Rotten in Denmark E-Book

Jim Pollard

• Herausgeber: The Poetry Business
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 443

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

If you know there was more to the seventies than boogie nights and flares but can't quite remember what, then this is the book to fill in the gaps. Jim Pollard's first novel reads like a thriller, it has pace, bite and great humour. It turns the music industry, punk rock and growing up in the 70s inside out. But it's a book about frailty as much as fame; about a man coming to terms with who he is, with the values of friendship, his own vulnerability and search for selfexpression. Merciless yet honest.

Leseprobe

Rotten inDenmark

Jim Pollard

Rotten In Denmark

‘I really enjoyed this book. Jim Pollard knows what he’s talking about.’ - Nigel Williams

‘Rotten in Denmark is funny and fast-moving, taking a look at both the music business and the business of growing up. Jim Pollard is a knowledgeable and thoughtful guide on both subjects. He’s a talented new writer: one to watch.’ - Mark Illis

‘Strong storytelling with surprising twists; a true portrayal of friendship and rivalry.’ - Jane Rogers

Jim Pollard was born and grew up in south London. A freelance writer, editor and photographer, he has an MA in Writing (Novel and Scriptwriting) from Sheffield Hallam University.

He is the author of three health books including the acclaimed All Right, Mate? - An Easy Intro To Men’s Health published by Gollancz Vista in 1999.

Rotten In Denmark is his first novel.

Published 2015 by smith/doorstop Books The Poetry Business Bank Street Arts32-40 Bank StreetSheffield S1 2DS

www.poetrybusiness.co.uk

Digital Edition copyright © Jim Pollard 2015 ISBN 1-902382-20-X

Print edition originally published 1999 © Jim Pollard

The text of this ebook including all preliminaries, biography and acknowledgements is an electronic rendering of the paperback published in 1999.

Jim Pollard hereby asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset by Alan Cooper CreativeCover design by Blue Door, Heckmondwike

smith|doorstop is a member of Inpress, www.inpressbooks.co.uk. Distributed by Central Books Ltd., 99 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN.

The Poetry Business is an Arts Council National Portfolio Organisation.

For My Mum and Dad

Acknowledgements

I’d like to say thank you to, in no particular order: the staff and students on the Sheffield Hallam University fiction MA particularly Jane Rogers for her tutoring, encouragement and advice; my editors and publishers at Smith Doorstop for their confidence in me and the novel; Amanda White for being a fantastic agent and Serafina Clarke for taking me on; Andrew Gillman, Julian Brown and Friedl Gamerith for the cover photos; Jill Dawson for friendship and encouragement; Dr Ronnie Montgomery for the medical bits; The Unknown, The Lemmings (Who Bottled Out), Just Good Friends and Spoilt For Choice for refusing to be bound by the musical shackles of talent, technique or theory; and Bela Maria for believing in me.

‘Promised Land’, words and music by Chuck Berry © 1964 Arc Music Corporation, by kind permission of Tristram Music Ltd., London.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Editor’s note:

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Frankie Dane

Chapter 3

Pedal power pop

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

The sultan of Shakespeare

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Don’t talk to me about the next big thing

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

The effortless ascent

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Police take possession of rock-star’s autobiography

Missing musician’s final release breaks all records

Editor’s note:

The recent history of Frankie Dane has, of course, been well-documented in the media.

This volume contains his full, unedited manuscript for Rotten In Denmark which, in keeping with the technique the author adopted throughout the text, has been supplemented with two topical newspaper cuttings chosen by the editor.

Cal Carter died in 1979, not yet twenty one. We were at the height of our fame.

He might have argued that Mrs Thatcher’s election alone was reason enough to take an overdose. As it was, there was a number of factors cited at the inquest including the state both of his mind, ‘disturbed’, and, of his amphetamine sulphate , ‘adulterated’. Whatever it might say elsewhere - and let’s face it, these things are always shrouded in mystery (look at Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, old Sid Vicious) – whatever it might say, I know Cal did not intend to die.

To him this book is dedicated.

Please allow me to introduce myself…

1

Nothing is subtle in the synthetic city. There is the perpetual scream of the house-lights rendering even a west coast tan, wan yellow. There are the jewels, flashing blades of brilliance, set in awkward billowing necks. There is the clatter and the rumble of the not-so-far-away fruit machines. And there is the smell - a smell where perfume ends and disinfectant and incontinence begins.

This could be a bingo hall. With a little imagination. They don’t play in tiara and fur in south east London but perhaps here. Big enough to house an aircraft. From the lighting balcony at the back, a technician sweeps the supertrouper across the vast stage like a searchlight.

The men are in dinner-dress: standing, civilised, easing back chairs. Big-shots or bouncers. It’s hard to tell. The women are plucked from the pages of a hundred magazines, the stuff of white dreams.

By a side-door, a young man with hair a cheerleader would kill for is playing his hunches. A doorman distracted by a lick of lamé, the young man marches in – adjusting his tie, nodding his hollow hellos with purpose. In his pocket are a handful of dollars. Tickets tonight cost hundreds. Anyone watching would see that he is an intruder and no master of disguises: hunched at the bar over another man’s bourbon; then standing at the door with a tip-me tug of his golden forelock; then crouched at the side of the stage scribbling into a notebook. Anyone watching could tell that he is an impostor but nobody watches. The crisp English cut of his suit is adequate, even appropriate. Cal Carter is wearing it for the first time, Elvis Presley his shimmering jumpsuit for the umpteenth. It is Las Vegas, it is 1976 and rock’n’roll has gotten fat.

