Dance On Fire - Chapter 11

Spike came back into the white room, carrying about half a dozen bottles of beer she had found in the kitchen.

‘I went to see my parents on the way here,’ Pete said.

‘Oh, yes? How are they?’

‘The same as usual. They seem to fit each other like a pair of gloves. My Dad still goes to the Albion every home game and my Mother seems to run the whole neighbourhood.’

‘Good. I’m glad to hear they’re fine. How was it though, still the same?’

‘Yes. I still feel as though I should be apologising to them.’

‘What for?’ Spike said as she put the bottles down on the table and fished a bottle-opener out of her trouser pocket.

‘The lack of grandchildren, mainly. No… for my whole life.’

‘The lack of grandchildren look. I get that look too.’ Spike nodded in agreement.

‘I suppose they are right though.’

‘What?’

‘Well, I suppose it is the duty – the responsibility – of each generation, isn’t it?’

‘If that is what you want.’ Spike picked up one of the bottles, studying its label.

‘Well, without responsibility – duty, even – what is there? I think that is where our generation – the post-Sixties generations – fucked up.’

Spike looked up at Pete. ‘What do you mean?’

‘We broke the chain, lost the direction. Threw out the babies with our liberation from the oppressive bathwater regime.’

‘Maybe,’ Spike said, picking at a loose corner of the bottle label.

Pete realised he was still holding the scrapbook in his hand. ‘It seems so long ago, now.’ He held the book up for Spike to see as she looked up to face him.

‘Yes. Yes, it does,’ Spike said.

‘I suppose, in the beginning,’ Pete said. ‘It seemed the only way for me to go. I never felt comfortable, at home, at work, in an ordinary life. I always felt like an outsider, as though I didn't belong.’

‘Me too.’ Spike handed one of the bottles to him, and picked one for herself. They sat down, side by side, again.

‘When we started the band, we all felt the same way, I think,’ she said. ‘Rock music, in those days, was the place for outsiders. It was the place for us. Or so we thought.’

‘But what happened, what changed?’

‘We got rich and famous, I suppose. Rock 'n' roll - as I understood it back then - was not about wealth and glamour. It was always the antithesis of that, for outsiders, rebels, losers.’

‘But the music itself changed too, didn't it?’

Spike nodded. ‘It has become just pop again, I suppose. Pop was something far different in those days. Remember back when we began? Pop was a music of belonging, of being a part of, and of being at home, within society. It was part of the entertainment industry, a commodity for people to purchase and use. Pop was stuff your relations played at their weddings and your grandparents and your aunts and uncles would dance to it when they were drunk enough.’

‘You still sound like a bloody sociologist though, sometimes,’ Pete said.

‘Bollocks. I’m a drop-out and proud of it.’ She thumped Pete on the thigh. ‘Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes… pop and rock…. Rock was not like that, not like pop. There was a quote I came across a while ago - let me see if I can remember it. Rock was dangerous, on the outside, standing in the shadows on midnight streets. It was about secret and dark things. It was the other side of the ordinary world. It was not the devil's music, but the music of the outsiders and the outcasts. This music was a place to belong for those that did not belong.’

‘You read too many of those books.’ Pete said, raising an eyebrow.

Spike smiled, but did not reply. She was too busy lighting another spliff. ‘In some ways the sixties revolution did happen,’ Spike said as she passed him the spliff. ‘When you look back at the TV and film of the fifties and early Sixties; see how the world has changed. It all looks so tight, uptight, strict and regimented. It really was a black-and-white world.’

‘Maybe it has, in a way. Now, I look back and see how that old culture destroyed, both by people like us who walked away from it, and by the sheer vandalism of Thatcherism. Bloody Thatcher destroyed whole communities, whole working-class cultures.’

‘Well, not so much her,’ Spike said. ‘But the mentality that created her, the conservative middle-class revival at the end of the seventies. The embodiment of that whole middle-class paranoia thing I wanted to escape from through our music.’

