I’m doing a line, then holding the phone to my ear as my manager
is rabbiting on the mobile about a forthcoming tour. Across
from me in the waiting room, some guys are sitting on a sofa
staring over. The sunglasses I’m wearing mean they can’t see me looking
back at them. They’re trying to work out if it’s really me. Behind
them, the rehearsal rooms manager is grabbing cables and handing
out microphones. The lads on the sofa are now whispering to each
other, pointing at me. One of them takes a piece of paper out of his
pocket, no doubt getting ready to ask me to autograph it.
I concentrate on the joint I’m rolling as my manager keeps going
on about the forthcoming tour. He’s saying the label are going in big
with tour support. He’s saying this should be our last tour at these
sizes of venues, then we should be looking at two-thousand-capacity
arenas when we go back out to promote the next single (a next single
that I’ve yet to write). After putting the phone on loudspeaker, I
place it down on the table, so the rest of the musicians in the room
can hear. Then I lick the spine of the cigarette, open it up, and tip
the tobacco into the cradle of skins.
‘Gotcha,’ I say.
‘But this one will be amazing,’ he says.
‘Sounds really exciting.’
‘Tickets are going to be like gold dust.’
‘Sure.’
‘The scenes with people trying to get in without a ticket.’
‘Yeah, carnage.’
‘We’ll get a lot of press out of it.’
‘Bye.’
I try to think for a second. Can’t come up with anything. Tip
some grass onto the tobacco and seal it with some saliva. I hang up
the phone as the rehearsal rooms assistant, Carol, comes in. It’s almost
lunchtime. I keep thinking of asking her out for lunch.
‘Good morning,’ she says, placing some cables in this big box they
keep in front of their table.
‘Carol,’ I say, turning the joint around in my hand.
‘Yeah?’
‘Could you please tell these guys here not to come over and ask
me for an autograph?’
The guys in the other band all look up from what they were doing.
Carol glances over at them, pretending not to be embarrassed.
‘How do you know they were about to ask for your signature?’
she says.
I look past her to the guy that’s holding the square of paper in
his hand.
‘You gonna sell it online after I give it to you?’
Carol gives me a tight little smile. She walks over to the boys in
the other band and stands in front of them while wrapping cables
around the crook of her elbow.
‘Don’t let him intimidate you. His real fear is you find out he’s
illiterate.’
Carol is mouthy, but I kind of like that about her. Great put-downs.
No come-ons. It’s just that perfect combination. She’s been working
here as the assistant for a few years now. She’s worked with all sorts of
established bands. She’s seen the business without the start dust. The
yawning, tired faces of the musicians getting dragged into practice on
a rainy Tuesday afternoon. The hair dye that hasn’t quite hidden the
grey. She knows the truth that we are terrifyingly normal. She needs to
unlearn this, though, and get back to looking at me as if I were gold.
‘Carol,’ I say as she gets to the door.
‘Yeah?’
‘Japan. We’re heading to Japan next week for a tour.’
‘Good for you.’ She turns to leave.
I think I was expecting more than this.
‘Have you been?
‘I work in a rehearsal room, Danny. Of course I haven’t been.’
She stands there at the doorway looking at me.
‘How long are you away for?’
First sign of interest piqued. ‘Two weeks,’ I tell her.
‘You still scared of flying?’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Can’t remember. But somebody said you lose the plot on planes.’
‘Not everything you hear about me is true.’
‘I really hope not, Danny.’
Then she’s gone and I open my packet of cigarettes, mostly empty
with only a few waxy tobacco bags left. But they contain pleasure.
The usual feelings of blood cooling and low-level euphoria, almost
in the moment you inhale.
It’s good to smoke. Safe and healthy. Some guy who smoked got a
tumour. Tennis balls inside him when they opened him up. Fifteen-love.
We caught it early. Fifteen-all. Sorry it’s spread. Thirty-fifteen.
Here’s your treatment plan. Thirty-all. Chemo isn’t working. Forty-thirty.
There’s this new revolutionary treatment. Deuce. That isn’t
working either. Advantage cancer. There are no treatment options
available to you now other than palliative care. Game, set, and match.
