STORIES

WE COULD

TELL

Tony Parsons

HarperCollinsPublishers

For David Morrison of Hong Kong

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Part One: 1977 - You May Not Be An Angel

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Part Two: 1977 - Angels are So Few

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Part Three: 1977 - Lovers of Today

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

CODA: 1977 - Another Girl, Another Planet

Chapter Sixteen

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

‘I Feel Love’ Words and Music by Giorgio Moroder, Pete Bellotte and Donna Summer © 1977 WB Music Corp, USA and Sweet Summer Night Music (66.67%) Warner/Chappell Music Ltd, London W6 8BS (33.33%) Warner/Chappell Artemis Music Ltd, London W6 8BS. Lyrics reproduced by permission of IMP Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

‘Stories We Could Tell’ Words and Music by John Sebastian © 1972 (renewed) Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp and Chicken Flats Music Inc, USA Warner/Chappell North America Ltd, London W6 8BS. Lyrics reproduced by permission of IMP Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

‘All You Need Is Love’ Words and Music by John Lennon and Paul McCartney © 1967 Sony/ATV Music Publishing (UK) Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

‘Shame’ Words and Music by Reuben Cross and John Henry Fitch Jr © 1975 Dunbar Music Inc, USA, Warner/Chappell North America Ltd, London W6 8BS. Lyrics reproduced by permission of IMP Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

‘Dancing Queen’ Words and Music by Benny Andersson, S. A. Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus © 1976 BOCU Music Ltd. Lyrics reproduced by permission of BOCU Music Ltd, 1 Wyndham Yard, London W1H 2QF. All Rights Reserved.

‘5.15’ Words and Music by Pete Townshend © 1973 Fabulous Music Limited, London SW10 OSZ. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.

‘Goodness Gracious Me’ Words and Music by David Lee & Herbert Kretzmer © 1960 TRO Essex Music Limited, London, SW10 OSZ. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.

‘I’ll String Along With You’ Words by Al Dubin and Music by Harry Warren © 1934, M. Witmark & Sons, USA. Reproduced by permission of B. Feldman & Co Ltd, London WC2H 0QY.

‘If I Can’t Have You’ Composed by Barry Gibb/Maurice Gibb/Robin Gibb. Published by BMG Music Publishing International Ltd. Used by permission. All Rights Reserved.

Although the Publisher has made every effort to trace and contact all copyright holders before publication, this has not been possible in every case. If notified, the publisher will be pleased to make any necessary arrangements at the earliest opportunity.

PART ONE: 1977 - YOU MAY NOT BE AN ANGEL

Chapter One

They stopped him as he was coming through customs. Why wouldn’t they stop him? Terry looked like trouble.

His skin pale from too many sleepless nights and God knows what else, the second-hand suit jacket from Oxfam, the CBGB’s T-shirt, Levi’s that hadn’t been touched by water since the day he bought them and wore them in the bath (his mother telling him he would catch his death, his father telling him he was bloody mental), Doctor Martens boots and – the crowning glory – his short, spiky hair dyed black, and badly, from a bottle of something called Deep Midnight that he had found at the bottom of the ladies’ grooming counter in Boots.

‘One moment, sir.’

Sir used like a weapon, like a joke. As if anyone would seriously call someone like Terry sir. Two customs men, one of them knocking on for thirty, with mutton chops and a mullet, like some King’s Road footballer trying to keep up with the times, and the other one really prehistoric, maybe even as old as Terry’s father, but lacking the old man’s twinkle.

‘Been far, sir?’

This from the elderly geezer, ramrod straight, all those years in uniform behind him. ‘Berlin,’ Terry said.

The younger one, as hairy as a character from Dickens, was already in Terry’s plastic Puma kitbag, pulling out his God Save the Queen T-shirt, his silver tape recorder, a spare pack of batteries, a microphone and a change of Y-fronts.

As Terry’s mum always pointed out, you never knew when you were going to get knocked over.

‘Berlin? Must be lovely this time of year,’ said muttonchops, and the old soldier sniggered. They thought they were funny. The Eric and Ernie of Terminal Three.

The old soldier flipped open Terry’s thick blue passport and did a double take. The pale-faced, black-haired youth before him bore little resemblance to this incriminating snapshot from Terry’s previous life, his mousey-haired and baggy-flared life, the living at home with Mum and Dad life, the working at the gin factory life when he walked around lost in dreams, and all his dreams were of getting out.

