The Age of Anxiety Page 5

  “Precise enough!” I laughed.

  “No!” He turned on me, very serious. “Not precise enough at all; I wish I had exact figures.”

  “The film changed things for you,” I said, a simple statement of fact that seemed to divert him and bring him back into the present.

  “I saw these wonderful things,” he said, smiling happily. “And I was able to draw them. Now I paint them. You sell them. Maud gets money. This is all very good indeed. I am very happy about it.”

  “Good!” I agreed, watching Maud, who appeared to be terribly uneasy, perhaps embarrassed at what a simpleton her husband had seemed.

  Nik noticed Maud’s anxiety and startled both of us when he spoke again. “Louis likes you, Maud,” he said. “I can see that. I’m not jealous.”

  This unsettled me. How did he know I was so attracted to Maud? I supposed he had an eye for it, or sixth sense.

  He turned to his wife. “I neglected you, Maud, when the band was on the road all the time. But darling, I never cheated on you. All the other rock guys were cheating, but I loved you so much. We should have had children, Maud. But how could we have a family when I was away all the time? Life is better now. Don’t you think, Maud? Don’t you agree that life is better for us now?”

  Maud nodded, looking shyly at me. It was clear that Nik was a good-hearted man, a sweet, kind man. What he had seen, and his representations in charcoal and paint, obviously delighted him; he felt special. He felt chosen. He was proud of himself.

  “Life is good, Nik,” she agreed. “Better now, yes.”

  But I sometimes wondered if Nik’s dependence on her was hard for her to accept. Now she looked at me awkwardly, as if to say: “I will never have any peace now.”

  It occurred to me while we were talking that Nik might be able to give Walter some advice. Despite Maud’s discomfort I decided to take a chance. Walter was frightened, troubled, and on the edge of depression. Nik by contrast was happy.

  “Maud, Nik, can I prevail on you for some advice?”

  They both nodded.

  “I told you about my godson Walter,” I continued. “He has been experiencing some strange things himself. Not visions, but sounds, like music, and it is rarely pleasant.”

  “You think Nik could help?” Maud looked quizzical.

  “You know, yes, I do think he might be able to help,” I confessed. “Nik seems to bear what happened to him, the massive breakdown he suffered, with such equanimity, and he has steered it to such a wonderful outcome with his art.”

  “Nik was a working musician once, just like your godson.” She was ready to agree. “I can’t see any harm in trying.”

  I described what Walter had been experiencing, without embellishment; my godson was hearing daunting sounds that he believed might be emanating from the people in his audience. Nik and Maud listened carefully. Then Nik seemed to make a decision.

  “There is no question,” he interjected firmly. “I can help your godson. I know exactly how to help.”

  After they left, I considered whether I should call Walter, and when.

  I hadn’t spoken to him for some time. His manager Frank Lovelace was, as I say, an extremely hard-driving and high-achieving man, and I’d heard that Walter was becoming uneasy about where his band was headed under Lovelace’s guidance.

  Lovelace was good-looking in a slightly battered, east London way with a good head of dark hair. He was midheight, about five foot nine, and carried himself lightly, in a manner that suggested he would be fast-moving in a fight. He was always suited up, in a kind of shiny mohair that looked cheap but was actually very expensive. He was not always without a tie, but he preferred expensive dark shirts in equally expensive-looking material, often with gold or silver thread at the seams, the two top buttons left open. His hands were calloused because he spent a fair bit of time boxing for a hobby, as his slightly battered nose betrayed. His eyes were a vivid blue, his teeth rather wolverine, but they were shiny white. Even so, his breath wasn’t always good. One felt challenged not to grimace and look away when he came close in order to say something intimate or secret.

  To make deals in the music business it was not unusual for managers to be tough guys, and to intimidate the record company people into favoring the artists they represented, but also to bully the artists in order to make good on careless promises they had made to record companies or show promoters.