New balls.
As I take a puff, I can feel the phlegm shake loose inside my chest.
I imagine it dripping off the ribcage, sliding down or coming up. I
look up to see Williams coming down the corridor, pushing an amp
along using the bottom part of the wheeled flight case. Williams.
Five-foot-two, the stature of a child, and the brains of a child. But
lacking the imagination or the charm of a child. He’s balancing a
polystyrene cup filled with something that looks like coffee on the
top of the amp. He’s the stupidest person we could ever have hired
as a tour manager, and if he spills coffee and ruins an amp, it’s coming
out of his far-too-generous wages. He salutes me as he passes the
open doorway, waving again when I don’t acknowledge him, looks
downcast when he realises that he’s been blanked, then trundles on
down the corridor towards the rehearsal room where the rest of the
band are setting up.
Like all true stars, I let everyone wait for my arrival, even the band
themselves, and this personal aloofness has stood me in good stead
over the years. I lean down and chop up another line. Then snort it.
Rub the numbness away from my nose.
Lean my head back to keep the coke inside then watch YouTube
for a bit. Minneapolis Uranium Club, Black Midi, and Black Country,
New Road. Then looking down the side panel I see there’s a clip of one of our gigs that someone’s put up. I watch a video of me being interviewed backstage. ‘That’s right,’ I say, ‘There are still people
following the tired old formula of four white men in the band,
that that’s somehow the template we’ve all to use. Yeah? But we don’t
believe in that.’
I look directly at the camera for full effect.
‘Share’, our new single, plays out at the end of the clip. Then I’m
hammering the volume button down, so I don’t have to hear it. It
was written by our other guitar player, Si, who decided about four
months ago that he wanted to be a songwriter too. Picture being a
teacher at the front of a class when a pupil announces they’ll be delivering
the next lesson.
He played me a demo. He asked if I could send it to our manager
Clark.
I sent it away and thought, fill your boots, you cunt.
Then I waited.
Then I waited some more.
Then somebody at the record label decided it was worth something.
It was released and looked lost in the weeds on the outskirts of
the charts. It wasn’t making playlists online either. It looked like the
turkey I’d judged it to be.
Then, something weird started to happen. Something demonic.
It got a couple of big indie playlists on Spotify. I was sitting in a
greasy spoon in London with Si when he got the news through. We
clinked china across the table and smiled. This icy glint in his eye. A
couple of 6 Music shows then gave it a spin. Felt like a bit of a ticking
time bomb after that 6 Music breakthrough and then the bomb
ticked down 5, 4, 3, 2, until Radio 1 picked up on it. Radio fucking
1. Everything went wrong after that. My mum phoned to say how
much she liked it. At the dentist, waiting to get root canal, it was
playing over the speakers in the waiting room, and I could see the
receptionist humming along to it. When the dentist took me into the
room, I wanted him to inject the anaesthetic straight into my brain.
It’s been all false teeth since then. Brilliant smiles. Brace yourself.
Watching him doing the interviews. Listening to him explaining
the lyric. Seeing the subtle shift in band dynamics as Clark gives
him more attention.
Can’t bear to listen to it.
Look around the room, and the other band has gone. Clench my
fist on and off. Realise my jaw is set and my shoulders are up. Genuinely
can’t remember if I took a line five minutes ago.
I chop up another line and snort it. Notice that there are some
drops of blood coming out of my nostril, so I jam some toilet paper
up there that I keep in my pocket for such occupational hazards.
Actually, it’s not exactly true that this is an occupational hazard.
For a lot of bands, they lead clean lives these days. That’s not for me,
though. Imagine empty packets of cigarettes lying discarded on a
floor, wraps of coke, bottles of whisky and crushed cans of beer. Picture
women without names leaving hotel rooms without numbers,
close-ups of their faces as they run down corridors with their mascara
running because they realise that’s it over and I didn’t ask for
their contact details. Picture a close-up on my heart beating, the atria
pumping hatred, not blood, through the ventricles, the valves closing
to prevent any more anger from escaping. Picture the steam coming
out of my ears and the painted-on smiles on my face as I greet fans
at the stage door, signing whatever they want me to sign, including
their tits as their boyfriends watch. Picture the first instalment of my
publishing deal dropping into the bank and me checking the balance
on my banking app, before logging out, then logging back in again
a few seconds later, just to check it again. Picture the pressing plants
with the limited-edition coloured vinyl dropping off a conveyor belt.
