Broken Music: A Memoir (34 page)

Andy has a youthful, intelligent face, framed with angelic golden locks. He is urbane, good-humored, something of a dilettante in things artistic, well dressed, and alert to any slights that may be directed toward him intentionally or otherwise. He possesses the kind of elegance that in a different age would have been described as dapper. I had seen him play once in the sixties at the Club A Go-Go with Zoot Money’s band and more recently as part of Kevin Coyne’s backup group. He had lived for a long time in the States and been a member of the New Animals with Eric Burdon, but he has been back in England for a year now with his American wife, Kate, to reestablish himself in the new British music scene.

I am on my best behavior.

When I get to know Andy better I will appreciate how well read he is. He has a large collection of books, with a leaning toward the esoteric, an encyclopedic knowledge of film, and is highly opinionated
in all matters cultural. All of this might have made him a terrible bore but for his excellent and often absurd sense of humor. He can be the best company, and having been on the road most of his life has learned the survivor’s knowledge—that to maintain a modicum of sanity when everyone else is losing theirs, you need to occasionally send yourself up. He does this with the same ease and grace that he displays as a guitarist. Stewart and I will dub him the “art monster,” which he will accept as the greatest compliment.

Andy blows us all away. He is clearly a fine musician, a master of many musical styles and techniques, from classical to jazz and everything in between. This is the kind of musician I could write for, the kind of musician I could entrust with my songs, who could inspire me, who could realize the music in my head, and although I don’t say anything because we are in Mike’s studio, this is exactly the kind of musician that the Police need. I can tell that Stewart is impressed too.

We wait until the session is over and we are driving back into town before anything is said.

“I know what you’re thinking.”

“Really, Stewart? What am I thinking?”

“You’re thinking that Andy is the guy we’re looking for.”

“Why, don’t you think so?”

“Well, yes and no.”

“I understand yes, but why no?”

“Well, he can certainly play, but …” He chooses his words carefully. “It’s a question of image.”

He knows I’m going to bristle here and go off on one of my rants about music versus fashion, but I bite my tongue and say nothing.

“Henry has the right image.”

“Henry can’t play.”

“He can play.”

“Stewart, you play better guitar than he does, and you’re crap.”

Stewart, ever the patient diplomat, tries a different approach. “Andy’s a whole decade older than we are.”

“Yes, he is, but strangely enough he looks younger than both of us.”

“Then it’s just a question of image.”

“Stewart, believe me, I love Henry as much as you do. He saved all of our lives, for fuck’s sake, but we’re not going to get any farther than we have done unless the fucking music improves, and I don’t want to be in Cherry’s band for the rest of my life.”

“No, Sting, nor do I.”

Neither of us will address the very real possibility that Andy will have no interest in joining our wretched little band or that we already seem to be painting Mike out of the picture, as if he is an unwanted Trotsky in a retouched photograph of the politburo.

I’m not sure which one of us said it, but it is as if we both reach the same conclusion at the same instant:

“What about if we used them both? Henry and Andy?”

The lights change and we are off, heartlessly planning a revolution in our heads all the way home.

So for a while we will continue supporting Cherry Vanilla, as well as playing in her band, and also rehearsing with Mike. He seems to have Virgin Records interested, so we put together demos of two of his songs. One is “Electron Romance,” a pseudo-scientific ditty with a textured, convoluted bass line, and the other, called “Not on the Planet,” is a proto-ecological rant, with some fine slide guitar by Mr. Summers. The demos are fine, but Mike’s voice and mine hardly blend, and while it is interesting to have two bass players, it is getting harder to justify the amount of work we have to do so as not to get in each other’s way. I’m not
really sure what my function is in this band, but Stewart is far more cynical.

“You’re there to make up for his deficiencies. He can’t sing. You can.”

Whatever the case, we have a great time playing with Andy. I’ve introduced a couple of my own songs into the set, which he seems to enjoy playing, and there is now a tacit understanding in the air that perhaps the band we had envisaged may be more than a pipe dream.

    The RCA pressing plant in County Durham is a shrine to Elvis Presley. His picture seems to be on every wall in every corridor in the place. The first Police single is scheduled to be released in May, so Stewart, Henry, and I stop at the plant to pick up the first pressings on our way to a gig at Newcastle Poly.

