(Just like) El Cid's Bloomers
by
Tim Roux
Published by Night Publishing, Smashwords edition
Copyright 2010, Tim Roux
ISBN 978-1-4581-7612-7
Thank you for downloading this e-book. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form.
Most of the characters in this book are fictional. The only real-life person to play an significant part in this tale is Nick Quantrill who really is a crime fiction writer based in Hull. However, the activities ascribed to him, other than his writing, have never in fact taken place and are consequently fictional. Nick plays a role in this book as a cameo character by his own kind permission. You can contact Nick at http://www.hullcrimefiction.co.uk.
To discover other books by Tim Roux, please go to http://www.nightpublishing.com/tim-roux.html
Chapter 1
The stages I appear on are usually small - local pubs or folk clubs that feature one or two artists over the weekend or on special nights. I have been doing this for fifteen years so I recognise many faces time and time again, and I usually get to have a drink or two with the other act although I never drink alcohol before a gig.
I have seen people get up there so drunk they can barely stand and make complete arses of themselves. I have seen people get up there so drunk they can barely stand and be absolutely incredible before passing out mid-act, mid-chord, or vomiting all over the audience. Tommy Hartley used to be famous for that. The audience used to come to lay bets on how long he would last. In his time, he was the biggest draw in the area until he made the mistake of playing the Beverley Festival in the same frame of mind, fell off the stage and broke his neck. He is still alive but he is also paralysed from the neck down. About the only thing he can do now is to knock back the alcohol and hope for the resultant poisoning to carry him away. I go to visit him every now and again, but I doubt that either of us gets much out of it. Duty, I suppose.
I have done local festivals too - Howden, Beverley, Cottingham, Filey, Driffield, the beach at Scarborough, but I am most often to be seen at a place like this, the Bay Horse in Pickering. About twenty-five people are here tonight. I recognise about a third of them. Denise, Rache, Dizzy, Sam, Paula and Chris, they are here again, my most loyal of fans. Jade is here too. She always comes along with me. She doesn't trust me with the women. She was a groupie when I picked her up. If it can happen to her, she thinks ….. Denise and gang know all that. They tease her rotten, always asking me to take my shirt off if I am hot and whether I am up for some fun afterwards. Jade often scowls throughout my whole performance, flashing daggers at them. They love it. It is probably why they still turn up.
"Hello, girls," I bow to them in a courtly gesture as I move to my seat.
They squeal at me. "Jake, Jake, let it be me."
"No, let it be me."
"Don't you dare look at Rache. She's just a slag."
"Quiet, girls," I say.
"Oooooh."
[chord]
"Good evening, everybody."
Smiles of welcome from individuals in the audience. Jade is watching my groupie collection from the other side of the room with a wary look on her face. Give her thirty years and she'll be Nora Batty.
[chord]
When I get on stage I have a routine to settle me down. Even though I have been doing this for fifteen years and even though this is a modest venue, I still get extremely nervous before a set. Audiences can be unpredictable and so can the equipment, or even me. I was at the Bridlington Folk Club, I played one chord, and my top E string snapped. I had to spend five minutes rigging up a new one and tuning it in. The audience forgave me but it was definitely getting bored and restless which was rushing me so that it took me even longer to get myself fixed. Sometimes my voice doesn't lock in immediately either. I slide all around the notes for a few bars sounding like I am tone deaf.
[chord]
Me and Billy the Kid
We've got nothing in common, no,
Him being an outlaw
Me being a fool ……
The voice is in tune, thank God, but slightly croaky. That'll go. Bit thin too, tonight. I must have been talking too much during the day.
He rode the hill country
West of Loreto
He knew of freedom
Me only rules
It takes a couple of minutes for the audience and me to get used to each other again. This is a familiar crowd so nothing much is going to go wrong, but it is always the same. We have to settle back into our acquaintance. It's the same with friends, mostly.
But I'd love to stand beside him
With my back to the border
The odds stacked against us
For making our stand
Me with my six-string
Slung over my shoulder
Him with them six guns
Held in his hands.
I always carry a pint on with me and pretend to drink it. If my voice is croaky like now, I do take a quick swig. You don't get drunk on a quick swig. The crowd likes it. It makes me a regular sort of guy.
Sometimes I wonder why anybody ever comes to see me, especially when they have copped me so often before. Perhaps it is not me they are here for tonight although they are listening attentively enough. Lesley is on after me and she not only writes great folky, country & western sorts of songs but she is a lot better looking than I am as well and still quite fit for her thirty-six years.
