Heartbreaker (3 page)

She shook her head.

‘Palm reading, tea leaves, spiritualism?’

‘No.’

He ran a hand through his hair. ‘Tarot cards? Have you ever owned a deck or had your fortune told with them?’

‘No. I’ve got a couple of mates who are into that sort of thing, but I leave it well alone.’

‘Is that because you think it’s dangerous?’

‘No, it’s because I think it’s bullshit.’ She sat back in her chair and folded her arms. ‘Johnny, what’s this all about?’

‘Ah … nothing, really.’ He smiled an apology, evaded her eyes. ‘I guess I’m just a bit superstitious about superstition.’

She’d pushed him on it, but he wouldn’t elaborate, changed the subject back to music and drew her into a discussion about Jack White’s stripped-bare approach to playing and recording blues. Alex let it go; if there was more to it, it would surface in its own time.

Chapter 5

The George and Dragon

A fifteen minute drive down leafy lanes took Alex to the George and Dragon where she would be staying while she worked with Johnny Burns. Helmsleigh Village itself was a picture, beautiful in the spring sunshine. There was a traditional village green at the heart, surrounded by pretty cottages and tall terraces, and a lovely little Victorian church with a graveyard full of earnest-faced angels, broken columns and shrouded urns.

The George and Dragon was also Victorian, with high ceilings, ornate cornices, polished brass and sparkling glass. Alex went into the bar to check it out and ordered a pint of Orkney Red McGregor. She was served by a tall, broad-shouldered man with a friendly smile and an easy manner. She introduced herself and explained that she had booked a room.

‘Yes, we’ve been expecting you. Gerry Edwards.’ They shook hands. ‘My wife Elaine and I run this place. Tell you what, you finish your drink, then I’ll give you a hand with your bags.’

Gerry was as good as his word and Alex was soon unpacking and settling into a spacious double room at the rear of the pub. The views were lovely; green and lush countryside as far as the eye could see. She knew the motorway snaked through the landscape somewhere in this direction, but could neither see nor hear it from her vantage point.

Alex dined at the George that night and was delighted to find that the food, like the beer, was excellent.

Later, upstairs in her room, she rang her sister Isabel.

‘How’s things?’ she asked.

‘Fine, thanks. Rob’s fine, too, and Bones is missing you.’

Bones was Alex’s black cat. He had been staying with Isabel and her husband Rob since before she went on holiday.

‘He’s not off his food, is he?’

‘No, just sulking. He’ll get over it.’

‘You sound like you’ve had too much coffee,’ said Alex, hearing a restlessness in Isabel’s voice. She pictured her sister winding crazy red curls around her fingers, a habit she had acquired as a little girl, and instinctively raised a hand to her own hair as if to remind herself that the curls were cropped, the red dyed white-blonde.

‘Just got a lot to think about. And I’m missing you, I’ve hardly seen you lately. When are you coming home?’

‘Probably not until the weekend after next. I don’t mind being away just now, you know?’

‘I know. But I want to have a proper talk. And Bones wants a hug.’

They chatted for a while longer then, call over, Alex got ready for bed. It was early, but it had been a long day and she wanted to be in good shape in the morning. Teeth cleaned and make-up removed, Alex took a long, hard look at herself in the bathroom mirror. The harsh overhead light made sharp angles of her cheekbones and jawline, rendered her pale and dark-eyed, washed out and nervy. Unimpressed, she turned out the light and headed for bed.

Chapter 6

As Alex headed off to Johnny Burns’s house the next morning, she checked the clock in the dash: quarter past ten. She would get there at about half past, which is what they had agreed. She had risen early, too edgy to lie in, wandered around Helmsleigh for an hour after breakfast to kill time. Then she’d headed back to her room and packed her bag: tape recorder, spare batteries and tapes, notebook and pens.

She wanted to start right at the beginning with Johnny, take him through the early years first. Things wouldn’t always emerge chronologically, but Alex would make sure everything ended up in the right place. The important thing today was to make a start, establish a routine.

In total, she reckoned on getting twenty-five to thirty hours’ worth of tape, which was a fair old bit, but they had a lot of ground to cover. Her usual approach would be to spend three or four intensive days with a subject, but Johnny had made it clear at the interview he didn’t want to do that. His preference was to take things slowly, an hour or so at a time.

