Flying Saucer Rock & Roll Read online

  Ben led me further down the strange road, at the end of which was a dual carriageway. On the other side was a strange construction of metal pillars and a corrugated roof. It had the words ‘Queensbury Market’ written in bright green metal letters on the side. There seemed no way to get to it across the road, as the traffic was fast and thick, and of course a barrier in the middle blocked the way. Did the council or whoever was in charge of these things expect us to jump over it?

  I must have looked confused, because Ben elbowed me in the ribs and pointed to our left. ‘Down there, come on,’ he said, sighing at me in frustration. It was something I’d never encountered before, a tunnel, going underneath the road, with an unsettling mixture of dank urine-tainted air and sodium glow. I didn’t like the look of it, and it seemed exactly the sort of place you could expect to be stabbed, but there was no way I was going to let Ben know I was afraid. So I went down the slope after him and into the tunnel, certain that we were being watched and followed as I entered a subway for the first time. It may sound bizarre, but it really was something I’d never come across before. This was simply a thing they did not have or need in Quireley. Even by the standards of the time I suppose I was a sheltered child. Ben walked ahead, taking giant strides with his long pipe-cleaner legs that I could not hope to match. Silhouetted against the light from the other side, he turned. ‘Are you coming or what?’ he said over his shoulder. I scurried along, my dignity trailing far behind me, until we emerged onto another slope leading up, taking us into what turned out to be the market car park.

  ‘We’ll go through the market, it’s quicker,’ said Ben, who now seemed resigned to the fact that I clearly didn’t know where I was, and had apparently never been outside ever, and that he had to lead the way completely.

  It was another world. Spoiled cabbages and oranges were at our feet as Ben took us through the market. It was bustling with trade on this grey January Saturday, a forest of anoraks and pacamacs and shell suits, with the smell of fruit and clothing damp from the drizzle. Shouts about things I didn’t understand, market stuff, jokes I didn’t get ricocheted off the corrugated roof. ‘Ron is a coppers nark,’ read some graffiti on the wall. I had never had cabbages at my feet before, and I had never come across any mention of narks except on the telly. That graffiti was the closest I’d ever got to real criminality. But what I found really strange was, well, the people. They didn’t look like the sort of people you’d find in Sholeham High Street. I mean, I’d seen the working classes before, I hadn’t lived totally in a shoebox, even though I hadn’t seen a subway, but here in the market, en masse, they all seemed – I suppose ‘damaged’ is the word. The young, the old, trader or customer – there was a strange look in their eyes I hadn’t ever seen, something I couldn’t pin down back then, but I suppose I would describe now as a kind of matter-of-factness. I mean, and this is hard to describe, not visibly enjoying where they were, and not obviously hoping for something better, but just being. But I remember them smiling and laughing too, loud working-class laughing. It’s confusing.

  I don’t know, I’m probably talking rubbish, I’m just trying to articulate how they appeared to me at the time, that’s all. If you showed me the same people today, maybe it wouldn’t seem that way. Anyway, the market’s been totally redeveloped since then, probably looks and feels completely different. And I’m a lower-middle-class arse and that probably accounts for everything. But that’s what places like Quireley do to you. However much you experience, wherever else you go, it will always seem a bit alien. Anything that’s not suburban, anywhere that’s not quiet, won’t feel quite right. The only places that will sit right with you are places that are like where you came from. Places that are nowhere.

  Ben led me over a zebra crossing. I could see that we were somewhere dark and scary, but very, very exciting. This was something new, I remember telling myself, something necessary and good. We walked past shops that had boards for windows, and signs on them indicating that they were for over—18s only, and that there was a back entrance for discretion. Along with the discovery that a copper’s nark had been in the vicinity, the mere sight of these shops made me feel that I was a man. ‘This way,’ said Ben. ‘We’ll go to Underground first.’

  I can only remember a few things about Underground Music now. Dark and dank, with the smell of second-hand merchandise in the air, it’s long since gone, but I remember that it had posters of the type of bands that meant nothing to me on the walls, the sort of music that Neil liked, probably. I didn’t really know how to behave or what to do, so I just copied Ben as he flicked through the records nonchalantly. Even though I didn’t recognise half the stuff I was looking at, I picked up the records the way Ben did, slipping the inner sleeve out, then the vinyl out of that, and inspecting it for scratches. The guy behind the counter didn’t pay us any attention. He just read his Melody Maker. I prayed that Ben wouldn’t spot me looking at a record he didn’t approve of and have a go at me. To prevent it I always looked at the rack he’d just looked at, and sometimes even the same record.

  ‘What are those tapes in that box?’ I asked, pointing to a collection of D60 cassettes with home-made photocopied covers.

  ‘They’re bootlegs.’

  ‘They’re what?’

  ‘Never mind. Come on,’ said Ben, ‘let’s go to Ferret’s and Weasel’s.’ Then he walked out of the shop, not bothering to hold the door for me.

  Ferrets and Weasels? Was he suggesting we go to a pub? But we were too young! Still, I’d learned from the ‘Masters of the Universe’ incident not to question anything Ben said, and so I followed his gigantic stride as best I could, down the street, past the porn shops, bookies and haberdasheries, until we approached another record shop. ‘Ferret’s’, it was called. Now I was really confused. Ferret’s, yes, that made sense, but why had Ben mentioned weasels?

  ‘All right, we’ll spend a few minutes in here,’ said Ben. ‘Then we’ll go across the road.’

  ‘What’s across the road?’ I asked, stupidly forgetting that I wasn’t meant to ask questions.

  ‘Weasel’s, of course! For fuck’s sake.’ Ben grabbed me by the neck and pushed my head up to the glass of Ferret’s, so that all I could see were picture sleeves on display. ‘This is Ferret’s!’ he snapped. Then he swung me round to face the other way. ‘And that’s Weasel’s!’ There, across the road was still another record shop. ‘Weasel’s’ said the hand-painted sign.

  ‘Ferret’s sells singles! Weasel’s sells albums! They’re both run by the same people! Is that fucking clear, you stupid monger?’

  And something inside of me stirred. I knew at that moment that I was not as soft as Ben thought I was, or indeed as I was acting. Yes, I had not been in a tunnel under the road before, or seen many working-class people, but I knew I could cope with both and more. I was going to survive in this new world that was opening up for me that day like a strange and exotic flower, then I was going to have to toughen up. I knew then that I didn’t have anything to fear from Ben, and neither would he desert me. I could taste his loneliness in his anger and saw that he desperately needed my company, despite his unpleasantness.

  ‘Look!’ I said, as I elbowed Ben squarely in the stomach, winding him. ‘Don’t ever grab me like that again, OK? I know I don’t know as much about these places as you do, but that’s because I don’t live round here, innit? Now get off my back and let’s go to Weasel’s cos I’m not interested in buying singles.’

  Ben shifted from one foot to the other and looked to the side of him. ‘No need to elbow me so fucking hard,’ he mumbled. ‘OK, let’s fucking go, then.’

  So Ben and I crossed the road, dodging the traffic that travelled so much faster than any of the cars I’d had to deal with in Quireley, to Weasel’s, a record shop that would prove to be in possession of even greater magical beauty than Underground. Turned out neither of us had the money to buy anything after McDonald’s, but it didn’t matter. To be near the music was enough.

  4
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br />   When we got to Ben’s house in Latham, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it’d be. OK, it wasn’t nearly as good a neighbourhood as Quireley, but the houses were mostly the same type, semi-detached, although more likely products of the sixties than the forties, which was when they built most of Quireley. The people loitering on the streets looked a bit scummier to me, though. Still, it felt a damn sight safer than the route through St Anne’s we’d just taken. Two things surprised me about Ben’s house on that first visit. The first was the thick smell of tobacco smoke. None of my other friends’ parents smoked, or if they did, they took great care to make sure their house didn’t reek of it. The other surprise being, despite the overwhelming smell, how nice it all was. I mean, it wasn’t in particularly good taste, but the furniture looked quite new, and their sofa was puffier, and would turn out to be more comfortable than any I could remember sitting in before. Also, they had a nice big television and hi-fi system. CD player and everything. But what was really impressive was the computer, an Atari ST. The Commodore 64 was totally on the way out by then. and kids in school were switching to games consoles, Sega mostly, but no one else I knew had managed to upgrade to one of the new generation of computers like the Atari or the Amiga. I don’t know, I just presumed that, what with Ben’s dad being a taxi driver, they’d be living in squalor in a bare room with rats or something. But no, it must have been bringing in some OK money. That and maybe credit, I should imagine.

