The Singer Read online

  Cathi Unsworth began her journalistic career at nineteen on the music paper Sounds. Later headhunted by Melody Maker, she worked there as a freelance feature writer and reviewer for several years before joining Bizarre magazine. She now works as a sub-editor and lives in West London. The Not Knowing, her first novel, was also published by Serpent’s Tail as well as her edited collection, London Noir.

  Praise for The Singer

  ‘A cracking page-turner that feels authentic, authoritative and evocative. And it’s beautifully written. This is a bloody good book’ Val McDermid

  ‘Brilliantly paced, plotted and stylish crime novel from the hugely talented and highly original Cathi Unsworth’ Daily Mirror

  ‘If Cathi Unsworth’s searing debut novel, The Not Knowing, was the perfect sound check, The Singer is the incredible show that everyone should be talking about…Gritty, raw with an authenticity that proves the author knows her stuff. Quite simply, Cathi Unsworth rocks’ Daily Record

  ‘[An] excellent slice of muso-noir…gripping’ Metro

  ‘This is not just essential reading, it’s also the ultimate punk noir novel’ Bizarre

  ‘An elegy to the punk experience…her evocation of the kohl-eyed post-punk netherworld is faultless…A deftly plotted narrative, testimony to the skills of an author whose flair for characterisation is a triumph of empathy’ Mojo

  The Singer

  Cathi Unsworth

  A complete catalogue record for this book can

  be obtained from the British Library on request

  The right of Cathi Unsworth to be identified as the author of this work has been

  asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Copyright © 2007 Cathi Unsworth

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real

  persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  First published in this edition in 2008 by Serpent’s Tail.

  First published in 2007 by Serpent’s Tail,

  an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

  3A Exmouth House

  Pine Street

  London EC1R 0JH

  website: www.serpentstail.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored

  in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,

  mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior

  permission of the publisher.

  Designed and typeset at Neuadd Bwll, Llanwrtyd Wells

  ISBN 978 1 84668 640 5

  Printed in Great Britain by Printed and bound in Great

  Britain by Bookmarque Ltd, Croydon, Surrey

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This Book is printed on FSC certified paper

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks and love to Brenda and Phil Unsworth, Yvette and Matthew Unsworth, Cath Meekin, Danny Meekin, Frances Meekin, Eva Snee, Ann Scanlon, Joe McNally, Pete Woodhead, Ken Bruen, Martyn Waites, Lydia Lunch and Marc Viaplana, Caroline Montgomery, John Williams, Pete Ayrton and all at Serpent’s Tail, Raphael Abraham, Damon Wise, Damjana and Predrag Finci, Johnny Volcano, Max Décharné, David Peace, Ben Newbery, Lynn Taylor, Emma and Paul Murphy, Florence Halfon, Mari Mansfield, Helen and Richard Cox, Ken and Rachel Hollings, James Hollands, Roger Burton and everyone at The Horse Hospital, Michael Dillon and the company of Gerry’s, Suzy Prince, Joolz Denby, Tommy Udo, Rod Stanley, Terry Edwards, David Knight, Ruth Bayer, Karl Blake, Margaret Nichols, Claudia Woodward and Tony Stewart and the Sounds massif for getting me backstage in the first place.

  Special thanks for the punk memories of Richard Newson, The Shend and Billy Chainsaw. And the music of John Lydon and Johnny Cash.

  ‘The Folksinger’ Words and Music by Johnny R. Cash and Charles E. Daniels – © 1968 (Renewed) Unichappell Music Inc. (BMI) – All Rights Reserved – Lyric reproduced by kind permission of Carlin Music Corp – London NW1 8BD

  For Michael Meekin

  Did you forget The Folksinger so soon?

  And did you forget my song?

  —Johnny Cash

  Prologue

  You can tell it’s love by the expression on their faces.

