The Singer (24 page)

‘Now, what station would you like?’ he asked.

‘Whatever the best news channel is. I don’t know, really…You probably know better than I do.’

‘Aha,’ nodded the toff. ‘Well,
let’s find Radio Four then. They have the updates every half an hour…’

‘Hey, we’ll leave you twos to it,’ said Robin from the door. ‘We’ll just make sure our Robber’s no up to somethin’ he shouldnae.’

‘Thanks, honey.’ Sylvana was still staring at the toff as he span the dial around, trying to concentrate on him and push away the red swirls that still danced round her peripheral vision.

‘Don’t
mention it.’

The toff couldn’t have known that much about radio stations either, as Sylvana must have sat through about forty minutes of the meaningless jabber of some play before the news finally did come back on.

‘A man has died following violent scenes in West London this afternoon, when thousands of protestors clashed with participants in a National Front rally held outside Southall Town
Hall. Amid scenes of total chaos, he was rushed to hospital with head wounds, but died shortly after arrival…’

‘Sylvana.’ Robin’s voice cut across the broadcast. ‘I’ve spoke to Donna on the phone just now and it’s definitely not Ray.’

He was standing at the doorway, a microphone cable wound round his arm.

Sylvana almost fell out of her plastic chair. She saw his mouth moving, but it took a
couple of seconds before the words sank in.

He came towards her, his eyes earnest, lifted up her left hand and started to rub her fingers.

‘He was there all right but he managed to get out of it, nae harm done. He had to run about a mile to get away from the coppers though, apparently. They’ve arrested three hundred, she said.’

Sylvana stood up; tried her best to smile.

‘Oh, thank you so much
for finding that out. Oh God. Not that it isn’t still so awful for whoever it is. He’s dead, the man, you know.’

She felt tears prick behind her eyelids.

‘So I just heard.’ Robin pulled her into his arms and they stood a moment, wrapped around each other, rocking slowly. Then gently, he pulled away. ‘Look, I’m sorry, but it’s four o’clock. We’ve got to do this soundcheck now. Are ye gonna be
OK?’

‘Yes,’ she nodded. When she opened her eyes, the colours had gone. She pulled herself together and followed him out of the door.

They found out later on that night that the man who had been killed was called Blair Peach; he was a teacher for special needs children in South London. They dedicated their last song to him, ‘Splintered’, one that had come to Sylvana in a rush of blood-red, with
Allie’s guitars like the savage strokes of black batons against soft skulls and Robin’s keyboards wailing like sirens. Sylvana had never put so much anger into anything as she did that song, that night, and the crowd went with her, roaring and cheering and reaching out their arms to try and pull her in with them. Robber had to practically wrap her in a blanket and bundle her backstage afterwards
or they might have made away with her. As it was, their dressing toilet was besieged by people wanting to shake their hands, local fanzine writers scribbling down everything they had to say, most of which simply boiled down to Robber’s eloquent interjection: ‘Fuck the Nazis and fuck the fucking pigs.’

It was well after midnight before they got away. As part of the deal, the toff had got a couple
of his student mates to put them up, which meant Allie got the sofa, Sylvana and Robin got a zed-bed in a box room above the garage, and Robber got the back of his van. The students were very sweet, though. They’d kept a couple of plastic bottles of cider and some cocktail sausage rolls for them, and were keen to keep the party going as long as they possibly could.

Robber and Allie were well
up for it, but Sylvana couldn’t face any more. Now the euphoria of the gig had passed, she felt cold and exhausted, all her emotions used up, and crying out for sleep.

Luckily, Robin felt the same. He excused them both, and led the way up the stairs. Both the room and bed looked big enough for a toddler, their bedding a couple of sleeping bags and an ancient, orange and purple bedspread, the
temperature a steep drop from the packed, sweaty pub.

And it dropped another couple of degrees the moment Robin shut the door.

‘I’ll sleep on the floor then, shall I?’ he said.

Sylvana, about to flop onto the zed-bed, looked up sharply.

His eyes had gone to pinpoints. A little tic was working up and down on his left cheek, something Sylvana had never seen before.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean,’
his voice was a hiss, ‘you’ll no want me in your bed tonight, will ye? Not when there are so many other men you’d like to be sharing it with.’