  As Ben let us in, I heard activity coming from a quite futuristic-looking kitchen. ‘Benjamin, is that you?’ a woman’s voice called as we stood in the hallway.

  ‘Yeah, it’s me,’ he shouted back, at a volume no one would consider using in Quireley.

  A plump woman, over fifty, with sandy-grey hair flowing loose over her shoulders and a fluffy pink dressing gown, appeared in the kitchen doorway, cigarette in hand. ‘Oh, hi there,’ she said upon seeing me.

  ‘Hello,’ I said back.

  ‘Is this your friend, Benjamin?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, the word short and low, given reluctantly.

  ‘Kenneth said to say he’s still coming, but he won’t be here till later. Why don’t the both of you sit down and I’ll fix you a snack? Would you like that, Christopher, is it?’

  ‘Uh, yes please. That would be very nice.’ I didn’t know if it would be, as I hadn’t eaten in the house of somebody whose dad didn’t have an office job like my dad’s before, let alone in a house in which all the air seemed to have been replaced by cigarette fog. All I could think of, for some reason, was a plateful of the jelly from pork pies, which gave me an impulse to gag I had to suppress. But when Ben led me into the living room and I saw the sofa, I thought it might be all right, which it was, of course. Ben’s mum came in a couple of minutes later with two plates piled with processed-cheese sandwiches, crisps and chocolate biscuits, and two glasses of lemonade.

  ‘Here you go,’ she said. ‘Put the telly on or something, Benjamin.’ Ben had been awkwardly showing me some recent copies of 2000 AD while we waited, telling me about the characters and the artists, but the TV made us both feel a lot more comfortable.

  ‘Do you want to watch The Young Ones? I’ve got it on video,’ asked Ben.

  ‘Yeah!’ My parents had never let me watch it when it was on telly, and I couldn’t believe that Ben was allowed to watch it in the afternoon, with his mum in the next room and without any cloak-and-dagger operation to hide it. Meanwhile, a black poodle scuttled in on tiny legs and sniffed our ankles before daintily sitting on its own plush cushion in the corner. We could never train Bess to stay on anything that was meant for her, be it a blanket or a basket.

  Of course, The Young Ones was hysterically funny. I was laughing so much I was in pain. Waiting for Kenneth, we got through the first two episodes of season one, and halfway through episode three. It was strange hearing Ben laugh so unguardedly after his tough-guy act of the morning, and then his quiet sheepishness following the window incident. His voice was getting lower, but had not yet fully broken, and had a strange quality, like the sound of blowing through a pipe. His laughter was that of a child, and like his need to share his comics, it undermined all his efforts to appear grown up.

  Sometimes his mum would wander in, and she would laugh at The Young Ones too. This was odd for me. Toilet humour, mild swearing and people hitting each other were not things any parents I’d encountered before approved of. Here, a new, freer order prevailed, it seemed.

  There was the sound of a key in the front door.

  ‘That’ll be Kenneth now, I expect,’ she said.

  Kenneth walked in, wearing motorcycle leathers and carrying his helmet. About thirty-five, balding, with weathered face and hands, like an aged version of Ben after putting on a stone or two. Thick neck. Small eyes hiding far back in his face. Hard like stone. Way too old to be anybody’s brother.

  ‘Hi, Mum. Hi, Ben,’ he said, kissing his mum on the cheek.

  ‘All right, Ken,’ Ben said. I could tell he was pleased to see him, although I don’t think I was meant to see it.

  ‘Ah, brilliant, The Young Ones,’ said Ken. He watched it with us for a few minutes, sitting on the armrest of the sofa. All of us, me, Ben, Kenneth and their mum, leaning in the doorway, were laughing unreservedly. Ken’s laugh was a low chugging sound, while his mum’s was a piercing whoop, both utterly unlike the softer, considered laughs of my parents and their friends.

  Madness appeared in the mid-episode musical interlude, to Ken’s excitement. ‘Ah, Madness, brilliant,’ he said.

  ‘You said you’d show us how to play power chords today,’ said Ben, oblivious to his brother’s enjoyment.

  ‘Yeah, OK,’ said Ken softly. Then he clapped his hands, and said much louder, ‘Right, I’m going to go upstairs and change, and then I’ll show you.’

