forty-four

After weeks of postponements, we eventually got to visit the recording studio one Sunday morning in the early summer. It was a warm, clear day, and me, Dave and Tony were in high spirits as we sat in the front of the Transit, singing along to a New Order tape, and cruised through the deserted country lanes to the north of Westing.

The studio was about ten miles outside the town in a converted manor house. The house was in the middle of nowhere, lost between hamlets that had remained unchanged for decades, on hilly land unsuitable for development. You couldn't even see the house from the road (or rather the narrow lane). The only evidence of it's existence was a lonely stone archway.

The archway looked as if it should have had a wall around it. And as I manoeuvred the transit carefully through a gap designed for horse-drawn carriages, I wondered aloud whether there had ever been one. But according to Dave there had only ever been the archway - serene and surreal, the gothic whim of some eccentric landscape architect, an elaborate memorial to the houses' existence where a simple sign stating 'this way' would have sufficed.

Beyond the archway, was a long drive of cracked and cratered tarmac, its many potholes partly filled in with loose gravel (which was strewn just about everywhere except actually in the holes). The drive was a couple of miles long, rolling up and down through fields peppered with cows and sheep and sometimes bordered by dense hedgerows where birds fluttered and you imagined foxes and badgers might thrive. In addition to numerous cattle grids, the drive was intermittently punctuated by rows of trees, brief avenues that ended in a series of stumps, then nothing but grass. At one point a stray sheep (there's always one) wandered out from between a row of poplars and ran in front of the van, so that I had to screech to a halt, sending out gear thumping about in the back and practically catapulting Tony and Dave through the windscreen. The sheep didn't seem that bothered though. It just stood looking up at us, its head tilted to one side with casual curiosity, then slowly trotted off as I tooted the horn.

Just when I had resigned myself to the fact that the road would go on for ever (like in some low budget 1960s horror film - a psychological chiller of the 'hey didn't we pass that same tree a few miles back' variety) the house appeared very suddenly round a tight bend, heavy with brambles and clouds of blossoming hawthorn.

The house looked as if it should have been in a film - not some Technicolor horror movie like Psycho III, but, rather, a vintage, black and white ghost story. It was a large, bare, grey building, with mossy stone window ledges, that resembled a huge mausoleum. Getting out of the van (my trainers crunching self-consciously into deep gravel) I half-expected to see a wispy weeping lady, with a face like floating ashes, peer round a corner then melt away into the mist, her disappearance accompanied by the clatter and gallop of unseen carriages, as an ugly, stooping, butler opened (with much creaking of hinges) a huge oaken slab of a door.

However, the door (which was surprisingly small and unspectacular in comparison to the gothic largess of the house) was - after we'd ring the bell a couple of times - in fact opened by a dopey looking bloke with hay-feverish eyes and a ring through his nose. He looked a typical muso. His hair hung half-way down his back, almost reaching the top of his skin-tight black jeans, which were set off by frayed baseball boots and a loose, black Zidijan sweat shirt. His mouth was set in a permanent grin as if he'd had some kind of surgery to lift the corners of his lips, a smile permanently stitched onto his face (a bit like the Joker in the new Batman movies).

He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn't for the life of me work out where I'd seen him before.

"All right?" he said and looked at us expectantly for a moment as if, other than to announce our arrival, there were some additional reason for us having rung the bell, as if we might have some momentous message to impart, which he had by chance intercepted. When it became clear, from our exchange of blank expressions, that this was not the case, he nodded vaguely and wandered away still grinning, leaving us stood in a high corridor, feeling as if we were the characters out of a Scooby Doo cartoon, improbably finding ourselves in a strange and eerie house, knowing the person we were looking for was in there somewhere, but too overawed by the spooky architecture to dare venture any further inside.

"What do we do now?" I asked Tony.

He shrugged. "All Brian said was to meet us here."

Dave nervously peered down the corridor.

"There's some people down there I think," he said.

Having tentatively wandered down to the end of the corridor we reached a large hallway with a lot of oak panelling and a large red Coke machine. A wide staircase led up to a balcony above, where you could picture men with extravagant moustaches and starched collars, smoking cigars and sipping port poured from crystal decanters, as they leered down at bashful young ladies who, with heaving cleavages and daintily waving fans, waited to be waltzed across the marble floor. It was the kind of hall where you expected to see swords and muskets hung on the wall above the skull of a slaughtered ibex and oil portraits of ancestors with wigs, whippets and eyes that followed you round the room.

Probably such things had once hung in that huge hall. But, latterly, they had been replaced by signed photographs of various obscure rock groups. Most of the photos were of short-lived seventies combos with very wide collars and dodgy beards. However there were a couple of more recent pictures of mop-haired indie bands - flavour-of-the-month clothes horses in brand new clip frames - as well as several faded, autographed snaps of various partying/rehearsing/ recording rock stars. Among these was a very young Brian Ferry looking slightly sozzled, Steve Howe out of Yes tuning a twelve string, and Curtis Cline, sat at a mixing desk smoking a spliff. Next to the photos were several silver and gold discs bearing names I had never heard of and, last but not least, a fully functioning cigarette dispenser.

