NEXT BEFORE WALTER. (Question: Can one actually say ‘next before’, or does the use of ‘next’ presuppose a future occurrence rather than a past one? Sounds pedantic, I know, but these things are important. I shouldn’t like my masterpiece to appear ungrammatical.) Anyway, right or wrong, next before Walter was Keith Cream, doyen of rock and, so far as I’m, aware, the only person I’ve ever killed accidentally.
I crossed paths with Keith in the February of 1969, shortly after the killing of Lord Slaggsby. Barely had the wheels of the latter’s bathchair stopped turning before Emily had picked me up in her van and driven me south, depositing me a day later in the centre of London. I was clad, of all things, in a pair of candy-striped bell-bottoms and a tie-dyed shirt, and, as is generally the case after I’ve murdered someone, had not the least idea what to do with myself.
‘Goodbye, Raphael,’ cried my golden-haired darling as she dropped me off in Soho. ‘You look fantastic!’
‘Wait!’ I shouted, banging on the side of her van. ‘I don’t know what to do! I’m almost 70, for Christ’s sake!’
‘You’ll be OK. Have fun! Live a little!’
‘How in God’s name am I supposed to live? Money doesn’t grow on trees, you know!’
‘Do be careful, Raphael! You’ll get run over. Goodbye! Goodbye!’
‘Please, Emily! Where are you going?’
She shouted something, but it was lost in a blast of hooting from the cars behind. I grasped despairingly at her rusted bumper and then she was gone, swallowed up in a surge of traffic. Once again it looked like I was going to have to start my life from scratch.
‘Bloody damn it,’ I muttered, fingering The Pill in my pocket. ‘Bloody damn damn it!’
Soho wasn’t at all as I remembered it. The last time I’d been there was as a child over half a century ago when it had been a rather drab, nondescript confusion of narrow streets and small shops, peopled in the main by artisans and Italian immigrants.
The scene that now confronted me was rather different. Crowds of people bustled in all directions; music belched from the interiors of garishly lit cafés, and everywhere I looked there were strip clubs and sex cinemas and peep shows and porn shops. I’d never seen anything like it in my life.
I wandered around aimlessly for a while, staring up at the winking neon signs and taking in the unfamiliar clothes and sounds; and then, feeling decidedly disorientated, ducked into a pub and ordered a large whisky. Nothing like a large whisky to settle the nerves.
‘Better make it a treble,’ I told the barmaid.
She served me, and I looked around for somewhere to sit. Most of the tables were taken, but after a bit of casting back and forth I noticed a space in a smoky booth at the back of the pub and duly made my way over and sat down. To my right a young couple were kissing and fondling each other, whilst to my left sat a morose-looking man in dark glasses, supping a pint of bitter. He had a large moustache, bushy sideburns and a voluminous Afro hairdo, which, sitting as it did atop a livid green shirt, made him look rather like a dandelion. I wondered if I blew at him whether all his hair would fly away.
I’d been ensconced beside the latter for almost 15 minutes when, apropos of nothing, he suddenly spoke.
‘Keith,’ he said, his voice a blur of pained adenoids. Since he didn’t actually look at me when he said it, it wasn’t immediately obvious to whom he was addressing the words.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Were you speaking to me?’
Rather than answering he flipped out a hand in my direction.
‘Keith Cream,’ he elaborated, adjusting his sunglasses and sniffing. ‘As in the music-industry Keith Cream.’
I shook the proffered hand.
‘Pleased to meet you, Keith. I’m Raphael Phoenix.’
‘That’s cool, man. You are who you are.’
I agreed that certainly seemed to be the case.
‘I run the Record Roundabout,’ he continued. ‘Down the King’s Road. You probably know it.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ I confessed. ‘I’ve been out of London for quite a while. I’ve only just arrived back.’
He nodded sympathetically and primped his Afro.
‘That’s cool, man. I don’t judge people. Be as you are now, not what you were then. You dig The Turtles?’
‘I can’t say I know them,’ I confessed.
‘’Cos I’ve got some bootlegs in today you can’t get anywhere else in Europe. Mint quality.’
‘Really.’
‘I’m not saying buy. I’m just letting you know.’
‘I see. Well, thank you.’
‘That’s cool, man. Cool.’
He slurped his beer, leaving a smudge of froth across the underside of his moustache.
‘So what sort of music are you into?’ he inquired after a moment’s silence.
‘Well,’ I admitted, ‘my tastes have been rather limited of late. It’s been Wagner mainly.’
He thought for a moment.
‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Don’t know them. I’ve got something that might interest you, though. Big Brother and the Holding Company, pre-Joplin, live in Seattle. It’s a collector’s piece.’
‘That’s really very kind of you, but I don’t have anywhere to play it at the moment.’
‘If you’re looking for a cheap stereo I’ve got contacts. Nothing flashy, mind. Just a good deck, basic speakers. Twenty pounds.’
‘I think not.’
‘Ten pounds, and I’ll throw in a couple of Richie Havens albums.’
‘It’s really not for me, but thank you anyway.’
‘Cool, man. I’m not going to get pushy or anything. You just be as you are.’
We relapsed into silence and sipped our respective drinks.
‘Although if you ever want anything by Moby Grape you know where to come.’
