The Singer (21 page)

She rolled him her most pleading eyes. Ray chewed his lip. He still didn’t look happy.

‘I’ve never thought about anything like this before,’ he finally admitted. ‘I thought I was lucky enough just doing what I do.’

‘You are,’ she agreed. ‘Sorry, Ray. Maybe you weren’t the right person to talk to about this. Maybe I should ask that Tony. He might be able
to help me.’

‘Maybe you should,’ said Ray, but he didn’t sound sarcastic,
more like wounded and lost. ‘Look, I’m sorry, Donna, I feel a bit out of my depth here. It’s just that I love what I do. I’ve never thought about doing anything else but writing. All that stuff about business and other people’s money scares me. I met Malcolm McLaren and I can honestly tell you, love, he scared the shit
out of me. He was an evil man. He didn’t want to help no one except himself. But I know you’re right, Tony Stevens ain’t like that, and there are plenty more like him.’

He sighed and hugged her closer. ‘Is that what you want, then, a record label?’

Donna nodded. ‘I’d be good at it, Ray, I know I would.’

‘Course you would, and I will help you with it. I just don’t want to be part of running
it, that’s all.’

‘Fair enough,’ Donna shrugged. As Ray continued to offer up suggestions of who he could get to help her and how he would do his bit in the paper, her head started to swim with the enormous possibility of it all. This was a better idea than she had ever anticipated. Instead of entering a partnership that could grow tiring, she could end up with her own business. She would become
a famous entrepreneur – the first woman of punk. She could use that dumb rich Yank Sylvana to elevate herself into the penthouse league. Say bye bye to the Tower of Terror for ever. The very thought of it almost gave her hysterics.

To make matters even better, Ray seemed to think he was letting her down by not coming in with her, just dishing out all his hard-won contacts on a plate instead.
After he’d apologised for the seventh time, she decided it was time the poor boy finally got his just rewards.

‘Ray,’ she said sweetly. ‘There’s something else I want to show you…’

February 2002

There were no more mad phone calls and, despite my paranoia, I never did look out of my window to find Robin Leith staring back up at me with bloodshot, accusatory eyes. Nor did I get an icy tap on the shoulder as I walked down a dark Camden alley at night. After two weeks had turned into three, I started to relax. I hadn’t told Gavin anything and I was relieved
about that; I could have made a right arse of myself there for no reason. Christophe continued to reassure me of the wisdom of this course of action every time I saw him, and Louise asked no more questions about it.

But Kevin Holme never did call me back, and that still rankled, still caused a couple of nights of fretful churning under tangled, sweaty sheets. Come the grey light of morning, my
fears would evaporate again and I gradually pushed the Leith incident to the back of my mind. Now that Gavin was back, it was all stations go again anyway.

I don’t know whether Gavin had nudged him for me, but soon after, Tony Stevens sent me a photocopy of his private detective’s
report into Vince’s disappearance, along with a copy of his own file of all Blood Truth’s Exile press cuttings.

At first, I had been really excited to receive the report, a thirty-page densely worded document, on what would have been the standard manual typewriter of the time. I thought I would be able to find something encoded there that Dan had missed or overlooked. It started off promisingly enough.

It gave Vincent’s address as apt 16, 112 Sacré Coeur, Paris Arrondissment 18 – the top flat in a nineteenth-century
residential building in a quiet neighbourhood street underneath Vince’s beloved cathedral. A bit of digging around on the net and I began to realise how appropriate this part of the French capital was for a man like Vince – the streets of the 18th district, combining Montmatre, Pigalle and la Chapelle, had long been home to anarchists and artists and the centre of the sex and drugs industry.
Emile Zola wrote about its ‘foul environments,’ Toulouse Lautrec immortalised its Chat Noir cabaret in oils and Picasso was put on police file on suspicion of being a robber when he lived there. Vince’s historical neighbours would also have included Degas, André Breton and Max Jacob – Impressionists, Dadaists and Cubists all carved out their own niche on the hill, under the neon underskirts
of the Moulin Rogue and the pure white domes of the Sacré Coeur.

