Educating Peter (25 page)

It very nearly felt tolerable.

‘
HOW DOES THAT
song go? That one you had on in the car before. “People try to put us down, just because we stay around”? I like that.'

‘Mmm. It's not one of the best Who songs, but it's okay, until you've heard it for the three hundredth time. It's actually “get around”, but I can see why you might have thought it was “stay”. The guy who wrote it's pretty old now. I interviewed him a few years ago. He can't hear very well, and I had an ear infection at the time. The interview was basically just us going “WHAT?”, “SPEAK UP!” at each other across the table in this studio that he owns.'

‘Is his name Roger Daltrey?'

‘No. Daltrey's the singer. Pete Townshend writes the songs.'

‘And that other one died this year, didn't he? And he'd been doing cocaine.'

‘Yeah. John Entwistle.'

‘Weird.'

‘Do you think your generation's got a defining song like that?'

‘I guess something by Eminem.'

‘I thought you didn't like hip-hop.'

‘No, er, I kind of do now.'

‘Ah, that explains it. I wondered why you kept saying “word” all the time the other day.'

‘Mmm.'

‘What else, though? You know, songs . . .'

‘I guess there's “How You Remind Me” by Nickelback. That's pretty cool, and a lot of people at my school liked it – y'know, even really tragic people who like Christina Aguilera.'

‘It doesn't really have much of a message, though.'

‘Do we have to have a message?'

‘No. I guess not. We had “Here we are now, entertain us”, but, when you think about it, that doesn't mean anything, does it?

‘But I was wondering how you felt – you know, whether you felt you've been swindled when it comes to the pop culture you get exposed to. And, you know, whether you feel any responsibility about saving the world and stuff.'

‘I don't know. Raf's brother – Jonti – he's, like, twenty-four, and he reckons that his generation really fucked up and it's up to us to put it all right. But I'm like, “Why should it be up to us?” I feel like the main thing about my generation is that nobody really feels the same about it. But I suppose, in a way, it's quite cool for us, 'cos, well, people who were a bit older than us didn't have the Internet and stuff.'

‘But don't you just use it to access porn? That's
what the teen flicks, like
American Pie
, seem to reckon.'

‘Yeah, that's what I said. It's cool.'

‘Ha.'

‘But no, those films like
American Pie
and
Loser
and stuff, I don't really feel like the kids in those. They're really old now, those films – like three years, some of them – and the kids in them weren't really teenagers anyway. They have loads more fun than us. But they're just really dumb, anyway. I dunno.'

‘You seem to have a lot of fun, though. I mean, you have a far more active social life than I did at your age. You do fencing and judo . . .'

‘Karate!'

‘Yeah, sorry. Fencing and karate and stuff. And you're always at parties doing mad things. I'm surprised there's room for feeling depressed. I mean, it seemed that when I was fourteen it was the weird, unpopular kids who wore black and listened to dark, heavy music. But now it seems like it's the popular kids, too. Or perhaps that's just in your social circle.'

‘It kind of is, and it kind of isn't. Er . . .'

‘Or maybe it's just that you have two different personalities and you keep them carefully compartmentalised. I mean, you know, you don't wear your black nail varnish for karate, do you?'

‘No. Er . . . mmmph.'

‘That reminds me. How did that nail varnish remover that my wife gave you work out? Did you get it all off in time for the lesson?'

‘Er . . . I guess. Yeah.'

‘It's funny: I remember you telling me earlier in the
year that modern goths didn't wear black nail varnish.'

‘Really? I don't think so. No. No way.'

‘You did. Definitely.'

‘No. No way. Black nail varnish is totally cool. Everyone knows that.'

‘Oh, okay then. But . . . getting back to what we were saying. Do you ever think about the differences between your generation and my generation?'

‘I suppose. Sometimes. I think it would have been kind of cool to have seen Nirvana before Kurt Cobain shot himself. And I like some of the clothes that you see them wearing – y'know, Alice In Chains, and people like that. But I guess it would have been kind of shitty, too. I mean, y'know, Tony Blair's shit, but my mum says John Major and Maggie Thatcher were shitter.'

‘And the mobile phones were crap. No text messaging.'

‘Yeah. Bummer!'