Picture monitors that are either too loud or too quiet or have too
much of Si’s fucking guitar in them. Picture an endless line of faces
asking me questions, from managers to tour managers, from engineers
to producers, from live agents to journalists. Picture the Artiste
& Repertoire people nodding away as they listen to the latest recordings
from studio sessions. Picture it all and then imagine how hard it
is to contemplate someone close taking it away from you.
Before I venture to the rehearsal room, I chop up another line.
Use the other nostril this time. It’s important to look a little bit perky
when you’re entering a rehearsal room. My leadership appears to be
open for challenge, and when that kind of thing is in the mix, it’s
crucial to look bulletproof. You look spooked and it goes the other
way. They smell blood and circle round you for the kill. Plectrums
start to look like a shark’s dorsal fin after a while.
As I walk down the corridor, I can hear the muffled noise of bands
playing in the different rooms. Every football league set-up needs a
pyramid structure, and by pyramid, I mean numerous slaves on the
bottom level whose sole job appears to be to hold everything else
up. They get to die in the sealed tomb when their masters pop their
clogs as well. These are the covers bands and the people so generic
in their own material that they’d be as well describing themselves as
covers bands.
For a minute, I stand outside their doors so I can get a laugh.
This cheerful chick singing. She sounds genuinely happy to be in a
rehearsal room on her day off, going nowhere. The screeching feedback
from her experimental guitar player. A drummer who has the
good fortune to be in time twice during the entire three minutes of
the song. These people are going nowhere. They won’t make a fortune.
They won’t get to experience that personal moment when a
crowd of ten thousand are hushed, listening to their confessional lyrics.
‘Oh, that one’s about her relationship with her dad.’ No, that’s
never going to be said about her lyrics. I’m lost in thought just staring
at their door when she opens it to step outside. She looks at me
for a beat then says, ‘You’re Danny McAllister.’
And I’m just thinking, the smell of B.O. coming from this room
is astonishing. Get some new bandmates.
‘I heard you used these studios sometimes,’ she says. ‘But I wasn’t
sure if it was true or not.’
She closes the door over behind her, and her band are mercifully
muted. She stands there waiting.
‘You’re sounding really good in there,’ I tell her. ‘I had to stop
and listen.’
‘Aw, thanks,’ she calls out after me.
This is what I do. I go to gigs, talk to singers, band members, managers,
and keep buttering everyone up. I then build good vibes for
my own band, which helps us climb the career ladder without taking
too many knives in the back. Do my band appreciate it? Do they
fuck—they sit at home with their partners while I’m out oiling the
wheels. Now, I’m not always nice to other bands. Not by any means.
There have been incidents of aggro, but I’m generally diplomatic. On
average I only get into fights with other musicians about once every
couple of months. So, nine bands walk away thinking I’m the nicest
guy in the business, and one knows who I really am.
I have rolled around the pavement outside pubs with the leading
lights of some bands you might have heard of. I have told musicians
they have a brass neck for even thinking of going up on a stage to make
the eyes of the watching masses bleed. It’s entirely possible that there
are voodoo dolls of my likeness being sold at certain bands’ merch
stalls, so that everyone has a chance to stick a pin into my head. We,
my band I mean, have held emergency meetings, with our manager
in attendance, with everyone there telling me in no uncertain terms
that they never want me to go out to other bands’ gigs unaccompanied
again. Which just shows how little balance and perspective they have
when it comes to my glad-handing. Usually some new band, some
teenage amateur outfit that keep grinning on stage because their guitars
are in tune, go home glowing after I bend their ear in a fury of
false, coked-up euphoria, talking to them about how someone will be
along any day to sign them. The band will walk out of that venue ten
feet tall and telling everyone how sincere Danny McAllister sounded.