Out of the darkness, a single spotlight targets the microphone. Presley appears. Applause. The lights lift as the orchestra clicks into a crisply concluded crescendo. Two bars. Cal has done it: gatecrashed the King. Imagine him glowing inside with a sip of Jack Daniels and a surge of pride.

‘I’m…’ The orchestra comes back as Presley sings: ‘…hurt’ – the word straddles a beat, a backbeat, a bar and another.

‘…to think that you lied to me.’

‘Hurt.’ Shorter this time. The first wiggle of the hip and shudder of the lip. ‘Way down deep inside of me.’

‘And that was it,’ Cal would say. ‘Down deep. Like a voice from a cave. Like buried treasure.’ Unless you really knew him and how fast his mind worked, my best friend’s sentences appeared to come in pre-packed, ready-to-speak slices. Whenever he told this story - and I heard him tell it several times to the band, to reporters, to fawning girls and buck-skinned boys - he always described the moment thus: like buried treasure. That was the moment Cal Carter believed he saw our future.

The first time I heard the story we were sitting five thousand miles away from Las Vegas in the far from glamorous public bar of The Roebuck, our special seats round the corner out the way of the dart board where we always sat when the information to be exchanged was serious stuff. He’d arrived back from America that morning and had jet lag scratched scarlet across his eyes.

I watched him standing at the bar. Shaking his head and waving his hand as he ordered bourbon and was offered scotch. We were neither of us whisky drinkers but Cal’s return was already working great changes in our lives. I was 18, a smoker of Players No.6 and a drinker of keg bitter. I was a member of Her Majesty’s Civil Service and a lowly one at that. Licensed to bill. Elvis Presley at the Hilton Hotel, Las Vegas was another world, another language.

Cal returned with more pints and two whiskies which he pointedly and, I discovered only years later, inaccurately, referred to as ‘chasers’. Then he was off again, back there again. ‘At first it was just a bit of a fun. Seeing how many Bourbons I could lift. It was just a scam. You know, Presley, Christ…’ He paused over his beer. ‘It was four lines in, Frankie… Buried treasure.’

He shook his head and smiled again. ‘And I could barely hear it beneath the applause and rattling of jewellery.’

I probably smiled back. I certainly lit a cigarette. He shook his head when I offered him one and produced an American soft-pack from the breast pocket of his denim jacket. He tapped on the top and a cigarette emerged, sliding upwards, humbling gravity. Although Cal went on about it for another half-an-hour that, I think, was the moment when he convinced me. You could put it down to the power of Presley but those soft-packs were something else.

‘It was better than any amount of money.’

My eyebrows barely moved and he may have sensed my interest waning. ‘It was better than sex.’

I smirked. ‘Presley singing was better than sex?’

‘Better than sex.’

Cal and I had grown up together. He understood the expressions on my face, the way I fiddled with my hair. He smiled and pushed a tumbler of scotch towards me.

‘More than that.’ he said. ‘It was better than you thought sex would be when you were 14’. I looked up at him. Now that was a wholly different ball-game of soldiers. He was in the process of sitting. He leaned across the table, his eyes inches from mine, his breath flecked with whisky.

There was a pause before I shook my head. ‘I thought we’d finished with that schoolkids stuff. Isn’t that what Jon said?’

‘But you never had the vision before,’ said Cal. ‘I never had the vision. Any of us. It’s all very well to want to make money, shag women and take drugs, but…’

‘I thought there might be a but.’

‘But you have to see it, feel it. Take it and twist it.’ In his eye there was a twinkle like a safety pin in the sun.

I wasn’t too sure what he was talking about but I could feel a schoolboy’s grin tighten across my face, a sensation I hadn’t felt for at least a year. The grin Wendy Carter said was cute when she was 20 and I was 15 and a half.

Potential is just that. Unrealised. But I am as close to certain as it is possible to be that when Cal died his best moments were yet to come, his best songs were yet to be recorded. Today he stands next to me just a stage width away from Elvis in some rock’n’roll waxworks museum they’ve got for the tourists up in town. They’ve made Cal three inches taller than he really was. I’m the right height but I’m told my eyes are hollow, empty and robbed of the sparkle of life.

I knew him – the supposed new McCartney to his new Lennon. I can say, hand on my rock-hardened heart and without an ounce of the all-American sentimentality that once inspired us that my story is nothing without the story of Cal Carter.

And when I think of him now, it’s often of that cabaret moment. Not of any of the umpteen millions of moments when we were together but of that one in Las Vegas when Elvis Presley sent a chill down his spine. And sometimes, I can see it as big and as bold and as bright as Presley’s white sequinned suit. And sometimes I can hardly imagine it at all. Perhaps that is because I can’t imagine me there. Sore thumb me but Cal fitted.

2

Beech Park, 1969

So far as I can remember I’ve only ever seen a bowler hat on television. And Oliver Hardy has usually got his foot through it. Neither the white heat of technology nor the black hat of respectability ever quite made it to the bit of Beech Park where I grew up. Ours were neat but not noteworthy streets. Neither garden suburb nor concrete jungle. Halfway houses.

I spent much of my childhood, or so it seems to me now, sitting in the window of the railway station. Beech Park was a two platform affair, in and out of Charing Cross, every half-an-hour. ‘Charing Cross, in the heart of London’s West End,’ as it always said in the newspapers. At the age of ten I was well aware that I lived a full four stops away from where life was being lived. They never mentioned Beech Park in the newspapers. Not even the local one.

