One Train Later: A Memoir (29 page)

In the afternoons we walk around the corner to a small coffee bar and get a cup of tea and a sausage roll and morosely discuss our somewhat clouded future and the tunes we are rehearsing. In this phase we don't yet have the songs that will make us famous. Sting has a few ideas, but we are groping, as if trying to fit a key in the dark. The pressure of writing "punk songs" just to keep going doesn't come easily. Sting has a natural talent for writing melodic and harmonic material, so we fall between two poles and come up with nothing satisfying. We need a catalyst. I find it discouraging because to be without gigs is one thing, but to be without music is another. We even try to play a blues, but it doesn't work and I begin to seriously question whether I have made the right decision and return home, moaning to Kate that these guys can't play. We seem to be in a dead zone: no gigs, shit management, nothing. But we walk back through the rain and cold and carry on working at songs, trying to improve, trying to survive on a diet of music and hope.

Prior to throwing in my lot with Sting and Stewart, I have had an on-andoff gig in Germany with a conductor by the name of Eberhard Schoener. I have one commitment left with him, and conveniently it falls at the tail end of a few days' playing in Holland and France with the Damned. But there are problems because there is no way for us to get our equipment to Rotterdam, and as I have the only car with an engine that starts (or maybe the only car with an engine), we have to risk it in that. If we actually get there, we can borrow amps from the Damned, maybe.

We pass a few queasy hours on the ferry from Ipswich to Holland, eating cheese sandwiches and staring out at the dismal puke-colored Channel, which churns below like vomit going down the toilet. We hit the grey shores of Holland and drive into the bowels of the Netherlands, praying that the bloody car won't give up the ghost-it's already wheezing like an old asthmatic. A few hours later, after driving around most of Holland and Germany and skirting the Russian border, we end up somewhere that can only be described as somewhere. We play that night in a dark, smoky hall in a Flemish field full of Flemish punks and Flemish puking. The Damned are the big stars, and we the poor side attraction, but they are decent enough to lend us their gear without putting us through total humiliation. Brian James, the guitarist, lets me use his amps and I am grateful.

After the gig and a night spent in a Belgian hostelry suffused with the sharp tang of animal urine and spilled beer, we set off for Paris in my cancerous auto, lurching toward ]a Belle France like a sausage sliding across the surface of a greasy omelet. We arrive in Paris the day before the show, and although we are excited to be in the French capital, we don't know what to do with ourselves. But we find somewhere to stay in the sixth arrondissement for the exacting sum of roughly a quid a night for a smelly matchbox of a room at the top of the building. It isn't worth even half that, and because there is no room to stand, we lie down and make remarks out of the side of our mouths about feeling romantic and gay. As usual, we have no money to do anything except play the gig, but Stewart and I scrape just enough together to see the afternoon showing of Star Wars with French subtitles in St.Michel. As we sit there in the dark, watching Darth Vader and making comments about the line "May the force be with you," Sting is wandering around the streets of Pigalle, observing the beautiful prostitutes.

The next night, after grinding through morning and afternoon like something out of Nausea, we go to le gig. It turns out to be a basement room below a restaurant somewhere near Les Halles. When we get there, the place is empty and the Damned are nowhere to be seen because the gig has been canceled. A Johnny Hallyday wannabe with a Gauloise hanging from his lips tells us that the Damned haven't sold enough tickets. "Ze Damned, no one knows whoza fuck she is," and "Ze Polis, don'mek mi larf." With a deep sense of failure and an "ah, fuck it all" attitude, we slink away in the direction of our Parisian shithole-but not without one more adventure.

Being good tourists, we're interested in seeing the sights and decide to make a detour back to the hotel over the famous Pont Neuf. We pull up in the middle of the bridge and get out to stare over the expanse of the Seine below. Paris and the Seine, such beauty, such history. We are silent for a moment, then awed by the weight of it all, inspired to poetic commentary: "I wonder how many dead prostitutes have ended up in there?" "It's full of piss, and that's where they get their drinking water from, froggy cesspool." "Brigittey Bardot Bardot." Having gotten that out of our system, we go into a mutually supportive eulogy about our own future. If we can survive this, we can do anything; it's just a question of time, obviously, isn't it? We become quiet and, staring across the river, fall into a dazed reverie-Sting generating a lyric for "Roxanne," me imagining weird chord inversions, Stewart hearing snare hits on unorthodox beats, the future unfolding like a path, like the river itself.