We are led into one of the listening rooms, and through a common glass window is another listening room with six ladies, all in advanced middle age, each wearing headphones and identical working smocks. They sit like religious devotees under their portrait of Elvis with the blank look of people in a trance, staring at nothing in particular, isolated in their private world. Two of them are knitting, one is crocheting, the other three are reading magazines. They are checking for crackles on the discs, one after the other, for hour after hour, day in day out. They could be listening to Puccini or Ziggy Stardust, they don’t care. I feel like we’ve walked into some obscure suburb of hell, and I must force myself not to look at them.

Listening to our single, we discover a fault, and indeed a whole box of fifty is deficient. We are somewhat deflated but they produce a further box of fifty perfect singles, which we load into the back of the van and head north to Newcastle.

I haven’t been home in five months. My mother is thrilled while Dad is amused. I peer closely at him and he looks healthy enough to me, which of course is reassuring. My parents are on their best behavior, entranced by Stewart’s American glamour and Henry’s Gallic charm. Stewart gets a great kick out of smoking a joint in my parents’ house. Ernie of course can’t resist having a toke, and after his second is telling us that it’s not making the slightest difference to the way he feels, but pretty soon he gets the giggles and ends up lying almost horizontal on his favorite armchair and dozing off. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so relaxed.

The next night at Newcastle Poly is far from being the glorious homecoming I’d envisioned. We get blown off the stage by a local punk group called Penetration who are, to be honest, absolutely wonderful. The best punk band I’ve ever seen, and that is not just local pride. When we walk onstage all the Penetration fans have left, and we face a discreet smattering of disapproving Last Exit followers, a few polite music lovers, Keith Gallagher, my best man, Terry Ellis, my erstwhile guitarist, Phil Sutcliffe, the father of the whole enterprise, and my ever-loyal brother. We play well and are applauded politely. Cherry gets the same response. Keith will tell me that he thinks the Police are a one-man show. I assume he means me, but I don’t press him for clarification. Terry has disappeared. Phil Sutcliffe is sphinxlike, and my brother, who now sports an awful mustache, thinks we’re crap. We sell four records.

When “Fall Out” is finally released it gets reasonable reviews in the U.K. A French music weekly votes it single of the week (though how much that has to do with Henry being a French national is hard to ascertain) and Radio Clyde makes it record of the week. Mark P. of that august and by now almost respectable organ
Sniffing Glue
says it’s rubbish. I suppose this was to be expected, despite us being
stablemates at Miles’s Dryden Chambers. We end up selling four thousand copies.

    There are great plans afoot for a Gong festival in Paris at the end of May. As the group had enjoyed cult status in France, someone had suggested a massing of the clans wherein the various offshoots of the original band would play at the Hippodrome, a permanent circus in the north of Paris. Strontium 90 are, of course, invited to play and we all are energized by the idea. The band will be fairly low on the bill, but we are used to that, and the event will dovetail handily with a festival in Colmar the next day that the Police have been booked for, supporting Dr. Feelgood.

The concert starts at three in the afternoon and doesn’t finish until three the next morning, with over five thousand French hippies in attendance. A giant weather balloon is suspended from the big top, and a piddling laser affair makes sporadic and halfhearted attempts at creating a science-fiction ambience. Here too are the more traditional fire-eaters, trapeze artists, and sad peripatetic clowns, who give the event more of the atmosphere of a shabby medieval fair than a convincing glimpse of the future. And then there are the bands. Splinter groups of splinter groups all loosely related to the vast amoebalike Gong phenomena, a band famous for its theatrical indulgence and hobbitlike eccentricities.

We play well and the audience applauds earnestly. The ubiquitous Phil Sutcliffe, who seems to be following me round like the recording angel, is covering the event for
Sounds
. He seems mightily impressed by the band and, in a turnaround from his response to the Police show in Newcastle, gushes enthusiastically. We stay to watch Steve Hillage, who is terrific—probably the nearest the British rock scene ever got to producing a Jerry Garcia—after which Andy, Stewart,
and I escape before the grand finale. Mike, of course, is forced to stay behind.