He finished his pint and, leaning forwards, fiddled in his back pocket, bringing out a crumpled cigarette packet.
‘Smoke?’ he said, offering me one.
‘Thank you.’
‘Been in music for years now,’ he went on, striking a match. ‘I’m what you might call an industry guru.’
I leaned forward to light my cigarette.
‘I’ll tell you someone I did rather like,’ I said. ‘Bing Crosby.’
Keith thought for a moment.
‘I thought it was David Crosby?’
‘No, definitely Bing.’
‘As in Stills, Nash and Young?’
‘I’m not sure. He smoked a pipe and made films with Bob Hope.’
‘Yeh,’ nodded Keith, ‘probably the same guy. I’ve got all their albums back at the shop.’
I sipped my whisky and gazed around the pub.
‘Everything seems to have changed so much,’ I sighed. ‘I grew up in London but now I hardly recognize the place. I’ve been away longer than I thought.’
‘I know where you’re coming from, man,’ said Keith, nodding his Afro up and down. ‘It’s like that Dylan song.’
‘Yeh. “The Times They are a-Changin”. It’s, like, about times changing. You know, one day it’s one thing, and the next it’s something completely different.’
I told him it sounded very appropriate, and downed the remainder of my whisky.
‘Another?’ I asked, indicating his empty glass.
‘Yeh, man, cool. And see if they’ve got any nuts, will you? I’ve suddenly got a real nut thing. Like, I’ve gotta have them or I’m gonna freak out and die.’
I squeezed my way to the bar and bought Keith’s pint and peanuts, and another large whisky for myself. Several people had started dancing, including an extremely large woman in a short skirt, who almost knocked me over as I returned to our seat.
‘So tell me,’ said Keith once I’d sat down again, ‘what’re your plans now you’re back in town?’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ I admitted, accepting another crumpled cigarette. ‘I’ve got enough money to last a week at a pinch. Hopefully something will come up.’
He shoved a fistful of peanuts in his mouth and washed them down with a long gulp of bitter, smearing more froth across his already sticky moustache.
‘I dig your style, man,’ he said, wiping his mouth. ‘Like, you’re a real free spirit. Not like most oldies. You’re cool.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘Take it from the guru.’
‘I will.’
We raised our glasses and clinked them together.
‘I’ll tell you what, you don’t want to come and see a band, do you? They’re mates of mine. Very hip. We all share the flat above the record shop.’
‘The Record Roundabout?’
‘Yeh, man. You know it?’
‘By reputation.’
‘Well, I’d like to, Keith, but I really ought to be finding myself a place to stay.’
‘But that’s just the point. We’ve got a spare room in the flat. Marvin’s gone into rehab and we’re looking for a new lodger. It all fits together, you know, like you coming into the pub now, at this time, looking for a place to stay.’
I sipped my drink and considered the proposition. Keith wasn’t, admittedly, the sort of person I could ever imagine myself sharing accommodation with. Judging by what I’d seen of him so far the flat was sure to be noisy, disorganized and, if his taste in clothes was anything to go by, horribly decorated. On the other hand, there didn’t appear to be any better options on the horizon and, as Emily had said, maybe it was time to start living a little. I therefore knocked back the remainder of my whisky and, not without a shiver of trepidation, accepted his offer.
‘Cool, man,’ he cried. ‘Like, cool-out at the OK Corral. We’ll have another couple here and then we’ll go. The band’s not on till midnight anyway. Single whisky, was it?’
‘A treble actually.’
‘Yeh, right. Cool. Life in the fast lane.’ With which he heaved himself to his feet and wandered off to the bar, returning a minute later to borrow enough money to pay for the round. ‘Bit short at the moment,’ he admitted. ‘Cash-flow problem with my agent in Nashville.’
The band Keith had mentioned were playing at a basement club on Windmill Street. It was a smoky, overcrowded affair, with a bar at one end, a stage at the other and a flag-stoned floor slippery with condensation and spilled drink. We arrived shortly before midnight, just as a group called The Magic Lizards were finishing their set.
‘I’ll go and tell the others we’re here,’ shouted my companion over the amplified cacophony. ‘You get the drinks in.’
He pushed his way off into the crowd, his Afro bobbing up and down like a beach ball in choppy water, whilst I navigated a path to the bar, where I bought a pint for my new friend and two treble Scotches for myself. I’d barely had time to sip the first of these, however, before Keith was back. He seemed agitated, and was primping his Afro violently.
‘We’ve got a serious situation, man!’ he puffed, wiping mist from the lenses of his sunglasses. ‘Like big-time serious. Dave’s fucked off.’
‘Dave?’
‘Yeh. Keyboard player with the band. Just upped and fucked off. The group’s buggered.’
‘Can’t you get someone else?’
‘Not at this short notice. The others are in a right state. This mine?’
He seized the pint and downed it in one.
‘I used to play piano,’ I said. ‘Years ago. A Canadian guy taught me. Nice fellow.’
I only mentioned the fact to make conversation. Keith’s reaction, however, was instantaneous.
‘That’s brilliant!’ he cried, throwing aside his cigarette, grabbing my arm and propelling me in the direction of the stage. ‘I knew you were in the business the moment I saw you. You’ve got that haggard, bluesy look about you.’
