Free Down and Out on Murder Mile by Tony O'Neill

time in British music. When I had left England, the whole Britpop thing had been falling apart. There was a very real sense that the party was somehow coming to a messy end. The new bands were all shit. The established bands like Oasiswere well past their primes, and even the really great bands like Pulp had started going through midlife crises. In LA, nothing whatsoever was going on. As far as music goes, LA is something of a black hole. People there were talking about a glam metal revival. The handful of cool bands floated mostly below the radar. All of a sudden everybody sounded like either Matchbox Twenty or Limp Bizkit. By the time I found myself in London again, New York bands were all over the press. It started with the Strokes, and then the Strokes’ imitators. Everything that bands had been doing in the UK suddenly seemed old. There was no effective response to the center of cool for the music universe suddenly being located on the East Coast of America. It seemed like everybody was looking for the next big thing in British music, so I figured, Why not us?
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    Our Peel session took place in a basement room at the Maida Vale studio. The place was huge and almost deserted. It had an eerie, hospital feel to it. The guys engineering the session had beards and wore cable-knit sweaters. They looked like a folk duo. We set up our equipment nervously.
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    â€œOkay, shall we do a quick run-through of one of the songs, to get levels?” the show’s producer asked through the talk-back system.
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    I gave him the thumbs-up. I counted us in and we started to play.
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    Shit.
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    I had forgotten to tell them to turn the bass down. Everything sounded like a mess. It astounded me that we had a bass player in the band who did not know how to play bass, yet didn’t seem to hear how terrible he sounded. He was completely unaware of his own incompetence. The song rattled along, and throughout it Louis’s bass line bounced around, in the wrong key and the wrong time signature, like the noodlings of a mental incompetent engaged in some kind of music therapy, yet he stood there with a big stupid grin plastered on his face as if he were maybe Tina Weymouth or Bootsy Collins. We struggled on, and after the song ground to a halt I looked over to the window of the producer’s booth. The engineers looked back at us in a kind of quiet puzzlement. I could see them thinking: “Is it meant to sound like this? Is this some kind of avant-garde thing? Or are they just completely inept?”
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    I cleared my throat and looked over to Elektra.
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    â€œErm…I think some of the levels are a little off. Let me go over and speak to them.”
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    I popped my head into the booth and called the producer over.
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    â€œYes?”
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    â€œErm…listen, is there any way you can kill the bass altogether? I mean, just take it out of the mix?”
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    â€œWell…sure. I can do that, but…”
    â€œThe bass lines are all programmed on the keyboards. We don’t turn him up when we play.”
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    â€œOh.”
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    He peered back through the window to look at the band again. Louis was still standing there grinning back at them.
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    â€œIt’s a kind of…care in the community thing,” I explained. “The girls just like having him around, like Bez from the Happy Mondays. Except he can’t dance.”
    â€œI see.”
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    I crept out and locked myself in the cavernous bathroom. The bathrooms were clean and smelled faintly of Pine-Sol. That was nice, at least. Nothing worse than having to shoot up in a dirty bathroom. I fixed and felt all of my anxieties about the session melt out of my body, through the soles of my feet and down into the tiles of the toilet stall. It was time to go make history.

12
DECEMBER
    On the Hammersmith and City line nodding—peaceful, all the way back to Kings Cross. It is Christmastime. I am waiting for RJ to show