Rock and Hard Places (19 page)

Sensing our disappointment at the lack of freely-flowing lager, the soldiers take us on a tour of the barracks, letting us climb around inside their Saxon APCs and look up into the surrounding hills through the sights of their rifles. It’s very sweet of them, but the novelty is lost on me: my father is in the army in Australia, and I grew up in military barracks. If I wanted to play with tanks, I’d have stayed at home,
where I could at least have got a drink. Still, we can’t complain: the Lancashires feed us in their canteen, buy us a round of Cokes in their bar, round up some mattresses for us to kip on in the guard room, and see us off with hot, sweet tea and handshakes just after dawn.

 

ONLY A DAY late, we’re in Sarajevo for lunch. Our rendezvous is Kuk, the venerable Sarajevo club in which China Drum will play tonight and tomorrow night. A few people have gathered here, clearly wondering what’s happened to us. I’m happy to catch up with several friends, including unfeasibly attractive translator Ida, to whom I present a photo of Robert Smith that I got him to sign for her last time I interviewed him; sadly, she doesn’t seem any more disposed towards marrying an unshaven hack in a bad Hawaiian shirt than she was last time. I also see Jim, who’d shown me around the Sarajevo suburb of Grbavica a few months previously, on the day it was handed back to the Bosnian government by its departing Serb population. Jim has been saving a delightful snippet for me: in the three weeks after we’d been pratting about in the ruined district, IFOR mine clearance operatives had discovered and removed 11,000 devices.

Our day at Kuk begins with a press conference, at which reporters from Sarajevo radio stations and magazines ask China Drum what they’re doing here. To China Drum’s credit, their attitude is devoid of any righteous, crusading aspect. They happily admit to being hazy on the details of Balkan politics, and explain that their rationale was always less “Why?” and more “Why not?” They name their influences (The Police, Stiff Little Fingers, The Undertones, Hüsker Dü, not The Cult) and recite the band’s history. “We used to play Wakefield snooker club for £12.50,” mourns Bill, to general mystification.

China Drum are then interviewed for the television music programme
Channel 99
by the extravagantly permed-and-moustached apparition of Zelimar Altarac-Cicak, a sort of Bosnian John Peel figure. He asks China Drum what it was like touring with Ash and Supergrass, and what they think of the recent Sex Pistols reunion.

The next port of call is the studio of Radio Zid, where the band give an interview, I drop off a large swag of CDs I’ve blagged for them from various record companies and then get interviewed myself about the last time I came to Sarajevo, to meet the city’s rock bands, and
the piece I wrote about them. The people at Zid seem genuinely and humblingly pleased by the story, though it’s peculiar to find myself explaining Sarajevo’s rock scene to the people who told me everything I know about it in the first place.

Back at the venue, that fearful ennui that sets in between soundcheck and gig is proving as tempting an arena for foolishness as it would at any other venue anywhere else in the world.

Someone says that, actually, if you think about it, and forget the videos for a minute, The Cult did make some quite good singles.

“No!” comes the well-rehearsed response. “I won’t have that! There’s a place in Eastbourne!”

I shamefacedly mutter something about the descending guitar riff from the opening bars of “She Sells Sanctuary” being an oddly satisfying one to play.

“You can play it?” asks Stealth.

We all know what we’re thinking. China Drum’s instruments are all set up. There’s nobody in the venue apart from a few Bosnian journalists.

Stealth, one of China Drum’s roadies, and me bound onto the stage and seize, respectively, bass, drumsticks and guitar.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” announces Stealth. “We are . . . Suck!”

We clatter through “She Sells Sanctuary” and, seeing as how we’re here and they’re practically the same song, “Love Removal Machine.”

“Thank you!” announces Stealth, as I try to armwheel up a proper heavy metal ending. “Suck have left the building! Goodnight!”

China Drum’s own set, and that of support band Z.O.C.H., are considerably more auspicious, and a capacity crowd energetically demonstrate that Bosnians dance like they drive.

