'This Was Music-Making As A Physical Act, Providing The Adrenaline-Squirting Euphoria Of A Brawl'
In part seven of Good Guys Lost, Billy discovers punk in London. At home, a troublesome scenario is developing. Featuring cameos from The Jam and The Sex Pistols
Read part six of Good Guys Lost here
AFTER MY FATHER’S death it was not so easy for me to spend time away from home. At weekends we all – my mother, me and the kids – stayed in her sisters’ flat in Burly but during the week I was obliged to go to the house close to Stanley Road. It was a mere 20 minutes’ walk or a 10-minute bus journey from where my mates lived and where I was comfortable. It felt like a different world.
There were problems brewing with the next-door neighbour. They had started as soon as we moved in. The 22-year-old man was dealing dope. He liked to play his music loud and slept at odd hours. This did not go down well with my father. In the brief interlude between us arriving and Joey Moran’s death there was trouble. He immediately labelled the dealer next door “the Divvy” and his contempt for the young man was palpable.
I can only imagine the neighbour knew about my dad’s reputation but was too stoned or drunk – or a combination of both – to care. It came to a head less than three months before my father died. Ironically, the confrontation was sparked by someone else.
It was mid-November. The couple next door but one had just had a baby. Around midnight, the new father knocked on the Divvy’s door to politely request he turn down the music. This perfectly reasonable action provoked a frenzy of violence. The Divvy threw himself out of the door, butted the new dad and screams resonated down the walkway between the two rows of houses. In pain from a series of lung biopsies, Joey went outside. People used to say he walked into a melee like Clint Eastwood and, even I, who felt the opposite of hero worship for him, was impressed by his composure and clinical actions. He strode up to the Divvy without a word and when the young man turned it became clear that the neighbour was armed with a cosh. He showed it to my father, and said: “Come on, old man. Let’s see if you’re as good as they say.”
He was. “You’ve haven’t ate the butties,” was Joey’s replay. It sounded benign, almost playful. Then the game began. He blocked the thrust of the blackjack and lifted the Divvy off his feet with a straight left. The power of the punch knocked the recipient out but it caused as much pain to the man who threw it. My dad could barely move.
For a moment my father stood over him and seemed poised to hit the prone body again. But he was not shaping up to land another blow. He was frozen in agony. Striding back to the house he betrayed no evidence of his weakness until he collapsed on the couch, gasping desperately for breath.
He was still in the same position half an hour later when the sound of shattering glass made him sit up. The Divvy had kicked in the front door and was back for the second round armed with a four-foot fencepole. Joey used all his strength to stand up and went outside into the tiny front garden, where the aggressor had retreated to give himself room to swing his staff.
The street was full of neighbours watching the confrontation. No one moved to help. Even I wondered if this was a fight too far for my father. There was no cagey moving about from him, however. He walked straight towards the Divvy and took the impact of the stick on his forearm without breaking stride. This time he did not punch: he butted the man on the bridge of his nose and knocked him over the fence. Then he picked up the remains of the fencepole and beat the injured drug dealer for a good minute; slowly, deliberately, without any indication of rage. Every blow brought a whelp of discomfort from my father but he carried on, determined that this would teach the Divvy a lesson that would stay with him for ever.
Two policeman, one a sergeant with his long nightstick, came into the close and faltered. For a moment it seemed as if they would leave but my father beckoned them over. “He’s drunk and disorderly,” he said. “And fell over. Might need patching up and a night in the cells.”
The senior officer nodded. “He’s a little gobshite, this one. You haven’t hit him hard enough, Joe.”
I’ve never liked Busies. That’s one of the things my father did teach me. But this one spoke the truth. I never met many others who did.
* * *
If you don’t want to wait for the next extracts, the paperback is available here
Life was difficult for the neighbours. They banged on the wall and shouted to Billy to stop playing the same songs over and over again. They screamed in frustration as the noise continued after midnight and turned up their own music centres to blot out and discourage Billy. That was impossible. He felt he was getting somewhere.
The last song he worked on had been written in a prison cell but he had been too embarrassed to send it to the Richman brothers. It needed something extra but every time he played it the memories flooded back. He put it aside. The humiliation in London changed that.
High up in the Piggeries he began to hone something of beauty. He called it ‘Slamming Doors’ and played it over and over again. It had been inspired by anger after the collapse of his marriage but even after his fury dissipated the shame remained. Screw it, he thought. He wrote down the lyrics and perfected the melody.
“The light’s on, there’s a car on the drive,
Never thought that she’d have lied,
My mind’s gone, so tired of life,
Result of all those sleepless nights,
And I would shift the world to see her,
One more chance and I’d believe her,
I know I can’t take no more,
To stop the sound of slamming doors.”
