The Singer (11 page)

‘The only thing I couldn’t work out,’ Stevens had said, twisting his glass between his fingers, ‘was why no one else had got in there first. There was a lot of competition coming straight after punk, anything with spiky hair and legs normally had a scrum of A&R men all waving their chequebooks around it. There were plenty in the audience that
night, as I recall, most of them majors, so I made sure Paul got me into that dressing room even before the set had ended. I thought I was gonna be smacking them off, and I knew they all had more money than me.

‘But as it happens, no. Apart from their girlfriends, I’m the only one in there. Paul makes the introduction and I’m chatting up Vincent straight away, with Steve and the others looking
more interested by the second. Then suddenly, boom, the door bangs open and there he is…the cock of the North, Mr Don Dawson.’

Stevens’s eyes had narrowed slightly and on the tape, his comments sounded more weighted than they had at the time, when it had all seemed a bit jovial.

‘He had the full get up, just so you understood. The suit, the rings, the football manager’s sheepskin and the great
smell of Brut coming on after him. Aha, I thought – so that’s why everyone else pissed themselves and ran away.

‘As soon as he clocked what I was doing, he was ready to start throwing his weight about, but—’ Stevens paused, sighed and examined his cuticles ‘—that’s not the way I do business. I made sure Vincent had my number and we took it from there…’

‘Did Dawson threaten you then?’ I had asked
at this point, and my voice came back highly overexcited.

‘He tried it on,’ Stevens said. ‘The problem was, he was their manager, their agent and their record company. That’s a clear conflict of interests and should it ever have got as far as a courtroom he wouldn’t have had a leg to stand on. No. Dawson used those old dog’s tricks that had worked for him before when he was building his ropey
empire on slots and comedy clubs up North. Well, they might have worked for him there…’ a shit-eating grin lit up Stevens’s face, ‘but it don’t wash down here.’

Then the subject of Dawson was closed, except in my head, where I wondered if the old bastard was still actually alive, and if so, how I could get hold of him.

Stevens spent the rest of the main course fondly discussing the band and
their achievements. They certainly came alive as characters, the way he told it. Stevie as a combination joker and grafter, the one who put it all together and kept it all together. Lynton as a modest musical chameleon. Kevin Holme as the drummer.

But it was soon evident that Stevens loved Vincent the most. He saw him as a total genius, not just as a songwriter, singer or performer but almost
as a visionary, a punk-rock William Blake who was too far ahead of his time. Following this analogy, he even
offered the surprising revelation that Vincent was a secret churchgoer. Stevens didn’t say if Smith ever saw any angels floating around in trees, but he did say the singer got a lot of inspiration from visiting the houses of the holy.

‘That’s why he was so pleased when he first got a place
near the Sacré Coeur in Paris,’ Stevens revealed. ‘You wouldn’t think so from his lyrics, but there you go. Maybe it was an extension of his faith in Elvis…’

Despite his comic flourishes, there was a level of respect in Stevens’s voice when he talked about Smith that he didn’t apply to the others. He regarded them with a more fatherly affection.

‘I’ve seen Stevie Mullin punch a bloke from one
end of the bar and out the door,’ he reflected, ‘but then I’ve seen him more protective and sensitive than Mother Teresa, especially when Lynton got himself into bother…’

Naturally, the record company boss didn’t want to talk too much about the darker sides of the story. ‘If he wants to tell you, then that’s fair enough, but I ain’t telling any tales out of school about personal problems. It’s
already on the record that Lynton got strung out, I can’t exactly deny it. Poor bloke was always too sensitive for his own skin, not surprising, really, considering where he grew up. Came across in his playing, though. He’s the best natural musician I’ve ever met, Lynton. You ask him how he learned the bass,’ Stevens raised an eyebrow.

‘I will,’ I nodded, remembering with slight distaste know-it-all
Mick Greer’s testimony on Powell. ‘But if you don’t mind me asking, all the articles I’ve read seem to blame Vincent for Lynton’s drug problems. Was that what you saw?’