Sylvana felt her mouth open, but she was too shocked to make any sound come out of it.

‘I mean,’ Robin’s voice rose up a notch, ‘you’d probably rather have Ray Spencer up here with ye, wouldn’t ye? Or maybe,’ he cocked his head to one side, put on a mocking
tone, ‘you’d prefer that wee wanker of a promoter to come up and twiddle with yer dials. Ye certainly couldn’t take yer eyes off him, now, could ye?’

‘Robin,’ Sylvana whispered, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

But Robin was getting louder as his face got darker, until his whipcord body was actually shaking with rage.

‘Or any of those students, those stupid wee fanzine writers, all
those guys that were clamourin’ for ye tonight, eh? Maybe ye could do the lot of ’em, eh, one after the other, is that what ye’d like, ye filthy bitch?’

He spat the last word right into her eye and she crumpled on the floor in front of him. Sobs wracked through her body, spontaneously, hysterically. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Her gentle Robin, transformed into this snarling, twisted
monster. The shock was as intense as falling into an ice bath.

He stood above her for a few moments, watching her reduced to a snivelling wreck, a bundle of rags on the floor.

Then suddenly, he was there beside her, his arms around her.

‘Oh my God, Sylvana, I’m so sorry, forgive me, I don’t know
what came over me, Jesus, I don’t know what I’m saying.’ Words tumbled out of him in rapid succession
as he tightened his grip.

Her first instinct was to pull away, smack him in the mouth, run.

But then she realised he was crying too.

‘I’m sorry,’ she heard herself say, though she couldn’t work out why she was saying it. ‘Please don’t cry, Robin, I’m sorry.’

‘No, I’m sorry, hen, I’m a bastid, I’ve got a wicked temper and I thought I could control it, but just somethin’ snapped inside me tonight,
I don’t know why. Oh God, please help me, you’re the last person on earth I want to do this to.’

And he continued to cry, sobbing long into the night, while Sylvana lay frozen in his arms, wondering what the hell it was that she had done wrong.

February 2002

Lynton Powell was surprisingly upfront when it came to the question of drugs. ‘I was pretty young, pretty confused, and a lot of mad things had happened in my life over a very short period of time,’ he said, with a wry smile. But he never lost eye contact for a second.

‘It’s a shockingly easy thing to get into when you’ve already been sliding towards
it for a couple of years without realising,’ he explained. ‘The environment we were in then, everyone was doing drugs anyway – speed when you were on the road, before you did a gig, pot and weed to relax afterwards, or while you were in the studio, or when you wanted to come up with another profound idea for a song. It wasn’t such a big thing to swap smoking reefer for something that made life seem
even easier. And as no doubt you’ve heard every junkie in history say – when you start to dance with it, it does make life seem a whole lot easier.

‘I was always shy, I never liked being under scrutiny,’ he considered, ‘even when journalists generally only had good
things to say, ’cos I always thought I never had anything particularly interesting to say back to them. H just took away that worry.
I stupidly thought that with its help, I could just concentrate on the important thing, the music. You gotta remember as well, all my heroes had been through their own personal romance with the stuff. If I’m being honest, I thought I was being like Miles, that I was gonna go places far outside normal, straight, boring people’s existences and report back from the amazing new worlds I’d discovered
out there.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘A common enough misconception.’

I nodded sympathetically, hiding the rush of relief and excitement that he hadn’t taken this turn in the conversation badly, because the next question was ultimately just as awkward.

‘So do you not blame Vince for getting you hooked? A lot of other people seemed to…’

Lynton lit a cigarette, took a puff then lifted it up in
front of my nose.

‘See this?’ he said. ‘This little white stick here is a hundred times harder to stop doing than H was. I can blame him for this, most probably, ’cos at some point in our murky past when we were spending our life on a tour bus, I took one of these bastards from him purely to see if it would stop me feeling bored. But anything else that I did was my fault and my responsibility.
And,’ he flashed that wry smile at me again, ‘I’m still here and he ain’t.’

This raised a chuckle from Gavin.