In the mug shot Terry peered out at the world from under a failed feather cut, trying to look like Rod Stewart but coming out more like Dave Hill of Slade. He even had the start of a suntan. It was a snapshot from when Terry was still waiting for his life to start, and his cheeks were burning as the old soldier closed the passport.

Then muttonchops was digging deeper in the kitbag, making Terry flinch now, because he was touching the things that really mattered to him, pulling out a two-week-old copy of The Paper with Joe Strummer on the cover, looking as beautiful and doomed as Laurence Harvey in Room at the Top. He flipped the big inky broadsheet open, gawped blankly at the news pages, at headlines that meant nothing to him.

This Year’s Costello. Talking Head Cases. Bachman Turner Overdrive Disband. Muddy Waters – Hard Again. Fanny to Warm Up Reading?

Quickly flicking through The Paper now. Not even glancing at the double-page centre-spread cover story on the Clash by Skip Jones, the greatest music writer in the world, but pausing – as if that’s what it was all about! – when he got to the classifieds.

‘Dirty Dick’s Records – get yourself a dosel muttonchops read out loud, pulling a face. ‘That’s disgusting, that is.’

He tossed The Paper to one side and rummaged deeper, producing Terry’s battered copy of The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby with entire paragraphs underlined, and then the truly irreplaceable – cassettes from Terry’s recent interview with the legendary Dag Wood, the only man to be booed off stage at Woodstock.

Terry watched the priceless cassettes being handled as though they were something that they gave away with the petrol and he felt like telling the bastards to do something useful, like go and catch Carlos the Jackal.

But he thought that might be an invitation to a full body search, so he bit his lip, clenched his buttocks and wondered how long his girlfriend would wait for him.

‘And was your trip business or pleasure, sir?’ said the old soldier.

‘I’m a journalist.’

It still gave him a kick to say that – nine months into the job and it gave him a thrill to see his name in a by-line, especially next to the postage-stamp picture you sometimes got. Small things, but they signified that Terry was becoming the someone he had always wanted to be. They couldn’t stop him now.

‘A journalist?’ said the man, a note of suspicion in his voice, as if a real journalist should be wearing a suit and tie, or carrying a briefcase, or old or something. ‘What you write about then?’

Terry smiled at him.

It was the end of a summer day in 1977 and there was something in the air, and in the clubs, and pouring out of every radio. Everything was suddenly good again, the way it had been good ten years ago, back in the Sixties, when Terry was a child, and his parents still thought that the Beatles seemed like nice boys.

What did he write about? He wrote about the way everything was changing. From haircuts to trousers, and all stops in between. What did he write about? Oh, that was a good one.

Terry thought of something that Ray Davies had said recently, about how he felt like sobbing his heart out whenever he looked at anyone’s record collection, because it was just so moving to see that personal soundtrack laid out before you, naked and open and fading with the years, because if you cared about this kind of thing then it was all there among the scratched vinyl and the cracked gatefold sleeves, as plain as could be, all the hopes and yearnings of someone’s private universe, and everything that a young heart could possibly want or need or yearn for.

‘I write about music,’ Terry said.

Misty was waiting for him at the arrivals gate.

He saw her before she saw him. He liked it that way. It was one of his favourite things in the world – to see her before she saw him.

Misty. His honey-haired, cat-faced darling. Tall and slim in a simple white dress matched with a pair of clonking great biker boots.

Girls were starting to do that all the time, pairing something undeniably feminine – mini-skirts, fishnet tights, high heels, Misty’s simple white dress – with something brutally male – DMs, spiked dog collars and wrist bands, Misty’s motorcycle boots. Throwing their sex in your face, Terry thought, demanding to know what you were looking at, and silently asking you what you were going to do about it. It was a new thing.

Slung over her shoulder was a bag with her camera equipment. Dangling from one of the straps, where you might expect to find a little plastic gonk or perhaps a figurine of the Fonz or Han Solo, there was a pair of handcuffs – pink fake mink handcuffs. You couldn’t tell at first glance if they came from a toyshop or a sex shop.

Misty and her pink fake mink handcuffs. Terry sighed at the sight of her.

She was like a girl from a book. No, a woman – you couldn’t say girl any more, that was another of the new things, it wasn’t allowed to say girl, you had to say woman, even when they were still – technically, legally – girls. Misty had explained it all to Terry – it was something to do with what she called the suffocating tyranny of men.

