This Could Be Rock 'N' Roll (3 page)

People criticise me for being the Billy Bragg of the East Riding. I take it as a compliment. At least Billy writes about something, and I try to too. Why would anybody want to write about nothing just to get the cash till jingling? How empty is that? Besides, who wants to be rich? What do you do with it? You’ve got the press at you all the time hoping that you get cancer or book into The Priory or get caught shagging Madonna in Birmingham New Street or something. Everything is a hoo-ha. Your kids need bodyguards and you need a PR agent. You sit in your fifty room mansion discussing the servant problem and whether ‘peak oil’ is a myth or not, and Lady Jake Pembleton thinks that her party is ruined because her blancmange wobbled too much or her soufflé flopped. Yeah, right, I would rather be in a bedsit down Victoria Ave with a real life and a smashing sexy girl who nearly gives me a heart attack every time she steps out of the shower.

Actually, Jade nearly gives me a heart attack quite a lot one way or another. Her attitude to life powering straight off the National Grid is the first reason. Her utter devotion to me to the point of asphyxiation is another. And then there is the question of when she opens her mouth. With her friends, she sounds just right and I come over like Prince Charles or Andrew Lloyd Webber or somebody. But when she is with my friends, she sort of squeaks like a little girl and embarrasses me. I can see Mike and Stoker and Kevin and Nancy sitting there thinking “he’s only with her because he’s desperate for a shag now that he and Cathy have broken up and nobody else will have him and his pathetic adolescent lifestyle”, but it isn’t like that at all. Jade really does have her head screwed on. It’s just that she’s only nineteen and all of my local friends are in their thirties and accountants or office workers with children and a mortgage and here am I, I’ve never grown up. I pretend to flog houses by day and at night I play at being Elton John or something. Shouldn’t I just grow out of it?

The answer is, yeah, I should, but I can’t because this bloody music keeps turning up and it will churn my guts if I don’t do something useful with it and when I have recorded it I am actually proud of what I do, and I wouldn’t be proud of being an accountant or an office worker, and I’m not proud at all of being an estate agent. And yet, I feel sometimes with my mates that if I introduced myself as an estate agent they would go “Yeah, right on,” but when I admit to being a folk singer they cringe into their chairs.

That’s why I like being with Lesley and the gang. They’re like me. They know what we do is important and they face all the same issues as I do. They make ends meet better or worse than I do, but none of them is a star or ever will be. If the public hasn’t caught on to what you do after fifteen years, let’s face it, it never will. It will take a bloody miracle (or a murder or AIDS) to make me into a household name and the same goes for them. We are going to be sitting in our bath chairs strumming away with our arthritic hands, croaking unintelligibly, recounting the glory days to our grandchildren who cannot stand the sour smell of us and who can’t wait to get away. That is the truth. But in our heads, success is still inches just around the corner for all of us, and if we only stand together we can all give each other a lift up.

And we certainly stand together. The music industry is a nasty business. A guitar is not nicknamed a ‘razor’ for nothing. If you cannot feel better about yourself, you can always make other people feel worse about themselves, that seems to be the motto. Then you have all the agents scrabbling away trying to get 15% of anything they can cobble together, the press which is just out for a story, the freeloaders and the stardust shoulder-rubbers. What a business! Shit, it makes breaking and entering look respectable. But our lot are not like that. We love each other and we support each other and we will not have a word said against each other. These guys are my real family. They are gold dust. And Jade fits in there too because she thinks and behaves the same way. For her, I really am an artist and a star, and she would kill anybody who denies it. She would kill anybody who ever shags me too.

Chapter 3

Harry calls around a lot, dragging Josh and Sam with him, although they probably don’t take much dragging. They still love me and they think Jade is cool, like a wild elder sister. The only problem is that there isn’t a lot for them to do here - no toys, no digital TV. Josh wants to mess around in the shed with my guitars and my recording equipment but I keep telling him that I need all that stuff intact for me to earn some money. He looks like he doesn’t really believe me and he is about right. It tears me apart not to see those two every bath time. Fuck Cathy. I just want to be with the kids.

