The Singer (26 page)

‘Well, I wish you’d warned me.’

‘Well, if I had done, you might have felt even more awkward. I just made sure you knew your shit, ’cos if he tries to test you out about what songs you
like, which he will in probably another
pint’s time, you’ve gotta be able to impress him. But honestly, mate, everyone goes through this, it’s the initiation ceremony.’

He tipped me a wink. ‘They did it to Mick as well. Him and Vince, it was fuckin’ carnage. But I promise you, after you’ve survived a night on the piss with Steve, you’ll have a mate for life.’

That made me feel a bit better,
but not much. ‘What’s with all this Digger shit anyway?’ I asked.

‘Mate, that’s how he thinks Australians speak. I think he got it from
The Paul Hogan Show
in the early eighties. He used to call Mick the Great White Wino.’

I couldn’t help but laugh at that. Obviously there was a very funny guy lurking underneath that obnoxious exterior. I just had to be patient and wait for him to out himself.

Only Steve came out of the bogs in a bullish mood, swaggering across the room and coming to a halt beside us to stand, rearranging his bollocks in his too-tight jeans. ‘I fancy a walk,’ he announced. ‘Let’s go and see what manner of cunts have taken over the rest of this place. See if there’s owt left I even recognise.’

Steve’s idea of a walkabout was to mosey from one pub to another, staring
at amazement as he entered each refurbished pile and spouting loudly of his disgust at the transformation. Predictably, his outrage reached its apex when we entered The Lounge and he saw the faux Warhol screenprint of Joe Strummer.

‘I’ve seen it fookin’ all now,’ he said, stopping dead in front of it.

By this point, I’d just about had enough. At the start of our odyssey, he’d run into an old
acquaintance, a huge Rasta, inside the Portobello Gold. In his delight to talk to the guy, he’d ignored both Gavin and me for the best part of an hour, which I had started to see as a blessing. But his reassurance that there was still human life in W11 took a turn for the worse when he
saw the pub he referred to as Finches, but to the rest of the world The Duke of Wellington, was crawling with
American tourists. He stormed straight out of there into the bar across the way and belched loudly in the barman’s face when he asked if sir would like to try today’s special Mojitos at two for the price of one. Taking gleeful delight that the Electric Cinema had been transformed into a playground for the glitterati, he’d stuck a foot to deliberately trip up a semi-famous TV actor who was mincing
his way in there, sending him flying into a table full of shocked Yummy Mummies. By the time we’d reached The Lounge it was nearly six o’clock and the whole afternoon had been akin to minding a gigantic toddler with Tourette’s and Attention Deficit Disorder.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘you used to get a better class of cunt in here in your day.’

‘You what?’ he snapped, his bloodshot eyes blazing. ‘You
calling Joe Strummer a cunt?’

‘No,’ I said simply. ‘I’m calling you one.’

And I stared him back full in the eye, the look I had spent hours learning from Paulie Sorvino in
Goodfellas
.

I was so full of adrenalin then that my hands had involuntarily bunched up into fists and I was fully prepared to swing for the bastard and fuck the consequences. But then Steve’s snarl turned into a wide grin
and the glint in his eye suddenly made about twenty years drop away from his face.

‘I wondered how long it’d tek you to realise,’ he said.

‘You tested him sorely,’ said Gavin.

‘Aye,’ nodded Steve, ‘but he’s finally passed.’

‘You cunts!’ I exclaimed. ‘You’re both fucking cunts!’

‘That’s right, Eddie,’ Steve said proudly. ‘We’re all bastard cunts together, which is just as well, like, ’cos
we seem to have found the centre of the cunt universe here.’

He surveyed the rest of the room disdainfully. ‘Right, well, Digger, I think I’ve had enough of trendy Portobello Road now.
What say we go to off licence, get us selves a nice bottle of Jack and repair to your humble abode?’

‘I’d say that was just about the most civilized idea I’ve heard all day.’

‘Then fookin’ lay on, McDigger, let’s
get out of here.’

Steve’s story after that was long in the telling. From the first Sex Pistols record he ever nicked in Sidney Scarborough’s record shop in Hull to the final showdown at the Lyceum Ballroom, he recalled it all with profane humour and astonishing honesty. Gavin, God bless him, kept us going, nipping out for another bottle of Jack, packets of fags and four-packs of lagers from the
dirty offie on the Grove; even supplying blank tapes when I ran out. The birds were twittering the dawn chorus by the time we got to the end.

