Stories We Could Tell

‘So how’s it going?’

Kevin White slumped into his chair and put his feet on his desk. The editor had the only corner office in The Paper, and Ray could see what seemed like all of London stretching out behind him.

‘It’s going okay,’ Ray said, making his fringe fall forward over his face. Even after three years, he couldn’t quite get over this shyness he felt around the editor. Ray had known White since he was fifteen years old, turning up in the reception of The Paper with a handwritten think piece on the Eagles when he should have been writing about An Inspector Calls for an English Literature paper. White had never treated him with anything but kindness. But somehow that only made Ray’s shyness worse. It was funny. Ray had never yet met a rock star that he felt in awe of, but he was in awe of Kevin White.

‘Your mum okay?’

She’s on the Valium, Ray thought. She cries in her sleep. Sometimes she can’t get out of bed in the morning. If you mention John she looks like she’s been given an electric shock.

‘She’s all right,’ Ray said.

White glanced at the photograph on his desk of two smiling toddlers, a small boy and a smaller girl. He was the only person in the office who had a photo of children on his desk.

‘I can’t imagine what she’s been through,’ White said, more to himself than Ray. ‘No parent should ever have to bury their child.’

Ray didn’t know what to say. Unless they were talking about music, he always felt tongue-tied around the editor. Like every other writer on The Paper, Ray thought that White was touched with greatness. Everybody knew the story. Even the readers.

In the early Seventies The Paper was a pop rag in terminal decline, called The Music Paper, if anything could ever be that corny – but then all music papers had corny titles, from Melody Maker to New Musical Express to Sounds to Disc, they all had names that had sounded groovy back when dinosaurs walked the earth – and Kevin White had saved it.

White had left school at fifteen, working on the print at the Daily Express with his father, his uncles, his brothers and his cousins until some bright spark above stairs asked the teenage Mod to write 500 words on a Motown revue – a dream ticket with the Four Tops, the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles all on one bill. White never looked back, and he was a junior reporter on The Music Paper when the big chance came. The suits upstairs gave White three months to increase advertising revenue and double the circulation, or they were going to put The Music Paper out of its misery.

White dropped the Music from the masthead, fired all the old farts who were nostalgic for the days when the big news was the Tremeloes’ tour and Herman’s Hermits secret heartache and whether Peter Tork was going to leave the Monkees. In a daring last throw of the dice, White kept the title alive by hiring heads, freaks and hairies from what was left of the underground press, because the underground press was dead or dying too. It felt like everything was dying in the early Seventies.

Ray could imagine the looks on their faces at Horse and Hounds when the new writers started turning up for work, all those refugees from Oz and Red Dwarf and Friendz and IT who filled The Paper with tales of bands that all the other heads, freaks and hairies knew by affectionate abbreviations. Heep. Floyd. Quo. Lizzy. Tull. Zep. And those writers loved Kevin White, just as Ray loved him, because White had the guts and the vision to do something that nobody else in this entire tower block of magazines would ever do – he gave you your first chance.

‘You just got back, didn’t you?’ White said.

Ray nodded, on surer ground now the talk was moving on to bands. Thin Lizzy,’ he said. ‘Leicester and Birmingham. Two thousand words. Centre spread.’

‘Good tour?’ White said.

Ray nodded, smiling. Thin Lizzy had been the first band he ever went on the road with, and they would always have a special place in his heart. When Ray had been a bumbling schoolboy with absolutely no idea how to conjure a two-page feature out of forty-eight hours with a band, Phil Lynott, the band’s black Irish frontman, had taken care of him – showed Ray that on the road it was okay to drink screwdrivers at breakfast if they calmed you down, coached Ray on how to conduct an interview, and even turned on Ray’s tape recorder when it was time to talk.

‘You’ve written about them before, haven’t you?’ White said.

‘This will be the third feature,’ Ray said.

White sighed, and something about that sound sent a sense of dread crawling up Ray’s spine. For the first time since entering the editor’s office, he felt that this was going to be bad.

‘Yeah, you’ve been doing this for a while, haven’t you?’ White took his feet off the desk and looked out the window. ‘And that’s the big problem with this job. You can only do it for so long.’

Ray felt sick to his stomach. That was the flip side of White’s fresh-blood policy – it meant some guy at the far side of his twenties quietly being put out to pasture.

But surely not me, Ray thought. I’m young. And I’ve got nowhere else to go. Nowhere else I want to be.

‘It’s like this, Ray,’ the editor said, talking more quickly now, wanting to get it over with. ‘We can’t send you to interview the new groups.’

‘But – Thin Lizzy!’

