'd you get here, Lee?'
'By limo, I suppose. Didn't really notice. Spent the night in
the village inn. Amazingly primitive. Rocks in the bed, appalling food. First
place I stayed in three years where nobody recognised me.'
'Hell, Lee, nobody recognised you?' Moira whispered. 'What
kind of morons
are
these people? Or
maybe you just forgot to hang your gold discs over the bed again.'
'You're just a goddamn jealous bitch, Cairns,' said Lee. 'No,
I won't be going back there tonight. I'm in a mobile home. Down by the river,
in the trees. Quite comfy. Little office in there too, and a PA. Called ... er ...
Michelle. Works nights.'
'All mod cons, then,' Moira said dryly.
'Yeah. All mod cons.'
Lee grinned. He'd be in his early thirties now. Over in the
States, where he was pretty enormous, few people would even remember him as a
drummer. Lee had switched pretty quickly to guitar: thrash metal and then
grunge, strategic career move.
No. Him being here made no sense; it was unreal.
'OK.' Moira walked purposefully across the studio and sat on
the edge of an amplifier. 'I'll admit it. I don't understand why you're doing
this.'
'Cause I'm sentimental, babe,' Lee said. 'I have attachments to
my roots.'
'Which is why you've cultivated that truly awful Californian accent,
huh?' .
Lee scowled. He could only take so much of this. It was more
like the old Lee. Or actually, the extremely young Lee; he couldn't have been
more than nineteen when he'd done that session. So could he just have come back
on a whim, to relish the irony, the reversal of fortunes?
That didn't make enough sense, either.
'You figuring to put a couple of your own songs in this time?'
Moira said casually.
'Shit, no.' Lee offered her a hit from his joint; she shook
her head. 'I'm just the session drummer.'
He wore white jeans and a black shirt open to a hairy chest
and a half-moon medallion. He was loving this.
'How's Tom?' he asked.
'As a guitarist or as a human being?'
'As a neurotic bastard,' said Lee. 'Shit, that cat was really unstable.
What happened, to his wife, all that - you didn't have to be frigging psychic
to see that coming a mile off. Still... I understand all that stuff better
these days.'
'What stuff?'
'This psychic shit. Some gigs, you really feel you're wielding
like cosmic power. Jim Morrison said that. Used to see himself as a shaman. That's
a guy who connects with the spirit world.'
'Yeah I know what a shaman is. The rock audience is like a tribe
and the musician's the medicine man.'
'Heavy shit,' Lee said. 'Up there on stage at a big gig or festival
I can feel where Morrison was corning from.'
'Except you were closer to being a real shaman in the old days,'
Moira said. 'Tribal shamans used to bang drums to summon and dismiss the
spirits, not stand there just growling out pretentious crap.'
'Yeah?'
'Yeah. Like this.' Moira stamped suddenly on the bass-drum pedal.
Bam!
'Leave those drums alone,' Lee snapped, not joking.
'Aw, come on, Lee, spill it.' Moira stepped away, lifting her
hands. 'What the hell are you really doing here?'
'Well, it's not a frigging holiday.' Lee sat down on his
stool, threw a pair of drumsticks in the air, watched them drop to the newly
laid grey carpet, didn't pick them up. 'Pound of flesh situation, if you must
know.'
'I'm sorry, I'm very ignorant, but are you with TMM or what?'
Lee stared at her, clearly amazed that somebody purporting to
be a musician didn't know which record company he was signed to.
'You remember when I first went out to the States. I was the drummer
with Captain Blood, right?'
'Sure,' Moira said. Captain Blood. That was the
second-division British blues band which acquired American personnel and came
to sound even less like the original than Fleetwood Mac. Until, pretty soon,
there was nothing left of it that was British except the name. And Lee Gibson,
presumably.
'See, it was Sile Copesake let me go. Fixed it for me
actually. After Frankie Lomax OD'd.'
'You were in Sile's band?'
'Who wasn't? The guy was good to me, what can I say? Got me
the Blood job. Backed me on the solo career when Blood split. Rest is history.'
'You mean Sile's calling in the favour,' Moira said.