  “He’ll do what I fucking say,” Lovelace would tell the businesspeople he dealt with, the show promoters and record company bosses. “Just give us the advance we need and leave him to me.”

  If there were any qualifications or reservations, he might sink into personal attacks.

  “Listen,” he would hiss, his face inches from his adversary. “You fucking little twat. I was in this business when you were at school lusting over Debbie Harry.”

  Despite my conviction that he was potentially an artist destined for more than Dingwalls, and that Lovelace’s efforts could almost certainly make him richer, Walter seemed to be entirely comfortable in the old dive, and in other modest venues like it. He appeared to love the smoky pubs and clubs packed to the roof with fans who could reach out and touch him, punch him, or even spit at him in the Fourth Wave manner if they wished. The band was selling a lot of albums and CDs, and he and Siobhan had a good little flat in South Ealing. She had also inherited her father’s cottage in Duncannon close to the sea near Waterford in Ireland. They retreated there sometimes when Walter wanted to write new songs. Walter’s band lineup was simple: singer with a harmonica, guitar, bass, drums.

  I’d often been to see them at Dingwalls—rehearsals and live performances. I’d station myself at the bar at the back. On guitar was Crow Williams. Crow was a purist. He played a Fender Telecaster with heavy strings through a small, but loud, vintage Fender Deluxe amplifier.

  “For fuck’s sake,” he would shout in rehearsal. “I can’t fucking hear myself. And when I can hear, we sound like a bad imitation of the fucking Shadows.” His Telecaster would bounce off the wooden floor and there would be another scar on its pale cream body. The band members just looked on, impassive. Crow never hit anyone, but he was scary.

  He used no effects. No pedals, no echo, no compression. He got his name from his black hair that he wore long like Ronnie Wood of the Stones; or it could have been from his grim expression and slightly hooked nose. He was striking-looking, and attractive to women—his blonde wife, Agneta, was a stunning and voluptuous Swedish businesswoman who looked like a glamour model. Crow had met Walter in their college days. He had been at a nearby college studying art, while Rain was at the same place studying journalism, so he knew her pretty well. Rain told me that Crow was really the leader of the band, even though he never wrote songs and never spoke about the band in public. In group interviews with the press he would never utter a single word, and rarely even nod to support what the other band members said. But he was the one who decided what they would play, how they would play it, and even how long they would perform. He was against onstage showing off of any kind, except by Walter, who was permitted a few flashy moments simply because he was the front man. Crow never seemed jealous of Walter’s status or reputation. Whenever creative matters came up for discussion, for example prior to recording sessions, he would simply pull out the same six vinyl albums.

  “Let me remind you lot what our mantra is here—what it is we do.” Then he would yank his shabby army surplus bag open and lift out several old vinyl albums. “This is the pinnacle. This is the White Cliffs of Dover we jump from. This is where we start. We are a pub rock band; we do not play fucking jazz.”

  The albums were Booker T and the MG’s Greatest Hits, Jimmy Reed at Carnegie Hall, The Everly Brothers Greatest Hits (two albums), a white label collection of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates’ singles, The Best of Little Walter on Chess Records, and Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline. Crow wanted to control where they were supposed to be heading with their music, not merely to exert influence. Somehow,
after sitting for several hours in moody silence while Crow made the band members, and anyone else who was creatively involved, listen to each album or set in turn, the band would knuckle down. As soon as they began to play, one got the impression of a large old American car with a V8 engine always spitting nearly a quarter of a gallon of wasted gasoline from its exhaust pipes onto the asphalt before it finally got rolling ruthlessly toward you blowing out blue smoke.

  On bass guitar was Steve Hanson. Hanson, as he liked to be called, was the exception to the pub rock rule in Walter and His Stand.

  “We get it, Crow,” he would say. “No jazz.” He would rub the side of his nose slowly and deliberately, aping Walter’s quirk, both teasing him and getting a conspiratorial smile from him in return: Crow was too serious, that was their message to each other.

  Hanson was tall and very heavily built and possibly even a little overweight. But he was regarded by everyone as a gentle giant. The truth is he could have been a fighter if he’d wished, but was too laid-back to bother. His gray-blond hair was long and slightly thin on top, often pulled back in a ponytail. He usually wore light-colored clothes, safari jackets, and sometimes even those Australian hats that seem too big and should come with corks hanging down, like Crocodile Dundee. In winter he always wore a raincoat that nearly touched the ground. He didn’t care if he looked unfashionable.

  If he had not been on bass, more of his extraordinary musicianship might have been manifested. Indeed, it was a measure of his musicianship that he was both able and content to serve as bass player, and to do so without any ostentation whatsoever. He never played an unnecessary or superfluous note. And yet he was a gifted pianist and classical organist, and when Crow allowed, Hanson would move to the Hammond organ (always played straight, without the whirling Leslie speaker sound so loved by most rock keyboardists) and covered the simple bass patterns required for Walter’s music with his feet and the organ pedals.

  “When you play a Hammond solo can you just play the fucking notes and not twiddle that underwater thingie,” Crow would command and grin menacingly, but Hanson understood. No whirling Leslie speaker.

  “Keep your effing wig on.” Hanson held his own with Crow, never raising his voice. “I get it. We need to be more “Green Onions,” more early Booker T than Billy Preston. But fuck it, Crow, both those guys are geniuses.”

  “But you’re not,” Crow would retort. “Keep your Grade Seven shit out of this band.”

  Hanson often quietly took Walter aside and made him sit and listen to the experimental orchestral recordings of György Ligeti and the advanced and anarchic piano jazz of Bud Powell. The intention was never to try to broaden what they did in the band, nor to challenge it, merely to acknowledge that crazy music was out there, and that what they were doing was providing a kind of deeply rooted backbone, a link to the very guts of popular radio music most appropriate to listen to while driving down a long straight road.

  On drums was Hanson’s wife, Patty. Patty was—like her husband—a musical dark horse. She too had studied at the Royal Academy, and could play viola, most of the instruments in the baroque viol family, and she could do OK on cello. She could play double bass too if the band ever wanted to take their music down a tone and evoke the early Nashville Hank Williams Trio sound that Crow occasionally permitted. Patty also had an extraordinary and versatile voice that was mostly wasted in the band. She could read music, of course, and could sing opera if she wished. She could also emulate and imitate almost any female singer under the sun. She did wonderful, funny impressions of Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette, Nina Simone, and even singers with quite unique voices like Ella Fitzgerald. What made her so great as a pub rock drummer was that it sometimes seemed she could barely play. Despite her extraordinary body, statuesque and curvaceous, but also graceful and strong—a body that had already passed into legend among her fans—she didn’t appear to have the strength or coordination to be a powerful rock drummer, and so she played very little, but very well, and very tightly. This was precisely what made the sound of the band so distinctive. Because they were so tight they seemed louder than in fact they were.

  It might be useful here to speak about Walter strictly with respect to his work and role in the band. As a musician Walter was disciplined and devoted. He felt supremely lucky to do what he did, and not to have to follow the career path laid out for him after college, slaving in some commercial garden-center-cum-blue-rinse-lady’s day out like Wisley, pruning roses all day. His songwriting was always impulsive, he rarely thought deeply about what he would put down on paper and usually left the music to Crow to polish off. Walter could play both the guitar and the piano pretty well, and did so on the demo recordings he made in his little home studio, but unlike Crow he was not averse to experimenting with effects boxes on his harmonicas to create new rhythms and complex and interesting sounds.