The station was a simple concrete building, sufficient to accommodate the ticket office, Mr Parker, Mr Parker’s confectionery stand, a cantankerous old dog belonging to the ticket clerk and two wooden staircases down to the respective platforms. It was finished with a solid Victorian surety and discreet flourish. The circular window between the in-door, which said ‘To The Trains’, and the out-door, which said ‘Missing. Small Ginger Tom. Answers To The Name Of Rusty’, had a concrete window ledge that was at least a foot deep. That was where I sat: feet up, my school bag under my knees, my back nestled in the curve of the white ledge.

I used to sit in it on the way to school and chew watermelon flavoured bubble gum. Only when the flavour had all gone, well and truly, would I walk on. I had no idea what watermelon tasted like or even looked like but the gum, which came in green balls slightly larger than a marble, was my favourite. My father, a man who disapproved of so many things - a man, indeed, whose defining quality was disapproval - disapproved of gum chewing so I kept the stuff out of the house. Anyway, the station window was a more comfortable place to sit and chew than our garden wall: our garden wall being shaped like the battlements of a castle. It’s a shame that now that I have tasted watermelon, and even fished it out of a cocktail glass, I can no longer remember what the gum tasted like.

At first, it was all I could do to climb up into the window alcove. Gradually, it got more comfortable. I liked watching the people, the men, getting on and, more rarely, off the train. I was fascinated by their briefcases - full of things to do. Black ones and brown ones, pristine and battered ones. I used to imagine what was in them and where they were going with them. Didn’t know then that one day I’d be joining them with them a briefcase of my own and nothing more interesting inside it than a cheese and pickle sandwich.

At first, I only had sufficient gum for one ball on the way to school and another on the way back but then I started to get more pocket money and I started to hear the school bell ringing at the top of the hill with me still sitting in the window chewing. Ball two, ball three, like an American baseball umpire counting someone out.

It was at about this time that my parents paid their first visit to the school to see about, as my mother put it, quoting from my report card, my ‘lack of satisfactory progress’ or, as my father put it, to get them to ‘knock some bloody sense’ in to me. At home the word ‘comprehensive’ assumed the whispered status of a profanity like ‘bloody’ – muttered with stifled anger and not for my ears. Increasingly, the two appeared in tandem. As in ‘bloody unions’ or ‘bloody Alf Ramsey’: ‘bloody comprehensive’.

My father got quite excited over the eleven-plus which he made sound like an educational version of penicillin – the cure for everything. To me, sitting down at the station window, watching our insignificant little world go by, became ever more attractive.

One day I was sitting there on the way home. It was early and apart from that stupid dog yapping the station was silent, deserted. I was so bored that I was rooting through my schoolbag looking for something to do or even to read.

‘Want to swap bags?’ came a still-in-short-trousers sort of a voice.

I looked down. A little blonde haired kid from the posh school - the one where the teachers were called masters. ‘Masters because they’ve mastered their subject,’ my father had explained. ‘Not like those half -trained bloody monkeys down your place.’

I was chewing bubble gum. The titchy kid was eating a bar of chocolate.

‘Is it your birthday?’ I asked.

He regarded me for a moment as if I were mad. He was a good foot shorter than me and I could have flattened him had I wanted but there was an assurance and confidence in his piggy eyes that I found appealing. Desirable. I realised it was an absurd question even as I was asking it but to me, Mars bars were the stuff of special occasions – the pantomime, cinema or birthdays. He looked up, fixed his eyes first on mine and then lowered them steadily towards my bag. He seemed to find it more interesting than my face.

I looked at his bag too. It was proper leather. He was carrying it like a satchel but with very little imagination it could have been a briefcase. That made me feel self conscious about mine. It was an old blue linen holdall with sparse dewlap trimmings in which my father had once kept his tools for the Morris Traveller.

‘Yeh, all right,’ I said, answering his original question.

The contempt which had slowly drained from his eyes returned in a flash. Without blinking, he began laughing, a laughter louder than his size should have permitted. I zipped my bag up. The smell of engine oil was beginning to make me feel nauseous.

‘My dad’s a publishing magnate’ he began.

I shuffled, my window seat beginning to feel uncomfortable.

‘He attracts money.’ He erupted into grating laughter again. But it’s the way you tell them and Cal could always do that. Even through puberty, Cal kept his confidence when, amidst the confusion of broken voices, volcanic acne and wayward testicles, all around were losing theirs. This despite the fact that he wasn’t gaining the inches that to the rest of us were the compensation for surviving adolescence.

He held his satchel up to me like an offering. It smelled of my Mum’s best handbag – the one she kept in the top drawer of her dressing table and only took out on special occasions or when we went to see Aunty Anne.

‘I don’t want your bag,’ I said.

‘Can’t have it, so,’ he said, snatching it back. His eyes were keenly fixed on my bag now. ‘That’s what bank robbers use, that is. Or the perpetrators of major heists or Mafia.’

I spat my gum out to near where he was standing.

‘Gum’s bad for you,’ he said. ‘It’s just glue, you know. It’s made out of animals’ bones. If you swallow it, it sticks your intestines together, the long one and the small one and you die a long, lingering and extremely painful death.’