Alex loved her job. She got to hear about things first hand, picked up snippets of gossip the tabloids would have killed for. She got to ask questions that under normal circumstances would be dismissed out of hand, and, nine times out of ten, to hear the answers to them as well.

She preferred to work with people on their home ground, somewhere they felt relaxed and confident, which in turn encouraged them to be unguarded, open and honest. She got to see people’s lives for herself at close quarters, didn’t need to rely on second-hand accounts of their day-to-day existence.

‘I always start the day with juiced wheatgrass and an omelette made from egg whites,’ so often translated into ‘I drag my sorry arse out of bed sometime in the afternoon and jack myself up with a speed and vodka cocktail’. Faces that had been replastered and painted over to look good, or shot showing the grim, grey reality then airbrushed to health, might keep the magazine crowd fooled, but Alex saw the true picture. Drug-thin and amphetamine-fuelled might masquerade as vibrant and healthy at a distance, but not close up. Alex saw behind the mask. Not that she was in the business of myth-busting; she worked with, not against, people. But whilst she was always happy to be sympathetic to her subject, she wouldn’t perpetuate blatant lies.

Johnny had coffee ready when she arrived and they settled down at the kitchen table. ‘As I explained yesterday, I want to take things in stages,’ Alex said. ‘We’ll start with the pre-Heartbreaker history and work up to the point the band was formed; that’s the first major milestone. Then we’ll cover the early days and the first couple of albums, and move onto
Rescued
; that album is the next major milestone. After that, we’ll take things up to the press exposé in ’79, then move on to ’86 and deal with what happened to Tom Watson and Andy Airey.’ She looked up at Johnny; he was once more studying the grain of the tabletop, tracing it with a finger. ‘Then we’ll bring it up to date.’

‘Fine.’ He nodded, finally looking up and meeting her eyes. ‘You’re in charge.’

Alex started the tape. She smiled at Johnny, hoping to encourage him. ‘Let’s start with your childhood.’

‘Well, I‘m the youngest of three boys. Keith is the eldest and Ian is the middle one. I was christened John Andrew. Mum and Dad are June and Matthew Burns, and we lived in York. We were happy enough, comfortably off but not what you would call wealthy. Dad was a civil servant, Mum looked after us all.’ Johnny paused. ‘Is this the sort of thing you want?’ he asked. ‘It all sounds pretty boring.’

She smiled at him and nodded. ‘This is great, Johnny. Just tell it like you remember it. Okay?’

‘Okay. It just feels a bit weird, that’s all.’

‘I know. But stick with it, it‘ll get easier.’

‘School, then. I went to Castle Keep Primary, same as Keith and Ian had, and passed my eleven-plus to go to Broomhill Grammar. Keith had passed and was in fourth year when I started. Ian hadn’t, he was at West Park. We were pretty cruel to him about not being at the same school we were, we took the piss big time. He’s got his own business now, he’s a carpenter and joiner. Anyway, it was at Broomhill that I met Tom Watson. He was my best friend.’ Johnny gave Alex a crooked little smile. ‘I still can’t believe he’s gone, you know? Tom, of all people. I thought we’d live forever.

‘He and I were in the same form group and we became friends straight off. We were both daft about music. We had paper rounds morning and evening, and we went into King’s Music Shop on a Saturday to spend our money. We liked blues, rock and roll, some chart stuff. When I turned thirteen, as well as the paper round, I got a Saturday job in King’s. They’d seen me in there so much, they knew that even though I was a kid, I knew enough to get by without sounding like an idiot. Plus, being tall, I could pass for being older, which was just as well, because I told them I was fourteen.

‘I saved my wages up and bought myself a second-hand acoustic guitar; best thing I ever did. I got it at the start of the summer holidays, so I had time to spend learning some chords and just getting used to it, how it felt, how it worked. I taught myself to play from books and records and picked it up pretty quickly. Turned out I had a knack for it.

