This Could Be Rock 'N' Roll (2 page)

“What do you think?” she asked me when I was concentrating hard on hanging in there and not dying of my wounds. “I’m not doing it justice. I’ll play it to you properly when we’ve finished.” She then switched to ‘Love Eyes’, glory be, and everything ended happily.

Anyway, ‘Jitterbug’ is definitely her anthem and I cannot hear it without thinking of that night. I don’t think that we were in love but I came close before we broke up acrimoniously after several bouts of accusing each other of nicking each other’s songs. We didn’t even talk to each other after that for about five years. However, she did communicate with me. She wrote ‘Jug Ears’ about me where she publicised quite a few scenes from our private lives. Everybody knew who it was about and waited for me to retaliate but I never did. My songs are not a medium for revenge.

So what do I write about? Well, there is a lot of stuff about having my back to the wall, some other stuff about being on the road, then mostly news items, things that catch my eye, experiences I have had. I don’t do many love songs. I feel that there are more important things for me to be writing about, which may be a sad reflection on me, I don’t know. I wrote one for Jade the other day, but it isn’t very good so I haven’t played it to her yet. She’d be flattered that I wrote it, but you can’t compose a mediocre song for the woman you are living with, so either I rescue it somehow or I shall have to think up another one. I want to offer Jade one soon. She does deserve it and she would certainly be chuffed, but I cannot chase songs. They come to me or not at all, and with love songs it is usually not at all.

“Here is one of my few love songs.”

[chord]

The trees lose their leaves in September

In a carpet of yellow and gold

Under Christmas tree lights in December

We cuddled to keep out the cold.

We’d hide in the park there for hours

Where the bullies would leave us alone

You carved our names there “Now it’s ours” you said

And later let me walk you home.

Each night after school I would wait for you there

In the dark on that park bench in St. Martin’s Square.

I knew you were leaving for college

Yeah and I’d got a job down at Kirk’s

I envied you all of that knowledge

But you don’t need it down at the works.

On the night you left you said you’d miss me

And you promised that you’d always write

And then you leaned forward and kissed me

And disappeared out of my life.

Still late in the evening I’d wait for you there

In the dark on that park bench in St. Martin’s Square.

I read and re-read all your letters

From the other side of the divide

I knew the boys there would all be my betters

And that’s why I never replied.

I bet you thought that I forgot you

And it all seems so obvious now

How I wanted to say that I loved you then

Truth is I didn’t know how.

The trees still lose their leaves in December

In a carpet of yellow and gold

But the Christmas tree lights in December

Mean nothing with no-one to hold

And I know I should put you behind me

But I just can’t forget you and me

And if ever you come back to find me

There’s only one place that I’ll be.

And part of me always will wait for you there

In the dark on that park bench in St. Martin’s Square.

Chapter 2

Sue (in the song) may have got her college degree (I dunno, I never saw her again), but Jade hasn’t which is not to say that she is stupid because she’s not, although she works with her mam down Skelton’s bakery which doesn’t sound too bright.

Jade is springy all over - her hair, her body, the way that she is always bobbing up and down. Her mum, Jackie, is from Birmingham originally, which gives her a worse accent than even the ones around here and her dad was a hit-and-run sailor from Zanzibar who turned up for a few days in the docks offloading wood at Hollis’ and then disappeared off again leaving both of them behind. According to Jackie, he claimed to be a cousin of Freddy Mercury which is where Jade gets her appreciation for music from, according to her, although she thinks that I must have been an aberration (tee - lots of hees). You have to hold onto something, I suppose. In consequence, Jade is really dark with frizzy hair and a lovely bum. Her mum, on the other hand, looks like she worked with cordite in the Birmingham Small Arms factory and that her skin hasn’t recovered yet. Jade’s granddad did just that. Jackie is a lively one too. She never shuts up when she could be talking and ends each sentence in a gale of laughter. She really embarrasses Jade except that if Jade submits to working alongside her eight hours a day, she can’t find her that bad. We all find her a right old laugh. At least she isn’t stuck up like Cathy’s parents. Blimey, what a pair! They must be the last people in Kirkella to keep their ‘drawing room’ in their three-up three-down semi ‘for best’. If they stuck their arses in aspic, they couldn’t be more Coronation Chicken, with serviettes naturally. I used to really hate going round there. It was straight out of ‘Keeping Up Appearances’, Hyacinth Bouquet and all that. They must have the smallest semi in Kirkella, but at least they cornered the postcode.