Jerry is over there too. He is a real pro on stage. He has great rapport with the audience, swopping one-liners and insults. He certainly knows how to work an audience. Mind you, he has about forty years' experience.
I love it up here. Once I have settled in after the first few bars I feel like I'm at home in a way that I never do at home. It is like I am marrying the audience, it feels that euphoric.
Me and Billy the Kid
We've got nothing in common, no,
He lived his whole life in 21 years.
Me I got older
The whole world on my shoulders,
He bit the dust
And I tasted the tears.
Jade is watching me now. I wonder what is going through her mind. Does it all still sound fresh to her? Does she relive when she first saw me, or does she look at me thinking "Jake and Billy the Kid, yeah. Never grew up, neither of them."
Actually, it's all going really well between Jade and me most of the time. Obviously we have our moments when things blow up, but it is certainly much more peaceful than with Cathy. Well, what wouldn't be? And Jade really does dig my stuff. She even sings it around the house which is more than I do. I am usually working on something new. Ideas hurl themselves at me all the time. It is a question of finding a way to capture them when I am in the middle of driving between appointments and most often when I am standing around waiting for the viewers to decide where they should put their second wardrobe.
Yeah, you've guessed it. I am an estate agent by day, a rebel with integrity by night.
But I'd love to stand beside him
With my back to the border
The odds stacked against us
For making our stand
Me with my six-string
Slung over my shoulder
Him with them six guns
Held in his hands, yeah.
[harmonica solo]
But I'll never stand beside him
With my back to the border
So I found my own way
Of making that stand
Not shot in the back
In some New Mexican sunset,
I took my chances
In a rock 'n' roll band.
Well, that last line is a bit of licence. I've never been in a rock 'n' roll band but I like to fantasise about it sometimes, and it sounds good, doesn't it, more romantic than being a strum-along folky? Besides, nearly all of my heroes are rockers - Joe Strummer, Ian Dury, Otis Redding, John Lennon - all dead, come to think of it. No wonder I want to be up there with Billy the Kid.
When I'm singing the songs that I've been performing for years, my mind does tend to wander off. I sometimes wonder what I'm actually singing. What if I am voicing my thoughts not the lyrics? I am sure that I would soon recognise the surprise on people's faces if I did. Some of these guys know the words better than I do. Later in the set, I get them singing both verse and chorus and they are word-perfect. Some of them sing better than I do too.
"OK. Thank you. This is a new one. I hope that you'll like it."
I shouldn't really do new ones live. The audience invariably doesn't like it if they have never heard it before, but I shove in a couple early on just for myself really. After that I stick to the tried-and-tested ones. I don't really have a closing number. I haven't managed to pen an anthem or a signature tune. It's a weakness. It's an ambition.
Lesley has 'Jitterbug'. God, I remember when I first heard that. We were making out. Lesley and I had a thing going in the early days. Luckily, Jade doesn't know anything about that. She can't have been more than ten at the time - Jade that is. Lesley was my sort of age, as she still is of course. We were both sure that we were on the way up and we quite fancied each other and were revelling in our impending breaks which we were absolutely sure were just around the corner. Perhaps we were merely clinging onto each other. Whatever. Anyway, Lesley does sing around the house and especially when she is making love. There she was on top of me when she suddenly burst into 'Jitterbug' which, as you can imagine if you have never heard it, has a frantic seven-eight beat. It was a real ball crusher. I think things dropped off me that night, sheered off. I certainly had bruises.
"What do you think?" she asked me when I was concentrating hard on hanging in there and not dying of my wounds. "I'm not doing it justice. I'll play it to you properly when we've finished." She then switched to 'Love Eyes', glory be, and everything ended happily.
Anyway, 'Jitterbug' is definitely her anthem and I cannot hear it without thinking of that night. I don't think that we were in love but I came close before we broke up acrimoniously after several bouts of accusing each other of nicking each other's songs. We didn't even talk to each other after that for about five years. However, she did communicate with me. She wrote 'Jug Ears' about me where she publicised quite a few scenes from our private lives. Everybody knew who it was about and waited for me to retaliate but I never did. My songs are not a medium for revenge.
