I think it was about November when everything began to change. We didn’t see the signs at first. One thing that shook it all up was when Freddie Mercury died of AIDS. Now obviously we never listened to Queen because it was poofters’ music. Even though it was meant to be rock and some of it sounded a bit like things we liked, like AC/DC, he was so obviously a bender that we just couldn’t be doing with it. And you couldn’t even forget it when you were just listening to it and not looking at him, because it was right there in the music, with all the opera and high voices and stuff. Only monger metallers listened to Queen. We all thought it was pretty funny when he died, Ben especially. ‘Arse bandit got what he fucking deserved,’ I remember him saying.
Only problem was, all the girls loved him, well a lot of them did. And they weren’t having any of our talk of it being ‘only right’. No, they demanded we respect his memory, and we had to listen to his bloody music all that Friday at the youth club, and keep quiet about it. This was a compromise for us, for some more than others. I could see Ben was on the verge of exploding all evening. But what some of the more enterprising of us realised was that the girls might need some comfort in their time of distress, so we held them as they rocked gently to the pre-recorded cassette of Greatest Hits II on a portable player, singing along to ‘The Show Must Go On’ with tears rolling down their faces, smudging all their make-up. Then we got off with them in the alleyway. Well, Ben didn’t. He ended up kicking the sponge football with the mongers that week.
Another thing that happened, and turned out to be more important really, was when ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ came out. You see, the thing was, we liked it. Now, we shouldn’t have done, because it was an indie record in our eyes. It wasn’t proper rock or metal. But even though it wasn’t ‘rock’, it did ‘rock’, in that stupid Bill and Ted sense of the word that we never really used. Our attitude was always free of irony. Of course, not only did we like it, but so did the indie-kids, who liked it more than us. It was one of ‘their’ records. And perhaps more importantly, a load of the girls liked it as well. And the girls found themselves liking the boys who liked the record. Suddenly indie-kids other than Damien were getting attention. And Damien was getting so much attention it was ridiculous. Even though Thomas made up another story about someone walking in on Damien as he was getting his dog to lick his cock, it didn’t make any difference.
Things really began to deteriorate when it became known that Nirvana were not a one-off, that there was a whole movement called ‘grunge’ built up around them, with its own style of music and fashion. Then the indie-kids started dressing up grunge. And the girls loved it. Then the girls started to dress grunge too: dreadlocks, checked lumberjack shirts and stripy jumpers with holes in and what have you. Doc Martens boots and fairy dresses. We were beginning to feel like yesterday’s men. Soon the church hall had three poles. Us at one end with our fucking piano, the Horned Gods at the other, and indie-kid grungers in the middle. More specifically, they lined up along the right-hand wall while the mongers still shuffled about with their sponge football on the left.
We looked to Thomas to lead us. He did not let us down, but at the time it seemed almost like a betrayal.
Thomas bought a lumberjack shirt. Pale blue and black. When he walked in, on the last Friday before the Christmas break, we could not speak. We just stood at the piano, gawping. ‘What’s the fucking problem?’ he snapped, only too aware all eyes were on him. He eyeballed us back through his jam jars. None of us could ever have told him what the problem was.
‘All right, Tom,’ said Jase. Jase, not being a metaller, had bought his own red and white lumberjack shirt some weeks previously.
‘All right,’ said Thomas. ‘Someone dead?’
No one was, but we were all in shock and facing impending bereavement. As one, we knew that we were not true metallers any more. Things had changed with one shirt.
In fact, this was as much Neil’s doing as it was Nirvana’s. We’d been rehearsing round his house most Saturdays since October, and Neil had put his own distinctive stamp on all our material, both Jase’s songs and the covers. For example, ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ now went ‘SWEET child! SWEET child! S-S-S-SWEET child o’ mi-mi-mi-mi-HI-hine!’ And ‘Johnny B. Goode’ went ‘Go! Go! G-G-G-go-o-o-a-a-ah-johnny-ah-a-agh!’ like water going down a plughole. They were pretty much unrecognisable from the originals. The only way you could identify them was from the guitar riffs. He’d throw in a bit of harmonica too, which he still hadn’t learned how to play. Fortunately his excessive vocal style didn’t leave too much room for this, although Ben didn’t like it at all as it filled up the time meant for his guitar solos. One day Neil’s harmonica went missing. We never found it.
