One Train Later: A Memoir (36 page)

I have Kate and Layla with me; Sting has his son, Joe, and wife, Frances; and tonight it feels as if we are attending our own coronation. Outside the tent we hear the grind and thrum of Lemmy's Motorhead, the roar of the crowd-can we follow that? A small moment of paranoia-that guitarist sounds to ... we have to go out there and blow the crowd away ... be the best band ... this is Reading, the tension like a tightly wound E string.

Weird-this mix of confidence and vulnerability, like thick cream in the gut. Is it time to reinforce with a quick toot? We have to go out there and do it-don't want to let the side down. Some people call this the willies, or stage fright, but it's more like a flesh-eating spider crawling through your liver. But wait, we're- The moment of madness and self-doubt passes, and with nothing more than a couple of sips of pinot grigio, we exit the tent.

In the already chill evening we mount the stairs to climb from the dark into the light, and a roar like a crashing wave rolls across the stage, drums explode, and we rocket into the first song.

This is the biggest crowd we have played to, and it's like trying to take control of a writhing beast. But we are intense, furious, tenacious. Sting takes command of the crowd, and they are willing conspirators who sing, chant, and clap along until we finish with a roaring "Can't Stand Losing You." It's a moment of triumph, and as I descend the steps to the backstage area Lemmy is standing there and he leans forward and whispers into my ear, "Who smells of roses, then?"

The evening is now topped off backstage with a little ceremony as A&M presents us with gold records for Outlandos dAmor, but as we stand there with big smiles and popping flashes, a dissolute arbiter of punk, Mark P of Sniffin' Glue, staggers into the scene, drunk and yelling epithets about betrayal and bullshit. Our success is like the ultimate letdown of punk, the signifier of its ultimate failure. From his perspective we are the destroyers of the dream, and he staggers about, clumsily knocking down a child. At this point Stewart strides over and tells him to fuck off and he is hustled away, sobbing. It is a moment shot with pain and embarrassment and I feel for him as I stand in the mud, gripping my first gold record with press carneras flashing. For him the shining beacon of punk has been pissed on by barbarians. We didn't carry out his agenda, but that was never in the cards.

Two weeks after the Reading Festival, our first single from our second album is released. "Message in a Bottle" enters the charts at number eight and rises to number one in its second week. We set out on another tour of the U.K. as the headlining act again. The tour is an intense rush of hysteria and pandemonium. Somehow we have morphed into a band that girls adore, and trying to leave the venue each night, we run a gauntlet of desperate sobbing females and a waving forest of records, photos, and autograph books, hands, arms, and the occasional bared breast. This state of affairs is interrupted rudely one night when we play a gig at the New Theatre in Oxford. Halfway through the show, the doors at the back of the theater burst open and a gang of about thirty skinheads in black leather, bovver boots, and a host of swastika tattoos march in. They come to the front of the theater and stand in a line below us. After a few minutes they begin chanting, "Sieg hell, sieg heil," up at us. By now the auditorium is crackling with tension. Sting takes his life-our lives-in his hands and invites them up. All thirty of them mount the steps and come onto the stage with us. Meanwhile, we have never stopped playing. The Skins begin pogo'ing all over the stage and turn it into a mosh pit. The curtains close, so now it's just us and them in a small enclosed space. The violence as they smash into one another and crash into the drums and amps is intense. But Sting is from Newcastle and has seen plenty of this stuff before. He takes control of the situation, lets one of them sing into the mic and then basically tells them to fuck off. He's faced them down; they seem to accept it and now, having done their bit, leave the theater to make a problem somewhere else. The curtains open and we finish the show to those of the audience that are left. The promoter of this show is a very tough guy from the East End of London. The following week he visits Oxford with a few friends and delivers divine retribution. "They're not gonna fuck up my shows," he says.

