Beneath the Blonde Read online

  In the past five years Siobhan and the guys had learnt more about the business than they’d ever hoped to know. They’d had a fairly slow start. The first single, a minor triumph, had been followed by another year of student gigs and record company stonewalling. Then they’d eventually managed to record a very well received first album with a willing if disorganized indie label. That album had been a huge and very surprising success. However, the subsequent tour had been followed not by the weeks of glory they’d expected but by another agonizing year in which they eventually sorted out all the business details. And rather messily extricated themselves from a tricky relationship with the guy who had been acting as their manager until a real one happened along. An old friend of the bass player Steve, Alan had known far more about managing stand-up comedians than bands and had only been looking after them as a favour. Manager-free (after a great deal of negotiating and a greater deal of cash), they accepted an offer from Cal Harding, a Texan businessman their record company had introduced them to. He’d commuted between LA and New York for thirty years and, in his early fifties, he knew the business inside out. Or certainly seemed to. With one success under their belt and badly needing to realize the promise of so much more, the band couldn’t afford not to make a leap of faith on the manager front. They signed away the next five years to him and then, for the first time in their career as musicians, they were able to leave business to someone else and get on with being creative. Greg and drummer Alex churned out over forty songs, Siobhan and Dan edited, pruned, arranged and then rearranged. After five major arguments between Alex and Dan, yet another monumental fight between Siobhan and Greg, and a single moment in which even Steve was ruffled, they finally had the sixteen tracks they felt ready to let Cal offer their record company. The album was whittled down to thirteen songs, at least one of which everyone hated, and another which needed virtual blackmail to get the record company to agree to. (Cal had proved himself a man of great artistic integrity by simply sending a fax to the most difficult company executive: “No ‘Pink Pleasure Please?’ No Blondes.”) Luckily for all of them, his bravura show of force was successful.

  And now, with the second album due out soon, Cal had set them up with a new tour manager, dates were being booked and time on the road was coming up in the new year. Only three months to start with, but that was three months too long for Alex and Steve who both hated to go away—and nine months too short for Dan who, having just broken up with his boyfriend, would have been happy to go on the road forever and never come back. Siobhan knew that they stood a chance of becoming something with this album, of building on their first success and actually making all the work really matter, not just the years she’d been with the band but everything else too: the hundreds of nights in grotty clubs and pubs since she was sixteen, the effort she’d put into trying to make homes out of sad bedsits and worse shared squats with Greg. She knew that Beneath The Blonde On Tour had to be something incredible.

  She also knew that the silent phone calls she was receiving at three in the morning were starting to annoy her. The nasty anonymous letters weren’t very pleasant and when the first bunch of yellow roses arrived, she realized she was frightened and maybe it wasn’t just a joke after all.

  FOUR

  The band had been Alex’s idea. Stoned again in the muggy summer of 1988, sitting on the roof of his squat in Vauxhall, gas tanks and the Oval hazy in the near distance, he was burning his back and rewriting his fourth poem of the day. Stuck on line three, he was relieved to hear Greg shout up from the street. He stood on the warm pavement with a twelve pack of beers and the bongos he’d borrowed for a party the night before. Alex threw the keys from the roof and watched after them as they floated down to the street on their pink silk handkerchief parachute. Five minutes later Greg dropped a cold beer two inches in front of his new friend’s face. “I bought them this morning and left a couple out so they’d warm up for your crap taste buds.”

  “Very considerate. Unusual for a colonial. Smoke?”

  To Greg’s nodded agreement, Alex rolled his fourth joint of the day—it was one-thirty in the afternoon, he’d been up since ten and he was cutting down.

  The two young men smoked and drank through the heat of the afternoon, enjoying the solid wall of breeze-free London heat and the freedom of summer. Greg was an engineer for a recording company and loathed every minute of his weekday job. He’d taken the job hoping it would help him with his own music, but found that the best of his work involved recording cheap radio ads with bad voice-over actors, while in the worst moments he was just a glorified (and slightly better paid) runner. Alex was signing on every second Tuesday morning and putting in twelve-hour days at a pine furniture factory in West London for twenty quid a day cash in hand. He’d just arrived back from two weeks with his family in Cork and was gearing himself up to the regime of fortnightly lying to the government and daily lies to the tube inspectors and then wasting himself at the weekend as a relief from hating his weekdays.

  As they sat and smoked and drank, Alex occasionally made forays all the way down to the cellar kitchen to bring up another slice of bread and jam for himself or bread and Vegemite for Greg, who complained that the Vegemite in Alex’s kitchen was Australian, not New Zealand, and therefore not the real thing. And then ate it anyway. After two warmish beers and a half-hearted attempt at conversation about cricket, Greg, who had cleared his own flat of party goers at six that morning, fell asleep and Alex finished his poem. Then Alex fell asleep, Greg woke up, rolled another joint, read Alex’s poem, edited Alex’s poem and wandered downstairs to chat in the kitchen to Alex’s Spanish girlfriend. Mariella had spent the day at Kennington Lido and after too long asleep by the reflected water, was applying after-sun to the backs of her arms and legs. He stayed long enough to make coffee until three of her dyke friends arrived with two dogs and a puppy on a string and he felt the warmth of Mariella’s welcome quickly turn to a more politically correct animosity. Waking Alex with the coffee, Greg told him that Mariella was back.