‘I were just so fookin’ angry,’ Steve told me, referring to the band’s fateful last night together. ‘I felt like, he weren’t just content to fookin’ ditch us for some dozy bint, but he wanted to fookin’ destroy us all in process. So, the whole way through
that last gig we done, that triumphant Lyceum gig as you call it, I was thinkin’ about how I were gonna kill him – and I seriously was, and probably would’ve done if old Stevens wasn’t there to protect his investment.

‘See, what no bastard realised about that gig was that Kevin, right, Kevin had nearly had his fookin’ arms broken by the cunt, our fookin’ drummer, he’d only just got enough strength
back in ’im to fookin’ play by then. And Lynton, fuck knows how he even stayed upright, let alone made a coherent noise, ’cos the rest of us might have been on a stage in London but his brain were on fookin’ Mars.

‘And Vince is there, poncing away, doin’ all his fookin’ “I’m a bad arse” shit and all the kids are lappin’ it up, but little do they know, he’s gonna get on a fookin’ aeroplane to
swan off with Gloria Vanderbilt straight after show, leavin’ us lot a load of
geriatric fookin’ old wrecks headed straight for knackers’ yard. After all’s we’d been through, how far we’d come, that were how he thought it were goin’ to end. So I thought, no, you cunt, that’s not how it’s goin’ to end, it’s goin’ to end with my big, fuck-off, steel-capped boots walking right up your bastard neck.
I grabbed hold of ’im just as we come off stage and if Stevens hadn’t had his little Richardsons army with ’im this story probably would have come to an even more tragic ending.’

Steve paused, gazed up at the ceiling, and reached for another sip of Jack. ‘Trouble was, though, at end of day, I fookin’ loved the guy. Not to sound gay about it or owt, but the truth was, I couldn’t handle fact he’d
dumped me for a fookin’ bird. Took me years to get over that, it did. By which time it was all too late, of course. Now there’s no way I’m gonna make amends to him in this life.’ He shook his head grimly.

‘What would you say to him if he walked through this door right now?’ I asked.

Steve stuck out his bottom lip and shook his head. ‘I’d say, “Where the fook have you been, you cunt?” No I wouldn’t.
I’d say, “I’m fookin’ sorry. Sorry for how it finished, how I behaved, and most of all, how I let you just walk off into sunset without raisin’ a finger to help you when the woman you loved was dead.”’

His voice sound strained and harsh.

‘But there’s no fookin’ point even speculating about that, is they? ’Cos he’s fookin’ dead now too, lyin’ in some cold earth, no cunt even knows where. All
on ’is own. Just lyin’ there.’

‘All right, mate, all right, it’s not your fault,’ Gavin went to put his arm round Steve then, but Steve brushed him off, wagged a finger in his face.

‘You know, Digger, I allus thought that bitch was such a fookin’ liar and I know you did too. One night she said to Lynton that the reason her lyrics were so fookin’ in the clouds were because she could actually
see different colours when she heard different words and sounds. Well that fookin’ proved to
me she was a nutcase, amongst other things, that were really like, “Nurse! The screens!”

‘But then, like, there was this programme on BBC World, or whatever the cable thing is that you can get in the States. A whole programme about folk what see words as colours, numbers as colours, sounds as colours
– a whole fookin’ load of ’em from all walks of life, none of them is makin’ this up. It’s a fookin’ real condition called synaethesia and they reckoned that somethin’ like one person in every hundred has got it. They even reckoned that was how language started in the first place, mebbe.’

‘So,’ Gavin shrugged, ‘that’s one thing she didn’t lie about. So what?’

‘No, you don’t get it,’ Steve looked
really agitated now. ‘The thing were, Vince was allus goin’ on about what a fookin’ genius she were and we was all too busy hatin’ her guts to even listen to him. But what if he were right? All them people on that programme were fookin’ brainy, I’m tellin’ you. And it made me stop and think. What if I’d spent less time being a cunt to him and more time tryin’ to get on with her? It never would
have turned out the way it did, don’t you see?’