We finish our headlining tour and return to the U.S. Our first gig is three nights at the Diplomat Hotel. For the past two tours of the U.K. we had a guy named Dave driving the gear from gig to gig and helping set up the equipment. Besides Kirn Turner, he is our only roadie. He is a truck driver from the West Country of England. A lovely guy who is the salt of the earth, we all really appreciate his efforts and fondly always call him "Doive" in homage to his rural accent. On the third day of the gigs at the Diplomat Hotel, Kim by chance gets into the hotel elevator with Dave and asks where he is going. Dave with a. sad look on his face tells Kim that he is going to the airport and follows that with "Oim leavin' the band-can't take it no more." He tells Kim that the pressure is too great and that he is now drinking an entire bottle of scotch a day to handle it, and heads off to Kennedy Airport. That night a new guy turns up-Danny Quatrochi, a guitar player from New Jersey. He pulls in his friend Jeff Seitz, a drummer from New Jersey. Both are very good musicians who agree to do this only on a temporary basis-but in fact they stay right through to the end and even beyond. Doive goes back to England and becomes a legend in the annals of the band. Eventually, T-shirts are made with his passport photo on the front, we start a religion of Doive, and it goes on and on and on. Becoming simpatico with our new New Jersey crew, Sting, Stewart, and I acquire Hoboken accents and become versed in the ways of Jersey subculture.

In October Regatta de Blanc is released and enters the U.K. charts at number one. But instead of capitalizing on our British success and enjoying this moment of glory, we perversely go back to the U.S. to play in kennel-size clubs with undersize audiences who have never heard of us. America is so vast that all we can do is hope to invade it like a virus or expand in it like the mitosis of a cell. It might take years, or the rest of our lives. As we bask in the number one spot three thousand miles across the Atlantic, we ignominiously head down a set of sunless steps in Virginia Beach to play in a gloomy cellar filled with beer drinkers. We are merely the evening's entertainment, our name in white chalk on a board behind the bar; tomorrow, Bret and the Falcons. It is a bitter pill to swallow, but encouraged by Miles, we try to keep the pioneer spirit going as we work our way through a new frontier, despite the fact that in our own country we are kings.

Seventeen

Staring across the dark at a cobweb-decorated bar serving Budweisers and Coors Light, I feel as though we are in someone else's movie; but with faltering resolve, we announce to the frat boys that tonight's entertainment-usare actually number one in the United Kingdom right now. The response is not the roar of Reading, but the strangled sound of voices giving a halfhearted "yeah" through a can of slurped Bud.

After a restless night with the sound of the Atlantic a few feet from the window deliberately mocking our plight, I decide to elevate my hangover mood by shopping at the local Woolworth's. It's situated on the promenade overlooking the beach, and I wander in from the brightly lit scene of photo kiosks, weight scales, and slot machines as the gusting wind blows the smell of candy floss in my face and the gulls overhead screech and dive for scraps of hot-dog bun in the trash cans. Inside the store the salt smell of the ocean blows in and fine grains of sand cover the wooden floorboards, so they constantly need sweeping. I trudge around, desultorily picking my way through the goods. Maybe I can find something for Layla-a shoe scraper, toothpowder, a thing for deboning salmon, a never-fail corkscrew, assorted buttons in a box. After ten minutes, feeling bored, I get a pair of baseball boots and a can of pink paint. I pay and go over to the soda fountain, slide onto the chrome-rimmed red leatherette and lean across the shiny Formica to read down the list of malteds, root beers, and shakes. I order a giant shake with ice cream, banana, and peach called a Virgin Explosion from a middle-aged blond, a Shelley Winters look-alike who says, "What'll it be, hon?" her rubycolored lips exuding the word boon as if she is chewing a stick of gum. "I'd like a Virgin," I say. She stares at me for a second and then, without batting an eye, says, "You can keep your hands offs me, limey," and bursts into convulsive laughter at her own joke as she slings the ingredients into a glass. I laugh too, and briefly wonder what it would be like to have sex with her, but move on quickly from that vision. I chug the Virgin down and a few minutes later, feeling sick and wasted, return to the motel with the boots and pink paint to collapse on the bed opposite the open window.

After half an hour the effects of several pounds of white sugar have been partially nullified by enzymes, and apart from a mild feeling of having been assaulted by a herd of enraged cows, I am fit enough to undertake the task of boot painting. I gingerly open the can of paint with a quarter and place it on the bedspread beside me. As I lean forward to pick up the boots, the can gently tips sideways to create a nice pink lake in the middle of the bed. "Damn, shit, fuck!", I cry to the Andrew Wyeth print on the wall, and leap off the bed like a scalded cat. 1: have to do something, get the pink paint from hell off the bed, but I need it for the boot job and I pull the dripping bedspread from the bed and upend it over the can on the floor, hoping desperately to get some of it back into the can. A meager amount oozes back in, while the rest just stays there or throws itself into the shag to smirk at me in triumph.