We turn back to the car for a contemplative drive back through the streets of Paris, but naturally the fucking Dyane has had a mid-bridge seizure and now won't even start despite my furious cursing, kicking, and twisting of the ignition key. To playfully compound the situation, it begins to rain-well, not rain, but piss down with a vengeance so mean-spirited that it feels like we need an ark, not a piece-of-shit French thing.

With more remarks like "I've pushed cars off better bridges than this, French turd," and out-of-tune whistlings of "La Marseillaise," we start heaving the waste of money off the Pont Neuf in the direction of the sixth arrondissement. Shortly after getting off the mighty bridge, we are stopped by the gendarmes, who want to see our passports (which by some bizarre piece of fortune we all have). Then ensues a long page-one Berlitz conversation about how we aren't actually stealing this French car but how in fact one of us, so admiring of French ingenuity, has actually purchased it and what a great little thing this French car is and what bad luck to have run out of petrol on a night like this, but, oh well, regret rien and c est la vie, constable. After much Gallic shrugging of shoulders and lip curling and probably not knowing what to do with us, the gendarmes climb back into their nice warm little van, light up some Gitanes, and take off in a haze of warm blue smoke while we stand like sodden sponges in the Niagra of water that is destroying all of Paris. With aching limbs and purple lips, we push on through the flood all the way back to the hotel with a desperate feeling in our stomachs about the morning.

Daylight arrives and in the streets below, well-heeled and chic Parisians with a petit dejeuner and strong French coffee in their stomachs go about their lives with smiling faces, thinking of a satisfying morning's work and a long delicious lunch of seafood crepes accompanied by something dry and white from the Loire Valley. Above their well-groomed and healthy bodies we drag ourselves out of our stinky little pallets, knowing that the first thing we have to do is find ze bloody garage. After a confused conversation at the front desk, it turns out that in fact there is one close by and, even better, it is downhill the whole way. With a dangerous combination of pushing, running, and braking amid filthy French insults, we skid into the auto repair in less than five minutes. After the mechanics look under the bonnet with disdain and clouds of Gauloise, we get the sage advice that they, French auto masters, could get the car going, but if the engine is ever turned off or if it stops, it will never start again-ever.

The horrible task of getting this wretched heap of metal back to Blighty falls to Sting, who has not been hired for the Eberhard Schoener gig in Germany. This is a Herculean task: he has to get the car onto the boat and keep the engine running all the way across the Channel. But he makes some remark that he is born for the job, and one can only admire his steely resolve and think that it was with men like him that the empire was built. Stewart and I luckily have been advised by Eberhard to hire a vehicle on his dime and drive to Munich, and we cheerily wave Sting off from the garage as he sets forth on his long journey back to the Emerald Isle. Maybe there is a hint of schadenfreude from Stewart and me, but in my case it's mixed because it's my car and I'll probably never see it again. There are murmurings of "poor fucker," "bastard," "he's had it coming for a long time now"-you know the sort of thing.

Having waved Sting off in the dying Dyanne, Stewart and I busy ourselves with the task of getting to Munich. Now that we are spending someone else's money, everything takes on a new brightness. We rent a nice new VW van at the appointed place, fuss a bit about the color, make sure the tank is full, and make an executive decision that we need a good meal before we set off on the long drive. We accomplish this in a rather expensive restaurant and then sleepily and contentedly set off for Munich and a paying gig. On the way there I relate to Stewart the story of the man we are about to share our fate with.

Eberhard is notorious in the German classical music scene because he's pulled off stunts like bringing an entire Balinese gamelan orchestra to Germany, combining there with an orchestra and electronics, and taking them on tour. I was introduced to him by Jon Lord, the keyboard player of Deep Purple, who asked me to come to Munich to play on a classical-rock album he was making there, with Eberhard conducting. I had run into Jon one night at the Speakeasy and he asked me if I would like to do it because he needed a guitarist who could read music and maybe play classical as well.