‘No, no,’ I protested, ‘I didn’t mean it like that. I used to play “Knees up, Mother Brown”. I couldn’t do the sort of stuff they play here.’
‘Don’t worry, man, it’ll be cool. Hurry up, they’re on in a few minutes.’
‘I can’t do it. It’s impossible.’
‘Nothing’s impossible,’ he cried, herding me onwards. ‘Just look how well Rick Wakeman’s done!’
Which is how, twenty minutes later, suitably fortified with several more whiskies, I found myself up on stage tinkling the ivories with what was later to become one of the seminal rock bands of the early Seventies. The crowd were going berserk, Keith was giving me the thumbs-up and I was thoroughly enjoying myself, especially when I looked down to see an extremely pretty girl gazing up at me and mouthing the words: ‘I want you.’
‘This is the life,’ I thought.
The band of which I had become an impromptu member was a five-piece outfit. As well as myself, there was Linus on guitar and lead vocals; Otis on mandolin, sitar and occasional harpsichord; Libby on bass; and Big Baz, one of the fattest people I’ve ever met, on drums. They had, apparently, all met at art college, and been doing the rounds of the small-club circuit for almost three years now, with little notable success.
Linus was the driving force behind the band. He wrote the songs, sung them and fronted the group, with the rest of us positioned slightly behind him. An emaciated, spotty young man with straggling tendrils of beard and a thick Mancunian accent, he wore the same purple bell-bottoms for the entire time I knew him. I heard that in later years he developed rather a serious drug habit and became, especially during the recording of his nine-hour rock-opera Hamlet, Prince of Moss Side, almost impossible to work with. During our brief time together, however, I found him perfectly affable, although if you made a mistake musically he could get very upset.
‘You fucked up the middle eight,’ he screamed at me more than once during our two-year association. ‘Don’t ever fuck up the middle eight.’
My memories of our first gig together are somewhat confused on account of the fact that not only was I drunk, but I’d also smoked some cannabis for the first time in my life. I know that we kicked off with ‘Love Typhoon’, Linus shouting out the chords as we went (Em, C, Am, F, etc.), and did a storming, 15-minute version of ‘Quintessence of Dust’. I definitely fucked up several middle eights, and played the whole of ‘Song to Doris’ in the wrong key (Gm as opposed to Dm), but on the whole I think I acquitted myself reasonably well. Indeed, considering I hadn’t been near a piano for the best part of quarter of a century, and prior to that my only musical experience had been playing cockney standards in a German prisoner-of-war camp, my performance was nothing short of miraculous. My fellow musicians certainly thought so. When we finally wound up ‘Tangerine Apocalypse’ and left the stage they slapped me on the back and duly asked me to join the band.
‘Your face fits, man,’ said Linus, lighting up a monster of a joint and handing it to me in the backstage cupboard that passed for a dressing room. ‘How about it? You wanna be in?’
I smiled, and took a deep puff on the joint.
‘Oh yes,’ I replied. ‘I wanna be in. I definitely wanna be in.’
Indeed how could I possibly not wanna be in when the band was so obviously tailored towards a man of my malevolent proclivities. They were, you see, called The Executioners. If that’s not a sign, I don’t know what is.
These days, it seems, no one has heard of The Executioners. They’ve been consigned to the scrapheap of musical history and only rock aficionados or collectors of obscure records remember anything about them. Their songs do occasionally pop up on the radio, usually as questions in late-night trivia quiz shows, but aside from a certain kitsch nostalgic value, their contribution to the canon of popular music has been all but forgotten.
In their day, however, they were big. Very big, especially on the Continent, where their incomprehensible lyrics and extended instrumental solos elevated them to near-cult status. When I joined them, of course, they were some way off their prime – at that point, they didn’t even have a record deal – but many of the songs that were later to become so popular were already in their repertoire. ‘Love Typhoon’, the first song I ever played with them, would later spend 31 weeks in the British charts, peaking at number eight, whilst ‘Quintessence of Dust’, ‘Woman, Oh Woman’, ‘Peace Explosion’ and ‘Sexual Alchemist’ were all destined for the hit parade of the early Seventies. ‘Phantasmagoria Elixus No. 3’, which I co-wrote with Linus, spent three years at Number One in Macedonia, and was later, apparently, used as a campaign theme tune by President Marcos of the Philippines.
All that, however, was in the future, as were the private jets, the white Rolls-Royces, the trashed hotel rooms and the sell-out concert tours of the world’s major sporting stadiums. Whilst I was with the band we were a strictly small-time outfit, playing nothing bigger than clubs and pubs and church halls; and if we did do the occasional gig at a more prestigious venue it was always on a midweek night when there was no one there anyway. Freddie Mercury did once pinch my bottom and congratulate me on my keyboard solo in ‘Fruit Surprise’, and I remember The Doors standing us a round of drinks after they’d seen us at The Marquee, but on the whole we were no more, nor no less, successful than the thousand and one other small groups doing the rounds at the end of the Sixties.
‘Do you think we’ll ever make it big?’ I once asked Linus.
‘Well, we can’t make it much smaller,’ he replied.