Sanctity and Sin, one just above the other. The psychogeography was perfect and I was itching to book my place on the Eurostar right there and then, so I could go and wander those historic streets myself, drink in the atmosphere along with some bitter black espresso and Gitanes. The only thing that stopped me was the thought that
Louise would probably want to come too, and then we would have to spend all our time looking at modern art rather than examining the underside of the red-light district. I would have to work this one out as a magazine trip, I reckoned, and not tell her I was going with Gavin.

Another lie, but still.

The detective signed himself M. J. Pascal and in the note Dan sent with the package he explained
the guy had been recommended by a friend who’d also once been in need of a French connection – Joseph Pascal was from Paris but had lived and worked in London for years. He had his snouts on both sides of the Channel and had quickly ascertained that the French cops hadn’t bothered too much with the disappearance of someone they considered little more than a criminal. Especially when it seemed
there wasn’t very much of a mystery to solve.

There was a thread of a story running through his report, but as hard as Pascal chased it, he couldn’t find any reliable witnesses to back up any of it. Plenty of locals had heard rumours about ‘les Anglais’ and some of them were pretty lurid too – one witness statement from a prostitute, referred to only as ‘Petite M’, said that Vince’s nickname
was ‘The Vampire’ and that the local working girls were afraid of him. But Pascal dismissed this tale as the fevered ranting of an addict who had only given her statement to make some money.

However, it was common knowledge that Vince had managed to get himself barred from a couple of the local pubs and nightclubs by causing disturbances with his fists. Pascal had spoken to a couple of aggrieved
Montmartre landlords who had told him that Vince had been keeping company with a local lowlife known as Marco, who was rumoured to run hashish up from Marseilles with the help of Algerian gangsters. Needless to say, Pascal couldn’t find hide nor hair of Marco. His contact with the local cops told him they didn’t figure him for a major player, just a boastful small-time crook who they’d picked
up a few times for pimping, not drugs. People told stories about him, they said, because he looked like an Arab.

Vince had also been seen with a blonde woman on a few of his wild nights out, but she wasn’t local and no one could tell Pascal who she could have been.

Pascal theorised that Vince could have got himself in even
more girl trouble, that the blonde could have been one of Marco’s whores
and they could have had a falling out over her. But of course, as Marco was long gone by the time Pascal reached Montmartre, he had no way of following this line.

With Vince being a junkie, there was also every possibility he could have finished his days OD-ed in some rat-infested flophouse and been an unidentified John Doe frozen in a local morgue. Pascal duly checked out this possibility, visiting
everywhere there was to visit in Paris and the surrounding area, but no stiffs had ever come in that could possibly have been a physical match for Vince.

Maybe he could have just insulted the wrong person one night and been what Pascal tactfully referred to as ‘disappeared’ – in which case, no one would ever find him again.

But the strongest evidence tended to offer another alternative. Vince
had paid his landlord in advance for the final three months of his tenancy in October. He had planned to leave when he did. However degenerate his final months in Paris may have been, his flat was left spotless, everything in order, no signs of a man interrupted. He didn’t leave a single thing behind.

Pascal ended his report by suggesting that, in his opinion, Vince had deliberately ‘disappeared’
himself, had spent three months carefully arranging it and had taken care that no one would be able to follow him.

Stevens had obviously gone along with this summation, even if it had sorely disappointed him. His note said that he had paid Pascal for his services and forgotten about looking for Vince.

Pascal’s number had turned into a mini-cab firm. Now the detective’s trail was long cold. But
Stevens had finished by saying that he would chase up the friend of a friend who had recommended him in the first place to see if he could find out if the PI was still around. Although if he was, he reminded me, he would be in his seventies by now.

I phoned Stevens to thank him and he was very genial,
although he hadn’t tracked down the friend of a friend yet, let alone a number. Somehow I didn’t
expect that he would. Knowing my luck, if Pascal was still alive, he’d be dribbling away in an old folks home by now. So I turned my attention to the press file.

Just about every piece of press Blood Truth had accrued in their two years with Exile was positive, the only voice of dissent being a
Melody Maker
live review that finished with the words:
‘Take this disgusting racket and shove it’
,
something that Vince and Steve happily told their next interviewer they were going to use on the top of all their press releases from then on. Mick Greer, was of course the
NME’s
biggest fan and had written the major feature for every release from
Down in the World
in March 1979 to
Butcher’s Brew
in May 1981.