Harry is Cathy’s boyfriend and he’s OK. Actually, he is better than OK. We get on pretty well given that he is rollicking my wife. He’s rich which will appeal to Cathy and even more to her parents who are no doubt hoping for an upgrade in their living accommodation as a result, but I’ll forgive him all that. You can’t help where you are born.

Harry’s people have a mansion in Ellerker, drive a Rolls Royce and some super-intelligent Mercedes, and go down to London about every weekend for a gala dinner. Believe it or not, Harry’s dad made all his money out of unblocking drains in emergencies. Yeah, he is a glorified plumber - very glorified. You see his vehicles all over Hull - Brakewell’s Emergency Sanitation. They charge £150 for a call-out and they invariably solve the problem within the hour. Not bad pay for an hour’s work, but they have the distinct advantage as plumbers go that you can actually get hold of them and that they reliably turn up within a couple of hours as you watch your ground floor disappearing under the flotsam of a swelling toilet bowl. Harry’s dad turns shit into gold, and now so does Harry - Cathy being just one example of note.

Harry himself is really down to earth although you instantly realise that his socks cost multiples of your entire wardrobe and he has a very cultivated accent having attended Uppingham Public School, wherever that is, before flunking Social Sciences at York. Still, he certainly knows how to have a good time and, more pertinently in this case, manages to give Cathy a good time too, although I am never quite sure what he gets out of it apart from playing sugar daddy to my two kids, which I don’t think he enjoys that much otherwise he wouldn’t be bringing them around here quite so often.

“Well, Jake, how’s it going?”

“Well, you know …..”

“Written any more songs recently?”

“Yeah, a few. Do you want to hear them?”

“Not particularly, thanks. We saw Maximo Park last night over in Sheffield. They were amazing.”

“Yeah, I quite like their stuff.” No I don’t, it’s crap, but you have to build bridges.

“You should see if you could get some gigs as their warm-up act, Jake. I reckon they’ll be huge one day.”

I didn’t say that Harry ever made me feel good but I am convinced that his putdowns are all accidental. Besides, it bucks me up a bit that Cathy may get all that money, but that she will be stuck listening to old shit-for-brains for the rest of her life, and he’ll get worse with age. He’s half senile now. He must be to be going out with Cathy.

“How’s the sewage industry, Harry?”

“Well, you know. There’s never a shortage of the stuff, nor of people who insist on shoving Pampers and baby wipes down their toilets. Dad says that every time they spend £5 million advertising their brand they spend the same amount advertising us. We’ve just bought up a company in Plymouth to cover the West Country. It never stops.”

“So, are you travelling a lot, Harry?”

“Yeah, all the time. Five days a week.”

“What about Cathy?”

“She gets me weekends. She doesn’t seem to mind. She has her life too.” Yeah, giving me her own brand of frustrated shit during the week.

“Have you got any closer to marrying her, Harry?”

“We’re discussing it. We’ll probably go ahead and get hitched one day. Between you and me, I am having a few problems with my folks on that one. They have a thing about divorcees or to-be-divorcees. They think they cannot stick at anything, so if they give up on one husband, they will give up on the next one too. Dad says that he has worked shit hard to get his money and he is not shitting it all down the toilet again paying alimony on behalf of his son. Cathy seems dead keen, in fact she has been pestering me, but I reckon that Dad will disown me if I don’t play it smart so I am back-peddling at the moment. I know a meal ticket when I see one.” Not so shit-for-brains, but I know that. I just like slagging him off in my head sometimes. It makes me feel less inadequate and cuckolded. Cathy goes out of her way to make me feel both.

Harry’s dad is obviously no fool. He can see exactly what’s coming. If Cathy and her family have their way, they’ll end up lounging around his mansion while he and Mrs. Brakewell flee to the gamekeeper’s lodge for a bit of peace and quiet.

