The True Story of Butterfish (5 page)

‘Six-pack abs. Does he realise how nineties he is?'

I couldn't imagine a better thing she could have said.

Inside, a door opened. Heavy feet came our way, and Mark's broad unshaped shadow cast itself onto the verandah.

‘I was just wondering...' he said when he appeared. ‘Annaliese said you might need someone to mow your lawn. And if you did, I'd probably be available for hire. And I'd happily undercut most commercial contractors.' Politeness felt wrong from a black-clad teenager with hair like a nest and a nail in his ear, but for Mark it seemed to be a tool that he could put to work whenever it might be useful. The tone was even coy, reserved.

‘
Most
commercial contractors?' Kate said, picking a hole in the way a parent can. ‘Do you have the overheads of
any
commercial contractors? I assume you're just planning to use our mower.'

‘I'm in the neighbourhood,' he said, more to me than to her. ‘And I pretty much guarantee a quick response time.' The cracked glass smile was back. I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be persuasive, or if he was just enjoying his politician's non-answer to his mother's questioning. I wondered if the smile was being pulled into its shape partly by the hot lumps of acne swelling near his mouth.

‘That sounds good to me,' I told him. My grass really needed cutting, and I had no inclination to get out there myself. ‘Of course I'd have to be indemnified against snake bite. Some of that grass is pretty long.'

The smile persisted. ‘Well, we could talk some kind of danger money,' he said. ‘Some kind of loading.'

‘What?' Kate was weighing in again. ‘Are you crazy? How good's an extra few dollars going to feel if a taipan bites you?'

‘That won't be happening,' he said dismissively. ‘You think snakes'll hang around when the mower starts? This is just a commercial arrangement.'

‘Right,' she said. ‘And if the worst comes to the worst I've still got Liesie to look after me in my old age.'

He gave a phlegmy unpractised laugh and said, ‘Thanks, Mum. Looks like we're good to go, Curtis.' I was sensing that, while giving as little away as possible, he had loved this game, that they both had.

‘Okay, it's a deal,' I said. ‘I'll pay you whatever's reasonable. Come and get started as soon as you're ready to.'

‘Cool,' he said, obviously fantasising about just how much he might be able to rip me off.

He went back to his room, his shadow swaying and following him. His door closed, and again I heard the muffled sound of loud music being compressed into willing, scheming teenage skull.

‘You've clearly never done a deal with Mark before,' Kate said.

‘I don't imagine the “special occasion” beer concept came out of nowhere. It sounds pretty heavily negotiated.' It wasn't the time to say that the money would be no issue, that I didn't have to think that way.

‘Everything's heavily negotiated with Mark,' she said. ‘I've got my limits though, and he knows it. Most of the time I've got a fair idea of where I'm going to draw the line. It's guess work to some extent, but you get a few dozen guesses a day so some of them have to work out. No, it's better than that, really. You know them, so your instincts put the lines close enough to the right place. And Mark's been a negotiator since he was about two. I've had plenty of practice. He should be drinking no beer. I know that. But I think this way he drinks less. I'm just lucky that Annaliese doesn't like the taste, or I'd be getting it in stereo. I only floss my teeth to make them floss theirs. Otherwise you get the whole “but you don't...” thing. So, I've flossed for years now, even though I hate it and I'd use a mouthwash even if it isn't as good. I have a friend who subscribes to Choice who told me that. Or maybe that was just her view.'

‘Whereas, in the world of the single plate, I just know where the food gets stuck between my teeth and I use a pencil. I click the lead out a couple of notches and push it through.'

I could feel my face going red, though the colour wouldn't show out here. Kate laughed, which was better than Kate not laughing.

‘You were obviously brought up right,' she said. ‘I think Choice really rated that.' She sat back in her chair and crossed her legs at the ankles and looked out at nothing in particular. ‘It's different being a kid now,' she said. ‘Different to the way it was for us. More pressures, more things to do, more to keep up with. They live in a different world. But maybe you know all that. They buy your music, don't they? Teenage people. Among others. I'm old enough to remember when TV ran out of shows at night and went to a test pattern. The first time I told the kids about that they wouldn't believe me. They wouldn't believe that TV ever stopped.'

I realised I should be going – that Kate was easy company, good company, but the last of my beer was as warm as the evening and it was better to leave before the conversation ran out and left us stranded, two awkward people on a back verandah in the dark.

‘I see the light in the granny flat some nights,' she said. ‘I thought maybe you had someone staying there, but Annaliese tells me it's your studio.'

