Flying Saucer Rock & Roll

1

I heard a song on the radio the other day. I don’t listen to the radio very often, but right then I wanted a bit of company, or at least the sound of another voice. I’d just had something weird turn up on my doorstep and it was freaking me out a bit. Anyway, this song, about seven minutes long it was, or seemed like it, kept on changing all the way through, like it would start out as a slushy ballad, and then it would be rocky, then all classical, then it would do mother thing, like go funky or something. The song hardly had any words, though. It just went, ‘Music was my first love, and it will be my last. Music of the future, and music of the past.’ And that was pretty much it.

It’s a silly song. This guy says he loves the music of the future as well as the past, but how does he know what the music of the future’s going to sound like, let alone that he’s going to love it? I mean, that song was probably written in the mid-seventies or something. What music of the future was he expecting to love? Rap? Industrial? Gabba? I don’t think so, somehow.

But anyway, there I was, sorting through this weird shit inside the big fuck-off box that the Parcelforce man had woken me up to sign for at eight o’clock in the morning, and which was so heavy it had taken both of us to carry it into the flat, when that song came on the radio. And the strange thing was, even though I’d never heard it before, and it’s crap and everything, it got about halfway through and I thought I was going to cry. I really did, until the weather report came on and snapped me out of it. I don’t need to think that hard about why. It’s obvious, to me anyway. The reason is that, and I suppose this will make me look pretty fucking stupid, I can kind of identify with that song. Not that music was my first love, because that would probably be Star Wars or trains, but it was a major part of my life for about ten years, and it affected nearly every single thing I did back then in some way. So yeah, I can understand where he’s coming from. I loved it once too, so much. And then gradually, without really noticing, I stopped. It was a golden age, back when I loved music, and music, I thought, loved me. I remember how it began. But when and why did it end? Maybe it’s time to find out.

I suppose hearing that song the other day must have started the train of thought that led me to want to do this, to – I nearly said make my confession. But that’s not quite it, or not all of it. I do want to tell my story, though; not just to make sense of it all for myself, but also because I think people should know what happened. Maybe it might even help a few people to not make the same mistakes that I did. Fuck, who am I kidding? You can only really learn from the ones you make yourself. What happened to me will happen to somebody else tomorrow. In fact it’s probably happening to hundreds, no, thousands of people, right now, up and down the country. Then a hundred times more around the world. A hundred thousand dreams, all smashed.

But I can’t pretend that I don’t feel a bit guilty about how some of it turned out. Mostly, I feel bad about Neil. There’s so much of that shit still floating about in my head, every day, however much I try to ignore it. Now’s the time to face up to it, I guess, try and make sense of it properly once and for all, get out of this rut I’ve ended up in. Typical Neil: you’re getting along, doing your own thing, and he comes and screws your head up just by sending you something through the post. Even now, after all this time. It’s a skill he has, I suppose.

So here I go. Back to the golden age.

Where did it all start for me? Music, I mean. In the womb probably, because they’ve proved you can hear music there, and seeing as I was born in 1976 that means I was most likely hearing Abba and Wings and Brotherhood of Man. But the first music I remember listening to, other than nursery rhymes and the theme tune to Trumpton and stuff, was ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’. I had a Fisher-Price music box made to look like a radio that used to play it. You’d turn the dial to make it work, and it had the words written on the back – although I couldn’t really read them, I was too young – along with a picture of two seventies kids with umbrellas splashing about in puddles. My mum used to sing it to me as it played. Burt Bacharach. What do they call music like that? Loungecore. I was into loungecore long before everyone else.

But other than that, I didn’t listen to music much as a little kid. Actually, I tell a lie. I really liked John Williams. Not the classical guitarist; I mean the guy who wrote the theme tunes for Star Wars and Jaws, Indiana Jones and ET and stuff. Top tunes. If you asked me to hum any of them I could, right on the spot, as well as all the love themes and villains’ tunes or whatever. Someone told me once he nicked all his ideas from classical composers like Stravinsky, and played me some to prove it. I could see what he was saying, but you can’t hum Stravinsky five minutes after hearing it. John Williams, on the other hand, you can hum a good twenty years later.