Funny that, thought Terry.

Yes, she was like the bird – woman – in the Thomas Hardy novel they read at school, the year he dropped out and went to work in the factory. Far from the Madding Crowd. Misty was like the woman in there – all female softness, but with a thread of steel you couldn’t guess at by looking at her. Bathsheba Everdene. That was Misty. Bathsheba Everdene in a white dress and biker boots, Bathsheba Everdene with a pair of pink fake mink handcuffs.

She still hadn’t seen him, and the sight of her face scanning the crowd full of strangers made his soul ache. Then she caught his gaze and started jumping up and down, so glad to see him again after being apart for so long.

Over a week!

She ducked under a sign that said STRICTLY NO ENTRY and ran to him. She wasn’t the kind who cared about signs, she moved through the world as if she had a right to be there – anywhere, everywhere. Like a woman in a book, like a girl in a song.

‘Look, Tel,’ she said.

She had the most recent copy of The Paper in her hands. Almost a week old, and somehow the ink was still damp, and her fingertips were black, and there on the cover was a gaunt, grim-faced man with platinum blond hair standing in a trench coat by a great wall with a sign that said, Achtung! Sie verlassen jetzt West Berlin.

Terry’s story on Dag Wood, written on a hotel laundry bag and phoned in from Berlin.

‘So what’s he like?’ Misty said, and he had to laugh, because normally the question drove him nuts.

You wrote a 3,000-word piece about someone and then everybody asked you, What’s he like then? What he was like was in the story, it was always in the story, or the story had failed. When Tom Wolfe wrote about Muhammad Ali, or Phil Spector, or Hugh Hefner, did people say, Yeah, Tom, but what are they really like? Probably. But Terry didn’t mind. As it was her. As it was Misty.

‘He’s the greatest,’ Terry said. ‘I’ll introduce you tonight, okay?’

Then Misty had that look in her eye, that sleepy, faraway look, and she was tilting her head to one side, so Terry placed his mouth on her mouth, and felt her fingers running through his dyed black hair, and the cameras that were stuffed inside her shoulder bag pressed through his Oxfam jacket and against his heart.

Their kisses tasted of Marlboro and Juicy Fruit, and as they snogged at the arrivals gate, completely wrapped up in each other, oblivious to the smirks and stares and snide comments – ‘What are that pair supposed to be dressed as, Dad?’ – neither of them doubted that their kisses would taste that way for ever.

Leon Peck was doing the singles.

He sat in the review room, the little corridor-shaped cubbyhole with a stereo where they went to listen to new music, and all around him were the week’s releases, maybe a hundred or more seven-inch 45s, some of them in the new-fangled coloured vinyl and picture sleeves.

Convention demanded that Leon found something to rave about – The Single of the Week – and then picked twenty or thirty other singles that were worthy of a cheap joke that could be told in one pithy, piss-taking paragraph.

A kind of spiteful irreverence had always been a part of The Paper’s appeal, and just under the title of every issue the readers were promised, ‘Hotsies, groovies, goldies and a rootin’, tootin’ tab of vicious controversy’. That was exactly what Leon needed to conjure up for his singles page. A rootin’, tootin’ tab of vicious controversy.

Except he couldn’t be bothered.

Something had happened to Leon at the weekend that made slagging off – let’s see, what do we have here? – ‘Float On’ by the Floaters or ‘Easy’ by the Commodores or ‘Silver Lady’ by David ‘Starsky’ Soul – or was he ‘Hutch’? – seem beneath him.

Something had happened at the weekend that had changed the way Leon looked at the world. So he picked up ‘Silver Lady’ -Starsky or Hutch grinning like a lobotomised Osmond on the picture sleeve – and flung it across the room like a Frisbee. The seven-inch slice of vinyl shattered with a satisfying, surprisingly loud crack against the far wall. It felt good.

So good in fact that Leon did the same with ‘Float On’. And then ‘Easy’. And then ‘You Got What It Takes’ by Showaddywaddy. Leon picked up ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’, the new single by Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and that was tossed with particular venom. Soon the review room was covered in shards of splintered vinyl.

Leon pushed back the stacks of singles and began leafing through the most recent issue of The Paper, sighing at the soul-shrivelling trivia of it all. Didn’t these people know what was going on in the world?

