This Could Be Rock 'N' Roll Read Free Page B

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.
    And we certainly stand together. The music industry is a nasty business. A guitar is not nicknamed a ‘razor’ for nothing. If you cannot feel better about yourself, you can always make other people feel worse about themselves, that seems to be the motto. Then you have all the agents scrabbling away trying to get 15% of anything they can cobble together, the press which is just out for a story, the freeloaders and the stardust shoulder-rubbers. What a business! Shit, it makes breaking and entering look respectable. But our lot are not like that. We love each other and we support each other and we will not have a word said against each other. These guys are my real family. They are gold dust. And Jade fits in there too because she thinks and behaves the same way. For her, I really am an artist and a star, and she would kill anybody who denies it. She would kill anybody who ever shags me too.
     
     

Chapter 3
     
    Harry calls around a lot, dragging Josh and Sam with him, although they probably don’t take much dragging. They still love me and they think Jade is cool, like a wild elder sister. The only problem is that there isn’t a lot for them to do here - no toys, no digital TV. Josh wants to mess around in the shed with my guitars and my recording equipment but I keep telling him that I need all that stuff intact for me to earn some money. He looks like he doesn’t really believe me and he is about right. It tears me apart not to see those two every bath time. Fuck Cathy. I just want to be with the kids.
    Harry is Cathy’s boyfriend and he’s OK. Actually, he is better than OK. We get on pretty well given that he is rollicking my wife. He’s rich