Why didn’t anyone tell her? Tell her she couldn’t sing. That “The Sultans” weren’t going anywhere fast. They weren’t going to be the New Red Hot Chilli Peppers. More like last night’s left-over Chilli Con Carne, micro-waved, cut The Blonde at the office who had given me her free ticket, and in doing so, I would never see again.
But the white powder of Fame is the hardest drug of all to kick, even before your first taste. Fame. The X-Factor. The crystal dust of distraction. For Life is one long distraction. Chasing The Hit in the brown smoke rising from the bubbling spoon. The One-Hit-Wonder. Distraction from what? I don’t suppose The Singer knew any more than the song she was murdering. Screeching to that top C like fingers scratching down a blackboard. Performance like a bad steak, always under, over-done, slightly. Singing a cover of Shania Twain, perfectly, a semi-tone flat. Not even over-enthusiastic applause and well-meant whoops could auto-tune failure. The talentless in pursuit of something even they could not describe. That was what the music was for.
Greg in a faded Stone Roses T-shirt Tour ‘92, did his improvised tom-tom breaks; rehearsed in a bedroom over his step-mother’s kitchenette. She believed in him. Phil made love to his Fender Strat model G balanced on his paunch; as later he would lie back on his TV recliner, naked with a Pot Noodle, Thai-inspired. Phil searching the audience for the tanned face of Alan-the-A&R man, who his brother-in-law’s friend had promised would come, somehow knowing he never would. So Avril swayed and she shimmied, in that silver mini-dress she smoothed down her chubby sausage legs. Reminded me of Miss Piggy- a little. The Blonde was a diamond-cut bitch but she was right. She told the truths the audience didn’t want; a discarded cardigan with holes in the elbow, they could not bear to throw away the lie.
And in the sheer morning light, still deafened from the fold-back VOX speakers, The Singer left; the little Vietnamese cleaner-cum-pimp closing the steel-reinforced club door behind her. Ran her long artificial nail across the spyhole and the rivets that spelt out its’ name “BUCANNEERS”. Trying to remember how she would remember, once she Hit It Big. Looking back wistfully when she had Made It, at the cobbled alley of her precious anonymity. Explaining to the interviewer in some ever-receding future, matching Greg’s hairline, how it all seemed like yesterday. “Like a dream”, she would say.
JAMES CHANEL- AMAZON/KDP PAPERMEDIA