He could hear the timbre of his voice buzz like a trumpet. Billy could feel his own conviction. It had been missing for more than half a decade and he could sense it growing again inside him.
“Spare a thought,
Look at me now,
We have stay together,
But show me how,
All along it’s been suspected,
To her friends it’s just what they expected,
And I would shift the world to see her,
One more chance and I’d believe her,
I know I can’t take no more,
To stop the sound of slamming doors.”
Here, he stopped. This was his problem. At this point he could not work out how to move the song forward. For two days he played it and tried idea after idea. It did not help. Finally he slapped the fretboard four times in frustration and attacked the strings in anger. Remarkably, it sparked something inside him and suddenly the song coalesced without Billy’s conscious effort. He followed his inadvertent key change and the words poured out.
“Living with me would never be the same,
I know he’s got letters after his name,
But he’ll get bored with her,
His type always do,
Always do.”
Then he was out of the break and it was easy to complete.
“Lights on, shadows move round the room,
Feeling sick but I’ll be talking to her soon,
If I close my eyes it won’t happen,
Count to ten it might go away,
And I would shift the world to see her,
One more chance and I’d believe her,
I know I can’t take no more,
To stop the sound of slamming doors….”
It was almost an out-of-body moment for Billy and one that he had never felt while smoking cannabis. For the first time he understood the process of turning experience into fiction, into art. After spending so many hours trying to wring lyrics and chord progressions from an uncompliant mind he realised he had been overthinking everything and inspiration was inside him. Hard work would drive him in its direction and help him unlock it.
He stood up and watched the Mersey turn from black to silver as the sun rose behind him. It was a turning point. The creative process had begun.
The next afternoon he passed a neighbour on the long trek up and down the stairs. “I liked that one you sang last night,” the man said. “If you’re going to keep me awake, at least do it with songs like that.”
At last Billy was on to something.
Listen to the song here. Written by Kevin McFarlane and Patrick Berry, vocals by McFarlane
* * *
The next time Billy went to London it was different. He had bought a pair of straight-legged jeans for a start. He noticed many of the younger men on Denmark Street had shed their flares. His leather jacket and hair were still assiduously stuck in the early 1970s but his look, if not quite contemporary, appeared less like an anachronism in Soho. His attitude had changed, too.
He walked into the office, went straight to the secretary and said: “Alright luv, tell Richman I’m here and I’ve only got half an hour. I need to be somewhere else this afternoon.” The girl looked at him with keener interest. Billy reciprocated.
She was young, definitely not much past 18 – if that – but was confident in a way he had only experienced in bold older women. There was a difference. She did not radiate the world-weariness of his quick conquests on the working-men’s club circuit.
It was impossible to tell whether she was beautiful or not. The girl’s hair was cropped short in what appeared to be an amateurish manner and she wore pale pancake makeup with black, exaggerated eyes sweeping up towards the temples. Her garb was equally confusing. The top half looked like she was a disturbed public schoolboy: a white shirt, baggy at the neck but with the top button secured over a loosely dangling school tie. The effect was confirmed by a stripped blazer with the pockets ripped off. When she stood up, the jacket came down to the top of her thighs, falling lower than the leather mini skirt she wore. The ensemble was completed by black tights and flat monkey boots. She was an intriguing mess. He watched her while he checked the tuning on the guitar.
He asked: “What do you call your style?”
“Gorgeous,” she replied.
The door opened and Richman was there, along with his hitherto unseen brother. Billy went through and sat with them. “Let’s hear your songs,” the man he’d seen before said.
“This is a new one, it’s on this tape,” Billy said, placing the cassette on the desk. “I’ll do just this one. Then I’ve got to go. You can listen to the tape later.” The brothers looked at each other, eyebrows raised slightly, and then the man who had not been introduced said: “You’ve got five minutes.”
Billy didn’t need it. He backstrummed E minor twice and began singing Slamming Doors. He could see a scintilla of interest in their eyes. Then he stopped caring about them. His voice buzzed off the walls of the small room, filling the empty space with thrilling, vibrating waves. Billy lost consciousness and became a vehicle for the song, staring into the void and funnelling every emotion through his vocal cords. When he came to the change he stopped. As the words “slamming doors” faded he let silence engulf the vacuum. He held the moment: not so long that the publishers would think the song was complete but just enough for the tension to build. In the quiet moment he refocused, looked both men in the eyes and then slapped the body of the guitar four times with a swift, rhythmic movement.
The key change caught them by surprise. He growled the words out low and then let his voice spiral up the scale. Across the room, the brothers looked on, rapt, and Billy experienced the same feeling he had felt back on the stairs more than a decade earlier. He had them. He controlled the audience. They were in thrall to his charisma. But how long could it hold?
The end of the song was close. It would last until then. It did. At the finish, he looked up. “How’s that?” he said.