‘Yeah, it said studio in the ad,' I told her. ‘I got slightly the wrong idea. But a studio with a kitchenette and a bathroom – that's not a bad thing. I'm working on a record with a Norwegian band. I might have said that before. I'm producing. We just laid down some tracks in Norway, so now I'm ... doing what producers do.'

‘You say that as if it's selling shoes.'

‘It's my version of selling shoes. I mean, it's great, but it's what I do.' That wasn't quite correct. ‘It's what I'm trying to do. The chance came along, so I took it. I met the two main guys in the band, Gunnar and Øivind, at a festival a couple of years ago. Roskilde, I think. In Denmark. There was Tuborg involved, so it was probably Denmark. We got on well, and I watched their set and liked what I heard. And Gunnar was starting to write some really strong material with English lyrics. I think every band in Norway feels a need to break out of Norway. It's not unlike here.'

That's what I remembered of Roskilde. Our set – the Butterfish set – on the main stage in the falling light of the late summer evening was lost somewhere. Too many festivals, too many nights of Derek Frick morphing from tour-bus weasel into rock god, strutting and posturing, calling up all the love in the town. It didn't so much matter which festival, or which town – it was the same show, the same long shapeless memory.

The Splades signed with management in London. A deal came along. Not the kind of deal that would have them browsing the castles-r-us websites, but healthy numbers nonetheless. They tracked me down just as the future fell out of my diary, and they sent a charming funny email that lured me without a sign of struggle to Svolvær, and my producing debut. ‘In Svolvær there will be peace and beer, and more dried cod than you have ever dreamed.'

‘Annaliese is quite a singer, you know,' Kate said, but I'd lost track of what was connecting the threads of the conversation. Maybe it was a new thought entirely. ‘We've got her singing on DVD. Let me show you.'

‘Would she be okay with that?'

‘Thousands of people saw her. Why wouldn't she be okay?' She was already moving.

I followed her inside, and she sorted through the pile of DVDs under the TV. She pulled one out of its box and pushed it into the player. There was a VCR wired in there as well, and a machine I didn't recognise. I wondered if Mark had gone to work on it all. He had probably charged her a fee.

‘It's supposed to operate from one remote,' she said. ‘This DVD is just Annaliese's segment of the show. If I can get it to...'

The screen burst into life, but on an analogue TV channel. Kate worked the volume down with her thumb, made an assortment of mistakes with the remote, swore under her breath. Then footage of a stage staggered onto the screen. Annaliese was standing alone in the back of a red convertible, with dancers around her. She was singing DJ Sammy's version of Boys of Summer, with the backing track ticking along at the requisite high BPM, and her only mistake was that she had too much voice to offer it. The original – the new original, anyway – was a dance track, and the voice deliberately pulled back to sound light on, but Annaliese was going for it, and she could really sing.

‘She's great,' I was saying, honestly, when her door swung open.

‘That's supposed to stay in my room,' she said to Kate angrily, ignoring me completely.

‘But you were really good.' I was trying to defuse the situation, but also meaning it. I was feeling tired, feeling the beer in my head, wanting to be back at my own house.

‘You're just trying to cover my mother's fat arse.' Still looking at Kate. Spleen was set to be vented here, and I could be collateral damage if I wanted to be.

‘Did you really need to say fat?' These were Kate's first words, and I wasn't sure they would help.

‘Okay, everyone,' I said, finding a peacemaker tone from somewhere. ‘Great singing, great arse.'

‘It was just an expression,' Annaliese said. ‘And I'd like the DVD now.'

The verandah light clicked off when I was halfway to the road from their front door. The darkness felt almost total, and I had to stop. Then I saw there were stars, plenty of them. No moon though. I looked up, half-expecting to see the constellations mapped out, the clear lines of an archer, a plough, across the sky. But I couldn't name one thing up there.

Cities are awash with light. Light surges through them, with a pulse that's almost arterial. But there are no stars. Cities coast along without respite. The big ones anyway, blanking out starlight with the light blasting from Seven Elevens, traffic, office buildings.

I could just make out the way ahead, the bare earth between the patches of pale dry grass. I found my way to the road, and turned right. In the distance there were streetlights, the houses of unseen neighbours, the gap in the hedge that would lead me to my bed.

I had made a start on a new song when the band broke up. I had given it the working title ‘The Light that Guides You Home'. I tried bits of it out with Derek, enough that I could sometimes hear him humming or singing a line or two to himself as he gazed out the tour bus window. It wasn't coming together though. It wasn't right. I was blaming that on Derek, and I knew that wasn't right either. But he didn't get it. Derek could be a blunt instrument more often than he realised, and it wasn't always smart to set him to work on the finer details.