There were another five balls of gum in my blazer pocket and I jiggled them around uneasily as I looked to get down from the window. I am sure that I had had cause to doubt my father’s wisdom on previous occasions but this is the first such moment I recall, the moment my memory has ascribed a significance. In his campaign against my chewing habit, why had my father never informed me of these facts?

I looked Cal up and down. The half-pint kid with a gold top. It didn’t take long.

My blue blazer was frayed and threadbare in places from a wash or two too many, his was shop window clean, his gold braided school badge demanding my attention like a stuck out tongue. My sleeves ended just beyond the elbow, his covered his shirt-cuffs like a suit. My shoes were scuffed from playground football and walking in the gutter, his were gleamingly polished and, I fancied, like his satchel, real leather.

But, I told myself, he was a shrimp and I, as my father would say, was a good deal bigger and stronger. I jumped down close to him, narrowly missing the masticated blob of gum on the pavement. This, with an emphatic swing of my considerably longer than his legs, I kicked into the road where it stuck to the door of a parked car.

‘Bet you can’t get up there,’ I said to Cal, gesturing at the window.

As I walked off, taking big, tall strides, I looked back over my shoulder to watch him trying and failing. After perhaps half a dozen attempts, he looked back at me and then walked off in the opposite direction, his satchel over his left shoulder and against his right hip. On properly, like a snob school kid. I kicked a stone along the gutter and pretended I was Jimmy Greaves.

A few months later, when I passed the eleven-plus, all was happy, joyous celebration in the Dane household for a period of approximately a day and a half.

My enthusiasm for the exam had blossomed when I learned that it was the difference between travelling several miles on a couple of buses (if you failed) and walking a few hundred yards (if you passed): the difference between leaving the house at eight and eight thirty. I didn’t yet appreciate, as I constantly tried to convince myself during my teens, that the exam was a measure of intellectual capacity. It seemed more like the puzzle page of The Wizard.

When Cal passed the eleven-plus, his mother and father were sufficiently confident of Beech Park Grammar to allow their son to return to the state system. We bumped into each other on the first day or rather, Cal sought me out. It was in the main assembly hall. I was with the other kids from my primary school concentrating on waiting patiently. There weren’t many of us and none of them were particularly friends of mine. I was trying to make conversation with a fat boy with whom my only previous contact had been to yell, ‘out of the way gut-bucket’ on the occasion he had strayed onto our playground football pitch.

Cal came up and poked me in the ribs. ‘Got any bubble-gum?’, he asked. A good six months had passed since our first meeting - an eternity at that age - but I remembered him immediately. He did not appear to have grown any.

He still had that leather satchel only now he was carrying it like a briefcase. He also had a new blazer. I tried to ignore him. I switched my fountain pen from one blazer pocket to the other, hoping it might hide the stitching marks left behind when my mother replaced my primary school badge with the new one.

‘I know your name,’ he said. ‘It’s Frankie.’

His voice was becoming loud enough to attract attention. The teachers were standing up the front of the hall, taking it in turns to step forward, read out the names of their forms and then lead their charges off to their classroom. There were only enough kids left now for two, maybe three, classes and I was beginning to worry that I had missed my name. There had been a Dean called but the teacher had had some sort of accent. Perhaps he meant Dane.

‘Ssh,’ I said.

‘Got any gum?’ he asked again.

I put my hand in my blazer pocket and, keeping my eyes fixed on the front of the hall cupped my hand around a bubble gum ball. I released it into his outstretched hand. The stupid little sod dropped it, of course, and to make matters worse got down on all fours to pursue it like a hound as it skated across the hall.

It completed one tight parabola before rolling across the polished floor like a little green jet propelled marble. At the front of the hall, Mr Blake trapped it, flicked it up with the toe of his slip-on shoe, caught it and dropped it in the bin. A suppressed titter rippled round the hall. He cast a hard stare in our general direction. I looked ahead like a squaddie. Then Mr Blake started reading names out. From the corner of my eye, I was aware of Cal smirking, trying to stop himself laughing.

Mr Blake called my name and, as I followed him out of the hall, I was relieved to see that Cal, whose name I still did not know, was not tagging along.

‘So,’ said Mr Blake, dropping back to walk next to me. ‘Like bubble gum do we, Mr Dane?’ Once again Cal’s advice on the dangers of chewing gum flashed red across my mind. Advice I realised he no longer himself heeded.

The word in the playground at break was that the classes were called out in reverse order and therefore I was in the second from top class. The fat kid told me this while we were waiting to be picked for a football game. After two hours in which we appeared to have done nothing but tell people our names, write our names and spell our names, secondary school had already taught me what six years of primary school had failed to do: the fat kid’s name was Hawkins. Obviously nobody was going to pick him for their team but they seemed to have decided that as I was talking to him, I was his friend and so I must be rubbish at footie too. I shuffled along the wall. If they picked him before they picked me I might as well throw myself under a train.

Kids were bagging position. Some were taking off jumpers and blazers, making goalposts and measuring out goals. The bigger kids were juggling with the tennis ball impatient for the game to start. Captains were scratching their heads. I was still standing against the wall.

‘Him,’ said a boy who was captain because he didn’t have a proper school uniform or a tie. He was also bigger and broader than the average first year. I resisted the temptation to look over my shoulder. I smiled. He was picking me. His name was Terry Chambers. I hand’t realised he was at Beech Park because he hadn’t been in assembly that morning. Must have sauntered in late as usual. He’d also come from my primary school and he was hard.

