The Singer by Cathi Unsworth

Prologue

You can tell it’s love by the expression on their faces.

Four, maybe five hundred of them, packed together so tightly they’ve formed a kind of human sea, rolling and lapping in waves around the rim of the stage. A couple of girls sway on the shoulders of their boyfriends, loudly beseeching the white spotlight that rests on the microphone in the centre of the stage. Like most of the rest of the assembled worshippers these girls have long black hair, crimped into corrugated ribbons then teased upwards with the help of Boots’ Ultra-Strong Hairspray. Thick black liner magnifies their eyes against china white foundation and slashes of red lips. The negative image of the crest of a wave, their clothes as the colour of their hair, their faces full of yearning, waiting:

For the man.

A big punk rocker with arms thick as tree trunks pushes his way to the front, elbowing and swearing, pumped up with expectation and adrenalin, the forthcoming catharsis of violence in song. His head is a black crown of soaped-up spikes, four inches long, liable to have someone’s eye out — or so he would hope. Round his neck a dog collar of spikes, ditto on his wrists, a visual dare for anyone to start on him. He’s ripped the sleeves off his GBH T-shirt, exposing flabby white flesh smudged with home-made blue tattoos, right down to his waistband, where a pyramid stud belt coils around the top of his tight black stretch jeans. No doubt he’s got steel toe-capped Doc Martens on his feet but you can’t see that from here. You just see the flash of his eyes as he wades through the waves to the front, hauls his upper body up onto the stage and starts pointing, shouting abuse to the wings, where he knows they’ll make their entrance.

Waiting for the band.

Then the house lights go down and a huge roar erupts.

A vein stands out on the punk rocker’s neck as he screams his lungs out into the white noise around him, punching the air with a hammy fist.

Slowly, they coil out onto the stage.

The bass player first, a tall, willowy black man, cigarette dangling from his bottom lip, black suit and white shirt and shades, the image of Don Cherry in the Ornette Coleman free jazz days. His bass guitar is slung low around his hips, and without looking up at the crowd he stands sideways and begins to pluck the strings, a low, loping, insistent sound.

Cigarette smoke swirls across the stage from the bassist’s lips.

The drummer has by now climbed behind his kit and begins to join in the tattoo, the undulating refrain quickly becoming hypnotic, the goth girls swaying on their boyfriends’ shoulders waving their arms like seaweed underwater. Their mouths form the words of a name.

Of the singer.

For five long minutes the men on stage continue to make their rumble. Then from stage left, the guitarist emerges. Compared to the bassist he is wide and solid. His round, slightly battered face peers out from under a black homburg hat. He looks like Gene Hackman as Popeye Doyle, and he knows it, cultivates it. Broad shoudered, bandy-legged, he wears a second-hand Sixties suit like it was handmade for his personal use from Savile Row.

The guitarist faces the crowd, rocking slightly on his heels, a flicker of amusement across his broad features, and slashes into his guitar like he’s taking a razor to soft skin. The jarring sound resonates through the crowd in a synaptic rush, wiring their collective conscious for action, and none more so than the punk rocker, who is by now attempting to get his feet onto the stage. A bouncer rushes from the darkness of the wings to push the spiky head back down, back into the sea of arms and backcombed hair. You can see his fists rising above the heads of the others and with them his feet, and yes, he is wearing Doctor Martens, eighteen holes with steel toe-caps.

Meanwhile, the guitarist, grinning now, stalks the front of the stage, shaking a violent hee haw from his strings, making a mangled blues turn red.

Punk rocker’s head comes back up. He screams the name of the singer.

Who comes tripping out of the darkness, as if somebody’s pushed him or he’s reeling drunk. If the other guys looked the epitome of louche cool, he actually looks frightening — long long legs in black leather, a shock of black hair greased into a glistening pompadour, a T-shirt printed with a picture of a gun bearing the legend: 'SMITH & WESSON: THE GREAT EQUALIZER’.