‘But things haven't changed that much, really.'

‘I dunno. I think I remember a lot of stuff about the Nineties that my mates don't. Like Caroline – she can't even remember Zig and Zag. I thought everyone remembered Zig and Zag.'

‘She is bayse, though, like you say.'

‘Yeah. Sooo bayse. Ha! I think I kind of like the past, but I wouldn't want to be in it.'

‘I feel the same about hippies. I love loads of hippie music and films and clothes and like to imagine myself in 1971, but in reality it probably wouldn't have been so great. I sometimes call my generation Generation Twat, and there are a lot of idiots in it, but
I think the self-righteous attitudes of hippies are responsible for a lot of the bad stuff. So, I guess, in a way, it's up to
us
to clear up the mess.'

‘Mmm. The one thing I hate about being around now is being told by everyone that I should be famous. There are all these things like
Pop Idol
and
Fame Academy
and
Model Behaviour
on telly and you get all these lameos at school saying they're going to be on them. I mean, like, that is sooo lame. Even if you do get on them, nobody's going to give a fuck about you in five years' time. Shut up and get a life.'

‘But I thought you
wanted
to be a famous rock star. You still do, right?'

‘Er, yeah; a
rock
star. Not a pop star. And anyway, I don't want to be famous; I just want to be cool.'

‘And do you feel any cooler after hanging around with me?'

‘Er . . . Um . . . Can I get back to you on that?'

WITH PETTER'S NEW
school term starting in earnest, our summer together was coming to an end and our final few adventures took on a frenetic quality that I hadn't quite planned for. This was partly my own fault for taking on a temporary job as manager of Circulus, and partly the fault of Marc Bolan from T-Rex for getting killed too close to the date of Axe Demons, Petter's beginning-of-term concert.

On 16 September 2002, it was exactly twenty-five years since Bolan's girlfriend, Gloria Jones, had driven her Mini into a tree on Barnes Common in West London, killing Bolan and badly injuring herself. I wanted to take Petter to the tree for the anniversary celebrations to witness an unsurpassable, authentic example of rock and roll hero worship. Personally, I found T-Rex repetitive and tediously kitsch, but, taking a democratic standpoint, I hoped that some of Bolan's much-discussed ‘stardust aura' might rub off on Petter in the build-up to Goat Punishment's
performance at Axe Demons the following Monday.

A couple of weeks before we visited Barnes, I'd realised one of my own musical dreams: to become a rock and roll manager. Over the last half decade, I'd become increasingly frustrated and mystified by Circulus's inability to get a record deal, and even more frustrated and mystified by their inability to get off Circulus Meantime and act concerned about it. Finally, while listening to their latest brilliant demo, something inside me had snapped, and I'd decided that if they couldn't do anything about their scandalous lack of corporate backing, then maybe I could. And even if I couldn't, maybe I could teach Petter something constructive in the process.

‘We're not going to be able to pay you, you know,' explained Michael. But this was about love, not money. Besides, I'd read about the great rock svengalis – Peter Grant, Don Arden, Sharon Osbourne – and the job seemed easy enough. Get a mahogany desk roughly the size of Birmingham, dangle a few promoters out of the windows by their legs, pay several hundred teenagers to go and buy your band's debut album, and before you knew it you'd be ordering your jumbo cigars from Harrods. Loveable hippie daydreamers that they were, the root of Circulus's unfulfilled promise seemed obvious to me: they'd never forced themselves on anyone. But now they would have me to do that for them. Petter, meanwhile, would act as The Sundance Kid to my managerial Butch Cassidy.

Our first job was to drum up interest in the band's next gig: a mid-morning, open-air performance at the European Car-Free Day demonstration in London's
Russell Square, with comedian-turned-traveller Michael Palin as compère. Immediately, Petter and I sent out a massive email circular to everyone I knew in the music industry, headed ‘BEST UNSIGNED BAND IN THE WORLD!', with details about the gig, a potted biography of the band, and the cunning insertion of the industry buzz phrase ‘acid folk'. Then, three minutes later, we sent out another, this time remembering to include the date of the gig.

