Free The Singer by Cathi Unsworth Page B

against me, smiling her cat smile, almost purring. ‘That’s right, Gavin,’ she nodded. ‘The year Eddie is going to take me on to better things.’ She said it semi-sarcastically, but there was humour underneath her tone and almost a touch of pride, I thought.
    ‘I’ll drinkto that,’ Granger raised his glass again.
    ‘To better things,’ he said.
    ‘To better things,’ we chorused as our glasses clashed and the bubbles rose up their stems and the sky was full of stardust and coloured lights.
    Just like my dreams.

7

Heart Attack Machine
    August 1977
    It was one sticky hot evening in August when Stevie heard the news. He was due at practice, in Lynton’s dad’s garage by sixthirty. But now it was pressing seven and his brother Connor still wouldn’t let him out of the pub.
    ‘Just ’old your ’osses, our kid. You’re gonna like this, believe me,’ Connor plonked another half of Tetleys down on the already soddenbeer mat in front of his brother, while Stevie fidgeted with his hair, his cigarettes, and his hang-nails impatiently.
    Inside the King’s Head on Hessle, you could see the dust swirling in the shaft of sunlight from the open pub door, just the way the cloudy beer swum down from the tap. It was over 70 degrees outside, and still Connor insisted on skulking down in the snug, where he had commandof the jukebox, the dartboard and a view of the entire room.
    Stevie’s brain was churning. Five weeks they’d been getting the band together, scraping and shaping the frameworks for songs. Lynton’s dad had let them have the garage, he was so grateful tosee his son finally settling in with local folk. They lived in a big house on the Avenues, far enough away for Kevin to be safe from Dunton’s pryingeyes. And with the kit that Stevie had promised him, the speccy twat was finally coming into his own.
    Lynton, who was after all the expert, said Kevin could play. Stevie realised it straight away. It weren’t just a question of technique, it were more like, he could swing. And Lynton, with the bass his parents had got him second-hand, twanged along with him, mastering the notes with seeminglyapparent ease, scratching the beginnings of a deep, menacing rumble.
    Stevie could keep up with them, just. The more he practised, the bigger the noise he could get out of the Holner, which he’d painted with a Union Flag to match the ‘God Save The Queen’ cover. It wasn’t quite the Jones sound he was after, though. The way it came out was more fractured, nervy. It suited the sound they were making.

    In fact, the tentatively titled Dead City even startled themselves at the way they intuitively worked together. It was almost like the music they were hatching had already been lurking there, somewhere in the atmosphere, waiting for them to grab hold of it.
    Only trouble was, none of them could sing. The other two had naturally assumed Stevie would take that role, but two things went against him.One, he still found it too hard to remember his chord sequences and sing at the same time. Two, he sounded like a foghorn.
    Kevin claimed he couldn’t sing either, and Stevie didn’t make him prove it. Only cunts like Genesis had singing drummers anyway. And Lynton…Well, Stevie suspected that he could, but he didn’t want to. Lynton wanted to be in the background. He was too thoughtful and shy tostand up front.
    What were they gonna do about it was what Stevie was wondering, as the reason for his imprisonment in the King’s Head came bowling through the bar.
    Terry Gough and Barry Hill were two lads in thick with Connor. Like Stevie’s brother, they dressed like Teddy Boys, with thick, greased-back hair that they were always running combs through, lurid coloured drape suits and thick-soledbrothel creepers.
    Terry and Barry were the source of Kevin’s drumkit, and the black drape suit that Lynton wore in homage to Rotten. They worked as roadies-cum-bouncers for local entrepreneur Don Dawson, who ran a handful of pubs