Broken Music: A Memoir (21 page)

“You have lovely eyes,” she says, handing me her empty champagne glass. “Would you buy me a drink?”

I have no idea whether I’ve been dismissed or if she really wants another drink, and I’m half-expecting her to be gone when I return with the champagne, but she’s still there, looking cool and relaxed with her attendant dog. I offer her the thin fluted wineglass, and while she thanks me graciously, her lips display a subtle irony that is difficult to decipher.

We both sip our champagne silently and watch the social commerce in the room.

“Where’s the guitarist?” she asks me out of the blue.

“John?” I say, playing for time. “Why?”

“No reason,” she says calmly.

“He must have gone home to his wife,” I say, after a pause and with as much innocence as I can muster.

“What a shame,” she says, equally deadpan.

Her name is Frances Tomelty and from the program notes I have learned that she is the daughter of the famous Belfast actor Joseph Tomelty, and before coming to Newcastle she had starred in plays at London’s Royal Court and the Shaw Theatre, as well as acted in films and television drama. She is a real actress and I suppose at first I’m starstruck, because night after night from the darkness of the band’s cave I will stare up at her through the superstructure of the stage set, where she stands illuminated in a single shaft of light.

We will fall in love and within eighteen months this woman will
become my wife, but as the play progressed and I became increasingly infatuated with her I began to wonder if our relationship had the remotest chance of surviving when she returned to London. This unlikely fantasy seemed to have become interwoven with the equally unlikely fantasy of becoming a recording artist, but I did begin to take the idea of the big city three hundred miles south more and more seriously.

My life at this point seems to have many different strands to it, like an improvised musical composition with the weaving and independent lines of a chaotic fugue. The ground bass of the fugue is my progress as a musician, slow but steady like a pulse; the line above it is the more complex progress of the band and the interrelationships that both weld us together and threaten to separate us. Then there is the central triad of my teaching job, my work with the Phoenix Jazzmen and the Newcastle Big Band, and the wilder flights of fancy that are my dreams of fame and fortune. These in turn are increasingly woven with the airy romantic descant introduced by Frances. Sooner or later the strains and tensions between all these disparate elements will begin to tell, and then I am going to have to make some radical, life-changing decisions. At the time, I don’t have the emotional maturity to know whether I am falling in love with an idea rather than a person, and even if the distinction had been pointed out to me, I wouldn’t have recognized it.

The play ends and Frances returns to London. We say our goodbyes, and I resolve to drive the three hundred miles south on the first weekend I have free.

    Last Exit resume their residency at the Gosforth Hotel and Gerry and I get back to writing songs. I will write two songs in this period that will have a longer life than most, “The Bed’s Too Big Without
You” and “I Burn for You.” Gerry of course gives me a few of his cynical, knowing looks when I debut these songs for him, and while it wouldn’t take a genius to identify the source of their inspiration, I half deny it, telling him “they’re just songs” and that no conclusions should be drawn.

We don’t have the easiest relationship at this time. I’m clearly defensive and he may be frustrated by my growing ascendancy, or that I’m becoming more and more prolific as a songwriter, or he may feel that my relationship with Frances is just a distraction from the band. He would deny all of these interpretations if he was challenged, and tell me that he didn’t give a fuck, but we are close like brothers and we share the same dreams, so there are few secrets between us. Whatever the truth, both the new songs get a better-than-average-response from the audience at the Gosforth, and Gerry, who is as honest as anyone I’ve ever known, will allow them a grudging respect as well as a place in the band’s repertoire.

As the songs become more complex, handling my duties as the band’s bass player as well as singer presents an interesting problem. Playing the bass and singing is not as natural as strumming on a guitar and singing. There is a certain amount of neural and muscular independence required, something like riding a bike and juggling at the same time. While I certainly put in the required hours trying to perfect this combination of skills, I also begin to rationalize the bass parts so that I have more freedom to sing, leaving gaps that I would normally have filled. In doing this, I begin to develop the genesis of a style, a spare and economic bass signature that I would later justify as part of a deliberate “less is more” ethos, but it really comes out of the necessity of having to deal with my own limitations.

