Broken Music: A Memoir (14 page)

“How long have I got?”

“’Bout five minutes,” he shoots back.

“Okay.”

I’m in a blind panic. I run to the studio reception desk and ask if I can use the phone. I call my home in London praying that Trudie will be there. She speaks French like a native. My housekeeper answers.

“No, she’s not in, she went to the Bullock Cart in Westbourne Grove—you know, the Indian restaurant.”

“Shit.” The minutes are ticking away.

“Can you get me the number, Carol? It’s a bit of an emergency.”

Shit, shit, shit, she’s taking an eternity Eventually, she returns with the number and I dial.

“Hello, I’d like to speak to one of your diners, she’s blond with green eyes, probably in a short skirt with high heels, very pretty.”

The seconds are ticking away, Miles’s assistant leans his head into the room. “You done?”

“Yeah, just a second.”

“Hello, Trudie? Please don’t ask me any questions—can you translate this?” I read the statement to her over the phone.

“‘You are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you
… So shut up!’”

Minutes later I run back into the studio, victorious with my little sheet of paper.

“Okay, follow me.” Miles beckons me into the vocal booth. “When I say so, shout this French shit at me as loud as you can, okay?” he says.

“Okay.”

I’m standing in a vocal booth with Miles Davis, one of my boyhood heroes, I’m about to scream the Miranda rights at him in French while a driving funk track is playing in the phones. Miles nods at me. Here goes:
“‘VOUS ETES EN ETAT D’ARRESTATION, VOUS AVEZ LE DROIT DE GARDER LE SILENCE, TOUT CE QUE VOUS DIREZ POURRA ETRE RETENU CONTRE VOUS.’ ALORS TAIS-TOI!”

Miles responds, pointing to his crotch, “YEAH?
TAIS-TOI
SOME OF THIS, MOTHERFUCKER!!!!!”

Minutes later I’m out on the street. I feel like I’ve been mugged, but I’m gloriously happy and proud. I’m on a Miles Davis album. It’s called
You’re Under Arrest
.

“What do you think?” says Gerry as the record finishes and I drowsily emerge from my dream state. And regardless of where the music had taken me in my head at that moment, or the extraordinary turns my life has taken since, or how I wish I could have said, “Oh, I just projected myself into the future, you know, where Miles was really pissed off with me and made me shout at him in French during a funk track on one of his albums.” “Shite and bollocks!” would have been Gerry’s reply.

    Paul and I join Gerry’s band at the college. In addition to ourselves, there is a gentle Italian trumpet and flügelhorn player named Aldo, and Steve, an opinionated but unarguably talented tenor sax player. I will play bass and sing backup. The band will be called Earthrise, which is Aldo’s idea, inspired he says by the picture of the earth taken from the moon by the Apollo astronauts.

The singer is Gerry’s current girlfriend, Megan, although, due to a combination of Gerry’s bohemian insouciance and my attraction to striking women, she will very soon become my girlfriend and not his. Gerry seems bafflingly unconcerned. Needless to say I am still going out with Deborah, and she attends a few rehearsals with me at the college but is so intimidated by Megan that she soon stops coming with me, and our relationship enters a kind of twilight of vague doubts that are unspoken and small deceits that go unchallenged. We will part soon, but the break is far from clean.

Megan is not shy, has a fine singing voice and, with her startling blue eyes, porcelain complexion, and luxurious shoulder-length blond hair, a confident sexuality. She is also from Leeds and, like Gerry, blessed with that same forthrightness that is guaranteed to make the more circumspect among us blush. She is highly educated and well bred, but when she speaks, the normal sensibilities of polite
conversation are somehow swept aside in favor of bald and often brutal statements of honesty.

“You’ll have to change the bloody key, Gerry, I sound like a screeching bloody parrot up there in B flat.”

“But …but I’ve already written out the arrangement, love,” pleads Gerry. “And the horns, they hate playing in sharp keys,” he adds, hoping, I suppose, to baffle her with theory.

“Then they can bloody sing it,’ cos I won’t. And don’t try and patronize me with that ‘love’ shit, either.”

