Get Into The Light: Chapter Six - Bruce Springsteen's not a Big Fan of Dutch House Music

Forest was a journalist and had written a semi-successful biography of Bruce Springsteen. He was also (Carl said) passionate about ‘smart drugs’. Smart drugs were presumably different to the substances I’d taken at the Milky Way - substances that had dissolved the contents of my stomach, transformed my feet into magical hooves and afterwards made my head feel like an abandoned classroom with the windows left open. No, instead of being stuck in bubble of loathing/love, Forest spent his toilet time constructively - he networked, started conversations, had his head screwed on - his mouth moving up and down rather than side to side. As a consequence of taking ‘smart drugs’ and clever networking, Forest knew most of the people who mattered in the Dutch music industry (there were about eight or so) and he’d finally managed to get the financial backing to start his own dance label. And people still talked about the fact that he knew Bruce Springsteen except he never really talked about it himself. In fact the only time he made the connection more explicit was when he rolled up a baseball cap and hung it from the back of his jeans in tribute the iconic record cover.

The first time I met him I was disappointed. In my mind, the King of Dutch Dance Music would be an elegant and refined creature, like Blake Carrington, beautifully dressed in a pin-striped bespoke suit with a ravishing, spider-lashed woman on his arm (this was the price you paid for growing up with American soap operas – financial success always involved shoulder pads and lashes of lip gloss) but in reality Forest looked like a slightly weary art teacher. And male art teachers didn’t necessarily have a nice bank of associations. We’d had a particularly lecherous bunch at the girls school - they’d let us smoke, encouraged us to drink vodka out of tea cups whilst we painted our dreadful still lifes of mackerel and tomatoes on gingham cloth but then herded us into the dark room, one at a time, breathing heavily in our ears whilst we tried to focus on the plastic tray of developing fluid – slowly revealing images we’d taken that day of young girls smoking and drinking with heavy breathing art teachers lurking nearby. Forest looked of this type.
‘That’s him,’ Carl said as we cycled up to the terrace of the café, ‘You’d never guess he knew Bruce Springsteen.
‘Are you sure it’s really him?’ I said trying to conceal my disappointment.
Carl and I sat down in the two chairs opposite. We ordered coffee (I ordered in Dutch and mentally high-five-d myself because the guy didn’t reply in English). But I’d been right about Forest’s art teacher vibe. The lecherous angle of it anyway. He didn’t divide his stares equally - the balance was firmly tipped in my favour.
‘When I first heard ‘I Call Upon,’ he said licking his teeth which stuck out at a right angle from his face, ‘ That’s what you’re going to call it yes?’ he licked his teeth again, ‘Well I loved it. Okay, it’s not the most original track I’ve ever heard but it’s definitely good enough to be a club hit.’
‘Well we aren’t trying to be Brian Eno,’ Carl said.
Forest licked his teeth again. The everyday mechanics of healthy tooth lubrication weren’t working very well for him it seemed.
‘It’s definitely not Brian Eno.’
Carl shook his head and lit a cigarette.
‘It’s mainstream House music. It’s not going to change the world. I’m under no illusions.’
‘That’s good. I hate dealing with pretension. Dance music is dance music. It serves a noble enough purpose as is. It opens peoples minds, it makes them feel like they’re good at dancing- it helps them dream of possibilities,’ he licked again, ‘Have you heard of Lazer 6?’ Forest said.
‘Of course. They’re huge.’
‘Yes well you either love or hate them and there’s a lot of jealousy out there at the moment because we’re hardly rolling in 2Unlimiteds and everyone wants to be the next big thing but these guys manage to do dance music and be completely credible at the same time. And the dancer girl, the Russian - what’s her name- Sun? She’s out of this world- she is literally on a different planet,’ he licked once more, ‘Such sensuality, such commitment, such abandon- it’s something I’ve never seen before. Not here in Holland anyway.’
‘You’re right. She’s pretty good,’ Carl said.
‘Are they signed to your label?’ I said.
‘No. I wish! They’re signed to Star System. But that’s not to say we can’t learn from them. We know what works now- two girls at the front dancing- that works. And two guys at the back -that certainly works. And total commitment to the music or at least the appearance of commitment.’
‘I’m not very good at dancing,’ I said.
I was picturing what total commitment might look like. I was worried about the implications.
‘It’s not called dancing. It’s called alchemy. That’s it - pure and simple.’
He licked his teeth again. I tried to look at Carl to see if he was distracted by this 24 Hour Tooth Wash but he was rubbing his stomach- he always developed stomach pains when he was nervous.
‘There’s no room for self consciousness in this game,’ Forest said.
Carl excused himself and went to the toilet. I drained the last dregs from my cup. It was fine to talk about these things in an abstract sense- there is always a side that excels at whatever we turn our hand to and I can’t have been the only person who secretly believed I could have run the fastest 100 metres in the world if I’d only been given the right circumstances - but I couldn’t help thinking through all the catastrophic errors and misjudgements I’d made on various dance floors in the past- like trying to do the running man and ending up with stitches in my chin or the time I sampled head banging and head butted the girl next to me and had to go home and sleep with a bag of frozen peas on my head. Sure there was nothing wrong with enthusiasm - enthusiasm and commitment were strong positives but these things had to be counterbalanced with skill, poise and dexterity- all that good stuff. I scraped the cup with my teaspoon. Forest continued to stare. He licked his teeth. I wondered if he was expecting more than a bit of heavy breathing in the dark room.
‘Do you really think we’ll be successful?’ I said feeling awkward - he hadn’t just undressed me with his eyes- he’d gone further with that final stare – we’d actually done the deed, had a cigarette, got dressed and then run hurriedly back upstairs to get undressed again.

