Gimme More (7 page)

Flambo drinks from the neck of a cheap wine bottle. Clumsily, he rolls a joint. A guy's got to come down after a gig. Normally, Karen would roll the joint with her fast little fingers. Good with her hands, our Karen.

Flambo stirs restlessly. He has after-gig jitters and no one to soothe him with bacon and eggs. Restlessness segues into scratchy irritability, and from there it changes tempo and becomes randy
anger. He watches the door and waits. He imagines Karen in a bath with Birdie; they are soaping each other. Later they sprawl in his bed doing a sixty-niner. This is going to be good. But first he unzips his fly and pisses on them. They like that. Oh yes they do.

But Flambo does not have fast little fingers and, unlike Karen, he isn't good with his hands. So, afterwards, he feels almost as raw and empty as he did before. He sleeps in his chair, facing the door, head lolling.

Karen, at her parents' house, goes to sleep in her old bedroom, under her old Wonder Woman duvet, and here she dreams one of her fear-of-failure dreams. She dreams that she is on stage with a superstar who might or might not be Sting. She is playing the Korg, but it is perched on top of an upright acoustic piano. She can't reach without stretching. As she plays, the Korg starts to heat up and melt. It drips and oozes down on to the acoustic piano until there is nothing left of it to play. The superstar who might or might not be Sting watches contemptuously. ‘Stir it with a wooden spoon,' he says, ‘or stay out of my kitchen.' Karen looks down at her hands and sees that she is trying to play a large pot of soup.

Sometimes, late at night, when she looks at the linear beauty of a piano keyboard, she thinks of the clean, logical progression of semitones which walk, step by step, ineluctably from low A in the bass across seven octaves to high C. Cool reason and symmetry. Each scale doing the same thing yet feeling so different to the fingers. The relationship of chords, inevitable, bound together in groups by a chain made of numbers. It's all too perfect. It excludes her. She can't imagine who invented this ultimate music machine. A mathematical genius? An acoustition? A nerd? She doesn't think it could possibly have been a musician.

She imagines the kind of musician she knows rolling a spliff one night and saying, ‘Yeah. I think what we need is a machine which will render the precise tonal relationship between eighty-eight notes at the touch of a finger. Yeah – but I can't get my head around it tonight, man.'

Now, here she is, playing a computer which looks like a piano keyboard but which can sound like a horn, a violin, a clavichord,
marimbas, percussion or raindrops. It can remember sequences. It can split. It can do just about anything short of climb on a table and dance. In fact, it can do more than Karen can think of to tell it to do.

And here is InnerVersions in a scraggy little rehearsal room in Fulham. They are fooling around with a number called ‘Howl'. Birdie Walker looks up from her notes and says, ‘Drop in a minor chord there.'

Flambo says, ‘Fuck off, you can't because …'

Karen drops in the relative minor and it sounds right. It leaves more space for the lyrics which were always too dense. And Karen wonders, ‘It's obvious. Why didn't I think of that?'

But she didn't. Birdie did.

Birdie takes Karen to a voice coach, which alarms the shit out of Sapper and Dram.

Birdie takes Karen to a terrifyingly cool hairdresser in Mayfair, which alarms the shit out of Flambo.

‘What's she doing to you?' he says. ‘More to the point –
why?
Are you being groomed for fucking
stardom?
Is that your game? Because if it is, I'm telling you right now, this ain't a girl band. Never was, never will be.'

Corky says, ‘We need a bit of colour.'

‘Then Sapper can dress up like a drag queen for all I care. He's the singer.'

Sapper doesn't say anything. In the last few weeks he's noticed that Karen is singing a lot more harmonies than Dram. He's noticed that whereas Dram's harmonies are there or thereabouts, Karen's are accurate. It makes him think he should be more accurate with the melody line. It's an unnerving thought because he's already turned down the offer of a voice coach and cut himself off from a chance of immediate and quick improvement.

It seems as if two camps have formed, with Sapper and Dram supporting Flambo, while Karen and Corky support Birdie. Sapper is beginning to wonder if he chose the wrong camp.

