Get Into The Light: Chapter Three - Don't Feel The Need to Vacuum Everything

‘How’s it going?’ Carl said, unpacking a couple of Grolsch beers from his rucksack, ‘Have you been thinking about the future?’
The potatoes were looking too mashy- they weren’t supposed to be mashy until you actually mashed them up. I drained them in the sink and they fell apart.
‘We’re having potatoes?’
‘What’s it look like?’

Having spent the afternoon on my own, it was now impossible to stop talking. Every other thought, in fact every thought forced out of my mouth in a lather of noise that flowed fast and straight and continued even when Carl’s plate was clean of mash. The supermarket was intimidating. There wasn’t any Marmite. The cheeses were all variations of the same theme. The flat was a tip. The flat was impossible to clean because it was too dirty. It looked like a crime scene. The Hoover was full of grey, dusty; insects that ran out of the nozzle and out onto the floor. These insects were dangerous. You would not find these creatures in England.
‘I’ll take you to the studio tomorrow,’ Carl said flatly.
This was better. This was healthier. A bit of time alone was fine but I needed company. I didn’t like being alone. It was different to being alone at home. Everything seemed more threatening.

The following morning, the bike route took us alongside the river and docks, much of the area still relatively undeveloped, still squats here and there, the odd, bewildered junkie blinking in the grim light of a spring afternoon. The wind, even in April was so cold that it made your teeth ache. Other cyclists hurtled past at break-neck speed. Carl tried to hang back so I could keep up. If you kept your head down you could escape the brunt of it but then it was impossible to see where you were going. Carl carved a path ahead and I focused on the back of his flapping coat and the blur of his porcelain ankles. There were certain rules and regulations as far as I could tell:
Pedal fast.
Take both hands off the handlebars and do variations of the finger.
Shout obscenities.
Never stop.

Give a Dutch man a bicycle and he becomes a maniac. Fearsome armies of cyclists all cursing and shouting and gesturing, all frustrated by the pathetic, milky, Spungen look-alike who’s legs never went fast enough, who had to get off at each junction and push because she didn’t want to be fed alive to a tram or a taxi. There was temporary respite as we neared Central Station and we got off and pushed for a bit. The studio was on the Herengracht, a wonky, red brick house with magnificent windows that reflected into the slate-grey canal. At night this was a fairyland- even in the daytime it didn’t look like a place where real people lived - all so rinky-dink, ordered and clean. The houses like rows of commuters pressed up against one another. Houses that didn’t have curtains because the inhabitants wanted people to see inside.

The top floor was Eddie’s apartment, equipped with a bathroom bigger than most people’s living quarters. Eddie liked to bathe. There was a separate recording studio on each floor. I’d only visited once before but it was clear that this place was special. These were the fruits of pure creativity. A palace to musicianship. Sega Megadrives connected to each and every television! Central heating! The bathrooms had lights that worked! It was a musician’s pleasure palace. Eddie’s bath towels dried your face rather than chased the moisture round.

The middle studio on the second floor hadn’t been finished for long - there were still tins of white paint and cardboard boxes lined up in the hallway. The noise coming from this studio as Carl and I ascended the stairs, was the noise of coffin lids being busted loose, corpses dropped from cliffs onto rocks, waves dashing these corpses to bits, bones and body parts being drilled and reassembled, made into ships and pirates mounting these ships, setting off to wreak havoc on the world.

I had only met Charles once before. He was chief engineer - Eddie’s right hand man. Carl said he never slept. Was a workaholic. Never happy until the noise was right. No one could identify what was right. It was right when it was right and what made the difference was a millisecond shaved off the trumpet sample that came in on the second bar. And he liked to use a few stimulants to keep him going. But it didn’t seem unusual to witness someone chewing his own lips. As we walked in, his eyes fixated on the monitor in front of him, squinting at a black and white graph as a line migrated across the screen. His chops went up and down in time. I thought about the monsters in the Hoover. Here was a bigger version of the same thing.
‘You need to adjust the bass,’ Carl said leaning across Charles’s keypad.
‘Don’t be a Klootzak!’ Charles said.
There was a lot of swearing. It was intimidating. There was so much man that it was hard to breath. Sweat hung in the air, the walls about to cave in with so many machines and DAT recorders. No one got their period. They didn’t say everything that came into their head. Later, when the place become more familiar to me, I got used to the fact that these men lived like cave dwellers, dropped whatever was in their hand and left it on the floor, gnawed at their lips, never rubbed soothing balm on their mouths and whenever the nightmarish noise started up rubbed their crotches against the mixing desk like they were trying to impregnate their own ball sacks.