Jackie’s nothing like that. She lives down Willerby New Road and probably knows everyone in the whole street which is several miles long. I keep threatening to make her my manager. If she could just get everyone she knows to one of my concerts all at the same time, we could easily fill the Guild Hall, and maybe even the Albert Hall. We could book a special Pullman to get us all down there.

I hooked up with Jade about three months after Cathy and I finally broke up. I came back from a gig at the Black Swan Folk Club in York, totally knackered having caught the last train into town, and there were three suitcases neatly packed outside the front door. No note - message unambiguous. I banged on the front door but nobody replied. I started hammering on the windows. I thought that I would at least wake the kids up and that that would rile Cathy into letting me in for a screaming match, but there was no response at all. Cathy had upped and taken the kids to Kirkella for the night. I got a bit of a chuckle out of that when I heard about it, the thought of Cathy’s parents having to cope with Josh and Sam. Josh is seven and Sam(antha) is five and behaving like china dolls is not what they do best.

Jade approached me after a lively gig at the Forge Valley Inn at Scarborough where I was knocking back the pints, and started to quiz me about my lyrics - who was the old guy in ‘The Undefeated’ (was it Jerry?), what was the pub in ‘I Wonder’, who was the girl in ‘St. Martin’s Square’? I looked at this eighteen year old (or thereabouts) creature and carried on talking to Rache and Sam. She didn’t give up. She butted in. We ignored her. She asked a pile more questions. We ignored those too. She waited until I had finished ignoring her. Eventually I turned on her:

“Yeah, what?”

“You look really lonely.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Your songs are really sad too.”

“Well, yeah, they are. That’s because I’m a happy-go-lucky type of guy and need some sort of balance in my life.”

She gave me the Spaniel-from-Zanzibar look. “I really love your stuff.”

“You’re young enough to be my daughter.”

“I’m looking for a father figure.”

“I could never have guessed.”

“Don’t you just want a friend?”

As it happened, I did. The hell-raising rock star act wasn’t making sense even to me. The limousine was looking more like a Williamson’s potatoes truck and the hangers-on were not exactly Pamela Des Barres, nor had they been with members of Franz Ferdinand or Keane the night before.

I did have friends. I have fantastic friends in Lesley, Jerry, Saskia and Martin who are fellow artists. We have supported each other over the years and I love them to bits. I also have friends from school and from the house we shared off the Anlaby Road but, yeah, I can always squeeze in one more, especially one who can’t get enough of me in a nice sort of way.

Jackie, Jade’s mum, refers to me as her very own Ralph McTell. In this game you are always being likened to somebody and most of the references I just don’t get. The Ralph McTell thing is a deliberate joke. Jackie’s mum, Jade’s nan, keeps harking back to George Formby. Luckily she isn’t deluded enough to think I am anything like him. I’m not fit even to lick his sandals according to Nan. Did George Formby really wear sandals? More likely golf shoes, or clogs. She’s a big Frank Sinatra fan too. As it happens, I do have something of the Frank Sinatra in me, except more in the future tense, as in “I’ll do it my way” rather than “I did it my way.” I wish I could afford to hire the guys to turn up to pubs and clubs before I get there and replace all the music being played with my stuff. It might help if I recorded some music videos sometime.