A female acoustic troubadour will be told she’s the next Joni Mitchell,
Carole King, Taylor Swift. ‘You have that kind of magic,’ I’ll tell her,
while contemplating another trip to the cubicle because the last line
is starting to taper off. I have a great capacity for bullshit, but only if
I have a nose full of blow. It’s very hard to say this stuff with a straight
face if you’re not absolutely loaded off your head with something potent.
I don’t even know where this impulse to butter them up comes
from. I just live for the moment when you see their little faces light
up as they fall for it. Everyone has a hit for themselves when you
drill down to it. Everyone thinks they’re going to make something
that will confirm their genius. I’m probably the same when it comes
down to it. But the thing is I manage to achieve what I know they
never will. I am, by any definition, talented. I am riding the crest of
a wave in a career I have created, surfboarding, albeit trying to avoid
the shark fin that is Si.
Standing outside the rehearsal room, I can hear him working on a
new piece of music with the band. It sounds all right, pretty good in
fact, and that brings a little bit of my lunch back up my throat. I like
to write my songs myself in my house and then bring them in with
the parts all written. You play this. Now you play that. It’s worked
very well for us so far in terms of approach. Now Si has got them
jamming and almost creating together. It’s undermining me and my
approach. It’s making me look dictatorial, I think. That’s pretty much
what I am, but as David Byrne once said, bands are not a democracy.
Or as I like to put it, it’s not Talking Heads, it’s Talking Head
and three Listening Heads, and it doesn’t matter how balanced and
lovely you want to make it, that’s not how the power is shared. The
biggest talent has the biggest say. That’s the way it is.
In the rehearsal room, I am now watching the other three people
who make up the band. Si with his guitar, Em on bass, and Hayleigh
on drums. From left to right I scan them, and they’re so lost in
the music that they don’t even notice I’m in. At the bridge, I’m seeing
them start to drive the song forward, and I’m thinking, by some
distance, this is the most into a song I’ve ever seen them. A useful
trick in rehearsals, to break the spell, is to flash the lights on and off,
and that’s what I do to snap them out of it. Somehow, they just keep
going, or act like they haven’t even seen the lights go on and off. I
then pull Si’s lead out of the amp, at the correct moment he’s going
for his interesting off-kilter solo, and I retire to my seat beside my
case and start to take my own guitar out.
They say a chicken still runs about for a bit after you cut off its
head. It’s the same with a band’s rhythm section. They can still trundle
on for a few bars before realising they’ve lost contact with the
brain. Then they stop.
‘What happened?’ says Em.
‘Dunno,’ says Si, but he does know. I watch him pick the lead
up and plug it back into his amp. After that, he starts fiddling about
with the settings because he doesn’t want to look at me.
Rehearsal rooms are a perfect environment to assert leadership.
It’s the one place a band is left alone without any outside interference.
It’s just us, and the backstabbing can be done more honestly
with the blade going into the chest.
There’s a cloth inside my case that I use to wipe down the body
of my Gibson SG. Then I look around the room at my musicians.
Every band these days has its makeup and composition forensically
studied. How diverse is the line-up, how evenly spread are its
markers like race, gender, sexuality, what’s the political positioning
of the band’s members? (No diversity encouraged here.) The light
is shone in all the dark corners now, and believe me, no one is hiding
anything any longer. Our drummer, Hayleigh, is a white female.
Our bassist, Em, is a mixed-race woman. Si is a white male like me,
but he’s always gone out with men and women, so Si’s bi. None of
these people were chosen by accident.
Si is a good guitar player. The outcome of preparation and that old
equation that goes proper lessons + proper talent = person with the plectrum.
I’m self-taught and clunkier. Sometimes he winces when he’s too
close to my amp. He’s got this aloof, detached quality that all the best
guitar players seem to have. He’s tall and gangly like guitarists should
be. Handsome in that po-faced posh kind of a way. Foppish, middleclass
or something. Si speaks slowly and deliberately like all the middle-
class people I’ve met do. He speaks like someone who expects to
be listened to until the end of the sentence, whereas I’m always rushing
to finish my lines as if I expect people to turn away halfway through.
‘Is that a new song?’ I say, before turning and fiddling with my
own amp’s settings so they can’t see the beads of sweat on my forehead.