The mixing table looked like the controls of a giant space craft with red and green lights flashing, computer monitors glowing and hundreds of buttons, plugs and wires hanging off of it. After the swearing fit, Charles offered his hand. It felt like it was attached to a shaking body. A body that wasn’t very reliable and didn’t like long walks in the sunshine or fruit smoothies. His limbs were long and lean, dressed in an ensemble of slim black jeans and polo neck. His head a small oval tea tray with skin so translucent that you could see the veins in his forehead frantically pulsating.
‘So you’re staying in Amsterdam?’ he said, holding out a cigarette.
‘It feels like the right thing to do.’
Charles didn’t reply and leant over the keyboard- he didn’t seem to enjoy talking. The noise started up again. I felt a hand on my shoulder. Carl had disappeared into the back of the studio. The cavemen were coming to mash my bones up.
‘Hey Lola,’ Eddie shouted over the noise.
He was smiling with a lop-sided grin- it looked like the bottom half of his face had melted. But he had colour in his cheeks. Like he indulged in a smoothie every now and then. He was well dressed- a clean shirt, tie and blue suit. Smelt vaguely of coconuts.
‘You know you can’t just hang out here whenever you feel like it,’ he said taking the cigarette from my fingers.
The noise stopped.
‘Except I’m joking so of course you can,’ he said.
He handed the cigarette back.
‘Or am I joking?’ he said going for the cigarette again.
It was disorientating to say the least.

The track finished and we all sat down. I rooted my feet on the floor to stop my head from spinning. They were reviewing the previous days work. The track was close to finished. The relief when it finished was complete. The room so quiet you could hear the creaking of the Dutch ancestors under the floorboards as they tried to wriggle their way deeper into the earth.
‘I like the lyrics.’
‘The lyrics are not quite there,’ Eddie said.
‘I thought they were pretty good,’ Carl said.
‘It’s hard to write good lyrics.’
‘It’s hard to be original.’
‘It’s called - ‘24 Hour Horny Mix,’ Eddie added.

The contrast between the day before, the day spent living inside my head, couldn’t have been more pronounced. Here there was too much stimulation. Behind each door, sat a creative mind, working away at creating the next, big hit. To say it was exciting would be an understatement. The possibility of success hung in the air. People didn’t just fantasise about it. And of course I wasn’t going home. I followed Eddie everywhere he went and despite his off-putting ways and strange odour, I wanted him to believe I could be part of it all.
‘Eddie- is there anyway I can work here? Are there things that need doing? Can I help with something?’
‘Don’t know about that,’ he said shaking his head.
‘Oh please. I am sure there’s plenty to do.’
‘Don’t think so.’
‘Please. I really want to get involved.’
Eddie rested his back against the kitchen cupboard. He pulled his cuffs out of his suit jacket and sniffed his wrists.
‘Do you like the scent I’m wearing?’
I nodded.
‘I will have to think about it,’ he said.

I went outside and walked over to the snack bar- ordered a milk shake and some chips. A sneaking suspicion that Eddie wasn’t going to think about it. This probably had something to do with the fact that I wasn’t a man who had great, big ball sacks and rubbed myself up and down the mixing desk at every opportunity. It was a gentleman’s club. Only they could make the terrible racket that made ordinary, everyday people froth at the mouth and lose their minds.
‘I thought about it,’ he said when I got back.
He grabbed a chip and shoved it in his mouth. Carl came down the stairs. I wanted to show him I could sort things out. And that he didn’t need to take care of me all the time.
‘The answer is NO,’ Eddie said smiling hard, ‘Except,’ he paused, ‘The answer is actually YES so I’m lying.’
Carl shook his head.
‘Or was I lying before, just back then?’
‘Stop messing about Eddie,’ Carl said.
‘Is it yes or no then?’ I said.

I’d hoped that I’d soon become part of this exclusive club, the exception to the rule –an apprentice to begin with, learn how to operate the machines, make the music and then take over the music industry - but this wasn’t the deal. Ultimately I trod the same path as many women who stand behind the male, creative geniuses of this world. I cleaned up. I spent three days a week pouring bleach into the toilet, wiping pee off the floor, emptying ashtrays, collecting the foil trays of greying, takeaways and humping the high-tech Hoover up and down the three flights of stairs. DJ’s and producers came and went. Singers sipped lemon juice and honey to protect their vocal chords. New genres of dance music were invented. Some of the songs became massive club hits. I told myself that the role I was playing was important. Someone had to clean Jim Morrison’s house and pick the pubes out of his flannel, go to the supermarket - otherwise he’d have run out of toilet paper and never had time to write great songs, becoming the repository of all our rock and roll fantasies.

