Down and Out on Murder Mile (6 page)

Money is tight
again. Money is always tight. The interview is in a couple of hours. Roar of the northern line and the shine of the shoes to Kentish Town, nod nodding—mouth slack and wide—a relaxed kind of autumnal mood. The leaves are turning and covering the ground in yellows, browns, and oranges, masking the dog shit and the used condoms and the crushed cans of Tennent's. The city is almost beautiful.

 

His name was Brian Stoker. An old, overweight man who huffed and puffed through his nasal passages as if it were a kind of tick or nervous habit—like he was trying to dislodge some particularly persistent mucus. The office of the magazine was in his terraced house in a suburban North London street, and it seemed as if the place had not been cleaned or redecorated in some years. The
carpets were brown and threadbare. The computers used to produce the magazine where cumbersome and outdated. There was a composite smell of mothballs, stale tobacco smoke, mildew, and ancient jizzum in crackling yellow Kleenex. I shook his hand, and he offered me a seat.

 

He regarded me silently for a while. I had made sure not to get too high before the interview so I could remain alert and enthusiastic about this new employment opportunity. Our money was low. We were facing the choice of heroin or rent this week, and I wasn't looking forward to being homeless again.

 

“Do you like country music?” he asked me eventually.

 

“Oh sure,” I lied. “I like all types of music.”

“I mean
real
country music. Not the shit that they're peddling in Nashville these days. The real stuff. Bluegrass. That kind of thing.”

 

I started to warm up. I have an amazing ability to bullshit potential employers when my back is against the wall. My father went through a period of listening to old country. The Irish like country; they even have their own horrible “country” bands who play an unholy genre known as country and Irish—watered-down country standards mixed with Irish folk, usually performed by a perma-grinning fool in a tuxedo, wielding an accordion like an instrument of musical destruction. Suddenly my mind was able to pluck out a few of the names my father had mentioned.

 

“Oh sure, I know what you mean. I can't stand new country. The stuff I know is Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, and Charley Pride…those kinds of people.”

 

“That's right!” my potential boss enthused, warming to me. “The new stuff is nothing but pop music! Real country couldn't get played on Nashville radio these days!”

 

“My father is a big country fan,” I carried on, “so that's the music I listened to growing up.”

 

Although not strictly a lie, this was a tremendous exaggeration. My father's country period lasted a year or two. At heart my father didn't really like music any more than he liked any of the arts. I recall him visiting a cinema once in my childhood, a trip to see a matinee of
E.T
., and even then he left halfway through to get a beer next door before returning for the credits. My father can proudly say he has never read any book apart from instruction manuals and how-to books. And music was just something to be on in the background when there was nothing to watch on TV.

 

Brian was asking me, “So you just got back from America, you say? What took you over there?”

 

“Work,” I told him, the lies falling from my mouth effortlessly. “And an urge to travel. I worked at a music magazine in Los Angeles. It was a fun time, but I missed London. It was time to come back.”

 

Brian got up, excited, and put a CD on. It was possibly the most excruciating music I had ever heard. It was a 1920s field recording of the “world-famous” yodeling cowboy Chip McGrits. I grinned and bobbed my head enthusiastically. Brian sat down and half-closed his eyes, dreamily listening to the crackly recording of the old dead bastard yodeling over fiddles and banjos. I was hit with the revelation that if funk was the logical conclusion to black music, then here was its white counterpart. After suffering through a couple of songs Brian informed me that I had the job and could start straight away.

 

I was employed for the first time in years, and it did not feel too great.

 

The hustle was this: Stoker produced a magazine that had various reprinted (without permission) articles from American country magazines and a few slim efforts penned by himself and some of his other wheezing, gray-haired friends in the London country scene. But the main body of the magazine was taken up with advertisements and reviews. It was my job to call people up and get them to advertise. I made a base salary, cash in hand, and a percentage of the advertising revenue.

 

Even for this kind of hustle it was despicably small-time. The only money the magazine made was in the reviews. Every day piles of CDs would arrive at the house for review in the magazine. The only people who bought the magazine were
people who were reviewed in it. However, we would review anybody as long as they took out an advertisement in the magazine to peddle their wares. No advertisement, no review. The bigger the advertisement, the more enthusiastic the review. It was pathetic.

 

I spent most of my time in the bathroom shooting up. The lime-green tiles, the noise of Stoker's music, and my blood flooding into the barrel. Then, full of drugs and good feelings, I would swagger into the office and start hitting up people for money on the phone.

