Dancing in the Darkness (5 page)
Read Dancing in the Darkness Online
Authors: Frankie Poullain
I
t all started two weeks into my brother-visit vacation, when we happened to bump into a panicking Danish education officer who’d come over to Venezuela to rescue his students from enforced labour camps. They were supposed to be on a six-month ‘travelling classroom’, learning Spanish while taking in the exotic waterfalls, tropical jungles and eerie tepui mountains of Venezuela, but a feckless operator had them toiling in the fields and labouring on construction sites for his own personal gain.
My brother Chris, an opportunist from the school of hard knocks, expertly set about blagging the contract – I could organise the educational and cultural side of things (I’d been organised enough to drop out of university, after all), while he’d provide the fun and adventure. It was a valuable contract: 80
students a year staying for six-month durations at a time.
*
I only had a three-month visa, but as my musical career seemed to have stalled, I decided to stay for a year and see out this undertaking.
The fact that I didn’t understand the Latin names of indigenous plants and diseases that lurked in the cruel jungle was neither here nor there to me. What mattered was that I couldn’t even crack open a coconut.
**
Or erect a tent. In fact, I was a tour guide with no sense of direction.
Luckily, the Danes had a Viking spirit that thrived on being stuck in the middle of nowhere at dangerous times of night. Perhaps they thought I was just testing them. I mean, surely once you’d
organised
an adventure it ceased to be a real adventure anyway? Leaving things to chance is just one of the many devices you can deploy to camouflage personal shortcomings.
We erected an isolated camp deep in the Amazon jungle – just myself, a native cook and 18 Danish gap-year students alone together for three weeks. It was my job to keep them stimulated, and
thinking that a wood sculpture competition would be as good a start as any, I set off canoeing through the waterways of the Delta Orinoco, searching for balsa wood in the Amazon jungle.
There was a dull thud as the blade of my machete sliced into something unexpectedly round and soft, with the consistency of an overripe orange. Then came a sharp pain and needles were piercing into my temples, accompanied by an angry buzzing sound. It took me a few seconds to realise I was being attacked by an army of jungle bees, before I plunged into the Orinoco River.
I paddled for my life, but each time I came up for air an angry black cloud of vengeance was waiting, tracking me 150m up river as I swam back to the camp, buzzing and jabbing all the way. When I finally clambered on to land I’d suffered over 40 stings.
Even though I’d just had a near-death experience, I didn’t shout for help – I was even quite reticent about it. The students were all in tropical lounging mode, reading books and idly chatting. When I told one of them what happened, she presumed I was just complaining about an annoying rash or a trifling insect bite. Then I collapsed and passed out.
I awoke to discover not bees, but bikini-clad Florence Nightingales busily tending to my grotesquely red and swollen body. None of the Danish girls could agree on the correct nursing procedure, so I found myself being simultaneously massaged with ointments, plant leaves and onions – yes,
onions
; why does there always seem to be a witch present at moments like these? It was probably the closest I’ll ever get to being molested by a homeopathic octopus. The delirium was broken when Helle, the hypochondriac of the group, produced a bottle of anti-histamine tablets. I swallowed a handful and disappeared for the next 11 hours.
I awoke with cloudy vision, a fuzzy head and furry tongue. Our cook, Victor, approached through a haze, barefooted and grinning, with what looked like two halves of a coconut in his hand. The nest had been surgically sliced through the middle like a Damien Hirst exhibit, revealing the tragic remnants of a wasp kingdom. And yet remarkably, apart from the tragic remnants of lost pride, things appeared to be OK in my own kingdom.
Two days later, things got even better when Katrine, the 18-year-old, green-eyed blonde
bombshell of the group, bequeathed to my person a sympathy shag – did she really just feel sorry for me and my silly moustache? I preferred to believe it was a sign that God existed after all: following a massive disaster there always seems to be a massive reward on its way – especially for gentlemen – since most women are big-hearted. If things are going badly wrong, you just need to break a leg or fracture a skull. It’s your best chance of getting a girlfriend.
Kind-hearted Katrine became mine, and what I presumed to be an act of charity turned out to be the first of many as she became a more-
than-generous
benefactor to my hopeless cause for the next three and three-quarter years.
With a spring in my step, I dragged the unfortunate group of students through the remaining eight weeks of the programme, before spending a week or so enjoying the occasional set of tongue tennis and then simply staring out to sea, wondering: what next?
Finally, in a Venezuelan beachfront internet café with the world’s slowest connection, I got an email from Justin Hawkins stating his intention to be the front man of our band. For once, he sounded deadly serious. Three weeks later, I headed back to
England with Katrine, alive and in love. I had finally discovered that sense of direction.
When you’re desperate to rent a room and the estate agent asks what you do for a living, you don’t say, ‘I’m a bon viveur,’ do you?
B
ack in London, I was the Ready Brek kid
*
– it was freezing but I had a warm, fuzzy glow on the inside. Sporting a virile Latino moustache and a beautiful new
chica
, I enjoyed my
homecoming
until it was pointed out to me that having a ‘cock duster’ and a girlfriend 15 years your junior weren’t things to be particularly proud of.