In the middle of the hall was a long smoked glass table on which was a large glass ashtray (the size of a small casserole dish), along with copies of Rolling Stone, The Face, Cosmopolitan, The Times and the ubiquitous Westing Chronicle. Around the table was a mature spider plant, and sat on a smart blue and white striped sofa, a couple of girls, who were as skinny and sulky as catwalk models (not quite as beautiful, but with bigger breasts). Both girls had over-the-top suntans, scruffy blonde hair, and very long legs in extremely tight jeans. As we entered the hall the girls looked up from the crossword they were doing and stared at us briefly (presumably to check if they'd ever seen us on Top of the Pops). Evidently deciding that they didn't recognise us, they went back to gazing idly at their 'quick clues' (distinctly unmoved by my efforts to smile like a soon-to-be-famous rock star).

In the middle of the hall was a silver-haired business man, who obviously liked to think he was a walking definition of all things dapper. He wore blue, pin-stripe trousers, a snow-white shirt, red braces, patent leather shoes (seriously) and big gold cuff links (cuff links for fuck's sake who the hell was still wearing cufflinks in the nineteen eighties?). The man was shouting into a portable phone. It wasn't one of those modern phones (which are the size of a Walkman and have a fold-away mouthpiece as thin as an After Eight mint), but a chunky black affair (bigger than a whole box of After Eights and with an aerial as thick as a riding crop) The phone was connected to a power pack the size of a car battery (like something you might expect to see being used to relay military commands to mud filled trenches during the First World War). Mind you, back in the 1980s, it was probably state-of-the-art.

The man who was using the phone had his finger in one ear and was pacing back and forth across the floor, his heels clicking on marble as he conversed in an impatient, toffee-nosed drawl (like someone pretending to be posher than they really are). He kept on having to repeat everything he said about five times.

I guess he was probably on the edge of the phone's range (the area covered by the mobile network at that time being more limited than it is today). And what with all those all those trees and hills around, I'm surprised he could hear anything at all.

"No, I said thirty thousand units, Jeremy ...No, not thirteen, three zero, thirty thousand units...OK...So, have we got any firm figures from that place in Germany yet?...No, Germany...Have they given you a price yet?...I said, have the bloody Germans given you a bloody price?...One-seventy. What's that for ten?...I said, one seventy can't be right...I said, it can't be right...That's Deutschmarks is it?...I said, is that Deutschmarks?...No, not bloody dollars, Jeremy, Deutschmarks!...Well which is it?...You're jacking me off. We could get it done for half that in bloody Manchester...I said it would be cheaper in bloody Manchester...That includes what?...Covers?...No, I've told him already we're getting the covers printed in Italy. In fact, I can tell you, they're already done and have been sitting in a warehouse in Hounslow for over a week now...No we can't...That's not possible...The press releases have already been posted.....I said the bloody press releases have already been bloody posted...Look Jeremy I don't care whose fucking fault it is. Just sort it bloody out...I said sort it out...OK...Well, give Manchester another ring...I said ring bloody Manchester. Ciao."

The man clicked the phone off. He stared at it irritatedly for a moment then slammed it back into its battery pack. He turned to us, pacing back and forth and muttering, "Fucking Germans! No wonder they lost the fucking war."

He took a packet of Marlboro from the table, and tapped out a single cigarette. He lit it with a gold lighter, which he'd whisked from the breast pocket of his shirt, and took several long, hard drags, the redness in his cheeks slowly subsiding as he did so.

We stood there awkwardly in the ensuing silence until the dopey bloke who'd opened the front door for us reappeared. He nodded politely, then went over to the cigarette machine, sliding his had flat into the pocket of his tight jeans to scoop out loose change. I sidled over towards him.

"Have you seen Brian about?" I asked.

"Brian who?" he said.

"You know Brian, the recording bloke. We were meant to be meeting him here somewhere."

Finally having managed to get the change from his pocket, the dopey bloke shrugged off-handedly (albeit with that grin still stitched to his face) indicating that he didn't have a flaming clue who Brian was or what we might want with him. He turned his back and started to count coins into the cigarette machine.

"Oh, Sorry. You don't work here then?" I asked.

He shook his head as his coins clattered into the cigarette machine, releasing twenty Camel king size.

"Sorry," I said as he turned to face me. "I thought you were a sound engineer or something."

"Naa," he laughed. "Just a humble drummer, I'm afraid."

"Oh, right," I said, stepping out of his way.

"You don't fancy joining our band then do you?" I asked, only half joking.

He laughed

"I'm kind of tied up at the moment."

"Oh, right," I said.

He turned to go, grinning even more widely.

"See ya later lads. Hope you find Brian"

"Yea, cheers," I said.

And we were left once more in awkward silence.

The man in the blue suit had disappeared taking his phone with him. But the girls were still sat there like part of the furniture, looking totally indifferent to what was going on.

"You don't know happen to know where Brian is do you?" I asked one of them. She looked up, scowling, and dismissively shook her head, making it clear that despite the fact that she was bored shitless, she would rather stare blankly at her crossword than talk to us (I thought to myself, see if you can work this one out then love: two words, six letters and five letters, 'a skinny tart who looks like her finger's just gone though the bog roll.' Don't know? Right, I'll tell you then - snooty bitch!)