‘You can go in goal,’ he said, turning on a well-scuffed heel.

Now, I am crap in goal. Always was. Still am. My palms were already sweating when a voice piped up, ‘I’ll go in goal’. It was Cal.

‘We’ve got this kid,’ I yelled to everyone bar Cal himself. The game was already underway.

The captain was unsure. ‘He’s a shrimp’ he said.

‘They’ve got one more player than you have’, said Cal as the ball flew past his right ear. He put out his left hand to try and stop it, flailing a bit like a girl hitting you. He missed it by miles and the ball continued goalward.

‘No goal’, shouted Cal. ‘Over the post.’

‘You’ve moved the post’, said someone from the other team but Cal had already restarted the game by throwing the ball out to our captain and the incident was over. I think we won the match. I played terribly, even missing an open goal and tripping over a duffel bag but the reason I am sure that we won is that our goalkeeper had moved our goalposts some three feet closer together. Cal, I realised, was in the top class.

Frankie Dane’s entry in the most recent edition of The Encyclopedia Of Rock:

Frankie Dane

English, singer-guitarist-songwriter

Born 1959

First exploded onto the London punk scene as one of The Go-Karts. On strength of excellent debut album Rotten In Denmark (1978), he and songwriting partner Cal Carter were hailed by the critics as the bards of the new wave - ‘the thinking men of punk’. After Carter’s untimely death the following year, Dane moved initially to France and disappeared from the rock scene. He returned with one of the biggest popular and critical successes of the 80s in Stolen Moments (1984). It went platinum - an achievement he matched with Phoenix (1989). His strength is in his unswerving approach unaffected by fashion - both solo albums display the Go-Karts hallmarks of dual guitars, infectious melodies and kitchen sink lyrics. His lack of pretentiousness throughout the 80s was wholly refreshing and now the circle has come around again - Dane is often cited as the Godfather of Grunge or the Great Uncle of Brit-Pop - his limited catalogue, just like that of The Beatles, is emerging as a strength as the runaway success of Frank (1998), the recent greatest hits repackaging proves. Dane enjoys both longevity and integrity - a combination, rare in the rock industry, which could yet see him become the biggest of them all.

3

Beech Park, the present day

The water splashes off the proud white hood and laps against the window, coming in long slow rushes like waves on an easy beach. Brushes like hairy paint-rollers, vertical Dougal dogs, grunt into action, licking the fibre-glass and chrome body, swallowing it. Soap runs down the glass. For a moment, foam and suds are everywhere, vision obscured. Then more water. Violently. Jets taming us from all directions. Clean, clean water. The car wash is nearly over.

Anyone watching would think us business men. Jonathan is regularly unconventional in contrasting jacket and tie, broadly cut, perhaps an advertising executive. He’s got some sort of a souped up sports car with a twin this and turbo that and a top speed more than double the legal maximum. You’ll know him as my regular bass player; he’s actually my manager too.

I remove my hat to mop my brow. It’s a warm morning and I am uncomfortable. For a moment, Jonathan’s car beaming in the morning sun reminds me of Cal’s old red Ford Escort and a dawn over Durham town.

From where we are standing, the car gleams, its chassis ready to pounce. But anyone looking closely, looking at the parts seen only by timid cats, would discover some secrets: caked on grease and dirt and features slightly off-centre. That’s the trouble with looking closely at anything - perhaps that’s why the modern world so lacks enthusiasm for it - but that is what I as an autobiographer am doomed to do.

Hand in my jacket pocket, I switch on and off the small cassette recorder that I have purchased to help me write this book. They’re already saying it will be a best-seller. My publishers and the music press, that is. So Jonathan tells me. I’ve stopped taking much notice of the music mags. In fact, I dislike them more now that I’m a ‘true original’ with ‘integrity’ than I did when I was ‘derivative’, ‘unambitious’ and ‘smugly overweight’.

Jonathan says the record company want me to record another album. ‘They’re phoning twice a day’ he keeps saying. ‘Before they go to lunch and four hours later when they get back’. I can’t help. Not until I’ve got this book out of my system. Maybe never.

I want everything in the open so we are on our way to see Tony Beale, our Artists and Repertoire man at my record company Phonodisc to tell him what I’m planning. He’ll be assuming we’re going to tell him the new album’s finally ready. I have no respect for Tony - he’s an Oxbridge-educated chump - but I am nervous nonetheless about telling him anything different.

‘I shouldn’t bring it to London,’ Jonathan begins as we shuffle along the Strand. He’s talking about the car. With the windows down, we are at the optimum height to inhale the exhaust from the vehicle in front. ‘You can’t leave it anywhere. You put your life-savings in a meter and ten minutes later some bastard on piece-rate claps a wheel clamp on. Or you put it where they’ve sledgehammered the tops off the meters and come back to find the chassis on bricks. That’s if you can find it at all. Don’t know what’s worse.’ His hand hovers menacingly over the gear stick.

As we crawl past Old Compton Street, a couple of guys wave.

‘Your expectant fans, Frank,’ says Jon, but I don’t see it like that. To me, they’re waving at him.

‘I don’t know why we didn’t get the bus.’ I say, fiddling about with the cassette recorder. It’s voice-activated and cuts off the first word of every new sentence. I am contemplating recording the meeting with Tony. Lighting the blue touchpaper of my career and retiring might make a significant moment for my book.

