Ask Jake to accompany you on a featherweight version of ‘The Girl From Ipanema’ and that’s the pattern he would have used, at top volume. He used to write songs for the band, too, but we never bothered to play any of them. Somehow his twin passions for metaphysics and pop music never cohered into a satisfactory whole. He would end up writing songs which combined the philosophical complexity of ‘Bat Out Of Hell’ with the raw rock’n’roll energy of Schopenhauer’s The World As Will and Representation. I liked Jake, on the whole, but found him infuriating. If he hadn’t been so intelligent I think he would have been one of the stupidest people I ever met in my life.
It was the first time we had all met up since our last, disastrous gig, so before starting to play we sat around for a while and chatted about it. Morale was low in The Alaska Factory, at this time. We’d been playing live for nearly a year now, and it was beginning to feel as though we hadn’t made an inch of progress. We still had the same hard-core following of about nine people, consisting mainly of relatives and girlfriends. (Madeline, incidentally, had never been to hear us play: in fact she had never even heard one of our tapes. She had never expressed any curiosity, and I didn’t feel strongly enough about our material — most of which was written by either Harry or Martin — to make her listen to any of it. For my part, I never talked about Madeline to the rest of the band. They knew her name and knew that she was my girlfriend, but they had never met her, and I was happy to keep it that way. It satisfied something in me to be leading two completely independent lives. I knew, too, that she wouldn’t have liked them; she wouldn’t have liked the tattiness of Thorn Bird Studios, either, or the places where we used to eat afterwards, or the venues where Chester used to arrange for us to play.) Our hold on the pathetically simple music we used to play remained as fragile as ever. It still wasn’t unknown for us to lose time completely in the middle of a twelve-bar blues. And the thing that we were all holding out for, that mirage, the holy grail which is the gleam in the eye of every aspiring band — a recording contract — seemed, as usual, to be utterly beyond our reach.
This evening, moreover, we had business to discuss, because we’d decided that we were going to record a new demo tape. We’d each arranged to take time off work and we’d booked into Room 2 for Tuesday morning, in four days’ time. Unusually, and largely because I had the support of Chester, I’d managed to persuade the others that we should record one of my pieces, an uplifting, danceable sort of number called ‘Stranger in a Foreign Land’ which was one of the latest things I’d written (Harry had helped me with the words). It called for one or two modest key changes and some shifts in dynamics that I wasn’t sure we would be able to handle, so we agreed to spend most of that night’s session practising it.
I gave Martin a chord sheet that I’d written out during my lunch break, and then turned to Jake.
‘I think — er — I think we want to give this a kind of Afro-Latin feel,’ I explained. ‘You know, lots of off-beats.’
‘Uh-huh,’ he said, nervously.
I looked to Harry for support.
‘Isn’t that right?’
He nodded. ‘Yeah, it’s…’ He begun to tap his feet and count silently to himself. ‘It wants to go, sort of… chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga, chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga. Isn’t that the sort of thing?’
I frowned. ‘Well, I was thinking more in terms of… chuggachug chuggachug chuggachug chuggachug… You know, as if we had shakers or something.’
‘Well, why doesn’t Jake try those out, and see which fits?’
Jake looked at us, from one to the other, nodded, spat on his hands, picked up his heaviest sticks and launched straight into:
After a few bars I signalled to him to stop but he was enjoying himself too much, and before I could do anything Martin had joined in, hammering out the same two chords incessandy so that the whole thing started to sound like a grotesque parody of a Status Quo number.
‘All right, all right!’ I shouted and waved my arms and managed to get them to stop. ‘That sounded… just great, boys, but do you think we could get back to my song?’
‘That was your song,’ said Martin.
‘It was?’
‘Those are the chords you’ve written here.’ He showed me the chord sheet. ‘E and F sharp, right?’
‘Well… nearly, Martin, nearly. You see, what we actually have here is an E minor nine, and an F sharp minor seven. You were playing major chords.’
‘Does it make much difference?’
‘Well, technically — yes. You see, they have different notes in them.’
‘I think we should keep things simple.’
‘Simplicity’s great, Martin, I’m all for simplicity. Don’t get me wrong. It’s just that what you were playing, from a — well, from a musical point of view, really — is completely different from what I wrote.’
He didn’t seem pleased by this criticism, and to express his annoyance he said, ‘I think I’d better tune up again.’
Knowing that this would take some time, I left him to it, and went to find the lavatory.
It was either on the first floor or the second floor — after you’d gone across all those little landings, and up and down so many stairs, it was impossible to be sure — and when I came to find my way back to our studio, I got lost again. Just as I thought I knew where I was going, the lights went off (they were on some kind of time switch) and I had to grope my way along a pitch black corridor. At the end of the corridor, I found myself up against a locked door. It was very quiet. I was about to turn back, when I suddenly thought that I had heard a voice. I could have sworn that I heard a voice shout something behind the door — but as if from a distance. I could tell that the voice (which was male) was shouting quite loud, although the noise was heavily muffled by the door. Then again, perhaps I was imagining it. I stood there for a few seconds, straining to hear more, and then a hand gripped my shoulder. At the same time, the lights came back on, and I found that I was standing outside the door to Studio B, with Vincent’s face pushed up close to mine.
‘Oy, Rumpelstiltsken!’ he said. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’
‘I was lost,’ I said.
‘Get away from there, will you? Your room’s bloody miles away. Come on, follow me.’
He tried the studio door, to make sure it was still locked, then led me away.
‘Sorry about this,’ I said. ‘It’s just that it’s hard to find your way around this place sometimes.’
‘You’ve been here often enough,’ he said; but he seemed to be making an effort to let his anger subside. ‘Anyway, how’s it going tonight? Getting plenty done, are you?’
‘We’re rehearsing this piece for Tuesday,’ I explained. ‘You know, that session you’re going to produce for us?’
The reminder seemed to cause him no particular pleasure. We weren’t keen on the thought of a whole day in the studio with Vincent, either, but he came with the price of the session, and none of us knew how to operate an 8-track desk ourselves. At least he was experienced, if his own stories were to be believed.