Last Exit now have a couple of roadies, Jim and Paul. They’re not real roadies, of course, but two student punters from the audience
with a van and some electronic expertise, who don’t charge us anything and are happy just to be along for the ride. It has certainly made life easier for Gerry and myself, and paradoxically the frail ship of our dreams feels more and more buoyant with every extra soul who steps aboard, every extra face in the crowd, every extra pound in the night’s takings, and every extra gig offer. “Hell,” we say to each other. “Pretty soon John and Ronnie will start believing and then we’ll really be going somewhere.”

    It is the spring of 1975 and I am twenty-three years old. In the months that follow I will begin to commute back and forth to London to see Frances. These are long, five-hour drives on the motorway, sometimes in the middle of the night after a Friday gig, or sometimes driving straight to the school on Monday mornings, bleary-eyed and unshaven. The head is beginning to notice that I’m looking more and more exhausted, but the fact is I am blissfully happy, probably for the first time in my life. The world seems to be opening up for me on many different levels and Frances seems to be the key to all of it. I will follow her to Edinburgh Playhouse, where she plays Bianca in
The Taming of the Shrew
, and when she walks onstage I desperately want to nudge the total strangers sitting next to me in the dark stalls and tell them that she’s my girlfriend. A month later she’s playing an heiress in
The Voysey Inheritance
, and then I’ll follow her to Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre, where she will play one of the leads in
Kennedy’s Children
.

On her returns to Newcastle, Frances watches my performances with the band and afterward gives me notes on how they can be improved, how to hold the audience’s attention, how to increase my concentration and focus and instill absolute belief into what I’m doing. Gerry may quietly disapprove of these “theatrical” pretentions, but in his pragmatic way he also believes that the band will ultimately
benefit if the lead singer can become a better showman. Frances begins to breathe the embers of my ambition into life, until my courage as a performer begins to look like something close to arrogance and my tentative vocal experiments begin to resonate with certainty Whether or not I am justified is moot, but I begin to see myself as a favored nation within the democracy of the band.

AS LAST EXIT WE WILL MAKE OUR FIRST RECORDINGS AT Impulse Studios in Wallsend, coincidentally above Mr. Braidford’s music shop in the old Gaumont Cinema, where I’d bought my first guitar. The studio is the brainchild of local entrepreneur Dave Wood, who had been influential in the early career moves of Lindisfarne, the only local band to succeed on a national level since the Animals. The studio is primitive but efficient, and will make a name for itself much later with the relative success of various heavy metal outfits.

Old Mr. Braidford is long dead and the shop is boarded up and terribly sad. I remember what a magical place it was for me as a child, but now the doorway is a mess of old newspapers, and peering through the wooden boards is to gaze into an empty tomb. The whole town seems to be suffering a slow, painful death. Orders for the tankers that had kept the shipyard and the town alive have gradually dried up. The industry has been undercut by the heavily subsidized Korean and Japanese consortiums, and there have been massive layoffs of hundreds of skilled workers. A few repair jobs are barely enough to keep a fraction of the workforce in employment.
There are no more steel leviathans blotting out the sun at the end of the terraced streets. An industry that had taken centuries to build up has been allowed to die almost overnight, and the collective skills and shipbuilding crafts of the town have been thrown onto a scrap heap of terminal unemployment. The bustling High Street of my childhood is now a deserted thoroughfare of empty shops. The economic downturn has affected my father’s business as well as everyone else’s and accomplished what the German bombers failed to do. Wallsend has had the beating heart ripped from it, it seems like a ghost town now, and the graffiti on the wooden boards of Braid-ford’s music shop seem like an epitaph to another era. The old Gaumont Cinema had closed down many years before, and had for a brief period become a club called the Manhole where bands played. The club enjoyed a dangerous reputation for amphetamines and gang fights. The Ritz was now a bingo hall. The irony of beginning my recording career in the Gaumont, haunted as it was by the ghosts of old Mr. Braidford with his cleft palate, was not lost on me as I carried my bass up the stone steps.

