Big Boy Did It and Ran Away (29 page)

In this sense, Div was the polar opposite of Simon, who gave the impression of being incredibly together, clinically organised, and yet let Ray down on more occasions than it was healthy to dwell upon. It had latterly occurred to him that the crucial difference was Div gave a fuck.

There were many ways, in fact, in which Div and Simon were opposites, which probably explained why they didn’t get along. The weird thing – no, perhaps the appropriate thing – was that it wasn’t an entirely mutual antipathy.

Simon, tending towards the highly strung, reserved a lot more venom for Div than Div, being more laid back than most other human beings could achieve without opiates, could be arsed mustering for Simon. Div was the only person Ray could remember not being angered to the point of destructive rage by something Simon had done, despite being the increasingly frequent target of his antics and abuse. This was because Div was also the only person who absolutely refused to take Simon seriously, and Simon liked to be taken very, very seriously. Obviously, there was some quality vicious‐
circle action going on there.

Ironically, the one thing they had in common was also the best illustration of what made them so very different. It was, in a word, Queen. Not the parasite, but the rock band: Freddie and Brian, John and Roger, Scaramouche and Beelzebub, thunderbolts and lightning. Queen was Div’s religion and Simon’s guilty little secret.

When they all shared a flat in third year (the three of them plus Simon’s long‐
suffering mate Ross), music was often less a shared enthusiasm than a battleground. It wasn’t simply a matter of debating the comparative merits of each other’s tastes and collections; much of what was said about music wasn’t about music at all, but a surrogate outlet for the tensions that were natural between four adolescents in such close proximity.

Ray would occasionally (and very, very foolishly) play the white dove and encourage everyone to agree to disagree. After all, they each had their own stereos in their respective rooms, so volume considerations aside, what did it matter what someone else was playing? Well, it sure mattered to Simon. All it took was Div to stick on a Queen album and Simon would be ripping into him for it as soon as he entered the Neutral Zone (aka the kitchen), demanding to know how he could listen to such garbage and growing all the more frustrated at Div’s refusal to offer any explanation beyond that he liked it.

Ray hadn’t been very familiar with the Queen oeuvre prior to living with Div, having written them off as the pantomime dames of British rock, listened to on Ford Sierra car stereos by people who bought one album a year, usually at Woolworth’s. It wasn’t hard to see why they wouldn’t be Simon’s cup of tea, but a little more tricky to explain the disproportionate ire their music provoked. But that was before Ray had heard the phrase ‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much’.

Ray was accompanying Simon on his regular weekend trip to his parents’ place in Giffnock to retrieve his laundry. Simon had gone downstairs to get them some coffees and left Ray alone in his old bedroom, where he spotted a pile of records at the bottom of an open wardrobe. Ray crouched down to get a closer look. In the main, the collection comprised valuables and rarities Ray had heard Simon boast about. There were picture discs, coloured vinyl twelve‐
inch singles, bootlegs, limited‐
edition gatefold sleeve covers: treasures Simon had tapes of at the flat, but understandably didn’t want any harm coming to the originals. Underneath that lot, however, were twelve Queen albums, stacked chronologically from Queen to The Works. The guy even had Hot Space, and had evidently forgiven them for it, given the subsequent purchase of its successor.

The picture was clear. Barring the existence of a sibling he inexplicably failed to mention, Simon had been heavily into Freddie and the boys from an early age; Ray was guessing around Bo‐
Rhap, 75–76, with the earlier material explored retrospectively. Some time after 1984, however, coinciding with his mid‐
to‐
late teens, there had been a Stalinesque purge, possibly the same month as he bought his first Bauhaus twelve‐
inch or maybe his first can of hairspray. It was one thing to grow out of a band, but this was like the revisionism that followed a military coup. Messrs Mercury, May, Deacon and Taylor had been airbrushed out of all photographs and their works hidden away in a vault.