‘An over-ripe overblown ballad' Rolling Stone had called Still Water, and given it two stars on its way to becoming our first US number one. It was our big break, the song that put us on planes and talk shows and stopped us seeing Brisbane for about two years. I can hardly remember finishing a conversation all that time.

It's where Derek would have taken the new song too. Rolling Stone wasn't entirely wrong about Still Water – it just misjudged the market's bottomless appetite for over-ripe overblown ballads. And I didn't want that for The Light that Guides You Home. Night after night Derek would sing Still Water, and each night I'd hate him for it just a little more. By the end, it was as overblown as Elvis when he faced the final fried peanut butter sandwich, and Derek, as far as I was concerned, was the man who overblew it, who turned it into a big pompous bastard of a song that only a stadium could love.

I could do an acoustic version of that song right now – just me and an upright piano – and show the bits people never heard. Strip it back and make it small, make it lean and underdone, and show people the song it might have been. But we added Derek, and charisma, and sold twelve million albums instead. That was The True Story of Butterfish. We followed it up with Supernature, which sold eight million, then came Written in Sand, Written in Sea. One hundred and forty-seven thousand copies sold, last time someone put the unit count into words and I didn't have my hands over my ears. ‘Rarely can an album be called pretentious and directionless at the same time,' Rolling Stone said. ‘Where are the effortless hooks from Frick and Holland that we became used to on their first two albums? Could be there's some turbulence in the still water these days.'

I also saw reviews that said ‘File this somewhere between esoteric and bad' and ‘It's either confused or confusing, neither of which is exactly a good thing'. So I stopped looking. Our US publicist told us she'd bundle them up at the end of the tour and send us each a copy. I hadn't seen mine and I didn't go chasing it.

We were in Frankfurt, drinking tall glasses of Schoefferhofer beer on a barge on the Main on a bright spring evening when we got the call to say our US label was dumping us.

‘Fuckers. They were never behind us,' Derek said, holding his phone like a stone that he might throw into the river.

He had a jacket on, since there was a cool breeze coming up the river, and his collar was turned up as if he was in a video. He needed a shave, and some sleep. His eyes were puffy. He had spent days looking as if he'd just woken up. I thought he had taken some pills before we'd taped an interview for MTV Europe earlier in the day, and he was on his way down by the evening. He had been like a sleepwalker with his finger in a power point on the show – jangly energy, scratchy thought processes and somnolence, all in the one body.

The barge was called the Bootshaus Dreyer, and the massive ironwork of the Eisener Steg rose up behind Derek's head, carrying pedestrians across the Main.

The US tour had not ended well and, from my perspective anyway, there had been a feeling that the dumping was coming. This was our difficult third album and we had outsmarted ourselves. We had never been paid more, never had so much at stake. It was a long way from shopping demos around and hoping someone somewhere might take an interest.

Third time around, we locked ourselves away in Malibu for weeks, months, racking up huge studio bills, hiring and firing session musos. Derek behaved like Nero. Maybe I did too. I had turned up with some songs that were mostly done and a few half there, but Derek – given to grandiose metaphor at the best of times – arrived with a pile of ideas straight from an ugly seventies acid trip. I wouldn't have been surprised if he had turned up one morning with a puffy shirt and a sword, and a Celtic princess he'd befriended the night before. But there were great ideas in there too, and glimpses of a vision that might be too epic to contain.

After about six weeks of nothing getting back to New York but bad stories, we had a surprise visit from a few of the senior people at the music company. They turned up with boxloads of Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and played it as though they just happened to be in the neigh bourhood and thought they might as well drop in.

‘Mind if we listen to some of what you've been doing?' one of them said after his second decaf skinny latte, as if it was an afterthought.

We played a few tracks and they listened studiously, and without moving. When they love you, you get some middle-aged-guy-type music-appreciation movements – the nodding head, the tapping foot, sometimes more – but they weren't giving us any of that.

‘We haven't heard the single yet?' It was somewhere between a statement and a question, and it came from the one of the three I had met before. His name was Karl. He was a vice president of something.

‘We're not about singles,' Derek said.

And Karl said, ‘I know that. But is there a big song? You owe a lot to one big song, remember. Still Water, Iris, Drops of Jupiter – those songs make bands. They sell albums, they book out arenas, commercial radio plays them until they've put your grandchildren through college. We're budgeting for six million units with this album, but a big song could take it past twelve.'