‘But now, when I go back there, back home, they are all strangers to me, but also strangers to one another. All the connections have been lost. As the current bloody Prime Minister once said, they have all become middle-class - those that escaped the underclass, anyway - now.’

‘Yes, well…. There was a big change, a very big change. It's what all that nostalgia for The Sixties and so on is all about. People sense there was a change, a big change and they are trying to get a hold on it.’

They were silent for a while, both watching the smoke from the spliff in Spike's hand. Pete suddenly realised the music had stopped. He got up and picked out a CD from Spike's massive collection - a T-Bone Walker compilation.

Pete finished off his beer as he sat back down. ‘What happened? I used to think it - the rock mythology, if you like - was the only way to live, the only true description of a… an… authentic life. But, I don't think it is, not any more - or even if it ever was.’ He opened himself another bottle. ‘Rebel music - making a rebellious stand - what happened to all that?’

‘How much of that is true? Look at our lifestyles. I don't think we can seriously call ourselves rebels any more, can we?’ Spike looked around the room and sighed. ‘Too much… stuff. Nowadays, though, it’s all just another marketing exercise. What was once the mark of the outsider - people like you and me - is now the mainstream, and its histories and mythologies are now part of the history of our society. Just look at all the adverts on the telly that use music - maybe even our stuff sometime, if we ever let them - to emphasise its point, or to sell its commodities.’ Spike sat back and closed her eyes. ‘Songs that used to mean so much to me, now just used to sell chewing gum.’

‘And people just seem to accept it. As though the music doesn't mean anything to them any more… if it ever did.’ Pete stood up and walked over to the racks of CDs. ‘I used to really believe in the power of rock 'n' roll, you know?’

Spike nodded. ‘I think I still do, deep down.’

‘I would like to believe in it once again, and every time I see some part of it again I do want to feel that feeling, that belief again. But something tells me it is all over now. I feel that I no longer have the will to believe in it. The new stuff that is coming through seems no more than the same old stuff in new hands… and the old stuff has become just a nostalgic device. Like all nostalgic devices, it’s used to sell a vision of the past, which may or may not have anything to do with the real past. Also, those memories - whether true or false - are used to give a feeling of familiar solidity in the selling of the new. It is so sad when something you believed was transcendental, ends up just selling some piece of pointless junk. Rock, when it became mainstream, lost its raison d'être. It was always meant to be on the outside, an alternative night-time. I think it is pitifully absurd when you get tabloids with pictures of the aged rock 'n' roll grandad playing cricket in Hollywood on his days off. Once it ceases to be rebellious, the alternative, the outsider, the other, then what is left? When the Prime Minister, as sober-suited and bland as a vicar, can claim to be a rock fan, then - surely - its time must be over as a distinct way of life, of seeing, of being. When rock stars like us can speak of a career in the industry without irony or absurdity then none of its, none of our, once-held values can remain standing.’

‘Quite a rant.’ Spike smiled touching Pete’s arm with her fingertips. ‘This reminds me of the good old days. Can you remember when we used to stay up nearly all night discussing these things?’

‘Yes, I remember how - often - everyone else would be having wild parties - all sorts of things going on - and we would be just sitting there, talking earnestly while it all went on around us.’

‘Somehow, I don't think we were ever the stereotypical rock 'n' roll animals,’ Spike said. ‘But that's just it isn't it?’

‘What?’

‘Rock has always existed by balancing somewhere between art and show business. These days it seems - with art reduced to just another part of show business itself - to have accepted that it is purely show business. It’s just another branch of the global entertainment industry that dominates the world now. Rock is now just another of the circuses, where its heroes can make plenty of bread before retiring to the paranoid seclusion of the Hollywood Hills. So we - people like us – who thought of rock as showing the way to the promised land, if there are any more of us left - are left with just the ghosts of our memories.’