  Four, maybe five hundred of them, packed together so tightly they’ve formed a kind of human sea, rolling and lapping in waves around the rim of the stage. A couple of girls sway on the shoulders of their boyfriends, loudly beseeching the white spotlight that rests on the microphone in the centre of the stage. Like most of the rest of the assembled worshippers, these girls have long black hair, crimped into corrugated ribbons then teased upwards with the help of Boots’ Ultra-Strong Hairspray. Thick black liner magnifies their eyes against china-white foundation and slashes of red lips. The negative image of the crest of a wave, their clothes as the colour of their hair, their faces full of yearning, waiting:

  For the man.

  A big punk rocker with arms thick as tree trunks pushes his way to the front, elbowing and swearing, pumped up with expectation and adrenalin, the forthcoming catharsis of violence in song. His head is a black crown of soaped-up spikes, four inches long, liable to have someone’s eye out – or so he would hope. Round his neck a dog collar of spikes, ditto on his wrists, a visual dare for anyone to start on him. He’s ripped the sleeves off his GBH T-shirt, exposing flabby white flesh smudged with home-made blue tattoos, right down to his waistband, where a pyramid stud belt coils around the top of his tight black stretch jeans. No doubt he’s got steel toe-capped Doc Martens on his feet but you can’t see that from here. You just see the flash of his eyes as he wades through the waves to the front, hauls his upper body up onto the stage and starts pointing, shouting abuse to the wings, where he knows they’ll make their entrance.

  Waiting for the band.

  Then the house lights go down and a huge roar erupts.

  A vein stands out on the punk rocker’s neck as he screams his lungs out into the white noise around him, punching the air with a hammy fist.

  Slowly, they coil out onto the stage.

  The bass player first, a tall, willowy black man, cigarette dangling from his bottom lip, black suit and white shirt and shades, the image of Don Cherry in the Ornette Coleman free jazz days. His bass guitar is slung low around his hips, and without looking up at the crowd he stands sideways and begins to pluck the strings, a low, loping, insistent sound.

  Cigarette smoke swirls across the stage from the bassist’s lips.

  The drummer has by now climbed behind his kit and begins to join in the tattoo, the undulating refrain quickly becoming hypnotic, the goth girls swaying on their boyfriends’ shoulders, waving their arms like seaweed underwater. Their mouths form the words of a name.

  Of the singer.

  For five long minutes the men on stage continue to make their rumble. Then from stage left, the guitarist emerges. Compared to the bassist he is wide and solid. His round, slightly battered face peers out from under a black Homburg hat. He looks like Gene Hackman as Popeye Doyle, and he knows it, cultivates it. Broadshoudered, bandy-legged, he wears a second-hand sixties suit like it was handmade for his personal use from Savile Row.

  The guitarist faces the crowd, rocking slightly on his heels, a flicker of amusement across his broad features, and slashes into his guitar like he’s taking a razor to soft skin. The jarring sound resonates through the crowd in a synaptic rush, wiring their collective conscious for action, and none more so than the punk rocker, who is by now attempting to get his feet onto the stage. A bouncer rushes from the darkness of the wings to push the spiky head back down, back into the sea of arms and backcombed hair. You can see his fists rising above the heads of the others and with them his feet, and yes, he is wear
ing Doc Martens, eighteen holes with steel toe-caps.

  Meanwhile, the guitarist, grinning now, stalks the front of the stage, shaking a violent heehaw from his strings, making a mangled blues turn red.

  Punk rocker’s head comes back up. He screams the name of the singer.

  Who comes tripping out of the darkness, as if somebody’s pushed him or he’s reeling drunk. If the other guys looked the epitome of louche cool, he actually looks frightening – long long legs in black leather, a shock of black hair greased into a glistening pompadour, a T-shirt printed with a picture of a gun bearing the legend: SMITH & WESSON: THE GREAT EQUALIZER.

  His arms are snaked with elaborate tattoos – skulls, dominos, women, dice and crosses. His eyes are wide and bulging, his lips a thin line across a taut jaw.

  He lurches towards the mic stand, pulls it towards him, leans into the face of punk rocker and screams: ‘Your funeral is about to begin!’

  The crowd lets rip a mutual roar and a thousand hands shoot skywards.