To begin with it was obvious: Flambo is a mate, Flambo likes Sapper's voice, and his ideas. Flambo is the drummer and he isn't in competition with Sapper. That threat always came from Dram. But
Flambo said it was creative to have artistic tension between singer and lead guitarist – look at Aerosmith, look at Oasis. There were a million examples. And Sapper agreed.

Now, though, Sapper is confused. Yesterday he had a sudden insight, and he is often confused by his own insight.

They were working on one of his songs – a song that neither he, Flambo nor Dram thought needed work. It just needed recording. But Birdie said it could do with a change of perspective.

Why? It's a song called, ‘Won't Go Home With You', and it's about a rude waitress. It's based on a real-life encounter Sapper had with a woman in an Italian restaurant. In it he notices the smear of her lipstick and a scar on her hand. She puts him down but takes his money.

‘OK,' Birdie says, ‘but the verse is too long and wordy. Cut to the chorus more quickly. Give the chorus a different voice.'

Sapper doesn't want to, but Birdie keeps coming back to it. She fixates on the scarred hand.

‘It's only a detail,' Sapper says in exasperation. ‘It doesn't matter.'

‘It does to her,' says Birdie.

Whose song is this? Sapper wants to say. Is it mine or yours? But he says, ‘Is it mine or the waitress's?'

‘Both – if you want it to be interesting,' she says. ‘Yours if you want it boring.'

So, reluctantly Sapper starts to work with Birdie and the chorus becomes the waitress telling the singer about the scar on her hand. She says, ‘Thirty-nine stitches, those sons of bitches, God how it hurt. They made me eat dirt. Don't you ever tell Mama, Don't cry.'

When Sapper sings it, Birdie gets him to growl in a mocking way. She puts the harmony a fifth above to give it a harsher sound. Karen isn't around so Birdie sings it herself. What emerges is a tired, hurt woman who won't take any crap from an attractive young man.

Sapper would never have written a song like that by himself. But when he listens to the playback he realises that the chorus now defines the song and that the song is dark and much stronger.

The A&R man drops in and hears some of it. ‘Better,' he says. ‘Way more punch. Could be a single.'

And Sapper feels proud.

‘I don't think you guys understand what proper A&R is,' the A&R man adds. ‘A&R is whatever it takes. And sometimes what it takes is a song doctor.'

And Sapper feels humiliated.

Proud. Humiliated. Confused.

The A&R man takes Birdie aside and Sapper watches their private conversation through an open door. He can't hear what they're saying but he's sure they are talking about him and his song. He hopes Birdie isn't reporting that he gave her a hard time, that he thought the song was perfect and didn't want to work on it. His dim little insight is that there might be people around who know more about stuff than he does. Well, anyway, different stuff.

In fact, the A&R man is worried about his job. Dog Records has a new boss and the company is cutting some of his bands. Others have been in preproduction far too long. Is Dog edging him out? He thinks Birdie has friends in high places and perhaps she'll put in a word for him.

Sapper, watching through the open door, sees Birdie pull her sweater down over her fingers as if her hands are cold. He can't see her face but her pose is defensive. She looks like something out of an old French movie – the faulty strip lighting in the corridor is stammering and her hair flares in staccato bursts. The A&R man has more to say. Then he stoops and kisses her on both cheeks. He turns and walks away. Birdie, starring in an old French movie, remains. She doesn't watch him go. She stands, head lowered, thinking.

When she returns to the rehearsal room, Sapper feels her absence more than her presence. During her talk with the A&R man she has become detached from Sapper and he misses the warmth.

Before he met me, Jack was managed by a man called Sasson Freel. Sasson and Jack went to the same school and Sasson got Jack's first band its first ever gig at his sister's birthday party. Sometimes it happens like that – a bunch of fifteen-year-old kids banging away in their dads' garages or school music rooms become hot property. And the first kid to pass his driving test and acquire wheels
can
find himself with hot property on his hands.

But not for long. As they say, rock'n'roll is here to pay, and where big money is involved amateur management is about as much use as shoes are to a mermaid.