I don’t know what Jade eats in that bakery - pure sugar I would guess - because she comes home bouncing off the walls ready to go out. We live in Victoria Ave, so just around the corner from Newland Avenue which is the liveliest, trendiest part of Hull (hold your excitement), so I don’t have many excuses to stay at home but I wish we could give it a miss sometimes. Jade is beginning to make me feel like an irretrievably clapped-out old rocker who just wants to crash at home while his missus paints the town red. Still, I get to meet Jade’s friends and several of those are easy on the eye so once I have been dragged out of the house I become a bit more lively again.

The house where we live in Victoria Ave is one of those places where the door bell looks like it should come with a bell-hop. There are six flats in the building, which leaves us with a ground floor bed sit. It’s not a lot to show for fifteen years hard toil day and night. Jade has ambitions. The trouble is, however hard I try, I sell about 250 - 350 CDs a year, or £1,000 to you. The gigs pay better but they are harder and harder to get. The venues want artists who are young and happening (i.e. virtually free) rather than established no-hopers who demand a proper fee. So us veterans of the circuit have to sit around on the bench waiting for a substitution. At least we are reliable.

I record my music down the shed in the garden. I had to insist on there being a shed, so it took some time to find the right flat. I don’t have a lot of equipment and I am a bit of a technophobe, so most of my stuff is recorded with me playing acoustic guitar and harmonica, singing and whatever I can find to bash. I have to lay down one track at a time for a maximum of eight bars, so it takes forever. The bass track comes from the lower E string on my Ibanez. It doesn’t usually take me long to compose a song, typically around two-to-three hours to get the main shape, a couple of days to finalise the lyrics, and then another two-to-three hours to lay it down. Some songs are just plain elusive. I fiddle with them for years and they never come out quite right. I don’t know why I bother. It’s a bit like doing the crossword puzzle, I suppose. I have to complete it however long it takes. I just wish that I could achieve the perfect song at the end of it all but they always work out a bit mangled.

I am not the world’s greatest instrumentalist and my voice isn’t Caruso, but I pride myself on my tunes and even more on my lyrics. I am probably more of a story-teller than strictly a musician. I love stories, and I love to tell stories in my songs - vignettes, slices of life. Something like this:

There’s bandit neon flashing by the fag machine as a barmaid sneers at leering lads who’ve had her … in their dreams.

There’s a bulldog with a pool cue on a picture on the wall.

And I wonder what I’m doing here at all.

Some walking tattoo stamps on my shoe then says: “Sorry mate”

You know the sort who’d need rohypnol just to get a date.

And I’m staring at my mobile wishing telesales would call.

And I wonder what I’m doing here at all.

Let’s get metaphysical and question why we’re here.

Cos it cannot be the company and I wouldn’t chance the beer.

You know this fog of smoke is second hand, but it’s fresher than the jokes.

It’s just like someone grabbed hold of my past and rammed it in my spokes.

The thump-thump jukebox pumping out that idle pop.

And just like anyone with any sense I’m wishing it would stop.

It’s another faceless one-hit-wonder’s name I can’t recall,

Let’s take a baseball bat to Simon Cowell now once and for all,

Because his so-called bloody music’s got me crawling up the wall,

And I wonder what I’m doing here at all.

Do I have hate? Yeah, I have hate and it isn’t buried very deep neither. I don’t really know why. My parents are great, the usual arguments and jockeying for power and individuality but that’s all. Nothing terrible has ever happened to me, no life-scarring tragedies, no being kissed by Steve Crum as a baby. But it just strikes me that I am surrounded by injustice from the derivative, manipulative crap that makes it to platinum to the brutal lives some folks have to lead because some bastard is exploiting them. So, I carry my soap box around with me and I rant at will. Cathy’s parents never got that. Ranting is what lunatics and working class people do, there only being a mere hair’s breadth between them. You wouldn’t think that Cathy’s dad’s family was digging turnips in Holderness only a couple of generations back or that Cathy’s mum was a factory worker down at Hawker Siddeley’s. Tossers. Yeah, that’s the sort of thing that gets me - class traitors and they’ve got fuck-all class if you ask me.