We rehearsed every night except Saturday, determined to be ready for Battle of the Bands. I barely got any sleep, but it didn’t matter: in Carter and Sam, I’d finally found people who loved music as much as I did. Keeping it a secret from everyone at the academy was easy because I had Ellie and Phoenix to debrief with after our late-night rehearsals, and I got a smug feeling of delight every time Verity complained that the band had been shut down.
Richie still didn’t like me, but I wasn’t his biggest fan either. He was easily bored at every rehearsal, giving up early and smoking on the beanbag while the rest of us kept playing. He reminded me of the snobby academy kids who preferred talking about music to actually playing it. He acted as if no music could be both popular and good, where ‘good’ was defined by his personal taste, and listened to a lot of obscure prog rock without any vocals. ‘Wilderness Rock’, Carter called it – because the bands Richie liked all had day jobs and would never truly ‘make it’.
Carter was fixated on ‘making it’ – he was certain that we just needed to write a great song and we’d be an overnight success. He insisted we write songs together, as a band, which ruled out using my existing tracks for the competition. That was fine by me – everything I’d written about Ellie felt too personal for the band to hear anyway. When we broke for the night, Carter would devour interviews with his favourite bands on Kerrang!, Melody Maker or the NME as if he could unravel the formula for fame.
Sam was two years older than the rest of us, studying for his A-levels at East Reading College and working as a music tutor to pay the bills. He could pick up any instrument and spin gold from it. He and Carter first met when Carter needed a music tutor, and his teaching experience came in handy when he patiently showed Richie the basslines every night, long after Carter and I had torn at our hair in frustration. Sam said he needed music like he needed to breathe – he was there for the pure joy of weaving songs from thin air.
I skipped Chapel every day and hid in the rehearsal room where Carter had first found me, practising my finger work or trying out new song ideas, although none of them were good enough to share.
Tish came to our rehearsals most nights, still in her work uniform and smelling of Subway, but we jammed better without an audience. I was more confident when it was just the band, and Sam spoke more freely when she wasn’t there. She was in the same year as me and Carter, but more confident than most people my age. She brought sandwiches for us all, which we slammed before picking up our instruments, and she never let us leave without getting some photos for the socials.
One night, she recorded Carter and I singing Queen’s ‘Under Pressure’ a cappella and put it online.
‘Should we have videos on the internet when we’re not even allowed to be in a band?’ I asked, but Tish waved away my concerns.
‘Leave the publicity to me,’ she said. ‘I’m going to add a new song every week.’
In the clip, Carter and I shared the beanbag, his arm draped around my shoulders, my guitar abandoned on my lap.
‘I let her sing the Freddie Mercury part,’ he winked at the camera. ‘Because I’m a true friend.’
I watched the whole video, perched on the edge of the schoolhouse verandah after Carter had gone in. The production was rough but my voice was clear and confident. Carter didn’t have the chops for Mercury even if he’d wanted to sing it, but he was so photogenic that it barely mattered, and he spoke to the camera as if confiding in a friend.
My fingers were so torn that Sam had to tape them for me before each rehearsal, but I would have taken a thousand stinging blisters to be part of the band. In the dining hall one morning, Carter motioned for me to join his table and from that day on, I sat with his group – Austin, Benton, Verity, Freya, and him. They weren’t exactly welcoming, and Verity outright ignored me, but at least I didn’t have to eat on my own anymore. A few days after that, I played pool with them in the rec room, and it soon became a regular thing.
Carter started to wait for me on the verandah after Lights Out so we could walk down to the boathouse together. One night I asked how Richie got expelled, and he grinned and told me that they’d taken the train to London to see Arctic Monkeys at Wembley Arena.
‘That doesn’t sound like it’s worth expelling someone for,’ I said, my breath steaming in the cold.
‘It was a Wednesday. We didn’t get night passes and we didn’t make it back in time for class the next morning. Ms Marney called the police – and our parents.’
‘So why are you still here if he got expelled?’
He had the grace to look awkward. ‘My mum is one of the school’s biggest donors. And my dad’s a musician – the academy uses his photo in their advertising. They both think that’s what passes for parental involvement.’
‘Yeah, I looked up Liam Tanqueray online.’ Jazz wasn’t my thing, but the man playing trumpet in the videos was a white version of Carter: the same arched eyebrows, the same smooth jawline.
‘Have you been stalking me, Jimi?’ he laughed, and I was glad it was too dark for him to see me blush.
The more we jammed together, the more cohesive we became, until a sound started to emerge. We were less of a punk band than I had expected from our original conversations and our combined influences; while we were certainly guitar-driven, Sam favoured slick basslines and, as he was the one teaching Richie, that was what we got. I’d always loved mainstream pop alongside Bowie and old-school punk, and I was happy to smooth out the riffs. Carter liked to choose the songs we covered, but left it to Sam and I to decide how they were played. But while our cover versions were coming together, our attempts to write an original track as a group had so far ended in a few half-baked tunes.
A week before the Battle, I texted Ellie.
I watched the screen, waiting for her response.
But if we were going to get over the line, we’d need more than belief. We’d need a miracle.