Geoff Nicholson - Flesh Guitar

And that was how it went for the rest of the gig, a perfectly attentive audience that became electrified every time the guitarist took a solo. Jenny watched and wasn’t sure what she thought. Should she disapprove? Was something deeply immoral going on here? The artistic objections were obvious enough, but it seemed mean-spirited to object when everyone in the place was having such a spectacularly good time. Jed Rhodes appeared to be having the best time of all. No doubt he’d taken twice as much of the drug as anyone in the audience and the look on his face was positively beatific.

As midnight came around the band tried to take a break, but the audience wouldn’t let them leave the stage. They played for another twenty minutes or so, then tried again. This time the audience threatened to turn ugly and demanded encores, dozens of them. The band was forced to play all through the night, to perform every song they knew, and the lead guitarist was forced to play solos until his hands almost bled. Only when the night sky began to lighten with the onset of dawn did the effects of the drug start to wear off. Only then did the audience quieten down and only then were the band allowed to finish.

Jenny left long before the end but she’d already seen more than enough. She didn’t get to speak to Jed that night and when she phoned him the next day she was told that he and his band had already left town and started a hastily arranged national tour. She feared the very worst.

Over the next few weeks she heard plenty of rumours, some were more reliable than others and a few were very strange indeed, but they all confirmed that Jed Rhodes was having one helluva tour. All over the country audiences were going crazy for Jed Rhodes, his band, his music, and particularly for his hot young lead guitarist. Jenny read reviews of the gigs, and sometimes the reviewers were mystified by Jed’s success with his audience, and she supposed these were reviewers who didn’t get to have any of the drug. But just as often the reviews showed every sign of participation in the drug experience, and were suitably agog in their appreciation. Tickets were selling fast.

The national tour became international. Jed and his band hit the road for America, Japan, the Pacific Rim. Jenny lost touch completely, lost track of his progress, but she did hear that a fifth member of the band had started to appear on stage, an enigmatic little character called Tubby Moran who didn’t appear to do much, didn’t play a musical instrument, and yet presided over the band as though he were their mascot and guiding genius.

Jenny wished Jed all the best, hoped he’d become rich and famous and able to buy all the drugs he wanted, and on those occasions when she was playing to dull, unresponsive audiences in cold empty halls she wished she could hand round a few draughts of the famous pink liquid. But on balance she never seriously envied Jed. She had a firm sense of impending disaster.

Six months later Jenny was buying some groceries in an all-night supermarket when she saw someone over by the pharmacy counter who looked a lot like Jed Rhodes. She thought it couldn’t be him because surely he was still on tour and also because Jed wouldn’t look so poor and hollowed out, wouldn’t be wearing that shabby old greatcoat, for instance. But she peered down into his shopping trolley, saw that it was full of vodka and cough medicine and she knew it had to be Jed. The face was older, the hair had turned a few shades greyer, the skin too, but it was him all right.

‘How’s it going, Jed?’ she asked.

Without lifting his head he said, ‘Don’t ask, Jenny,’ but she couldn’t stop herself asking, and later in an all-night coffee bar Jed couldn’t help himself telling her the whole sad story.

‘Right from the beginning there were problems,’ he admitted, ‘and I don’t deny they were largely caused by drugs. But you know, I’ve been on other tours where there were problems with drugs, and usually they were drugs a whole lot nastier than Bliss. I thought I could cope. I was stupid, right?’

Jenny didn’t reply, so he continued, ‘The major problem was getting all the Bliss that we needed. Tubby Moran was a great guy but he was a cottage industry and we needed industrial amounts of the stuff — we were playing to huge audiences remember.

‘If he’d stayed home in England and employed a few helpers it might have worked, but he insisted on coming with us and making the stuff while we were on tour. We had to use local ingredients, had to mix up the stuff in the dressing room during sound checks. There were quality control problems. It wasn’t that the drug didn’t work, just that it could be a little unpredictable.’

‘You don’t say,’ Jenny sniped.

‘One night I started the gig with an unaccompanied bass solo and the audience loved it. In fact they loved it so much I had keep on playing it for four hours. They wouldn’t let the rest of the band get on stage. Sometimes they loved us so much they wanted to take us home with them and adopt us. Sometimes they loved us so much they wanted to tear us limb from limb. It was weird.

‘You probably heard about Tubby demanding to appear on stage with us, and in one way I thought he had a point, because obviously he was vital to the act; it was just that he looked like such a prat on stage. I mean he was completely unmusical. He couldn’t dance, couldn’t even play a tambourine. He made us look stupid.

‘But he was a pussycat compared to my lead guitarist. I know you’ve got to have plenty of ego in this business and I know that being cheered ecstatically by thousands of people every night must do strange things to your head, but he was ridiculous. He really thought he was the best guitarist who’d ever lived. He really did think he was God and Eric Clapton all rolled into one. He never twigged that it had anything to do with the drug. The worst part of it was that if I happened to be on Bliss at the time I’d think he was right. When the drug wore off, I tried telling him that audiences would have reacted the same way if he’d been a well-trained monkey up there, but he just didn’t get it.

‘And the rest of the band weren’t much better. They got to the stage where they’d only play if the audience was drugged up. They were scared of playing to a straight audience, to anyone who might have their critical faculties intact. They forced me to cancel gigs when Tubby hadn’t managed to mix up enough Bliss to get the whole audience loaded.’

Jed shook his head at the terrible memory.

‘Still,’ said Jenny, ‘it can’t have been all bad, playing to such adoring audiences.’

‘Yeah, on balance I was happy enough but the record company weren’t.’

‘No?’

‘No, because none of the buggers who came to the gigs ever bought any recordings. Maybe they knew it was only a live experience, or maybe one or two had actually bought our records, listened to them and realized they were no good without the drug. I suggested we give away free samples of Bliss with every album, but the record company didn’t like that at all.

‘So an A&R man took Tubby aside and said to him, couldn’t he redesign this drug of his a little so that the effect lasted, either permanently or at least until the punters had bought the CD, taken it home and played it a few times. And couldn’t he maybe change the drug so that instead of reacting to raucous guitar noise, the audiences would react instead to strings or middle-of-the-road vocal harmonies. Tubby said he’d see what he could do, but then, of course, the penny dropped. The record company bosses realized they could do without me and the rest of the band. All they needed was Tubby and his drugs. If they could get the right drug to the audience they could put out any old crap and people would still love it and buy it.