The woman we have come to see is called Marie LaSalle; she’s got a couple of solo records out on an independent label, and once had one of her songs covered by Nanci Griffith. Dick says Marie lives here now; he read somewhere that she finds England more open to the kind of music she makes, which means, presumably, that we’re cheerfully indifferent rather than actively hostile. There are a lot of single men here, not single as in unmarried, but single as in no friends. In this sort of company the three of us—me morose and monosyllabic, Dick nervy and shy, Barry solicitously self-censoring—constitute a wild and massive office outing.
There’s no support, just a crappy PA system squelching out tasteful country-rock, and people stand around cradling their pints and reading the handbills that were thrust at them on the way in. Marie LaSalle comes onstage (as it were—there is a little platform and a couple of microphones a few yards in front of us) at nine; by five past nine, to my intense irritation and embarrassment, I’m in tears, and the feel-nothing world that I’ve been living in for the last few days has vanished.
There are many songs that I’ve been trying to avoid since Laura went, but the song that Marie LaSalle opens with, the song that makes me cry, is not one of them. The song that makes me cry has never made me cry before; in fact, the song that makes me cry used to make me puke. When it was a hit, I was at college, and Charlie and I used to roll our eyes and stick our fingers down our throats when somebody—invariably a geography student, or a girl training to be a primary school teacher (and I don’t see how you can be accused of snobbishness if all you are doing is stating the plain, simple truth), put it on the jukebox in the bar. The song that makes me cry is Marie LaSalle’s version of Peter Frampton’s ‘Baby, I Love Your Way.’
Imagine standing with Barry, and Dick, in his Lemon-heads T-shirt, and listening to a cover version of a Peter Frampton song, and blubbering! Peter Frampton! ‘Show Me the Way’! That perm! That stupid bag thing he used to blow into, which made his guitar sound like Donald Duck! Frampton Comes Alive, top of the American rock charts for something like seven hundred and twenty years, and bought, presumably, by every brain-dead, coke-addled airhead in L.A.! I understand that I was in dire need of symptoms to help me understand that I have been deeply traumatized by recent events, but did they have to be this extreme? Couldn’t God have settled for something just mildly awful—an old Diana Ross hit, say, or an Elton John original?
And it doesn’t stop there. As a result of Marie LaSalle’s cover version of ‘Baby, I Love Your Way’ (“I know I’m not supposed to like that song, but I do,” she says with a cheeky smile when she’s finished), I find myself in two apparently contradictory states: a) I suddenly miss Laura with a passion that has been entirely absent for the last four days, and b) I fall in love with Marie LaSalle.
These things happen. They happen to men, at any rate. Or to this particular man. Sometimes. It’s difficult to explain why or how you can find yourself pulled in two different directions at once, and obviously a certain amount of dreamy irrationality is a prerequisite. But there’s a logic to it, too. Marie is pretty, in that nearly cross-eyed American way—she looks like a slightly plumper, post-Partridge Family, pre-L.A.Law Susan Dey—and if you were going to develop a spontaneous and pointless crush on somebody, you could do a lot worse. (One Saturday morning, I woke up, switched on the TV, and found myself smitten with Sarah Greene from Going Live, a devotion I kept very quiet about at the time.) And she’s charming, as far as I can tell, and not without talent: once she has got Peter Frampton out of her system, she sticks to her own songs, and they’re good, affecting and funny and delicate. All my life I have wanted to go to bed with—no, have a relationship with—a musician: I’d want her to write songs at home, and ask me what I thought of them, and maybe include one of our private jokes in the lyrics, and thank me in the sleeve notes, maybe even include a picture of me on the inside cover, in the background somewhere, and I could watch her play live from the back, in the wings (although I’d look a bit of a berk at the Lauder, where there are no wings: I’d be standing on my own, in full view of everybody).
The Marie bit is easy enough to understand, then. The Laura thing takes a bit more explaining, but what it is, think, is this: sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostalgic and hopeful all at the same time. Marie’s the hopeful, forward part of it—maybe not her, necessarily, but somebody like her, somebody who can turn things around for me. (Exactly that: I always think that women are going to save me, lead me through to a better life, that they can change and redeem me.) And Laura’s the backward part, the last person I loved, and when I hear those sweet, sticky acoustic guitar chords, I reinvent our time together, and, before I know it, we’re in the car trying to sing the harmonies on ‘Love Hurts’ and getting it wrong and laughing. We never did that in real life. We never sang in the car, and we certainly never laughed when we got something wrong. This is why I shouldn’t be listening to pop music at the moment.
Tonight, it really doesn’t matter either way. Marie could come up to me as I was leaving and ask if I wanted to go for something to eat; or I could get home, and Laura would be sitting there, sipping tea and waiting nervously for absolution. Both of these daydreams sound equally attractive, and either would make me very happy.
Marie takes a break after an hour or so. She sits on the stage and swigs from a bottle of Budweiser, and some guy comes out with a box of cassettes and puts them on the stage beside her. They’re £5.99, but they haven’t got any pennies, so really they’re six quid. We all buy one from her, and to our horror she speaks to us.
“You enjoying yourselves?”
We nod.
“Good, ’cause I’m enjoying myself.”
“Good,” I say, and that seems to be the best I can do for the moment.
I’ve only got a tenner, so I stand there twiddling my thumbs while the guy fishes around for four-pound coins.
“You live in London now, is that right?” I ask her.
“Yup. Not far from here, actually.”
“You like it?” Barry asks. Good one. I wouldn’t have thought of that.
“It’s OK. Hey, you guys might be the sort to know. Are there any good record shops up around here, or do I have to go into the West End?”
What’s the use of taking offense? We are the sort of guys who would know about record shops. That’s what we look like, and that’s what we are.
Barry and Dick almost fall over in their haste to explain.
“He’s got one!”
“He’s got one!”
“In Holloway!”
“Just up the Seven Sisters Road!”
“Championship Vinyl!”
“We work there!”
“You’d love it!”
“Come in!”
She laughs at the onslaught of enthusiasm.
“What d’you sell?”
“Bit of everything good. Blues, country, vintage soul, new wave … ”
“Sounds great.”
Somebody else wants to talk to her, so she smiles nicely at us and turns round. We go back to where we were standing.
“What did you tell her about the shop for?” I ask the others.
“I didn’t know it was classified information,” says Barry. “I mean, I know we don’t have any customers, but I thought that was a bad thing, not, like, a business strategy.”
“She won’t spend any money.”
“No, course not. That’s why she was asking if we knew any good record shops. She just wants to come in and waste our time.”
I know I’m being stupid, but I don’t want her coming to my shop. If she came into my shop, I might really get to like her, and then I’d be waiting for her to come in all the time, and then when she did come in I’d be nervous and stupid, and probably end up asking her out for a drink in some cack-handed roundabout way, and either she wouldn’t catch my drift, and I’d feel like an idiot, or she’d turn me down flat, and I’d feel like an idiot. And on the way home after the gig, I’m already wondering whether she’ll come tomorrow, and whether it will mean anything if she does, and if it does mean something, then which one of us it will mean something to, although Barry is probably a nonstarter.