Chapter Nineteen
Martine did not phone the next day, or the day after that. Theo resisted the temptation of phoning her, hoping that his lack of communication was a message in itself, and was as painful for her as it was for him.
The X-Tradition practice sessions began. August had indeed managed to lure well-regarded bass player Tom away from Downward Spiral and he had recruited a rhythm guitarist via a Want Ad in the window of Lyncombe's main newsagents.
X-Tradition's music became less like the free-form noodling of August and Theo's first jam session and more like what he expected hard core punk songs to sound like: loud, fast and short. Theo kept to his original strategy of using plenty of tom toms instead of the hi-hat; giving the rhythm section a stomping, heavy feel that nicely counteracted the spiky treble guitar.
With each practice session, more and more people seemed to cram into the attic practice space of Wells' crumbling farmhouse. First Sophie brought along a couple of her friends, and then they brought their boyfriends, and then Tom invited over a couple of guys he knew, and soon the practices became social events as much as jam sessions. Although the crowd were friendly enough, the sudden influx of so many strangers alarmed Theo and he found it difficult to relax or bond with them.
Another thing that alarmed him was the amount of marijuana that was being smoked. He had no moral objection obviously, but the practice room would become a haze of red leb, and to make matters worse, the smoke tended to linger at Theo's end, and he often felt queasy from smoke inhalation.
On the plus side however, August liked the logo he'd created for the band and had asked him to paint it on the back of his leather jacket. He had also painted it on a white bed sheet that hung on the back wall of the practice area, behind Theo's drum kit.
The practice sessions took place most afternoons, and in the mornings Theo kept to his original plan of sketching rural life and labour. He produced what he thought was an excellent series drawings around the Colerne water tower, and he then went on to sketch more traditional rural scenes involving tractors and combine harvesters at several of the farms between Lyncombe and Monkton Farleigh.
Evenings were spent either at August's place, at the fountain, or round at Pete's. After a week or so, he gave up any hope of Martine phoning him, and he became resolute that he would not phone her. Did that mean that he had chucked her? He had never chucked a girl before, but he assumed that saying he was going to phone a girl and then not phoning her constituted a chucking. That he had ended it gave him some sense of satisfaction, although not enough to make him stop missing her.
Theo continued with his guitar playing too. He quickly mastered the Johnny Ramone chords, and became proficient at the major (and some minor) open chords too. He studied the song sheets Tim had given him, and he was soon able to play along to 409 by The Beach Boys. Singing and playing guitar at the same time seemed to come naturally and gave him an enormous feeling of achievement.
By the time the Tuesday evening guitar lesson came round again, Theo had managed to put the Martine incident into some sort of perspective. Maybe she hadn't done such a bad thing. After all, hadn't Theo routinely taken money from his mother's purse until only a couple of years ago? Don't all people have the urge to steal at some time or other? Maybe Martine just found it more difficult to resist than most. He was toying with the idea of phoning her. It had only been a week or so; he could just say that he had been busy with his new band, which was partially true.
Tim was pleased with the progress both his pupils were making at the Tuesday evening lessons. Laura seemed to be taking a different approach to Theo - she was more interested in classical guitar, so spent her time learning how to use her thumb and fingers to pluck the strings individually. Theo pressed Tim for more guitar shortcuts, and Tim showed him how to do power chords, which Theo found fun to play.
Sometimes during the lessons Theo would look Laura's way and find her looking at him, which would cause him to blush. He tried to hide it by quickly looking down at his guitar, hoping that his burning cheeks were at an un-viewable angle. Once he felt his blush recede he would look back up and again she would still be looking his way, so the whole process would start again.
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Since the X-Tradition practice sessions had become so overcrowded, Theo had spent little one-on-one time with August. He needed a way of re-establishing the (now not remotely sexual) friendship that he felt had blossomed over the past couple of weeks.
Perhaps now was the time to continue working on 'The Dead White Sky', and get it finished so he could present it to August. As far as he knew, August had not debuted the song in any of the practice sessions they had had so far, although with all the shouting it was sometimes impossible to tell what each song was actually about. The sing-along chorus that Theo had created was still in his head, as well as being stored away safely on his parent's Gilbert & Sullivan rehearsal cassette.