  “Are those ‘wimmin’ with her?”

  “Yep.”

  Alex grabbed his coffee and growled. “Fuck it.”

  Greg shook his head, “Nah, they’re all right. They’re just not very …”

  “Nice?”

  “Chatty.”

  “Yeah, well it’s my fucking kitchen, man, and they’re always bloody here.”

  “Is Mariella …?”

  “I dunno. Not yet anyway. Oh fuck it, why me?”

  “Why you what?”

  “Why do all my fucking girlfriends become lesbians?”

  Greg laughed, “Only one of your girlfriends has become gay, and you knew Hannah was more or less a dyke when you started going out with her.”

  “So why’d she go out with me then?”

  “Last fling? Sad and desperate? Just to persuade herself of what she wouldn’t be missing?”

  “Bitch.”

  “Nah. Just confused. It’s the zeitgeist.”

  “The what?”

  Greg picked up the bongos and started drumming while Alex rolled another joint. He explained, “Sign of the times. It’s trendy for girls. The girls we know anyway. Look at Mariella, I mean she’s probably more or less straight.”

  “Oh, she’s more, believe me.”

  “Ok, but if most of her women friends are gay, and it’s not as if she really knows that many other people in London anyway, she’s bound to get a bit curious. And you know … they’re women. They’re girls. They’re nicer, softer, cleaner—all that shit. I’d be a lesbian if I was a girl.”

  Alex snarled, “Not if the lesbians you knew were those lesbians.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe I could do without the barbed-wire tattoo on the face …”

  “And the fucking dogs everywhere.”

  Greg drummed faster, Alex holding the joint for him so he didn’t have to move his hands from the rhythm. “That’s not the point. These specific lesbians aren’t the point. I know some l
esbians who don’t have tattoos or dogs.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. There’s a girl in my photography class. And she doesn’t live in Brixton either.”

  “Well, she must have got lost.”

  Greg stopped drumming. “You’re deliberately being a wanker now. My point is that when you say all dykes are ugly or nasty or whatever …”

  “I didn’t.”

  “No, but you implied it. And that’s just the same as when they say all men are crap or all men are slobs—which, come to think of it, is probably true …”

  “Fuck off, you might be, but I did my washing this morning. And I’ll be ironing tonight.”

  “Or all men are liars …”

  “Or all men are rapists?”

  “Maybe that’s stretching the analogy a little too far, but you know what I mean. You know, all Irish are thick?”

  Alex stood up and started pacing the small roof area, looking down at the square he’d lived in for the past four years, once a haven for squatters of all kinds, now slowly reverting to “society” as the housing associations and coops bought up the properties and normalized them. He sat on the edge of the roof and looked back at Greg. “Yeah, all right. Of course I know what you mean. And I also know that this is my house. I found it. I opened it, I got the electricity and water put on, I cleared the garden, I fixed the roof, I put in the windows and when Mariella brings that bloody Autumn round here …”

  “Autumn?”

  “Yeah. Her girlfriend’s called Evechild.”

  “Oh.”

  “See? Anyway, the problem is, I don’t exactly end up feeling that this Englishman’s home is his castle.”

  “Fair point. Even for an Irishman. Pub?”

  “In a minute. I just want to finish this.” Alex looked around for his notepad, Greg pointed it out under the several empty cans of beer.

  “I did it for you. Edited the poem. It’s finished.”

  “You bastard. That’s private.”

  “People who get stoned as much as you do should never attempt to keep things private, they fall asleep too fucking much. It’s good though.”

  “Thanks, you’d know.”

  “But I’ve made it better.”

  Alex grabbed the notepad and stared at it for a couple of minutes, frowning hard. “Fuck me, but you have. Hah!” He tossed the notepad down and opened the last can of very warm beer.

  The young men shared the last beer and watched the sun set on the other side of the river and talked of Greg’s photography course and the relative merits of Split Enz and Crowded House, football and rugby, until Mariella joined them with three glasses, two bottles of Spanish wine and two mammoth portions of chips swimming in salty vinegar. When she went inside to get her after-sun cream for Alex, having kissed him for a full five and half minutes, Greg looked across at his friend and smiled. “Yeah, she certainly looks like a dyke to me.”

  Alex threw a handful of cold chips at him. “Fuck off. Let’s start a band.”

