Leon believed that the new music could be a force for social change. The fire still burned. The audience just needed to be radicalised. And the musicians just needed to be educated. Basically all you needed to change was everything.
Most of the new groups just didn't get it. They dreamed of the same old stuff - sexual opportunities, uncut white drugs and driving a Rolls-Royce into a swimming pool. They thought that anti-Nazism was just a cool brand name to be dropped in interviews, just another pose to be struck, as empty as Mick lagger marching to Grosvenor Square to stop the Vietnam War in the Sixties.
But Leon knew this was real. The Labour Government wasn't going to last for ever. Jim Callaghan wasn't going to be around for much longer. And then what would happen? Fighting in the streets, Leon reckoned. Struggle. Civil unrest. More riots. Read your history books, he thought. Ask A. J. P. Taylor. See what happens when the centre is too weak to hold. A Lewisham every day of the year.
And when it was all over, from the ashes would rise a better world where racism was defeated and Leon's hair did exactly what it was told to do.
THREE
I tell you, Dag Wood is hung like Red Rum,' Terry said. 'When he ets it out, it's like - I don't know - an Indian snake charmer… r a sailor with a rope… he sort of has to unfurl it.'
This was one of the best parts of the job, Terry thought, oming home and telling your mates what had happened, all the interesting stuff that you weren't allowed to put in a magazine..^at they sold in sweet shops. He loved it. He looked over at Misty sitting on his desk and she smiled encouragement. He knew how to tell a story.
'Now are you sure it was Red Rum?' Leon said, slightly bashful in the presence of Misty. He had only recently learned how to be around her without blushing. He was sitting on his desk, knees drawn up to his chin, smiling as Terry paced their little office, holding his hands out like a fisherman measuring the one that got away. 'Are you sure it wasn't Arkle he was hung like?'
'What's Red Rum?' Ray said, swinging back and forth in his chair, fiddling with his tape recorder, his hair falling in his face.
'Famous racehorse,' Leon said. 'Won the Grand National lots of times. Despite being built like Dag Wood.'
'Definitely Red Rum,' Terry said. 'I got a good look. We were standing at these traffic lights, right? Just me and Dag, in the middle
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of the night. And he's asking me about the scene in London -how good the bands really are, what the audience are going to make of him - and this VW Beetle pulls up at a red light, and Dag whips it out - unfurls himself - and then… takes a leak on the Beetle with this enormous thing.' Terry shook his head. He still couldn't believe it. The outrageous act had been done so casually, so naturally, that he still couldn't work out if Dag had done it to shock him, or if he was truly that untamed. 'I'll never forget the look on that Beetle driver's face.'
Misty slid off Terry's desk and half-raised a hand in salute, leaving their office with a wry smile and a raised eyebrow, like a wife of twenty-five years who enjoyed the story, but who had heard it before: Dag taking cocaine until his ears bled, Dag reducing a woman reporter from Fleet Street to tears, Dag banging groupies two at a time after his girlfriend had left town.
There were things about Dag that had made Terry uncomfortable - the cruelty, the casual, almost gluttonous infidelity, the choice of drugs - everybody in London under the age of twenty-five believed that cocaine was the chemical equivalent of a feather cut. But Dag had been like every rock star that Terry had ever met - a great seducer.
Dag had gone out of his way to make Terry love him - giving him a book of Van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo that Dag had been given by David Bowie - there was a neatly written inscription at the front - borrowing some instruments in a West Berlin jazz bar so that Dag and his band could play a few of their greatest hits, showing him his extraordinary cock - and so Terry did.
In fact, Terry loved Dag so very much that there was one thing he had left out of both his piece and the other story he told his friends. Dag looked old.
Really old. Horribly old. If you could imagine Rip Van Winkle as a porn star, then you were getting the general idea about Dag Wood and the way he looked. Terry had been so eager to hero worship Dag, so desperate to lionise this man that all the new bands name-checked as a major influence, so hungry to be his best friend that he hadn't had the heart to say how prehistoric Dag looked.
Dag's body - which he showed off at every possible opportunity, habitually tearing off his shirt not just on stage but during interviews and at sound checks and at the hotel's buffet breakfast - was still in great shape, lean and pumped, like one of those Charles Atlas ads at the back of DC and Marvel comics.
But the ravages of ten thousand nights of debauchery and depravity were in every deeply ploughed line of Dag's- face, like Dorian Gray in silver lame trousers with his hair dyed white. Dag Wood looked like a recently deceased bodybuilder. But Terry kept that to himself. Because it didn't fit his story.
The three of them looked up as the editor of The Paper appeared in their doorway. Kevin White was twenty-nine years old, and every inch a grown-up version of the Mod he had once been. The only man in the office who came to work in a suit. White was tall, powerfully built, with curtain-parting hair, like one of the Small Faces around the time of 'Lazy Sunday'. 'Can I see you in my office, Ray?'
Ray shoved his tape recorder in his desk and followed White to his office. Leon pulled a copy of Red Mist out of his shoulder bag and began thumbing through it. Terry sat at his desk, closed his eyes and sighed with contentment.
It was good, yes, telling his friends was good. Almost the best part.
But when Terry introduced Dag Wood to Misty later at the Western World, and they both saw just how much the other one loved him, then it would be perfect. 'So how's it going?'
Kevin White slumped into his chair and put his feet on his desk. The editor had the only corner office in The Paper, and Ray
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could see what seemed like all of London stretching out behind him. 'It's going okay,' Ray said, making his fringe fall forward over his face. Even after three years, he couldn't quite get over this shyness he felt around the editor. Ray had known White since he was fifteen years old, turning up in the reception of The Paper with a handwritten think piece on the Eagles when he should have been writing about An Inspector Calls for an English Literature paper. White had never treated him with anything but kindness. But somehow that only made Ray's shyness worse. It was funny. Ray had never yet met a rock star that he felt in awe of, but he was in awe of Kevin White. 'Your mum okay?' She's on the Valium, Ray thought. She cries in her sleep. Sometimes she can't get out of bed in the morning. If you mention John she looks like she's been given an electric shock. 'She's all right,' Ray said.
White glanced at the photograph on his desk of two smiling toddlers, a small boy and a smaller girl. He was the only person in the office who had a photo of children on his desk. 'I can't imagine what she's been through,' White said, more to himself than Ray. 'No parent should ever have to bury their child.' Ray didn't know what to say. Unless they were talking about music, he always felt tongue-tied around the editor. Like every other writer on The Paper, Ray thought that White was touched with greatness. Everybody knew the story. Even the readers.
In the early Seventies The Paper was a pop rag in terminal decline, called The Music Paper, if anything could ever be that corny - but then all music papers had corny tides, from Melody Maker to New Musical Express to Sounds to Disc, they all had names that had sounded groovy back when dinosaurs walked the earth - and Kevin White had saved it.