People say I came between Jack and Sasson. They say I was the greedy bitch who intercepted Jack on his way to stardom; that I attached myself to him, rendered him fuck-struck and pushed him towards fame and the highlife. They say that I was so impatient for Jack to become a gourmet meal ticket that I separated him from his old friends, corrupted him and introduced him to the professional sharks of the music biz. Oh what power I had.

It simply isn't true. Well, true and simple aren't words which sit comfortably side by side, but apart from that – it didn't happen that way.

None the less, some things get said so often that even the participants in a story come to believe them. You wouldn't think that either Jack or Sasson would accept alien versions of their own story, would you? But it was convenient to both of them for Jack to forget about his ambition and for Sasson to forget his incompetence. If they wanted to forget those critical facts they had to
replace them with fiction. And why go to all the bother of inventing a fiction when fans and critics had already done the job for them?

Well, who cares how it happened? The important thing was that I hadn't spoken to Sasson in years. And now I am going to meet him for lunch at that Hyde Park Corner hotel which used to be a hospital. Not my choice of venue.

As a matter of policy, I am always late for an important meeting, but judging just how late to be is a fine art. It's easy with people like Barry because what you are demonstrating is indifference and contempt. With others, it's a question of reminding them that you're worth waiting for. Sometimes you do it to demonstrate how important and busy you are.

What I wanted to show Sasson was not indifference for
him,
but indifference for time itself. I wanted to show him my arty side. He knows it exists because, at several steps removed, he pays me for it. He has recently become Managing Director of Dog Records. And, whatever he thinks of me personally, he also thinks that I'm capable of giving some of his baby bands, and their baby songs, a bit of spin and polish.

To give him credit, when he was frozen out of Jack's charmed circle, Sasson must've admitted to his own shortcoming. Because after wasting a few months ranting about ingratitude and betrayal he got a job with Wild Management and later became part of a consortium which set up an independent label. In other words, he learnt the business and understood that there was more to it than the blind luck of being at school with a major talent.

He came to understand that the music business is business, not music. True, he made quite a nice chunk of change for a few musicians, but he made a fortune for himself. He became a serious player in a dirty game. How serious and how dirty? I'm beginning to find out, thanks to a small South London security firm with a good computer and an extensive network of contacts.

Now that I can research Sasson Freel I've come to admire and despise him in equal measure. What I've found out makes me a little afraid of him.

Working for a security firm would be a truly unprofitable use of
my time if I didn't have an agenda of my own. But I always do have an agenda of my own, and I don't work for peanuts unless my employers can supply me with the facilities I need to make a bigger score. Cole-Adler provides me with research facilities. The score is information.

There is a problem though: if you want, successfully, to pose as a good employee, a reliable office manager, a loyal wage-slave, you have to think like one. And after a while you begin to feel like one. Feeling like a good employee is death to the entrepreneurial soul. The fox, posing as a rabbit, feels like a rabbit. And, believe me, it's dangerous to go to lunch with another fox if you happen to be feeling like a rabbit.

I caught myself walking up Sloane Street, looking at expensive shop windows like an obedient office worker who has asked for and been granted time off. Obviously I wasn't ready for Sasson.

I turned into the Connaught Hotel to steady myself and adjust my mask. I was angry with myself. I used to be able to switch characters at the speed of light. It isn't just your skin which loses elasticity as you get older.

I followed two well-heeled American women into the cloakroom. There's something reassuring about cloakrooms in big hotels: they're designed to make you feel worth pampering. Even the tint and tilt of the mirrors give you a rosy view of yourself and your place in the world. You're valued.

I checked my reflection for weakness, spiritual flab and lumpy mascara. I found a hint of doubt in my eyes. Bad, very bad. I thought, I've been in this cold, cramped, soggy, snobby little country too long. I'm beginning to look as if I know my place.

Behind me, the American women smoothed their non-iron garments and blotted their lipstick. I gathered that they were off to tour the public wing of Buckingham Palace, to trot through royal halls fast enough so that they could hit the stores afterwards and still manage tea at Brown's. They wore energy and confidence like I wore
L'Air du Temps.