‘Tom was so jealous. He’d been taking piano lessons since he was eight, he had a real gift for keyboards. But he went on and on at his folks for a guitar, drove them nuts, and so they gave in and got him a second-hand bass and a little practice amp that Christmas. He was made up. A bass guitar was quite a novelty back then, you know. Tom always was a poser, always played his bass like it was a lead. So, since we had a guitar each, we decided to start a band. As you do.’ Johnny laughed, back in the moment.

‘A couple of boys in our class were interested, Gary Walsh and Vinnie Brown. We all collected records and we would recommend tracks and artists to each other, we learned a lot that way. Gary had a drum kit and Vinnie had a good, strong voice. We called ourselves Blue Velvet.

‘We practised in Gary’s folks’ garage. That’s where he kept his kit and they had got used to him banging around in there. Tom traded his amp up to a Vox AC30. If you push the volume up they sound pretty good and Tom always loved to be loud. We learned a few songs, popular stuff to start with, and we thought we sounded great. So much so that we pestered our teachers to let us play at the end-of-year party that July. After a lot of effort, we finally managed to persuade them to give us half an hour, which meant playing everything we knew. For the encore, which we never doubted we would get, we decided we would just play whatever had got the best reaction again. We were fourteen, fifteen at the time.’

Chapter 7

Blue Velvet’s first gig — July 1965

The boys set their gear up at lunchtime on the day of the dance and dashed home after school as fast as they could to get into their best threads for the big party. Johnny was sick with excitement, could barely speak, let alone drink fizzy cola and eat sausage rolls in the run up to their spot. He saw Tom chatting up Sally Chalmers, easily the prettiest girl in their year, and was amazed at his friend’s icy-cool demeanour. He sidled over to hear what Tom was saying.

‘Oh yes, we’re on at seven o’clock,’ he was telling her. ‘Of course, they were lucky to get us, we’re in demand, but you don’t want to let your mates down, do you?’ Sally was agog at Tom’s patter, hanging onto his every word. So was Johnny.

All too soon, it was time to get onstage. The boys fidgeted behind the curtain, Gary at the back with his kit and Vinnie centre front at the mic, flanked by Tom on the right and Johnny on the left.

Mr Joyce, their head of year, gave them a thumbs up then stepped through the curtain to introduce them.

‘Right, folks,’ they heard him saying, ‘we’ve got something very special for you tonight. Playing live, all the way from class 4M, put your hands together for … Blue Velvet!’

The curtains opened to sporadic applause. Johnny had to consciously loosen the grip he had on the neck of his guitar; his fingers had gone white with the pressure. He stared goggle-eyed at the crowd and they stared right back, daring him to entertain them. His throat went dry. Then he heard Gary rap his sticks together and utter the immortal words: ‘One, two, three, four,’ and they were off, straight into
Love Me Do
.

By the time they were halfway through the second number,
I Wanna Be Your Man
, Johnny was beginning to loosen up. By the end of the third, Blue Velvet’s rendition of another Beatles song, this time
I Want to Hold Your Hand
, he was thoroughly enjoying himself. He looked round at his bandmates; they were all having the time of their lives. Gary was showing off the drumstick twirls he’d practised for hours in the garage, Tom was doing a bit of fancy footwork and Vinnie was dancing with the mic stand.

It wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination — Johnny fluffed a couple of breaks, Tom started playing the wrong song entirely at one point, Gary dropped his sticks and Vinnie forgot the words and froze halfway through
Sweet Little Sixteen
— but it was live and it felt good, their classmates were almost all dancing and getting off on the vibe; even some of the teachers were joining in, and the applause at the end of each number was pure magic. They got an encore and a standing ovation at the end, and Tom Watson danced the rest of the night away with Sally Chalmers, walked her home and snogged her face off at the front door of her parents’ house.

Johnny was happy just to have survived the night. Their first show. He’d never known anything like the sheer exhilaration he’d felt onstage once his nerves had settled, and he could hardly wait to do it again. Whatever else might happen to him, Johnny knew he’d found what it was he wanted to do with his life. He was a musician, pure and simple.

Chapter 8

Johnny looked at Alex and grinned. ‘We were mediocre at best, but we’d played live in front of an audience and that was me and Tom hooked for life. We loved it. Girls who’d never previously looked twice at a couple of spotty Herberts like us suddenly knew our names and wanted to hang out with us. We thought that was fantastic.