Dance On Fire - Chapter 03

It looked dark out there. The roar of the crowd was low, dull, echoing around the arena like the moan of some mythical beast. Pete saw the sudden flash of a torch from near the opposite wing. His hands suddenly felt hot and sweaty, he wiped them on his jeans.
Henry saw what Pete was doing and laughed. Pete smiled nervously and shook his head. Henry turned away and Pete stuck his tongue out at the back of Henry’s head.

Des the Road, standing in front of the band, looked at each of them in turn. They all looked at one another and then nodded.

The low rumble of the crowd turned into a roar. It was impossible to distinguish a voice, or even to regard the sound as human.

Pete picked up his guitar and strapped it on. He stared down at it. It seemed strange, alien. He couldn’t remember how to play it. He couldn’t remember any of the songs, or even which song they intended to start with. He watched his hands moving. They seemingly operated of their own accord, outside his control. He shivered.

He looked up, and saw Spike walk up to the microphone. ‘Hello!’ She yelled and turned back to her keyboards, counting down with her arm.

Suddenly it all came back to Pete, and they were off. He could feel the thump of the drums through his feet and Annabelle's bass throbbing in the pit of his stomach.

Then they were moving. It was if the music were some vital force, as though the band were Frankenstein’s monster. They needed this… this… power to bring them into being.

Pete still found the transformation fascinating. The five tired and bored figures that had sat slumped - and, in Henry’s case, seemingly lifeless - in the dressing room, miraculously brought back to life by this force. A force that took the electricity flowing through the instruments and PA and blended it with the waves of energy flowing from the crowd to create some new greater force the band fed on, and, in turn, passed it through the instruments and PA back to the crowd again.

What bollocks, Pete thought. But he could feel it in his veins now, flowing strong and powerful. He watched his fingers moving over the frets with a grace and fluidity he had never expected to possess.

Spike moved from behind her keyboards, grabbed the microphone stand and dragged it over towards Pete, throwing her arm around his shoulder as they sang together into the same microphone. Pete grinned as he recalled this selfsame pose, a singer and guitarist together, from so many times in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. Keef and Mick, Rod and Ron, David and Mick and so many more, whose names he might just recall when he sat down with Spike, back in the dressing room.

The song ended and the crowd roared. Spike pressed him on the shoulder forcing him to bow with her. She stood up on her tiptoes and kissed Pete’s cheek, her eyes looking out at the audience.

‘Ain’t he lovely?’ she said to the crowd. Pete grinned sheepishly as the crowd roared back. He started on the intro for the next song, turning away from the audience as Spike sprinted back to her keyboards.

Pete turned to face the front again. ‘Twenty-odd years ago,’ he said into his microphone, ‘we played our first ever gig. We are now going to play the first song we played at that gig. This is it!’ He looked over at Spike and nodded.

‘One… two… three… four…!’ she yelled into her mike and they were off into Firestorm. There was a clearly audible roar from the crowd as they recognised the song.

Pete glimpsed Suzy in the wings; she was taking occasional notes in a small black book. She noticed him looking at her and smiled briefly at him, snapping the notebook closed. Pete stuck his tongue out at her. She laughed and mouthed something, but he couldn’t make it out. Pete shook his head and she shrugged. The song ended and he turned away from the microphone, walking over to get his towel from on the top of an amp.

Spike sat down at her keyboard and started to play the long slow introduction to Still Dreaming. Pete suddenly remembered an early review, years ago, which had questioned Spike’s musical ability. It had made some - unflattering - comparisons to Linda McCartney. Spike had laughed at it, but the rest of the band all could see how much it angered her.

Stan leaked Spike’s classical piano training to the magazine’s rivals in response to the review. One of those rivals had even found Miss Pringle - Spike’s old piano teacher - and interviewed her. Typically, Miss Pringle had said how saddened she had been when her star pupil had given up on Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert to become a 'pop' star. Spike had kept the cutting in one of her scrapbooks.

All too soon, it was over and they were back in the dressing room. They were all hot, sweaty and worn out. It was the last gig of the tour and they were all pissed off with one another in one way or another. They were sitting side but side, but not speaking, touching or even looking at one another.

Slowly they began to unwind. The tension eased slightly. Awkward conversations started, only to fade slowly into glances away from one another around the room. There was none of the partying, the antics, the food fights, which had marked the end of previous tours.

Each tour, Pete thought, gets more and more like some empty ritual. We go through the motions, but none of us still believes - except maybe Henry - not any more. But what else can we do? This is all we know. He looked over to where Spike was sitting, cradling a half-empty bottle of red wine in her arms and staring off into the distance. She seemed to sense his gaze and turned. She gave a weak, exhausted-looking smile and raised the bottle to him, before taking a long slow drink.

Pete smiled back, half-raising his hand in a gesture of acknowledgement. Had it really been twenty-how ever many years? He was still watching Spike, she seemed not much older than that first day they had met.

*

After leaving the pub, Spike and Pete spent that first afternoon together listening to music, and then discussing it long into the night. At first, Pete was unsure of what Spike was expecting from him. He could not tell if she was waiting for him to make the first move. But, he felt, there was something else, something beyond the usual female coyness in Spike’s attitude that made him reluctant to try anything. As Pete left – around midnight – they both agreed that they’d enjoyed the time together, and arranged to meet again the following day.

Three days after they had first met, they were sitting side by side on the bed in Spike’s room. Pete now understood that it was a student house owned by the university, which Spike shared with six other students.

The two of them were sharing a final spliff before Pete had to go. Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks was playing quietly on the stereo.

‘You know,’ Spike said. ‘It is such a relief to be with you. I feel so relaxed.’ She stretched out on the bed.

