One Train Later: A Memoir (38 page)

Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, Honolulu, and on to Narita Airport in Japan, where a flood of memories come rushing back. What if those guys are still around? What if they want to settle an old debt? What if? I decide to let it go and hope that the new promoter has the wherewithal to protect his investment. Before we are actually let into the country, we get a rigorous checking by small grim-faced Japanese men with sniffing dogs that conduct searches of our bodies, equipment, suitcases, guitars, and amplifiers. Clearly disappointed and slightly mystified to have come up with nothing, they finally let us go and we wearily climb onto the bus to make the excruciating three-hour drive to Tokyo.

We are working for the Udo Organization, and Mr. Udo himself, a rotund and charming middle-aged man with a gentle manner, meets us in the lobby of the hotel. He speaks English and has an urbane manner but runs his organization with a fist of steel. As usual with the Japanese, it is difficult to tell what is actually going on-emotions tend to be hidden behind an impassive mask-but with us Udo is never less than cordial. Accompanying him at all times in all shapes and sizes are his boys, who have names like Moony, Snake, Bullseye, and Tommy, who seems to be the leader. There are several of them, and all double as bodyguards and roadies wearing dark blue bomber jackets with UDO ORG in large white letters on the back. Carrying little walkie-talkies that they mutter into in rapid-fire Japanese, they communicate nonstop with one another from positions of scout and rearguard. Wherever we are, they are too; and if they think we are going somewhere, one will be there ahead of us. When we retire for the night, one stands guard outside until you wake in the morning. On rising for breakfast, you are greeted at the door with a bow from Snake, who politely asks you where you are headed. "Breakfast," you yawn, "ground floor." He immediately communicates this information downstairs to Moony, who will stand outside the breakfast room while you eat. It is faintly claustrophobic but also flattering, as if we are some sort of precious cargo. The truth is that Mr. Udo is protecting his investment, and we perambulate down wellmarked corridors.

Outside the breakfast room, watching us eat, is a mob of schoolgirls who, whenever you cast a look in their direction, burst into giggles, cover their mouth, and take a step back. It is amusing and it turns into a little piece of theater as you stare down at your cornflakes and then suddenly looking up with milk and cornflakes falling out of your mouth. This drives them insane, and they fall back again as if on a set of invisible threads.

After these intellectual diversions it is time to go shopping in Tokyo with our photographer friend Watal Asanuma. He takes us down to the Yodobashi camera store, the band and about a hundred schoolgirls trailing behind us like a navy blue cloud. Yodobashi has five floors of photographic equipment, audio devices, and every gadget that the Japanese mind can invent, it's half the price and twice as small, stuff you don't see anywhere else. And for half an hour we become rabid consumers, buying things we don't need just because they are so small. As we walk around the store we are assaulted about every five minutes by a very loud track coming through the PA system. It is a song about Yodobashi cameras sung to the tune of "John Brown's Body"; it is incredibly irritating and irresistibly funny, and becomes a theme song for the rest of the tour.

The tour in Japan turns out to be more fun and less lonely than some of our stateside touring. Anne Nightingale of BBC fame joins us, and we go around in a large entourage with the film crew, our stage crew, Mr. Udo and his boys, and an ever growing mob of schoolgirls. We travel on the bullet train, stare out the window at Mount Fuji and visit the Zen gardens and temples of Kyoto. We create out-of-control hysteria for Mr. Udo everywhere, and honor is satisfied. But we like to leave the stage at the end of the show with its bursting-to-the-roof audience and apologize to Mr. Udo for not doing better business, and we'll try again tomorrow night. Udo greets this with a faint Buddha-like smile.