And then I can’t remember what music I liked after that. I was aware there was this thing called pop music, and some of it certainly had a catchy tune, but I couldn’t really say I liked it. I was much more interested in my Commodore 64. Most of it I just thought was stupid, or at least I did when Neil made me laugh about it. ‘Doctor, doctor, can’t you see I’m burning, burning?’ I mean, what’s wrong with this doctor – is he blind? I remember Neil saying that. He was as sharp as fuck when he wanted to be, even though he was away with the fairies. Aside from that, I got a few albums on cassette as Christmas presents, like Now That’s What I Call Music and UB40 and things, though I can’t say I was particularly into them. But sometime around the age of twelve, that was when I began to get it. It all started then really, with Christian heavy metal.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I was never a Biblebasher, but hearing Stryper for the first time, it was the door to something. ‘To Hell With the Devil’! ‘Come to the Everlife!’ ‘Rock the Hell Out of You’! Those were some of their song titles. I got into them through Barry. He was my older sister’s boyfriend back then. I liked him, he was a good bloke. I thought so at the time, anyway. He was quite shy and quiet, but nice to be around. He looked pretty weedy, wore big glasses with thick blue frames, like you used to get in the eighties, though they didn’t really go with the heavy metal gear he wore, with the logos of his favourite Christian bands sewn onto everything and drawn on the back of his fake leather jacket. Barry had a mullet, a classic one, but he usually tied it back into a ponytail. He was interested in computers, I mean knowing how to program them and stuff. And he was a God-botherer, obviously. Anyway, one time he was round and he played me his Christian heavy metal, and I just went mad over it. He lent me a load of his records – Petra, Sacred Reign and Stryper, of course, and others – but made me promise not to tape them, because that was stealing and stealing was a sin. I taped them anyway. He told me that he used to be into normal heavy metal before he became a Christian, but then God told him that it was the Devil’s music, so he didn’t listen to it any more. He still had all his old records, though, for some reason. I begged him to let me hear some, but he wouldn’t for ages.

Then one day he finally said yes, because he’d decided I ought to know what to guard myself against in the future. He played me Metallica, ...And Justice For All, and oh my fucking god. I mean, it was just fucking unbelievable. This was music with the power of John Williams’s Darth Vader theme, but with guitars. Really fucking loud fucking amazing guitars. And they looked like gods. Screaming, hairy gods, their thick muscular arms pounding down on their instruments in the photos from the magazines Barry showed me, which he’d guiltily stashed in a drawer like they were pornography. Christ, they made Stryper look stupid all of a sudden, with their matching yellow and black uniforms like fucking Christian metal-playing bees. All the while, Barry was telling me how the music glorified Satan, and how I should keep this in mind if I ever heard it again, but his argument didn’t make sense and anyway I couldn’t care less. I remember him saying that even bands like Fleetwood Mac were glorifying Satan in their music, I think because they wrote a song about a witch or something.

Next time I saw Barry, he said it had been wrong of him to play me that kind of music, that he was very sorry, and God had told him to go into the garage and smash up all his old records with a sledgehammer. He started getting a bit weird round about then and my sister broke up with him. I bumped into him in the street a few times, then I never saw him again. My sister heard that he’d ended up losing his faith and having a mental breakdown. Sad really.

Anyway, after hearing that Metallica album I got myself a paper round, so I had money to buy my own copy, plus a lot of their back catalogue. I listened to my records every day after school and drew the Metallica logo on my pencil case and all my folders. Pretty soon, kids would just come up to me and sort of say, ‘Oi, mush. Didn’t know you were into Metallica.’ Then they’d say, ‘Have you heard such and such?’ and I’d say no, and they’d say they’d do me a tape. It was like a secret society, and you’d never know for sure who was a member because school rules meant you couldn’t grow your hair over the collar. But every so often you’d see a kid pass round a copy of Kerrang! and then you’d know they were one of ‘us’ too. Soon I was being lent loads of stuff. The softer bands like Poison, Queensrÿche and Bon Jovi reminded me of Stryper, but with decent non-religious lyrics, and I liked that, but it was really the harder stuff that I got into. Iron Maiden, Megadeth, Anthrax, Slayer. Thrash metal, mostly. Then one day this kid, John, told me I had to listen to someone called Joe Satriani. He said that he was a great guitar player and he’d do me a tape. He’d want it back at the end of the week, though.

