forty-two

A couple of weeks after Ian's wedding, Barry moved to Bristol, and me and Tony gave up trying to get another band together for a while. We were considering doing something acoustic, like we had in the old days, with just the two of us on guitars. But then we met David Isaacs.

I met Dave in quite a strange way. I'd stopped at the ESSO garage - where Target had an account - to buy some petrol, when this classic car pulled up alongside me. It was a cherry-coloured Ford Consul rag-top (a soft top to you), which gleamed like it had just been driven out of a show room in 1958. The driver of the car had a huge blonde quiff (like the singer out of the Stray Cats). His hair wasn't quite as Billy-Idol -white as Stewy's used to be, but was still pretty radical. He was wearing one of those American college jackets (blue wool with white leather sleeves), black drainpipe trousers and red suede brothel creepers, which had two-inch crepe soles and were decorated with ornamental perforations like a pair of brogues. And, as I filled up with four star, I thought to myself (half-joking) I wonder if he plays guitar, or bass or drums (or preferably all three).

After I'd finished at the pump, I stood there for a couple of moments admiring the Consul then went to pay for my petrol. During the previous few weeks, the garage had been doing this promotion whereby every time you spent a fiver you got a token. And when you'd collected ten tokens you could trade them in for a free cassette featuring the sounds of the fifties, sixties, seventies or eighties. The cassettes weren't exactly brilliant. However, the recordings were all by the original artists, and there were at least one or two decent tracks on each of them.

As I stood there waiting for a girl in a red jumper and matching lipstick to find our account for October, the Stray Cat came in and stood beside me. Glancing down (to marvel at his red suede shoes) I noticed he was clutching a handful of the free cassette tokens from his jacket pocket. Being the cheeky young van driver I was in those days, I broke the Southern taboo of never talking to strangers and said, "I guess you'll be going for the Fifties then."

"Huh?" said the Stray Cat.

"Your free tape," I said grinning. "Guess you'll be going for the rock 'n' roll."

"Oh, no," he said quietly, with a shyness that belied his garish appearance.

"Sixties?" I said.

"Keep going," he said.

"Seventies?"

He nodded.

The girl returned with a clipboard and a dirty yellow account card (covered in oily fingerprints) for me to date and sign. As I did so, the Stray Cat paid cash and counted out the tokens for his free tape. Hence, we left the garage at about the same time.

"Cheers," he said, as I held the door open for him.

We walked across the forecourt together.

"Anything decent on there?" I asked, as he studied the back of his tape.

"Just one Mott the Hoople track I like," he said. "Saves buying the whole album."

"All The Young Dudes?"

He nodded.

We reached our vehicles.

"Great car," I said, nodding at the Consul.

"Yea." He smirked with barely-restrained pride and ran his hand along her rear wing, the way one might caress the flank of a favourite horse.

"I don't suppose you play bass guitar or anything do you," I said?

"Well, not exactly," he said. "Why?"

"It's just that we've got this band 'Casino Royal'."

"Oh yea, right," he nodded.

"You recognise the name?"

"Yea, didn't you play up at the college with that old blues band," he said.

"Yea, Blue Murder," I said.

"Yea, that's right. I knew I'd seen you somewhere. You were playing the guitar with that guy who works in the music shop," he said.

"Tony," I said.

"Yea, right. He's a pretty good guitarist isn't he?"

"Yea, shit hot," I nodded.

"So, what's happened to your band then? I haven't seen your posters for a while. You split up or something?"

"Oh no...well kind of. Me and Tony are still trying to get something together, but it's difficult finding a decent drummer and bass player."

"Well if you ever want someone to play keyboards give us a bell," he said.

"Yea, great," I said enthusiastically.

We weren't particularly looking for a keyboard player, but I thought if me and Tony got to know him we might be able to wangle a ride in that cool car of his.

"Hold on a sec," I said. "I'll scribble my number down."

I tore a couple of strips off the bottom of a delivery note which I had in the cab of the van. Then we exchanged details and drove off in opposite directions.

It had been one of those impromptu encounters, the kind that occur on delayed trains or foreign beaches, which result in polite (but vacuous) spur-of-the-moment promises to 'get in touch' or 'call in next time you're passing.' And, I never really expected to hear from the shy Stray Cat (David Isaacs) ever again. But the next day, to my surprise, he gave me a call at work. And I arranged to go round to his house with Tony early the following week.

Dave Isaacs lived five miles or so to the north west of Westing, out on Hallowsmere Common, which consisted of acre after acre of tangled bracken, brambles and silver birches dissected at it's edges by pot-holed single-track lanes. The nameless lane that Dave lived down was particularly narrow and overgrown, so much so that it probably wouldn't have accommodated the van had not the occasional tractor torn away the densest of the over-hanging holly bushes and wheel-scraped a path through the steep green banks.

The lane's untended tarmac was cracked like snake-skin, grass growing down it's silted spine, making you wonder if you weren't going to end up in the middle of a field. And, as it turned out, Dave did almost live in a field; an old farmyard on the nearside of a ridiculously tight U-bend (which the van could not possibly have negotiated had we had to go on any further).

The farmyard was full of dilapidated sheds and lots of cars in various states of repair. Some of the cars were modern, but most were classics from the late fifties and early sixties. Among them I spotted Dave's cherry Consul rag-top, a jet black 1956 Vauxhall Velox, and a grey Singer Vogue with a red roof. On the left hand side of the farmyard stood a fifties-built bungalow with a neat front lawn and potted geraniums on the porch. It looked as if it had been whisked up from the suburbs by a freak tornado and set down somehow unharmed in the midst of all that rural dereliction.

Parked directly outside the bungalow was a 1964 Chevrolet Bel-Air 283ci V8 with immaculate metallic blue bodywork, which was so polished it looked as if it were made of glass. As we got out of the van we half-expected to see some old boy in dungarees with skin like a sun dried prune, sat in a rocking chair playing blues harmonica.

However, instead we saw Dave appear from a shed wearing a navy blue boiler suit, wellington boots and a dirty red baseball cap (the sartorial opposite of how he'd looked when I'd first seen him at the garage). His entire face (except for the area around each eye) was covered in oil. And as he came over to greet us, grinning and wiping his hands on a torn sheet of blue paper towel, he looked rather like a mechanically-minded panda

I introduced Tony as we walked towards the bungalow and Dave proffered his hand. I presumed the gesture was a joke, given that his fingers were dripping with oil. But Tony shook it anyway.

We followed Dave around the side of the bungalow, then paused outside the back door as he stooped to tug his wellington boots off, hooking the rubber heel against the chipped edge of a single broad stone step.

"I didn't realise you had so many old cars," I said.

"Oh yea," said Dave, laughing.

"You collect them or something?" I asked.

"Dad does," explained Dave, his Westingshire accent suddenly becoming broader. "He does 'em up for weddings and that, and quite often the TV."

"Television?" chirped Tony, his eyes suddenly sparking (the way they always did when someone mentioned they had some vague connection with the world of showbusiness).

"Just adverts and dramas and stuff set in the fifties," he explained, and wrinkled his nose as if he found the idea of using the cars for such purposes rather distasteful.

"Sounds quite exciting," I said. Dave laughed again.

"No, it's just bloody messy," he said, holding up his oil-black hands like a politically incorrect minstrel.

Although Dave called the room into which we stepped a kitchen, it actually more closely resembled a workshop (containing more spanners and screwdrivers than knives and forks). You could tell that the kitchen - with it's big oak farmhouse table, the tiled floor, the antique spice rack, fruit bowls, and ladles and whisks hanging from hooks on the wall - had originally been designed and used for the preparation of food. In the corner of the room (hidden in an alcove which looked as if it had, probably, previously housed a cupboard) was a small, extra sink ingrained with oil and tea, where Dave (and Tony) washed their hands.

It was obvious that, at some stage, this sink had been plumbed in (on the insistence of Dave's mum) to save her precious pots, pans and china from being soiled. You can imagine that, at first, a spanner, a couple of nuts and washes perhaps, were left on the edge of the small sink (with a murmur of I'll move them later, they're not doing any harm). Next perhaps a screwdriver was left on the shelf, in front of the tarragon and thyme (I'll move it in a moment, I'm using it right now).

Gradually, imperceptibly, malignantly, the tools and car parts had obviously spread from the sink. Week by week day by day, distributor caps and wrenches had invaded the drawers and shelves and tables, spilt oil on cookery books, forced best china tea sets into a cupboard by the cooker, spread across the old oak table, pushed the new fridge freezer into the corridor outside, until the 'kitchen proper,' the actual cooking area, was squeezed into a corner little bigger than the alcove in which that fateful sink had first been installed.

Dave's mother didn't seem to mind. As we followed Dave down the corridor from the kitchen to his room, we saw her briefly - a surprisingly old lady sitting, grey haired and plump, on a sofa in a room full of cushions and literal paintings of hills and trees.

"Have you offered your friends some biscuits?" she called out (why is it that musicians mother's are always offering you food?)

"You didn't want anything to eat did you?" said Dave and kept on walking, eager to show us his keyboards (quite justifiably as it turned out).

Dave's keyboards were in what he called the 'music room' an unexpectedly large extension (not visible from the front of the bungalow) which jutted out into a paddock.

"Do you have horses or anything?" I asked, noticing a halter hanging from a hook beside the door to his room.

"We used to have a donkey but it died," he explained.

Given Dave's rock and roll appearance I expected the room to contain an upright piano, apropos of Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard, or at best, one of those Japanese home organs with eight pre-set drum patterns and twenty different sounds. But when he opened the door and switched the light on, the room (clad in pine like a Danish sauna) was, to our amazement an Aladdin's cave of electronic instruments, with four keyboards of varying size and complexity, connected by leads to a series of grey and black boxes covered in knobs and buttons.

"Wow," said Tony.

"Shit," I said.

Dave switched on a hi-fi amp which stood on a bench in the middle of all the gadgetry. "Have a play around if you like," he said, producing a Jean Michelle Jarre type chord from one of the keyboards. "I'm going to get out of these things. I'll be back in a minute."

When he'd gone we stood there for a minute rooted to the spot, feeling like we were in the Science Museum, surrounded by exhibits you weren't supposed to touch.

"Look at all this stuff," I whispered.

Tony, who was always braver than me, edged over to the biggest keyboard and touched a single black key. Another voluminous chord pulsated between the pine walls. He looked slightly puzzled and touched another key, producing another chord. He played two notes at once and the chord shifted from major to minor, the sound pulsating even more wildly.

"Don't do that, you'll bloody break it," I hissed retaining a respectful distance .

Next to the keyboard was a black box with a square orange button on top of it, like a control for launching missiles. Tony casually touched the button and a rapid synthesised drum beat clattered from the speakers in the corner of the room, like machine gun fire. I swear I all but ducked, my heart pumping like that of a startled rabbit. Tony switched the drum machine off, as Dave reappeared through the door.

"It's good isn't it?" he grinned, tucking a red checked shirt into his turned-up jeans.

"Yea," I said. "Great, just great."