One Train Later: A Memoir (31 page)

Between March and August we have very few gigs to sustain a belief in our own future. But we get a few opportunities as a support group-a couple of appearances with the American group Spirit, another with the reggae group Steel Pulse at the Roundhouse in London, and another in Germany with Eberhard on his Laser Theater tour. Finally on August 14 "Can't Stand Losing You" is released and gets to forty-two on the British charts. We are so elated by this small success that it's as if we have actually gone to number one. Unfortunately, the BBC won't play it because it's about suicide. Although it's tongue-in-cheek, they believe it might cause a rash of suicides and cannot take the responsibility. Besides, the cover has Stewart standing on a melting block of ice with a rope around his neck. So, without the power of the BBC behind us, we get stuck at forty-two and our hopes fade again. But still, we have a hit (even if a small one); as a result, A&M agrees to release our album in October, which feels like eons away. But it is going to happen.

We drag our way through the summer, managing only two shows as a support act for Chelsea and one on our own at the Rock Garden in Covent Garden. We are not exactly a roaring success. Every time we play on our own, no one comes and we end the night dividing two pounds between the three of us and then usually start pushing the van back down the street. Stewart alone keeps the spirit with calls to go out and graffiti our name up on a wall somewhere, but I get depressed. The long summer evenings drag on with a buttery glow, the TV flickers on and off with cricket test matches, and happy people go to the pub. For me this summer is turning into a test of faith. Like a permanent solar eclipse, this-the summer of '78-is the thinnest, the most tenuous, point of our existence.

In September things take a slight upward turn when we play gigs at the Nashville Room and the Marquee. We get a substantial turnout at both gigs, and it seems that maybe things are progressing slightly. These events are capped by an appearance on October 2 (Sting's birthday) on The Old Grey Whistle Test, a very popular television pop music program. Anne Nightingale, the host, announces us as an exciting new group who look like angels, and then we play "Can't Stand Losing You." This event should be a big break for us but is slightly marred by Sting's having had a can of hair spray explode in his face just before appearing on camera. By incredible luck there is an eye hospital right around the corner from the studio, and they manage to wash all the chemicals from his eyes. This takes time and by the skin of our teeth we just make it onto the show, with Sting wearing a large pair of dark sunglasses. Two weeks after this we leave for a three-week tour of the U.S., Miles having decided a few weeks earlier that we have to do something to save the band. If we can't really break through in the U.K., maybe we'll have better luck over there. Miles is always espousing the opinion that if you make it in America, the rest will follow-and he turns out to be right.

In '78 there is a company by the name of Laker Airways that has been conceived and masterminded by the redoubtable Freddie Laker, who in rebellious opposition to the mega-airlines has set up a cheap and fair-minded airline. On the Laker Skytrain it's possible to get a round trip to New York and back for sixty dollars.

Ian Copeland, the brother of Miles and Stewart, is an agent working out of Macon, Georgia, with Capricorn/Paragon Production and he books us into a series of clubs on the East Coast, starting with CBGB's in New York's Bowery, which is already the legendary mecca of punk and New Wave. Ian and Miles work out the finances: with the small fees we will get paid for the gigs, we can do a three-week tour and just about break even. It's a bleak financial scenario but it represents a chance. CBGB's-the beating heart of the new music-is the coolest place to be. By so doing, we would naturally acquire a few more points of street cred, something we are not seen as having back home. But for me it's risky because Kate is now eight months pregnant, and I am going to disappear as the baby is about due. We talk about it and agree that it is the path we're on, that I should go, and that as long as we stay close, we can deal with the situation.

To help us with this tour we have hired a former drummer by the name of Kim Turner. Kim played in a group called Cat Iron that Stewart worked for as road manager a few years back before deciding at a young age that he would rather be on the management side of rock. Kim becomes almost a fourth member of the group.