  Clearly delighted, punk rocker grabs hold of the singer’s T-shirt, pulling him down into the throng. Long insect arms and legs flail above the hands of the faithful, pieces of T-shirt ripped off his back and delivered up, consecrated in hair grease and sweat. The mic has gone with the singer into the pit; at first it must have been grabbed out of his hands by the punk rocker, who shouts into it: ‘You’re a fucking arsehole,’ in a South London accent.

  By now two bouncers are wading in from the stage, trying to separate the writhing form of the singer from the mass of arms that want to keep him. He has wrestled the mic away now, words are discernible, cutting in and out of earshot, more guttural howl than singing – ‘I am the king of this wasteland’.

  It sounds like, ‘Blackened, empty, fill my eyes…’

  The bouncers now forcing him out seemingly against his will, long legs lashing, T-shirt long gone, traces of blood trickling down pasty white skin.

  Belt buckle of a Colt .45.

  All the while, that voodoo beat pounding, that guitar shrieking.

  The singer thrashes his way out of the bouncers’ grasp, teeters on the edge of the stage. He pushes his hair, now standing up like porcupine quills, out of his pale saucer eyes, stares into the writhing throng of his flock as if stupefied. Their hungry hands try to catch him again, but this time he is too quick for them, leaping sideways, almost colliding with the guitarist, who leans backwards against him, his white Custom Les Paul at crotch level, pumping away at those mangled notes as if he’s fucking some girl against an alley wall.

  Punk rocker making the wanker sign, shit-eating grin on his face.

  The singer raises the mic to his lips: ‘I am the fucking king/The wretched king/Of all this shit/Of all nothing!’ he screams. The congregation scream back their approval.

  He glances over at the guitarist for a second. An almost imperceptible nod. Then he runs to the front of the stage, leaps back into the crowd, who open up and swallow him in a grateful frenzy.

  The scene dissolves into a studio shot, one of those chirpy tosser presenters that were everywhere in the early eighties, paisley shirt with the top button done up, waistband of his jeans practically under his armpits, mullet hairdo with blond tips.

  He opens his mouth to say something and dissolves into static.

  Gavin gets up laughing, turns the video recorder off.

  ‘That was all they did!’ he whoops, still in disbelief, twenty years later. ‘That one song. That was the whole gig. It was a riot. They had a record number of complaints for putting that on the TV too.’

  ‘That,’ I tell him, still staring at the blank screen in astonishment, ‘was fucking amazing. Why the fuck wasn’t I around then?’ I add to myself.

  ‘Ahh, you young ’uns,’ Gavin sits back in his armchair, cracks open another can of lager. ‘You missed out. Those days were the shit.’

  Gavin Granger is fifteen years older than me but he’s still whippet-thin, still wears a crumpled lounge suit with bonhomie, knows he’s still good-looking enough not to care about the salt-and-pepper streaks in his shaggy hair. Maybe it’s because he’s Australian. Brought up on sunshine and cold beer and shrimps on the barbie – not roast dinners and cold winters and Surrey motherly love.

  Whereas I, Eddie Bracknell, am twenty-nine and already running to flab, already starting to lose my hair, already in a permanent state of anxiety. As a result of all those things and probably more.

  But at this moment I don’t give a shit. At this moment, my palms are sticky with elation, sliding down the side of my tin of Red Stripe, which has crumpled and turned warm in my grasp.

  There are so many questions I want to ask him.

  ‘What happened, then?’ I start with the obvious one.

  ‘To him – to the singer?’

  Gavin lifts his eyes and then his can to the ceiling.

  ‘A chick happened, mate,’ he finally says. ‘Isn’t it always the fucking way…’

  Part One

  1

  Potential H-Bomb

  May 1977

  Stevie Mullin was already halfway through his second jam doughnut, on top of the new school sports centre, when he realised what all the shouting was about.

  He liked it up there, on top of the world. Ever since he’d found a way how – a tree, a rope, the top of the boys’ changing rooms – he’d been spending the best part of his lunchtimes high above the playground. As Stevie spent more time twagging than actually in lessons, no one missed him much. To be frank, most of his peers were actually relieved by his absence. It made him laugh that no one had ever so much as looked up and noticed him.