One of the few good things to be said about having email access to the music industry is that, over time, you pick up some pretty tasty virtual addresses from the ether, and can pretend that you're mates with famous people. Somewhere during my seven years' writing about music for a living, I'd acquired the email address for Peter Jenner, legendary early Pink Floyd manager and psychedelic scenester. Petter and I were thrilled to find that, within moments of my Circulus missive going out, Jenner had responded. We were slightly less thrilled, however, to read the email itself, which featured the lone sentence, ‘Please remove me from your mailing list.' Still, an assortment of music editors, A&R men and gig promoters had come back to us, making vague promises to ‘swing by and watch a few tunes'. I assumed this meant that they were intrigued.

We began to make notes about strategy – not because we needed to, but because it seemed like a manager-type thing to do. One of the toughest things about planning a strategy for your favourite band is that they
are
your favourite band: you don't really want to change anything about them. Instead, I tried to find ways of playing to Circulus's strengths. Noting that
they had rarely performed outside London, Petter and I went to work on getting them an out-of-the-way gig – something that would compliment the pastoral, hippies-in-space-but-sort-of-on-a-farm-at-the-same-time ambience of their latest demo.

‘What about getting them to play at my school?' asked Petter.

‘But that's not really out of the way, is it? And I thought you ditched your folk night,' I said.

‘It's a good ten miles from the centre of London, though.'

‘Mmm. No. We need to work on the provinces.'

‘What about getting them to play in Snowdonia? How cool would that be? Goat Punishment could support. We could have goats there and everything.'

‘Now you're just being silly.'

After ten minutes of cold calling, during which we were turned down by my local village fête, we secured Circulus a last-minute headline slot at a cider shed in Banham, a large-ish village in the South Norfolk wilderness. In the end, Petter and I were surprised at how easy this was to arrange: apparently all we had needed to do was give our management company an intriguing name (Goat Enterprises), emphasise the fact that the band had once been reviewed by the
Guardian
, and pretend that we knew who Headspace – the hot folk band on the Banham scene, apparently – were. I felt sure, though, that our success was largely down to the extremely professional nature of our administrative tactics. These consisted of Petter making the call to the promoter on my behalf, asking to speak to the person in charge, then putting the head
of his ‘management company' (i.e. me) on the line to do the real, hardcore business negotiations. It was all very intimidating, we felt, and only slightly marred by Petter's habit of loudly crunching Kettle Chips in the background while I sealed the deal.

‘Brilliant! A cider shed! Perfect!' responded Michael later that day when I informed him about the gig.

‘A cider shed? What would we want to play there for?' asked Emma, later still.

One problem I found with managing Circulus was that it was easy to fall into the trap of thinking of them purely as a collective entity. This was no doubt because they
were
so pure, each member's dress sense, musical taste and sleepy way of looking at the world fitting snugly into a bubble of idiosyncratic 1971 perfection that seemed to insulate them from a harsher reality containing nasty things like bandannas and Pete Waterman. I hadn't bargained for the fact that such gentle, perfect musical creatures might be capable of disagreeing or not communicating successfully with one another.

Nevertheless, I pressed on, despite Emma's reservations.

‘Don't worry. I hear it's a really fun place. Apparently there's a zoo and a car boot sale just across the road from the venue.'

‘And, like, hopefully we can get hold of some of those laser specs Michael was going to get you all to wear!' added Petter.

‘What laser specs?' said Emma.

Exposing Petter to the harsh realities of rock management was something I'd never intended as part
of our curriculum, but I could see that he was learning some valuable lessons. He was learning, as I was, that bands didn't always communicate well with one another – even cuddly bands who periodically live together and act like one big chemically enhanced family. He was also learning that it was best not to get your band to say, ‘Welcome To European People-Free Day!' to the thirteen people who had made the effort to come out and see you, when those people's attention was in severe danger of wandering towards a man on enormous stilts performing on an adjacent stage. But, most pertinently of all, he was learning that it was a good idea to sort out money matters
before
your band played their gig, not afterwards. I hoped that Petter was learning from my mistakes, yet I also hoped that, were he to abandon his dreams of headlining the London Astoria with Goat Punishment in favour of a more behind-the-scenes role in the music industry, he'd be able to employ my fast-talking Colonel Tom-style as a blueprint for future success.