One Train Later: A Memoir (25 page)

But he calls me the next day full of apologies, and with a shrug we resume. As I get to know him I realize that I love this man and have great respect for him because under the raw-nerve personality, he is full of humanity, compassion, and music. But often, after hours of Carlsberg, abuse, and exhausting verbal swordplay, personal perspective goes and I return home ready to get out. I don't leave, because the band-with Kevin banging a wooden chair up and down on the stage and giving fantastic maniac performances-is great. The band is rough and bluesy (akin to the current style of pub rock), and we become more and more popular, with Kevin getting recognition as a British original.

This is London 1975, a music scene full of old hippie bands, vinyl albums, gatefold sleeves, collectors, record shops, glam rock, progressive rock, art rock, ambient music, The Old Grey Whistle Test, and the dregs of the sixties. In this framework I feel as if I've returned to almost exactly the same place I left a few years ago. I put everything into the music but wonder where this is leading. This is the life of the gigging musician, the hired gun. In a way it's fun to be back in a band, with its banter and bullshit; but like an echo of my first incarnation with bands in London, it isn't quite enough. In private I write music, tape endless demos of songs for my own imaginary albums, keep journals, and grip the bars of the cage that helps us survive but keeps me from breaking into a larger space.

In the midst of my private distractions, my star seems to be rising in the London scene anyway. I've now had several favorable reviews about my playing, been singled out as a possibility to join the Rolling Stones, and had a large photo essay in Melody Maker. But despite all of this, nothing much has changed. Did I make a mistake by leaving for five years; is it too late? How long can I do this? Kate and I have married, and although I am not looking for a bourgeois existence, the idea of a kid of our own is appealing-but not on this pittance.

Kevin begins to get a lot of notice on the London scene, and it's not long before Virgin Records decides to sign him. As Kevin likes his mates around, we all go along with him to witness his signing. Afterward we cross the road to the pub to celebrate this good fortune, and as usual with Kevin, we start to drink-and drink and drink. In a overly convivial mood I manage to down four vodkas, a beer, and a lager, which turns me into a drooling and mindless puppet. I can no longer walk or talk except in a garbled idiom somewhere between Chechen and Urdu, so it's thought best to drag me up the road to Richard Branson's house. We arrive at his front door and ring the bell. Richard opens the door with an inquiring smile as I lean forward and spew with great violence about fifteen feet down his rather nice Persian rug, to a great chorus of oohs and aahs, with poor Branson whipping back against the wall to avoid death by vomit. I'm then laid down gently on a couch and left to sleep it off. I wake up around two in the morning feeling like a piece of dog shit and shamefully creep out of the house, find the Dyane 6, and make it back to Shepherds Bush.

Despite this shabby rock-and-roll start, I begin to hang out at the Virgin offices on Portobello Road. This is still the early days of Virgin, and at least on the surface there is a loose hippie feeling to everything. I am able to wander around the buildings, getting to know a number of people in the offices: Jumbo, Simon, and Al Clark, a former journalist and now the head of publicity. Doors are literally open in this company, a mark of sharing and openness. A few short years before the corporate and MTV-ridden age begins, Virgin feels like the last holdout of the sixties. Mike Oldfield's hugely popular "Tubular Bells"-a cunning weave of Irish jig, dancing elves, goblin music, and all instruments played by Mike-is a phenomenon. It stays at an unassailable number one position for two years and basically finances the incipient Virgin empire. There are bands like Hatfield and the North, Matching Mole, Caravan, and Gong, all of whom have a wonderful English quirkiness and occupy a late-hippie world. For a moment there is a softness to everything, a placid surface, a lull while something new and aggressive stirs in the substrata.

Most afternoons I climb up the basement steps with a sense of deja vu and slump into the back of the van with the rest of the Coyne band. We greet one another with sardonic remarks, to the effect that we'll all be dead soon anyway, and then head off for the ferry to Holland, Germany, or Belgium or for the MI up to Birmingham. We play at the Paradiso or the Melk- weg in Amsterdam, sleep at the top of crooked little guest houses, eat boiled eggs and hard yellow cheese, drink beer and stare at the hashish dealers who sit in a little room with plastic packets of ginger and brown dope lined up like turds on a counter.. Kevin screams, bangs his wooden chair about, and wacks at his open tuning, and I whip a brass slide up and down the neck of my Tele. We adopt facial tics, weird mannerisms, and accents; mock our landlady, who complains that the streets of Amsterdam are too lumpy; and retire into various paperbacks: we are a band. We have a great drummer, a little guy named Peter Wolf, and I love playing with him. Zoot even joins the band, and it feels as if everything has come full circle.