There was Dag Wood on the cover, doing his tired old heroic-junkie routine by the Berlin Wall. Leon was pleased for Terry – could imagine him puffing up with pride at the sight of his story on the cover – but come on. As if Lou Reed hadn’t done it all first and better! As if Dag Wood actually knew the difference between Karl Marx and Groucho!

Terry’s such a sucker for all that rock-god schtick, Leon thought. They all are up here.

Leon yawned, and turned to page two, sighing at the sight of the charts. Mindless disco crud ruled the singles – Donna Summer faking multiple orgasms all over ‘I Feel Love’ – and, top of the albums, music to help tranked-out housewives hobble through the menopause. The Johnny Mathis Collection.

Leon snorted with derision. He flicked through The Paper, his fingers, like his mood, becoming blacker by the second.

Eater to record first album during school holidays…new singles by Pilot, Gentle Giant and the Roy Wood Band…new albums by Ry Cooder, Boney M and the Modern Lovers…

And then – finally! – at the bottom of page 11, jostled into a corner by a massive ad for Aerosmith at Reading and a world exclusive on the break-up of Steeleye Span, there were a few brief paragraphs that held Leon’s interest and made his heart start pumping. The piece had his by-line.

The National Front plan to parade through a black neighbourhood this coming weekend. Hiding their racist views behind an anti-mugging campaign and countless Union Jacks, the NF plan to leave from Clifton Rise, New Cross. Their route and the time of the march remain undisclosed.

A peaceful counter demonstration planned by local umbrella group the All Lewisham Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (ALCARAF) will assemble in Ladywell Fields, next to the British Rail Ladywell Station, at 11 a.m.

Be there or be square.

The magazine had appeared on newsstands nationwide the previous Thursday, and in London as far back as last Wednesday. A lifetime away, thought Leon. Because last Saturday the march and the counter demonstration had combined to produce the biggest riot London had seen since the war. And Leon Peck had been there.

I was there, he thought, touching the bruise on his cheekbone where he had been clipped by the knee of a policeman on horse-back. I saw it happen. While many of his peers were dreaming of seeing Aerosmith at Reading, Leon had been in the middle of the riot at Lewisham, crushed in with the protesters being forced back by the police and their horses, and he had felt as if the world was ending.

Flags waving, bricks flying, policemen on horses riding into the crowds, the battle lines ebbing and flowing – screaming, righteous chaos all around. Orange smoke bombs on Lewisham High Street, the air full of masonry, dustbins, bottles and screams, taunts, chanting. The sound of plate-glass windows collapsing.

What he remembered most was the physical sensation of the riot, the way he experienced it in his blood and bones. His legs turning to water with terror as the air filled with missiles and the police spurred their horses into the crowd, his heart pumping at the sight of the loathing on the faces of the marchers, and the raging anger he felt at the sight of these bigots parading their racist views through a neighbourhood where almost everyone was black.

He had never felt so scared in his life. And yet there was never a place where he was so glad to be.

It mattered. It mattered more than anything. Leon Peck, child of peace and prosperity, had spent his Saturday afternoon doing what his father had done in Italy during the war, in Sicily and Monte Cassino and the march on Rome. Fighting Nazis.

Leon didn’t kid himself. Lewisham had been one Saturday out of his life. It couldn’t compare to what the old man had done in World War Two. But the experience had been like nothing he had ever known.

When he was younger than today, Leon had been involved in student politics at school and at university. But this was some thing else. The Pakistani shopkeeper at the end of the road where Leon was squatting had had his face opened up by a racist with a Stanley knife. The Nazis were coming back. It was really happening. And you either did something about it, or you went to see Aerosmith at Reading.

Later that sunny Saturday, just when the riot was starting to feel like one of those visions he’d had when he was dropping acid in the lecture halls of the London School of Economics, Leon had stopped outside an electrical shop on Oxford Street and watched the news on a dozen different TV sets. The riot was the first story. The only story. A quarter of the Metropolitan Police Force had been there, and they couldn’t stop it.

Leon wondered if any of the readers of The Paper had gone to Lewisham because of his few measly paragraphs. He wondered if he had done any good. He wondered if soon the – he had to consult his own article here – the ALCARAF would be the name on everyone’s lips. But then he turned the page and the classified ads brought him back to reality. This was what their readers were interested in.

LOOK SCANDINAVIAN! Scandinavian-style clogs – £5.50…Cheesecloth shirts for £2.70 plus 20p postage and packing…Cotton Drill Loons. ‘A good quality cotton drill in the original hip-fitting loons.’ Still only £2.60.