  Walter’s wife Siobhan, like me, had great ambitions for him, but of a different nature. As Walter had told me that night when he suddenly turned up at my flat, she felt he could be a poet. In my view, had he not chosen Dingwalls as his primary performance venue, Walter might have made a half-decent poet. The fact is, few people know what a poet really is, or what a good poem should be, whether it should be spoken or sung, or rapped out in street slang. Walter had a fairly good way with words. It was his immense good fortune that Crow had absolutely no interest in taking any credit for helping Walter to complete his very basic home demo recordings. The fact that Crow helped Walter tighten up his songs but wanted no share in the writing royalties meant that neither of the other two members felt they could demand a share. Walter didn’t think about this very much; he made about three times as much money as the rest of the band members, but they sold plenty of CDs, the proceeds of which they all shared, and they all lived well enough.

  It must be said that, although Crow felt sure neither he nor Walter would ever leave pub rock behind, Steve and Patty Hanson wanted to be famous and rich. This was not about amassing money. It was because they knew that sooner or later they would begin to feel trapped by the sheer simplicity of what they played in the band. Being rich would allow them to diversify, and maybe to do so in a medium less commercially safe than pub rock. They saw Big Walter and His Stand and their residency at Dingwalls as a stepping-stone. Walter and Crow were both aware of the Hansons’ ambitions, but it was also very clear that Crow for one had no conception of what they might have in mind. Crow had deliberately confined and limited his musical language in order to give it nozzle power. He might have understood that the Hansons might want to write symphonies, but he would have had great difficulty allowing the idea to stay in his mind long enough for him to start worrying about it as a reality. It would be like someone sitting down to enjoy a meal consisting of a perfect steak, salad, and fries longing instead for foie gras and mixed olives. It simply wasn’t conceivable; it was not in his vocabulary.

  The Stand wasn’t exactly a straitjacket for Walter. There were subtle differences in the band and musical influences beyond the basic pub rock, but I knew none of them could help him with the strange sounds he was hearing. He too seemed to sense that. The politics in the band were set in stone. Whoever he turned to, he would upset or distract the others. Crow might understand, might even be sympathetic to Walter’s dilemma, but he would want him to “man up.” The Hansons would start prattling on about Stockhausen and the mysticism of sound, and Crow would flip. Crow was the boss. He represented the end-stop to all and any musical diversions.

  Many months later, after some time worrying and fretting about how I might help my godson, a new possibility had presented itself.

  I phoned Walter on a warm, sunny morning in August. “Walter! I met with Paul Jackson, Nikolai Andréevich now of course. I’m selling his paintings for him.”

  “Aha, terrific,” breathed Walter. “How did that come about?”

  I explained about the visit from Maud, Andréevich’s wife.

  Walter had loved The Curious Life of Nikolai
Andréevich, returning to the cinema to see it over a dozen times when he was between the ages of eight and thirteen. It had become something of a cult classic, shown regularly at the Electric Cinema on Portobello Road.

  “He’s a painter now?”

  “Extraordinary drawings and paintings made while he was living rough up in the Lakes.”

  “Does he still make music?”

  “I think he experienced a really enormous trauma of some kind while he was working on the film. He just produces art now. I say that, although he hasn’t done anything new since he returned to his wife, but I’m hopeful. I’m just organizing the first exhibition of the works he did while he was up the mountain. There are lots of them, and they’re all good.”

  “So how is he? Is he OK?” said Walter.

  “He is very clear about what happened. He speaks of a revelation.”

  “Not mad, then?”

  “Not mad,” I confirmed. “Neither are you mad, Walter.”

  “I’m hearing some really strange stuff; you know that. A psychiatrist might regard me as mad. A little bit.”

  “You told me about the ‘sound attacks.’ Isn’t that what you called them?”

  “Yeah,” he slurred. “And I’ve been getting more of them. And there’s something new: I am starting to see lights now too, and they usually combine to form a single very bright light. You know I don’t do drugs.”

  “That sounds like Nik’s final moments in the movie,” I said. “His revelation began that way, with the intense light from the lamps used to backlight him. Is it like that?”

  “Not quite,” said Walter. “I do see a light, almost like a star in the sky, but it’s explosive. Inside that starburst is a child.”