I hung on to that tape all through the Christmas holiday, and by the end of it Joe Satriani was even more exciting for me than Metallica. It was all instrumental. Hard-rock guitar solos played very fast. It all sounded complex and very, very hard. I was obsessed with the music and, I suppose, the man. When I wasn’t listening to him, I was thinking about him, fantasising about what Joe Satriani was like, and how it would feel to be able to play guitar that well, what it would be like, in fact, to be him. And while I was listening to that album, over and over again in my bedroom until my sister burst in to tell me to stop bloody playing it, I realised I had to learn to play guitar, and get really, really good. Then maybe, one day, I might even be good enough for Joe to want to jam with me. And then maybe he’d want us to form a band together, him and me both taking solos. Why not? If I could play as well as he could, then it would be only right, he’d have to let me, wouldn’t he? And we’d be mates, and hang out together all the time, playing pool and discussing technique, and maybe even snogging ladies occasionally, although that was something I hadn’t begun to get my head round yet. It was all just a silly little boy’s daydream, but it wouldn’t leave my mind. Not only that, it had a power most things that pass through a kid’s head don’t have. The power to actually make me get off my Commodore 64-playing arse and do something about it.

Now wouldn’t you know it, I found out from another metaller kid that you could take guitar lessons at school, beginning straight after the Christmas holidays, and they’d even lend you an instrument to practise on. The lifelong comradeship of Joe Satriani was surely within my grasp. I don’t think anybody’s been as excited about their first music lesson with a peripatetic teacher as I was that Tuesday, and not just because it got me out of German with the terrifying Miss Rand, who stank of cigarettes and could make the hardest lads break down into an uncontrollable stutter just by looking at them.

I had imagined rows of metaller kids, hunched over their guitars as a cool long-haired guy in leather took them through ‘Master of Puppets’. It didn’t turn out like that. Firstly, we all had to play on folk guitars with nylon strings wound so tightly you couldn’t bend them even if you had a crowbar. Also, we were learning from a book called The Complete Guitar Player, by some bloke called Russ something-or-other. There weren’t any Metallica songs in that book, just songs by people my mum liked, like Cat Stevens and John Denver. The guitar teacher was called Mr McDiarmid, and was from Yorkshire or the West Country or somewhere. He had bales of hay for sideburns, and used to go on about how ‘Streets of London’ was a really great song that we just had to learn so we could entertain our friends at parties and impress the girls, who he called ‘lasses’, that were all waiting just round the corner for us when we started ‘wooing’ in a few years. We couldn’t get him to realise we wouldn’t have any friends, let alone ‘lasses’, if we played that old crap.

There were four of us in the class to start with, and by the second week there were two. Me and a lanky boy called Ben, who had sandy hair and a centre parting, metaller-style. He used to walk in, slouch down and put his feet up on another chair and stretch out, sighing at the effort of it all. Then he’d yawn constantly, until his guitar distracted him and he came to life. He was good. Better than the rest of us. He could play stuff he’d worked out for himself and everything. He wasn’t exactly communicative, but by the third week, we were just about on speaking terms. I think it’s fair to say that Ben was one of those people who just have something about them, and you know that they’re special in some way, despite the fact that, guitar-playing aside, he was obviously very lazy. I realise now that Neil had that too, in some weird way.

Anyway, after three weeks of these bloody guitar lessons, I was almost ready to go back to Miss Rand and take my chances.

Already, our spirits were nearly broken and dreams shattered by the constant down-strumming on nylon strings without even a plectrum for protection. I mean, it was almost like we were in a folk-guitar concentration camp. We had to find an escape route.

Well, we found one. Ben told me his older brother could play rock guitar, and he knew about something called a power chord. Instead of having to learn all the different shapes for the different chords, you just learned one, and ran your hand up and down the fretboard to get all the different chords. He said that his brother would be willing to show us both how it was done. If I went round his house on Saturday afternoon, he said, his brother would be there then. ‘OK,’ I said, and we went to tell Mr McDiarmid we wouldn’t be coming to guitar lessons any more.

‘Oh well,’ he sighed, ‘that’ll be another thirty quid a month sup money I’ll be doing wi’out.’ He said we had to give the guitars back to the school, but we never did, and no one ever asked for them again.

So that’s how it began, the golden age. With Christian heavy metal, a borrowed tape of Joe Satriani and nylon guitar strings. If only I’d realised, I would have treasured every second, bottled the air. But the best times rarely announce themselves as such, and it’s rarer still for them to let you know that they’re over.