Leon’s thoughts turned reluctantly to fashion, and he wondered, Who wears this crap? Leon himself looked like a shorthaired Ramone – a London spin on a New York archetype. A style that said – I am making an effort, but not much of one.

Leon’s face and body had not quite caught up with the greasy machismo of his clothes. At twenty he was still whiplash thin, frail and boyish, looking as though he only had to shave about once a week.

His Lewis Leather biker’s jacket sported a plastic badge on the lapel featuring the Jimmy Hill-like profile of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He wore drainpipe Levi’s, a threadbare Thin Lizzy T-shirt and white Adidas trainers with three blue stripes down the side. Pretty much the standard uniform for the enlightened urban male in the summer of 1977, although Leon had topped off his look with a trilby hat from a charity shop. Funnily enough, you couldn’t buy that look in the back of The Paper, where they were still packaging what was left of the spirit of the Sixties.

Cannabis leaf jewellery. Solid silver leaf pendant on real silver chain - £7.

Leon closed The Paper, shaking his head. He adjusted his trilby. It was as if nothing had changed. It was as if there wasn’t a war on.

It seemed to Leon that everyone he knew was living in some old Sixties dream. The people he worked with at The Paper, all of the readers, his father – especially his father, a man who had belonged to CND for a few years but who now belonged to a golf club.

What was wrong with them? Didn’t they realise it was time to take a stand? What did they think the National Front was doing marching in South London? He touched the bruise on his cheek again, and wished it could stay there for ever.

This wasn’t about some little style option – the choice between long hair or spiky, flared trousers or straight, Elvis or Johnny Rotten. It was about a more fundamental choice – not between the NF and the SWP, who were daubing their rival slogans all over the city, like the Sharks and Jets of political extremism – but the choice between evil, hatred, racism, xenophobia, bigotry, and everything that was their opposite.

The memory of Lewisham still made him shake with fear. The rocks showering down on the marchers. The faces twisted with hatred. The police lashing out with truncheon, boot or knee. The sudden eruption of hand-to-hand fighting as marcher or demonstrator broke through the police lines, fists and feet flying. And the horses, shitting themselves with terror as they were driven into the protesters. Leon knew how those horses felt. Lewisham had been the first violence that he had been involved in since a fight in the playground at junior school. And he had lost that one.

Mind you, Leon thought, she was a very big girl for nine.

He thumbed through the singles until he found something worth playing. ‘Pretty Vacant’ by the Sex Pistols. He put the record on the turntable, placed the needle on the record, and pulled the arm back for repeat play. Then, as the stuttering guitar riff came pouring out of the speakers, he set about destroying the rest of the singles. The Jacksons, Donna Summer, Hot Chocolate, Carly Simon and the Brotherhood of Man – all of them were thrown to their doom across the review room, all of them perished in a dramatic explosion of vinyl.

Leon was about to launch Boney M’s ‘Ma Baker’ when the door to the review room opened and standing there was an elderly black cleaner with a Hoover in his hands, staring open-mouthed at the destroyed vinyl that littered the carpet.

‘What the goodness you doing in here, man?’ the cleaner said.

‘I’m doing the singles,’ Leon said, his face burning with embarrassment. ‘I was just about to clear all this up.’

Watched by the cleaner, Leon got down on his hands and knees and began picking up the smashed records, his mouth fixed in a smile that he hoped showed solidarity, and some sort of apology.

‘I hope you like curry,’ Terry’s mum said to Misty.

‘I love curry,’ Misty said. ‘In fact, my father was born in India.’

Terry shot her a look. He didn’t know that Misty’s dad had been born in India. It seemed there were a lot of things he didn’t know about her, despite being together since Christmas.

Misty and Terry and his parents crowded awkwardly in the tiny hallway. Misty was making some rapturous speech about the glories of the Raj and something Kipling had written about the correct way to cook chicken tikka masala. Terry’s parents smiled politely as she babbled on. His father took her photographers bag. Terry noticed that she had unclipped her pink fake mink handcuffs, and stuffed them in the bag. It was her first visit to his home and everyone was making an effort. Misty had turned the charm up to ten and Terry’s dad had put his shirt on. Terry’s mum had prepared a special menu and Terry hadn’t brought any of his laundry home.

They entered the front room where an old film was blaring from the telly in the corner. For a moment it commanded all their attention. Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier were runaways from a chain gang, a white racist and a proud black man, still handcuffed together.