We all lived together – myself, Linus, Keith, Otis, Libby and Baz – in a large, three-storey house on the King’s Road, the ground floor of which was given over to Keith’s music shop, The Record Roundabout. The latter was a small, dingy affair which, in the two years I knew it, was never once visited by anything that might reasonably be called a customer. People occasionally popped in to ask for directions, or collect for the Salvation Army, or escape from a sudden rainstorm, but they never stayed very long, and displayed not the least spark of interest in Jethro Tull or the latest themed triple album by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention. All day Keith would sit behind his plywood counter, smoking pot and reading his Record Mirror, and all day more dust would settle on his sparse album racks and more grime accrue to the already grimy windows at the front of the shop. He did make a sale in early 1970, a bootleg recording of Pete Seeger and The Little Boxes, but by that point he was so stoned he undercharged for the tape and ended up losing out on the deal.
‘It’s a temporary slump,’ he opined optimistically. ‘Music’s a fickle lady.’
If nothing much happened in the Record Roundabout, the same could not be said for the three floors above it. The flat in which we all lived, with its mouldy maroon carpets and disintegrating furniture, was the scene of a permanent party, and became, indeed, so renowned for its swinging 24-hour-a-day, anything-goes Bohemianism, that one merely had to mention ‘The Flat’ and anybody who was anybody knew precisely to which flat you were referring.
My bedroom was on the first floor, wedged between the kitchen and the living room. Linus and Baz were on the floor above, as were Otis and Libby, who were a couple and so shared a room. Keith lived in the attic, where he slept on a Lilo and, although he didn’t know that we knew, kept a large stash of pornographic magazines secreted beneath the floorboards.
For reasons I never quite understood my room was always the room in which everyone chose to congregate. There was plenty of space elsewhere in the flat, and plenty of other rooms to choose from, but, as if by some irresistible magnetism, flatmates and visitors alike were constantly drawn to my particular bedroom where, once drawn, they would remain for hours and, in some cases, days at a stretch. It wasn’t unusual for me to wake up to find myself sharing an eiderdown with five or six people I’d never met before, whilst on more than one occasion I ended up camping out on the living-room sofa because there was no longer any space left in my own bed. Even police raids, which occurred on a weekly basis, seemed to focus exclusively on my room, which was fortunate, because we always kept our drugs upstairs in the bathroom cabinet.
‘What is it about my bedroom that makes everybody want to be in it?’ I once asked Keith.
‘I don’t know, man,’ he replied. ‘It’s just got this, like, karma. I reckon it might be on a ley line.’
After all those gloomy, silent years with Lord Slaggsby, this new, relentlessly communal lifestyle obviously took a bit of getting used to. I was particularly concerned that, with so many people about, especially so many stoned people, something untoward might happen to The Pill or The Photo (I could just see someone getting hold of The Pill, mistaking it for speed or something, and ending up having a rather more permanent trip than they’d intended). My killer tablet, therefore, I secured in a heavy gold locket about my neck, where I could keep an eye on it day and night, whilst The Photo I kept about me at all times in the pocket of my trousers.
Once the safety of my most precious possessions had been assured, however, and once I’d got used to the idea of co-habiting with what seemed, at times, like half the population of London, I found I was actually extremely happy in my new life. I enjoyed smoking dope, and dropping acid, and snorting cocaine and dancing all night. I liked being surrounded by young people, and listening to loud music, and wearing colourful clothes and letting my hair grow (Lord Slaggsby had insisted I keep it short). It was fun getting up at four in the afternoon, and eating baked beans out of the tin, and never doing the washing-up, and spending hours on end discussing the meaning of life with people who were so stoned they couldn’t even remember their own names. Above all, I absolutely loved having all that sex.
Neither before nor since have I ever made love as often, as vigorously and with such wild abandon as I did during my brief sojourn with The Executioners. Those were crazy, carefree days. Anything went, nothing was taboo. I tried positions that made the Karma Sutra look like a Catholic training manual, and combinations that I wouldn’t have dreamed possible had I not experienced them myself at first hand. Up to that point I’d been a strictly one-on-one type of lover. Now, however, I had three-in-a-bed sex, four-in-a-bed, five, six, so many I lost count and we had to spill out of the bed and on to the floor as well. I fucked Angie, and Carrie, and Anita, and Hermione, and Betty, and Mary, and Running Wolf (whose real name was Amanda but who was going through a Red Indian period at the time) and Sadie and Jan – and that was just in a single day. I had sex in parks, sex on trains, sex in swimming pools and, once, sex in Westminster Abbey. I even had a go at kissing with another man, although I didn’t do it for long because he’d been drinking sweet sherry and I found the taste objectionable.
And I wasn’t the only one to so indulge himself. Our King’s Road flat seemed to be in the throes of a near-permanent orgy. Parties invariably culminated with everybody having sex with everybody else, and usually started that way too, whilst Otis and Libby seemed to do little else besides playing their instruments and bonking, often both at the same time. Even Baz got his end away, which, considering his elephantine girth and the multiple sweaty chins that spilled down over the neck of his soiled T-shirt, was a testament to the overwhelming sexual allure of playing in a band.
The one exception to this near-universal promiscuousness was poor old Keith. Although he talked about them at inordinate length, and never ceased to dole out advice as to what turned them on, Keith wasn’t very good with women. He was, in fact, disastrous with them. At a time when everyone else was having sex, everywhere, all the time, Keith achieved the near impossible and remained celibate.
