‘No, that was earlier, about a month earlier.’
‘If you two are off wandering down Memory Lane again,’ I said, ‘I’m going to go for a walk or something.’
They ignored me. Once they got going on this subject, Jake and Harry (who had both been in their teens during the late seventies) were unstoppable.
‘What about The Vibrators, eh? “We Vibrate".’
‘The Jam. The Buzzcocks. The Adverts. Siouxsie.’
‘May the seventh, nineteen seventy-seven. The London Rainbow. I was there. What a fucking brilliant night that was. The Clash, The Slits, The Jam and Subway Sect.’
‘X-Ray Spex, “Oh Bondage Up Yours". Great single.’
‘"Spiral Scratch".’
‘"Pretty Vacant".’
‘"Right to Work".’
‘"Get a Grip".’
‘Do you remember The Rezillos?’
‘Do you remember Alternative TV?’
‘Stiff Little Fingers.’
‘The Desperate Bicycles.’
‘XTC.’
‘999.’
‘Slaughter and the Dogs.’
‘What about The Dwarves of Death?’
The flood of reminiscence stopped and Jake stared at Harry in surprise.
‘Who?’
‘The Dwarves of Death — they did that single, what was it called… “Black and Blue”.’
‘You’re making this up.’
‘No, you remember them, surely? I mean, it didn’t chart or anything, but they were a real cult band.’
‘I think you’re pulling my leg.’
‘No I’m not. They did two singles — “Black and Blue", and then another one, I can’t remember the name.’
‘Look, I was around at the time, right? I can remember the name of every band from the punk era. Stop taking the piss.’
‘I’m not. Honest. You must remember. There were four of them — they had this amazing girl singer with a really unpleasant voice — made Poly Styrene sound like Kiri Te Kanawa — and they had this guitarist and this bass player who were both dwarves. Brothers. That’s where they got the name.’
‘That’s only three,’ I pointed out.
‘Well, there was some other guy. The drummer or something.’
‘Sorry, Harry, I’m not buying it.’
‘Are you calling me a liar?’
‘I just don’t believe you, that’s all.’
‘Look, why don’t we ask Vincent?’ I said, thinking that we already had enough trouble on our hands without falling out over a stupid argument like this. ‘He’s always going on about how he was right there in the thick of it when punk happened. Ask him, he’d remember.’
And so it was Vincent who settled the argument, after a fashion, with a curt ‘Nope, never heard of them’, when we got back into the studio. Harry began to sulk and Jake grinned in triumph. Then shordy afterwards, he and Martin left: their jobs were done and there was little point in them hanging around to watch the tedious process of me and Harry finishing the song off.
We had recorded the drums in stereo, so now, with the drums and bass guitar all laid down, we only had four tracks left to complete the recording. We decided to put the vocal line down on one track and leave the other three free for keyboards. The real hook of the song was a recurring figure which should really have been played on the saxophone, but we didn’t know any saxophone players so we had to make do with a fairly convincing sample which Vincent had found for us. I recorded that, and a piano part, and added some strings, and then Harry had a go at the vocals:
Now and then
I wonder if I should have come here
Real men
Who’s going to ask me what I’ve done here?
I search for buried treasure
Precious gifts from out of Araby
I know it’s now or never
And when I’m down, will you carry me?
I shook my head sadly as he sang these lines. I’ve always found it hard to write lyrics, and as Harry struggled to get the top B at the beginning of each phrase, these ones sounded more lame than ever. Then there was the chorus:
And then I went away
And I left behind the times
And the place where she stayed
Often lingers in my mind
Wish I knew what you planned
Feel your fingers in my hand
I just hope I can stand –
Stranger in a foreign land
By five o’clock the recording was finished. We took an hour off to have some tea, then came back to do the mix-down. We listened to the finished version a couple of times and tried to feel good about it.
‘There you are, boys,’ said Vincent, presenting us with a reel of one-inch tape in a white cardboard box. ‘Your passport to success.’
‘Sarcastic bastard,’ said Harry, when he’d gone out of the room. He opened the box and looked at the tape. ‘I suppose we’d better get a few cassettes and make some copies of this, had we?’
‘Perhaps we’d better leave it a few days,’ I said, ‘and listen to it again.’
Harry must have sensed the pessimism that this implied. He nodded understandingly.
‘I believe you,’ I added. ‘About that band.’
He shrugged.
‘Doesn’t matter really, does it?’
‘Look, I’ve got this friend, back in Sheffield. He knows everything about music. He’s a walking encyclopaedia. I’ll write and ask him — he’ll know.’
‘It’s no big deal. Really.’
But I could see that it mattered to him, and I decided to do something about it that evening. Besides, I had been out of touch with Derek for far too long.
*
The tune of ‘Stranger in a Foreign Land’ was still dancing around my head as I waited for Madeline outside the Swiss Centre in Leicester Square on Thursday evening. I suppose when I wrote those words, ‘Wish I knew what you planned, Feel your fingers in my hand’, she had been at the back of my mind — where she always was, when she wasn’t at the front. The chords I had used were meant to have a bitter-sweet feel — alternating minor sevenths, a whole tone apart, a favourite mannerism of mine — but on the whole the piece was designed to sound optimistic and forward-looking, which was still how I tried to feel about the relationship: in the face, it has to be said, of much discouraging evidence.
And that evening, the evidence started to pile up. It started with her being late. This in itself was unusuaclass="underline" she had never kept me waiting for more than about five minutes before, but this time she was more than half an hour late, and it was past nine o’clock by the time I spotted her threading through the crowds from Piccadilly Circus.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘My watch must be slow.’
‘You aren’t wearing a watch,’ I pointed out.
Madeline pulled her coat tightly around herself.
‘Don’t snap at me when I’ve just arrived,’ she said. ‘What are we going to do, anyway?’
‘I thought we could go to a film, but it’s too late now, they’ve all started.’ I expected her to apologize again at this point, but she didn’t. ‘So, I don’t know… I suppose we might as well get something to eat.’
‘Don’t sound so enthusiastic.’
‘It’s just that I’ve hardly got any money.’
The sheer predictability of my feelings for Madeline never ceased to surprise me. Ebb and flow, ebb and flow. In her absence, a simple longing; as soon as we were together again, irritation, petulance, angry devotion. Whenever I saw her I was immediately struck by how beautiful she was, and then immediately devastated by the thought that I had known her for six months and still not even come close to making love to her. And yet, just when I was dying to give vent to my emotion, I was expected to be cool and level-headed, to look around me and to choose, from the hundreds of restaurants on offer in the Leicester Square area, the one where we were to go and have dinner. French? Italian? Greek? Indian? Chinese? Thai? Vietnamese? Indonesian? Malaysian? Vegetarian? Nepalese?