All he needed now was a melody for the verses, but Theo did not know how to do this. Was there some formula that songwriters used? Did you play the same chords as the chorus but in a different order perhaps? Or did you go up an octave, or down an octave? Theo realised that he didn't actually know what an octave was. He decided to listen to some of his favourite songs to see if he could find any clues.
First he listened to 'See You' by Depeche Mode but couldn't really tell much difference between verse and chorus, except perhaps that the chorus felt faster somehow. Maybe the trick was to fit more notes into the chorus. Next he listened to 'The Air That I Breathe' by The Hollies. The chorus seemed to be sung in a higher octave or key or whatever, but again the notes seemed essentially the same.
He decided to just get on with it. So he picked up the sky blue Strat, plugged it into the newly acquired Marshall practice amp, made sure the newly borrowed fuzzbox was working and sang the melody of the chorus of The Dead White Sky in his head. Then he strummed the lower E string to find a note that sounded like the opening note in his head. He decided that it was the F. Then came the G, the A and then further up the fretboard for the B and down again to the G. He played it again, singing along in his head. It felt right. So that was the chorus figured out. He seemed to remember Tim telling him some formula for figuring out if a chord should be a minor or major one, but decided to put that on the back-burner for now.
For the verses maybe he should just use the same four chords - F, the G, the A and the B. He started with the A chord, but remembering that verses seemed slower somehow than choruses, he kept strumming on that note for two bars instead of one. Then he moved down to the G chord for one bar, and then went up to the B for two more. Another melody formed in his mind. So he played the notes again, this time humming the new melody as he went. Yes, this seemed to work. Now he had to see if the lyrics that August had written would actually fit into this new verse format. He retrieved the folded piece of A4 from his desk and read the first verse:
You see the noise and hear the pain
The sky it drowns with acid rain
A blink of light that cracks the sky
Leaves houses up but children die
He tried to make the lyrics scan to his verse melody. To do so meant leaving a fairly big gap in the middle of every other line:
You see the noise and hear the pain
The sky it drowns with acid rain
A blink of light that cracks the sky
Leaves houses up but children die
But this wasn't necessarily a problem. In fact he liked the fact that the verses felt slower as a result. It meant the song would stand out from the normally frenetically fast X-Tradition output, and the chorus - when it came - would be even more powerful.
So now Theo had the chorus and the verse. He knew that songs also contained a middle eight section after the second chorus, but he didn't think that this was something he needed to concern himself with now. Perhaps he and August could work on that together.
The next step was to get this finished song onto tape. So once
more he retrieved the cassette recorder from the downstairs cupboard and cued the Gilbert & Sullivan rehearsal tape to the beginning and pressed Play and Record. After a couple of bars of guitar intro, he sang the first verse and the chorus into the machine, his timing faltering only once or twice as he changed from chord to chord.
He stopped the recording and rewound it to the beginning. He pressed Play and sat back, his heart pumping, half with expectation and half with trepidation. The guitar intro began and sounded very loud. He waited for his voice to come in after the first couple of bars, but when it did he could hardly hear it. Even though the Marshall was on a low volume setting the guitar completely drowned out his voice.
He rewound the tape to the beginning again. He reduced the volume on the Marshall amp and turned down the fuzzbox. If he was going to be heard over the guitar he needed to sing louder. He pressed Play and Record again. With the reduced fuzz level, his guitar sounded more rock n roll than punk. He took a deep breath and sang the opening lines of the first verse again, this time getting his voice as loud as he dared:
You see the noise and hear the pain
The sky it drowns with acid rain
On he went, this time with less faltering between chord changes. When he reached the end of the first chorus, his throat began to tickle and he felt the need to cough. So he pressed Stop and rewound the tape. He listened again as the guitar intro started, and then heard a voice; a reedy, resonant voice far removed from the motherly lullaby that he had heard on first playback. He liked this voice. It sounded like the voice of a singer. It seemed that raising his voice to be heard over the guitar had given it more authority. Or was it that the guitar had hidden the softer aspects of his voice that he had disliked?
He sat stunned for a moment. This sounded like an actual song. Was this what it felt like to be Mark Heritage or August Wells? To create music from nothing? To be the instigator?
But would August like it? He could think of no reason why not. It may not be as punky as a lot of the X-Tradition stuff, but August said that he wanted the band to be a more democratic unit than the New England Planets. All band members should be able to contribute. And what was this if not a contribution?
