The Singer (6 page)

Sylvana’s presence on the tour bus added
to the tensions, as did Uncle Sam’s lacklustre enthusiasm for Blood Truth, especially in the Southern states where Smith’s Elvis apparel was viewed as an insult. The band struggled through their commitments before flying back to London to record their new album, nursing grudges and burgeoning substance problems.

Initially, Smith left his new missus in Paris, either to protect her from the attentions
of Leith or to shield himself from an increasingly irate Steve Mullin. The on-edge band began recording at Nomis studios in March 1981. Within a week, Sylvana was back at Vincent’s side and maintained a Yoko-like presence there during the rest of the torturous month-and-a-half long session. In that time, Mullin was arrested for drunken disorder, Kevin Holme was hospitalised for injuries apparently
caused by the rest of the band, and Lynton Powell began quietly following in Sylvana and Smith’s trackmarks.

Even so, the resultant ‘Butchers’ Brew’ (Powell’s idea, now that he was seeing more clearly where Miles had been coming from) remains a post-punk masterpiece, up there with Joy Division’s ‘Unknown Pleasures’ and PiL’s ‘Metal Box’. Whatever conflicts they endured only seemed to galvanise
Blood Truth into even greater musical feats. On the week of its release, late in May 1981, it entered the UK national charts at 25 and the band headlined the Lyceum Ballroom, their biggest London date and a total sell-out. Smith and Mullin managed to keep it together for what aficionados generally regard as the greatest gig of the band’s career.

Sadly, this triumph was to be short-lived. Three
weeks later, after a violent argument with her husband, Sylvana Smith took a fatal overdose in Paris.

Blood Truth never played together again. The split was so acrimonious that Mullin vowed he would never so much as step into the same room as Smith again, blaming the singer not only for putting a woman before his friends to the cost of his band, but also (and with some justification) for turning
Powell into a junkie. Smith remained in Paris for six months after Sylvana’s death, depressed and alone. Finally, he packed up his belongings from their shared apartment in Montmartre and disappeared into the night on New Year’s Eve 1981, never to be heard of again.

In this post-Richie Manic world, Vincent Smith’s exit from the music business would have been spectacular, ensuring for him enduring
notoriety and endless front cover features on every anniversary of his moonlight flit. But in 1981, a nearly-popular goth/punk band were never going to be the stuff of such legend. Smith remained a curio for the next couple of years, like his hero Elvis he popped up in supermarkets and bars on three continents, but it didn’t take long for everyone to move on to something else. The Birthday Party,
Southern Death Cult, The Sisters of Mercy – skinny young men with black hair and mysterious personas were a booming genre.

Today it is likely that Alien Sex Fiend have left a more lasting impression than Blood Truth, which, like the rest of this tale, is a
tragedy. Anyone moved by this Gothic Love Story is urged to seek out the compilation
Shots
, released by Exile on CD to an indifferent world
in 1997, and listen to the future as it could have been.

My heart was pounding by the time I reached the end of all this.

Fuck.

Who was the author of this piece? It was signed MG.

I scrolled back up to the top of the web page, looking for elaboration on these credits. There was a little editorial box on the side of the page, listing contributors: David Burbeck, Andrew Hain, Sara Spedding,
Kenneth Cox, Annie Hanson, Mick Greer…

Mick Greer
. The name rang a vague bell somewhere in the memory vault.

Sweating now, I pulled off my overcoat and scarf and threw them onto the sofa.

Fuck. Mick Greer. I knew that name. About to punch Granger’s number into the mobile when it came to me.

Greer was Granger’s old partner in the
NME
days. The one that provided most of the ink that went with
his images – the John Lydon piece, the Ian Curtis, the Siouxsie Sioux. Of course. They must have done their Blood Truth pieces together, the two Gs.

Fuck. What if this Greer cunt had already had the same idea that I did? What if he had it ages ago? If he already had a book deal? He knew the fucking band, for Christ’s sake…

Back over to the sofa, rummaging for my fags in my coat pocket. Only
a book of matches swiped from the Market Bar to light them with, fumbling to rip one off with sweaty palms, practically ripping the book to pieces before I had the fag alight, sucking down the nicotine, telling myself: Calm down. You haven’t heard the name in years. Means he’s not working for anyone big. If he’s writing for a web fanzine that proves it.