This wasn’t, admittedly, for want of trying. Whenever we had a party or played a gig Keith went to enormous trouble to dress himself up and engage any attendant females in pithy conversation. Considering the number of parties we had, indeed, and the number of gigs we played, the law of averages alone should have assured him at least some small measure of success.
It was, however, not to be. Women rejected Keith in the same way as human bodies sometimes reject foreign organs (i.e. swiftly and violently). His dark sunglasses, blossoming sideburns, appalling fashion sense and dandelion Afro inspired a sort of instinctive vomit reflex in members of the opposite sex.
‘Check out that bird over there, man,’ he’d say, nodding towards some pouting lovely on the far side of the room. ‘She’s been giving me the eye all night. Probably recognizes me.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Oh yeh. It’s like that in music. Your face gets around. Stay here, man. I’ve got business in the love dimension.’
And off he’d trot, returning five minutes later with his sunglasses all skew-whiff, having been the recipient of a short, sharp slap around the face.
‘Obviously looking for someone a little less successful,’ he’d mutter. ‘There’s no accounting for taste.’
To his credit, Keith never let on that he was in the slightest bit perturbed by these setbacks. The way he talked, indeed, one would have thought he was the most highly sexed man in Britain. Not a day went by without him regaling us with tales of the previous night’s frolics, this despite the fact we all knew the previous night he’d gone up to his Lilo early with a cup of Horlicks and a copy of Record Mirror.
Only once did the façade drop. We were lying, just the two of us, flat on our backs in the middle of Hyde Park, smoking dope, when he suddenly burst into tears.
‘I’m a fucking failure, man,’ he wailed. ‘A big-time loser.’
‘No, you’re not,’ I consoled.
‘I fucking am, man. Compared to me, the worst loser in the world is like a fucking glowing success.’
‘Come on, Keith. It’s not that bad. Have another toke.’
‘Everything I touch turns to shit. I’ve got failure written all over me.’
‘No, you haven’t, Keith.’
‘Yes, I have!’ he screamed, scrabbling to his feet. ‘Look at me. Look at me and tell me I haven’t got failure written all over me, from head to fucking foot.’
I looked, and was forced to concede there was some truth in what he said. I kept it to myself, however, and instead did my best to ring a more positive note.
‘You look cool, Keith. Everyone thinks you look cool. You’re our role model.’
‘Yeh?’ he sniffed.
‘You’re just ahead of your time, that’s all. One day people will see you for the innovator you really are.’
‘I guess you’re right,’ he said, wiping his eyes and puffing up his Afro. ‘I guess pain’s like the price you pay for being at the cutting edge. It’s like that Hendrix song . . .’
Whereupon he launched into an extended homily on why The Jimi Hendrix Experience could never be the same now that bassist Noel Redding had quit to form Fat Mattress, by the end of which his earlier outburst had been quite forgotten.
‘I tell you, man,’ he droned. ‘There’s this bird who waits every day at the bus stop outside the shop, and I just know she’s eyeing me up. It’s the music connection. They can’t resist it. I might just do her a favour and ask her out.’
The only thing I enjoyed doing more during that period than having sex, although only just, was making music. Surprising, perhaps, given that I’d never before displayed a particularly melodious bent. (Emily always used to tease me about my woeful inability to sing in tune.) During my two years with The Executioners, however, I discovered, to no one’s surprise more than my own, that I actually wasn’t that bad a musician. In fact, all things considered, I was rather a good one. It naturally took a few weeks to become fully conversant with the group’s playlist; but once I’d found my feet, or rather my fingers, I got on splendidly.
None of our tunes was, admittedly, especially taxing – although the chorus of ‘Vermicelli Minefield’, all minor 7ths and sustained major 4ths, was a bit of a bugger – and once you’d got to grips with the basic melody there was plenty of room for improvisation and embellishment. Long instrumental solos were a hallmark of the band and, depending on where we were playing and how many drugs we’d done at the time, we could generally be relied upon to string out a reasonably simple tune into something resembling a Beethoven symphony. Our efforts were remarkably well-received, although things did sometimes get out of hand, such as the time at a club in Deptford when I unleashed an hour-long Hammond organ solo, by the end of which the entire audience had either left, fallen asleep or, in one unfortunate case, taken an overdose.
As well as playing keyboards I also supplied backing vocals on a number of tracks, proving particularly adept at the Shoo-be-doo-be-doo-wahs on ‘Peace Explosion’ and the Tra-na-na-na-nooos on ‘Woman, Oh Woman’. I did the scream on ‘Psychedelic Psychopath’, read the Shakespeare soliloquy on ‘Quintessence of Dust’ and, most innovative of all, played the three-minute cowbell solo on ‘Phantasmagoria Elixus No. 3’. There was some argument as to whether it should be me or Big Baz who did the latter, but seeing as it was I who had suggested the cowbell in the first place the honours eventually fell my way. When the song was subsequently released as a single in the mid-Seventies, long after I’d done for Keith and disappeared into another world, the cowbell was removed, in my opinion much to the detriment of the number as a whole.
