Peter Stoneman – Freelance Writer and Researcher

Extract From: David Wild & the Very High Numbers (A Rock Opera.)

 For the first three years of my life, I lived with my mother and father in a single room above a bakery. We were happy enough, I gather, living as we did, under foggy skies. We lived on working class streets, unaware of our station, in leaky, dirt brown tenements, held together with optimism. Hope and lead paint and tobacco wallpaper. The old houses peered down over the roads, suspended like weary puppets, held in place by telephone cables and aching pylons. The streets smelled of week-old vegetables from the Saturday market stalls. The tarmac and pavements were sweet and sticky from chrysanthemum petals and stems from the flower shop dustbins.

 It was a thousand years ago, but still I remember the room so vividly. When I close my eyes, I see it in my dreams. The high ceilings. The threadbare carpet, warm from the bakers oven below. My blankets and clothes smelling of white loaves and cobs in the winter, hot cross buns in the spring. The place was cheap but it was no slum, as I remember. If it ever crossed our minds that we were poor, it was never mentioned. No one knew any different back then anyway. We were all disenfranchised. Besides, we were clean and adequately fed. We had no TV, but that was ok. Television was still a rich man’s plaything, I guess. Even so, I didn’t want for entertainment. I remember I used to sprawl myself across the stacks of ironing, warming my plates on the three bar fire that made the place reek of gas. Idling away my afternoons colouring or drawing, while my mother sang along to the hits on the wireless. If I scrunch up my eyes and send myself backward in time, I can still see the old 45s strewn over the hardwood floor, marking a path to the brown, dusty stereogram we bought on the never never. When we ventured out, my mum wore her hair in a scarf. My old man wore a shirt and tie and a pencil behind his ear to a factory, just beyond the tracks. He repaired a hangar full of ancient sewing machines for an army of seamstresses. They were in the employ of an old Jewish tailor who’d been cutting cloth since the Great War.

 When I turned three, the arrival of a kid brother heralded a new start. The promise of clean air and a council house with an indoor toilet. The notion was sufficiently seductive for us to move out of the city and beyond the suburbs. So we packed our trunk and decamped to a sparkling new town halfway between the coast and the arse of the capital. It wasn’t the centre of the universe, but it was ok. I became a satellite kid in a satellite town. There was a nearby airport and plentiful jobs and before long every one heard the call. Over the course of eight or nine short years, the modest population exploded. I guess it was a different time. The last days before the dawn of the Corporate Epoch and our higher ideals were swept under the rug of history. When we still believed in the greater good. Under our hopeful eyes, a new nation was being constructed on a foundation of Paternalism and national pride. While the outside world looked on in quiet wonder, waistcoated men with sleeves rolled up to their elbows stood upon blank canvas fields, unrolling blueprints for the City of Tomorrow. In the blink of an eye, our new town became a beacon. A socialist utopia of playing fields and comprehensives. There was no three-day-week. No rolling power cuts. Every month our mums and aunts waited for their numbers to come up on the Premium Bonds, then quietly complained when they didn’t. The first post arrived over breakfast and the second awaited your return from the working day like a loyal gundog. On Thursday, the rubbish was taken from galvanised metal bins and taken to the landfill. Our dead, taken from pristine hospital wards, through red brick cloisters and promptly buried in the municipal cemetery across town.

 As word of our Earthly paradise spread, the slums and bombsites of the capital began to empty. The new town slowly filled and began to forge its own identity. It was a schizophrenic little place, designed by committee. It was as if the qualities it upheld had been arrived at by a kind of mad consensus. A Ladybird Peter and Jane town of austere white walls and streets, populated by the grey working classes and the well-meaning middle. Its gleaming roads, at first named for famed Labour Party martyrs. Then as the boundary grew, the town planners ran out of intellectual utopians to namecheck and began to name the avenues and byways after wading birds and obscure nocturnal mammals. The main road to the industrial area was named after the man who discovered something to do with electricity, while the spur roads, leading to a square mile of industrial units and factories with zigzag roofs, were named for (now) infamous union leaders or marchers. The schools were three storeys high and appeared on teatime bulletins, billed as the largest and most modern in Europe. They were built from steel and corrugated asbestos and named after beloved women who were blinded in accidents or raped by bastard landowners. Science and politics were so commonplace in our lives, they were almost invisible.