There is nothing in those early Last Exit tapes to indicate anything but the floundering of an inexperienced group working without the help of a producer. There is no evidence of the raw, visceral power of the unschooled or the primitive punk charm of the musically inept. The tapes contain only the uninspiring bromides of competence and mimicry. If we had any potential as a band at all, it was well hidden among the acetates and the magnetic tape. We hadn’t captured any of the excitement that we could generate as a live band. The recording art is learned slowly, and we were intimidated by its novelty into the prim good behavior that the wise elders of the band thought proper. I was bitterly disappointed but I kept my own counsel, not wanting to rock the boat too much. Gerry and
I would take more of a leading role in subsequent recordings, and we progressively got closer to the sound of the band at its best.

    Our live show is getting better and better, and soon we will be rewarded for our improvement. Andy Hudson manages to get us a spot at the San Sebastian Jazz Festival on the Basque coast of Spain. The Big Band had played there successfully two years before and Andy had kept in touch with the organizers. The festival would take place over a week and begin toward the end of July. This is exciting news for us, our first date abroad. Our new roadies, Paul and Jim, are excited too. Now they can take their own fantasy a stage further. They estimate that it will take three days and nights to get the van and our equipment across the Spanish border. We don’t have anything as sophisticated as an export carnet, so the band gear will have to be loosely disguised as camping equipment. Paul and Jim will have to suspend their macho roles while going through customs. I suggest they wear knotted handkerchiefs on their heads and learn the words to the holiday anthem “Viva España.” This suggestion does not go down well, particularly as I’m going to have to miss this journey and travel to San Sebastian by air. The three days of travel coincide with the last three days of the school term, and as I’ve already gotten away with murder in the amount of time I’ve taken off school with all the theater work, I don’t want to push the good Sister any further. The others of course think that I’m being grand, and even though I’m paying the fare out of my own pocket, there is an atmosphere. Gerry will rough it in the van with the roadies and the “camping equipment,” and Ronnie and John will drive down in Ronnie’s car.

My first year as a schoolmaster has turned out to be a relative success. I haven’t been fired; I’ve managed to sustain my career as a
working musician, developed as a performer, and kept the Last Exit dream afloat. I’ve arranged to meet Frances in London after the festival so I can spend the rest of the summer with her. As the plane takes off from Newcastle Airport on the way to Spain I imagine that my career too is on its way. Tyneside recedes beneath its covering of clouds as we head toward the sun. Viva España!

While my itinerary via London and Paris has been relatively painless, the journey south for my compadres has turned out to be a hellish odyssey of breakdowns, non-air-conditioned traffic jams, and absurd mishaps worthy of Don Quixote. When we finally meet up, I find myself even more persona non grata than I was already. A night of Cuba Libres and sangria lubricates me back into the fold, though, and after the sagas of the last three days have been recounted, we drunkenly help each other mount the four-story climb to the two attic rooms at the top of the pensione as if we were summitting the Pyrenees. There are three of us to a room, and I don’t get much sleep: one, because I’m exhilarated, and two, because of a horrendous symphony of snoring punctuated by farts. When the Spanish sun pours through the window, I am visited by
la madre
of a hangover, but though I know we’re still only tilting at windmills, I’m very happy to be here.

The big acts in the festival are Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie. They will play at the weekend in the huge velodrome on the outskirts of town. We will perform along with several other little bands from all over Europe in the town square in the old city, a picturesque jumble of alleyways, street cafés, and bars. There is a buzz of anticipation in the streets. We will complete a brief sound check that night along with all the other bands and then it’s back to the serious business of reveling.

The citizens of San Sebastian take their music very seriously,
and all the bands that play in the town square play to a packed, attentive audience. There is a bright sliver of a moon making its way over the rooftops as we launch into our opening number, Horace Silver’s “The Tokyo Blues,” which is Gerry’s chance to shine on the electric piano, reminding all of us what an asset he is to the band. He is still our leader and all of us begin to relax when he shows himself in such form. Ronnie is all slick and flash, and John starts wailing and rocking like the blues giant he always was. With such a platform I have no choice but to give the performance of my life. After all those weeks upstairs at the Gosforth, straining my vocal chords into a flexible, resilient instrument that owes more to bloody-minded commitment than it does to any trace of finesse, I stare into the white nothingness of the spotlight and know that even if some people may find the result unlovely, it is my voice and the unique song of my life soaring on the night air all the way to the moon and back.