We worked hard at our music, and days when we didn’t rehearse (in my bedroom, naturally) for at least three hours were rare. Then, of course, we had gigs most nights, which involved loading all our equipment into the back of Otis’s transit van, unloading it again at the other end, playing two or three sets, reloading the van, re-unloading it back at the King’s Road, lugging everything upstairs into the flat (where it was stored in my bedroom), and then sitting down for a lengthy debrief on the night’s performance (‘You screwed up the fucking arpeggio on “Love Typhoon”, Raph!’ Linus would storm. ‘It fucked the whole song!’) If my hippy life was one of unabashed indulgence, it was also surprisingly hard work.
Not that we minded, however, for in the final analysis the hard work worked. The more we rehearsed and gigged the better we got, and the better we got the more fun we had. All bands, of course, have a high opinion of themselves, but in our case the confidence was not misplaced. We were good. Very good. And people eventually began to notice.
It didn’t happen overnight. The band had been on the circuit for three years before I joined them, with little evident success, and my arrival heralded no immediate upturn in their fortunes. As the months went by, however, and 1969 slipped into 1970, and then 1970 into 1971, we gradually found ourselves getting offered bigger gigs, at better venues, for more money. We started doing tours around the country (and, once, to Luxembourg); began to get reviews in the music press; headlined on one of the side-stages at the Isle of Wight Festival (albeit the smallest one); and even supported Captain Beefheart when he played the Finsbury Astoria.
Shady-looking men in suits began approaching us and asking if we were looking for a manager (we turned them down). Linus got to do some session work for Marianne Faithfull, and I very nearly played on a Donovan album, although in the end he settled for someone else, which was a relief because I didn’t much like his music. There was even talk that we might play at Woodstock, although it all came to nothing.
The band’s reputation grew steadily throughout 1971 until, eventually, in the December of that year, to a great fanfare in the music papers, The Executioners were signed, for a record-breaking sum, to Decca, going on to release their first platinum-selling album, Hymns to the Cosmic Walrus, the following spring.
By that point, however, I was no longer with them, my place at piano being taken by one Dave Gittens, he being the very Dave whose original departure from the group had been the reason I joined them in the first place.
It was, you see, in the October of 1971, two months before the band’s triumphal signing, that I murdered Keith, an event precipitating my departure into an altogether less glamorous life. Not, I should add, that I harbour any regrets. At 71 I was far too old for all that rock-stardom stuff.
Keith’s murder was, I freely admit, a tragedy. Not so much because it happened, but rather because it did so at a time when, after years of relentless underachievement, things were finally beginning to look up for him.
The improvement in Keith’s fortunes happened at much the same time as, and in large part because of, the improvement in the fortunes of The Executioners. He never actually acknowledged the connection, and we never made a thing of it, but the fact was that our success rubbed off on him, and the better things got for us, the better they did for Keith too.
It started with the bootlegs. Keith had, over the years, built up a sizeable collection of recordings of the band and, as our reputation grew, he began flogging copies of these to anyone who was interested. Word soon got around that if you wanted anything by The Executioners – and these, remember, were the days before the band had actually cut its first record – Keith Cream was the man to go to, and before long he was doing, if not a roaring trade, at least a steady one from behind his plywood counter in the Record Roundabout, paying the rest of us a nominal, and rather paltry, commission on each sale.
‘What’s important here, guys,’ he’d explain, ‘is not the financial angle, but what I’m doing for your image. I’m spreading the word. If you think of yourselves as Jesus, then I’m, like, your ten disciples.’
With more and more people coming into the Record Roundabout to buy bootlegs, Keith’s other records began to sell too. Albums that had lain untouched for years, their sleeves yellowed with age, now, at last, started to find buyers. Richie Havens went, as did The Turtles, and Big Brother and The Holding Company, pre-Joplin, live in Seattle. He flogged all his Pete Seegers, and most of his Ramblin’ Jack Elliotts, and had to order in more Grateful Dead. He even found a buyer for his entire Tiny Tim collection, which, as Keith himself admitted, ‘was something I expected to do when, like, pigs began to fly’.
Girls stopped being quite so dismissive of Keith when he tried to chat them up at gigs, aware that he was a friend of the band. Music-industry executives no longer told him to fuck off when he sidled up at parties. He even got his photo in Music Echo, albeit with a caption announcing he was Aretha Franklin.
Most dramatic and life-changing of all, Keith found a girlfriend.
Marcie was, admittedly, not the most prepossessing of women. She wore thick bubble spectacles, sported even more chins than Baz, and was the only person I’ve ever met with legs hairier than Keith’s. She was also extremely aggressive, tending to lash out violently with her fists and feet at anybody with whom she disagreed, which, so far as I could ascertain, was everybody.
None of that, however, seemed to matter to Keith, who was utterly devoted to Marcie. And she, in turn, was utterly devoted to him. So devoted were they, indeed, the one to the other, that they had little time for anyone else, so that from the moment they met – at one of our gigs in the Crawdaddy Club – communication between Keith and the rest of us dwindled to next to nothing. Which was just as well, because Marcie didn’t like him talking to other people.
Such, pretty much, was the state of affairs that chilly October night of 1971.
Keith was out with Marcie for the evening, as he was most evenings now, and since for the first time in months we didn’t have a gig, the rest of us were all crashed out in my room, listening to records and smoking dope. As well as the band, there were ten or eleven other people present, including a bald American poet who kept standing up and reciting his work, which was mostly about dying children and, probably on account of the dope, made us all laugh uproariously.