At the same time, I needed to be realistic - these things were common. If I wanted to get ahead, be Queen to his King, I needed to flatter his ego, perhaps even kiss the two hulks of dead stone that hung from his lips - especially if he really was that important and not just a restless art teacher from South London. Even Carl would kiss them if it meant it would change our lives forever.
‘Of course you’ll be successful,’ Forest said stubbing his cigarette out in the ashtray, ‘I wouldn’t be wasting my time talking to you otherwise. Do I look like a complete loser?’
This was exactly what he looked like. There was nothing about Forest that suggested he was head of a semi-successful dance label, that he carried authority, had money to do the things that people dreamt about when they were drunk on the toilet. And it was hard to believe that this salivating, art teacher was my MEAL TICKET and that soon he’d sweep me away from the overpowering man smell, fag ash and urine and onto something so much better. Was the rabbit man really able to offer hope?
Forest lit another cigarette and stared some more.
‘Have you really met Bruce?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘Does he like Dutch House Music?’
‘I doubt it. It’s not really his scene.’
He licked his teeth again.
‘Do you want some Chapstick?’
‘No, why do you ask?’ he said his tongue gliding back and forth like a windscreen wiper.
‘Nothing. I just love this stuff. It stops all that licking you know,’ I rubbed some on my lips to illustrate the role and place of alternative sources of moisture in maintaining lip and mouth hygiene. Except Chapstick didn’t really work for teeth.
‘We have a love/hate relationship with the English you know,’ Forest said.
‘I can’t say I’ve noticed. Everyone’s been really friendly so far.’
‘We sometimes get a little jealous of the English it’s true.’
‘Well I guess when it comes to music I can see where you’re coming from.’
‘Don’t forget Golden Earring,’ Forest said.
I looked away. A woman had fallen from her bicycle and was trying to get it back into an upright position without crying too much. She must have been English – I felt a pang of sympathy. We would never be able to ride bicycles as well as these people but we would have better music than Golden Earring that’s for sure.
‘And Lazer 6,’ I said.
‘And Lazer 6,’ he said.

And just like I believed anyone really successful looked like Blake Carrington, so I also imagined we’d get a huge amount of money when we signed, certainly enough to move out of the spaghetti sauce chamber with the bathroom floor so cold you had to give yourself a pep-talk for ten minutes before taking a shower. But we weren’t Golden Earring yet. Weren’t even Lazer 6 standard.