At least this finally explained Simon’s advocacy of grandiose stagecraft, which had always sat incongruously with his, ahem, official record collection. He detested the minimalism not just of bands he hated, such as The Smiths, but even of those he liked, such as the Mary Chain. He couldn’t take all that standing‐
in‐
one‐
place stuff, looking bored and indifferent, and as for the twenty‐
minute set, don’t go there, man. Ray now understood: onstage, Simon wanted to see the kind of thing Queen did, just as long as it wasn’t Queen doing it. He had been raised on the Mercury ethos that ‘anything worth doing is worth overdoing’, but the problem latterly was that Freddie Mercury was as far from cool as the planet Mercury was from Pluto. To Simon, cool was everything. Image was everything, and the perception of his peers was the thing he worried about most.

Div wasn’t winding Simon up with his simplistic explanation (well, maybe just a bit or he wouldn’t be Div). Div listened to Queen because he liked their music. Loved their music. That was all. His overall rock’n’roll philosophy was also very simple: if it was loud, he generally liked it. This was nothing to do with volume. If you listened to The Clash on a pocket tranny, they would still be loud, just like if you listened to Belle and Sebastian at ten thousand decibels, they would still be quiet. Ray hadn’t been round chez Div recently, but considered it unlikely he would own any B&S discs. Granted, Queen weren’t the loudest thing in Div’s student record pile, but they were loud enough, and that overblown grandiosity counted for a lot too.

Despite all of this, they each had enough in common musically (even that they were admitting to) for them to make the colossal but glorious mistake of starting a band. In retrospect, Ray could see that it was probably motivated by a subconscious awareness that there wasn’t quite enough tension between them as things stood, and what the situation really needed was an undertaking guaranteed to push them over the edge.

It started innocently enough, one Sunday afternoon, but then alcohol got involved and foolish things were said and done. They’d spent the preceding Saturday in the QM, watching the ‘Battle of the Bands’, a monthly opportunity for student hopefuls to strut their stuff in front of apathetic afternoon drinkers. The Entertainments Convenor had cynically proposed this democratic slot as part of his election manifesto, winning him the vote of every chord‐
strumming wanna be on campus. In that respect, his victory was also his punishment.

The audience at these things tended to be made up of three factions, in ascending order of magnitude: friends of the performers along to offer moral support; folk looking for a quiet drink and a blether, who had failed to see the Convenor’s single four‐
inch‐
square poster publicising the event in one (out of order) cubicle of the Gents’ toilets; and rubber‐
neckers having a good laugh at the train wreck. Simon, Div, Ross and Ray entered in the second category, but had very soon transformed to join the third.

They were still talking about it late on Saturday night, Simon being inventively scathing about what they’d witnessed and the rest having their own digs when they were able to get a word in. Simon’s scorn was unquestionably fuelled in part by frustration that these no‐
hopers had nonetheless managed to team up and get on a stage, something his own greater talents had thus far failed to achieve. He had been for a few auditions only to find, when he got there, that the existing members of the proposed band were ‘total arseholes’, which may or may not have been another way of saying he didn’t get the nod. Either that or they weren’t specifically looking for a lead guitarist/
lead vocalist/
sole lyricist/
stage coordinator/
cover designer/
rock visionary at that particular moment.

The consensus that they could do better themselves led to Ray’s imprudent admission that he had a drumkit back in Houston, and Div’s astonishing revelation that he could play bass. He had chosen this instrument, as he claimed in typical Div style, because it had fewer strings than a normal guitar and was therefore less work. This turned out, also in typical Div style, to be deceptive, self‐
deprecatory mince. Div could play a standard six‐
string more than competently, but in aspiring to play along with his fave records, he had found it a sight easier to learn John Deacon’s riffs than Brian May’s.

Ray, for his part, had never laid claim to any musical talent, but he had been fairly blessed when it came to skills involving hand‐
eye coordination, not that it took much aim to hit a drum. His abilities at computer games, archery (which he took up at uni simply because it was on offer) and arguably even cartoons stemmed from a degree of natural dexterity that he had dedicatedly applied to no useful purpose throughout his adult life.

It was suggested by Simon that they get together first thing on Sunday for a jam session, what with there being a ready‐
made rhythm section in the house to join the aspiring axe duo of himself and Ross. Despite Ray’s gross scepticism about how good an idea it would sound in the cold light of day, sure enough the Dark Man rose at the crack of half‐
eleven and borrowed his mum’s car to ferry Ray’s kit in from Ayrshire. They set up in Simon’s room (naturally the biggest), Ray damping the kit with towels and jumpers, and got underway as soon as Div got back from his folks’ place with his bass and a carry‐
out.

After half an hour of doing unspeakable things to Tommy Gun, they were ready to chuck it. Unfortunately, they persevered, and by half‐
ten they were all drunk enough to think they were beginning to sound not bad. By midnight, they had agreed to go in for the next month’s Battle of the Bands ‘just for a laugh’, and by two o’clock they had a name. Well, actually, they had four names, with a decision deferred until the next session, when they all knew Simon would get his way.

He did. In preference to Slideshow (Ross, cool and simple), Manic Minors (Ray, after a ZX Spectrum game) and All Dead (Div, from a Queen song, natch), they were to be The Bacchae. No, really. It was the name of a play by Euripides, the title referring to a female cult in naked hedonistic frenzy, which was itself all very rock’n’roll, but the actual name stank. The Bacchae, for fuck’s sake. Div said it sounded like something you needed ointment for.

When they first reconvened, the only dose of reality to puncture their plans was the remembrance that they were a fortnight from the end of term, so there was no Battle of the Bands to aim at until at least seven weeks hence. That left time enough – particularly including the Easter holidays – for something truly horrible to get underway.

Perhaps it would have been better if they had been utterly appalling, as opposed to just bad, as that way it would have soon petered out through lack of enthusiasm and mutual embarrassment. Ray and Ross certainly did their part, contributing sufficient mediocrity and borderline competence to puncture the ambitions of any self‐
respecting combo, but unfortunately Simon and even Div let the side down badly. Div, once the rust was shaken off, turned out to be a far better bass player than he had let on, and as for Simon, well, the guy could play guitar. There were people who could play the guitar and people who could play guitar, and with Simon there was no definite article. Between their unevenly matched talents, they had the basis for something that they were fairly confident wouldn’t get them bottled off the stage.

To be fair, there was only so far you could go wrong with the classic four‐
piece line‐
up, as long as you knew your own limits and had realistic ambitions. And thereby hung the problem. Simon was an undeniably talented musician and had this grand, highly developed vision, but lacked the more immediate clarity to see that they weren’t it. He had been cooking up his schemes for conquering the rock world for a frustratingly long time, and had such belief in himself that as soon as he had a quorate line‐
up, he just assumed the path was set. He also assumed that the rest of them would a) come to realise this; b) toe the line; and c) instantly turn into accomplished musicians.

His impatience was obvious in his insistence on the name. Talk about blowing your wad. His band, the band of his vision, were to be The Bacchae. Fair enough, everyone had a rock’n’roll dream. But most would surely bide their time a wee bit, rather than forcing the issue on their first student covers‐
band after what it would be generous to call one rehearsal. Simon’s mind, though, was already years down the line. Within a fortnight, while the rest of them were optimistically talking about their first gig, he was talking about resenting his future fans for what they wanted to take from him.

‘I hate all that deliberate hysteria. It really fuckin’ offends me to think of these yahoos shoutin’ for certain songs, Christ, demanding what they want to hear. You’ve spent ages puttin’ a show together, but you’ve to abandon your playlist because they’ve decided what they want from your set? You’re just supposed to perform for them on request. Do they think you’re their personal lapdancer?’

All of which was bound to make for a very loud thud when he came back down to earth.

Ray found it difficult to admit to people that their glorified‐
jamsession‐
with‐
aspirations‐
of‐
pub‐
rock was called The Bacchae, while Div refused to utter the name at all. Instead, he began referring to the band as The Arguments, which was far more appropriate, as they spent more time and energy doing that than on actually playing.

There was very little that they didn’t all disagree on, but once Simon had unilaterally signed them up for the next BOTB, they had to decide what their set should comprise, and a stushie ensued that made what had passed already seem like a lost golden age of harmony and accord. While the other three traded suggestions that they thought might be mutually palatable, Simon was, as ever, operating on a different plane, and handed out screeds of photocopied lyrics; his idea of egalitarianism being that they all got a say in selecting which of his compositions would make up the playlist. When civil terms of address were reestablished, two or three hours later, it was suggested to Simon that they were less likely to go down like a cup of cold sick if they stuck mainly to songs people knew, maybe sneaking one original track into the set if they weren’t getting too many missiles thrown at them.