We’d been thinking of going out to a club, to which end I was wearing my hippest red sequinned trousers and cheesecloth shirt. As the evening wore on, however, and we got more and more stoned, the idea of moving became ever less appealing and was eventually abandoned altogether. Instead we just sprawled around the room, working our way through a large wedge of Moroccan hash and holding a long and at times heated discussion about whether the universe was simply a minute particle in the body of some superior being, which personally I didn’t think it was.
Around midnight, by which point The American Poet had, thank God, passed out in the living room, everyone decided to drop some acid. I, however, wasn’t in the mood, and so whilst the others popped their tabs, I went upstairs to get some fresh air.
There was a large skylight in Keith’s bedroom through which one could climb out on to the roof, and after downing a glass of water I duly clambered through this, ripping my lovely cheesecloth shirt on the way out. I was extremely stoned by this point, and when I saw the pumpkin at first thought I was having some sort of hallucination. It was only when I’d crawled over to it, and slapped it with my hand, and laid my cheek against its rindy orange skin, that I realized it was for real.
‘A pumpkin,’ I thought to myself. ‘A pumpkin on the roof. Very strange.’
It was wedged in the angle between the slope of the roof and the brick parapet running along its foot. I presumed Keith had put it there, although for what purpose I had no idea. Probably something to do with Halloween, which was only a couple of weeks away. I staggered to my feet, swaying dangerously against the parapet, and, leaning down, tried to pick the giant vegetable up. It was extremely heavy, and it took all my strength to heave it up on to the top of the wall. So huge was its girth I could barely circle my arms around it.
‘That is one motherfucker of a pumpkin,’ I gasped to myself. ‘Jesus.’
I rested for a moment to get my breath back, peering down at the cars passing along the King’s Road 40 feet below, and then grasped the pumpkin once again, thinking it might be quite good fun to get it inside the flat and roll it down the stairs. As I was tensing to lift it, however, I was distracted by the sound of voices down below. It was Keith and Marcie, and they appeared to be arguing. Intrigued, I released my grip on the pumpkin and looked down.
‘I’m not,’ whined Keith. ‘I respect you too much!’
‘You are!’ screamed Marcie. ‘You are!’
‘No, no, you got me all wrong.’
‘Admit it!’
‘There’s nothing to . . . Ow! That hurts!’
‘You’re having an affair! I know you’re having an affair!’
‘No way, babe. Like, no fucking way. Please, not my hair!’
‘Who is she? Tell me! Tell me or I’ll rip your head off!’
There was a loud thud and, leaning dangerously far out, I saw, by the light of a nearby streetlamp, that Marcie had grabbed a handful of Keith’s hair and was repeatedly banging his head against our front door. His sunglasses had fallen off, and he had his arms over his face to ward off her blows.
‘It’s you I dig!’ he kept shouting. ‘You’re my girl!’
‘Tell me!’ screamed Marcie. ‘It’s Libby, isn’t it! Oh God, I want to die!’
The banging continued for some while until, suddenly, in a manner no less violent than that she had recently been employing to berate her lover, Marcie seized his frightened face, pulled it towards her and jammed her mouth on his. Keith responded, throwing his arms about her ample waist and hugging her to him, Marcie treading on his sunglasses in the process. I could hear the slurp of their kisses, and Keith’s muffled refrain of:
‘I dig you too much to shag around, Marcie. I, like, dig you too much, babe.’
I watched them for some while, fascinated, as naturalists are by mating elephants or rare breeds of shrimp, wondering what it felt like to kiss Marcie, and whether she was as aggressive in bed as she was out of it; and then, rather repelled by the thought, turned my attention back to the pumpkin, hugging it to my chest, bending my knees and hoisting it off the parapet.
My intention was to swivel round, shuffle back to the skylight and drop the vast fruit through on to Keith’s Lilo, which was on the floor directly beneath. Unfortunately, as I turned, I somehow lost my footing, crashing sideways against the slope of the roof and, in my desperation to break my fall, releasing the pumpkin, which thudded down on to the edge of the parapet. For a moment it wobbled back and forth as though undecided which way to fall. Then, however, as though in slow motion, it rolled outwards into space and down, plummeting earthwards like a small orange comet. There was a hushed silence, and then what sounded like a loud squelch, followed closely by an ear-piecing scream.
I pushed myself upright, cursing, and peered over the edge, hoping the pumpkin hadn’t hurt anyone. Unfortunately it had, for with a degree of accuracy I could never have achieved had I been aiming for it, my pumpkin had landed slap bang on top of Keith’s head, the latter disappearing right inside the monstrous fruit as though into a large diving helmet. Amazingly, considering the weight of the thing and the speed at which it must have been travelling when it hit him, he was still on his feet, tottering to and fro across the pavement whilst Marcie, her face and clothes covered in freckles of pumpkin pith, screamed hysterically and tried to wrestle the rindy sphere off her lover’s head. They continued thus for some seconds, swaying back and forth as though engaged in some bizarre dance, before Keith eventually slumped to his knees and, arms twitching manically, pitched face forward on to the pavement, dead, the pumpkin hitting the concrete with a resounding thud. Marcie’s screams redoubled, and a crowd began to gather.