There’s still an 11:00 PM-5:00 AM curfew enforced in Sarajevo, so post-gig revelry is cut short. We retire to a variety of spare beds, couches and floors.

 

ON SATURDAY MORNING, at the behest of The Serious Road Trip, we make the drive about an hour west of Sarajevo to Pazaric, a run-down psychiatric hospital situated amid some of the most green and rolling of Bosnia’s infinite resources of green, rolling hills. The Serious Road Trip have bought performers here before, and China Drum play the
inmates as normal a set as they can manage with an acoustic guitar and a set of bongos.

The afternoon is given over to sightseeing in Sarajevo—a city which remains an attractive place to look at and a pleasant one to spend time in, despite the best efforts of the Bosnian Serb Army—and a six-a-side football match. This takes place on a concrete pitch behind a billiard club, and may be the first game in the history of the sport in which fluffed chances can be legitimately blamed on unlikely bounces caused by shrapnel craters. Much I care: my team wins 2-1, the winning goal put away by Stealth from my cross (“cross” in this case being a term denoting an attempt at goal sliced so badly it left my foot at a right angle).

At Kuk that evening, the second gig, supported this time by Protest, is just as mayhemic a success. Afterwards, China Drum head back to Radio Zid to co-host the night shift. If “There’s a place in Eastbourne!” is not now a popular catchphrase in Sarajevo, it isn’t China Drum’s fault.

“MORNING, FAWLTY!”

Morning, Major.

“Have you seen my paper?”

Under your arm, Major.

“Ah, so it is.”

Getting in the bus first is never a good idea.

“Morning, Fawlty!”

And so on.

After night and the curfew have lifted, we’re on our way. Due to China Drum’s commitments back in the real world, we’re going to do Sarajevo to London in one go. This plan stays on track as far as a village on the southern outskirts of Vitez. There is an enormous bang, the truck bounces violently, and lurches to a stop.

“Shit! Is everyone okay? Are you okay? I’m okay! What the fuck was that?”

Everyone is shouting again because everyone, again, was thinking the first thing you think when you’re driving along a Bosnian road and you hear a loud bang and your vehicle leaps into the air. It turns out to have been a speed bump that was bigger than it looked from a distance; for the effect it’s had on the truck, it might as well have been
an anti-tank mine. Smoke is pouring from the brake pads, front and rear. Adam reacts decisively.

“Right,” he says, brandishing his video camera and carrying the football over to a vacant lot across the street. “Positions, everybody, please. We’re going to get that Gascoigne goal right if it kills us.”

Those guardian angels otherwise known as the Queen’s Lancashires happen past again.

“We’ll get you a mechanic,” they say, sounding surprisingly jolly, as if they haven’t yet done enough for us. “Wait here,” they add, like we’ve got a choice.

An hour or so later, we’re back under way; in the dust on the back of the van, one of our number has inscribed the words “Arses in transit, Bosnia and Herzegovina, summer 1996.” Cresting a hill along the stretch of the road that passes through Republika Srpska, we find the route blocked by four armed men wearing purple camouflage. Whatever you believe about judging people by appearances, there are a few assumptions you can safely make about men wearing Bosnian Serb Army uniform in this part of the world, and none of those assumptions make us happy about having guns pointed at us by them. The one of the four who seems the least drunk and the most in charge—neither is much of a distinction—asks for our passports. Max, in the passenger seat, hands the stack over.

“What are you doing here?” asks the sentry.

“We’re a rock’n’roll band from Newcastle,” explains Max.

Not the answer he was expecting, to judge from his expression. His men lower their rifles and let us through.

In the hours it takes us to drive to the border, we manage to get menaced by both of Bosnia’s other querulous factions. During a petrol and football stop approaching Bihac, Stealth gets an animated lecture from a Bosnian policeman with conspicuous scarring around one temple and a distracting way of waving his pistol about while he talks. We eventually deduce that he’s displeased by Stealth’s camouflage-print shorts. His point made, the cop gives us all patches and stickers bearing his unit’s shoulder-flash. At the border, Croatian customs officers search everything bar the clothes we’re wearing, but given the way we must all smell by now, I think they’d have left us alone even if we had all had suspiciously grenade-launcher-shaped bulges in our trousers.