Lynton rested his cigarette back down in the ashtray, a beautiful black and gold chunk of glass that looked more like a modern art sculpture than something you should put a fag out in. He meshed his long fingers together in a reflective pose. ‘What else?’ he asked mildly. ‘Don’t worry,
Eddie. Ain’t nothing that’s off limits to me.’

I sensed that maybe he was saying the opposite of what he meant here, but I carried on regardless.

‘What about Sylvana?’ I asked. ‘Was it her who changed everything? I’m trying to get some sense of what she was like…’

Lynton unlinked his fingers in a graceful flourish and picked up the cigarette again. He closed his eyes as he inhaled, then blew
the smoke out slowly.

‘You ever heard of
amour fou?’
he asked.

I shook my head.

‘Mad love. That’s the French expression for it, which is sadly appropriate, as it goes. Well. That Sylvana, man, she wasn’t what you’d call mad, but she wasn’t really all there, if you know what I mean. D’you ever listen to her music?’

I didn’t want to admit I’d spent more time looking at her picture than actually
taking in the content of the albums I’d managed to acquire so far. But I got the general drift of it. So I said: ‘Well, she doesn’t make a lot of sense, lyric-wise, and the music is pretty away with the fairies.’

Lynton nodded. ‘Well, there you go. That explains her really. She was pretty out there. Not in the way that Vince was, though, that’s why we all thought it was kind of a strange attraction.
He was crazy in an aggressive, confrontational way; he liked getting a rise out of people. She was more the type that always had these mystical “feelings” that she had to “go with”, pretty much a hippy really. Which was why it did seem kind of strange to us that Vince would get so besotted with her so quickly.’

‘Yeah, well, that was all a put-on if you ask me,’ said Gavin. ‘That little girl lost
bit. She dumped her boyfriend quick enough and they’d been in that band together for years.’

‘True,’ Lynton nodded amiably, ‘and Vince dropped his girlfriend just as quick, who he’d been with even longer. It ain’t really fair to judge her on that.’

I clocked Gavin’s scowl out of the corner of my eye.

‘But what it was about her that really fucked things up,’ Lynton carried on, oblivious, ‘was
the effect her ditzy behavior had on Stevie. Stevie couldn’t stand her, man, he really could
not stand her. The thing was, I think, that Stevie had always had Vince’s full attention up to that point. I mean, I love Stevie and I always will; he’s my Paddy soul brother from way back, but within that band there had always been kinda like two factions. Me and Kevin: the swotty ones, always staying
up late to try out new chords and write new songs; and him and Vince, Los Banditos.

‘Vince’s first girlfriend, Rachel, she was always there, like, but she was always in the background, even when we was sharing that squat together up the hill,’ he waved his arm in a northerly direction, then swooped it down to put his cigarette out. ‘And when we was on tour, forget about it, he weren’t thinking
of her at all. So Stevie lost his alley-cat pulling partner, and for the first time since we’d been together, Vince’s interest wasn’t fully focused on the band. He’d changed. If you look at the records and the interviews we did from that point on, you’ll notice that Vince became Vincent. It was probably a combination of the drugs and Sylvana, to be honest, but he was starting to take himself a lot
more seriously.

‘That’s what fucked Stevie up, man, and that’s why he always deals with it by twisting it round that because of Sylvana meeting Vince, I became a junkie. And no doubt he’ll tell you that exact same thing when you meet him. I’ve had the argument with him a million times myself and it still don’t work. We just leave it now,’ he said with a chuckle, ‘that we’ve just remembered things
differently, that’s all.

‘And my man Gavin here,’ he leaned over and gave the photographer a hearty slap on the knee, ‘he remembers it differently again, right?’

‘Yeah, right, mate,’ Gavin laughed back. ‘I remember it clearly. As seen through the bottom of a glass.’

That was just about the end of the interview, though we stayed around so that Gavin could take a few new shots afterwards of Lynton
looking debonair on the sofa, with that beautiful ashtray
arranged in front of him on the coffee table. He and Gavin laughed and joked throughout the clicks and poses; that little crackle of tension that had risen between them now lost on the breeze. I flicked through my notes one more time as they were composing themselves and realised I’d left out one important one. I saved it until Gavin had
finished and was stashing his gear back into his camera bag.

‘Lynton, do you mind me asking one last thing?’