Дэвид Митчелл - Utopia Avenue

‘Cheers. Guess I owe yer a royalty cheque.’

‘Just make a third album. Please.’

‘I’ll see what we can do. Yer boy’s struck gold.’ The lollipop lady is holding the jar for Bolívar.

‘Oh, he could charm the birds and fishes,’ says Ben. ‘Do you have kids, or … I didn’t get what Bolly was saying just now.’

The smell of toasted chestnuts wafts by. No, I can’t tell a total stranger about my legal woes when I haven’t even told my own family. ‘He asked if I had kids and I was just saying I don’t feel ready to be a father. That’s all.’

‘“Ready”? Forget it. I’m winging it, every single day.’ Ben offers Dean a Marlboro: Dean accepts. ‘To Dad or Not to Dad? That is the question. It is heavy shit. I won’t say, “Do it,” if you don’t want to.’ He puffs the smoke away. ‘But if you’re on the fence, and want a nudge, I’ll nudge you. You won’t miss what you think you’ll miss. You’ll have more headaches but you’ll have more joy. Joy and headaches. The A side and the flip-side.’ Bolly returns with a fistful of candy. ‘Look at you, you hunter-gatherer.’

Bolly spots someone behind Dean. He waves. ‘Mom! Mom! It’s okay – I found Ben. He’s here.’

Dee-Dee, a heavily pregnant woman with beaded, braided hair lets out a long, earthy groan of relief and smothers her son in an enormous hug. ‘ Damn it , Bolly, please don’t go wandering off like that …’

The boy wriggles free. ‘One quarter! One whole dollar for the Profanity Jar. I got us a lollipop each, plus one for the baby. Dean, this is Mom. She’s in her third trimester. Mom, Dean helped me find you. What do you say to him?’

‘Bolly, it’s you who went off—’

Bolly holds up an admonitory finger.

Dee-Dee takes a deep breath. ‘Thank you.’

The crowd of seven or eight thousand is the biggest by far the band have played. Dean feels stage fright bubbling under. The sky is the sky from the Eight of Cups, on the cusp of evening. ‘Please welcome,’ booms Bill Quarry at the central mic, ‘all the way from England, the one, the only UTOPIA AVENUE!’ Levon slaps Dean on the back; Dee-Dee, Ben and Bolívar slap his shoulder, and he’s following Elf onto the stage. Can’t turn back now. The crowd blast out a roar that Dean wasn’t expecting: he feels it on his face. Elf turns and grins. The band take their positions. Jasper and Dean plug in while Elf speaks into her mic. ‘Thanks, California. We weren’t sure if anyone here knows us, but I guess—’ The roar and whistles intensify, and a chant spreads out from a spot Dean can’t locate: to the tune of ‘John Brown’s Body Lies A-mouldering In The Grave’, the crowd sings: ‘Randy Thorn’s career lies a-mouldering in its grave, Randy Thorn’s career lies a-mouldering in its grave …’ Jasper picks out the melody on his guitar; the notes are burnished and golden. For the ‘Glory, Glory Hallelujah’ chorus, Elf vamps on the organ, and Dean conducts like Herbert von Karajan. His stage fright has evaporated.

‘We love you too,’ says Elf. ‘So, our first song was written by Dean in a dungeon.’ A roar of approval. She nods at Dean.

Dean deploys a trick Mama Cass told him for opening a song with an unaccompanied vocal: run through the line once, in your mind’s ear, at the pitch you want, then replay it, but join in:

I-i-i-i-i-f life has shot yer full of ho-o-ooooles –

a-a-a-a-nd hung yer out to-ooo-oo-o dry …

Mick Jagger told Dean the hardest part of his job was singing ‘Satisfaction’ for the five-hundredth time as if he’d only written it an hour before, but there’s no danger of ‘Roll Away The Stone’ sounding tired this evening. The size of the crowd heightens Dean’s senses. His voice booms out over the PA and off into the universe like the voice of God …

a-a-aaa-and slung you in a pau-au-auper’s grave

down where the dead men li-i-i-i-iiiii-i-i-i-ie –

Griff clicks his sticks to launch the first chorus. The song grows bigger to fill the bowl of the showground. Dean’s stagecraft is more theatrical than usual and Jasper’s playing is fiercer. During Elf’s roller-coasting Hammond solo, Dean looks at people in the crowd nodding in time and swaying as they drink beers and toke on roll-ups. Where the crush is less, near naked revellers perform the shamanistic dance beloved of film crews at mad hippie festivals.

The song ends in applause that goes on much longer than Dean would expect for act number eleven on day two. ‘Prove It’ gets a similar reception. Combed-out clouds glow incandescent as the sun sinks. As Jasper hits the first chord of ‘Darkroom’, the stage-lights come on. Jasper’s posh English voice carries an exoticness in the oncoming American twilight that it lacks when they perform the song at home. The rapid punch of ‘The Hook’ grounds the set. They extend the bridge and swathes of audience clap in time. Dean sings with a harnessed ferocity. Everything he tries works. Griff takes a drum solo and gets into a call-and-response sequence with Elf. Somehow it’s funny. Jasper takes a solo that burns up slowly, like a meteor, and smashes to bits at the end of the song. The applause is long and loud. Cocaine’s a pale imitation o’ this , thinks Dean. He mops his face with a damp towel. I hope someone somewhere’s making a quality bootleg o’ this ’cause tonight we’re bloody brilliant. He glances at Levon in the wings, and sees Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead clapping with four fingers against his palm. Dean nods back. Bolívar and his parents are sitting up on some scaffolding.

Elf plays a few lines of the Moonlight Sonata for fun before seguing into ‘A Raft And A River’. After the riff-sticky madness of ‘The Hook’, her song is a cool glass of water. Faces stare at her, hypnotised. Griff pitter-patters and shushes on his cymbals and hi-hat. Dean and Jasper join in on Elf’s new three-part harmony chorus, inspired by hearing Graham Nash, Stephen Stills and David Crosby singing in Mama Cass’s kitchen. It’s risky – there’s nowhere to hide if harmony turns bad – but they’ve been practising and the applause is vigorous. Bill Quarry calls from the side, tapping his watch and megaphoning through his hands, ‘One more big one!’ It’s Jasper’s pick. Dean’s expecting ‘Sound Mind’, but Jasper calls, ‘Let’s do “Who Shall I Say Is Calling?”’ He wrote the entire song on the flight from New York. His onstage seizure appears to have had the benign side-effect of curing Jasper’s fear of flying. It’s a brave choice. They’ve only played the piece through a few times in the studio, but it does feel like one of those gigs when the songs half play themselves. Elf nods at Dean, who nods at Jasper, who addresses the crowd. ‘Our last song’s our newest. It’s one day old and it’s called “Who Shall I Say Is Calling?”’ He looks at Dean, nods, ‘And one, and two, and three, and—’

Dean’s there with the blues riff. A, G, F back to A.

Elf’s Hammond gatecrashes the party, finds its feet and dances a drunken jig. Griff joins in with a round of backbeats, the snare, and distant thunder on the bass drum. Jasper’s guitar picks out a hovering Grateful Dead-style intro before he sings into the mic:

You loved him in the tropics,

they labelled you ‘Immoral’;

you gave me life and kissed my head,

then sank among the coral.

You loved her in the tropics,

when Europe was aflame.

I’m your indiscretion,

I have your name.

Dean wonders if the words make any sense at all to people who don’t know it’s about Jasper’s father. ‘Nightwatchman’ and ‘Darkroom’ feel personal but, actually, aren’t. The first two verses of this new one are raw. In lieu of a chorus, Elf plays a half-jazz-half-blues piano solo of cascading runs before the next verse: