Dear Ferguslie; my cradle, my adventure playground. I'd moved away from it, but only a mile away. It still held me. Christ, what a dump, what a sorry mess it was. They should make a documentary about it; it was ideal material. Urban deprivation?< The failure of post-war town planning? An indictment of the ghettoisation of problem families? It was all here. Bring lots of film and fashionable theories, chaps, but don't forget the lockable petrol cap and theft-proof wheelnuts for the Range-Rover. And maybe a riot gun or two.
I wanted out of this. I wanted away.
I reached into my jacket's inside pocket and took out some folded sheets of paper. One of my flatmates had let me use his typewriter to print out a few of my songs. I'd bought real stave paper from a music shop, carefully transcribed all the quavers and hemi-demi-semiquavers from my old exercise jotters, and then typed in the words underneath.
I knew I'd never make it as a singer-songwriter, so I was currently looking for a band to make rich and famous. I had a third or fourth-hand bass guitar I'd almost learned to play, and knew the most basic rudiments of writing music. I'd started out with my own system of musical notation; at the age of eight I'd invented a way of writing down music based on the use of graph paper and twenty coloured pens I'd been given for Christmas. Curiously enough this system, though complicated, did work. It became a sort of personal institution, something I was proud of, and I'd spent the last eight years stubbornly resisting the inevitable, refusing to learn the system everybody else used and trying to persuade anybody who'd listen that my way was better. I honestly, fervently believed that the musical world would see that my system was superior, and change over. It would be like going metric, it would be like decimalisation ...
Insane.
Anyway, I had, with much ill grace, finally bought myself a teach-yourself music book, and grudgingly learned about the basic arithmetic of staves and time signatures, even if diminished minor sevenths and chord progressions still seemed like higher mathematics (I wasn't worried; I knew what the songs sounded like in my head, and they were brilliant. It would be a minor matter to transfer them into the real world. Any fool could play a guitar or a keyboard and notate; the real talent lay in thinking up the tunes).
And tonight I was off to the Union of the Paisley College of Technology, where a band called Frozen Gold were playing. A lad I'd known at school, who now worked as an assistant on one of the lathes in Dinwoodie's, had seen the group play in some pub in Glasgow and recommended them. I was sceptical in the extreme. Frozen Gold? Pathetic. I had lots of far better names. In the unlikely event this lot turned out to be the ones to go with, I'd let them choose from those I'd come up with.
I tramped through the rain, shoulders hunched, hands as deep in the shallow pockets of my corduroy bomber jacket as they would go. I kept the Embassy Regal between my lips and smoked it down to the filter, staring down at the sodden ground, protecting the fag from the rain with my head. I spat the dog-end into the gutter as I walked under the railway line and out of Ferguslie Park.
The Union was warm and noisy. The beer cost twenty pence a pint and it was only fifty pence to see the band. I knew a few people in the bar, and nodded, grinned, said a couple of hellos, but really I was there on business, so I was trying to look serious and distracted and generally as much as possible like a man with more serious things on his mind than standing around talking and drinking and enjoying himself. I would probably have been like that even if there hadn't been any women there, but to be honest it was mostly for the chicks. I was a man with a mission, a young fellow with the future history of the popular song resting next to his breast. I was going places; I was important... or at least I was very obviously going to be important, and soon.
I took my pint of lager down to the Union's modestly proportioned lower hall, usually used as its snooker room. The Union building, an off-grey edifice on the side of a hill facing the Gourock-Glasgow railway line, was Paisley's old Social Security office, and had — consequently, apparently — been designed in an appropriately depressing blind-cubist-with-a-hangover style. The low-ceilinged room where Frozen Gold would have their unwitting appointment or near-miss with Destiny was already smoky and warm. I could almost feel the steam coming off my wet clothes; I could smell my own body, too. Nothing too offensive, quite comforting in fact, but I was standing beside a couple of girls for the set and I wished I'd gone home first and put on some aftershave.
Frozen Gold were a five-piece band. Lead, rhythm and bass guitars, drums and Hammond organ. Three mikes, including the one for the drummer. The equipment looked surprisingly new; the amps and speakers were hardly battered at all, and the Hammond was in mint condition. They even seemed to have their own two roadies, who were finishing the setting up. No sign of the band themselves yet. It puzzled me that a fairly well-off band should be playing this small, hardly publicised gig. Somehow it made it even less likely they'd be what I was looking for. If I hadn't just started my pint I'd have left then, drained the glass and swept importantly out of the building, into the rain and back to the flat. Another evening in, sitting in front of the one-bar electric fire, watching the black and white telly with the lads, or reading my library books, or messing about with Ken's acoustic guitar, or playing poker for pennies, and maybe a pint or two in Bisland's before ten... but instead I stayed, though I felt a sense of incipient hopelessness.
The band; four guys, one chick. The two girls standing nearby clapped enthusiastically and shouted; the band smiled and waved; the girls seemed to know them by name. 'Ayyy,Davey...!' they yelled; a young blond guy, about my own age and carrying a Les Paul, winked at them, then plugged the Gibson in. He looked like a male model; perfect hair and teeth and skin, broad shoulders, narrow hips. He took off a black leather jacket that looked too soft to be real leather and too expensive to be anything else and revealed a white shirt. Silk, my brain told me, though I didn't remember ever seeing a silk shirt in my life before, not in the flesh. Faded Levis. He adjusted the mike. He was a little smaller than I'd thought at first. He grinned out at the gradually gathering audience. I caught a glimpse of a guy's watch in front of me; good grief, they were starting on time!
I didn't notice the other three men; by then I was looking at the chick. Blonde too, quite small, semi-acoustic guitar, dressed very similarly to the bloke; white and faded blue, reading from the top. Again, about the same age as me, maybe a little older. A looker, I thought. Bet she can't sing and the guitar's not even wired up properly. What a face though. Just on the plump side of beautiful, if you were clutching at straws to find something to criticise. Nobody could look that good and have a voice too.
Jesus ... and what a smile... I was left metaphorless before the warmth of a small, shy grin. She looked from the audience to the Les Paul Adonis and gave him a smile I'd have killed a higher vertebrate for .
I didn't know what this lot were doing here, but they weren't for me. They hadn't played a note but they just looked together, already set up. They gave the impression they already had a recording contract (though I'd been told they hadn't). I was looking for some hardly formed, rough-edged squad of rockers who could more-or-less play, didn't have any original material, and would do as they were told, musically at least; play the goddamn songs and the absolute minimum of flash solos.
I was wrong about the girl. She and the Greek god led off together; lead and rhythm, both singing. 'Jean Genie'; recent Bowie. She could sing and he could play. In fact, she could play too; perfectly decent rhythm guitar, steady and energetic at the same time, like another storey on top of the bass line. The bass was a factory; big, regular, efficient... the chick's rhythm guitar was an award-winning office block, glossy but human. The blond guy's lead was... Jesus, a cathedral. Gothic and Gaudi; by the Late Perpendicular out of the NASA assembly building. It wasn't just speed; he didn't just play fast, like there was some sort of world lead-guitar-playing sprint record waiting to be broken; it was fluid, it just flowed, effortless, natural, perfect. He made all the local board merchants sound like lumbering Jumbos, and this guy was an F1-11 doing aerobatics.