“I’ve heard worse,” said the man he had originally met. “I’ll tell you what, maybe we’ll put up a couple of hundred quid to get you in the studio and do a professional demo. You might be able to sing your own songs. We’ll see. How about we draw up a contract? How long are you in London?”
Billy thought. He could stay with a friend in Walthamstow that he knew from going away to sea. The offer was there. “A couple of days.”
“OK, maybe come back tomorrow. Give us a chance to have a chat about you. Maybe I can get some studio time for you over the next few weeks.”
“Great, thanks, I really appreciate it.” The confidence, the aura he had conjured up during the song, had dispelled. He was back to being a needy, desperate hopeful. “Go on, get out of here,” the second brother said gruffly. “We’re busy. Leave your tape.”
He went to the waiting room and put away his guitar. “You fancy a drink tonight, Gorgeous?” he said. The girl stared at him aghast. “Who said you could call me gorgeous?”
“You,” he said. “You said that’s your look. What’s your name, then?”
“I never said anything of the sort.” There was silence.
“Eileen.”
“No, no, you can’t be an Eileen,” he said, shaking his head in disgust. “Every third girl round ours is an Eileen. Where’s the glamour in it? You look like someone else.”
She raised her eyebrows. He thought. “OK, I’ll try this. You look like an Eileen from another planet.”
Did she like that? He couldn’t tell. Probably, he thought.
“You’re too old for me,” she said dismissively and put a digit in the rotary dial of the phone and started to turn the disc around. Billy put his finger on one of the stubby connectors to kill the call. “I didn’t ask your age. I asked if you’d like a drink. I assume you like lager and lime?”
“Rum and black,” she said insolently. “I could hear you in there. It wasn’t bad. I finish at six. Maybe one drink. We’ll have that and when that’s finished I’ll know whether I like you. There’s a lot of boys” – she accentuated the word – “who come through here. I don’t like many of them. Let’s see if you’re different.”
* * *
Billy was unusually nervous as he waited in the darkness on the pavement in Denmark Street. The girl finally exited the office door nearer 7pm and did a theatrical jump at the sight of the man waiting for her. “What are you doing here?” she asked in a manner that suggested it was a surprise meeting. “The drink,” he said nervously. “Oh that,” she exclaimed as if being told she was required to do unpaid overtime. She sighed. “Is this your first time away from home?” she asked. “Are you easily impressed? Is this Billy-Boy’s big adventure?”
“I’ve been across the world. I’ve been away to sea,” Billy said, miffed. “I’ve seen things you can’t imagine.”
Eileen sniggered. “I can imagine. There’s plenty of places in Soho where you, er, sailorboys can enjoy a bit of male companionship. Three to a hammock, eh?” She tweaked his backside. “Let’s go over the road. You’ll be impressed.”
They went to the Fitzroy Tavern and he was impressed. Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan and George Orwell had drunk there and all had been on Billy’s rather perfunctory reading list. She was amused that he was star-struck.
“Behan was drinking in the Honky Tonk on Scotland Road the night he was arrested,” he said with pride. “Round ours.”
“One of my favourites used to come here, too,” Eileen said. “You ever heard of Aleister Crowley? He liked a good time. Or maybe a bad time would be a better description.”
The name meant nothing to Billy. The conversation stalled. “I asked you about your clothes,” Billy said. “Tell me about the way you dress. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“It’s called Punk,” she said. “It’s about the young idea. Why would you know about it? It’s a long way from your music. You wouldn’t like it.”
He was irritated. “How do you know? I haven’t heard it.”
“You wouldn’t like it. I have to go soon. I’m going to see a band tonight. I have to meet some people.”
“Can I come?”
She reached over and squeezed his crotch. “I’m sure you’d love to, big boy. And so would I. But I’m off to see The Jam. They’re only a bit punky. Too much for you, though. See you around.” With one gulp of the rum and black she was gone.
Perturbed, Billy sat alone for some minutes. He swilled away the dregs of weak, sulphury IPA and went out into the gloom. After finding a phone box he called his mate in Walthamstow and told him he was on the way. Then he walked down Rathbone Place to Oxford Street, intending to take the Victoria Line north from Oxford Circus. On his way, he saw some strangely-dressed young people gathered on the street. It was the 100 Club. That night The Jam were playing. For a moment, he thought about going in. Instead he headed for the tube.
Just before he was about to step into the Underground he had second thoughts. He took his indecision to the Argyll Arms and drank another four pints in one of its small, cloistered lounges. After a final swig from his pint glass, he crossed the road back to the venue.