On October 20, 1978, Sting and I fly to New York; Stewart is already there, visiting his father. We arrive at around 10:30 P.m. and are supposed to be on stage at midnight. Kim meets us at Kennedy and we drive hell for leather into the city and straight into the Bowery. As we drive into Manhattan I have a slight sense of deja vu.

CBGB's is surrounded mostly by industrial buildings and places known in the United States as flophouses. The exterior atmosphere around the club is one of seediness and violence. In this part of New York the streets contain many derelict and homeless people; mugging-or jack rolling, as it's known-is commonplace. Started in 1974, CBGB's actually means country, bluegrass and blues, which was the favorite music of the owner, Hilly Kristal; but by the time of our appearance in 1978, it has become the shrine to punk and New Wave-a melting pot and laboratory to try out new music. With bands like Television, Blondie, the Talking Heads, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, the Heartbreakers, Patti Smith, and the Ramones, it has become a club with a pedigree. But physically, just like the clubs in London, it's not much more than a filthy hole. With graffiti everywhere, nowhere to change, a dressing room with no door and practically in the toilet, it's what we are used to and we start setting up our gear. I am renting Marshall cabinets for this tour but have brought along my Echoplex. We do a quick rough sound check in front of the audience and then are ready to go. No one there knows who we are, or have ever heard of us-we have to prove our worth, and knowing this makes us all the more determined to blow the audience away. We're tired from the long plane trip, but somehow New York comes in off the street to fill us with adrenaline and we play a hard and edgy set that rivets the audience, who haven't heard anything like it before. The Echoplex-reggae jams and Sting's high vocals cut through the tawdry atmosphere like a knife, and by the end of the first set the audience is on its feet and literally howling along with us. Despite the small numbers, it feels like a raging success.

We come offstage and disappear into the dressing room to wrestle our sweat-sodden clothes to the floor; as there's no door, most of the audience walk right in too. We're asked a lot of questions about our style: "Where d'you get that from?" "How you doin' that?" "You guys rock-yeah." This is very different from the London scene-these people really seem to like us for the music we are making and don't seem bothered about punk credibility. Less hung-up on fashion and more musical, they catch on to the music as it organically happens onstage. As time goes on I realize that the U.S. audiences are nay favorite because they have the most natural appreciation of the music. They get it on a gut level. Maybe in the dark gloom of CBGB's they are more receptive to us. They know nothing about us-we stand or fall on the music alone, a clean shot without the "proto-hippes on the other side of punk" smear courtesy of Sounds magazine back in England.

Our second set at CBGB's starts at about two-thirty in the morning, and we repeat the first one with almost no variation. We are so short of material that we don't have much choice except to jam and extend all the instrumental sections in the middle of the songs. This lack of material becomes an important factor in the creation of our style because it means we have to extract as much as possible from each song just to play the required time. Although we have rehearsed a lot in London, playing in front of an audience every night for three weeks will be a different experience. The energy of an audience gives us the power to take our jams all the way out. We start meshing and pushing toward a new edge in our playing that simply doesn't happen in a rehearsal room, proving the axiom that one gig in front of an audience is worth ten days of practice.

Some people refer to our music as space jams. We are able to hit a place where with a combination of tape delay, Trenchtown beats, dissonant harmony, and Sting's soaring tenor over the top, we start sounding like a punk version of Weather Report. But with no formal agreements or rigid arrangements up-front, the playing develops naturally and we find our way by pushing, pulling, and reacting to one another. From a tight little repertoire of six or seven songs-"Landlord," "Roxanne," "Can't Stand Losing You," "Nothing Achieving," "Next to You," "Truth Hits Everybody," "Hole in My Life"-we are forced into a new freedom and a way of playing that becomes our style. We leave CBGB's that night with the sound of the crowd in our ears and a sweat-soaked sense of renewal.