His arms are snaked with elaborate tattoos — skulls, dominos, women, dice and crosses. His eyes are wide and bulging, his lips a thin line across a taut jaw.

He lurches towards the mic stand, pulls it towards him, leans into the face of punk rocker and screams: “Your funeral is about to begin!”

The crowd lets rip a mutual roar and a thousand hands shoot skywards.

Clearly delighted, punk rocker grabs hold of the singer’s T-shirt, pulling him down into the throng. Long insect arms and legs flail above the hands of the faithful, pieces of T-shirt ripped off his back and delivered up, consecrated in hair grease and sweat. The mic has gone with the singer into the pit, at first it must have been grabbed out of his hands by the punk rocker who shouts into it: “You’re a fucking arsehole,” in a South London accent.

By now two bouncers are wading in from the stage, trying to separate the writhing form of the singer from the mass of arms that want to keep him. He has wrestled the mic away now, words are discernable, cutting in and out of earshot, more gutteral howl than singing — “I am the king of this wasteland,”

It sounds like, "Blackened, empty, fill my eyes…”

The bouncers now forcing him out seemingly against his will, long legs lashing, T-shirt long gone, traces of blood trickling down pasty white skin.

Belt buckle of a Colt .45.

All the while, that voodoo beat pounding, that guitar shrieking.

The singer thrashes his way out of the bouncers grasp, teeters on the edge of the stage. He pushes his hair, now standing up like porcupine quills, out of his pale saucer eyes, stares into the writhing throng of his flock as if stupefied. Their hungry hands try to catch him again, but this time he is too quick for them, leaping sideways, almost colliding with the guitarist who leans backwards against him, his white Custom Les Paul at crotch level, pumping away at those mangled notes as if he’s fucking some girl against an alley wall.

Punk rocker making the wanker sign, shit-eating grin on his face.

The singer raises the mic to his lips: “I am the fucking king/The wretched king/Of all this shit/Of all nothing!” he screams. The congregation scream back their approval.

He glances over at the guitarist for a second. An almost imperceptible nod. Then he runs to the front of the stage, leaps back into the crowd, who open up and swallow him in a grateful frenzy.

The scene dissolves into a studio shot, one of those chirpy tosser presenters that were everywhere in the early Eighties, paisley shirt with the top button done up, waistband of his jeans practically under his armpits, mullet hairdo with blonde tips.

He opens his mouth to say something and dissolves into static.

Gavin gets up laughing, turns the video recorder off.

“That was all they did!” he whoops, still in disbelief, twenty years later. “That one song. That was the whole gig. It was a riot. They had a record number of complaints for putting that on the TV too.”

“That,” I tell him, still starting at the blank screen in astonishment, “was fucking amazing. Why the fuck wasn’t I around then?” I add to myself.

“Ahh, you young ’uns,” Gavin sits back in his armchair, cracks open another can of lager. “You missed out. Those days were the shit.”

Gavin Granger is fifteen years older than me but he’s still whippet thin, still wears a crumpled lounge suit with bonhomie, knows he’s still good-looking enough not to care about the salt-and-pepper streaks in his shaggy hair. Maybe it’s because he’s Australian. Brought up on sunshine and cold beer and shrimps on the barbie — not roast dinners and cold winters and Surrey motherly love.

Where as I, Eddie Bracknell, am 29 and already running to flab, already starting to lose my hair, already in a permanent state of anxiety. As a result of all those things and probably more.

But at this moment I don’t give a shit. At this moment, my palms are sticky with elation, sliding down the side of my tin of Red Stripe, which has crumpled and turned warm in my grasp.

There are so many questions I want to ask him.

“What happened, then?” I start with the obvious one.

“To him — to the singer?”

Gavin lifts his eyes and then his can to the ceiling.

“A chick happened, mate,” he finally says. “Isn’t it always the fucking way…”

© Cathi Unsworth 2007 All Rights Reserved