 

After two weeks I was moved out of the office and into Stoker's garage. He called it the “back office” but it was just a garage, a damp storage space piled high with unsold copies of the magazine in rotting brown cardboard boxes, a meager strip of carpeting, some electrical outlets, and a phone. I didn't mind so much. It was good to be away from the music.

 

I was obviously better at selling than most of Stoker's previous employees. I knew that I could make at least two sales a day—to keep him happy—and the rest of the time I could nod out in the back office, with the portable radio tuned to the BBC World Service. The voices of the reporters lulled me into very gentle space. Some of the people I called from Stoker's decade-old list screamed abuse when they heard my voice. One in particular started yelling hysterically when I said I was from
Traditional Country Music Monthly
.

 

“Stop calling here!” he yelled. “Every two weeks some new idiot calls me from your magazine asking me to advertise. I advertised once three years ago and it did nothing! I do not want to advertise with you again! Remove my name from your list, idiot!”

 

This guy's deal was accordions. He repaired them, sold them, reconditioned them. I didn't like his tone so I made a point of calling him at least twice a week and acting as if it were the first time I had ever called him, and I had no idea that he didn't want to be solicited anymore. Eventually a woman started answering the phone and I lost interest, as I couldn't provoke her into yelling abuse at me.

The John Peel
session with Liquid Sky turned out to be the first thing we did as a band. Leading up to the show, I put in a lot of work. The band had recorded demos with producers but had only a rudimentary grasp of how to play their instruments. It was up to me to re-create the drums and keyboards on all of the tracks. Louis XIV had never learned to play the bass, and Elektra confided in me that they had removed all of his bass lines from the demos without his knowledge and replaced them with the work of a session guy. But they liked him and didn't want to hurt his feelings. We decided to program all of the bass lines in on the keyboards as well and to turn his bass low in the mix.

 

The first rehearsal took place at Elektra's house in Hoxton. She lived with a guy called Tom,
who was also in a band. They were married, although Elektra insisted it was only to get her into the country. She told me that Tom was really into fucking transvestites and doing coke, two things that didn't really interest her. He worked a straight job in the city, doing phone sales, and then rehearsed with his band, the Ones, in the evening.

 

Tom disliked me immediately. Our first rehearsal I spent the whole day there with Elektra and Paris trying to make some sense out of the songs. It took us seven hours and a case of beer, but we finally got the rudiments of two tracks down. Paris plugged her fifty-quid replica Telecaster though Elektra's stereo and played along. Her guitar seemed to be constantly going out of tune. I stopped asking her to put it back in tune though, because she didn't seem entirely sure of how to do it and would take ten or twenty minutes to fiddle around with it. It would come back sounding exactly the same. The second time this happened, fearful of embarrassing her, I told her it sounded great and she smiled, relieved. Despite the fact that the guitars were out of tune and the bass player couldn't really play his instrument, I thought that the band had something. A certain ramshackle power. So I persevered.

 

Then, around five, Tom came home. He walked into the room silently and looked at us programming the synthesizer with obvious disdain.

 

“All right?” he grunted.

 

“Tom—this is our new keyboard player.”

 

“Hi.”

 

He listened to us for a little while. He quite obviously hated the music. We took a break, Elektra ran out to get more beers, and I tried to make conversation with him.

 

“Elektra tells me that you're in a band.”

 

“Yeah. The Ones. You wanna hear our demo?”

 

“Sure.”

 

He stuck a cassette in the stereo. Paris rolled her eyes at me and went to make a phone call. The music started. It sounded like fairly standard indie rock. And then the singing began. Before I said anything else, I asked Tom: “Are you the singer?”

 

“Yup.”

 

Oh Jesus. It was terrible. It was one of the worst things I've ever heard. His voice had an almost uniquely tuneless and charmless sound to it. But I had to be polite. So I told him it was great.

 

“I know!” he said without missing a beat. “I can't believe it's you lot that got a Peel session first, to be honest. I mean, truth be told—Elektra's a great girl—but we piss all over your band.”

 

I looked at him and he seemed completely serious.

 

“So,” I asked eventually, “how's work?”

 

He then started telling me a long story about his job. He had to wear a suit, so he could sit on the phone and sell printing products all day. And whenever someone did a big sale, they had to go up and ring a gong that was in the center of the office, and everybody had to cheer. They kept a scoreboard up there, and at the end of the day the person with the lowest score had to take the wooden spoon.

 

“What's the wooden spoon?” I asked.

