Wish You Were Here (24 page)

Douglas and Jane had a fierce spat over these speakers. Douglas fancied them something wicked, but Jane, burdened as she is with taste, thought they dominated the room. It was not quite a matter of choosing between Jane and the speakers, but Rick recalls that the atmosphere became distinctly gelid before a compromise on location was reached.

These monsters required a hefty signal to drive them. Douglas was persuaded that valve-amplifiers produced a warmer sound than solid state machines. Just possibly his ear was acute enough to hear a difference. When he turned the system on needles flickered in distant power stations and there was a slight whoompf, like a far-off mortar, from outside the room. This was the automatic extractor fan coming on to vent the heat from two thousand-watt valve amplifiers, one per channel, that lived in the specially designed cupboard under the stairs. The whole system cost—and this was the eighties—just a tad over £30,000. I remember we had some badinage on the subject:

“Fucking hell, Douglas,” I said wittily. “Thirty grand for a stereo. That’s pretty decadent. Our house in Hackney cost that.”

Douglas blushed, a pretty effect on a surface so large. “Actually,” he said, “
honestly,
the system was a bit of a bargain. You can spend much more at this end of the market. Besides, the suppliers threw in the phono cartridge—twenty-five hundred quids worth—for free.”

How Douglas spent his money was his choice, after all. He was not a man for floating tupperware gin-palaces or shared legs of race-horses; nor did he belong among the affluent who invest in art so that it can advertise their taste while increasing in value. It was because he genuinely loved music that he wanted the best possible reproduction of it. He possessed an ear (his right actually, as he was a tiny bit deaf in his left) educated enough to appreciate the nuances.

But, you will be wondering, what did this thirty grand’s worth of equipment
sound
like? Does the law of diminishing returns apply with a vengeance here, as in other areas of conspicuous consumption? A £20 meal may be twice as good as a £10 meal, but can a £100 meal be ten times as good?

In this case, however, the sound was astonishing. It might not have been as loud as the noise made by Disaster Area, the heavy metal band in
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,
for which the ideal listening position was in a concrete bunker thirty miles away, but it approached the pain threshold if wound up to maximum. It also boasted amazing definition and clarity. Beatles albums that I thought I knew acquired new colour. Not a scrap of information imprinted on the original vinyl or CD was lost. In classical music the sheer physical effort of playing was apparent even to the musically uneducated. The friction of the strings, the movement of the bodies, the scrape of chairs moving on concert platforms, the sigh of the conductor making some athletic Guilini-type gesture—all the ambience of live performance somehow materialized around you, only better, for no concert hall boasts acoustics as brilliant as absolutely top-end stereo equipment. You wanted to look behind the sofa to see if Douglas and Jane had cunningly hidden an orchestra somewhere in the room.

Douglas’s record collection—both vinyl and CD (that saviour of the record companies which reissued the back catalogue at twice the price)—was stunning both in number and the catholic eclecticism of his taste. It was large enough to be housed in bespoke CD cupboards of blond wood the length of the wall in that half of the drawing room nearest the street. He could have stocked a medium-sized record shop.

Incidentally, his next generation stereo went solid state. Douglas got irritated by the frequency with which he had to replace valves, and the nearly ubiquitous use of a digital sound source had come to favour amplifiers specifically designed to cope with it. The speakers changed to the large Nautilus design whose intriguing tapered rear-facing cones and snail-like Fibonacci coils mop up the reaction energy from the speakers so completely that the sound emerging from them suffers almost no interference, and is thus exceptionally unmuddied. The amplifier, CD player, turntable and radio were all housed in a large free-standing cabinet of considerable stylishness and incorporating every imaginable technical goody. The CD player looked as if it was carved out of a solid lump of slate and titanium.

But none of this kit could match the delight of live performance. Douglas wanted to hear live music in his own house and so set about getting to know some world-class musicians. One of them was Robbie McIntosh, known in the music world as the guitarists’ guitarist. His touch combines precision and passion. Here’s what Douglas said about him:

Robbie McIntosh is one of the world’s best guitar players, and also one of its most incompetent human beings, as anyone who has watched him trying to buy a shirt will tell you.