‘Mate, you’re pissed,’ said Gavin. ‘That chick didn’t top herself because of you. You can’t blame yourself, especially not after all these years, just because you saw one documentary that maybe proves she wasn’t quite as insane as you thought she was. It still doesn’t change the fact she was completely unstable and would have done anything to get
attention, including and especially wrecking the band. I think you need some sleep.’ He glanced down at his wristwatch. ‘I think we all fucking do.’

Steve’s expression of anguish faded into weary resignation.

‘I think you could be right, Digger. You usually are. Scratch my last comments, Boswell,’ he said, waving an unsteady finger in my direction. ‘I’ll come back to you in mornin’.’

And with
that, he keeled over onto the sofa and began snoring loudly.

Gently, Gavin removed the smouldering cigarette from between his fingers and stubbed it out.

‘Looks like your bed’s taken,’ he said to me. ‘You’d better come in with me – and you better not make the sort of noise that he does.’

‘OK,’ I nodded, rubbing my eyes. ‘It’ll make a change to sleep in a bed for once, even if it is with you.’

‘Eddie, has anyone ever told you what a charmer you are?’

‘Frequently,’ I sighed. ‘And one day someone will mean it.’

August 1980

Donna put the phone down with an expression of triumph.

‘You won’t believe this,’ she said, crossing fingers plated with silver rings and black nail varnish. ‘But “Cherry Coma” is number 15 and you’re wanted for this week’s
Top of the Pops’
.

Donna had a bright red telephone to go with her redlacquered desk. Behind her, painted in bold black and white, was a geometric
abstract mural designed and executed by two eager young students. It vaguely resembled the Rising Sun, for faux Japanese was her latest style obsession. Decorative orchids hung from the top of filing cabinets. The lampshade was a huge white paper moon. She had even piled her hair up and skewered it in place with chopsticks, although her kimono-style top, pencil skirt and winklepickers remained
resolutely black.

Donna fancied herself as a high-powered businesswoman now, and this, finally, was her crossover moment. After two and a half years, approaching four albums and two previous Top 20 singles, Mood Violet were headed for the real big time. A big red smile curled across her face.

Not that their progress so far had been slow, she had to admit. They’d grown out of the toilet circuit
by the end of the
Ice-Tapped Vein
tour in June of ’79. It had been a major success. Demand for tickets on their final night in London had reached such proportions that Donna had been forced to switch venues from the proposed Fulham Greyhound to the Electric Ballroom in Camden, a venue that held twice the punters, and still it was a sell-out.

Watching the crowd go wild for one track in particular,
Donna had been quick to release ‘Splintered’, possibly the most discordant track on the album and one that she’d previously not even thought of as a possible single. It had reached the low 30s in the actual charts and the press had not been slow to record their admiration for the one seemingly spontaneous political statement made by a band that some had seen up to that point as being fairly obtuse.

The times were changing and Mood Violet seemed to be capturing the encroaching harshness of a new era. By the time they’d returned to London, Margaret Thatcher had swept the floundering Labour government aside in the May General Election like a one-woman legion of Panzer tanks, promising to get tough on the recalcitrant unions and clean up the Labour-constructed ghetto. Once the iron bouffant
was installed, it was important to show opposition to all she stood for, especially so far as the music press were concerned. Donna kept her sneaking admiration for the woman to herself and let her band get on with maiming her name in interviews.

With both cred and burgeoning popularity on their side, Mood Violet went straight back into the studio, delivering the
Shapeshifter
LP to more acclaim
and even more sales in November of that year. No such thing as a ‘difficult third’, their sound had become more complex and deep with each new piece of equipment the boys could afford to buy to enhance it, still producing and engineering everything themselves.

Sylvana’s vocals soared and stretched to meet the challenge. Hormonal boys not only drooled over her now, they sought to divine the true
meaning of her continually obscure offerings and she furthered the mystery by refusing to print the actual lyrics and leaving nearly all the interview-talking to Robin and Allie. Notoriously difficult to interview, she had become an enigma, a beautiful enigma.

The ‘Astra’ single had cracked through the barriers at number 19 in December 1979, ‘Dawnburst’ had followed it up to number 15 in January
1980. They actually would have made
Top of the Pops
then, if the entire band hadn’t been stricken with a particularly nasty bout of flu.

Then it all went quiet, for over half a year. By which time, Donna already had her flat in Holland Park, five more successful bands on her roster, a sideline career as a TV pundit and her own weekly column in
Time Out
where she shared the secrets of her glamorous,
yet cutting-edge life.