‘Oh shit,’ I mumbled. ‘Oh shit.’
My immediate thought was to get out of the house for a bit and clear my head.
With a quick pat to ensure The Pill and The Photo were safe, therefore, I clambered back through the skylight, descended to our front door and slipped unnoticed out on to the street. Several police cars had by now arrived, and an ambulance. Marcie was still screaming loudly, and punching at a Chelsea pensioner who was trying to console her.
‘Oh shit,’ I mumbled, hurrying into the night. ‘Oh shit!’
I didn’t really know where I was going, and wandered aimlessly for an hour before eventually finding myself in Trafalgar Square. My head felt thick and woozy and, crossing to one of the fountains, I dunked it in the icy water, leaving it submerged for almost a minute before throwing it back and shaking a shower of droplets into the cold night air.
Which is when I noticed Emily, sitting between the paws of one of the ornamental bronze lions, her golden hair shining in the pale moonlight.
At first I could hardly believe it was her.
‘Emily!’ I cried, running over and standing at the foot of the plinth upon which she was seated. ‘Emily, is that you!’
‘Hello, Raphael.’
‘Well, don’t sound too surprised, will you!’
‘I’m not surprised. I’ve been watching you since you came under Admiralty Arch. Come up and sit beside me.’
I struggled on to the plinth and stretched out at her side.
‘It’s unbelievable,’ I said.
‘What is?’
‘Meeting like this, of course. It must be the biggest coincidence since . . . well, since the last time we met. I always seem to bump into you after I’ve . . .’
‘What?’
I was going to say ‘killed someone’, but, of course, Emily knew nothing of my murders, and I thought it best to keep it that way.
‘After you’ve what?’ she repeated.
‘Been thinking of you,’ I said quickly. ‘You always seem to pop up right after I’ve been thinking of you.’
‘Perhaps you conjure me up, like a spirit,’ she laughed. ‘Perhaps I’m your magic genie.’
‘You’re my love, Emily,’ I said, taking her hand. ‘I love you. I miss you. I can’t live without you.’
She put her arm around me and I snuggled down beside her.
‘What rubbish you talk, Raphael. You’ve always talked rubbish. I don’t know why I put up with you.’
‘It’s because you love me too.’
‘Do I now!’ she laughed.
‘Marry me,’ I said, closing my eyes. ‘It’s not too late. I’m only 71. And you don’t look a day over 18.’
‘Flatterer.’
‘I’m serious.’
She tickled my nose.
‘Not tonight, Raphael. But thanks, anyway.’
I pressed my head against her thigh.
‘Where have you been these last couple of years?’ I asked, breathing her in.
‘Oh, here and there. Nowhere exciting. You seem to have been enjoying yourself.’
‘Yes,’ I sighed. ‘I’ve had a lot of fun. I’ve been a pop-star, you know. I’m feeling a bit rough now though. God, I feel rough.’
She said nothing, just shifted a little closer. The sound of her breathing lulled me, and although I tried to stay awake, to make the most of the few moments we had together, it wasn’t long before I’d drifted off. And then, when I awoke, she was gone. And in her place . . . Walter. Poor Walter, his chin cupped in his hands, peering soulfully upwards at the greying sky of dawn.
‘You’re on my lion,’ he said.
Another day. Another victim. Another life. Off we go again.
A little story to end a story; another of those bizarre coincidences that pepper my life like rivets down the hull of an ocean liner.
Two years after the events described above I was lurking among the book stacks of Weston-super-Mare Municipal Library, looking for the best place to secrete a turd-filled paper bag, when I noticed an open book lying on a nearby table. Had it been any other book, or any other page, I would doubtless have ignored it. This particular one, however, caught my eye, prompting me to put the turd back in my pocket and go over and look. There was, you see, a photo of Marcie on it.
The book, a slim volume, was entitled Lady Murderers of Our Time and, in a chapter entitled ‘The Black Widow of Rock’ recounted the strange story of Marcie Goodfellow. The latter, I discovered (not entirely to my surprise), was a ‘psychopath in the classic mould’, who’d been in the habit of picking up unsuspecting men at rock concerts, wooing them and then bumping them off. She’d been doing this for several years, and might well have continued for several more had she not been foolhardy enough to commit her final murder in so eye-catching a manner (i.e. by slamming a pumpkin down on her victim’s head) and in so public a place (i.e. the middle of a busy London street). At her subsequent trial she had pleaded guilty to six counts of murder, although she always maintained she was innocent of the death for which she’d actually been arrested, insisting the offending pumpkin had simply dropped out of the sky. No one believed her, however, and she was committed for an indefinite term of detention to a secure unit for the criminally insane.
I read all this both with interest and, also, with some considerable relief. Not just because it got me off the hook for Keith’s death, but also because it unburdened me of any lingering feelings of guilt I might have harboured about the affair. He was going to be murdered anyway, I thought to myself. All I did was speed the process up a bit. Indeed by dropping the pumpkin I’d probably actually saved lives. God knows how many people the black widow of rock might have gone on to murder had she not been arrested that night. The whole thing made me feel quite good about myself, and I set off to plant my bag of dogshit with a carefree step and a big smile on my face.