Over dinner in a cheap but pleasant Algerian restaurant Andy, in his cups, will reveal to us that he does not share Mr. Sutcliffe’s enthusiasms. He seems to want to throw his lot in with Stewart and me, although he does see himself as a direct replacement for Henry and not as his supplement. Stewart and I keep our counsel, knowing that in the short term all our options need to be kept open.

Back in London, the Police are starting to headline at clubs like the Marquee in Wardour Street, so the Cherry Vanilla Band has had to find replacements for Stewart and me. Though our set has now expanded to an hour, we still have to play some songs more than once. I keep telling Stewart that if we would only play a little slower, then the problem would disappear, but he won’t have any of it.

As it turns out, all the record company promises for Strontium 90 seem to have been as ephemeral as they had been for Last Exit. Mike has tried to bring some new energy to the project by renaming the band the Elevators, but halfway through our first set at Dingwalls, when we can’t seem to get the two basses in tune and the audience loses interest, we realize that this particular elevator isn’t going to get off the first floor. Predictably, Andy calls up the next day to say that he is no longer going to be an Elevator or a Strontium 90 or whatever other isotope Mike might have in mind, and when are we going to sack Henry?

Though disappointed, Mike is sanguine. He is at the core a gentleman and a realist. He accepts that the balance of power has shifted, and will not stand in our way. We will remain friends. This, however, does not solve the Henry situation. Our lovable Corsican has definitely intuited that something is going on, and while his
musicianship has certainly improved, his enthusiasm has dimmed, particularly onstage. But Stewart is still not convinced that Andy should replace him and wants to sustain the band as a quartet. Trusting in Stewart’s diplomatic skills, I agree we should give it a try.

    It’s 1977 in the summer of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, and every Wednesday afternoon I walk to Lisson Grove to sign on the dole. There are flags and bunting festooning the streets in every part of the city. It will be a lavish and extravagant celebration of this second Elizabethan Age, banishing for a while the grim realities of our struggling economy and social malaise.

My usual route from Bayswater takes me past a Victorian house above a boarded-up shop. On this particular Wednesday, there is a huge black Bentley with a liveried chauffeur parked incongruously in the street below the flat, and a young man with an untidy shag of blond hair is leaning out the window on the upper floor. The young man is Paul Cook, drummer of the Sex Pistols. The rest of the band—Sid Vicious, Johnny Rotten, and Steve Jones—are falling out of the car in their expensive leather trousers and teased hair. They are all out of their trees, quaffing cans of lager and shouting up to Paul, who seems to be observing their antics with a sober, detached amusement. Sid is now halfway up a lamppost and pointing drunkenly at the window. Lisson Grove dole stands mistily in the background, and if I’d had a camera I could have captured in one snapshot a perfect portrait of Britain in this jubilee year, her wry contradictions and her wayward, hilarious sons.

I like the Pistols. The only jealousy I harbor is that they don’t have to sign on today and I do. I pass by unmolested, but there is chaos at the dole. A new girl sits behind the grille at box 26. She can’t
cope and the queue stretches miserably all the way to the doorway like an angry snake. How much longer will I have to do this?

That night Stewart and I go to the 100 Club in Oxford Street to see Alternative TV This is Mark P.’s band. Mark, having peaked as a critic, has decided to try his hand at performing. The band have asked to borrow my bass gear, to which I accede, if only to show that I don’t bear any grudges about the lousy review he gave our record in his magazine. As Mark has only been playing the guitar for a few weeks and has never sung a note in his life, it would be unfair to offer any criticism here, but Stewart and I have scrounged enough money for a few beers and meet an old friend of his named Kim Turner.

Kim is the younger brother of Martin Turner, bassist for the Wishbone Ash. Kim had been the drummer in a band called Cat Iron that Stewart had tour-managed a number of years before. Now a jack-of-all-trades, Kim had thrown in his lot with Miles as an assistant manager. Street-smart, wily, and immensely likable, Kim would become tour manager of the Police, playing a significant role in our subsequent adventures and ultimate success. But that is light-years away from this dingy little club on a wet Wednesday night. On this occasion Kim had been drafted into Mark’s band as an experienced guitarist to fill in the considerable gaps in Mark’s repertoire of riffs and basic chords.