Theo didn't want to take any chances; he wanted August to hear the song in its best possible light. He imagined his song with a drum track behind it - how much more powerful it would be with the onslaught of his drumming behind the guitar and vocal. His cymbals and tom toms would fill out the sound and turn the song into a powerhouse that August would be unable to resist! But how could he get his drumming onto this demo tape demo as well as sing and play the guitar?
Then the answer presented itself, as plain as day. He would need to find another cassette recorder, then he could record his drum track onto the first recorder and play that recording back as he sang and played guitar into the second recorder. He could think of no reason why this would not work. He was pretty sure that his parents did not own another cassette recorder, and he didn't want to ask any of his friends in case they wondered why he needed it. So another trip to Bath was required.
The next day he arranged to pick his kit up from its week-long residency at August's house and made the trip into Bath to find a cassette player. He couldn't fine one in any of the second-hand shops so he had to buy one from Woolworths for £7.99, which seriously ate into his remaining holiday money. But he believed the end result would be worth it. He also bought a three-pack of blank Maxwell C-30 cassettes.
When he got home, the house was empty, so he could conduct his two-track audio experiment without fear of interruption. The first step was to record the drum part: he set his new cassette player on his desk approximately four feet from the front of the kit and pressed the Play and Record buttons. Then he then ran to the drum kit, sat on the stool and clicked his sticks together four times to count himself in. He then waited for two bars (which he imagined to be the unaccompanied guitar intro) before beginning his drum part. He sang along in his head, creating fills and drum rolls where necessary, and then stopped completely for one bar before hitting the snare and floor tom simultaneously three times to back up the Dead White Sky segment of the chorus.
When he finished, he got up from behind the kit and pressed Stop and Rewind, and then Play. He listened as the tape recorder began to hum. Then the click-click-click-click of his drumsticks, and then a deafening clatter as the bass and snare drum kicked in. The hi-hat sounded fine, but the drums and cymbal smashes were far too loud. He was frustrated that the recording sounded amateurish, and he had to find a way of improving it.
He tried putting the tape recorder further away, but that led to the sound becoming muddy. So he tried placing the recorder directly behind him at head height (he placed the tape recorder on a stool placed on top of his desk to achieve this), and this, combined with some tea towels to dampen the drum heads, seemed to provide an acceptable recording.
Now that he had his drum track in the bag, he needed to add the guitar and vocal parts. To test levels he positioned the cassette recorder containing his drum track right next to the other recorder and pressed Play. He then pressed Play and Record on the other cassette player and strummed the opening couple of bars of the guitar intro. He could just make out the drum track emanating muddily from the other cassette player, and after a few more bars he pressed the Stop button. The resulting recording contained twice the "hum" levels of his previous efforts, but the system seemed to work. The drum track was too quiet on his first attempt however, so he turned the volume up to full and tried again. This time the levels seemed more or less okay, so he attempted playing the whole song uninterrupted.
After a couple of abortive attempts during which chord changes were forgotten or notes not reached, he managed to complete the song from first verse to final chorus. He pressed Stop on both machines and rewound both cassettes. He pressed Play on the cassette containing both the drum track and the second guitar/vocal track and listened. Apart from the loudness of the hum, and the quietness of the recording itself, the song presented itself to the world, if not quite fully formed, then in an embryonic version that August would not be able to resist.
He ejected the tape from the player and mimicking August's own handwriting, wrote THE DEAD WHITE SKY in capitals on the 'contents' strip of the cassette. Then he wrote VERSION 1 next to it. He wasn't quite sure why he wrote this, perhaps to imply that there could be several more versions if need be.
He put the cassette in its protective plastic case and again wrote THE DEAD WHITE SKY on its spine. He put the cassette in the top drawer of his desk and then placed the sky blue Strat in its makeshift cradle in front of the desk drawers, as if to protect his first recording.
But now he wasn't sure what his next move should be. How would he present this song to August? The obvious thing to do would be to give it to him at the next practice session, but what if he were to play it there and then, in front of everybody? And what if his tune wasn't in fact an original and everybody heard his shameless copy of a recent chart hit, or a long-forgotten sixties classic?
He decided to think about it. Not sure what else to do, he emptied the contents of his rucksack onto his desk and took the bus to the off-licence by the train station in Chippenham. There he stocked up on booze and fags and spent the rest of the evening round at Pete's.