It was only in the UK that people associated a moustache with gayness. In other parts of the world, it meant that you were tough, reliable and even streetwise. Stateside in years to come, I would be treated with the utmost respect by Yankee fans who were brought up to look upon the ’tache as a symbol of upstanding virility and virtue. The guys all wanted to hang with me, not because they wanted a shag – at least, I hoped not – but rather to bask in the presence of good
old-fashioned
manliness.
Besides, how could I be gay with a tanned nymphet on my arm? I
had
tried encouraging
18-year
-old Katrine to smoke whenever she felt like it and smear herself in olive oil before sunbathing – so she’d wrinkle prematurely and our age gap wouldn’t be so obvious. But the results would take years to show.
Instead, I treated everyone to my very own Nasty Bastard cocktail, made from Brazilian Cachaça 51 (or Cinquenta Uno as they call it – in reference to its strength) and liquid guarana (a plant extract that taken in large quantities lends energy) that I’d brought home with me. Some of us (though not Justin who was resolutely anti-drugs at the time) then smoked the quaintly named but potentially brain-demolishing ‘pain y queso’ or ‘bread and cheese’ – a joint of marijuana (bread) sprinkled with cocaine (cheese) that I’d tried in Venezuela and may well have contributed to my gormless jungle meanderings. Myself, Dan, Justin and Ed talked plenty of gibberish that night, into the small hours –– mapping out our plan to hit the
Camden music scene with a flamboyant glam-rock style that showcased not just our singer’s
sky-scraping
falsetto but, perhaps more importantly, a collective antipathy to what we perceived as fey ‘indie’ music. What we didn’t foresee at the time was that three years later we’d be feted as a gay metal band, proving that the more macho you try to act, the gayer you become.
*
Kids on a TV commercial that ran in the seventies and eighties, who ate a porridge-like breakfast that gave them a radioactive-like ‘perma’ glow.
I
’m now going to treat you to a little background regarding the band I played in. Between June 2003 and March 2004, we were almost as big as Dolly Parton’s tits. I make that nine months in total, which is apt, because though many critics saw us as a musical Jaffa (artificial, tasteless, airbrushed and garish), we somehow managed to impregnate the nation. In the process, we earned ourselves three Brits, an MTV Europe breakthrough award, a chart-topping
multi-million
-selling album, numerous
Kerrang!
and
Metal Hammer
accolades, four Ivor Novello Songwriter of the Year statuettes and, last but not least, a steaming Christmas number two.
For the sake of anyone out there who still isn’t quite sure what’s going on, I’ve decided to be precise from now on. I’m going to start by quoting a German band bio, courtesy of one of those online search engine translators:
Facts: Pitch name: Justin Hawkins (Vocals, Guitar, Synthesizer)
Dan Hawkins (Guitar)
Frankie Poullain (bass)
OD Graham (Drums)
Star bio: Justin Hawkins buildup in Suffolk Town, Lowestoft. Already in recent years he often entrenchd in his room and practiced for hours on its guitar. It was condemned good, but its small brother Dan was still better. The two began to play in a Coverband – with Dan as Leadsaenger.
1997 went to Justin to the university to Huddersfield. Its brother Dan pulled to London, on which search for volume, in which he could find its place. In London it met Frankie Poullain, a Scot living in the exile, who originates and stated from a family from adventurers, its father is Pirat in west India and his brother luck knight. Soon Justin and Frankie a dwelling divided into Shepherd’s Bush. Few time wimmelte later it in its dwelling regularly from around-pulling musicians, who went past for Jamsessions. Justin and Dans school buddy OD
Graham, a schlagzeuger, mostly went past on the weekends. Under the name ‘Empire’ created the brothers as well as Frankie progressive skirt volume, whose sound under Justins became ever harder guidance, so that the original Leadsaenger finally left the volume.
The brothers Hawkins had to fall now a decision: Was those worth volume it to make further? They should receive the answer with the Sylvesterfeier to the new millennium: The brothers made themselves on the way back after Norfolk, in order to celebrate in the Pub of their aunt the turn of the year.
Justin participated there with the Karaokewettbewerb, sang ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and put down an unbelievable performance with skirt star floats and everything which to it belonged. Dan was impressed by the undreamt-of star qualities of its large brother and saw the future. First man which they called thereafter, was Frankie, which made itself immediately from Venezuela on the way, in order to play again in that volume. As the second they called OD, which its volume left, in order them again to follow – THE DARKNESS were born.
It’s an ideal way to cut through PR gibberish, as these online translators specialise in unearthing
secret truths (and generously shaving 10 years off my age). An Italian Wikimedia entry begins enigmatically:
‘Frankie Poullain (name of art by Francis Poullain Gilles-Patterson) (Edinburgh, April 15 1977) is a bassist British, famous for its militancy in Darkness.’
Before coming straight to the point:
‘Frankie was riconosciblissimo for his image: had style mustache “beaver”, had a bandana and a look wrong.’
