The conversation drifted, as it always did, towards music.
JONATHAN COE, The Rotters’ Club
We walked into the English countryside winter’s night because someone had told someone who’d told one of us that in a house at the end of a lane or past a farm or beyond a wood was a party. No one would give us a lift and none of us could drive, so we set out as the crow flies across the fields. In absolute darkness we stumbled over ploughed and frozen earth, slipping from ridge to rut, laughing and falling and calling to one another because we could not see beyond ourselves.
Released from the etiquette of disco, I had relaxed. I stopped giggling, stopped crying and started to pay attention to boys I didn’t find attractive but interesting. As for music, I sat down and started listening. The interesting boys did not sing along, they discussed; or they said nothing but would smile and nod because they knew. They weren’t dancers or footballers and could neither flirt nor drive. None of these boys had cars but they had stereos, record collections, amplifiers and instruments. Their tastes were a mixture of hippy, heavy metal and esoteric, which included a little punk. They dressed quietly, even negligently; what mattered to them was talk. They had never been any good at football or fighting and so communicated through arias from Monty Python and Derek and Clive. Someone only had to mutter an opening phrase and a dozen boys would launch into the Parrot Sketch or the Lumberjack Song. In that dingy school, that dull town, during those endless afternoons, they got laughs every time. They would discover that being clever and funny worked with girls, only it couldn’t yet because they were still bludgeoned by their own chemistry.
We gave up dancing, the boys stopped repeating themselves and everyone calmed down. In those last years of school, we formed an acerbic but tolerant gang. The parties we went to were smaller and the music quieter. People sat around and talked, smoked and listened to Bob Dylan or ‘Stairway to Heaven’.
We talked about Devo, Blondie and the Damned. Punk had taken hold in London and Liverpool. Soon we would start buying the records and going to see the bands but first there was a lull, as if we had to get used to the idea.
Luke had been a fat boy but always cool. He never tried too hard, and was funnier than anyone else. On sunny afternoons, his end of his parents’ bungalow was a fug of smoke and pounding rock. I don’t think he ever drew his curtains – at least I don’t remember a window. His mother would bring us trays of tea and cake as if Luke were entertaining in a front parlour instead of slumped on his bedroom floor rolling joints on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti.
Over the next few years Luke and I spent hours in that room. We talked about love and death and the world and other people, but always while listening to music. We were so companionable that each would forget the other was there and behave as if listening alone: I’d sway and sing along while Luke, a drummer, tapped and slapped out rhythms as another boy might play air guitar. (Why did girls never play air guitar? Did we sing along because singing was what girls did or was it that girls only sang because they didn’t play air guitar? These are not questions I asked myself at the time. I was pushing away such complications.)
Luke was passionate about what he liked, scornful of what he didn’t, and open to everything except jazz and soul. I had thought of music as being the same as style: you were a type and you stuck to it. You couldn’t be devoted to heavy metal but also enjoy punk, only Luke did and so we would follow Led Zeppelin with Blondie, and I would relax and admit that I actually liked Joe Cocker’s ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’ live at Woodstock and could we put it on – only it really started to drag and here was The Cars’ ‘My Best Friend’s Girl’ … Luke showed me that loving music didn’t have to mean wanting the same song all the time, or believing it perfect, and that what you loved didn’t have to add up, let alone define you.
Why leave this in order to go to a party? It would be like all parties: a boy lying on the grass next to a pool of vomit, a girl crying on the stairs. The house would be bleary and smoky and too dark because all the candles had burnt down hours ago. Couples would have installed themselves on cushions and sofas, and would writhe ritually in the shadows. There might be boys and girls sitting together talking and listening to music, and while Luke and I were like them, we refused any affinity. We would go straight to the kitchen and requisition whatever bottles or cans we found. We set up in a corner near the stereo and, where we could, took over the music. We liked to sneer at the party and rarely stayed long. When we decided to go we would return to the kitchen, grab another bottle each and begin the walk home.
Why did we search out these parties when all we would do was continue the conversations of his room? Perhaps we had to take our idea of ourselves out into the world, or prove our independence. Had it been worth it? Somehow it had.