So what do I write about? Well, there is a lot of stuff about having my back to the wall, some other stuff about being on the road, then mostly news items, things that catch my eye, experiences I have had. I don't do many love songs. I feel that there are more important things for me to be writing about, which may be a sad reflection on me, I don't know. I wrote one for Jade the other day, but it isn't very good so I haven't played it to her yet. She'd be flattered that I wrote it, but you can't compose a mediocre song for the woman you are living with, so either I rescue it somehow or I shall have to think up another one. I want to offer Jade one soon. She does deserve it and she would certainly be chuffed, but I cannot chase songs. They come to me or not at all, and with love songs it is usually not at all.
"Here is one of my few love songs."
[chord]
The trees lose their leaves in September
In a carpet of yellow and gold
Under Christmas tree lights in December
We cuddled to keep out the cold.
We'd hide in the park there for hours
Where the bullies would leave us alone
You carved our names there "Now it's ours" you said
And later let me walk you home.
Each night after school I would wait for you there
In the dark on that park bench in St. Martin's Square.
I knew you were leaving for college
Yeah and I'd got a job down at Kirk's
I envied you all of that knowledge
But you don't need it down at the works.
On the night you left you said you'd miss me
And you promised that you'd always write
And then you leaned forward and kissed me
And disappeared out of my life.
Still late in the evening I'd wait for you there
In the dark on that park bench in St. Martin's Square.
I read and re-read all your letters
From the other side of the divide
I knew the boys there would all be my betters
And that's why I never replied.
I bet you thought that I forgot you
And it all seems so obvious now
How I wanted to say that I loved you then
Truth is I didn't know how.
The trees still lose their leaves in December
In a carpet of yellow and gold
But the Christmas tree lights in December
Mean nothing with no-one to hold
And I know I should put you behind me
But I just can't forget you and me
And if ever you come back to find me
There's only one place that I'll be.
And part of me always will wait for you there
In the dark on that park bench in St. Martin's Square.
* * *
Chapter 2
Sue (in the song) may have got her college degree (I dunno, I never saw her again), but Jade hasn't which is not to say that she is stupid because she's not, although she works with her mam down Skelton's bakery which doesn't sound too bright.
Jade is springy all over - her hair, her body, the way that she is always bobbing up and down. Her mum, Jackie, is from Birmingham originally, which gives her a worse accent than even the ones around here and her dad was a hit-and-run sailor from Zanzibar who turned up for a few days in the docks offloading wood at Hollis' and then disappeared off again leaving both of them behind. According to Jackie, he claimed to be a cousin of Freddy Mercury which is where Jade gets her appreciation for music from, according to her, although she thinks that I must have been an aberration (tee - lots of hees). You have to hold onto something, I suppose. In consequence, Jade is really dark with frizzy hair and a lovely bum. Her mum, on the other hand, looks like she worked with cordite in the Birmingham Small Arms factory and that her skin hasn't recovered yet. Jade's granddad did just that. Jackie is a lively one too. She never shuts up when she could be talking and ends each sentence in a gale of laughter. She really embarrasses Jade except that if Jade submits to working alongside her eight hours a day, she can't find her that bad. We all find her a right old laugh. At least she isn't stuck up like Cathy's parents. Blimey, what a pair! They must be the last people in Kirkella to keep their 'drawing room' in their three-up three-down semi 'for best'. If they stuck their arses in aspic, they couldn't be more Coronation Chicken, with serviettes naturally. I used to really hate going round there. It was straight out of 'Keeping Up Appearances', Hyacinth Bouquet and all that. They must have the smallest semi in Kirkella, but at least they cornered the postcode.
Jackie's nothing like that. She lives down Willerby New Road and probably knows everyone in the whole street which is several miles long. I keep threatening to make her my manager. If she could just get everyone she knows to one of my concerts all at the same time, we could easily fill the Guild Hall, and maybe even the Albert Hall. We could book a special Pullman to get us all down there.
I hooked up with Jade about three months after Cathy and I finally broke up. I came back from a gig at the Black Swan Folk Club in York, totally knackered having caught the last train into town, and there were three suitcases neatly packed outside the front door. No note - message unambiguous. I banged on the front door but nobody replied. I started hammering on the windows. I thought that I would at least wake the kids up and that that would rile Cathy into letting me in for a screaming match, but there was no response at all. Cathy had upped and taken the kids to Kirkella for the night. I got a bit of a chuckle out of that when I heard about it, the thought of Cathy's parents having to cope with Josh and Sam. Josh is seven and Sam(antha) is five and behaving like china dolls is not what they do best.