I moved back to the desk, nodding to myself,
thinking: Print that one out and look for some more. Start compiling a dossier.

I turned the printer on, fed through the first few sheets by hand until it got the idea. Mick Greer’s feature dropping out onto the tray while I went to the next site, Exile records.

It was a plug for the
Shots
album Greer mentioned, complete with biography penned by…Mick Greer.

I was starting to hate the guy already.
What he’d written for Exile was a less flowery version of the
Careless Love
feature, concentrating more on the music and how highly Vince Smith rated on Greer’s personal genius scale. It did provide more of an insight into what the rest of the band got up to in the years after, however, with a handful of quotes from Lynton Powell (reformed junkie, now respected jazzer), Kevin Holme (now backing
up Lou Feane, the former singer with a weedy early eighties pop band who reinvented himself as a loungecore act) and finally, the thoughts of Steven Mullin, successful record producer and occasional collaborator with Powell.

‘Sixteen years later, it’s easier to look back on the actual music we made, rather than the madness that went on around it. Tell you the truth, there were a time when I never
wanted to hear a fuckin’ note of it ever again. But now that I have, sat down with Lynton and gone over the whole of the back catalogue, I have to admit it…I’m fuckin’ proud of us.’

More Mick Greer humming through the printer, still more of him to come. All the fan sites I could find – and most of them were appalling goth rubbish – had posted up old
NME
articles written by the cunt, with Granger’s
photos to go with them. Oh dear. Granger went ballistic when he found out people had been stealing his images. As soon as I let him know what
www.thedarkside.org
,
www.childrenofthenight.com
and
www.thebatcave.co.uk
had been up to behind his back it would be a darker night in Gotham City than any of them could possibly have imagined.

Then I could just casually mention the infringement of Greer’s
copyright too, get him into the conversation, find out what the bastard was up to these days.

It was getting on for ten o’clock when the key in the front door brought me back from Vincent Smith’s world.

Louise stood framed in the hall light. Black wool coat with Astrakhan collar, black gloves, black wool trousers and black high-heeled boots. Thick black hair cut into the style of her namesake,
her lookalike, Lulu Brookes. Her lips were red. Her eyes were narrow. She looked like one of the evil queens from the Disney movies, the ones with poisoned apples in their handbags.

‘H-hello, darling,’ I tried to sound cheerful. ‘Been anywhere nice?’

Louise’s glittering green eyes took in the scene.

Her fat bastard boyfriend in a dishevelled suit he’d obviously slept in, sitting red-eyed among
a paper mountain that spilled from the desk to the floor, a similarly towering ashtray, a coffee cup with rings around it and cornflakes all over the toffee shop.

Her red nails tapped on the doorframe. The shutters came down in her eyes. ‘Anywhere,’ she finally said, ‘would be nice compared to here.’

‘Darling,’ I stood up and went to walk towards her, catching my foot in the flex from the fan
heater and diving headfirst into the carpet, spilling cornflakes and print-outs like dandruff as I went down.

Louise shut her eyes like it was a monumental effort of will for her not to start screaming.

I stared up at her from the carpet, prostrate at her feet. Started to laugh, laugh hysterically at the stupidity of it all, trying to stagger back upright as I did so, clutching at the side of
my chair. Hoping my stupid laughter would somehow reach out to her, explain to her that I was sorry, so sorry, for everything that I’d done wrong, for all the late nights and trips away and showbiz parties while she stayed in alone, with her books. Sorry for all
the times I’d staggered in drunk and broken things, for the time I tried to take my cowboy boots off and fell through the window, for
the time she found my friend Christophe asleep in the bath when she tried to get ready for work in the morning. Sorry for all the money I spent on drinking and trying to impress other people who were not her, for the fact that ten years after I so grandly announced I was going to be a writer I had got only so far as leaving a shitty second-hand paper shop for a regular gig on a low-selling gentleman’s
monthly. Sorry for the fact I once had the most glamorous, mysterious woman at our school and now I ignored her and dreaded seeing her and preferred the company of ageing photographers and vanished goths. Sorry for all the things I couldn’t say and all the lies I told instead.

Sorry that I existed.