  It was a good place for a smoke and a raid on the day’s takings from the school canteen, or cornershop, whichever was most vulnerable to his wandering hands that day. But the thing he liked about it most was that you could see the big cranes of the docks from up here.

  Stevie’s Grandad Cooper worked on Hull docks, and he was Stevie’s favourite relative. A rubble-faced Yorkshireman, as short as he was broad, with fair hair that stood up like Stan Laurel’s, a permanent roll-up hanging from the corner of his mouth and a permanent ‘bastard’ on his lips. He’d taken Stevie up one of those cranes once, when he was seven.

  ‘Don’t worry, son, I’m right behind you,’ he’d said, as the wind whipped through Stevie’s hair and his little hands gripped the freezing iron rail tightly. ‘Steady as a goat.’

  But Stevie hadn’t been frightened, he’d been exhilarated. He could see everything from here – the mouth of the Humber curving grey out to the North Sea, the city stretched out beneath him like it was nothing but a toy town, and away to the north, the outline of the distant moors. It instilled in him an urgent desire to be places he wasn’t supposed to be, to see things other people didn’t see.

  Eight years later he could still feel that weird yearning in his stomach that he’d felt on that day, still kept it close. But Stevie wasn’t dreaming about the dockyards as he crammed the sticky stolen bounty into his mouth that day. Instead his head was playing over and over The Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’, a single that had been on his turntable incessantly since he’d liberated it from Sidney Scarborough’s record shop at the weekend.

  He just loved the way Johnny Rotten said: ‘We mean it, maaaaaannnn,’ like one drawn-out sneer.

  He also loved the way Steve Jones played guitar, was glad that his name was Steve too, because Mullin also harboured a dream of playing in a band. He knew the guitar he had to have – a white Custom Les Paul. At the moment all he had was a thing called a Holner which cost £40 from Band Box second-hand music shop and was supposed to kid you into thinking it was a Hofner. It sounded crap and it hurt his fingers trying to keep the notes down, but he had begun to riddle out how to get those chords, if not the monster sound that Jones achieved.

  He was lost in his reverie for some time, picturing the fretboard and how his fingers had to fit there, until gradually his subconscious drifted and harsh noises filtered thro
ugh the veil.

  ‘Fuckin’ nignog,’ rang out clearly from below.

  ‘It’s Chalkie,’ came another, a bad impersonation of Jim Davidson’s bad impersonation of a West Indian accent, ‘Chalkie White!’

  ‘How you doin’ den, Chalkie?’ Another comedian. ‘You want some ban-an-na?’

  Stevie was on his feet and over to the side of the sports hall.

  A group of his classmates had cornered the new boy by the side of the boys’ changing rooms where any patrolling teachers would be hard-pressed to see.

  There were five of them – the hard men of the fifth year. Gary Dunton, stocky, red-haired, trying hard to grow his first sidies and bumfluff moustache was the ringleader and chief Davidson impersonator. Then there were Malc and Martin Carver, twin bruisers with Kevin Keegan perms and thick eyebrows that formed single lines across their Neanderthal foreheads. Hull Kingston Rovers scarves and donkey jackets buttoned up despite the warmness of the day, going ‘Hur hur hur,’ like two cast-offs from Planet of the Apes. Skinhead Barney Lee, Dunton’s second-in-command, Rovers scarf as well and a Leeds Utd thumbs-up patch sewn on his demin jacket, waving a banana and pretending to scratch under his armpits. Lagging back from the others, shortarse speccy Kevin Holme, their lackey, keeping a lookout for teacher.

  Their prey was pressed up against the bricks of the changing room wall, breathing heavily. From his head burst a fuzzy mass of black candyfloss, a thug beacon that would stand out a mile anywhere in Hull, especially in the place he’d been consigned to for his education. His black skin gleamed like crude oil in the sun, shockingly dark and exotic against the acne-riddled, raspberry-and-cream complexions of his tormentors. Beads of sweat broken out on his forehead, eyes a mixture of fear and rage.

  Lynton Powell was too tall for his school uniform, but not yet broad enough to fill it out. He was taller than any of the others, in fact, but so skinny and slight they wouldn’t look upon that as an advantage.