Gerry glowers at her darkly but nonetheless begins to cross out the arrangement he has painstakingly been working on all morning, grumbling sotto voce about women in bands and the trouble they cause.

I note with some interest that while Gerry is no pushover when it comes to music, he is no match for a woman with attitude. Soon, though, I begin to understand that Megan’s toughness, while effective, is only a well-crafted outer shell that armors a much more sensitive and insecure soul than the one she presents to the world. She will, nonetheless, be the second person to break my heart.

    As this is essentially Gerry’s band there will be no guitarist and the music will be oriented around jazz-tinged piano voicings rather than the cruder modal shapes of guitar-driven pop. One of the first tunes we rehearse is Graham Bond’s “Springtime in the City.” Megan’s strident, uncompromising contralto lends an authenticity to “Cry Me a River” and “The Letter,” even though we have culled the arrangements straight from Joe Cocker’s
Mad Dogs and Englishmen
album.

We don’t have much equipment to speak of and gigs are hard to come by. We play a few support spots for the bigger bands that drive up from London to perform at the students’ union on Friday nights.
We acquit ourselves pretty well, but apart from the odd club date outside of the college, we don’t seem to be able to get the thing off the ground. Megan, despite her seeming fearlessness, suffers from debilitating bouts of stage fright which she usually manages to disguise behind a smoke screen of irritability mainly directed at Gerry. I begin, with Gerry’s encouragement, to take over more and more of the singing duties when Megan is indisposed, but I can see the whole enterprise falling apart long before it finally does.

We struggle for a year until Gerry is offered a nightclub residency in Bristol, working six nights a week with a trio and a girl singer. He decides to quit college, and the band, and I more than anyone else am bereft, as without its presiding genius the band will fold. Paul will go to work in his father’s business, and Aldo and Steve will take up full-time teaching. Megan and I, with another year to complete at college, will stay together for a little while longer but not before I receive a bitter dose of my own unpleasant medicine.

Deborah had become a surrogate for my mother’s longing and it may have been this primitive but mutual understanding between them that provoked the stirrings of a deep rage in me, as if I were being led unconsciously to act out some vague, confusing myth of betrayal and revenge. Whatever the psychological truth of the matter, and whatever unread myth was being played out, the scene was set and Megan would make her Amazonian entrance into the overwrought emotional theater inside my head. Infidelity became an engrossing aphrodisiac and a mentally exhausting game of timing and lies. I was smitten in a way that was totally novel to me. The gentle innocence of my first love had been swept aside by a close-to-profligate wantonness that seemed modern, unsentimental, and refreshingly cold. But it was a lust that was more than sexual, there were social elements of class and education, and this was my coldness,
that a part of me saw Megan as a resource, as an escape route and a weapon.

Afternoon lectures are soon replaced by languid hours in Megan’s room in the halls of residence across the campus. The line from Leonard Cohen’s “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” that describes “her hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm” will always remind me of Megan in these days.

Her shelves are lined with the plays of Genet and Ionesco, the novels of Sartre and Camus, and while her library and tastes are not exclusively French it is the exoticism of these names that will attract my attention before I’ve even heard of existentialism or have begun to identify with the muted and lonely heroism of
L’Etranger
and
La Nausée
. After our first afternoon session she will lend me
Iron in the Soul
, telling me that if I like it she’ll give me the first two books of the Sartre trilogy, and only now does that seem like a strange and quite deliberate initiation. But our relationship was in many ways something played out and explored backward, from sudden and shocking intimacy to a slowly revealed understanding.

I will sustain my double life for a term and a half until the strain becomes unbearable. I will painfully break with Deborah, but that is only half of my purpose. Introducing Megan to my mother will complete the circle, and while this will bring me no obvious joy it is somehow bracing, like the cold thrill of steel.

When I bring her home for the first time the occasion, while cordial, is hardly warm. Audrey is clearly put out while maintaining an innocuous if prickly humor, and Megan bristles quietly without a contentious word being said. They exchange bland pleasantries while sipping tea and I begin to understand that women are able to communicate in subtle codes beyond the ken of mere males. Still, by the end of this uneasy summit, I am confident that Megan knows my mother and that my mother knows Megan.