‘We didn’t get the bus because…’ Jonathan turns to peer at me over his Ray-bans. They have a curious medicinal green tint. ‘Well, when was the last time you actually got a bus, Frank. I think they’ve been abolished.’

‘There’s one.’

‘Of course, they have them up here. For the tourists. When is that arsehole going to move? Anyway the meeting’s today not next week.’

Jonathan swings the car off the road into an underground car park. He operates the gear stick for the first time in half-an-hour. ‘Should be an attendant here. It’s expensive enough.’

I’m trying to relax. Remind myself that Tony is not what he was. He used to be sixpenny sharp with fine judgement and a natural authority, making and breaking teenage hearts. Safety-pins and tie pins. Bollinger and bitter. Out of marketing meetings into The Vortex without missing a stride. But that was then.

And all these years later, I could bank with Coutts if I wanted to. Nobody would ask squirming questions or quibble over the number of noughts in my current account. But I cough and shuffle in the glossy leather passenger seat either wishing I had or feeling like I’ve already got a great mouthful of bubble gum. I still want to please. I know that Tony is not going to be happy and it sickens me. And it sickens me that it sickens me.

‘I still think of you as my little Van Morrison, Frankie,’ Tony will say as he always says at some point during our meetings, spitting the end of his cigar into the wastebasket like a pea from a shooter. ‘You split the bollocking band, do one like a whatsit, Lord Lucan, and out Astral Weeks, Astral Weeks. Fucking brilliant. And again. Sod it. Like a fucking little Jack Horner. You keep pulling out the plums, Frankie boy. Keep pulling out those plums.’

But even the liberal plunder of his limited but graphic collection of curses is insufficient to take the cultured edge from his accent. He is, quite simply, an affected fucker and despite his having overseen my career since the beginning, our only point of contact is when we shake hands.

Tony nearly spits out his preprandial gin when I tell him. Nearly. Would have done if he wasn’t supposed to be on the wagon. I enjoy the moment. Freudian, I am. Not Sigmund but schaden. Tony is getting old. He hasn’t signed anyone decent for years. Still thinks a sample is something you provide for the doctor. If I dry up, what then? I can read it in the lines of his face. If he can’t do the business with that difficult bastard whose pal topped himself…

‘A book! Most fucking rock fans are illiterate,’ he splutters. He fixes his eyes on mine. Slowly, he places the drink down on his leather-topped mahogany desk and looks at me as if I were a lump of excrement or a roadie.

‘Actually, most of them are ABC1 white collar professionals,’ chirps Jon.

‘I’m all washed-up,’ I say, churning on the clichés, Tony-esque. ‘All played out.’

Tony changes by inches between our meetings: a couple more around the waist, a couple less at the temples and crown. Looking at his play-doh cheeks, I wonder if he moves by inches too. I’d like to be able to relate that his face turned red with anger but it was rosy red already – three parts alcohol, two parts cocaine and one part tropical sunshine. Tony flexes his nostrils. ‘Shit. Fuck. Jesus.’

He inclines an unfocused gaze towards me. ‘Fucking illiterate,’ he says, shaking his head like an ageing uncle at a loss with the ways of the world.

‘There are no more songs, Tony. It’s as simple as that.’

We were all young once and, if Jon and Cal and I had been hungry, Tony was ravenous. Now, heavier, tireder and desperate, he smiles. ‘Frankie, Frankie, believe me: you should be sitting at a mixing desk not a word-processor. You’re an artist not a fantasist.’ I tighten my resolve not to speak. ‘You make fantasies, Frankie. You are a fantasy. You’re a. Shit. Bollocks.’ He looks at Jon again. There’s something in their eyes that’s like parents with a wayward son.

‘Tony,’ I say after a pause. ‘Don’t get so hung up on product. This is the age of the multinational. Phonodisc own the publishing house anyway. You’ll still get your profit-share.’

‘Don’t fuck with me Frankie as if this is just some bollocking financial kiss my arse relationship. We’re talking…’ Once again the rage evaporates to be replaced by a slow shake of the fleshy jowl. ‘We’re talking rock’n’roll here. The lifeblood of a generation. Fuck.’

I look into his eyes and he doesn’t see me because that’s it. The one who’s all played out is Tony. After a moment of heavyweight silence, I pick up my hat and Jon and I leave, closing the door carefully as if on grief.

All of the young punks got new boots and contracts, according to the Clash. We certainly did. A contract. An advance. Everyone within five years of your age and ten miles of your school claiming that they were in your class. It’s a dream, until the second single bombs and you’re back behind the counter at Dixons faster than you can say ‘one-hit wonder’. And if you are successful, it doesn’t really change. Things just get bigger. The same feudal principle remains: they own you and they can finish you. It’s hard to take control unless being finished doesn’t bother you.

The Go-Karts split up in disarray following Cal’s death. Tony says that he hasn’t touched amphetamines since. (This is probably true though he’s touched, caressed, manhandled and mauled everything else.) Our first, our only, album Rotten In Denmark was still riding high in the charts and had gone gold.

The rest is the omniscient H. Five years later Frankie Dane and the Denmarks returned with Stolen Moments. Pleasantly surprised, the critics said. Thought he’d be nothing without Carter. We did it again with Phoenix. And sold even more albums. Now, as the tabloids might say, I am telling it all. I am sitting at my desk, I am sorting my papers and I am rewinding my cassette recorder. It is time for the truth.