Jade approached me after a lively gig at the Forge Valley Inn at Scarborough where I was knocking back the pints, and started to quiz me about my lyrics - who was the old guy in 'The Undefeated' (was it Jerry?), what was the pub in 'I Wonder', who was the girl in 'St. Martin's Square'? I looked at this eighteen year old (or thereabouts) creature and carried on talking to Rache and Sam. She didn't give up. She butted in. We ignored her. She asked a pile more questions. We ignored those too. She waited until I had finished ignoring her. Eventually I turned on her:
"Yeah, what?"
"You look really lonely."
"No, I'm not."
"Your songs are really sad too."
"Well, yeah, they are. That's because I'm a happy-go-lucky type of guy and need some sort of balance in my life."
She gave me the Spaniel-from-Zanzibar look. "I really love your stuff."
"You're young enough to be my daughter."
"I'm looking for a father figure."
"I could never have guessed."
"Don't you just want a friend?"
As it happened, I did. The hell-raising rock star act wasn't making sense even to me. The limousine was looking more like a Williamson's potatoes truck and the hangers-on were not exactly Pamela Des Barres, nor had they been with members of Franz Ferdinand or Keane the night before.
I did have friends. I have fantastic friends in Lesley, Jerry, Saskia and Martin who are fellow artists. We have supported each other over the years and I love them to bits. I also have friends from school and from the house we shared off the Anlaby Road but, yeah, I can always squeeze in one more, especially one who can't get enough of me in a nice sort of way.
Jackie, Jade's mum, refers to me as her very own Ralph McTell. In this game you are always being likened to somebody and most of the references I just don't get. The Ralph McTell thing is a deliberate joke. Jackie's mum, Jade's nan, keeps harking back to George Formby. Luckily she isn't deluded enough to think I am anything like him. I'm not fit even to lick his sandals according to Nan. Did George Formby really wear sandals? More likely golf shoes, or clogs. She's a big Frank Sinatra fan too. As it happens, I do have something of the Frank Sinatra in me, except more in the future tense, as in "I'll do it my way" rather than "I did it my way." I wish I could afford to hire the guys to turn up to pubs and clubs before I get there and replace all the music being played with my stuff. It might help if I recorded some music videos sometime.
I don't know what Jade eats in that bakery - pure sugar I would guess - because she comes home bouncing off the walls ready to go out. We live in Victoria Ave, so just around the corner from Newland Avenue which is the liveliest, trendiest part of Hull (hold your excitement), so I don't have many excuses to stay at home but I wish we could give it a miss sometimes. Jade is beginning to make me feel like an irretrievably clapped-out old rocker who just wants to crash at home while his missus paints the town red. Still, I get to meet Jade's friends and several of those are easy on the eye so once I have been dragged out of the house I become a bit more lively again.
The house where we live in Victoria Ave is one of those places where the door bell looks like it should come with a bell-hop. There are six flats in the building, which leaves us with a ground floor bed sit. It's not a lot to show for fifteen years hard toil day and night. Jade has ambitions. The trouble is, however hard I try, I sell about 250 - 350 CDs a year, or £1,000 to you. The gigs pay better but they are harder and harder to get. The venues want artists who are young and happening (i.e. virtually free) rather than established no-hopers who demand a proper fee. So us veterans of the circuit have to sit around on the bench waiting for a substitution. At least we are reliable.
I record my music down the shed in the garden. I had to insist on there being a shed, so it took some time to find the right flat. I don't have a lot of equipment and I am a bit of a technophobe, so most of my stuff is recorded with me playing acoustic guitar and harmonica, singing and whatever I can find to bash. I have to lay down one track at a time for a maximum of eight bars, so it takes forever. The bass track comes from the lower E string on my Ibanez. It doesn't usually take me long to compose a song, typically around two-to-three hours to get the main shape, a couple of days to finalise the lyrics, and then another two-to-three hours to lay it down. Some songs are just plain elusive. I fiddle with them for years and they never come out quite right. I don't know why I bother. It's a bit like doing the crossword puzzle, I suppose. I have to complete it however long it takes. I just wish that I could achieve the perfect song at the end of it all but they always work out a bit mangled.
I am not the world's greatest instrumentalist and my voice isn't Caruso, but I pride myself on my tunes and even more on my lyrics. I am probably more of a story-teller than strictly a musician. I love stories, and I love to tell stories in my songs - vignettes, slices of life. Something like this:
There's bandit neon flashing by the fag machine as a barmaid sneers at leering lads who've had her … in their dreams.
There's a bulldog with a pool cue on a picture on the wall.