‘It’s just a rough idea,’ Si says, pushing his hair back off his face.
‘We want to try and have it ready for our next gig.’
That’s Hayleigh. She never used to say anything like this. She just
drummed. I think I liked her better that way. Now she’s a passionate
advocate for Si’s burgeoning songwriting career. I lean down and
change the battery in a pedal. Look back at Hayleigh and wonder if
I could replace her with a drum machine. Just change the battery. Sit
it on a stool. Punch some fucking programme into it. That would be
so much easier. She takes her glasses off and gives the lenses a wipe
using the towel at the side of her stool.
She looks at me and smiles before turning the wingnut that’s holding
her ride cymbal in place.
She takes a draw of her vape and then keeps talking, about how
great the song’s already sounding. She is glowing in her enthusiasm.
But to be honest, she’s probably only into the song because it’s technical
and she considers herself a technical drummer. She plays in a jazz
band sometimes. Some trio that she’s a part of. Fuck me, it’s deplorable.
We sometimes have to go to some gig and show our support. Sit
in this pretentious alcove with a candle on the table, applauding at
the wrong bits because you never know when a jazz song is actually
fucking finished or when it’s merely at a low ebb before the inevitable
next crescendo. They keep getting asked to festivals in Germany
or America, and she keeps having to say no because this is the band
that pays her wages. If I didn’t know any better, though, I’d say jazz
is her love, and if it paid half as well as we do, she’d be off like a shot
with her double-bass player, her saxophonist, and whatever warbling
catastrophe of a crooner they have guest vocalising that particular
week. When I zone back in from character assassinating her, she’s
still speaking.
‘We have two more practice sessions booked in before we leave
for Japan. We could do it.’
‘Yeah,’ Si says.
I’m almost a bystander in this band now while the others organise
everything. That’s how it’s starting to feel. I lift the guitar up and
try to fix the strap over my shoulder.
‘Wednesday evening,’ Hayleigh is now saying to Em. ‘Si and I are
going to get together at seven for a songwriting session.’
Em, in between plucking at her bass, says she could come over
and play for them while they’re writing. I’m just standing at the amp,
waiting for them to invite me along to this impromptu writing session.
But they don’t.
Si is replacing a guitar string, a picture of concentration, his eyes
narrow as he weaves and coils the string at the end.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘will we run through the set as it currently stands?’
I go into the toilet to perk myself up with a line. There under the
fluorescent light in the cubicle, the colour of purple. But I am seeing
red. Move from the stinks to the sinks. Stand there in front of the
small square mirror, breathing. Lean down and wash my face with
cold water. Dab myself down with paper towels. Si, when I return,
is talking to Em in the corner, whispering almost.
‘What are you talking about?’ I ask.
He’s flicking his fringe away, and my eyes rotate across the room,
slowly, looking for the faintest trace of a smile on either of their faces.
‘We were just talking about the harmony in the chorus.’
My nostrils flare. I feel cold and violent. ‘What harmony in what
chorus?’
Si is saying, ‘My new song. Mistake. The one we were jamming.
I’m not sure it needs a harmony.’
Needs a harmony.
‘I like it.’ Hayleigh drums a little pattern on her hi-hats as she
speaks. ‘I vote for harmony.’
I pull the guitar strap over my shoulder and run the plectrum
down the strings to check the tuning. Over the noise of people tuning
up, Hayleigh has to speak into the mic now to be heard.
‘And remember, Clark loves the fact the girls are singing on this
one, so that’s two votes for the harmony.’
My head snaps up from tuning the guitar. ‘Clark? How did he
hear it?’
Bullseye. There’s always a moment when you’re doing a lot of
coke when people tell you that you’re becoming a bit paranoid, a bit
unhinged. That moment when they take you aside, to show concern
for your well-being. Have you thought about the path to recovery?
Here’s a leaflet. Then there is sometimes another moment where you
realise you weren’t that paranoid after all, that they were gaslighting
you, and that your internal radar was pinging for a reason. In the rush
of excitement after creating his new song, Si has sent the demo off to
our manager, Clark, who’s probably also sent it onto our A&R woman,
Miriam. This is not the way we do things. This is trying to jump the
queue without my knowledge. I had no idea he would do that.