Pete could see the soft bare skin of her stomach in the gap between her jeans and where her shirt had ridden up. ‘Why?’

‘You don’t keep trying it on. When I say I only want to be friends with men, they all seem to take it as some sort of… coded phrase. They don’t realise that I mean it.’

Pete sighed in relief as he stubbed out the spliff. For once, his intuition had been right and he hadn’t buggered it up. He smiled as he got unsteadily to his feet.

At the door, Spike looked up at him blearily. ‘Friends, yes?’ She said.

‘Of course,’ Pete replied.

‘Good.’

They arranged when to meet again and said goodbye. Spike stared into his eyes. Their heads moved closer together, each inclining their face.

Spike suddenly blinked and turned her face away from Pete. His kiss landed on her cheek. Spike laughed and blushed. She held out her hand and took his in it. She squeezed, gently.

‘Tomorrow, then? About seven?’ She said, letting go of his hand and beginning to close the door.

‘Er… yes. Right. Of course.’ Pete stood for a moment, breathing deeply, as he stared unseeing at the closed door.

As the weeks passed, Spike and Pete spent even more time together, becoming almost constant companions. Pete kept searching; looking for the hint, the gesture, the touch that would mean that Spike wanted to take it further. But it never happened.

They began going out to the local rock club - The Pit - and to the university and other local venues to see bands. They tried to learn to play the stuff they had been listening to together. Eventually they began to talk about writing some songs.

Pete had notebooks full of what he - with remarkable originality - called ‘things’. Just sets of words that were neither song lyrics nor poems. Stuff that he felt he had to write down just to get it out of his head. They were, at best; loose collections of images, thoughts, ideas.

Together, Spike and Pete slowly began to shape this raw material. Spike had a knack for finding tunes, melodies, which turned some of those rough ideas of his into things that could almost be called songs.

Spike spent a great deal of time trying to convince Pete that he could sing. He took much persuading, but eventually she did manage to get him to start to believe it. After giving him a few tips she remembered from her own school choir days, Spike managed to convince him that he could do it. She also proved, with the aid of a cassette recorder, that he did not – as he claimed - sound like a sexually-ambiguous crow caught in a threshing machine.

Spike was the first to notice the punk phenomenon creeping up, getting attention in the music press. She read all the music papers avidly, so she was aware of certain new names and how they kept reappearing with increasing frequency: The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Damned and, as time passed, many more. She became excited about it all, but Pete was not so sure though, thinking that it wouldn’t be anything other than yet another short-lived, over-hyped craze.

It first struck Pete that something fundamental was changing - that rock was about to go through one of its periodic paradigm shifts - when they walked into The Pit one evening, and saw that Mott - the DJ - had lost his long flowing Robert Plant-style locks and now had a short spiky haircut.

Pete stood - just staring at Mott. ‘Bloody hell!’

Spike turned to see where Pete was staring. She laughed and took his arm, dragging him towards the bar. ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’,’ she said. ‘Come on, we are supposed to be celebrating your new job.’

Pete had – after a long search - managed to get another job. Starting the following Monday he was to be a storeman at the local electricity company’s head office.

They sat down together at a table and Pete told Spike about his new job. ‘It seems to involve shifting boxes and boxes of paper around - mainly to the computer room - and -mainly from the computer room - then emptying bin after bin of paper into the huge rubbish skips behind the building.’

‘Is that all?’ Spike said.

‘As far as I can see, yes. Anyway, that is the major part of it. But it also involves loads of other petty jobs that are too manual for the office-types to soil their delicate hands with.’ Pete smiled. ‘Although, there is an office called Data Processing. It’s a large room overflowing with nubile young women.’

‘Ah, now that sounds interesting.’ Spike leant forward, her chin resting on her hand.

‘Of course, being a storeman, I’m more or less invisible to most of them. But already - after only a couple of days in the job - I’m having fantasies about several of them. The trip up to Data Processing is becoming my favourite part of the job.’ Pete smiled at Spike’s grin. ‘Unfortunately, it is everyone else’s favourite job too. So, from what I’ve seen so far, our boss dispenses our trips up there as rewards for good work - by his standards, of course, not the company’s.’

‘But where do you want to go from there?’ Spike said.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Surely being a storeman isn’t the limit of your ambition. I can’t see you doing that for the rest of your life. Can you?’

‘Ambition? I’ve never thought about that before - not in job terms anyway. A job is a job - nothing more. Those in the offices - with suits and ties, and people like you, eventually, with university degrees - it is the sort of question people like you ask about yourselves: careers, ambitions, progress up the greasy pole.’

‘God, no…’ Spike looked down at the beer bottle in her hand. ‘A career, house, mortgage…’

‘Marriage?’

She looked up at Pete, sharply. She saw his smile and laughed ‘Yeah, right. No, I was thinking… last night… well, y’know… with this punk thing. I mean we have all those songs - a dozen good ones now, at least. Well… why don’t we try… well… try to form a band…?’

‘Good idea.’

‘Well, of course, you may not, and… well, your new job and everything….’ She looked up at Pete again. ‘What?’

‘Yes, I think we ought to. I talk about all, this career stuff, about ambition and all that being bollocks. But the only think I can ever recall wanting to be - except a bus conductor, of course - was to be in a band. So… yes… certainly. Count me in.’

‘Great. Cheers, let’s drink to it.’

‘Cheers, yes!’

‘Pete?’

‘What?’

‘Why a bus conductor?’

‘I dunno…. No, when I was a kid, really little… five or six, that kind of age. It used to impress me how they could stand up on the bus… y’know, while the bus was moving… without holding on, and collect the money and give out tickets without falling over.’

‘Ah,’ Spike said, smiling as she raised her beer bottle to her lips.

Dance On Fire is available here