Forty and Fat (continued)
Chapter 4
As often happened, it was the sound of
daughter's laughter that woke me. She was always laughing or
crying or just chundering away. For someone still only a couple
of feet tall hers was the largest presence in the house;
constantly wanting to watch her Thomas The Tank Engine video
again, or read a book, do a puzzle, play 'shops' or 'dollies'
or something else; an endless repertoire of songs and chatter,
dances and smiles, mischief and miracles. They were coming down
the stairs and daughter was screeching with laughter as mummy
carried her over her shoulder in a fireman's lift. Then she
must have seen me because she stopped and I heard her say:
“Look, mummy. Daddy on the couch… dead!”
“Again,” said mummy,
sighing.
I opened my eyes. The TV was still
on.
“Hello, darlings,” I
croaked. “Any chance…”
“… of a cup of
tea?” said wife. “Are you sure you've got the time?
Shouldn't you be working?”
Beneath the belt, I thought, but I
couldn't blame her. I had also become sick of the sound of
myself trying to justify our increasingly disordered existence.
She was a good kid, pure gold inside and out, and she did her
best to understand. It wasn't like she hadn't been there before
with me. But this was the first book I'd tried to write since
we'd married and started a family and she was finding it hard
going. We both were. In the past, when I had reached the stage
I was at now with it -- where every hour god gave was devoted
to getting the job done -- I had simply been able to filter out
all other 'distractions'. Pulled up the drawbridge and told the
world to leave a message after the beep. But there's no way you
can filter out a pregnant wife and two-year-old daughter. No
way I could just retreat to my dimly lit room and put up the Do
Not Disturb sign, as had been my habit before. Indeed, I had
never considered writing a book and living what passes for a
normal life as compatible in any way. Until now, it had never
needed to be.
Beyond that, of course, wife had her
own pressures to bear. While I was locked away in the torture
chamber night and day she was having to assume full-time
responsibility for everything else. Hard enough at any time
with a too-clever-for-her-own-good infant in tow. But when
you're about to give birth to the next one and you've just
moved into a strange new house which you desperately want to
turn into a home, except your husband says he can't help right
now because he has a Very Important Book to finish… well,
I still can't imagine how that feels, and I've really tried.
Guilt keeps me trying even now.
She did make us some tea, though. We
sat there sipping it as daughter coaxed me into helping her put
a Bob The Builder puzzle together on the floor. Spud was her
favourite. I rather liked Wendy. Bob was a lucky man.
“What are your plans for
today?” wife asked idly.
I looked up at her with pain in my
eyes, still too zonked to come up with a smart one-liner.
She sat back and laughed.
“Sorry! What I mean is, are you doing the book today --
or that other thing?”
Ah, yes. That other thing. In this
case, the Zeppelin DVD notes. It was something that should have
been done and dusted long before I'd become so entangled in the
book. But Zeppelin being Zeppelin, things hadn't panned out
that way and now it was becoming the monkey on my back.
In my star-mangled corner of the
rock magazine universe, they don't come any bigger than Led
Zeppelin. Like the Beatles to Mojo, for the Classic Rock crowd
there was Zeppelin -- and then there was everybody else. Being
asked to write the notes for their new DVD -- the first
official release of any 'new' Zep material for over twenty
years -- was like being given the keys to the executive
shithouse in any other business. Like the band itself, it meant
that in this world I was now officially the man. The old
credibility-by-association shtick. Well, all right, I'd have
some of that. In the same way as when I was a dishwasher I
always wanted to be thought of by the rest of the kitchen as
the best dishwasher. My motivation: sheer boredom. There was
simply no better way to kill it, short of killing yourself. Now
it seems I had found a way to do both.
Back then I had wanted the Zeppelin
thing to be a masterpiece; now I just wanted it to be over. It
had seemed like a good enough plan. I would watch the DVD -- a
seriously far out piece of work built around four cornerstone
Zep concerts from the seventies -- with Jimmy Page, who had
spent a year putting the whole thing together. Then I would
interview him about it. Which I did. So far, so cool. But then
Jimmy's never been a problem. I've known him for over fifteen
years and, I don't know why, but he's just always been good to
me. I guess it goes back to the days when I was presenting a
weekly rock show on Sky TV and Jimmy was “a fan.”
Those were his words. He laughed when he said them, but not as
much as I did. As a teenager, I walked around most days
believing I was in Led Zeppelin. Sometimes I was the singer,
sometimes the guitarist. Sometimes I was both. And I was good.
The best in the biz. Everybody said so…
I was nearly thirty when I met Jimmy
for the first time and by then I was just about reconciled to
the fact that I was never going to be in the band. But that
didn't make me any less jittery about meeting a genuine boyhood
idol and I was surprised to learn that tucked away in some dark
crevice of my hobbled soul, impossible to winkle out it seemed,
there still lurked the faintly beating heart of… a fan.