Si swallows, looks across to me. ‘Yeah. He heard it, but—’
‘You’re making fucking songs for the next fucking single without me
and sending them to the manager without me. Are you trying to take
over my fucking band?’
My rage is so complete that for a second, I feel out of control. I
stand there breathless, scanning them all like a demented loon.
‘But Danny, I thought if—’
‘I don’t want to hear it. If we write a song, it’s me who sends it to the
manager. That’s how the band has always worked. I’m the leader. You
don’t pull the rug away from me. The fucking rug. You get me, Si?’
‘Yes, but—’ Si is sinking, and he knows it.
‘Do you fucking get me?’ I scrape the plectrum down the fretboard
frantically with my teeth gritted, and after a period of ear-bleeding
feedback, everything goes quiet. The other three just look at their
shoes. It’s all breathing after that and the low electrical hum of the
strip lighting high above our heads.
Si is looking pretty shaken. I guess being confronted by genuine
vein-popping aggression is alien to him. You know, maybe given his
experience of growing up in an affluent area where reasonable people
make reasonable arguments, and compromises are made without
the need for machismo and male physical grandstanding.
Now that I think about it, this whole ‘raised voices and eyes burning
with hatred’ thing is probably too much for dear old Si. For ultraprogressive
middle-class men like Si, the idea of some working-class
thug, potentially with a weapon hidden away in his bag, becomes a
bit threatening. A London gangster movie made real. The middle-class
equivalent of stumbling out of your gated community to find yourself
walking through the poverty safari. A year ago, one of the females in
the band, I think it was Em, ended up in a high rise after a night of
clubbing and couldn’t stop talking next day about the types of people
she’d met, the violent dogs she’d petted, the grim views from the
fifteenth-floor window looking out onto other high-rise flats. The
fishtanks without fish. The widescreen TVs nailed to the walls. The
drugs, the drink, how everyone—and she meant everyone—smoked
real cigarettes and not vapes. She said there was blood on one of the
walls, or it could have been ketchup, but whatever, someone or something
had taken a hell of a beating, and it was very exciting.
Now, they say that a band should be a collective, everyone pulling
in the same direction, a beat laid out by the drummer that we all
march to. Now that we’ve all calmed down a bit, everything should
return to normal, but I need to hear it, Si, I need to hear it.
‘Sorry,’ he finally whispers.
I nod at him. He nods back and returns to staring at the effects
pedals at his feet. I feel the anger still pulsing through me. Em gives
me a look. She is much less likely to be able to move on than Si. She’s
always noticing things that she considers problematic and then calls
meetings to help us resolve them. Today she’s noticing that I’m a psycho
bully with a coke problem who’s becoming slightly unhinged,
and there’s no way she’ll let that go. On some days, she posts these
cryptic messages on her social media platforms about issues women
can encounter in the industry. I give a doughnut-hole-sized fuck
about it normally, but you can have some pushback if word gets out,
you’re, dare I say it, toxic. Toxic makes you human waste. It means
you should be going to landfill, or people should wear hazmat suits
around you. Her face is framed by virtue as she watches me. Hate
with a halo. That look they can have where they pretend that they’ve
never had a dark thought in their own minds. Never felt like hitting
someone or nailing them to the floor with some barbed comment
about their specific protected characteristics. Never suffered
the derangement that someone like me has.
‘Okay, let’s get back to rehearsing,’ Si says, unfolding a set list that
he kept from the last gig we played. His hands are shaking, I notice,
as he places the list down at his feet. Twelve songs and eleven of them
mine. His song ‘Share’ that he didn’t want to share the credits on. His
new song ‘Mistake’ that he’s made a mistake with by sending to our
manager without my permission. My band. My group. My need for
another line. Hayleigh starts talking about how she needs to leave in
half an hour, so we need to get cracking.
Later, as we finish the set, Si comes up to me and whispers, ‘That
sounded really good, eh?’
‘Yeah,’ I reply automatically, as I start to pull the earplugs from
my ears.