'That's about it,' Lee was sounding
suddenly English again. Maybe L.A.-speak was hard to sustain in Britain in December.
It made business sense. An album with Tom Storey on it,
plus
Lee Gibson, would be guaranteed to recoup expenses. But what
if it was lousy? People who hadn't played together for getting on for fifteen
years - about four generations in rock music - thrown into a studio, no
rehearsals? Was this not a major gamble during a recession?
Maybe. Maybe not. What it certainly was, Moira realised, was a
well-calculated replay of December 1980. The studio layout was exactly the
same; even the same amps, you'd swear: two Voxes, a Fender Twin and a McCarthy
Dual. And on the stand in the booth nearest the mixing desk was an orange coloured
basic Fender Telecaster, the only guitar Tom Storey ever used in the studio.
How did they know which was Tom's old booth? How did they know
about the original amps? How did they know - peering into the second booth -
that Dave liked to perch on packing-case type McCarthy amp, even playing
acoustic?
Russell? Had Russell told them all
this? Before he ...
She said to Lee, 'Hey, d'you hear
about Russell Hornby?'
'Yeah.' Lee finished off his joint,
holding it between clawed thumb and index finger in the time-honoured,
waste-not-want not fashion. Stylishly blew out some fragrant smoke. 'Aaaaah, Russell,
yeah. Stupid bastard. Why'd he do a thing like that?'
Moira shook her head. She might as well have asked him if he
knew Russell had got married again or bought himself an English setter. 'What's
it like outside?'
'Filthy,' Lee said. 'Anyway, I don't get this whole business
either. You were having a bad time before, you couldn't get out fast enough,
you destroyed the frigging tapes. So what the hell are
you
doing back here? You all suddenly desperate for cash? That's
the case, I'll give you some to get us all the hell out of this museum.'
It was a simple enough question. Why were they here?
And yet this was the one big question which, whenever the four
of them were together, nobody seemed to ask.
'Straightforward enough, I suppose,' Moira said. 'We came here
to make an album and we never finished it. It's taken us fourteen years to realise
that this is one of those albums that's just got to be finished.'
'Or else?'
'Yeah,' Moira said.
Vanessa rubbed at the glass
panel and peered through into the cab.
She just didn't know
what
was wrong with Weasel.
His eyes were still open, so he couldn't be asleep. He
couldn't be dead either. Dead people's eyes were always closed; she'd seen a
dead person once, Granny Love, Shelley's mummy.
She looked like a doll, but Shelley
had said she was very peaceful.
Weasel wasn't peaceful. For ages and ages. Weasel had been looking
very angry through the dried soup.
Vanessa knew he wasn't angry at her. Weasel was never angry at
her. He called her Princess, like Princess Diana, who used to live near their
house but didn't any more.
She supposed she must have fallen asleep in the back of the van.
Again! She'd fallen asleep the first time, after eating up all the food and
then she'd woken up very cold and felt a bit sick and wanted to go to the
toilet.
It had been dark by then. Vanessa had climbed out of the back
door of the van and gone round to the front and pulled open the door to ask Weasel
where the toilet was. But Weasel felt funny and wet and didn't smell very nice.
The van was in a big long shed with straw all over the place.
There were cracks of light where the doors were. The doors had only been pulled
to, and she opened them easily and it was very dark outside, but she was never
frightened of the dark, not like Daddy.
It was a sort of farm, like Rudkins's farm up the lane, only
the Rudkins had chickens and horses and dogs everywhere and there were no
animals here at all. Round the back of the house, Vanessa found a little shed
with a creaky door and a string to put the light on, which was just a horrible
bulb with dead flies all over it. There was a
very dirty lavatory
that she refused to touch with her bottom but
had to use anyway because she just couldn't wait. It was a nuisance.
There'd been a light on in the house but Vanessa didn't like
to knock because the Bad Man who'd had a fight with Weasel was probably inside
and he might want to fight her.
So Vanessa had gone back to the van and didn't know what to
do, so she prayed to her Guardian Angel, using the prayer
s
he'd been taught at the convent.