The band obviously loved the cunt; they had taken him on the road with them all over
the place, providing lots of riotous copy involving copious drinking, bar fights and mad Americans trying to kill Vince for taking the piss out of Elvis. But happily, the one article that really interested me wasn’t by him. It was in
Sounds
, from February 1979, and it was written by a guy called Ray Spencer.

It was called ‘The Way of the Weird’ and what immediately grabbed my attention was the
big, black and white picture that had obviously been taken in the squat that Kevin had told me about. It looked like the band had dragged some old car seats off a breaker’s yard and into their front room. Vince, naturally, was sitting in the centre of the disembodied back seat, his feet up on a tea chest, alongside an overflowing pub ashtray with SKOL written around the edge of it and a load of
empty bottles. Vince, completely dressed in black and wearing a big pair of Robot creepers, appeared to be toasting the photographer with a chipped mug. To his left, Steve lounged sideways, playing an unplugged white guitar, his hat pulled down over his eyes; to his right Lynton followed the pose with his bass, a cigarette hanging coolly from the corner of his mouth. Standing behind them all,
Kevin raised his drumsticks as if he were about to start playing his bandmates’ heads. If they were having a bad time of it in that squat, this picture certainly didn’t show it.

‘We’re a long way from Hull now, Toto,’ laughs big Steve Mullin, guitarist from the North’s most sh** kicking beast of a band, Blood Truth, went the first sentence.

Newly signed to Exile, this band have already conquered
the savage lands north of Watford, spending nearly two years riding their wheels of steel to the remotest, most punk-starved corners of our isles. A string of 45s on the Hull-based Dawsongs label lighted their trail, culminating with November’s incendiary
King of Nothing
EP, which finally set the south aflame. A savage, nihilistic anthem delivered by a six-foot-four, raven-haired punk possessed
like an old Testament preacher, who has a penchant for fighting with his own audience, backed up by a bunch of hoodlums who wouldn’t look out of place in a Peckinpah movie. No wonder Tony Stevens wanted their names in blood.

He duly got those signatures in January and wasted no time shipping his charges down to Ladbroke Grove, where they have been holed up in his X World studios, feverishly working
on the first album proper and marvelling at the atmosphere of their new neighbourhood.

‘We’re walking in the footsteps of The Clash here,’ continues Mullin, enthusiasm spilling visibly from his lips. ‘The Slits live round the corner. We’re five minutes from Shepherd’s Bush, where half of the Pistols come from. It feels like we’re in some kind of movie. I can’t quite believe it’s real, to be honest.’

With his red-raw fusion of Steve Jones sonics to mangled mad rockabilly guitar (think Link Wray’s
Bollocks
), founder-member Mullin is the heart of the band. He comes across as both joker and protector, a big bad brother to softly spoken bassist Lynton Powell and drummer Kevin Holme. In turn, the modest Blood Truth rhythm section are the reason this band sounds so very different from the rest of
the post-Pistols
pack. The heavy, heady, swampy beats laid down by Powell and Holme have more in common with Captain Beefheart or Screamin’ Jay Hawkins than the work of any of their immediate peers. Perhaps part of this otherness stems from the fact that Powell was, in his own words ‘the only black kid in Hull’, growing up with adoptive white parents and only an extensive jazz collection for company.

‘Jazz was the original punk,’ Powell points out, ‘made in big cities by very angry young men. Be-bop in the fifties probably sounded like the Pistols did in ’77 – like a call to arms, an alarm clock going off in people’s heads. Jazz might just be some old Grandad thing to most people now, but it has definitely marked what we do and I certainly wouldn’t call our music easy listening.’

The focus
for all this seething intensity, however, is Vince Smith. The brilliant frontman is just as intimidating as you’d expect. When
Sounds
arrives on the doorstep of Blood Truth’s house this morning, he opens the door in a lurid yellow skinny-rib Elvis T-shirt and still more eye-watering pink-and-yellow striped Y-fronts, seemingly oblivious to the sub-zero temperatures both outside and in. Showing
us into the kitchen, he invites us to join him in a bracing breakfast cup of Thunderbird, a local delicacy he has just discovered, much to his delight. A ream of paper is scattered across the Formica-topped table, covered in spidery scrawl. Smith reveals he has been up writing lyrics for new songs since six.