‘Have you heard the news about Arthur Lee?’ I said to Doyle on the telephone. He was working on a rail fault, and in his now-managerial capacity as senior faults engineer, he was showing a novice worker the ropes. ‘He’s dead.’
It was 4 August 2006. Arthur Lee, whose late-blooming recognition had come only a few years earlier, had died the day before after a bone marrow transplant to fight the leukaemia he had recently been diagnosed with had been unsuccessful. The lead singer of Love had moved back to his mother’s old house in Memphis, where he had teamed up with a younger generation of local musicians who were behind a series of benefit concerts for the ailing rock legend. Arthur had not paid medical insurance hence, in the home of capitalism, he would find no support from the state.
‘The old boy’s finally croaked it, then,’ said Doyle. ‘No, the wrench, not the screwdriver.’
‘First Syd Barrett, and now Arthur Lee. Our men are dying.’
‘It’s a miracle that either of them got this far. They weren’t exactly health freaks, were they? Not that one! I’ve got to go, Will. This clown is going to electrocute us if I don’t watch out. We’ll meet up and have a beer for old Arthur some time, eh?’
Doyle’s indifference to the deaths of our musical heroes, which reminded me of the reactions of Bobbie Gentry’s family in ‘Ode To Billie Joe’, was understandable. His own father had died a few days earlier after a lifetime of alcoholism had led to physical and mental collapse. For the last year or so, Doyle’s father had been in a wheelchair, just about capable of stringing a sentence together, most of his hair shaved off after a particularly nasty drunken fall resulted in stitching across his scalp. ‘You’ve got to give him credit,’ said Doyle, on the news of his father’s death. ‘At least he stuck to his guns.’
Love’s album Forever Changes held so many memories. Polly, my first girlfriend, had no interest in rock’n’roll and preferred arranging dinner parties for unappreciative seventeen-year-olds to being in the kind of places where pissing in the urinals rather than the sink is seen as showing off. But even she loved this wonderfully elegant, dark, tender and violent piece of music, and it found a place in her minimal record collection alongside Hymns We Have Loved and James Last’s Make The Party Last. Arthur Lee may have been a difficult man, but, with the help of the (also now dead) Bryan MacLean, he made an album that was a gift to the world.
With the death of my songwriting heroes only a few weeks apart, I couldn’t help feel that something – my youth, perhaps – was coming to an end. And, by coincidence, Top Of The Pops, the BBC’s forty-year-old chart show, which was requisite viewing for much of my childhood and adolescence, if only for the (usually vain) hope that there would be a decent song on it, broadcast its last show a couple of days before Arthur died. I missed it.
I got a call from Lawrence to say that he had been thrown out of his flat and was staying in a hostel in the far reaches of east London, and he was terrified every time he walked into the place. ‘I’m going to get mugged sooner or later,’ he said. ‘I’m too naive. I don’t know anything about being streetwise.’ For the time being at least, survival was going to have to take precedence over song writing in Lawrence’s life.
The following day I drove to Hayes, Middlesex, to get the record made up at a pressing plant called Damont Audio. Two weeks earlier I had taken the master tapes of the songs that Liam had given me to a re-mastering company where a lacquer, or master disc, was cut. I took the lacquer, sealed in a cardboard pizza box, on a train to Hayes & Harlington Station on the outskirts of west London, where Damont, in existence since 1976, was just about hanging on in there despite the fact that the majority of people in Britain no longer owned a record player. Vinyl was now the preserve of collectors, nerds, the elderly, hopeless romantics and other marginal figures alienated by the crush of modernity.
A friendly woman with large glasses and short brown hair, who had been at Damont since it opened and appeared to be its sole occupant on my visit, showed me Double Fantasy’s first and no doubt only seven-inch single, played both sides so that I could check that no hisses and scratches had made their way on there, and helped me load up the six boxes of fifty singles into the boot of the car. I drove back with anticipation, but with sadness too. The adventure was over and so was, I couldn’t help but suspect, a chapter in my life.
My father had come to visit us that day. A sagacious, calm man, Nev (as we have always called him) gave up a heady, stressful, hard-drinking and hard-working life at the age of thirty-eight – two years older than me – to pursue meditation and the quest for spiritual enlightenment. He was excited to discover that one of his sons had made a single, so he joined Otto, Pearl and NJ as they sat and waited expectantly as I put the 45 on the turntable. ‘Ask Me No Questions’ came on first.