In the confines of the van Kevin continues to regale us for hours with further tales of lunatics, manic depressives, pyromaniacs, dipsomaniacs, and schizophrenics. Every ten minutes he will sing out the name Doreen, a reference to a running joke that seems to sum it all up with the line "Doreen, Doreen, arch your back-gentlemen's balls are on cold lino." These tales of madness permeate everything until it feels as if we are no more than a mental ward on wheels. I compound this by reading Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, getting carsick, and feeling a strong urge to hurl myself into the nearest Dutch canal. At night through the thin walls of whatever cheap accommodation we are in, our leader can be heard in his room, howling at the walls and moaning away to himself-some of this no doubt due to the effect of the extremely large amounts of alcohol downed prior to bedtime. But astonishingly, like a wind-up doll, he always makes it down to breakfast. He sits there like some creature that has been invented the night before in the lab of a mad scientist and always orders the same thing: a boiled egg and toast cut into soldiers. Like a man a hundred years old, he feebly swings at it with his spoon, trying to take the top off but missing by a few inches. He sighs deeply and buries his head in his hands. Maybe he's acting with brilliance, but it's hilarious and we have to stifle our laughter so as not to upset him. But maybe that's what he is after.

Sadly, the band comes to an end after a grueling eight-week tour of the Continent. This one was simply too much, and by the time we arrive back in England, we are frayed and suffering from temporary brain damage. The word comes a few days later from Kevin's manager, Steve Lewis, that Kevin is breaking up the band. He's had enough-never wants to tour again. I think it's a terrible decision on his part. The band is great-one of the best in the U.K. now-and I know that he will relax for a couple of weeks and then regret it, which he does.

Later I think I should have called him up and tried to talk him out of it. I don't, because another opportunity arises at almost exactly the same time. My old nemesis Kevin Ayers, the bass player from the Soft Machine, is putting a new band together. I am given his phone number and told by Al Clark to call him. It turns out that he is living on a houseboat in Little Venice with his American girlfriend, whom he has stolen from Richard Branson. Kevin is friendly and suggests in silky Noel Coward tones that I come over to see him at the cocktail hour. I have some mixed feelings but I am not really in a position to be choosy, so I agree to go. The appointed hour comes, and we sling back a couple of vodka martinis and with a warm glow put our less-thansuccessful history behind us. The next afternoon I am at a rehearsal with the rest of the band. In the intervening years Kevin has become an indolent sort of pop star in his own right, having some European success with the albums The Confessions of Dr. Dream and Other Stories and Yes, We Have No Marianas. The Ayers band has Charlie and Rob, the bass player and drummer from the original Kevin Coyne Band, plus Zoot again. I have no trouble fitting in, but now it's beginning to feel like a repeated joke, the bandleaders even sharing the same first name. I spend yet another year on the road in the Kevin Ayers Band, and although lacking the trenchant genius of Kevin Coyne, the year is full of daft adventures.