And so it continued. The men ate chow mein and left noodles stuck to the floor. If the loo was occupied they peed in the sink. If the sink was full of dishes they peed in the plant pots. If I was cleaning the room with the plant pots in, they peed in a beer bottle (Carl was different, he had ladies ankles and always used the toilet). The kitchen overflowed with mess - it was like living in a slightly more glamorous student house. The Hoover became my friend. Meanwhile Carl got the opportunity to make a demo of some of his own material in return for helping Eddie and Charles mix - ‘Death Gabber House Volume 3’ (German release only). I was rarely allowed into the studios because the men worked all hours and couldn’t abide the sound I made sighing, vacuuming and dreaming of a better outcome. At best, I was allowed to sneak in when they came out to urinate.

It wasn’t long before I began to adapt strategies to get work done more quickly. I wanted to play more of a significant part in musical history and not be the girl stood in the back of the photo clutching a duster. On this particular day Charles was lying on the floor of the middle studio- spittle dried at the corners of his mouth. It was four in the afternoon and the room smelt like old fish laid out to rot in the sun. I switched the computer on and the screen sprang into life- the mixing table festooned with sticky pieces of masking tape and covered in a fine layer of dust and fag ash that would take hours to smooth away by hand so instead I attached the smallest nozzle onto the Hoover and started the woman’s work of cleaning the tools so man could go on to make the art that changed the world. Some of the levers were hard to vacuum because they moved up and down if you touched them. The keyboard looked like it was covered in a fine web of omelette. Grabbing the duster at my feet, I rubbed away at the keyboard whilst simultaneously sucking up the mixing desk- the concentration, sense of flow, at a push, almost as satisfying as writing a hit record. I heard a sound. Eddie stood in the doorway. His lips moving. I turned the Hoover off.
‘GODVERDOMME!!!’ he shouted.
Now I’d turned it off, I could hear another noise coming from one of the speakers- a small noise like a spider walking over the skin of a drum. It was the sound the computer made when it was upset. Charles sat upright and groaned. Eddie frantically grabbed at the mouse, looking at the screen. He shook his head. He spent a few seconds running his eyes over the mixing desk. Some of the levers were where they’d been before, others were not.
‘NEVER TOUCH this. Don’t even look at this. And never, ever VACUUM THE MIXING DESK!’
I felt my cheeks redden and a lump rising in my throat. I was trying to make it easy for these geniuses and I was cleaning up all their shit all day and yet they treated me like a complete imbecile! I ran from the room and sat down on the stair. My parents, their voices, their wrinkled foreheads were sitting close to the surface of things. The tiniest event made me reconsider my decision. Eddie emerged and shut the door behind him. Some new noise started – the sound, I discovered later of Charles trying to put right everything I’d destroyed – three days work wasted by my stupid mistake.
‘Don’t cry,’ Eddie said, ‘It makes me nervous. It’s not a big deal.’
I nodded, feeling dejected and stupid.
‘Except it is a big deal so don’t do it again.’

I needed something to counterbalance all that male energy, the weird games they played, the in-jokes and smans that came to an abrupt stop whenever I walked in the room. It was lucky that the friendship with Lynette developed at the same time. On my days off, we foraged together around Waterlooplein market looking for velvet jackets and bits of lace that Lynette made into spectacular outfits. Lynette had plans to be a fashion designer. If that didn’t work, she’d be a dancer. She was the kind of woman that cleared a dance floor of all female competition because you didn’t want to look pathetic next to her. She shared her flat with her boyfriend Pete. Pete had been in a band. And looked like he was still in a band. And for a while the band had done well, played the small clubs and collected a small group of fans. But like many other bands (and like Carl’s band), the lead singer looked around one day and thought ‘I need a bigger wig/ bigger hair/more money/I’m the one with all the talent anyway,’ and the band fell apart. But in many ways Pete still had the perks of being a rock star - a beautiful girlfriend, enough unemployment benefit to eat steak tartar for breakfast and slept most days till late in the afternoon. But it was obviously frustrating to never have the opportunity to showcase your talent anymore. Overall he seemed to have reached a point when crosswords became more interesting than getting into the Top Ten Indie chart. He yawned a lot. His body seemed to be shutting down like a bear going into hibernation. Amsterdam seemed to be littered with the leather-clad corpses of men like this- men who’d grown up on Golden Earring and thought one day they’d be the exception to the rule. You could count the number of famous Dutch rock bands on one finger so the odds weren’t stacked in your favour. But Pete had a cruel streak. He took his disappointment out on his lover. When Lynette went in for a kiss, Pete stuck his tongue out and turned his head to the side. When she danced in front of him, trying desperately to get him to want her, not wanting attention from anyone else but him, he took the newspaper and locked himself in the toilet. If he’d been Slash it would have been easier to accept. But he wasn’t Slash. And Lynette became a time bomb.

If you keep a woman at arms length for too long, something’s bound to go wrong.