And I wonder what I'm doing here at all.
Some walking tattoo stamps on my shoe then says: "Sorry mate"
You know the sort who'd need rohypnol just to get a date.
And I'm staring at my mobile wishing telesales would call.
And I wonder what I'm doing here at all.
Let's get metaphysical and question why we're here.
Cos it cannot be the company and I wouldn't chance the beer.
You know this fog of smoke is second hand, but it's fresher than the jokes.
It's just like someone grabbed hold of my past and rammed it in my spokes.
The thump-thump jukebox pumping out that idle pop.
And just like anyone with any sense I'm wishing it would stop.
It's another faceless one-hit-wonder's name I can't recall,
Let's take a baseball bat to Simon Cowell now once and for all,
Because his so-called bloody music's got me crawling up the wall,
And I wonder what I'm doing here at all.
Do I have hate? Yeah, I have hate and it isn't buried very deep neither. I don't really know why. My parents are great, the usual arguments and jockeying for power and individuality but that's all. Nothing terrible has ever happened to me, no life-scarring tragedies, no being kissed by Steve Crum as a baby. But it just strikes me that I am surrounded by injustice from the derivative, manipulative crap that makes it to platinum to the brutal lives some folks have to lead because some bastard is exploiting them. So, I carry my soap box around with me and I rant at will. Cathy's parents never got that. Ranting is what lunatics and working class people do, there only being a mere hair's breadth between them. You wouldn't think that Cathy's dad's family was digging turnips in Holderness only a couple of generations back or that Cathy's mum was a factory worker down at Hawker Siddeley's. Tossers. Yeah, that's the sort of thing that gets me - class traitors and they've got fuck-all class if you ask me.
People criticise me for being the Billy Bragg of the East Riding. I take it as a compliment. At least Billy writes about something, and I try to too. Why would anybody want to write about nothing just to get the cash till jingling? How empty is that? Besides, who wants to be rich? What do you do with it? You've got the press at you all the time hoping that you get cancer or book into The Priory or get caught shagging Madonna in Birmingham New Street or something. Everything is a hoo-ha. Your kids need bodyguards and you need a PR agent. You sit in your fifty room mansion discussing the servant problem and whether 'peak oil' is a myth or not, and Lady Jake Pembleton thinks that her party is ruined because her blancmange wobbled too much or her soufflé flopped. Yeah, right, I would rather be in a bedsit down Victoria Ave with a real life and a smashing sexy girl who nearly gives me a heart attack every time she steps out of the shower.
Actually, Jade nearly gives me a heart attack quite a lot one way or another. Her attitude to life powering straight off the National Grid is the first reason. Her utter devotion to me to the point of asphyxiation is another. And then there is the question of when she opens her mouth. With her friends, she sounds just right and I come over like Prince Charles or Andrew Lloyd Webber or somebody. But when she is with my friends, she sort of squeaks like a little girl and embarrasses me. I can see Mike and Stoker and Kevin and Nancy sitting there thinking "he's only with her because he's desperate for a shag now that he and Cathy have broken up and nobody else will have him and his pathetic adolescent lifestyle", but it isn't like that at all. Jade really does have her head screwed on. It's just that she's only nineteen and all of my local friends are in their thirties and accountants or office workers with children and a mortgage and here am I, I've never grown up. I pretend to flog houses by day and at night I play at being Elton John or something. Shouldn't I just grow out of it?
The answer is, yeah, I should, but I can't because this bloody music keeps turning up and it will churn my guts if I don't do something useful with it and when I have recorded it I am actually proud of what I do, and I wouldn't be proud of being an accountant or an office worker, and I'm not proud at all of being an estate agent. And yet, I feel sometimes with my mates that if I introduced myself as an estate agent they would go "Yeah, right on," but when I admit to being a folk singer they cringe into their chairs.
That's why I like being with Lesley and the gang. They're like me. They know what we do is important and they face all the same issues as I do. They make ends meet better or worse than I do, but none of them is a star or ever will be. If the public hasn't caught on to what you do after fifteen years, let's face it, it never will. It will take a bloody miracle (or a murder or AIDS) to make me into a household name and the same goes for them. We are going to be sitting in our bath chairs strumming away with our arthritic hands, croaking unintelligibly, recounting the glory days to our grandchildren who cannot stand the sour smell of us and who can't wait to get away. That is the truth. But in our heads, success is still inches just around the corner for all of us, and if we only stand together we can all give each other a lift up.