‘The Defiant Ones,’ said Terry’s mum. ‘He was lovely, Tony Curtis.’

‘I’ll turn that thing off,’ said Terry’s dad. That was a sure sign that royalty was visiting. They never turned the TV off until it told them to go to bed.

‘What was it that Truffaut said about life before television?’ Misty said, her lovely face frowning with concentration.

‘I don’t quite recall, dear,’ said Terry’s mum, as if she had been asked the name of Des O’Connor’s last single, and it was on the tip of her tongue.

‘Truffaut said that before television was invented, people stared at the fire.’ Misty looked very serious, as she always did when relating the thoughts of one of her heroes. ‘He said that there has always been this need for moving pictures.’

They all thought about it for a while.

‘Cocktail sausage?’ said Terry’s mum, holding out a plate of shrivelled chipolatas bristling with little sticks. ‘Take two, love. They’re only small.’

Terry thought it was so strange to see Misty parked on the brown three-piece suite in the front room of the pebbledash semi where he had grown up. When Terry was small, his father had worked at three jobs to get them out of rented accommodation above the butcher’s shop and into a place of their own, but he knew that what was a dream home to his mum and dad must have seemed very modest to a girl like Misty.

There was flock wallpaper and an upright piano in the corner and a wall-to-wall orange carpet that looked like the aftermath of some terrible car crash. There were matching pouffes for them to put their feet up on while they were reading Reveille (Mum) and Reader’s Digest (Dad). Misty perched on the middle cushion of what they called the settee in what they called the front room about to eat what they called their tea.

Strange for all of them. Front room, settee, tea – it even felt like his parents spoke a different language to Misty.

Terry’s dad stared bleary-eyed at the dead TV, a cocktail sausage on a stick forgotten in his hand. He had just woken up, and was getting ready for another night shift at Smithfield meat market. Even if he had been more awake, small talk wasn’t really his thing, unless he was around people he had known for years, like the men at the market. But Terry’s mum could have small talked for England. She busied herself in the kitchen, conversing with Misty through the serving hatch, like a sailor peering through a porthole.

‘I do like your frock,’ Terry’s mum said, her eyes running over the white dress and down to Misty’s biker boots. ‘It’s a lovely frock.’ She passed no comment on the biker’s boots. ‘Would you like chicken or beef curry, love?’

Misty almost squealed with delight. ‘I can’t believe that you’ve gone to all this trouble!’

But Terry knew that the curry was no trouble at all. His mum would just drop the bag of Birds Eye curry in boiling water for fifteen minutes. He knew that wasn’t the kind of curry that his girlfriend was expecting. He knew she was used to real Indian take-aways.

Waiting for tea, Terry had the same sinking feeling, that preparation for humiliation, that he had once felt after PE in the junior school when Hairy Norton had hidden his trousers. Unable to locate his missing pair of grey shorts that were stuffed behind the urinal (thanks, Hairy) Terry had made the long walk into the classroom, fully dressed apart from his trousers.

‘Please, miss…’

The rest had been drowned out by the mocking laughter of thirty eight-year-old children. That’s how he felt waiting for his mother to serve them their curry. Like Hairy Norton had hidden his trousers in the toilets all over again.

And the funny thing was his mum was a good cook.

When Terry had been living at home, tea (Misty would have called it dinner) and Sunday dinner (Misty would have called it lunch) was always meat and two veg, with a nice roast on the Sabbath.

Apart from Sundays, the meal was always consumed in their favourite chairs, the toad in the hole or shepherd’s pie or pork chops and their attendant soggy vegetables wolfed down in front of Are You Being Served? or The World at War or Fawlty Towers or Nationwide or The Generation Game.

‘Nice to see you, to see you – nice!’

But something had happened since Terry had left home. Now it was all convenience food – Vesta chicken supreme and rice, Birds Eye Taste of India, ‘For mash get Smash’ – spaceman food, dark powders or a solidified brown mass that required either the addition of or immersion in boiling water.

When Terry was a boy, his mum had baked bread, and it was the most wonderful taste in the world. The smell of a freshly baked loaf or rolls had made little Terry swoon. Now his mum no longer had time for all that business. Terry’s dad blamed women’s lib and Captain Birds Eye.

But his mum had pushed the boat out tonight, or at least as far as the boat would go in these modern times, and Terry loved her for it, even though it seemed he never had much of an appetite these days.