 

Tom looked at me like I was crazy.

 

“It's a spoon, man. It's made of wood. You know, a wooden spoon!”

 

“O…kay. What do you do with the wooden spoon?”

 

“Nothing! You have to keep it on your desk for all of the next day. And it stays there until you move up a place on the scoreboard.”

 

“Oh. That's weird.”

 

“Weird? It's fucking humiliating! I got the wooden spoon last week. I had to spend extra money on fucking coke just so I was aggressive enough to sell my way back out of the bottom. They're fucking assholes! A wooden spoon! Can you imagine?”

 

“Yeah. That's crazy. Why don't you quit?”

 

“Well, it's easy money. I couldn't afford to live in Hoxton if I didn't have a decent paying job. What do you do?”

 

“Well…at the moment I do sales for a folk music magazine. I work in some guy's garage. The magazine isn't real. It's just a hustle to get money coming in.”

 

“That sounds depressing.”

 

“It is, but I'm in that garage without any other people around me, and I can listen to the World Service. And they don't have gongs or wooden spoons, or some fool telling me I have to wear a suit so I can call people on the phone. But on the other hand, I am basically being paid five pounds an hour to sit in some crazy old bastard's garage in North London and harass people who repair accordions.”

 

“That's absurd.”

 

“I know. Life is absurd.”

 

Bit by bit, over the next few weeks we got four songs ready for the Peel session. It was a weird time in British music. When I had left England, the whole Britpop thing had been falling apart. There was a very real sense that the party was somehow coming to a messy end. The new bands were all shit. The established bands like Oasis
were well past their primes, and even the really great bands like Pulp had started going through midlife crises. In LA, nothing whatsoever was going on. As far as music goes, LA is something of a black hole. People there were talking about a glam metal revival. The handful of cool bands floated mostly below the radar. All of a sudden everybody sounded like either Matchbox Twenty or Limp Bizkit. By the time I found myself in London again, New York bands were all over the press. It started with the Strokes, and then the Strokes' imitators. Everything that bands had been doing in the UK suddenly seemed old. There was no effective response to the center of cool for the music universe suddenly being located on the East Coast of America. It seemed like everybody was looking for the next big thing in British music, so I figured, Why not us?

 

Our Peel session took place in a basement room at the Maida Vale studio. The place was huge and almost deserted. It had an eerie, hospital feel to it. The guys engineering the session had beards and wore cable-knit sweaters. They looked like a folk duo. We set up our equipment nervously.

 

“Okay, shall we do a quick run-through of one of the songs, to get levels?” the show's producer asked through the talk-back system.

 

I gave him the thumbs-up. I counted us in and we started to play.

 

Shit.

 

I had forgotten to tell them to turn the bass down. Everything sounded like a mess. It astounded me that we had a bass player in the band who did not know how to play bass, yet didn't seem to hear how terrible he sounded. He was completely unaware of his own incompetence. The song rattled along, and throughout it Louis's bass line bounced around, in the wrong key and the wrong time signature, like the noodlings of a mental incompetent engaged in some kind of music therapy, yet he stood there with a big stupid grin plastered on his face as if he were maybe Tina Weymouth or Bootsy Collins. We struggled on, and after the song ground to a halt I looked over to the window of the producer's booth. The engineers looked back at us in a kind of quiet puzzlement. I could see them thinking: “Is it meant to sound like this? Is this some kind of avant-garde thing? Or are they just completely inept?”

 

I cleared my throat and looked over to Elektra.

 

“Erm…I think some of the levels are a little off. Let me go over and speak to them.”

 

I popped my head into the booth and called the producer over.

 

“Yes?”

 

“Erm…listen, is there any way you can kill the bass altogether? I mean, just take it out of the mix?”

 

“Well…sure. I can do that, but…”

“The bass lines are all programmed on the keyboards. We don't turn him up when we play.”

 

“Oh.”

 

He peered back through the window to look at the band again. Louis was still standing there grinning back at them.

 

“It's a kind of…care in the community thing,” I explained. “The girls just like having him around, like Bez from the Happy Mondays. Except he can't dance.”

“I see.”

 

I crept out and locked myself in the cavernous bathroom. The bathrooms were clean and smelled faintly of Pine-Sol. That was nice, at least. Nothing worse than having to shoot up in a dirty bathroom. I fixed and felt all of my anxieties about the session melt out of my body, through the soles of my feet and down into the tiles of the toilet stall. It was time to go make history.