‘No pressure though,' Paul, our drummer, said, and Karl said, ‘That's right,' and smiled. How many times had he, or someone like him, had the same conversation with the Goo Goo Dolls in the years after Iris had worked its big-song magic for them? He dusted doughnut sugar from his hand and asked where the bathroom was.

‘I thought they were all big songs,' Derek said quietly and only to me, once they had left.

The last strand of that conversation unwound that evening in Frankfurt, almost a year later, when Derek took the call from our New York manager saying that he had had a meeting with Karl, and they were cutting us loose.

We ordered another round of beers in tall half-litre glasses, and not a lot was said. The beer was cloudy and slightly sweet, and I could taste bananas and citrus and cloves. Around us people ate fat sausages and schnitzels. We were under an umbrella – an orange umbrella emblazoned with the Schoefferhofer name in a Germanic script, with three ancient-looking gold medals above it – but the sun had gone and the wind rushed in as a huge barge loaded with rusty scrap metal pushed by. Three of us – Derek, Darren and I – had been part of Butterfish since before the first US deal. Paul was from Melbourne and had joined after the first album. Then we added Ben – from Cambridge, Massachusetts – just in time for the This is Spinal Tap remake that was Written in Sand, Written in Sea. The five of us sat awkwardly around a small wooden table for four, each of us trying not to take up an entire side and look like the alpha male. Each of us alone with his own complex arrangement of thoughts about what was going on, what might happen next. For Ben, it may have been as simple as wanting to get the hell out and hoping that the cheque would clear.

We walked along the riverbank where people had been lazing in the evening sun but were now wrapping up against the chill that had blown in, and we bought kebabs from a small white boat called the Istanbul. The others drank late that night and, no doubt, skirted around a morose deconstruction of our grand and soon to be public failure. I couldn't face it, and I went to my room. It felt as if several years of tiredness had caught me in a rush and tackled me hard.

I was up early the next morning, and I saw there was a market on the iron bridge. I almost bought a threeeuro belt from a guy with a stall a metre wide that sold only belts, and all for three euros each. I remembered that I had kept the same crappy belt for years, saving money in case my career fell over and, in the moment of reaching for my wallet and then not buying the new belt, I realised that that was what had happened the evening before. My career had fallen over, without a sound, and I had met it with a beer-fuzzed brain and some ambivalence. Anger, relief, a sense of shame. A sense that some of the noise in my head might be about to go.

There was to be no fourth album, and the band broke up before I finished the song that may one day be known as The Light that Guides You Home. It had a chorus and one long verse, so it felt only halfway to being a song, and its bridge was problematic. Those were its shortcomings in structural terms. I also didn't really know what it was about, where it was heading. It was entirely true to life, in that sense at least. I walked away from the iron bridge market with the money to buy all the belts in Frankfurt, but I didn't feel rich, or even safe, and I had no clear idea about how to live a rich person's life, or any other. I had seen affluent lives and they didn't feel like me. For a while, nothing did.

We tore ourselves apart with Written in Sand, Written in Sea. We even argued about the comma in the title. Derek actually called it elegant. I was the one who ended up shouting, ‘No one buys albums with commas in the title.' I had no evidence for that, of course. Not until we released the album anyway. ‘Tore apart' is unjustly dramatic. We snapped like perished elastic, tamely and definitively. We wore out. Our best new ideas, our friendships, everything – we wore it all out.

So, it was over now. Derek was famously out of control and the others were, respectively, in Sydney, on tour with a side-project band, and last heard of back in his old bedroom at his parents' house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Where, presumably, he woke up every morning, took a look at the wallpaper he knew best and wondered for at least a second or two if his whole Butterfish experience might have been no more than a bad dream with an Australian accent.

Since all the songs were Frick/Holland, I was still riding high on my share of the royalties. Still Water alone had clocked up US radio airplays in the hundreds of thousands, and had featured in two movies, a TV series and advertisements in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, South Africa and Belgium, mostly promoting still water (no imagination required there). It was a steady earner as an iTunes download, and its chorus was a ringtone for which people around the world regularly handed over money. My grandchildren would thank me, if I ended up being smart with it.

I tripped on my own front steps in the dark, and wondered why I hadn't thought to leave a light on. I found the door handle by feel, and the keyhole beneath it. The issue of grandchildren seemed very theoretical, like particle physics, or those equations that cross blackboards with a spray of sigmas in their wakes. I had no future planned, yet. I had a bunch of Norwegians to coax through the white-knuckle ride of their first major international album, and I thought that would do for now.