Stevens pursed his lips and shrugged. ‘The trouble was with Vincent,’ he considered, ‘all along, he could do stuff that nobody else could. It just didn’t affect him in the same way. Spliff, speed, smack…it was the same to him
as a few jars is to us. A way of winding down, something amusing to pass the time. He could take loads of everything, drink like a mule at the same time, stay
up all night writing songs, or laying down tracks, or just talking in the bar, and there never seemed to be any payback. So what Lynton saw was pretty different from how it affected him. I don’t think Vincent had a normal constitution, therefore
I don’t think he did that old junky’s trick of turning on everyone around him. I know this sounds strange, but there didn’t seem to be any form of chemical or booze that he
could
get addicted to.’

‘Apart from love, mate,’ Gavin had said then.

Which was when I saw Stevens harden for the second time. ‘If you want to call it that,’ he muttered, then smiled, shaking his head as if casting off a
bad feeling.

The waitress came then to take our dinner plates and offer us the dessert menu. Stevens continued his commentary as his eyes scanned down the list.

‘Little Sylvana,’ he sighed. ‘Don’t make me speak ill of the dead, Gavin.’ He looked up and straight at me.

‘You want to be careful what you write about her. Seriously. Her family are loaded, they could shut you down like that,’ he
snapped his fingers.

‘Well he’s gotta write something about the bitch,’ Granger noted. ‘Otherwise, it’s not gonna be the whole story. You can’t libel the dead, whether the Schmoldberg family like it or not.’

Stevens continued to eyeball me in a way that was almost uncomfortable. ‘She was nothing but trouble,’ he told me, and on tape it sounded nonchalant, nothing like the moment it actually
happened. ‘Other people will probably tell you, continue to proliferate that tall story about them falling in love with each other over the sausage rolls at my Christmas party…’

Granger winced a bit at that and I suppressed a smile. So Mick Greer wasn’t so all-knowing, then.

‘Don’t you believe it. She had him in her sights a long way off. She was working up to it, and she seized her chance that
night. You want my opinion? You can write her down as Nancy Spungen – came over here to try and bag a Sex Pistol, wound
up with some poor little effeminate Scotsman who she quickly turned into a cripple. She got her own band out of it, and yeah, they were pretty good for a while, but that wasn’t really what she was all about. Little Sylvana wanted to write herself into some rock’n’roll legend
and she did so at the expense of everyone around her. Vincent, the band, that poor bastard Leith – all the ones with the talent.’ Then he turned on that smile again. ‘Fancy some dessert?’

‘Just deserts?’ quipped Granger drily, and everyone laughed.

‘Seriously,’ Stevens looked at both of us with a twinkle in his eye. ‘Get someone else to dish the dirt on that one. I don’t really want to talk
about her. I might have the most successful band in the world on my roster – but she lost me the best one.’

‘Fair play,’ Granger shrugged and the subject was dropped. I didn’t mind one bit. Stevens’s reaction to her after all this time was fascinating enough; I couldn’t wait to fill in the gaps elsewhere.

I waited till after dessert and cheeses, for the haze of brandies and cigars, before asking
probably the trickiest question of all: ‘What do you reckon happened to Vincent?’

Stevens’s eyes followed the smoke upwards and he smiled sadly. ‘I change my mind about that on a frequent basis,’ he admitted. ‘Sometimes I think he must have took a vow of silence with some dodgy monks somewhere and they’re still keeping him prisoner. That’s the only way of explaining how someone as noticeable
as he was has stayed AWOL so long. ’Cos, I don’t know about you,’ he nodded at Gavin, ‘but the Vincent Smith I knew wouldn’t just walk away from everything and go and be some old goat herder in Tibet or something.’

Gavin agreed. ‘Can’t see that myself either. He wasn’t exactly cut out for manual work.’

‘Or mucking in with the locals, fading into the background,’ Stevens nodded. ‘Nah, but that’s
a fantasy really, a distraction from thinking about the fact he’s almost certainly dead.’

Gavin looked down at the tablecloth, as if those words were a
bit too strong for him to take, and muttered: ‘Yeah. I came to the same conclusion myself.’

Stevens puffed on his cigar. ‘You can’t trust the police to find out anything,’ he said evenly, still looking at Gavin. ‘And foreign ones, forget it.
So I did hire a sort of a private eye myself to try and find out what happened in Paris.’

‘You did?’ Gavin looked amazed.