They sat themselves at the table that was usually reserved for Sundays and Christmas, paper napkins, folded into neat triangles, by best plates, the prawn cocktails in place. A bottle of Lambrusco had already been unscrewed.

‘So you work at night,’ Misty said to Terry’s father. ‘Just like us.’

Terry’s dad shifted awkwardly in his seat, considering the prawn drowning in pink sauce on the end of his teaspoon.

‘Hmmm,’ he said. ‘Night work. Working at night. Yes.’

‘You hate it, don’t you, the night work?’ Terry’s mum said, prompting him. ‘He hates the night work,’ she told Misty in a stage whisper.

‘Why’s that then, Dad?’ Terry said, rearranging his prawn cocktail with his teaspoon. His father had been working night shifts for as long as Terry could remember. It had never occurred to him that he would have preferred working during the day. ‘Why do you hate working nights, Dad?’

The old man snorted. If you stirred him from his silence, he could be brutally frank. ‘Because you’re working when everyone else is asleep. And you’re asleep when everyone else is awake. And then you get up when the day’s gone, and you don’t get cornflakes or a nice fry-up for your breakfast, you get prawns.’

He smiled at his wife with a mouthful of prawns, to draw the sting from his words and show her that he was grateful for her efforts. Misty smiled and nodded as if everything was wonderful.

‘Salad, anyone?’ said Terry’s mum.

‘Not for me,’ said Terry.

‘I’ll have a bit of salad,’ said Terry’s dad.

‘He likes his salad,’ said Terry’s mum.

Terry knew it wasn’t real salad – he knew that what his parents called salad was really just tomatoes and cucumber and lettuce, with a radish or two chucked on top for special occasions, such as today. He knew that Misty would expect a salad to come with some sort of dressing. Vinaigrette or thousand island or olive oil or something. He knew this because joining The Paper had been a crash course in food and restaurant lore, as every press officer on every record label in Soho Square had rushed to buy the new boy lunch on their expense account, until they realised that he was going to slag off their rotten acts anyway.

But here was another thing he was learning about Misty. Salad dressing didn’t matter as much to her as making his mum feel appreciated, and that touched his heart. By the time his girlfriend had pronounced his mother’s boil-in-a-bag beef curry to be delicious, Terry was more deeply in love with her than ever, if that was possible.

‘So how did you like Berlin, Tel?’ his mum said, sinking a bread knife into a Black Forest gateau. If she had noticed that her son was only force-feeding himself enough to be polite, she gave no sign.

‘It was incredible,’ Terry said.

His mum waved the bread knife expansively. ‘Lovely to go travelling all over the world and get paid for it. You were in Germany, weren’t you?’ she said to his dad. Terry realised that many of his mum’s observations ended with a question to his dad, as if she was afraid the old man’s natural reticence might mean he was left out of the conversation.

‘Bit different in my day,’ said Terry’s dad.

‘Why’s that, Mr Warboys?’ Misty asked.

Terry’s dad grinned ruefully. ‘Because some bugger was always shooting at me.’

Misty shook her head with wonder. ‘You’ve had such an interesting life,’ she said. She touched the hand of Terry’s mum, the hand where she wore her engagement ring, her wedding ring and the eternity ring she had got last birthday. ‘You both have. Depression…war…it’s like you’ve lived through history.’ She looked at Terry. ‘What has our generation ever seen or done?’

Terry’s parents stared at her. World war, global economic collapse – they thought that was all normal.

‘Lump of gateau?’ said Terry’s mum.

They took their Black Forest gateau to the settee, and Misty perched herself on the piano stool, lifting the lid on the old upright.

‘I had lessons for ten years,’ she said. ‘Five to fifteen. My mother was very keen for me to play.’

Terry smiled proudly. He had no idea she played piano. His smile began to fade as it became clear that she didn’t, not really. Misty picked out the worst version of ‘Chopsticks’ that he had ever heard.

‘Ten years?’ Terry’s dad chuckled with genuine amusement. ‘I reckon you want your money back, love!’

‘I’m a bit rusty, it’s true,’ Misty smiled, seeing the funny side.

‘Don’t listen to him, darling,’ said Terry’s mum, and she sat next to Misty. ‘Shove up a bit. Let me have a go.’