 As we slept, grey pylons stood watch over us like iron giants. We, in our utilitarian three bedroom terraces. Interconnected boxes with double rooms and coal bunkers. In the shade of trees marked for Dutch Elm disease, every street had a red phone, pillar box, a row of garages, a patch of green with a ‘no ball games’ sign and a neat line of eight-foot saplings. Every neighbourhood had a children’s home, filled with the unwanted bastards of the free love generation. If not for the cuckoos left in our midst, the era would have bypassed us entirely, I realise now. But we were happy to stand with them. We were juxtaposed together, socially-engineered. As if to underline the point, at the top end of every street there stood a brace of four bedroom palaces, with short concrete driveways that cut through the corporation paving, like butter-cream filling in a sponge cake. These lofty accommodations were reserved for the councillor for the ward or the local GP or bank manager. Beyond the terraces and chalked games of hopscotch, rows of bungalows for the elderly. Depressed beyond tablets, the old timers lived among us. They’d survived the worst the world had to offer, then a while longer. Hanging on to the wireless for dear life. Standing with us a few more years, till the moptops grew moustaches or Bowie daubed his face with lippy and eyeliner. We only realised they’d left us when their curtains stopped twitching and the bottles of gold-top started to amass on the front stoop. Then, after the local coppers had to boot the door in, our mothers mourned their passing in the bus stop line. Waiting on a green double decker to sweep you along the bypass to the precinct. There, built on the site of a lost marsh, the town square went up over the course of a few short months. The Queen didn’t come down but she sent a third division duke to lay a foundation. The ceremony was covered in the evening paper. The four corners of the square were marked out with identical multi-storey Brutalist towers, with shingled concrete tiers. Awaiting their stone-faced future as graffiti-sprayed suicide spots for lost souls. Our broken brothers and forgotten sisters with no more tears to cry. Leaving notes on the ledge as they fell. Their final testaments, held against the wind, using pebbles as paperweights.

 Down below, stark red and black flagstones faded to pink and grey over the course of that first summer. The fountains and push button ‘you are here’ maps, mosaics and Timothy Whites appeared overnight. Rows of boutiques with lurid gold signs. Changing rooms with swing louvre doors like a wild west saloon, where big sisters congregated. Comparing love-bites, gushing over the pretty boys in the hit parade. Our world smelled of new paint and of fresh plaster or mortar and the empty green fields were transformed into fresh streets over the course of single seasons. At the stroke of a councillor’s biro, summer meadows became clustered October streets and avenues, with forty houses and forty families in the process of moving in. Saxon roads and streets that were designed to never be true. Everywhere, as if by magic, leading to everywhere else. Snaking around bends and over hills and uncovering undiscovered thoroughfares and alleys or shopping parades that were not there a week before. Local shops with generic council signage marking out the butchers, the bakers or the candlestick makers. Every parade blessed with a bookies and a paper shop with a collection box for the blind chained to a drainpipe. Afternoon tea at the Lyte-a-Byte, then two doors down to the barber shop run by an Italian in a doctor’s tunic. Shuffling, scuffing your shoes as you pass the next door ladies salon with disobedient, arcing cheese plants you could see through the mottled glass windows. If you could only sneak a peak beyond the threshold and see the mysterious world on the other side. Walls adorned with gold wallpaper and lined with B&W photographs of women with Liz Taylor hair from ten years before. The mums and aunts sitting under jet-age hairdryers of chrome and bronze, having their perms and quick-sets done by the Italian barber’s wife. Insidious Glam blaring out of a transistor radio as they’re sent on their way to Saturday weddings at the town hall and Monday funerals at the red brick county crematorium at the edge of town. There were playgrounds, youth clubs, community centres and miles of endless green nothing in all directions. There was no dyslexia, only bad spelling. You weren’t on the spectrum, you were just quiet or loud. If you were fatally allergic, they found out when they conducted your post-mortem. Or we never found out at all. Meanwhile, the rest of us, those fortunate to have survived, fought real and play fights and crossed our fingers and said ‘Fainites’ to call a truce. Television began and ended in the evenings so you just ran and ran like dogs. Running until the call from your mum, or it became too dark to play or you were starving hungry. Always careful to avoid the woman in white that everyone called Mad Mary, as you made your way home. Never wondering what pain she held in her heart. What fever dreams carried her off to sleep at night, as the rains lashed against her shutter. You never wondered because you never cared. You took a bath on Sunday and fell into bed after the top 40 on the wireless. If you took a holiday you travelled by coach with forty people from your old man’s factory. Men in hats and waistcoats. Vests under starched white collars, as if the sixties had never happened. Every other house had an Escort or Cortina parked out front and the houses that didn’t, never had a car at all.

