Jonathan Coe - The Dwarves of Death

Funnily enough, I look back on that recording session with some fondness. The fact that Jake and Martin weren’t there, and knew nothing about it, put us in a conspiratorial mood and infected the whole occasion with a sort of cheerfulness which I didn’t normally associate with Thorn Bird Studios. The only real argument we had was at the very beginning, over the changes I had made to the lyrics. At first Harry couldn’t believe I was being serious, but I pointed out to him that it was his idea that I should propose to Madeline, originally, and besides, he had to admit that in this version the song was definitely more memorable.

For instance, the second half now went like this:

Madeline

You look at me without a murmur

The time has come

To make the bond between us firmer

I’ll give you every token

Precious gifts from out of Araby

Why am I heartbroken?

Oh Madeline, will you marry me?

Harry shook his head.

‘I can’t sing this,’ he kept saying. ‘I don’t even know the woman.’

All the same, I soon talked him round to it.

As usual we got precious little joy out of Vincent. I suppose it was our fault for antagonizing him to start with. I hadn’t been able to resist bringing the Dwarves of Death record along with me, just to prove that he had been wrong. His initial reaction had been one of surly disbelief; he took the record off me and said that he wanted to look at it more closely. I hate people who can’t bear to lose an argument. After that he didn’t talk to us much, just sat in the control booth reading a back issue of Midi Mania while making occasional adjustments to the faders. At the end, when we asked him how it had sounded, he said: ‘Brilliant. I should get on the phone to EMI right away, if I was you. Which one of you’s going to have the golden disc on his bedroom wall, then? Or do you both share the same bedroom, eh? Har, har, har!’

Then a strange thing happened: when we asked him to give us the record back, he couldn’t find it. He claimed to have taken it upstairs with him and left it on his desk, and now it had disappeared.

‘Typical!’ he said. ‘I should know better than to leave anything lying around in this place. The kind of low-life I get in here, they’re no better than criminals, most of them.’

‘Look, that wasn’t even my record,’ I said. ‘It belonged to a friend of mine. And it’s extremely rare.’

I was appalled to think what Derek might say when I told him that I’d lost it. Nevertheless, Vincent was blithely unapologetic, and to make things even worse he charged us twice as much for the session as we had been expecting.

‘Your manager didn’t tell me anything about this,’ he said, ‘so I’m going to have to charge you normal rates.’

‘The man’s a total bastard,’ said Harry, as we sat, a few minutes later, in a café near London Bridge station, eating sausage and chips. ‘I reckon he stole that record himself. He probably knows how much it’s worth on the collectors’ market.’

I nodded, and chased a recalcitrant baked bean around my plate before saying, ‘It makes you wonder about Chester a bit, doesn’t it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, how come Chester manages to get on with him? How do you come to have such a good business arrangement with a man like that?’

‘That’s the sign of a good manager, though, isn’t it? Being able to get on the right side of different sorts of people.’

I considered this and shook my head.

‘No, there’s more to it than that.’ I tapped my fork against the table in frustration. ‘There’s something going on at that place, and I don’t know what it is. You know Karla, the woman behind the bar at The White Goat?’

‘Yes?’

‘She doesn’t trust Chester. She says she sees him there all the time, with all sorts of strange people. And last Sunday, just after we’d all had that… discussion, this bloke came in. Paisley, his name was — he’s the lead singer with this other band that Chester manages. And he was desperate for a fix or something. In the end they went off together.’

‘You think Chester was supplying him?’

‘Maybe. And if Chester’s involved in all that scene, what about Vincent? Where does he come in?’

‘Don’t get carried away, Bill. Vincent’s just a mean-minded little bastard, that’s all. I don’t think he’s up to anything shady.’

‘So what does he keep in Studio B? You’re not telling me that’s really a rehearsal room. Nobody’s allowed to go near the place.’

Harry resumed his eating. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘You’ve lost me.’

I leant forward, and said in an urgent whisper: ‘I heard voices behind that door, Harry. I’m sure of it.’

‘If you ask me, you’re letting your imagination get the better of you. In any case it’s none of your business, and the less I know about what that guy gets up to in his spare time, the happier I’ll be. At the moment, I’m more interested in this.’

From his coat pocket, he brought out the spool of tape containing the new version of ‘Madeline (Stranger in a Foreign Land)’.

I smiled.

‘How do you think it went?’

‘Pretty good. Pretty bloody good. Probably the best thing we’ve done.’

I thought so too, but it was reassuring to have it confirmed. Using the drum machine had enabled us to create, at last, exactly the rhythm we wanted, with some extra effects like shakers and handclaps, and Harry had added a funky little guitar pattern which went against the basic drumbeat: it gave the whole song a far busier and more purposeful feel. The new words I had written were easier to sing, and he had slightly altered the vocal part anyway to bring it within his range. It was an enormous improvement on our other effort.

‘I’ll buy some tapes tomorrow and get about a dozen copies done,’ he said. ‘I’ve already been to see a printer about the inlay cards. He said I could pick them up tomorrow.’

‘What did you put on them?’

‘I just said who was in the band, and I credited Vincent as producer, and I gave a phone number.’

‘Whose phone number?’

‘Yours. You’re the one with the answering machine.’

‘Fair enough. I’d like a couple of copies as soon as possible, then.’

‘A couple?’

‘Well, one for me, and one…’

‘Yes?’

I didn’t bother to spell it out, and Harry was too nice to want to tease me about it. All he said, with a friendly smile, was ‘Good luck.’

*

It was not quite midnight, this time, when I got back to the flat, and Tina was awake for once. There was a light coming from the kitchen, where she was sitting at the table with her back to the door.

‘Hello,’ I said, agreeably surprised.

She answered, ‘Hello, William,’ without looking round. ‘I was just going to write you a note, only now I needn’t bother.’

‘Oh. Anything important?’

‘Only to say that you still owe me for rent, and that I’d drunk some of your milk. You don’t mind, do you?’

‘No, not at all.’

It was the first time we had spoken for weeks. It seemed absurd that we should have so little to say to each other.

‘Is Pedro coming round tonight?’ I asked.

‘He’s already been.’

‘Oh.’

Tina got up, and with a slow, careful movement she pulled her green cotton dressing-gown tightly around her.

‘I’m going to bed.’

She walked quickly past me, and neither of us said good night. Her face was badly bruised, her throat red with finger marks.