A beginning. Now I must pick through all the threads of my memory, all the paths through the knotted jumble of thoughts and sensations that make up my life, and find those that might lead me through. Out of all of them, it is the path marked ‘Neil’ that beckons.

2

‘Chris! Chris!’

A voice from the school gates called to me. There, a boy was waiting, gangly, blond and pale, almost albino. Neil. As always, he’d got there ahead of me, to make sure we walked home together. This being a Friday, he was no doubt also hoping that I’d invite him round for an hour or so before tea and, if my mum was in a good mood, which she usually was when Neil was there, that he’d be allowed to stay and eat with us and spend the evening. Sometimes, I admit, I wished he wasn’t waiting for me, so I could be free to invite someone else round for once, or even actually go round theirs. But I never minded too much because, for all his awkwardness and occasional inconvenience, Neil was responsible for some of my happiest memories. Not so much actual specific events I could pin down, but little fleeting moments of remembered pleasure that came with Neil’s face attached when they popped into my head.

Neil waved to me as I got near, beaming his usual goofy grin. ‘Hi, Neil.’

‘Chris, you’ll never guess what!’ he said, as we swung through the gates to freedom.

‘Dunno, what?’

‘I heard the new Morrissey single on the radio last night!’

‘Really?’

‘Yes! It’s called Piccadilly Palare! It’s mega!’

‘Sounds ... good.’

This was a lie. Aged thirteen, someone like Morrissey meant nothing to me other than a thing to be avoided. His music, like all that featured on the ‘indie’ rundown on The Chart Show, seemed either wet or poofy. Unlike metal, which was impenetrable, hard, masculine. There lay certainty and truth. But Neil loved all that indie stuff, which made me think that he might be bent, so I might not want him around so much. Especially as he seemed so desperate to hang out with me, which was beginning to strike me as a bit homo. Even though he had been my best friend for all those years, right then there were things about him that were making me uncomfortable.

‘Yeah, it is,’ said Neil. ‘Apparently, palare is a secret language that gay people used to use, and that’s what the song’s about.’

God help me, I thought, it’s definitely time for a new best friend. Still, Neil and I went way back. We were probably about six when we met. He was the new kid in school and the teacher gave me the job of looking after him and being his pretend friend while he was settling in and making proper friends for himself. But Neil never really did settle in and make proper friends. It was pretty much just me, and I guess I had that job for the next seven years, although I stopped thinking of it like that after a while. He never fitted in at school, or anywhere else, for that matter. It was as if he’d just beamed down from space, or something. Neil was plain at odds with the world. A tetrahedron in a round hole, was how he put it in one of his more reflective moments. People generally didn’t like him, and he had a unique gift for getting on the wrong side of people without trying. But if you got to know him, then you’d realise he was the sweetest, most caring person you could ever meet, without a malicious bone in his body. He was just very, very odd and a bit annoying.

One time, for instance, we were in my garden, and my cousin Jo was there. It was the summer, and my mum had brought us out a jug of fizzy squash. Jo was a couple of years older than us, and mouthy, the way some girls are at that age. When Neil was in the toilet she told me that she was finding him a bit creepy, thinking that he fancied her and was trying to impress her with all the weird things he was saying. Neil was just being Neil, and at that age probably hadn’t even started thinking about girls, but back then Jo thought that all boys were trying to get off with her. After he came back from the toilet, Neil said something really odd about the leaves on the trees being fish, and you could tell they were fish because you could see them wriggling about. In those days, Neil always went on about fish, thinking it was really surreal. And Jo just says, can she pour her glass of squash over Neil’s head. And Neil says, sure, all right, he’d be delighted. So she picks up her glass and literally pours it all over his head. Then he’s just sitting there with sticky orange squash in his hair for the rest of the afternoon, until my mum finds him and makes him wash under the tap before he goes home.

I could go on. Every so often, something that strange would happen, and half the stuff he said you could tell he thought was clever, but it was just rubbish. And it would wind you up and you’d want him to fuck off. But sometimes it would all click, and he would be really funny, and everything he said actually would be as clever as he thought it was. And that made it all worthwhile, because those moments were priceless, they really were. But right then, attending a boys’ school and having your best friend get really excited about the next single by a gay pop star that was all about how gay people talked was not priceless. And to be honest, I just wasn’t in the mood, and certainly didn’t want a whole evening of it, especially not a Friday evening. At thirteen, I was just becoming aware of the specialness of that night, and the idea that it was meant to be spent in the pursuit