The CD ended and Spike got up to change it. The new one was something slow and jazzy. She started talking again, before Pete had a chance to ask her what it was.

‘I think we fooled ourselves,’ Spike said. ‘When you are young, you can see the sheer simplicity of it all. We thought it would be so easy. We thought we knew what we were doing.’ She was silent for a moment or two. ‘There was a revolution in a way, though. If you do not believe me, just go back - as I said earlier - and have a look at some news film from the days before the Sixties, and compare it with what came afterwards. It is like two different planets. It's just that it was nowhere near the revolution we wanted it to be.’

‘Yes, I know all that,’ he said, lighting another one of the ready-made spliffs from the box. ‘But what was alternative then - back in the sixties and seventies - has now become subsumed into the mainstream. It has all been absorbed into the modern world, into ordinary life. There are no outsiders now, no rock 'n' roll rebels. All the folk-devils exorcised and the villains rehabilitated. All those rock ‘n’ roll animals and devils are now the new media darlings or playing villains in the global entertainment pantomime. We, they, did change the world, if only slightly, and that changed world has absorbed us.’

‘It is hard to accept that the world did not change in the way most of us wanted, that's true,’ Spike said. ‘There is still so much out there to protest over, to fight against. Other things have changed though. The hangover from the Victorian period of extreme hypocritical up-tightness is almost gone. Snobbishness and class differences mean far less than they used to.’

‘But… I still get the feeling that it ought to be very different. That something is not quite right about it all. I still feel let down by it, disappointed with it. I feel that it ought to be - somehow - different to this, but it isn't.’

‘Soooo…’ Spike stretched out on the seat next to Pete. ‘What conclusions can we draw from our little seminar?’

‘Fuck knows,’ he said.

‘Ah, so… the same conclusion as always.’ Spike laughed. ‘You know, maybe we would have been better off, forgetting all this stuff and joining in the parties with the rock 'n' roll animals.’

‘Maybe,’ he said, stifling a yawn. ‘From what I can see, it would have amounted to much the same thing. We took ourselves far too seriously - and for what? Nobody cares that much.’

‘Oh, come on,’ Spike said. ‘At least if we didn't change the world, at least we escaped the dull lives that were waiting for us, and - maybe, just maybe - our songs did add something to other people's lives. Isn't that enough for you? How many other people can say they achieved even that?’

‘I dunno,’ Pete said. ‘Is a bunch of songs enough? I mean, I can remember when songs, music, mattered more to me than almost anything. But now… now…. Along came MTV and bloody music videos and that was the end of the possibility of popular music as anything meaningful.’ he shrugged. ‘I used to think too, that our music was the truth - or, at least, a kind of truth - but I'm not sure about even that any more.’ He turned to face Spike. ‘Do you think we lied?’

‘I don't know,’ Spike said. ‘No… I don't think we lied. We may have been naïve at times, but I don't think we lied. I don't think many people take music, even rock music, as seriously as some others, as people like us.’

The CD had long since ended, but neither of them seemed interested in changing it.

‘Sometimes I forget that I’m a different person to who I was back then. I listen to some music and part of me still feels as though I am still that person. But, then there comes a time part-way through the song, or album, when I suddenly start to feel the distance between who I was then and who I am now.’ Pete shrugged sadly. ‘Then I can’t listen any more.’

Pete was still facing Spike, she smiled and the smile turned into a yawn.

‘I don't think I could stay up all night arguing these days anyway,’ she said. ‘In fact, I don't think I'd want to.’

‘I know what you mean, and that is part of it too,’ Pete drank the last of the beer. ‘I've lost all that… that… idealism, that fervour. I just want to go to bed.’

Spike stretched out again, yawning at the same time. Pete noticed her silk shirt ride up, exposing the flesh of her stomach. She noticed he was looking. She took his hand. ‘Come on, then.’

‘Where?’

‘We are going to bed.’