The bouncers gave Billy strange looks when he entered but allowed him in. He went downstairs, straight to the bar and bought a drink. He felt very out of place but not intimidated. The room buzzed with aggression but it was forced, manufactured. The Hotsy on a Saturday night was significantly more dangerous and some of the working mens’ clubs fizzed with way more unfocused anger. Too many people here were trying too hard to act tough.
The girl was thrashing around in front of the stage with her friends. It was not dancing as Billy knew it. He lurked in the shadows waiting for the band to come on. He did not want Eileen to see him.
With six pints down him Billy was in that dangerous state where elation, mental fuzziness and anger vie for control of the psyche. Young men bumped into him at the bar and met his gaze with brittle tough-guy stares. The mood could have turned ugly and he clenched and unclenched his fists a few times. Then the band came on and everything changed.
They were a three-piece combo in badly-fitting suits and looked young enough to be playing a school fete, Billy thought, even though he had never been near any such event. Even before they started feedback wailed from their amps. Automatically he sniggered at their lack of professionalism. He had spent the past couple of years learning how to avoid making such an unpleasant noise.
Eventually, with a gruff “One-two-three-four,” they began to play. Billy was not prepared for what he saw and heard: the visceral fury, the energy, the rawness of the voices and the string-ripping strumming. They made no attempt to be cool, to project the aura of stardom. For this band sweat was a prop to be embraced and celebrated, not something to be wiped away. The level of commitment astounded him. This was music-making as a physical act, providing the adrenaline-squirting euphoria of a brawl. Against all his preconceptions he loved it.
He recognised Slow Down, the Larry Williams standard he had played and sung a thousand times, but it was like hearing it for the first time. The performance was intensely brutal, pop music as a contact sport.
It was reflected by the audience. The crowd fought on the dancefloor, threw glasses and spat randomly into the air.
The man who had that afternoon been trying to become a 1970s pop star was destabilised, undermined and thrilled. Life would never be the same again. It was a 40-minute assault on every musical belief Billy had held. He almost forgot the girl as his mind spun wildly. Although he remained perched at the bar he was exhausted at the end of the set. He gulped down what was left of his drink and headed for the exit.
As he was leaving, he saw the girl involved in a pushing match with a skinhead on the dance floor. She stormed off towards the toilets and the skin chased her, shouting abuse. Billy followed them. At the toilet door, the youth grabbed Eileen’s wrist and pulled her back. She hurled a foul mouthful of invective and Billy began to move out of the darkness. His fists were bunched and he was calm; it was not the raw aggression that had sent him to jail but a settled, composed intent that was even more dangerous.
To Billy’s surprise, the girl pulled the man towards her and kissed him, thrusting her tongue into his mouth as if she were the predator. She stepped back to the door and pulled the skinhead into the toilets. As she pushed him inside she turned back and looked into the blackness. Billy thought she had not seen him until she winked and cackled. He was stunned. He wanted to hate her. Instead he just wanted her.
* * *
When Eileen emerged from the club alone she found Billy loitering. This time she expressed no surprise. “Waiting for me, Scouse?” It was mocking. “Yeah,” he said. “Can I see you home.”
She snorted out a laugh. “Think you’re getting sloppy seconds? But I’ll take you with me. We’re going to a party.”
They went back to Denmark Street, to another building, and went through an open door to what was clearly a squat. A number of angry young men were drinking and talking. Three or four girls – all with frightening makeup – were hanging about but the atmosphere was not sexual. “Meet,” the girl said loudly, “the worst band in history. The Sex Pistols. People will talk about them when your Beatles are forgotten. And this,” she spread one arm to make a theatrical introduction, “is my pet Liverpudlian. Do not provoke him. He may be dangerous. I don’t think he has been house trained.” If anyone heard, they did not acknowledge his presence. There were cans of warm Harp sitting on a wooden crate. She took two. “Welcome to the new age.” Billy looked around. The wall was full of graffiti and one snippet caught his eye. ‘Depressed miserable tired ill sick booed & bored.’ A buffoon in a studded leather jacket squared up to him and said, “Fuck off hippy,” waving a bicycle chain. Billy slapped him with the back of the hand and that appeared to earn the approval of the room.
There were no seats so he leaned against the wall. A red-headed teenager that appeared to be the ringleader looked at him with bug eyes. “We played Eric’s last month,” he said. “They’d never seen nothing like it on Mathew Street. We disgusted them.” The boy let loose a music-hall chuckle.
Billy had never heard of Eric’s but he resolved to go there as soon as he got home. “I’ll be there next time you play,” he replied. “We need more disgust.”
“You’re growing on me,” the girl said. “Maybe we’ll snog. I’m beginning to think you have something about you. Come on, I think it’s time for some Hole.” And she was off, with Billy trailing in her wake wondering whether he could cope with sloppy seconds.
On Wednesday: Billy goes into the studio, finds love but the pull of family takes him in the wrong direction