God help me. A true believer. Re-playing some of the old Zep
albums, in lieu of that first meeting, I sat there entranced,
reminded again of days that seemed further away to me then than
they do even now… sitting cross-legged in the aisle of
the local Odeon when we went to see The Song Remains The Same,
not because the seats were all taken but because we were
Zep-heads and we always sat cross-legged on the floor…
smoking my first joint and coughing my guts up all over the
juddering crescendo to 'Whole Lotta Love'… borrowing Zep
'III' from a hippy mate at school and never giving it
back…
It wasn't often I allowed myself
such indulgences. Who had the time to sit around listening to
old albums anymore? Besides, I had been in the business long
enough by then to know that the people who made that special
music were rarely special themselves. Often, it was true, the
devil really did have the best tunes. Did it matter, though? On
one level, not at all. Look at Lennon: the screwed-up,
self-loathing, smack addict who wrote 'Imagine', the most
transcendent message-song of our time; a 'Jerusalem' for the
new age.
On the other hand, I have never been
able to think of my old Cockney Rebel albums in the same way
again since working with their singer, Steve Harley, some years
ago. It was during my brief tenure back in PR and when the
Harley account landed on my desk I actually thought: wow, Steve
Harley, I wonder if he still does 'Judy Teen'? What I should
have said was: wow, Steve Harley, I wonder if he's a bitter old
brontosaurus that still thinks it's 1975? Twenty years since
his heyday, Harley, I discovered, was another Miss Haversham.
You get 'em everywhere in the music biz: has-beens and
once-upon-a-times who still insist they're in with a shout;
nobodies still clinging to the fact that they were once,
briefly, somebodies. It's not everyday, though, you get the
chance to work with one you actually used to put pictures of on
your bedroom wall, and so I thought I'd give it a crack.
Big mistake. He had a new album out,
but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't get anybody
interested in it. Then I sat down and actually listened to it
and understood why: gruel-thin melodies and Harley's flat,
wheezing vocals, like an old woman with a chesty cough. It also
contained the world's worst ever version of 'What Becomes Of
The Broken Hearted'; solid gold in anybody else's hands, here
transformed into something so staggeringly repulsive you
half-wondered if it was some sort of deliberate post-modern
'joke'.
With mounting alarm, I checked the
cuttings file, searching for old 'friends' in the press that
had written about him favourably in the past, and discovered he
hadn't done any major press interviews for over ten years.
Jesus, I thought, what have I taken on? From a PR perspective,
his career looked like an old abandoned churchyard, smothered
in weeds and dog shit. Now neglect had turned to desperation.
He was so needy he used to phone or fax me constantly.
“Just to check on the situation.” The situation was:
forget it, nobody cares anymore. But of course I couldn't tell
him that and so he started to blame me. I just wasn't trying
hard enough.
To prove the point, he phoned me at
home one Sunday morning to tell me he was on Channel Four
Racing. “Something I got for myself,” he added like
a sulky schoolgirl. I was still in bed but I switched on the TV
and there he was, smothered in Burberry, the stereotypical
horse racing nutter. He waffled on about the gee-gees for a
while then they cut to an old clip of him doing 'Make Me Smile'
from about fifty years ago. It made me feel queasy and vaguely
depressed.
“If I can get great stuff like
that, why can't you?” he admonished me on the phone the
next day. It was a fair question. The answer was in the answer,
of course, but he was too up his own arse to see it. A
rock'n'roll Victor Meldrew who badly needed putting out of his
misery.
I plodded on. Not a tickle. Then
Steve came up with another great idea, even better than the one
about the horse racing. He urged me to write a letter on his
behalf to the late John Diamond, whose courageous weekly column
chronicling his -- ultimately unsuccessful -- treatment for
lung cancer was then running in the Daily Telegraph. On the
basis that Harley had a “special empathy” for what
Diamond was going through, having been in and out of hospital
himself as a child with polio, he felt that Diamond might find
it interesting to meet him, perhaps. To compare notes, he said.
“I feel like I already know him, you see, like we've
already bonded through our shared experiences, our shared
pain…”
I could barely believe what I was
hearing. I sat there silently, huddled in a cringe, as he
continued to elaborate. “Are you jotting this
down?” he asked tetchily. Oh, yeah. But if I could just
ask a question. What did he hope to get from all this? I winced
as I waited for the inevitable reply. I just wanted to hear him
come out and say it, the shameless fuck.
“Well, he might mention me in
the column or interview me,” he said. The phone suddenly
felt very sticky in my hand. And maybe give a plug to the new
album, too, eh? “Well, you never know,” he said
excitedly. That was when I knew for sure who I was dealing
with.
I told him I'd write the letter and copy
him in on it, which I did. But I never sent it, obviously.
Gimme a break. Not even on a bad day. Do I need to add that
'Make Me Smile' doesn't anymore? continue
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