We first met years ago when he walked up to me in a bar and said that one of his best friends knew my grandmother very well. Good opening. It was Wix he was talking about, or Paul Wickens as I knew him when we had the same piano teacher at school. Robbie and Wix were both in Paul McCartney’s band at this time (no, not that one).

Before that, Robbie had been lead guitarist in The Pretenders, and has also played for Talk Talk, Tears for Fears, Paul Young and even Cher. When he’s not jetting round the world playing vast stadiums, he tends to sit at home in Dorset looking after his goats and chickens, and tinkering. Actually, let me correct that last sentence. When he’s not jetting round the world playing vast stadiums he tends to sit at home in Dorset being looked after by his goats and chickens, and tinkering.

I asked him what he’d been tinkering at, and he showed me. I should mention at this point that I am myself a passionate, though not very good, acoustic guitarist, so Robbie decided to play me some of the acoustic guitar pieces he’d been tinkering with down in Dorset. I was transfixed. It was some of the most mesmerizing music I’d heard in years. Most of the pieces were original, but some of them were arrangements of old folk tunes, Elvis Presley, Chopin, blues . . . What they all shared was an apparently simple melodic surface with a wonderfully rich internal life of harmony and counterpoint, which meant that each piece grew and grew in your mind with every listening. It’s technically complex, but there’s no showing off. All the technique is there just to serve the music. It’s not folk, it’s not jazz, it’s not pop, it’s not classical, it’s just pure, pure music. The real stuff. Complex. Simple. Breathtaking.

I played the tapes Robbie gave me incessantly, and it quickly became one of my favourite-ever albums. People would sit in my car and say “What is this?” Over a period of years I gradually coaxed and nudged Robbie into making an actual CD of it and letting my company, The Digital Village, release it. It took an astonishingly long time, but it is astonishingly good. The reasons for both of these things are contained in my opening paragraph.

There’s one more thing I should add. Robbie McIntosh is one of the nicest people in the world.*
 
¹²⁷

Another famous rock musician that Douglas befriended was Procul Harum’s Gary Brooker, now a drily amusing silver-bearded chap in his fifties. Margo Buchanan, who knew him well, had arranged an introduction following a meal during which Douglas had banged on about how much he loved Gary’s music. Douglas had played Procul Harum’s
Grand Hotel
again and again while writing
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
This was a pattern with him: whenever he was chained to his keyboard with a book, Douglas would play certain pieces with demented repetitiveness, almost as if he were deliberately trying to induce some state of fugue or trance in which he would be exulted enough—or mad enough—to write without pain.

For those of you under a certain age, Procol Harum was a band famous for a song called
A Whiter Shade of Pale
which dominated the singles charts (a Deram label EP—remember those?) in the summer of 1967. It was music to get stoned to; it was slow enough to smooch to if you were lucky. It’s a great song, with strange, poetic, slightly anxiety-inducing lyrics by Keith Reid and a piercingly atmospheric, almost hymnal melody that Gary Brooker admits to having been inspired by Bach’s Air on a G-String. The song is so evocative, so arcane, so downright enigmatic, that there is a minor scholarship industry, active on the net, dedicated to working out what the hell it means. Procol Harum, though some of its personnel changed, went on to produce a lot of good music, but
A Whiter Shade of Pale
just caught a moment. (Once, indeed, it was used in a Dr. Who episode, but not one written by Douglas.)
AWSoP,
as it’s known to the buffs, is a classic that will always haunt them, and by and large there are worse things to be haunted by than a song.

From time to time Gary Brooker reformed the band, and he also had his own group, The Gary Brooker Ensemble, that played with many of the biggest names in the business (Stevie Winwood, Eric Clapton and so on). Rather than attempt to encapsulate his career, here are Douglas’s own words from a speech he made introducing the sell-out Procol Harum and London Symphony Orchestra concert that took place in the Barbican on 8 February 1996:

I have loved Gary Brooker and Procol Harum ever since nearly thirty years ago when they suddenly surprised the world by leaping absolutely out of nowhere with one of the biggest hit records ever done by anybody at all ever under any circumstances. They then surprised the world even more by suddenly turning out to be from Southend and not from Detroit as everybody thought.