We are returning to England from Bremerhaven, Germany, via the ferryboat, and as we drive on we notice some equestrian types boarding with a horse trailer, and with them ... the royal personage of Princess Anne. After several ooohs and aaahs and a :Few typical musician remarks, we park our grotty van in the bowels of the ship and go in search of the bar. Later that night as we are making the crossing it turns out that we passengers will all be dining together. The supper is a generous-looking buffet served in a small dining room on the upper deck, and all passengers-should they wish an evening mealwill eventually arrive here. We crowd into the small room just as Princess Anne and entourage arrive and we delicately press back into the wall to let her pass by. Pressing back with our disheveled ensemble is a Scottish roadie by the name of Soapy, a man deeply appreciated for his perverse and ill-timed sense of humor. The princess begins to make her way around the buffet table with her lady-in-waiting. As they pick daintily at the food, they are followed closely by Soapy in his filthy T-shirt asking them questions about the items on display, a look of pure innocence on his face. As the responses from HRH and her lady-in-waiting become more and more tight-lipped, the rest of us sit in the corner of the room quietly cackling to ourselves. Shortly after the buffet it's time for the ship dance. Like some weird throwback to colonial England, it's held on a postage-stamp-sized floor, and all are invited. This is asking for it, and naturally the moment HRH gets out onto the floor to do the twist, Soapy and I follow and start in with a drunken shambles of a boogaloo right next to her. After a few minutes of serious getting down, a thuggish-looking and oversize military type appears at our side with the advice to get off the dance floor pronto if we know what is good for us. He looks nasty, and with Zoot right behind us, we hop to the edge of the floor, spy the exit door, and stagger up the stairs. As we hit the upper deck, the tilt of the ship and the icy wind blasting from the fjords of Norway seem to worsen our crapulous condition, our grip of reality becoming a greasy blur. Zoot and Soapy, both laughing like Zen monks, think it will help me recover if they hold me upside down over the side of the ship. Bevied to the eyeballs, they somehow manage to pull me out from behind the life jackets and dangle me by the ankles over the rail, where I stare glassy-eyed and giggling down at the black and icy waters fifty feet below, where giant waves pound the hull; a drunken slip of the fingers would mean certain death. Finally they haul me back onto the slippery deck and we slide off in three different directions. I try to go back to my cabin but get hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of swaying metal corridors and fall into Kevin's cabin, where he is canoodling with his girlfriend. I immediately throw up spectacularly on the nearest bunk, sending Kevin and beauty shooting out the door in search of another cabin and leaving me to moan incomprehensibly at the rivets in the cabin wall for the rest of the night.

As we dock at seven the next morning to begin the long drive back to London, I feel full of remorse, horribly fucked-up, and more ill than at any other time in my life. I finally collapse on the couch about midday, feeling like a victim of Crohn's disease, and pass out watching Emmerdale Farm.

One Saturday afternoon Kate and I return home to find that we have been robbed. Things are thrown about the steps that lead to our flat as if the burglar left in a hurry. In shock we walk through the place and note everything that has been taken, including valuable heirloom jewelry of Kate's. Oddly and symbolically, my Telecaster has not been taken but has in fact been played. It's propped up next to the little Fender Princeton amp, which hums quietly to itself, its red power light glowing like a watchful eye. I pick it up and play a couple of chords; it seems alright, but the word cunt fills my head anyway.

Soon after this event, having finally scraped enough money together, Kate and I move to a more spacious flat in Putney. Kate now works at Young & Rubicam as a copywriter and has written an award-winning ad for Smirnoff vodka, something along the lines of "Smirnoff won't make me an overnight sensation-that's alright, I'm busy tomorrow."

I sleep until eleven every morning, at which time Kate calls me and we exchange a few sweet words. Through Virgin, which seems to be our epicenter for everything, we make many friends and move in a crowd of likeminded people, in particular Martine and Anthony Moore from the band Slapp Happy. We become Tai Chi fanatics and go to the house of Master Chu three times a week, practicing "wave hands like clouds, single whip, needle at bottom of sea." Kate begins sessions with a Jungian analyst, and a few months later I follow; our conversations become laced with references to the shadow, archetypes, anima, animus.

We sink into London life and like most young couples gaze into the future, hoping for the best. Although some months it is a desperate struggle to get the mortgage payment, put up with the pissing rain, and struggle through dense traffic, it's okay because we are in the hub of the scene, surviving and surrounded by friends. We go on a package holiday to Tunisia and walk up and down the beach outside of Hammamet, talking about the future we want to share. But first I have to make it, break beyond this hired-gunplaying-in-bands mode. But it seems impossible. We walk back toward the hotel, kicking through waves and expanding our dreams.

A small burnoose-covered man approaches us, insisting that we buy his carpet, and we get into a huge wrangling match full of jokes that neither side understands. "You are sheepstich man," he keeps telling me. Eventually we buy his carpet and he goes off, smiling and waving, and we go back to the hotel dance for tourists. The whole place is so weird; we get drunk and perversely dance with as many goofy holiday packagers as we can rather than with each other and then spend the rest of the night in our bedroom, howling with laughter and spluttering, "Sheepstitch man," as we pass out.