We wandered back down the corridor and waited chatting in whispers by the front door (for what seemed hours) until Brian eventually appeared. He looked totally surprised to see us there at first, and then was really over friendly (pretending that he hadn't completely forgotten that we were coming over).

"So this is your band then?" he said to Tony, shaking us all by the hand with the same fixed grin that the dopey drummer had greeted us with.

"The main studio's actually in use at the moment," he said. "So I thought I'd set you up in the chapel which we use for most of our demo work."

I obviously looked slightly disappointed that we were only going into a 'demo room' (which I imagined would be just like one of the rehearsal rooms we normally practised in)

"It'll be better than the four track," said Tony confidently, nudging me with his elbow, but, at the same time, looking up at Brian with puppy eyes, asking the question (it will be better, won't it?)

"Oh yea," said Brian laughing. "Should be."

He obviously found our naivety quite endearing. And, apparently, that wasn't the only thing he found endearing. As, someone later let slip, Brian's interest in Tony was not purely musical. But that's another story!

The chapel was small but perfectly formed, constructed like a miniature church. It had that lived in feel, that shrouded, slightly supernatural atmosphere that only old buildings have. The chapel had obviously been used for regular worship until the ancestors of the family who'd owned the house for centuries had been forced to sell it to some brash pop impresario flush with new money (lots of small slices from several very large pies) who upon seeing the chapel had thought 'Hmm, this would be a great place for recording demos in.' I could picture him stood there - a baseball-capped control freak who liked the bands he managed to record in his own studio so that he could keep an eye on them and the amount of money they were spending. I could just picture him rubbing his fleshy, bejewelled hands together and trying to remember the name of that antique dealer he'd met, who would probably offer him a good price for all those pews and that exquisitely carved pulpit.

The shell of the chapel had remained the same as undoubtedly it had always been, stained glass windows and statues of dead ancestors looking down soberly from the walls, their mortal remains, no doubt, still buried beneath the cold, flagstoned floor, in eternal peace, not realising that two centuries later the oak guts of their mausoleum would be stripped out to make way for a mixing desk, digital delays, drum kits and a Fender twin reverb; the gentle whisper of family hymns and prayers replaced by the raucous sonic excesses of wayward rock 'n' roll aliens.

Tony's and Dave's faces lit up like Christmas when they saw all that gear.

"Great acoustics," I said, in a loud, deep voice.

"Yea, oh yea," said Brian, sneaking a look at Tony's youthful buttocks.

Although we 'd brought all Dave's gear with us in the van, we left most of it there (as it seemed very shoddy and ordinary in comparison to the thousands of pounds worth of gadgetry that the studio offered).

Unsurprisingly, it took us quite a while to acclimatise to the sophistication of all that new technology. Of course, when I say 'us,' I actually mean 'Tony and Dave,' who flicked switches, twiddled knobs and asked Brian intelligent questions as I mucked around on Tony's Casino in my usual irritating way.

All in all, it took Tony and Dave a couple of hours to get to grips with the differences between the drum machines and sequencers they normally used and those owned by the studio, whilst I sat yawning on a deconsecrated pew and thought about what I was going to have for my lunch (in particular about the marvellous veggie lasagne they did at the Old Oak, a pub we'd passed earlier that morning on the way to the studio).

After they'd got everything set up, Tony spent a bit of time getting the sound right on the guitar, running through that Curtis Cline song 'Hands on the Clock.' Even though I'd been in groups with Tony for years, I was still entranced by the hypnotic magic of his playing. And all of us (me, Dave and Brian) were sat there just listening to him, when suddenly I was aware that someone else was watching.

I glanced casually over my shoulder and saw a man standing behind us. He reminded me of a bad guy out of a western movie - a heartless hombre silhouetted in the doorway of some insalubrious saloon (a bit like Lee Van Cleef, but without the moustache). The man wore a neat black cowboy hat decorated with metal buckles, and a black shirt with white eagle wings spreading from each lapel. Strung round his neck was a huge ram's head bootlace tie with emeralds for eyes, and his feet were clad in a pair of pristine, silver-capped boots. He stepped down into the light like some fallen Country and Western angel (tempted by the tunes of the devil, who after all has all the best ones) light reflecting off the polished decorations of his cowboy hat like a halo.

The moment he stepped down into the light, I knew I recognised him from somewhere, but being half asleep at the time, it took me a few seconds to realise who he was. When I did realise, I was so shocked I literally fell off my pew, my throat tightening like someone had sewn an extra button into the collar of my shirt. As the man came closer, Tony glanced up, but didn't skip a note. He just kept on playing, allowing himself only the merest nod of recognition. In fact, he acted (as Stewy's brother would've said) cooler than a polar bear's codpiece.

The angelic cowboy just stood grinning and listening with the rest of us. There was nothing unusual in that (people were always stopping to listen when Tony played). But this was different. This was the man who'd written the song. This was Curtis Cline.