The ice maiden’s eyelids slowly rose on her hard, cold, emerald eyes.

‘You’re fucking pathetic,
Eddie,’ she pronounced, letting each word drop like dead leaves on dirty flagstones. She didn’t say anything more. Just turned on her heel towards the bedroom, slamming the door behind her so loudly my coffee cup jumped off the desk to join me in splinters on the floor.

Another night on another sofa, dreaming of a vanished rock star, and how he could save me.

June 1977

‘What you got there then, Kevin?’

Kevin Holme nearly dropped the bass drum he had been carrying into the school hall.

Lounging against the side of the wall by all the massive food bins storing leftovers to be taken away for pigswill, was Stevie Mullin. Stevie Mullin looking like he’d come in from a different planet. Wearing a leather jacket and a T-shirt all
ripped up and then pulled back together with safety pins. Drainpipe jeans with luminous yellow socks and black, thick-soled brothel creepers. A padlock holding a bike chain around his neck. His hair all up in spikes. Stevie Mullin looking harder than even he had looked before. Smoking a fag on school grounds.

Kevin’s eyes darted around, looking for teacher.

‘What you doing with that, Kevin?’
Stevie nodded at the kit, almost bigger than the awkward boy holding it.

Old Tucker already in the school hall, helping all the other kids to set up their gear. Not even looking round and noticing.

Kevin could feel his heart beating as Stevie slouched off the
wall and started towards him, with a slow, menacing, bow-legged swagger.

‘You play that, do you?’ Stevie was still smiling as he got
near enough to blow his fag smoke into Speccy Kevin’s face, watch him go red and start stammering: ‘Wh-wh-what’s it to you, Mullin?’ Kevin’s voice was only just breaking and veered from high-pitched to low to comedic effect.

‘I’m interested in music, me,’ Stevie told him. ‘Especially in drummers.’ He circled around his prey like a panther. ‘So that’s what you get up to behind Dunton’s back, eh?
Playing drums in school band? You any good at it, Kevin?’

Kevin looked like he was going to shit himself. ‘Look, Mullin, I’ve got to go in,’ he sounded like a girl, pleading. ‘They’ll notice.’

‘All right, Kevin,’ Stevie said amiably. ‘I’ve got a detention to go to myself.’ He blew another line of smoke into Kevin’s face, dropped the butt of his cigarette and ground it out slowly, like he didn’t
care if anyone saw.

Walked off just as casually. Speccy Kevin blinked, took off his glasses and rubbed them on his pullover. By the time he’d put them back on, Mullin had disappeared. As if he’d never been there in the first place.

Kevin couldn’t concentrate on band practice that night. He got shouted at three times for not coming in at the right moment, and then, most mortifyingly, playing
the wrong part entirely.

‘Something wrong with you, lad?’ enquired Old Tucker, the music teacher, normally a genial duffer but not one to tolerate any sort of mucking about. ‘Been getting enough sleep, have you? Eh? Well, will you do us the pleasure of joining the rest of us then?’

The hall resounded with laughter, all eyes fixed on Kevin.

His face burned bright red and his palms were sweaty.
His sticks felt big and clumsy in his hands. What he was thinking was: ‘Is Mullin going to get me when Gary’s not around?’

He’d never wanted to join Dunton’s gang in the first place, but
he didn’t have much choice. As their next-door neighbour he’d grown up playing with Gary, his brothers Darren and Keith and their little sister Mandy. Their mums went to bingo and Beverley races together. Their
dads to the Working Men’s Club and to see Rovers, sometimes taking the boys along if they’d kept enough cash back that week. Kevin didn’t have any brothers or sisters of his own, so he’d been unofficially adopted by that lot.

All the Duntons had called Kevin ‘Brains’ ever since he got his first glasses when he was seven. He didn’t just look like the
Thunderbirds
puppet, he was the cleverest out
of all of them. By the time they reached North Hull High, it was a given that Kevin would do all Gary and his mates’ homework in return for the honour of being protected by them. Knowing he was too soft to be of any use in a fight, they used him instead as their lookout and scapegoat. More than once Kevin had taken the blame for something one of the others had done, especially if it meant them
avoiding the cane or suspension. It did his reputation with the other kids no harm.