They then surprised the world even more by their complete failure to bring out an album within four months of the single, on the grounds that they hadn’t written it yet. And then in a move of unparalleled marketing shrewdness and ingenuity they also actually left
A Whiter Shade of Pale
off the album. They never did anything straightforwardly at all as anyone who’s ever tried to follow the chords of
A Rum Tale
will know.

Now they had one very very particular effect on my life. It was a song they did, which I expect some of you here will know, called
Grand Hotel.
Whenever I’m writing I tend to have music on in the background, and on this particular occasion I had
Grand Hotel
on the record player. This song always used to interest me because while Keith Reid’s lyrics were all about this sort of beautiful hotel—the silver, the chandeliers, all those kind of things—suddenly in the middle of the song there was this huge orchestral climax that came out of nowhere and didn’t seem to be about anything. I kept wondering what was this huge thing happening in the background? And I eventually thought, it sounds as if there ought to be some sort of floorshow going on. Something huge and extraordinary, like, well, like the end of the universe. And so that was where the idea for
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
came from—from
Grand Hotel . . .

Given a choice of venues, Margo says that musicians love small, intimate ones like pubs; you can see the whites of the audience’s eyes and get instant and gratifying feedback. There’s nothing like it. But pubs don’t pay anything, and hiring a van to move the equipment means that the musos are often out of pocket. It’s not worth the hassle. She was lamenting this one day in Douglas’s company, and he just went quieter and quieter while the cogs turned. “Well,” he said eventually, “I’ve got this great idea. You should come and play in my house. It’s a good room, and quite feasible . . .” And so began a legendary run of parties.

All through the nineties, until their departure to California, Douglas and Jane threw some wonderful parties in Duncan Terrace. Once or twice a year they’d organize the added draw of live music, and these were called Douglas and Jane’s Partially Unplugged evenings (a reference to Paul McCartney’s “Official Bootleg”
Unplugged
album).*
 
¹²⁸

These evenings were magical. First there would be champagne—lots of it, gallons and gallons in fact. Jane Belson has a rule to serve only champagne or white wine. Though they wreak havoc with the higher cognitive functions, they do less mischief to the surroundings than red wine. A suave local caterer would provide delicious little nibbly things on sticks; this company made superior party food and seemed to have a policy of only employing sexy young things who looked good in black. Douglas and Jane were exceedingly generous hosts; that kind of entertaining is expensive.

The guests were the brightest and the best from the media and the law. The term “élite” is frowned upon these days. Some people find it to be triumphalist and implicitly snotty, but this useful little word undoubtedly describes the guests at the Partially Unplugged parties. You couldn’t move for actors, film people, writers, stand-up comedians, barristers, telly presenters, scientists, technology billionaires, even a publisher or two . . . You found yourself forever on the point of greeting someone as a long-lost old friend, one whose name had just slipped through a lacuna in your brain, until, waking up, you’d realize that the familiarity of the phizzog was not friendship blurred by time but the spurious intimacy of telly. Jonathan Porrit would be chatting to Stephen Fry, Richard Dawkins to Clive Anderson, Clare Francis to Lenny Henry, Kathy Lette to Terry Gilliam, Melvyn Bragg with Ben Elton. Salman Rushdie was often there, radiating intelligence and looking very dapper for a man under siege from a
fatwah.
His Special Branch minder would blend in almost invisibly. There was the odd, very rare spliff, but dope was not a feature of Douglas’s parties. Douglas said that he’d tried it once and didn’t like it very much and Jane would not countenance the house being used for anything illegal. When the guests were truly warmed up, the lights would dim and the music would begin.

Of course, there were people present who would not have stopped flirting, or talking shop, even if Horowitz had been playing a duet with God himself. This was a crowd of people quite pleased to be in each other’s company. Fortunately the house was quite big enough for the party to continue on different floors with people drifting in and out as the mood took them.