 Meanwhile, as the horizon shifted in stop-motion, we dozed through juniors and comprehensive. When we turned fifteen we artlessly tried to deflower the local girls named Sue and Anita. We frittered our pocket money on records by older boys in skinny ties and boating blazers. We cared little that we were predestined to fail our O levels (except for English and Art, natch.) We were busy feigning boredom in the careers office. Gawping out the window as the careers master sucked down an Embassy, absently flicking ash on our empty files, before pushing a YTS pamphlet across the table with the tip of a yellow finger. The words polytechnic and university were never heard. Higher education was an alien concept. No one went to Uni. No one knew what a grant was, let alone how to go about applying for one. Besides, the way we saw it, none of us would see twenty. The Soviets had the bomb. At the age of fifteen, time was already running out for us. So we did what anyone would do under the circumstances. Almost anyone. We learned to stop worrying and to embrace the bomb. We rejected our predestined, uneventful paths through the world. We fell in love. We learned to forge our mothers’ handwriting and passed sick notes to teachers and flimsy, explanatory letters to tobacconists asking if he’d sell us a pack of ten JPS. We bought handfuls of fake French Blues from the old mods and skinheads who occupied the Laundromat and spent days and nights dancing to old 45s in our bedrooms, smoking tabs out the window. Oh, and we formed the greatest rock and roll band of our generation.

 When things began to happen for us, I was already an old man of approaching eighteen. Coming to terms with the fact I’d soon have to make something of myself. Our dear mother put up with me as best she could, dropping hints about the kids up the street. Their cars and girlfriends and jobs. Sometimes the old man would leave the local paper open on the situations vacant page on the kitchen table while I stirred my morning tea. To their credit, they never really challenged me about my lack of any real prospects beyond the Labour Exchange. I may sound misty-eyed here, maybe it’s youth, I don’t know, but that’s my take. It felt like you were still allowed to find yourself before you were thrown helpless into the churning wheels of the machine.

 Meanwhile Jim was sixteen. He was in the joyless process of fucking his way through the girls standing in line for our shows. Lines of girls called Caz and Emma who fluttered about the community centres and pub back rooms we found ourselves playing once we could string a couple of notes together. He was breaking hearts and not giving a fuck either way. In matters of taste and decency, he’s always been a little behind the curve, I suppose. His discarded wives and his baker’s dozen children will testify to that. None saw any good in him in the end. And those that still maintain contact with him after they’ve been jettisoned, do so only through solicitors. In legal papers, they are politely reminded to clear their possessions from the house he had built (on the Thames, near Henley.) The one that resembles the eyesore new wing of a provincial art centre. The kind they tacked onto the building in the 1980s and had to tear down and rebuild twenty years later. In the interests of full disclosure, my kid brother also keeps a pied-à-terre in an empty skyscraper near the centre of town (an investment, he tells me,) and a mock-baronial castle (with a fucking moat) in the Hollywood Hills. He also kept a ranch briefly, but I gather the rights to that money-pit were lost in his bloodbath divorce from Cathy, his first wife. She was the girl we knew from school. She was all smiles and misplaced devotion, but for my brother, she was little more than a placeholder. To give her credit, she was tenacious though. She managed to hold on for a while, as he toured the world four times, receiving clumsy head from teenagers and pragmatic handjobs from the star struck sisters of promoters. His sophomore and make-or-break third wives were less fortunate. Each showed singular bad judgement in signing his lawyer’s notoriously watertight pre-nups. If they have any contact with James Wild now, it’s via his accountant. A man who assiduously mails-out child support cheques, with one eye on the calendar. Waiting for the blessed day the kids turn sixteen and his client can put the money to better use. Sibling rivalry between us notwithstanding, I’m sure you’ll understand when I tell you that I don’t think my brother has much in the way of class or good taste. Sorry Jimmy. Not sorry.

