CHILDREN AND CARS ARE A HORRIFIC COMBINATION—THE CONFINED space, the boredom, the ease with which vomit seeps down a leather seam to the unknowable shadow beneath. Nowadays it’s more child-friendly: one kid’s playing Sushi Cat on your iPad and the other’s watching Baby Einstein on a decommissioned phone. There’s always a CD you can slide into the stereo, or maybe a satellite radio channel that specializes in “Family Music,” if things get really desperate.
The “nightmare car journey” is a genre unto itself, but it has a particularly outsized role in the Wonderkids’ origin myth. I heard this one many times, mostly told by the driver, but once by the passenger. He’s the real star of the show.
Nick Hedges is driving his son down to the West Country from the Baker Street offices of Endymion Records. Laurie, aged six, had spent a relentless Friday kicking his heels waiting for the head of Endymion to drag himself away from his work and spirit the boy down to their holiday cottage to rendezvous with his mother and brother for the weekend.
“We’ll be outta here shortly,” was Nick’s unpersuasive mantra. They weren’t.
The day fidgeted on. It didn’t take long for Laurie to tire of his father’s determined chair swiveling and phone flaunting, his commanding use of the intercom. Provided with no alternative, the boy dreamed up a game where he carried messages between his father and the secretary, but neither played along. His eyes lit on a pile of cassette cases on the bookshelf by the door, a Babel of C-60s, an Elephant’s Graveyard of demos that his father had been meaning to clear away. Nick had warned the cleaners off: it might not withstand even the lightest dusting. To his bored son, this tottering tower seemed full of dangerous potential. Unmonitored, ignored, he started to extricate the most obviously loose and structurally superfluous of the cassettes. This kept him occupied for a few blessed minutes, until his father, noticing, screamed: “LAURIE!” and Laurie started to cry.
“Sorry, Norm, sorry,” Nick told America. “My boy’s in the office, causing mayhem . . . I know, I know . . . animals and children, animals and children . . .”
Endymion had never been a Virgin or a Charisma or Harvest, nor was their logo as iconic as any of those, but the label had broken a number of household names, even if those bands had invariably moved on as soon as their initial contracts were up. In fact, in the case of their largest act, Endymion had simply forgotten to pick up the option. The first Nick had known about it was a letter from the band’s lawyer pointing this out and saying goodbye.
Even if these were no longer the glory years, the label had had real top-ten success, the evidence of which still glinted in the sunlight on the walls. These days, however, Nick was completely at the mercy of Norm Bloch (“The Unmerciful”), head of WBA, Endymion’s parent company. It sometimes seemed that the only thing he could do without Norm’s written consent was score Norm drugs.
Nick’s workday finally fizzled: London had given up for the weekend, New York was in Los Angeles, and Los Angeles was having a “Funky Friday” to entertain New York. On his reluctant way, two folders clamped beneath his chin as he shepherded Laurie out of the door, Nick took a last cursory glance at his office and, in an inspired gesture at spring-cleaning, decided to dump the entire collection of cassettes into a large Sainsbury’s bag. His execution was poor (a fair percentage fell to the floor, many shattering at the hinge), but obscured spines were visible for the first time in two years.
“About time. Let’s chuck this lot.”
His son, however, felt sentimental about the source of his brief distraction. He saw the possibility of a number of distinct structures to be built and then torn down noisily at his leisure, and he insisted his father bring the tapes. Nick, who just wanted his son to shut up, did.
The trip was a disaster. For the few moments Laurie wasn’t whining about the window being up, it rained. Nick’s back spasmed whenever he reached behind him to pick up something Laurie had dropped (often) or tried to foist upon him something he didn’t want. Suddenly it was blazing sun. Nick opened the sunroof, enjoying a moment’s silence until he looked in the rearview mirror as they sat immobile in traffic, to see his son squinting in the glare, sweating implausibly.
“Whose stupid idea was this?” he thought. He should have just stayed in town all weekend with his girlfriend.
When they finally hit the motorway, Laurie immediately wanted to stop, but Nick wanted to drive because they’d finally hit the motorway. He was soon met with a damp surprise, so they had to stop anyway. Laurie, pants and underwear removed, was reseated on a throne of Rolling Stones T-shirts Nick found in the boot, stuffed between boxes of promotional Converse. (He liked to impress people by casually asking their shoe size, then lobbing a pair of sneakers at them.) Nick had the presence of mind to dry the offending pieces of clothing outside, closing the window on them to keep them from flying away.
Back on the road, Laurie decided to recite a poem. His father, making mental notes on a deal memo, feigned interest, then found himself genuinely impressed by the sheer mental effort Laurie was putting into his performance.
“Great, mate,” he said.
“Well, it took eight miles, that’s something,” said Laurie woefully, eye on the odometer. “Know any poems, Dad?”
Nick did, but said he didn’t. Laurie retaliated by fiddling with the automatic window, which sent his clothes flying off onto the hard shoulder. They couldn’t very well reverse up the motorway. The alternative was for Nick to lose his temper, which he did, to which Laurie reacted with his most impressive bout of sobbing yet. Millie was going to be fucking thrilled when her son arrived, shivering, naked from the waist down. Nick tried to imagine every shop between their present location and their cottage, the Sirens. Nothing at this time of night. Wait! Rolling Stones tracksuit bottoms in the boot. The wrong size but they’d do.
“Why don’t we put on some of your music, Laurie?” asked Nick in desperation. There were tapes that he occasionally allowed his children to play: Sesame Street crap, some bloke who sang “clap your hands, here comes Charlie”-type Christian songs, and a few Disney cassettes rewound so often that parts sounded like they’d been recorded underwater. It was difficult to know which was worse, but there was no choice.