The culmination of this trip to Japan is when I agree to a fight to the death with a champion sumo wrestler in a house on the outskirts of Tokyo. We drive out on a cold January morning to the sumo hostel; it turns out that they all live together (at least when in training). We pull up in an anonymous-looking suburb, I make the sign of the cross, and we enter. After five minutes of mutual bowing and smiling, we are led into an anteroom and I meet my adversary. Imagine Captain Ahab up-close with Moby Dick the great white whale. A vast sea of blubber confronts me in all directions; I slowly raise my eyes, and looking down with a beneficent smile is Yaki San, my opponent. "He doesn't stand a chance," I say, my voice muffled by the folds of his flesh.

Because there is a spiritual side to the art of sumo wrestling, we have to sit down and eat together as a bonding ritual. We will acknowledge the eternal spirit in each other before trying to beat each other's brains out. I notice that while I take up one space at the table, Yaki takes up twelve. I try not to let this deter me but keep a mean look on my face. I have by this time been dressed to appropriate sumo standards, which means tying my hair in a knot and wearing a skimpy loincloth. I look like a wimp version of Tarzan. The house is freezing, as central heating is not part of the sumo credo, and I sit slurping noodles through chattering teeth. As I suck down the noodles I recycle samurai flicks through my head, desperately trying to remember Toshiro Mifune's greatest movies, The Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Rashomoan, a black-and-white pastiche of flashing swords and grunting soundtrack, but it is to no avail-this is flesh and bone, unarmed combat, and I will probably have to finish him off with my secret armadillo lizard lock.

The moment of truth comes and we are led into another concrete room with a circle marked out in chalk. After another seventeen or eighteen bows it is time. We snarl at each other, I perceive a small look of fear pass over his face, and then we're across the ring and at each other's throats. Dazed and confused, I pick myself up about five minutes later on the far side of the room, wondering how I got there. I stare across the concrete: he is still there with a large Jackie Chan grin lighting up his mug and pity in his eyes. Right, I think, and shoot like a bullet across the ring, to be rolled up like a rag doll in the arms of a giant and gently placed upside down at the side of the ring. We go at it again in a flurry of grunts and slippery moves. Sting, Stewart, and Miles stand ringside, and their shadowy forms merge into the smirking mums and dads at Summerbee school as the Welsh boy Evans pummels me into a near coma. I stagger up from the concrete and bury my head like an ant in the folds of Yaki's vast gut, to be repelled like a pebble from a catapult. One thing I notice as I continue to be tossed like a cork on a rough sea is how sweet he smells. My face is squashed time and time again into his big soft chest, and a sweet perfume wafts over me that is intoxicating and otherworldly. With a voluptuous resignation, I feel myself falling in love with him even as he smashes me back and forth on the concrete. I have no other explanation for this other than the thought that I may be a latent masochist or that in fact I like boys. It finally comes to an end and I grumpily cede the victory on points; meanwhile, in the freezing temperature I have caught the flu.

We fly to Hong Kong to play at Today's World disco. The reason we are playing in a disco is that it is the only gig we can get at this time in Hong Kong and it fits in with our scheme about playing around the world. I have a temperature hovering around 102-the actual Hong Kong flu in Hong Kong, which is rather pleasing. But overriding health concerns is my burning desire to get a suit made; I have been told that in this city you can get a suit knocked up in a few hours, and we decide to put it to the test. We arrive at a funky-looking tailor's shop and go in to order our suits. With a great deal of confusion on the tailor's part, I describe a powder blue number with zips from hell, across the lapels, on the pockets, up the arms, until it looks like a Vivian Westwood creation on steroids. The tailor is babbling away in Mandarin, not understanding this latest fashion from the West until a faint glimmer appears on his face and he finally twigs that it might be a joke.

I am still running a temperature when we turn up to play the disco. I feel quite ill but I get a B,, shot and I make it through on that and adrenaline; strangely, after the performance I feel a whole lot better, as if I have just sweated out the virus. A group of young men are led into the dressing room wearing uniforms with the word POLICE emblazoned across the chest; it turns out that they are British cadets from the Hong Kong police academy, and we all agree to swap T-shirts. We get theirs and they get ours: a very satisfying exchange. After the show Anne Nightingale presents us with some awards for Best New British band and Best Album. The ceremony is televised by satellite live to England, and like martians, we all wave from the disco across the globe to those back in Blighty. I imagine my mum and dad sitting on the couch with cups of tea, smiling as they nudge each other, and Mum murmuring, "Be careful, love." I wonder if Kate and Layla are watching; with the vast time difference, we haven't talked lately.