‘Yeah,’ Stevens blew a long plume of smoke up to the ceiling. ‘After about three months, when it became obvious he wasn’t suddenly going to turn up on the doorstep again. Course, the trail was long cold by then. Found out fuck all. Vincent and the lovely Sylvana were surrounded
by dealers and junkies while they lived in Montmartre, and you know how they all melt away when the cock crows. You can’t find out anything of substance from people like that.’

‘Is he still around, this private eye?’ I blurted, and Stevens blinked at me, totally amused.

I thought I’d said a stupid thing and he was going to laugh in my face, but instead he said kindly: ‘I might be able to dig
him out for you if you’re really interested. If he’s still alive and even remembers it. But I could show you his report and you’d be none the wiser.’

‘I just want to get a feel,’ I explained, ‘of what it was like there in Paris, just of what it felt like at the time, before he…went up in smoke.’

Stevens nodded. ‘I understand that. Give me your number and I’ll get back to you.’

He still sounded
genuine when I played back the tape. I was soon to realise that that lunch had been something of an initiation ceremony for me. Stevens already knew and trusted Gavin, but if he hadn’t liked me, I don’t think that anyone would have talked. After we’d gone our separate ways that day, with Stevens footing the entire bill, Gavin started to get the calls.

Lynton Powell was first. He rang Gavin to
say he could meet
us in a month, after he had finished the production on his latest album, which he needed to do in Los Angeles. Which was lucky, because that was where Steve Mullin was still hanging out with the metal boys, and he would put in a word for us while he was out there.

A few days after that, Kevin Holme agreed to meet. Of all of Blood Truth, he was the one who had always said the
least. Some of the articles I had in my archive scarcely even mentioned him, and Mick Greer’s only seemed to point out the amount of abuse he’d got off his fellow band members. So I was determined to let him have the say that no one else had ever allowed him. Hoped that would get him to open up, get me the inside line.

As it happened, on the day we were due to meet Kevin, Gavin got a commission
from the
Sunday Times
and had to jet off somewhere, so I ended up going it alone. At first, I was a bit wary of how it would pan out without Gavin making the introductions, whether it would be so easy to get the instant rapport we had with Tony Stevens.

But going it alone, it seemed afterwards, was a stroke of luck.

Kevin had asked us to meet him in his local, the Red Lion, off Stoke Newington
Church Street. It was a cavernous old ginhouse that slumped across the corner of the road, decked with garish banners offering various lager promotions, big screen football fixtures and dubious claims about being the ‘home of live music’. The list of upcoming attractions was a veritable
Who’s You?
of pub-rock dinosaurs and tribute bands, mirroring a clientele of aged hippies, wizened roadies and
threadbare one-hit wonders, who basked around the fruit machines in the lounge bar and looked up sullenly as I walked in for my one o’clock meeting.

They all looked as dull and hungover as the day was outside, and for a moment I felt an overwhelming anxiety that I wouldn’t recognise Kevin Holme amid the lined faces and faded tattoos that sat there with their roll-ups hanging from their thin lips,
yellowed fingers clawed around their flat pints of bitter.

But Kevin had chosen this venue because, he said, he was friends with the landlord and could get us a private room upstairs. I remembered I was supposed to ask at the bar for him and did so with relief.

The only bar staff around was a slight teenager with long, dyed black hair and a bolt piercing through his eyebrow. He looked like most
of his flock probably had the last time they were famous, in around 1984. Again, I had that weird sense that time was going backwards and made a mental note that this had to come through in the writing. The London of the rock community like some kind of Swiss cheese, riddled with wormholes in time.

Bar goth perked up when I asked him if I could find Kevin Holme anywhere. ‘Ah yih,’ he said in
the Kiwi accent that was now
de rigueur
of London barmen. ‘Go upstairs, mate, and turn to your lift,’ he pointed round the corner of the bar. ‘He’s in the function room. You can’t muss ut.’

‘Great,’ I smiled. ‘Can I get a pint of Four X to take with me? And d’you know what Kevin likes drinking?’

‘Don’t worry about that, he’s swit,’ the pasty youth told me. ‘Kivin only drunks muneral water, eh.’

I clocked his Sisters of Mercy badge as he poured my pint and thought to ask him: ‘Do you like his band, Blood Truth?’

He frowned. ‘Nuver heard of ’um, mate. I jist thought he was a sussion guy.’

‘Ah,’ I handed over a fiver. ‘You should check them out. I think you might like them somehow.’

I left him scratching his head and wondering.