  Alex always maintained that he’d been thinking about suggesting a band to Greg for months, but it was Greg’s editing of his poem that decided him. Greg believed Alex was too unnerved by the honesty of their earlier conversation about sex and sexuality and wanted to get back to any safe topic. Football, music, anything as long as it didn’t involve sexual truth. Whatever the reason, Greg agreed and the idea became real. Alex brought in his old friend Dan as keyboards player and singer, gleefully pointing out that Dan was gay and wasn’t it strange that Greg didn’t seem to have any gay men friends, and Mariella pointed them in the direction of Steve, bass player, sometime playwright and Autumn’s brother. The band rehearsed on the roof for the rest of the summer and moved down to Alex’s bedroom when the days turned colder. For a while, Mariella sang with them but when she left in October, with Autumn and the two puppies, Alex wrote their first real song “Welcome Winter” and Greg brought in his new flatmate, Siobhan, to sing. Greg and Siobhan weren’t yet lovers. That grew over the following months, but by late November of 1988, the line up of Beneath The Blonde was firmly established.

  FIVE

  Since 1988, Siobhan Forrester had created one hell of a reputation for herself. When the band was performing she strode the stage like a manic sex goddess. Alternating between her whispered intros and proclaiming the songs with cut-glass attitude, she held court between chord changes—rude, crude, loud and powerful. The music press, at a loss to describe her adequately, took the easy route, comparing her to other women performers. Gig reviews were crammed with quotes like “A cross between Sinead O’Connor and Jenny Eclair with the voice of Annie Lennox”. And always, no matter how erudite the publication, the reviewer would find some way of getting in a description of the physical Siobhan—long lean limbs, impressive height, amazing mouth, tits that shouldn’t be allowed near hips so sheer and, inevitably, all that hair. The celebrated blonde locks. Blonde that changed from week to week, gig to gig—elemental silver and platinum, alchemical peroxide, edible strawberry and honey, and occasionally just pure out-and-out white. Whatever they thought of the music, and most were agreed the band was close as fuck to perfect, every reviewer, male or female, gay, straight or raving queer was in agreement on one thing—Siobhan Forrester’s looks were phenomenal.

  So, turning up at the Chalk Farm address on Sunday afternoon, Saz had expected a collection of security guards and a video entryphone at the very least. What she didn’t expect was to stroll up the overgrown path, climb the three steps to the purple front door of the baby pink house, ring the bell and, after a fish eye had glared at her through the peep hole, to be greeted by Siobhan herself. At least she thought it was Siobhan. The mouth looked like it belonged on Siobhan Forrester, but very little else did. Saz was just starting to wonder if every beautiful woman had a dowdy little sister hidden away somewhere when the tall, thin woman with short brown hair held out her hand. “Saz Martin? Thanks for coming so quickly. I’m Siobhan. Come in.”

  Saz followed her into an open entrance hall, decorated in a mini rain forest of tropical houseplants and pots of yellow and orange flowers against a backdrop of draped purple muslins.

  The newest icon of female pop sexuality shuffled away on holey socks and called over her hunched shoulders, “I’ve just put the kettle on, would you like some tea?”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  In the first floor kitchen Saz sat on an extremely modern and very uncomfortable stool, four inches too tall for her legs to reach the floor. She watched while the darling girl of Britpop poured boiling water on round Tetley teabags in chipped yellow china mugs and then fished out the soggy bags with a bone caviar spoon. She knew it was a caviar spoon because Siobhan told her so. “It’s since we’ve had some money. Greg’s got this thing about caviar. I don’t get it myself. The only time I like seafood is when it’s a tiny piece of anchovy with a thin crust pizza base on one side and a lot of melted mozzarella on the other.”

  Saz could see that the woman before her was the Siobhan Forrester she thought she knew, but only just. She had the distinct feeling she was looking at the “before” photo from a trashy magazine makeover. This woman was tall enough, but hardly the giant she seemed on stage, closer to Molly’s height, maybe five foot nine or ten. Saz knew most of the hair must be a wig though she wasn’t prepared for the ordinariness of the mousey brown bob. But what really got her was the body. It just didn’t seem to be there. She looked up from Siobhan’s T-shirt covered chest to see the younger woman smiling at her.

  “I know. It’s a shock. Or so the men tell me. And of course I don’t answer the door like this to the press—our manager would never allow it. It is me though. It’s easy. Really. Same old girl shit just taken to extremes.”

  “Girl shit?”

  “Yeah, you know. Hair, height and hips. Hair’s obvious—just wigs. Height’s shoes. And hips—well, there’s never really any hips anyway. I’m lucky I suppose. Prancing around the stage for two hours a night does wonders for the bottom
line—that’s why I like doing the big dates last, so I’m even thinner than usual by the time we get to them. Makes the waist go in and so the hips go out—with the right clothes they do, anyway. The rest of it’s just makeup.”

  Saz nodded. “All of it?”

  Siobhan grabbed a breast in each hand, pulling the T-shirt material tight across her front. “Almost. These bits are all mine—with a little help from Mr Gossard of course.”

  Saz had the grace to blush. “Yeah. Right. I’m sorry. It’s none of my business. I just …”

  “Expected Bette Lynch?”