White held up a hand. ‘Hardly new. And that’s different. We all love the first band we went on the road with. You can’t do that every week.’ Then White was leaning forward, almost pleading. ‘I need writers who I can send to interview Johnny Rotten and Elvis Costello and Dag Wood.’ White sighed with exasperation. ‘And that’s not you, is it? Look at your hair.’

Ray suddenly saw himself in White’s eyes and – beyond the paternal affection and friendly chitchat – Ray saw that he looked ridiculous.

The music had changed, as the music always will, and Ray had not changed with it. Suddenly The Paper didn’t need a young head who was still hung up on the flowers-in-your-hair thing. It was a joke, man. Ray still believed in the whole peace and love and acoustic guitars thing that everybody was sneering about now. How could you send someone like that to talk to John Lydon? What would the Clash think?

He was no longer the little star. The world had changed while he wasn’t looking. It was like Ray – Beatles fan, California dreamer, the hippy child who was born ten years too late – was a star of the silent era, and talkies had just come in. He watched the editor pick up a copy of The Paper and turn to the section for album reviews.

‘Listen to this,’ White said. ‘Another slice of New Nihilism for all you crazy pop kids, and it’s like staring into an abyss of meaning-lessness.’

Ray listened to his words being read. His mood improved. He had been reasonably pleased with it, especially the bit about the abyss of meaninglessness. That sounded pretty good. That sounded like something Skip Jones might write.

‘What’s wrong with it?’ Ray said mildly.

Kevin White scowled at him, and Ray flinched. The editor could be scary when he wanted to be. For five years he had bossed an office full of precocious, overgrown adolescents, all of them high-IQ misfits, many of them habitual users of illegal substances. He knew how to control a meeting.

‘The abyss ofmeaninglessness?’ White threw the paper on his desk. ‘It’s KC and the Sunshine Band!’ Then his voice softened. White had seen it all before. Writers who were once part of the Zeitgeist – a word that was freely bandied around in the offices of The Paper – but now belonged to yesterday, writers who had done their stint on The Paper, their bit for rock and roll, and didn’t realise that it was time to be moving on. Writers who had lived for music suddenly discovering that everything they heard disgusted them, suddenly discovering that the music didn’t live for them.

‘This new music…’ Ray shook his head, and a veil of yellow hair fell in front of his face. He brushed it away. ‘Tear it down, smash it up. No words you can understand, no tunes you can hear.’

‘Who are you?’ White said angrily. ‘My maiden aunt from Brighton?’

Ray hated it when the editor raised his voice. It reminded him of home.

‘What’s happening?’ Ray said. ‘I don’t understand what’s happening.’

But he understood only too well. He should have been writing ten years ago, when it really felt like this music was going to change the world. 1967 – summer of love, year of wonders, the year of Sgt Pepper, when music was still pushing back the boundaries, when people still believed in something. He should have been in London when heads and hearts were still open, when there was still the possibility of glimpsing the Beatles playing live on a rooftop in Savile Row. He should have been tooling around and taking notes when the world still believed in love, enlightenment and John Lennon. And he should definitely have been at Woodstock, chanting no rain, no rain in the mud, with flowers in his hair and a California girl in his sleeping bag, a mellow smoke on the go, good acid in his veins turning everything the colour of sunshine, and maybe Arlo Guthrie up on stage singing. Instead of having to wait until the film came out in the grey light of a colder, drabber new decade. Yes, those few days on Yasgur’s farm really summed it all up for Ray.

Were you at Woodstock?

No, but I saw the film with my mum.

Kevin White took a deep breath.

‘Maybe, Ray, maybe a move from the staff to freelance would be good for you, and good for the paper.’

Ray’s eyes were hot. ‘Would I still have my desk?’ he asked.

White shifted uncomfortably. ‘Well, probably we would have to give your desk to someone else.’

Ray could see it now. He would be like one of the freelancers who came into the office hoping to be tossed a bone – a minor album to review, a lesser gig to attend – while the stars of The Paper wrote the cover stories, while Terry and Leon flew around the world, and got their picture next to their by-line. No desk to call his own, never really belonging, on the way out.

‘This is the only job I want,’ Ray said, and it was true. Ray could not imagine his life without The Paper, without his friends, without the comforting routines and rituals of rock and roll – going on the road, doing the singles, having somewhere to come every day, somewhere that felt more like home than the house where he lived. He had loved it as a reader, and he loved it as a writer. On either side of the looking glass, it was in his blood.

‘Then you’re going to have to give me something fast,’ White said, embarrassed that he had to act like the boss of IBM or something. ‘Something I can use.’

At that moment Leon Peck burst into the editor’s office. ‘Let me read you something,’ he said. ‘Sorry and all that – this won’t take long.’

White and Ray stared at Leon. ‘Don’t you knock?’ White said. ‘And what’s with the stupid hat?’