We work our way up the East Coast, playing places like Willimantic, Philadelphia, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo. One night we turn up in a town called Poughkeepsie to play at a venue aptly called the Last Chance Saloon. It is bitterly cold and we unload our gear from the van into deep snow. It looks like a decent place, but obviously tonight we are not going to get an audience. There are four people. These are hardy or insane souls who have braved the bone-numbing cold to see an unknown English punk band called the Police. Four? For a moment we feel a sense of doom-maybe we are fated to go under, even in this country, and suddenly the success of CBGB's feels a long way behind us. But we set up our gear and after getting something to eat are recovered enough to say, "Oh fuck it, let's play, we need the practice and at least we'll keep warm." And we hit the stage in front of our almost invisible ticketholders and give a full-on show, leaping about like maniacs, strutting, parading, and jamming our asses off. The four recipients of this mayhem respond in kind with vociferous applause, and in a perverse way we have enjoyed ourselves-there's a nice fuck-you about it, a raising of one finger to the gods. After the show everyone joins us in the dressing room and tells us how much they dug it. The manager tells us he was blown away by the performance and would love to have us back despite the pitiful turnout. We return to the motel feeling rather pleased with ourselves.

In Boston we have a booking for four nights at the Rat club, a cellar with a German theme in the middle of the city. A&M US, despite initial protes- rations to Miles not to bring us to America, is now getting interested. Just because we are signed to the U.K. label doesn't mean A&M US wants to get involved or put up any money. But now, after having seen us play and how we are received by U.S. audiences, they do an about-face and turn up at the Rat wearing cop outfits and sheriff's badges and handing out all manner of police items like handcuffs, rubber truncheons, whistles, and badges. This is the start of cop shop as we think of it, a pathetically literal translation of our stupid group name. It will go on for a couple of years with some of the most inane Police promotions imaginable, until we finally put our collective boot down and tell them we won't be appearing if they pull anymore of that Police shit. Along with this, of course, we have to put up with endless review headlines like ITS A FAIR COP, ARRESTING PERFORMANCE, COPS BLOW THE WHISTLE TO THE POINT OF DESPAIR.

Boston has a radio station, WBCN, whose most popular deejay is a guy by the name of Oedipus. Oedipus is playing "Roxanne" in rotation; in other words, it will be heard at least once an hour. The song, which is also being picked up by other radio stations, is becoming a hit in Boston. We're thrilled to hear this, and when we get a request from A&M to do several interviews on different stations in the area, we are ready to go. Because of the Sex Pistols furor, the U.S. media are aware that there is something called punk or New Wave going on in Britain but have found it difficult to embrace in the form of the Sex Pistols, who were too raw, too British, and didn't have a song that they felt could be played on the radio. We fill the slot perfectly. We have a great song, they think we are a punk band, we can articulate the new scene, and we don't destroy offices or insult people-at least not to their faces.

We sell out four nights at the Rat and suddenly feel that we are on the way again, although there is no tangible success other than the audience applause each night. At this point "Roxanne" is being played only as an import and is not an official release, but now seeing the potential, A&M changes its mind about us and decides to release the album in America. Despite the rigor of travel, vans, and icy conditions, I find myself excited by our transformation from a raw nothing into something. Maybe I'm finally in the right band. I can't afford it, but I stand in a freezing motel hallway each day and call back to London to talk to Kate, to check on her and let her know how it's going with the tour. She is stoic, calm, and encouraging. She's the one with the guts, not me.

We drive out to the Midwest and into Cleveland, where we have a show at the Pirates Cove. It's late October and we pull up to the stage door in gloom and cold. Inside, the crepuscular ambience of the club is suffused with the faint smell of beer and cigarettes, the vestige of loneliness accented by the garish posters on the wall. There is a small stage at one end where we will try to take it to the people. Just as we are setting up, four or five guys who look like roadies march in and ask what the fuck do we think we are doing, and who the fuck are we. We let them know: the fucking support group. They grunt at one another and tell us that they are here to set up for RavenSlaughter, the local headliner, and need to set up first. "Okay Okay, whatever," we say, letting them have their little power play, and take off up to the dressing room, where we piss ourselves with laughter. RavenSlaughter- Christ, in this day and age.