 Back then we were called Secondary Modern until we realised how passé it sounded. We switched to The Turing Test for a couple of weeks. The Dead Famous, The Prime Numbers, The Other Room, Paymaster General followed in quick succession. Then Grand Mal, The Savants, Idiot Savants, Savants (definite article) and inevitably, Definite Article. Back in our new town, NewTown, as we referred to it, the world was still Joy Division monochrome and Thatcher grey. We wore our hair in spiky New Wave number fours and we joylessly classified rock as an old man’s caper. We were men apart. Musically indebted to Gang of Four and Wire. Plucking new names from the ether, every one of them a flag of convenience while we learned our meagre craft. Then after a spell of shows without a name at all, an old modernist promoter made a crack about us being hack revivalists. So, either out of boredom or spite, we became the Very High Numbers. Credit where due, the name was Jim’s idea. I wanted the name Luddites; definite article, but somehow the name stuck. It’s a name I don’t care for particularly, then or now. I would have pressed harder for a change but for the fact that my pig-snouted brother had already sent a tape to the BBC. It was there, against all manner of odds and against the grain, our name and music began to find an audience. Every band has its time, I guess. The moment everything crystallises. That was ours.

 The world has of course changed in the million years since we first stepped out on our path to infamy. I’ve seen it all pass, the journey from Cool Britannia right through to Cruel. But if you were to seek to somehow follow me down this road, the first advice I’d offer is you have to do the work. I mean this kindly. Forget fame. Fuck it. Even if you’re plucked from obscurity by a panel of know-nothings for the sake of ratings. For it to last longer than five minutes you have to do the work. It’s not particularly interesting or – dare I say? – cool, but your craft is everything. The minute you stop trying to make something new and start buying castles and hiring groundskeepers you’re lost. The moment you’re ruled by the bottom line over your instincts, when you choose pragmatism over magic, in every sense that’s important, it’s over. You just have to decide on your destiny. And you have to choose now. Whether to become someone who consumes or someone who creates. The sad fact is, if you’ve chosen unwisely, you’ll only realise once it’s too late. Suddenly it’s your trade and not your art. You’re playing to live, when really you have it arse-about-face. Choose the wrong fork in the road and instantly, the worlds you create mean nothing. It’s just product. No doubt some fool somewhere will continue to believe. He or she will continue to pore through your words, as if there’s a deeper meaning. They’ll pump their fists to the dead beat, they’ll sing your hollow words back to you, but deep down they’ll understand your time has come and gone. And you’ll know of course.

 Presuming you’re not dissuaded by these words of caution, I congratulate you. Your BELIEF (in caps) is a credit to you. You’re part of the way to your reinvention. You don’t need advice from an old fool like me. Just be sure of the people around you. You know this already, but how you lead a band is through force of will. You don’t issue directives, but you quietly put in place a structure. There are songs you need to lay down. Make them good. That’s important. You’ll only succeed if the work is dazzling to those around you. It must make them feel mundane and suburban. As if you have real vision. It should be so wondrous as to dissuade them from ever challenging you. You cut down any pecking order, any semblance of democracy and replace it with a tender tyranny. You need to have a will of iron. You must show no mercy. A messianic zeal that will make others follow you into the abyss. As with any great leader, for good or for ill, the quality you require above all others is charisma. Then, following your gentle coup, you can map out where you want to take the songs. If you find yourself sullen and quiet in those moments when you’re not performing, there’s every chance you’ll fast make enemies. Don’t be discouraged by this. This is as it should be. Your off stage persona should be of no interest to anyone. The moments you’re on stage are the ones that will define you in the hearts and minds of people. That’s when you touch them. Not when you’re gurning into the camera backstage or strutting along Sunset Strip on the arm of a model. No one cares that you’re funny or what books you’ve read. No one. And if you’re only truly yourself when you’re up there, if you’re a stranger to the world when you aren’t, don’t worry. It may be that you’ve yet to pick up a pen and write a song. Maybe you only half-learned your instrument. It might stare sullenly back at you from a corner of your bedroom. The place you threw it in a fit of frustration. Don’t concern yourself. You’re further along the path than you probably imagine. Your genius has yet to surface, but I’m certain it will.