Jonathan Coe - The Dwarves of Death

This evening, moreover, we had business to discuss, because we’d decided that we were going to record a new demo tape. We’d each arranged to take time off work and we’d booked into Room 2 for Tuesday morning, in four days’ time. Unusually, and largely because I had the support of Chester, I’d managed to persuade the others that we should record one of my pieces, an uplifting, danceable sort of number called ‘Stranger in a Foreign Land’ which was one of the latest things I’d written (Harry had helped me with the words). It called for one or two modest key changes and some shifts in dynamics that I wasn’t sure we would be able to handle, so we agreed to spend most of that night’s session practising it.

I gave Martin a chord sheet that I’d written out during my lunch break, and then turned to Jake.

‘I think — er — I think we want to give this a kind of Afro-Latin feel,’ I explained. ‘You know, lots of off-beats.’

‘Uh-huh,’ he said, nervously.

I looked to Harry for support.

‘Isn’t that right?’

He nodded. ‘Yeah, it’s…’ He begun to tap his feet and count silently to himself. ‘It wants to go, sort of… chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga, chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga. Isn’t that the sort of thing?’

I frowned. ‘Well, I was thinking more in terms of… chugga chug chugga chug chugga chug chugga chug … You know, as if we had shakers or something.’

‘Well, why doesn’t Jake try those out, and see which fits?’

Jake looked at us, from one to the other, nodded, spat on his hands, picked up his heaviest sticks and launched straight into:

After a few bars I signalled to him to stop but he was enjoying himself too much, and before I could do anything Martin had joined in, hammering out the same two chords incessandy so that the whole thing started to sound like a grotesque parody of a Status Quo number.

‘All right, all right!’ I shouted and waved my arms and managed to get them to stop. ‘That sounded… just great, boys, but do you think we could get back to my song?’

‘That was your song,’ said Martin.

‘It was?’

‘Those are the chords you’ve written here.’ He showed me the chord sheet. ‘E and F sharp, right?’

‘Well… nearly, Martin, nearly. You see, what we actually have here is an E minor nine, and an F sharp minor seven. You were playing major chords.’

‘Does it make much difference?’

‘Well, technically — yes. You see, they have different notes in them.’

‘I think we should keep things simple.’

‘Simplicity’s great, Martin, I’m all for simplicity. Don’t get me wrong. It’s just that what you were playing, from a — well, from a musical point of view, really — is completely different from what I wrote.’

He didn’t seem pleased by this criticism, and to express his annoyance he said, ‘I think I’d better tune up again.’

Knowing that this would take some time, I left him to it, and went to find the lavatory.

It was either on the first floor or the second floor — after you’d gone across all those little landings, and up and down so many stairs, it was impossible to be sure — and when I came to find my way back to our studio, I got lost again. Just as I thought I knew where I was going, the lights went off (they were on some kind of time switch) and I had to grope my way along a pitch black corridor. At the end of the corridor, I found myself up against a locked door. It was very quiet. I was about to turn back, when I suddenly thought that I had heard a voice. I could have sworn that I heard a voice shout something behind the door — but as if from a distance. I could tell that the voice (which was male) was shouting quite loud, although the noise was heavily muffled by the door. Then again, perhaps I was imagining it. I stood there for a few seconds, straining to hear more, and then a hand gripped my shoulder. At the same time, the lights came back on, and I found that I was standing outside the door to Studio B, with Vincent’s face pushed up close to mine.

‘Oy, Rumpelstiltsken!’ he said. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

‘I was lost,’ I said.

‘Get away from there, will you? Your room’s bloody miles away. Come on, follow me.’

He tried the studio door, to make sure it was still locked, then led me away.

‘Sorry about this,’ I said. ‘It’s just that it’s hard to find your way around this place sometimes.’

‘You’ve been here often enough,’ he said; but he seemed to be making an effort to let his anger subside. ‘Anyway, how’s it going tonight? Getting plenty done, are you?’

‘We’re rehearsing this piece for Tuesday,’ I explained. ‘You know, that session you’re going to produce for us?’

The reminder seemed to cause him no particular pleasure. We weren’t keen on the thought of a whole day in the studio with Vincent, either, but he came with the price of the session, and none of us knew how to operate an 8-track desk ourselves. At least he was experienced, if his own stories were to be believed.

I rejoined the others and for the next couple of hours concentration was high and the rehearsal went fairly well. I forgot about the voices I thought I had heard behind the locked door of Studio B. By ten o’clock, ‘Stranger in a Foreign Land’ seemed to be shaping up nicely, and Harry was just about getting the hang of the rather wide-ranging vocal line, when all of a sudden Martin screamed ‘STOP!’ at the top of his voice, threw down his guitar, and stood there with his hands on his hips, listening intently. We watched him in fear.

‘Where’s that hiss coming from?’ he asked eventually.

‘What hiss?’

‘I can’t hear any hiss.’

‘The speakers are hissing. Can’t you hear it? It’s deafening!’

We listened for a while and then Harry said, in a conciliatory way, ‘Well, it’s not as if we need a perfect sound right now, this is only a rehearsal — ’

Martin stamped his foot and said, ‘God, this band is so technologically… illiterate! You’re all such bloody — ’ Then he stiffened again. ‘What’s that crackle?’

‘What crackle?’

‘I didn’t hear any crackle.’

‘Sorry, that was me,’ said Jake, who had opened a packet of crisps.

Harry made the mistake of laughing.

‘Right! That’s it!’ Martin shouted, and started unplugging his guitar and packing it away. ‘I don’t see why I should go on playing with a bunch of amateurs, who don’t even realize the importance of having a good sound. It’s like banging your head against a wall, playing in this band. There’s no professionalism, no commitment…’ He picked up his guitar case, made for the exit, and said, before departing and slamming the door, ‘Once and for all: I quit.’

He was gone, and there was a short silence. Then Jake put down his sticks, and began to take the drum kit apart.

‘Well, there we go,’ he sighed. ‘Another hour of studio time down the drain.’

None of us were unduly worried, because this was at least the fifteenth time that Martin had threatened to leave. Usually he would just turn up at the next rehearsal without saying anything about it. It wasn’t worth chasing after him: Harry lit up a cigarette, and I played through a few choruses of ‘Autumn Leaves’. The atmosphere in the studio was tired rather than tense.

‘Chester phoned up,’ Harry said, after a while.

I stopped playing.

‘Yes?’