First, some starters for ten. Frankie Dane. That’s Francis Derek Dane. Francis was my mother’s choice, Derek, my father’s. He let her have her own way on that one. Nothing if not reasonable my father. He told me that himself. ‘Let her decide everything,’ he would say. ‘Except when it’s important. And let you decide what’s important. That’s the way.’

FD Dane it would have said had I been a cricketer. Born 6th June 1959 in south east London. Education: Beech Park Grammar and the Open University. Club: Tottenham Hotspur FC.

My mother comes from a village in County Durham, her father a miner. He ought to have died before I was born, victim of a tragedy of folk song proportions but it wasn’t like that. I am the spawn of the families who don’t have stories. Where there is no heroism save existence and no passion greater than good sense. No glory days nor vital hours. Few enough poignant moments. On our rare sorties north, my grandfather was always to be found sat in a tight little chair wheezing away, wasting away and always, to my grandmother’s disappointment, letting his tea go cold. He may have been a big man once - his great arms hung over the wooden arms of the chair almost to the floor - but one Sunday he wasn’t there anymore and I didn’t really notice until we were driving home.

My father grew up beneath the monochrome monoxide skies of Battersea (or South Chelsea as the estate agents now like to call it). His father worked in Covent Garden fruit market in an administrative capacity. I remember my Grandad’s proud voice - me on his lap, his glass of stout in his hand. ‘Porter this is, Frankie. Named after the porters in Covent Garden.’

‘Are you a porter, Grandad?’

‘No, son. I’m a book-keeper.’ Too dull he was even to lug around potatoes.

My own father, a meat and two veg man but never one for fruit didn’t follow his father into the market. Until his recent retirement my Dad drove for a living. Not black taxis but minicabs. Park Cabs was one of the first in London, apparently. Before that he drove lorries.

Both my grandparents with a smug Protestant symmetry that continues down the line produced one of each. My mum’s brother Uncle Alan lives up north, my father’s sister Aunty Anne just around the corner. As a child I used to wish it were the other way round. While I couldn’t understand why when granted the freedom of the skies his pigeons should want to fly home so rapidly and repeatedly, at least Uncle Alan with his coot and his crisp country mornings offered something of interest. Aunty Anne just had her endless cups of coffee.

I was an only child, of course. My father, cheated by a handful of months of the chance to serve in combat did his homefront bit for blighty with a diligence that never abated. He rationed even children and although I remember my mother asking me a couple of times if I would like ‘someone to play with’, no sister or brother materialised.

Today, I’m lucky enough to have two of everything. I have two homes – a semi in London and the apartment in Paris where we lived for a handful of years in the early eighties. Despite my dislike of motoring, I have two cars. And, I have, in the family tradition, two, as they say, lovely kids - Philip and Rebecca.

I also have a wife, Wendy, elder sister of Cal Carter. When I tell you that we have been married for nearly 20 years, the mathematical among you will calculate correctly that we took the plunge in the wake of Cal’s death. Her first husband - a gentleman named Julian - could not handle being married to the sister of a pop star and he could handle being married to the sister of a dead pop star even less. She, like her father, works in publishing.

I tease Wendy that she got lumbered with the workhorse of the partnership when the creative one died. Certainly, that was the media’s response once it drew breath long enough to reflect. ‘Workhorse?’ she says raising an already arched eyebrow still further. ‘When are you going to do some work then?’

‘When you can drive directly to the supermarket without getting lost,’ I smile. ‘I mean we come every fortnight.’

‘Yeh, and they reroute the one-way system every week.’

I have been criticised because my songs are still about chip shops and vinegar kisses, Babycham and darts, broken hearts and rubber band engagement rings. ‘Are we supposed to credit that a man with four platinum albums regularly adjourns to his local fish and chip emporium?’ scoffed the reviewer in The Independent. Well, the answer, at the risk of making my family sound like The Brady Bunch, is yes. Or, at least, Wendy and the kids do. I usually stay at home and prepare a side salad with vinaigrette dressing. Wild man of rock. In general, we still live much as we ever did when Wendy was married to another and I was a civil servant with a battered guitar beneath his bed. The same part of town. A slightly bigger house.

You may have all my albums (and if you do, thanks very much) but I doubt you know what I look like - not anymore anyway. There isn’t an accurate photograph of me in circulation taken later than about 1983. I have a range of glasses, plain and tinted. And I have the hat collection from hell. Trilbies. Boaters. Panamas. Fedoras. Baseball caps. Balaclavas. Berets. Some of these I have been pictured in, some not and ne’er the twain. Some of the locals know who I am, of course they do - the few who have been here as long as I have. Others, those who have asked directly, think that like my wife I work in publishing - proof-reading and editing from home - but few ask. People don’t. Suburbs, you see.

I haven’t toured since The Go-Karts broke up. I reappear when a new album comes out and do the TV and the interviews, but I don’t make a big deal out of my lifestyle or call myself a recluse. That’s the way to guarantee that you get hounded. Nobody thinks my low-profile is a matter of policy. Indeed, I’ve never mentioned it at all until now. The truth, you see. That’s what I want. After I’ve been on the box or done the pics for what they amusingly call the lifestyle mags, I shave the beard off and allow the apparently receding hairline to grow back again. I think that is the secret of my success: I make myself look less attractive for the media and who’d credit that?