I arrived in Munich a few days later at the Hilton, where the sessions were taking place in the basement, now converted into a recording studio. Here I met Eberhard, a tall, thin German with a wild artistic shock of hair. With many stories to tell, he was very pleasant and fun to be with; we hit it off, not knowing how intertwined we would become in the future. The sessions, although difficult, went well as we worked through the day with the orchestra-all Hungarian refugees, with an entire village to themselves somewhere outside of Munich. Problems arose because we (the rock band) were on a stage at one end of a large hall and they (the orchestra) were stuck at the far end, so when we all tried to play together a tremendous time lag made it very difficult to arrive at the beginning of a bar together, never mind the orchestra's very legato phrasing, which dragged horribly against the rock band's pushing beat. But over the course of a day we managed to solve the problems by having Eberhard in the middle of the hall, waving his arms about like an epileptic rag doll. Somehow it worked, and the end of the day is rosy with many Germanic murmurings of "zumzing new, I tink, zumzing new, ya-gut."

Eberhard and I must have bonded in some way because shortly after I returned to London he called to ask if I would mind returning to Munich to do some more guitar overdubs for him. Naturally enough, I went back, as I was on the verge of selling my guitar, but from then on I regularly returned to Munich to do guitar stuff for Eberhard. I always stayed with him and his family in his beautiful apartment in Schwabing, a high-end quarter of Munich. A great raconteur, he was fun to be around and usually let me play whatever I want.

As the relationship progressed Eberhard gave me free rein until we reached the point where I would turn up at the studio, open the place up, start the tape machines rolling, and record myself. The studio was at the side of an old hall called the Burgerbrau, infamous as one of the places where Hitler had made early speeches on his way to power and in fact the scene of an assassination attempt on his life. One of his enemies had packed the place with dynamite, intending to blow him to kingdom come while making his speech, but unfortunately Hitler finished early and left, and so history unfolded in the way we know. Each day as I wandered in with my guitar I would stare up at that stage and try to feel the evil vibes coming from the spot where he stood, but actually I didn't feel anything much. Outside, though, it was different. There was a cafe attached to the building; sitting at the tables were many men in their sixties or seventies, all wearing dark glasses and all in competition for the number one Dr. Strangelove look-alike. They would sit there silently in the pale Bavarian sunlight, staring off into the distance, perhaps dreaming of the former cruelty and power they had once enjoyed.

Occasionally you would see them smirking to themselves as they raised yet another cup of bitter German kaffe to their thin lips or speared a hapless bratwurst, the other black-gloved hand desperately gripping a chain attached to the panting throats of a Rottweiler, Alsatian, or other weird breed of Bavarian killer dog. There was no question that beneath the thin veneer of respectability, they were Nazis. I made a few discreet inquiries and, sure enough, there were places around town where they had secret meetings and paid homage to the swastika. It hadn't gone away but had merely gone underground, presumably until the Fiihrer rose once again. I would sit there alone at lunchtime, forking up a plate of sauerkraut, feeling a strange mix of a giggle fit and fearful humor.

My story told, Stewart and I drive all the way across France, studying the map and rambling on about our possible future. We arrive in Munich in the early evening, make our confused way to Schwabing, and are greeted warmly by Eberhard. Over dinner we tell him about our terrific bass player Stingwhat about him? Can we include him? In an expansive mood, Eberhard agrees that maybe we should have him along as well. We call Sting in London-apart from the small matter of abandoning my car in Dover, he has gotten there fine-and tell him to get the first plane out in the morning. Two nights later we are in a circus tent in the center of Munich. This gig with an opera singer, electronic keyboards, and an acrobat (plus a rock band) has a Fellini aspect to it. Well, I think, I dreamed of running away with the circus, but this is ridiculous. Sting sings some stuff for Eberhard, who is very impressed and immediately uses his voice in the show. He asks me about Sting: where did he come from.? Wonderful voice, but he's like a child-so quiet, so mysterious. Clearly Eberhard is fascinated by this wunderkind. We form a relationship with Eberhard and quickly establish ourselves as German circus performers.