“No,” said Laurie, his misery definitive. “Mum took them in the car with Darren.”
“Well, I’ve got some music,” said his father unappealingly, before slapping himself on the forehead: “You fucking idiot!” His whole weekend had just gone up the spout: he’d put the CDs down on his desk when he was cleaning those stupid cassettes away. “Sorry, son. I forgot something.”
“Why don’t we listen to one of these tapes?” asked Laurie. There was one at the top of the Sainsbury’s bag with a picture of an old TV with some kids’ show on.
“What tapes? Oh, Christ. No. We’re not listening to that shit.”
God, he wanted a drink. He deserved a drink. Enough to leave Laurie sitting in the car with a bag of cheese’n’onion in the sure knowledge that the boy would then unavoidably mention this desertion to his mother? Yes. There was a little pub Nick had noticed many times just off the main road. He fantasized that it seemed welcoming.
“How do you fancy a Coke, Laurie?” he asked, as if out of the blue.
“Are you going to leave me in the car while you’re in a pub?” Laurie wasn’t a mind reader. It happened all the time.
“Would you like me to sit with you in the garden?” It might be worth it.
Laurie sighed. “Can I listen to the tapes?”
“Yeah, course you can, mate.” Suddenly his father was unusually cheerful. “And I’ve got some spare bottoms in the back you can wear.”
In the parking lot, Laurie scrabbled through the cassettes. The one he’d had his eye on had somehow sifted from the top of the heap, so he decided to lay them out on the tarmac as though he was having a car boot sale. His father emerged with Coke and crisps.
“You’re gonna have to pick those all up, you know. All of them.”
It was a sorry collection, but Laurie finally found the one he was looking for. Its cover, craftily handmade, distinguished it from the others, all beige inserts and typewriter font: someone had actually gone to the trouble of cutting out the front of the TV so, depending on how you folded the paper behind, it could broadcast different “channels,” one of which, bizarrely, was a naked woman and her private pieces. Laurie slotted it into the stereo.
He didn’t have the vocabulary, nor would he have felt the need to explain, but the herky-jerky simplicity sang to him in a way that his dad’s cassettes rarely did. The chorus of the first song seemed to be “I’ve got a song stuck in my head, I’m gonna rock around the bed” over and over and over, and when his father reemerged, mood two pints less bitter, Laurie was three or four songs in, one called “Lucky Duck.” Nick liked nothing more than being able to leave somewhere the moment he wanted, a freedom his family had severely restricted, and when he saw that the tapes were already cleared away, that his son was sitting in the front with a seat belt on, Nick felt benign enough to let him stay there despite the safety hazard and dubious legality. And though there were at least two hours to go—they were about to be funneled off into the infinite twists and turns of country lanes, where the taking of a bend at over ten miles an hour without honking represented a calculated risk about which Nick felt considerably less anxious than usual—he let Laurie leave the cassette in.
“Oh, wind it back to the beginning, Dad.”
“Wouldn’t you rather . . .?”
“Wind it back!”
When they pulled into the Sirens’s driveway, the tape was still playing—they’d been through all five songs about ten times, even had something approaching a discussion, as Nick tried to understand what it was precisely that Laurie liked about it, and what it was precisely that he himself liked about it. Laurie was punching the air with abandon and even Nick was singing along:
I’m gonna rock around the bed
I’m gonna rock around the bed
I got a song stuck in my head
I’m gonna rock around the bed
And you can keep your peanut butter
And your whole wheat bread
I’ve got a song stuck in my head
I’m gonna rock around the bed.
Nick had his weekend’s work cut out for him—a terrific relief—and Rock Music for Kids, maybe even Kindie Music (though he did not yet know it as either of those things) was born.
There was a phone number on the cassette and, first thing Monday morning, that number would be receiving a surprise call from the head of Endymion Records, yes, the very one, no this isn’t a prank call. The future of the Wunderkinds, the band, rolled out before Nick like a Persian rug from which is delivered, at the end, a beautiful woman—or perhaps, in this case, a Grammy or an MTV award.
And as they walked into the Sirens, he ruffled Laurie’s hair and shouted: “Millie, Millie, love! We’re here! I’ve got some amazing news. I’m the man who discovered the Beatles!”
I’ve heard Nick say: “Whatever inspiration made me bundle all those dusty old demos into that plastic bag that day, we’ll never know. Call it luck. Call it fate.” He wouldn’t say “Call it genius,” but he’d let it linger. Who wouldn’t?
But he was kind of a genius, Nick, and it made him, briefly, very rich. He had an idea, inspired by the Wunderkinds, and apparently no one had had it before. He heard a band and he saw a niche—Rock Music for Kids—and he wanted that band to fill that niche, and he didn’t for a moment consider that there were fairly obvious reasons why they couldn’t, or wouldn’t want to.
Rock Music had always been for Kids. It was the spirit of Rock Music. That was what Nick Hedges understood when he heard “Rock Around the Bed.” But then there was that weird bit about the girl pushing the singer down on the kitchen table and how he nearly fainted as they “got acquainted.” Kids didn’t want to hear that; or maybe they did, but their parents certainly didn’t want them to.
But so what? That’s what an edit is for. That’s what A&R men do. Or they get the band to sing another song entirely. Because if Nick had learned one thing in his years at Endymion, including when he himself had bent over and let WBA fuck him royally up the ass for a few million, it was this: if you wave the readies, there is nothing people won’t do. His three favorite sayings were: “Treat me like a whore; I have the ‘integrity’ bit covered”; in second place: “The further Monkey climbs up the tree, the more you can see his ass.” And favorite of all: “Everyone’s a whore. You just need to find out what their price is.” There was a theme.
Nick Hedges and the Wunderkinds were a match made in Heaven and Hell.