Driving into Bombay for the first time is an assault. Trapped between the past and the future, the city is a disordered emblem of two competing civilizations. Each time the car stops at a traffic light (if it stops at all), beggars begin clawing and shouting at the window. Other than a piece of rag around the waist, they are naked; many of them have a limb missing. Hands are outstretched for alms, and mothers of fourteen or fifteen years old extend their palms with a look of ancient sorrow. I sit in the back of the car with all sense of what I had previously called reality blown away because nothing prepares you for this. We are here to entertain, which seems incongruous in this first confrontation with Bombay. Billboards stare down onto the masses below encouraging them to brush with fluoride toothpaste and to eat chocolate, as if all can suddenly drop the sham of poverty and go home laughing at their little bit of playacting. After what seems like a torturous and circuitous route designed to say "this is India," we pull up in front of the Taj Intercontinental. Compared with what we have just passed through, the Taj, with its luxurious Western version of India, is a haven of peace and security. Passing through its regal lobby to the main lounge the dichotomy is visceral. Outside, chaos, pressure, disease, and white glaring heat: inside, American Express, room service, and sparkling mineral water. The idea to play in these countries was originally mine, and Miles has flown to Bombay with no previous contact to see if he can set up some sort of concert. He has made contact with an organization called the Time and Talents Club, a committee of middle-aged Indian ladies who work for charity and occasionally put on concerts to raise money. They are charmed by Miles, and as the word gets out about the Police pop group, the gig changes from a small club to a crumbling auditorium that holds three thousand people.

We are taken to a lunch by the river to meet the ladies of the Time and Talents Club. They are excited to meet us, and in their multicolored saris they chatter and flutter about like exotic birds. These ladies all speak in posh English accents and are a different type of Indian altogether from those outside on the streets of Bombay. They are Parsis and hold a religious belief that belongs to Zoroastrianism, which originated in Persia about 1500 B.C. with its prophet Zarathustra. One of the tenets of the Parsi faith is that the elements earth, water, fire, and air are sacred and must not be polluted by human waste. Therefore, when they die Parsis are left in concentric concrete structures-the Towers of Silence-to be picked apart by vultures. As coffee and cake are proffered and announcements are made in voices that echo the Raj, it is hard to keep your mind off the fact that the bones of these sweet enthusiastic ladies-our promoters-will one day be ripped apart by scavenger birds. We are introduced to their president of the box office, a tiny and shrunken woman who must be at least 120 years old, but she has her infant-size fist on the money with a glint in her eyes that says "don't fuck with me, bub."

We have a couple of days before the concert and we go out into the streets of the city to pass through the swarming streets of Bombay. A simple word to describe it would be fucking insane. As you struggle through the crowds with the babble of Hindi penetrating your eardrums, you are confronted by sadhus with gouged limbs who endure horrific acts of penance, merchants leaning across every stall with imploring eyes, naked children, honking taxicabs, and giant billboards showing the latest Bollywood extravaganza in lurid colors. It is a steaming and ancient povertyridden version of New York, India style. With nine million people, and more like the movie Blade Runner than a city of antiquity, Bombay remains a magnet for all of India. We stop for a moment and watch a mongoose rip the head off a snake. So much for Rikki-tikki-tavi, I think as we stagger off into the heat. Life here is so locked in time and tradition that people seem to accept this grinding reality as normal. At night in the stultifying heat, people sleep in heaps in the streets and squares as if just falling down wherever they happen to be. Later we find out that they do so because it beats the other choice-the crowded and disease-ridden horror of the tenement buildings.