ONCE CLEAR OF Bosnia, we settle into the ennui and
Monopoly
of the long road ahead. At the Slovenian border, it becomes apparent that we’ve relaxed too soon. They won’t let us in. As far as we can understand, there’s a problem with our paperwork. Phil, the veins in his forehead throbbing impressively, explains that the paperwork we have now is exactly the same as the paperwork we had when we were let into Slovenia coming the other way three days ago.

“You do not have permit,” says the official. “You must return for permit to Zagreb.”

He mutters something else about a green sticker we don’t have in our windscreen. We’ve never had a green sticker. We’ve never heard of a green sticker. There was nothing about green stickers in the brochure. Getting one from Zagreb now would add another eight hours to what is already going to be at least a forty-four-hour drive, an enormously depressing prospect. It’s like being told two songs into a Morrissey gig that he’s going to do an encore.

We consider our options in a layby.

“There’s another crossing 20 kilometres away,” says Stealth, consulting a map.

“But what if they want this fucking green sticker thing there as well?” asks Phil.

It’s hard to say who has the idea first; the attention of all seems to fall, as one, on Bill, who in the current
Monopoly
game (“No buying except on a double, all fines to be paid to the player on your left, every player immune from rent on one pre-named set of properties, er . . .”) has Regent, Oxford and Bond streets in his portfolio. The green properties.

“Brilliant!” yelps Stealth. He seizes the deeds from an aggrieved Bill (“Fucking hell, man, this is the first one I’ve looked like winning”) and affixes them to the inside of the windscreen with gaffer tape.

At the crossing up the road, we are waved through without question. The rest is easy.

 

 

 

I
N WHICH YOUR correspondent and
Uncut
magazine make a virtue of necessity. I’m fairly certain there was some pretty solid talk at one point that this piece was going to be my long-hankered-for, proper on-the-road-with-Bruce-Springsteen story. This plan fell through, for reasons I can no longer recall, possibly because my anguished subconscious has deleted them from memory, the better to prevent me from being caught muttering imprecations about the unfairness of the universe in queues, on buses, during dinner parties and so forth (I would, yes, quite like to interview Bruce Springsteen at some point).

It was Michael Bonner,
Uncut
’s associate editor, who suggested that we do it anyway. He observed, quite rightly, that Bruce Springsteen’s ongoing efforts to embody something of the best of his country made it uniquely possible, in his case, to write a tour story which would be as much about the places Springsteen was going and the people he was playing to as it was about the artist in question. With this idea in mind—of, essentially, conjuring something of a road movie to which Springsteen would provide the soundtrack—we settled upon the least alluring stretch of the
Magic
tour: St. Paul, Minnesota; Cleveland, Ohio; Auburn Hills, Michigan.

For all the mild sport that I make of those locations in what follows—St. Paul in particular struck me as a plausible facsimile of what it might have been like
to visit Leipzig in about 1974—there are no places I enjoy travelling more as a journalist than those that lie a way off the regularly trodden path in the United States. This is, admittedly, partly due to the way in which they compensate handily for my own awkwardness and laziness—which is to say that it’s not like you even have to make an effort to ask questions of the people in these places, as once they perceive even a few hesitant syllables of a foreign accent, you can neither shut them up nor pay for your own drinks. But I’d admire and enjoy that openness and generosity even if I wasn’t working.

So, I’d like to dedicate this chapter to all the people who shared a drink, their time, and their thoughts with me during this trip. I believe that there is much to be said for the theory that artists tend to attract the audiences they deserve, and on that score Bruce Springsteen has more to be proud of than most. Everyone I met, whatever their ideological inclinations, was astutely attuned to both the essential hope and the crucial melancholy at large in Springsteen’s songs, whether they were songs about the political, the personal or both. They all understood what Springsteen has articulated with greater facility than any other songwriter I can think of: that a decent man, and a great country, are perpetual works in progress.