Much to my surprise, the guys were warming to Neil as a person. Of course, they found a lot of the things he said and did pretty spazzy, but they didn’t hold it against him that much. Even when he did do something really stupid, like drop a plate of sandwiches or something, sure, they’d take the piss out of him, but it wasn’t followed by the unremitting abuse that you’d come to expect from Thomas, or even the more snide stuff you got from Ben. Somehow, Neil had charmed them. Maybe it was the way everything seemed to bounce off him. He didn’t take it to heart and crawl away to die like your average monger. He just carried right on, singing the songs in his own strange way. I still hated it, and I don’t know if Ben was ever too keen on it, but Thomas and Jase were really into it. Maybe it was because they were more rock than metal, they were more susceptible.
He’d even begun to widen their musical tastes a bit, making them compilation tapes of things he thought they should listen to. First, he went for really basic, obvious stuff, like the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Kinks and the Who, but before long he’d even got them listening to groups like the Velvet Underground, although they were a bit suspicious about that at first because some of it was so obviously gay. But crucially, that didn’t stop them listening to it, and they even ended up liking it later on. That was a turning point, I think. Another was that REM broke big that year, and Neil had been listening to them for ages. Thomas and Jase decided that they were good and were quite excited to find that Neil had their entire back catalogue. Neil pushed them further and further from their original hard rock position, to the point that the lumberjack shirt shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
So, as far as the band was concerned, things were going pretty well, it seemed, even though we still weren’t anywhere near doing proper metal. Then something crazy happened. The day after the last Friday at the youth club before the Christmas break, just as we were packing up at our Saturday rehearsal, Jase was talking about the youth club, and what a bunch of wankers the Horned Gods were, and how Damien had bummed his dog and got it to lick his cock, when he said, out of the blue, ‘You should come, Neil – you’d like it.’
Ben and I looked at him, silently saying ‘No’ with all the facial muscles we could work. Thomas looked out of the side of his glasses, his eyes slits, unreadable.
‘Yeah, I’d like that,’ said Neil. ‘Do you have to dress up for it or anything?’
‘What do you mean?’ said Jase.
‘I mean, do you have to wear a tie or a jacket? It’s a club, isn’t it?’ said Neil.
‘It’s not that type of club, Neil,’ I said through gritted teeth, marvelling at the series of associations that had led him from the simplicity and obviousness of a youth club to some gentlemen’s drinking club from the 1930s or something. I really didn’t know if he was being serious or not.
What I did know was that I wasn’t happy about it, not one bit. I said as much to Ben afterwards, but it seemed that he’d gone as soft as Thomas and Jase, pretty much. ‘Well, he can come if he wants to,’ Ben said. ‘It’ll be a laugh, won’t it?’
‘He’ll just make a tit out of himself and embarrass us!’ I said. ‘He’ll hardly be a hit with the girls, will he?’
‘S’pose,’ said Ben. ‘Don’t really care, to be honest.’
‘Well, if he bollocks it all up for us, don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said, and picked up the last copy of 2000 AD he would ever buy from his bed.
And so, on the first Friday after the Christmas break, the other side of the New Year, Neil came to the youth club for the first time. Jase had been hassling about it on the phone for a few days previously. It seemed he really wanted him to come along. Of course, Neil was already there when we arrived. In fact, he was there before anybody. One of the God-botherers found him waiting patiently by the door of the hall and had to let him in.
‘Hi there,’ he said, as we walked in. He was standing at the wrong end, where the Horned Gods would soon pitch themselves. A few mongers were hanging around their allotted wall, and some of our girls were waiting for us by the grand piano.
‘All right, Neil,’ I muttered. I really didn’t want this to be happening. Ben grunted. Thomas nodded.
‘All right!’ said Jase with enthusiasm. ‘How’s it going, Neil?’
He beckoned Neil to join us at the correct end of the hall.
‘I’m fine,’ said Neil. ‘Are we allowed to play the piano?’
‘Yeah, of course,’ said Jase.
‘Oh, great!’ he said, lifting the lid and sitting down in a second, utterly unaware of the sexy teenage girls leaning up against it. They looked at him as if he were a new species, as yet unclassified.
Then he started to play. Well, I say play. More like he just picked out notes at random, without any relationship to each other at all. I mean, it was horrendous, just awful. But the thing was, like his singing, however horrible it was, there was some undeniable logic to it. It did make some sort of sense. Not an enjoyable sense, but there definitely was one.
The girls looked at each other, their mouths open and eyes rolling, that private form of communication that teenage girls always carry out in public. ‘Sad,’ one of them, Hannah, finally said to Jenny, another. But in a way it wasn’t a statement, more a question. Because Thomas was not far away, and he was fascinated, his face frozen in concentration as he watched Neil’s fingers.