  ‘Shall we come up in five minutes or something?’ asked Ben.

  ‘Make it ten, yeah?’

  ‘OK.’

  We watched the episode to the end, then almost reluctantly, because there was a whole other tape with another three episodes, we went upstairs. Past the pink lavatory and along the landing, we came to Ken’s room. The door had posters all over it. Ben knocked, and a voice from inside shouted for us to come in. Inside, it was a shrine to what I would learn was called the New Wave of British Heavy Metal from the early eighties, with tattered glossy fold-out posters of bands like Judas Priest, Motörhead, Diamond Head, Saxon and Tygers of Pan Tang covering the walls and ceiling. A large picture of Iron Maiden’s mascot Eddie hung in an antique gilt frame next to the wardrobe, which itself was plastered with magazine cut-outs. It was strange, you could have almost imagined it being the bedroom of a twelve-year-old girl, if the pictures had been of New Kids on the Block and Big Fun. But this room was the work of a grown man.

  The floor was a tip, covered in collapsing piles of magazines, empty cassette boxes and disembodied pieces of electrical equipment – circuit boards and wires that led nowhere. Ken was on the bed, his leathers in a heap to his left, next to his helmet. ‘Right, lads,’ he said, ‘take a pew.’

  Ben sat on the bed next to his brother. I realised that under a pile of faded and suspiciously smelling band T-shirts, there was a chair. ‘Oh, just chuck ’em on the floor,’ said Ken, which I did.

  ‘Right, could you pass me my geetar, please, Ben?’ he asked, and Ben dutifully unearthed a guitar case from behind half a television. Kenneth clicked open the locks and took out a Fender Stratocaster, spray-painted black with various band names stickered all over it. A beautiful thing, nevertheless, or so it looked at the time. Indeed, in that moment, just looking at it and the anticipation of holding it filled me with a rare excitement.

  ‘OK,’ he said, putting the strap round his neck and hunching over the guitar, ‘to play a basic power chord, you need two fingers – this one,’ holding up his index finger, ‘and this one.’ He forced his other fingers down with his thumb so only his ring finger was up. For a moment, I thought it might be rud
e but then realised it wasn’t. ‘Now, what you do with this first finger is place it on the bottom string on any fret, it doesn’t matter. Except if you want to play E. Then you just leave the string open. Now with this one, you put it here, two frets up from the other one, over the fourth and fifth strings.’ He demonstrated the shape, and then deftly carried out a downward strike on the bottom three strings of his guitar. I was expecting an almighty blast of rock greatness, so was a little disappointed by the tinny sound that it made. Then I remembered that there was no amp. It would sound better with an amp, I reasoned.

  ‘So, with this shape,’ Kenneth continued, ‘you can play any chord just by running your hand up and down the fretboard, like this.’ He did just that, playing a dark, satanic riff very fast.

  ‘Wow,’ I said, in a stage whisper.

  ‘How do you play minor chords, then?’ asked Ben.

  ‘Ah, that’s the beauty of it. In a power chord, you’re playing your root note, the same note an octave above, and a fifth. You’re leaving out the third note of the triad, so the chord is neither major nor minor. So you can use them instead of either.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Ben. I didn’t know what either of them was talking about, but it sounded very exciting and useful.

  ‘OK, do you want to try it?’ said Ken, passing the guitar to Ben. Ben took it, and after shuffling his long fingers about for a few seconds, got them in position, and there and then struck a perfect power chord. First time. He ran his hand up and down the fretboard for a full five minutes or so, sometimes linking chords that clearly didn’t flow, other times hinting at potential riffs. It was as if that guitar and him, that chord shape, belonged together. It was meant to be. Ken just looked on in admiration. ‘Yeah, you’ve got it,’ he said.

  ‘Want a go?’ Ben said to me, after what seemed an age.

  ‘Yeah, sure.’

  He passed me the guitar and I struggled to get the strap over my head. The Stratocaster seemed to sit much lower in my lap than the school folk acoustic, and it felt like it was in danger of slipping off my leg completely. The strings were insanely loose compared with the cheese-cutter tightness of the school guitar, and I found it hard to get a grip on the thin neck. Finally, I tried to get my fingers in the right position, and though I thought I had it, when I gingerly hit down on them, the strings made a horrible scraping sound that, even amplified, wouldn’t have sounded any good.