One month later and Carl had finished three songs and I’d been hard at work writing lyrics. All it took was a couple of bottles of Grolsch, and an hour long session on Sonic the Hedgehog (which seemed to simultaneously wipe the slate clean and provide enough adrenalin and anxiety to spur me on). Except it became more and more difficult to step away from the game after the allotted hour, purely treat it as a mental warm up and then sit down at the typewriter for the meat of the day. Writing had the same emotional appeal as ironing. And it didn’t help that the typewriter was slow or that it took hours to think up an idea that went beyond ‘I want to dance. I’m in a trance.’ And in fact once you got those lines caught in your head, it was tough to think of anything bigger, better, more original- themes that hadn’t been explored in conventional dance music before- themes like incest, pollution or Bertolt Brecht. And perhaps Sonic wasn’t having such a good effect on writing so I cut that out and just smoked and looked out the window of the studio. But I could only think in rhymes. I abandoned the rhyming dictionary but everything was a permanent limerick unfolding in my head. Dance, Trance, Prance, Chance, Romance… so I typed these down and then tried to conjure all the rich emotions that were sitting down there somewhere - the slights, the tears, the punch ups with myself in the middle of the night but there was nothing. Had my brain really been wiped clean? Where had all the juicy stuff gone? It was like my whole existence was just reduced to the same pathetic, rhyming words and I’d never really suffered or felt anything for real and whilst I knew this wasn’t Darkness on the Edge of Town, I wanted it to be good. I didn’t want to be one of those acts like Ace of Base that you laughed at when they came on the telly. Writing lyrics is hard. Writing lyrics for dance music is really hard. There’s a reason why all of the songs are the same. So I immersed myself in the competition and I listened to as much dance music as I could and sat with headphones on, rocking backwards and forwards whilst the divas sang about love, dancing, happiness, new states of consciousness, more dancing and love again. It seemed to focus primarily on the positive side of things. So perhaps the darkness was to be avoided. I wrote two pages in one night and pulled out key phrases from my Susan Jeffers book - ‘Feel the Fear And Do it Anyway’. Eddie, Charles and Carl said they were the best lyrics they’d heard in a long time.

I was finally on a roll.

Meanwhile, where there’s creativity, there’s usually some debauchery (that almost rhymes) or at least I felt this should be part of the narrative right now - if you spent the days and some nights searching your soul for new themes – not just rehashing -trance, dance, prance, France - then you deserved to go out and get absolutely wrecked because you had to live life in order to write about it convincingly. I wasn’t sure how this worked with people like Shakespeare but for me, I needed to feel like I was in the hot pulse with the other horses braying and clicking our silken hooves. But the frequency of going out became a problem. You probably need to be writing more than you’re going out if it’s going to work in some sort of positive way. And we quickly went from going out once a week to going out almost every night (apart from Sundays).

It was a well-worn course, a course traversed by many head-strong horses before me and I enjoyed wearing it down some more. Lynette’s tartan purse became as familiar to me as Granny’s shortbread biscuits. Before I’d had a long list of things I’d never try/do/inhale, now I justified trying everything in light of now being a bona fide artist. And there was peer pressure involved. It is tedious to hang out with a bunch of people who turn into monkeys after twelve o’clock and keep repeating the same sentences until they fall asleep. But I was wrong about the emotions, the deep stuff being too far down - it was right near the surface and all it took was a few tablets from Lynette’s special purse and they all came rumbling forth in no particular order.

Scene One
Location: ‘The Artic Dance,’- a boat moored in the docks covered in heaps of fake snow and bar staff dressed as polar bears, penguins and magical silver Eskimos.

I sit on the toilet at this party for over an hour and conduct a conversation with a piece of toilet paper. Carl and Lynette send out a search party and I miss the seminal performance of Lazer 6 and the Russian dancing that shows total commitment/alchemy. The toilet paper has a small mouth that speaks very slowly- it tells me that black hair doesn’t suit me, that the lyrics are really bad, nowhere near good enough for mainstream dance music anyway, that my parents will never recover from what I’ve done to them.

Scene Two
Location: ‘Alice in Cyberland’ a sports hall in Rotterdam. Dwarves dressed as rabbits, hedgerows made of green knitted wool and Alice in Wonderland S&M act that culminates in a man in a gas mask wrapping his girlfriend in bandages and then lowering her into a coffin.

At this event I start to cry in the chill out room – becoming utterly fixated on the time I ordered my best friend in primary school – Janice Brown - to pull down her pants and show her bum to the rest of the school. I cannot stop thinking about Janice. I am concerned for her welfare. I want to say sorry. Instead I hold hands with a man called Pansy whilst he strokes my face.

Scene Three
Location: ‘Back to Mother Earth’. On the outskirts of Amsterdam is a hippie settlement. It was only when I saw the film Apocalypse Now that I remembered this party properly.

I run from the ‘Mushroom Tent’ at two in the morning believing that I’m being chased by a pit bull. The dog doesn’t exist. It may have existed earlier in the day when the festival was much more family orientated and there was food and nice music but I am convinced the dog has returned now it is later, darker, Carl is nowhere to be seen and the DJ is playing music that sounds like a car backfiring into a choir of primary school children. It is the first time that my vomit comes up black. I end up sleeping next to a bonfire. I am too scared to go to the toilet and when no one is looking I pee standing up next to the fire. I am a cavewoman. I need to rely on my instincts. I cannot get the dog out of my mind for days. The dog represents something very bad. I try and use the dog to inspire new song lyrics but just write the same words again –dance, trance, romance, chance.