I rush into the tiny bathroom with the bedspread and try to stuff the whole thing into the sink with the tap running. Nothing moves and I quickly conclude that Woolworth's paint is made out of horse glue. Now the washbasin has a thick coating of pink. Almost in tears, I quietly close the door on the carnage with a feeling of bitter remorse. I hate Virginia Beach, hate it. I try not to drip pink on the tobacco brown shag as I cover the boots in a lurid rose. It occurs to me that Layla, who is still less than a year old, would probably like this color and would probably drag these boots across the bedroom and chew the laces. I need to call Kate, who is back there bobbing like a lone cork on the ocean, and I feel pain. Great as all of this is-touring the hamlets of the U.S., playing to tiny audiences, with somewhere at the back of your mind the idea that with the winnings you'll be able to provide for a family-it's tough to be away from those you love. I pull out a photograph and stare at a picture of a beautifully smiling Kate with our baby in her arms, then look up at the tawdry room I'm in and think, Christ, we've got to pull this off.

The boots are wet and the paint seems to have shrunk them one size smaller, but there is just enough left to do the laces. I lift them up onto the windowsill and quickly whip the paint onto the laces, and it all goes well enough except for a few pink streaks running down the exterior wall of the motel. Shit job, I say to myself in the mirror over the bright pink bathroom sink. Why don't you fuck off? replies the mirror. Okay, I say to the reflection, wiping a dollop of pink into my hair, fuck you too. Holding my suitcase in one hand and the boots in the other, I pass through the lobby quickly to meet the others outside in the pale watery light of Virginia Beach. "What happened to your hands?" asks Kim. "Oh, nothing," I say, trying to look unconcerned about my hands, which now look as if they have been painted for an exotic ritual. "It's calamine lotion, you know-those bloody mosquitoes." I hold up the boots inside the van for all to admire. "Please, I haven't had lunch yet," says Sting. "You offering those to the Tate?" says Stewart. I will wear these boots for the next few years as they get photographed on different stages around the world. I hang them out the window, where they jiggle and bounce, roses in the Virginia sun; inside we pass out and dream of the glory two weeks past.

BRIOGEHAMPTON, AUGUST 18, 1983

I stare at my open Samsonite. The fabled pink hoots sit on top of everything like two small exotic birds. By now they gave been around the world three times, photographed by Leica, Nikon, Canon, Minolta, and Pentax cameras; stomped on the pedal board; trekked from endless dressing room to endless stages; emerged icy from cargo holds; wrapped my feet in the familiar; flashed in the faces of the front row; witnessed fights, arguments, and bad jokes; and acquired their own very distinct smell. But the pink is wearing thin....

We get to Tennessee and Kim, Stewart, and I pull into a weird-looking diner with a giant yellow chicken on the roof, the bird above presumably signifying the meal below. There are not many people in the place except for three guys who look like extras from the movie Deliverance. A very bad feeling emanates from their table, and almost on cue they begin snarling and spitting in our direction, warning, us to get out or they will kill us. They don't like our hair; they don't like our clothes; and did one hear the word faggot, or is that something on the menu? Stewart Copeland, my hero, gets up and in so many words tells them to prove it or fuck off. Stewart is big, lean, and threatening, and they zip their mean little mouths shut and stare at their food like whipped dogs. We carry on eating but don't stick around for too long, just in case they have reinforcements, but we pass their table on the way out with an attitude noting the smell and the spittle that greases the tabletop.

In the middle of this American leg (leg always being the term used, to the point where you feel that rather than playing music, you are having intercourse with a centipede), we arrive at Cape Canaveral. The reason we are here, apart from playing a gig at nearby Miami, is to film a video for "Walking on the Moon," which is to be our next single release. We have a special pass to see the rockets and spaceships of the 1960s, and we clamber about this old technology that has actually been into space and I think about Dan Dare and the Mekon and Journey into Space. We begin the daft process of illustrating the song by miming the lyrics and larking about on giant fins and retro-boosters, etc. This is a couple of years before MTV and the era of solipsistic video. Handheld super 8 and 16mm with introspective victim attitudes are still a thing of the future. We are still in the Beatles era of happy, larking-about personality video, and our efforts are based mostly on this alone: our job on camera is to shine.