It is my dad of all people who warms to Megan; her sassy confidence gives him license to flirt and I see a part of my father’s personality that I had assumed dead brought back to life. But he is still a handsome older man and she, being the smart girl that she is, plays her coquettish role with some elegance and a confident ease. There is something protean in Megan’s personality: she has an actor’s talent to be all things to all men, and I am falling in love.

She and my father had first met in distinctly odd circumstances.

At 5 o’clock one morning some weeks earlier, I am standing in a red phone box in Front Street, Tynemouth. I call my father at home, knowing he will be cooking a couple of eggs and a rasher of bacon for his breakfast before he sets off for work in the car. The phone rings three times and I imagine the darkened hall and my father’s puzzled expression as he makes his way from the kitchen to pick up the black handset. I’m praying that no one else answers.

“Hello?”

“Dad, it’s me.”

“Where are you?”

There is only the slightest hesitation in my voice. “I’m at the Spanish Battery.”

“Oh aye?”

The Spanish Battery is the site of the old gun emplacements at the mouth of the Tyne, and my father knows that there is only one reason why a young man would be in such a place at five in the morning. He must be up to no good.

“Who are you with?”

“A friend,” I reply, desperately trying to sound casual and move the conversation to the point and away from embarrassing revelations.

“Oh aye? And who might that be then?”

“Look, Dad, do you have your towrope in the boot?”

“Aye?”

“Well, could you bring it down to the Spanish Battery?”

“What for?” He is being quite deliberately obtuse. I try to ignore his unhelpful and spurious questioning, and at the same time try to maintain a polite calm.

“I need a tow, I’m stuck.”

The simple facts of the matter are this: after a night of torrid and in my case, to be honest, rather inexpert lovemaking with my new “friend,” I have decided in the interests of romance and local pride to show Megan the magnificent view at the mouth of the Tyne. Below the eleventh-century abbey on the cliff top is a narrow causeway leading up to a roughly circular headland, where gun batteries that had defended the river since the time of the Spanish Armada, through the Napoleonic Wars and against the threat of German invasion in the twentieth century, have been replaced by a rather fine car park. While less imposing than the artillery emplacements, the car park does maintain, as I said, a magnificent view of the twin piers and their respective lighthouses, which sit like sentinels on either side of our famous river. However, the Spanish Battery, having lost its strategic, defensive importance, is still celebrated locally as a “snogging pitch,” where the steamed-up windows and the gentle rocking of cars on their chassis, under the moonlight and the ruined abbey, are merely the outward signs of a thriving fertility cult that has probably been celebrated covertly on this site since old King Oswald was a lad. Well, at least that was the pseudohistorical guff I was feeding Megan to get her to come down here in the first place. We had driven the seven miles from her rooms at the college to the coast, in my 1964 Reg. green Mini with the fiberglass bonnet, and every movable part having been replaced or repaired at some time by my good self.

I am driving with a newfound assurance, the proud captain of my own fate, flying into the teeth of the hurricane, the radio blaring some late-night jazz, with my new girl, smart and secret and so sexy. I take corners and roundabouts a little too fast, hoping that she’ll notice my expert double-clutching and my predatory watchfulness. “You’re safe with me, baby” is the desired subtext for all of this nonsense. “I’m fucking James Bond and at your service.”

A half-moon sails above a flotilla of dark scudding clouds and hides itself behind the ruined walls of the old abbey. It has been raining heavily and the road is slick in the moonlight, but the sky is now almost clear and I can see the brightest planet, Venus, on the eastern horizon.

There is a steep road from the seafront down to a narrow isthmus that connects the headland with the shore, where the road rises on the other side to a surprisingly empty car park. We descend quickly and as we do so, one of the black clouds obscures the bright moon and we are in sudden darkness but for my headlights. To my horror the twin beams wanly reveal that the narrow causeway has disappeared under half a fathom of seawater, but by this time it is too late. We hit the obstacle at speed, and freezing water is now flooding across the transom of the engine and into the cab of the little green car. In this sudden shock we find ourselves up to our knees in the flood and the car is still, dead in the water, and so am I.