Sunday afternoons became all about recovery. There was no predicting what kind of experience would bubble up to the surface and each one left me exhausted and drained. Some of these things were emotions I’d never felt before. I’d had my fair share of unhappiness but it was easy enough to predict when this might occur- if one of the Croydon boys failed to call or I fell over and hurt myself or a friend told me I was a failure- these were all traditional catalysts but as soon as I went out and started taking different substances, anything could set me off on the wrong track. It wasn’t good to be left alone. I’d never liked being alone- had a strong sense that there was something inside that would rear up and do damage if left unsupervised for too long and yet Carl had another meeting with Forest. And it should have been exciting because it looked like we might actually make a whole album and we could start planning the shows properly (trying not to think about the dancing – the massive amount of improvement that was needed there) and it was the tinkling excitement that kept me going especially when it was three in the afternoon by the time I got up with no appetite, no mood to do anything and a sense that something somewhere had gone terribly wrong.

‘What were you talking to Eddie about earlier?’ I’d asked Carl before he left.
He’d just hung up the phone.
‘We were just talking about the new songs- what we need to do next. Whether we need to get some proper singing on some of them and then have some of the others with you speaking.’
‘What do you mean ‘proper singing’?’
‘I mean singing where melodic noise comes out and not just words,’ Carl said.
He was grumpy. Tired. The fact that he was thirty didn’t help with the nights wandering about in fields trying to lose his girlfriend who was peeing into a bonfire like a desperate cave ancestor.
‘What else did you say about me?’ I asked.
‘I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about the music itself.’
Carl looked into my eyes trying, no doubt, to read what was going on in my head. All manner of neurons were firing off, some were clambering on top of others and some were trying to elbow their way out of my ears. This place didn’t feel very safe anymore. There were better, more robust brains that could be found elsewhere.
‘You think I can’t understand Dutch properly so you talk about me on the phone and whilst I don’t understand most of what you’re saying, I’m not so stupid that I don’t recognise my own name when you say it. So you better just WATCH IT!’
I raised my finger to my eye and then pointed at Carl’s eye in a threatening manner. It was the kind of thing Mum would have done to signal she had her eye on me. I’ve never used it before and never will again. It didn’t look right.
‘Why would I be talking about you?’ Carl said.
‘Because you want to use ‘proper singers’ and want to ditch me and if that’s the case then you just need to come right out and tell me. Be honest. Tell me to my face.’
Some of the neurons were half-way down my arms by now and were trying to jump from my jeans into the carpet, then nestle down for a while till someone arrived with a slightly more predictable brain to hang out inside.
‘You need to get out for a bit Lola. You’re getting a little paranoid. I told you about the singing thing so I’m not doing anything behind your back and I never talk about you- to be honest I don’t see any reason to. I’m happy. We’re happy. What’s the problem?’
And I felt bad then because we were happy. When I could find him, when we were out, yes we were happy, that was true.

I flicked on the TV. It wasn’t working as usual and took four or five attempts to fire it up. Press button in, hold, pull finger off very quickly, apply just the right amount of pressure, feign disinterest, stare out window, off and then on one last time and a flicker of green light and MTV came on.

‘On today’s chart we have Billy Ray Cyrus at number 5, Prince at number 4 with ‘Diamond’s and Pearls’ and here’s the new video that everyone is talking about- Nirvana and ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’’. I settled onto the sofa and lit a cigarette. I’d watched the video so many times before. And every time I watched it, I realised that I was deluded. There were people who had talent, real talent and then there were poor fools who tried but really were better off scrubbing toilets. It wasn’t just a case of having the feelings- you also had to have a way of channelling those feelings so other people understood and not only understood, were moved in some way.

The phone rang. It was Lynette. Joost, the guy that we’d met at the Milky Way several weeks before wanted to take photos of the two of us. I suspected that he wasn’t that interested in taking photos of me but perhaps this feeling would wear off once Sunday came to an end. Lynette had just completed a couple of stage outfits and she was excited about the idea of wearing them for the shoot because it would be the first real piece of publicity we’d done together.
‘So when are we going to do this photo shoot?’ I asked.
I was thinking about the difference between real talent and the milky, limp stuff that leaked out of my fingers whenever I sat down at the typewriter.
‘9.30am tomorrow. I’ve hired a room upstairs in the Milky Way. Bring any of the clothes that you really like.’
‘I don’t like very much at the moment.’
‘Is something wrong?’
‘I just feel sad.’
‘We all feel sad on Sundays. But this is exciting. And whatever happens, you’ll have some amazing photographs you can show your grandchildren.’
Amazing was one way to describe them. There would be other words to describe them too.