All around there are small whirring creatures, mechanical, sounding like sophisticated mini-robots, but with clockwork motors inside them, slowly, steadily running down. Massive airships, driven through the whistling breeze by buzzing motors that seem far too small for the job.
When the partly realized soundscape was finished, I could see that Crow wanted—desperately—to break the ensuing painful silence with a joke. He wanted to say, right, Walter, very nice, let’s get your leather jacket back out of the wardrobe and I’ll see you onstage at Dingwalls at nine thirty tonight. Instead he got up, walked over to Walter who was looking at the floor, and put his hand on his shoulder, and did so surprisingly gently and kindly.
“This is your father’s work, isn’t it, Walter?”
I jumped in quickly. “What Walter has been experiencing has been extraordinary. He’s connected to the people around him. Look at the soundscape descriptions.”
“I have looked at them,” said Crow. “I see my old buddy in them. But I don’t hear him in the music. Selena fixed this. Siobhan passed it to Harry. Brilliant.”
He turned to Walter.
“You always worried too much about the planet, mate.”
He gestured to the computer and the speakers. “You can’t orchestrate for violins and brass, or classical organ. But you and your dad have made Stockhausen sound like Abba by comparison. Same old shit, but really heavy shit. Great sounds.”
There was no greater compliment for Walter from his old bandmate.
“Steve has to hear this stuff, Walter,” Crow continued gently. “He’ll know exactly how to make it work for a band.”
Walter looked up and there were tears welling in his eyes.
Crow broke the spell. “And of course we need some fucking songs to hold it all together, and to lighten the fucking mood. Leave that to the other grown-ups in your past life. Me and Steve and Patty will make this work.”
Crow left quickly and returned later that same day with Hanson in tow. Walter and I were waiting.
“Walter,” breathed Hanson, holding his old friend in a bear hug. “How the hell are you?”
Hanson was looking slightly bloated and his thinning hair was long. He seemed a little dizzy as he walked around the room and I got the feeling that at any moment he might just fall over slowly and gracefully, like a condemned chimney. At one point he took out a silver cigarette case that was obviously full of pre-made joints, then had a last-minute rethink and snapped it shut. His eyes were bleary. He wasn’t drunk; he just seemed luxuriously and dissonantly worn out, like some grand Russian duke from the time of the Romanovs. His coat was more like a cape, and was lushly embroidered with threads that glinted with gold and silver.
The three men from the old band fell easily into the same kind of catching-up chitchat that Crow and Walter had had earlier in the day. This catch-up was a little easier for Walter because Hanson’s band was famous, always on television and radio. He was perhaps also of the opinion that Steve and Patty had been happy to move on, and had found what they wanted.
After these preliminaries, Steve swung around in a circle, taking in the almost empty room. He was holding a bottle of Evian and waved away the offer of a hot drink.
“Patty told me you were doing brave new stuff.” He gestured around him at the clean, open space. “I love this! Just a piano and a laptop; it must challenge you to get new ideas down.”
He sat at the Yamaha grand piano and performed a flourish evidently meant to show off the piano itself and the reverberant sound of the room rather than his own skills. But despite his world weariness he was obviously still an incredibly adept musician.
“Great sound in here, nice piano too.” He nodded as he stood up, tottering very slightly like an old tree in a strong wind. “Inspiring.”
Crow looked at Walter. His friend was standing quietly, not moving. Crow looked down at Walter’s hands and saw that two of his fingers were moving, fluttering in a nervous motion. Still treating Walter with uncharacteristic gentleness, he put his hand on his friend’s shoulder.
“Are you OK?”
Walter nodded and looked up and smiled. He turned back to Hanson.
“And you and Patty,” he said quietly. “You’ve done so well. How are you guys?”
Hanson was clearly trying hard not to brag, but as he spoke easily about Hero Ground Zero and the triumphs they had enjoyed in the preceding fifteen years, it fell to Crow to bring him down to earth.
“It’s all on fucking tape these days,” Crow sneered. “They don’t play live onstage!”
“Computer you mean.” Hanson was unapologetic. “Not tape. Everyone uses computers now. You have to use them to synchronize the video.”
“Oh yes, the video.” Crow laughed. “We’re thinking of smashing some television sets at Dingwalls to remember the sixties.”
His jibes were on one level affectionate, but they were also accurate: Hanson had made a lot of money and sold huge numbers of CDs, but times were changing. In any case, Hero Ground Zero were fucking awful in Crow’s opinion. Hanson laughed, relying on Crow’s affection, but everyone who had followed the extreme divergence of the members of the Stand after Walter’s departure knew Crow would never hold back. He would say what he felt was true. Hanson would never return the criticism because the Stand had been his band too, and for many years he had been a passionate advocate of what they had done. He wasn’t immovable like Crow. He never said much. For those who are as successful as Hanson there was nothing much to be said to detractors. Better just to let them rant. Where Crow had driven to Sheen in an absurd and anachronistic old American car that polluted the air and used ten gallons of fuel to get there from Camden Lock, Hanson had driven in a powerful sports Lexus hybrid costing as much as a Porsche. Walter later told me he thought they were both nuts, but then he never drove anywhere except to the local horticultural nursery, and he went on his scooter and had his purchases delivered to his house.
“Hanson,” Crow said with a laugh, “fifteen years and really nothing has changed at all. You’re still avoiding the main thing. We are just musicians. That’s all.”
“You’re right, Crow,” agreed Hanson, seeming to give in. “We both feel we’ve been off in a wide circle, a great arc, and we’re back facing the basics. We need great songs. But you know that for Patty and me this was all inevitable. You can call our journey pretentious, and you may be right, but we did what we had to do.”
Walter seemed content to stay out of the discussion. Perhaps he was surprised at how easily he had fallen back into his old role as the front man of their band and felt some of the dignity of that position returning. Then Crow, impatient as ever, turned and looked at him.
“Will you play Hanson that stuff you played me?”
Walter knew what was expected of him, and what he had to do, and was surely aware that Hanson would be a far more receptive listener than Crow.
As Walter touched the space bar on his laptop to start playing the soundscape composed by his father, the mix of music and sound effects mangled together and disturbing, he realized how strange was the day he found himself in: his old bandmates gathered to listen to something he had “written” after a fifteen-year hiatus. This was friendship, if nothing else. I could tell he trusted his two old compatriots to be kind, but to be honest. He knew he was making himself vulnerable, but he also knew he was being true to who he really was as an artist, and that he had changed, for whatever reason. Steve Hanson’s expression as he listened to what Walter had put together was telling. His face first hardened, then his eyes narrowed and took on a gleam. When the sound stopped, he turned to Walter, glanced at Crow, then back to Walter.