Once, a make-up girl noticed the follicled pores on the top of my head, the dots of hair, and blabbed. This gave rise to the ‘Dane Has Hair Transplant’ story in the mid-eighties. It was quite the opposite of the truth but it kept my name alive between the two albums. One of the tabloids was ready to camp on my doorstep to monitor my visits to the trichologist but they never turned up. Jonathan says they found my address easily enough but the editor couldn’t believe that with all my spondys I still lived in Beech Park. He assumed the info was out of date and sacked the researcher. Dull anonymity - it’s the family trait.

PEDAL POWER POP

by Ian Martyn-Baker

(from the New Rock Journal, 1978)

Careering. They mean it, maaan. That’s The Go-Karts. Go-getters, going places, all four. Places this scribe has never seen. We’re in Goddard’s Pie and Mash emporium in Greenwich near that big boat. Their choice, natch. Find it on the map and make it a shrine. These boys are gonna be BIG. Or should be. One day.

They’re talking of meat and eels, gravy and liquor and some of the most infectious punk-pop this side of the safety-pin. Calum Carter, the little kid with the Telecaster, has hair longer than regulation but the hippie taunts don’t harm him. He downs his cup of rosie. The chips aren’t on these shoulders. ‘If ripped T’s are the new uniform we want nothing of it,’ he says to communal nodding. ‘Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,’ The Go-Karts sing Peter Townsend to the accompaniment of Mr Goddard’s LSD cash-register (sic). No new wave–old wave snobbery here.

Carter continues, ‘It’s part of what we’re about.’ He picks up a battered brown brief-case and puts it down on the table. ‘This is where I keep the songs that will single-handedly bring down the establishment,’ he says with an ironic chuckle. I dare to mention tongues and cheeks and don’t get my pie and two mash upended on my head. It’s a little refreshing.

Frankie Dane, Carter’s songwriting partner, the one who plays the Townsend/Weller-esque Rickenbacker, is wearing a pin-striped jacket two sizes too small over his Too-Thick-for-University T. ‘It was Cal’s dad’s,’ he explains. (The jacket, natch) ‘We’re not in favour of that suburban conformity, anymore than we’re in favour of everyone wearing biker jackets and bondage strides or tightly knotted ties. Or flares for that matter.’ Bassist Jon Waters has a pair of loon pants broader than Jimmy Page’s ego and Carter himself sports a leather jacket. The point is well-made.

There’s a quiet - and not so quiet when CC’s in full flow – confidence about south-east London’s brightest hope. No dedicated followers these. Individuals all. They even cover Presley. Three times. Tonight they’ll be packing them in in Wardour St. First-time headliners at the Marquee and they’ll be opening with ‘You Were Always On My Mind’. That’s confidence.

‘We usually do “Promised Land” as an encore but tonight we might just do it second,’ says drummer Charlie Ball. [They did too–Ed]

But these are no worshippers of the cabaret King neither. The Presley numbers get the same frenetic treatment as the originals, chainsaw guitars wrestling with the melodies.

Some people say you’re too small to front a band, Cal. Is that the reason for the on-stage aggro with Jon here. ‘We want to be known for playing good songs,’ Carter says emphatically. ‘Anybody worried about that is stupid,’ says Dane, interrupting. ‘The same people who say women can’t be in groups and that you have to be able to play a diminished seventh augmented fifth twice removed to be a good guitar player.’

‘No sweat,’ smiles Carter, twisting his fingers into bizarre positions round the neck of a ketchup bottle.

They seem too happy with themselves to be as angry as they claim and somehow they don’t quite sit (or stand or pogo) with their contemps. The Clash eating mash, The Jam saying what you wear doesn’t matter (yikes!), The Pistols praising Presley? I don’t think.

Phonodisc are said to be interested in The Go-Karts with the original ‘Rotten In Denmark’ earmarked as the single. This boy hopes that these boys get that little break they need but, as Calum Carter sings, nay roars, at the climax of their set, ‘Do not adjust your scepticism. Do not adjust your mind-set. Do not adjust.’ Can rock’n’roll adjust just enough to let The Go-Karts in?

4

After two weeks, I moved classes.

Mr Parker was rearranging the tobacco dispenser at the back of his kiosk, a task to which he appeared to devote most of his non-serving time. He smiled his policeman’s smile when he noticed me lurking. I didn’t like to go too close. The edge of the counter extended a foot or so beyond the booth and when I was small I was forever cracking my skull on it, the blue paint flaking off into my hair.

‘Is that the usual, young man?’ he asked. Mr Parker always wore a bow-tie.

I nodded, running my finger along the narrow strip of wood which was supposed to stop the newspapers falling on the floor. The nails were clogged with the fibres of inattentive sweaters.

‘Mind you don’t get a splinter.’

My pockets were full of foreign coins and football cards as usual. I sorted through them trying to assemble the right money. Mr Parker sold a couple of newspapers to men in a hurry.

‘You’ll have noticed you’ve lost your resting place, I dare say,’ he said as I pushed my little pile of coins across the counter.

I turned towards my window. I could guess from the shadowy shape pressed against the glass that somebody else was already sitting there and I had a fair idea who, too. Rapping on the pane with my knuckles as I passed, I strode casually out of the station. Casually for Mr Parker’s benefit - he didn’t strike me as the sort of man who approved of haste.

But it wasn’t Cal looking down at me as I emerged onto the pavement. In my seat was his briefcase. He looked at me expectantly. I tossed him a ball of gum and popped another into my own mouth.

‘You’re coming in our class, you know,’ he said.

‘I know,’ I said. It was the first I had heard of it.

‘Mr Jackson told us yesterday at home time.’