Jade is less enamoured of Harry and tends to find an excuse to go off somewhere until he is gone. She then comes back and plays with the kids. She is only twelve years older than Josh. She takes them off to the park or into town or whatever while I get on with writing the next ditty.

People (very few people) sometimes ask me how I write a song. They then usually forget to hang around for the answer which is that I don’t know, so perhaps it is not worth hanging around for anyway. It is the hesitation in my response that is the giveaway. They anticipate that my reply will be all wind and no spit, and hasn’t been properly rehearsed.

Actually, it mostly starts with an idea for a story - what the song is going to be about. I drum up a few lines and see if I can use them as a structure to whip up a half-decent tune. Half-decent is indeed where it starts. There are only twelve notes in an octave, at least around Hull, and those twelve notes have spawned about a million songs so, to be honest, any set of notes will do. It’s what you do with them that matters - the sequencing, the chords, the duration, the silences, the hooks. These I add later. So I have some words forming, then I shape a riff around them, then I build on that riff to make it fuller and more interesting, then I work on the words, then I make sure that I have a couple of hooks in there, especially between the verse and the chorus, and finally I polish up the lyrics. I normally make a few changes during the recording session as well, get some inspiration as to some fancy runs or a surprise sound effect or two. To finish off, I tend to toss in the odd ‘yeah’ or a snarl or a laugh or something improvisational-sounding that isn’t written on the lyric sheet. Yeah, I write the lyrics. I never type them. Computers destroy poetry. It’s all in the feel of the paper.

There’s no such thing as a perfect life.

No perfect home. No perfect wife.

No perfect job. No perfect car.

No perfect grasp of who we are.

No perfect night. No perfect day.

No perfect place to hide away.

No perfect sea. No perfect sky.

No perfect truth. No perfect lie.

No perfect boy. No perfect girl.

No, we don’t live in a perfect world.

There ain’t no perfect song to sing.

There ain’t no perfect anything.

No perfect body, perfect mind,

No perfect calm, no perfect kind,

No perfect peace, no perfect rest.

There’s no perfection….just your best.

Na-na-na-Na, na-na-na-Na,

Na-na-na-Na, na-na-na-Na,

Na-na-na-Na, na-na-na-Na,

Na-na-na-Na, na-na-na-Na.

Na-na-na-Na, na-na-na-Na,

Na-na-na-Na, na-na-na-Na,

Na-na-na-Na, na-na-na-Na,

Na-na-na-Na, na-na-na-Na.

OK, this one wasn’t written like that at all, except that I got the idea of lots of ‘no perfects’ (I cannot imagine where I got that idea from), and then had to find the tune to go with them. But there aren’t any hooks, and there isn’t any instrumentation except for my handclapping which took forever to get right, and I wrote the lyrics on my PC.

I think those guys who asked me the question were right not to hang around for the answer. We never make a word of sense when we talk about being creative.

Chapter 4

Even though we are not talking, Cathy and I still communicate under sufferance. We have two kids in common and decisions still need to be made. We are playing the separated-couple -with-kids carousel game. We can never get closer and we can never escape each other either.

During the week, Cathy phones me up to make ever more radical demands as the days progress until I am forced to say “No”, at which point she goes off into a flurry about how I am always saying “No” to anything she wants and why don’t I listen to her etc.? At weekends, when Harry is back, she is more reasonable. She rarely phones at all. Harry brings the kids around instead.

Cathy and I also meet glare-to-frown about every two to three weeks which is a high risk venture. We started out meeting in pubs but that was disastrous. Pints got thrown and we got thrown out. We then tried Starbucks and Costa Coffee. It is too easy to have arguments there too. Now we meet in the café area of Waterstones in Jameson Street. That has closer to a library atmosphere and neither of us dare raise our voices for more than a couple of words otherwise we attract the seriously distressed scrutiny of outraged book readers.