‘NJ!’ said Nev in the kind of wide-eyed state of terminal surprise that we had come to expect from him. ‘What a beautiful voice! I never knew you could sing like that. It’s marvellous!’
I turned it over and put on ‘Bad Part Of Town’. Otto started doing somersaults on the sofa and Pearl ran upstairs to her bedroom.
‘Sturch!’ he said, using my boyhood nickname. ‘All of your life I’ve been telling you that you can sing, that it’s only been your lack of confidence that has stopped you. Now you’ve finally listened to me and, you know what?’
‘What?’
‘I wish you never had! It’s absolutely awful!’
I sent out the single to friends and the people who had helped me along the way, and even managed to get a few into the record shop Rough Trade in Notting Hill Gate, where I had discovered so many vistas of possibility back in my teens. Those 300 copies would get out there, to attics, charity shops and maybe even a few turntables, and have a life of their own. And I hoped that one day, perhaps when Otto was my age, ‘Bad Part Of Town’ might end up on a compilation of obscure British bands from the first decade of the twenty-first century. I put the songs up onto the music-sharing website MySpace and got a minor charge of thrill when someone from, say, Sweden would have something nice to say about them. (But then, nobody ever says anything horrible on MySpace because they are all hoping that you will be similarly effusive about their songwriting efforts.)
Everyone seemed to love ‘Ask Me No Questions’, and shared my father’s amazement that NJ had been restricting this wonderfully pure voice to the four walls of the bathroom for so long. It was also confirmation that Bridget St John’s song was an unfairly obscure gem. There are such things as perfect songs, and ‘Ask Me No Questions’ is one of them.
‘Bad Part Of Town’ wasn’t received as the stone-cold classic I had hoped it would be, but it did have one extremely enthusiastic fan: Otto. ‘It’s the best song in the world,’ he said during our summer holiday car journey. ‘When I’m older, my band is going to do “Bad Part Of Town”. I’m going to learn how to play electric guitar and I’m going to do it REALLY LOUD.’
‘What’s the name of your band?’
‘Dragon’s Tooth Smashes Through Thunder.’
It was so much better than Double Fantasy. I was almost jealous.
Doyle, NJ, Colin and I agreed that, with the help of Richard Vine and his mastery of digital technology, we would record ‘Coming Back To You’, ‘Ibid’ and ‘My Dearest Dear’. Every time we made a date something got in the way. It still hasn’t happened. We keep promising each other that those songs will make for some good recordings . . . one day.
I thought about the purpose of what I had been doing for the last year. Songwriting is time-consuming, and, ostensibly, not the kind of thing an adult with responsibilities should be preoccupied with, but it makes you yield to expression, and reflection. It renews your focus on the aspects of life that matter. And Tim Siddall, the bicycle-fixated friend who had told me that night in the Hatcham Social that songs were all about expressing a worldview rather than a perfect piece of music, had been inspired by his own words. His new obsession was performing protest songs about the end of the world and the evils of Coca-Cola at a local pub called The Ivy House. ‘It’s all I need,’ he said. ‘Doing a couple of songs every Wednesday night at The Ivy House has given my life meaning.’ And, although Tim’s singing and guitar skills were no better than mine, The Boycott Coke Experience was going down a storm.
To the chagrin of London’s hardcore cycling community, writing songs had replaced fixed-wheel bicycles in Tim’s one-track vision of the world. ‘What’s the point in cycling all through the night to go to, say, Brighton, then turning round and going all the way back again,’ he said of his former Friday-night ritual, ‘unless you’re going to do a gig?’ He had even thought of the perfect way to combine his former and current obsessions: to perform with a bicycle-powered amplifier. All he had to do now was find someone willing to pedal furiously while he sang on stage.
I was reminded of something that Bridget St John had said on that winter evening in her cramped Greenwich Village apartment, where she had stayed since abandoning any kind of high-profile singing career in order that she could give her daughter a happy and secure upbringing, while never actually abandoning the craft of songwriting itself:
’Whatever your level of success, you will have written songs that mean something to someone. That should be enough.’