The piano had belonged to Terry’s grandmother – his mum’s mum, back in the days before television when every sprawling East End family had their own upright in the corner and a chicken run out back. You made your own entertainment and your own eggs. There wasn’t really room for a piano in that little front room, but Terry’s mum refused to get rid of it, especially now that Terry’s nan was no longer around.

His mum cracked the bones in her fingers, smiling shyly, then began to play one of the old songs, about seeing your loved one’s faults but staying with them anyway. She had the easy grace of the self-taught and she started singing in a soft, halting voice that made them all very still and quiet, although Terry’s dad wore a knowing grin on his face.

‘You may not be an angel Angels are so few…’

Terry’s mum paused, but kept playing, and Terry’s dad guffawed with delight.

‘She’s forgotten the words,’ he said, embarrassed at his fierce pride in his wife and her gift. But she hadn’t forgotten the words.

‘But until the day that one comes along…’

And here she gave a rueful look at Terry’s dad.

‘I’ll string along with you.’

Misty stared at Terry’s mum with an expression of total seriousness, as if she was in church, or in the presence of Truffaut saying something profound.

Misty had once told Terry that she’d never tasted instant coffee until after she had left home. And he knew that his mum would end the dinner with coffee that came out of a jar from Nescafé. He also knew that his mum would probably add sugar and milk without asking Misty if she wanted any or not, the way you were supposed to, and he knew that someone was going to have to wash up those prawn cocktail teaspoons before they could stir their Nescafé.

But as he watched his girlfriend watching his mum pick out that old song, Terry felt for the first time that none of that stuff mattered very much.

The train shook Ray Keeley awake.

He brushed a veil of long blond hair out of his bleary eyes and stared at the harvest fields, the scattering of farm houses, a couple of mangy horses. One hour to London, he thought.

Ray knew those fields, could read them like a clock. He even recognised the horses. He had been passing through this part of the country for three years, since he was fifteen years old, heading north to see bands on tour in Newcastle and Leicester, Manchester and Liverpool, Leeds and Glasgow, and then coming back to London to write about them.

He realised what had woken him. There were voices drifting through the carriage, loud and coarse, effing and blinding. A bunch of football fans were approaching, on their way to the dining car. At least they looked like football fans – long floppy feather cuts, short-sleeve shirts that were tighter than a coat of emulsion, and flared trousers that stopped some distance from their clunky boots. Feeling a familiar shiver of fear, he sunk deeper into his rock-hard British Rail seat, allowing his fringe to fall over his face, hoping to hide from the world.

Ray knew their type, and knew what they would make of him with his long hair, denim jacket, white jeans and cowboy boots. But they were more interested in finding lager than tormenting a lone hippy kid, and guffawed their way out of the far end of the carriage.

Ray closed his eyes. He didn’t feel good. He couldn’t remember sleeping last night, although he knew he must have at some point, because he couldn’t remember when the woman had left his hotel room.

She was the press officer from the record company, there to make sure that Ray got into the shows and got to interview the lead singer while they were travelling from one town to the next. He liked her a lot – she looked a bit like the girl in Bouquet of Barbed Wire, and she knew her music. But Ray knew that the next time they met she would act as though nothing much had happened. That’s what it was like. You were meant to take these things lightly.

He always felt a bit down coming off the road. You were tired. You were hungover. There was a ringing in your ears from seeing two shows and two sound checks in the last forty-eight hours. And there was always some girl you liked who would be somewhere else tonight. And of course you were going home.

The youths came back, swigging from cans of Carlsberg Special Brew, a few of them leering at Ray with amused belligerence. He stared out of the window, trying to control his breathing, feeling his heart pounding inside his denim jacket. They were everywhere these days. But they’re nothing compared to my father, he thought. My father would kill them.

Then he must have fallen asleep again, because when he awoke the sun was low, and it took Ray one foggy moment to realise that the fields were gone, there were graffiti-stained walls all around and people were collecting their bags as the train pulled into Euston.

16th August 1977, and here comes the night.

Chapter Two

As Misty steered her father’s Ford Capri along the Westway towards the city, Terry laid his right hand lightly on her leg, feeling the warmth of her flesh through the white dress, idly wondering what their children would look like, and loving that little swoon of longing he got every time he looked at her.

Misty was nineteen years old – three years younger than Terry – and although they had grown up within a few miles of each other, he was aware they were from very different places. More like different planets than different parts of the London sprawl. Misty’s family rode horses and Terry’s family bet on them.

He was born in a rented room above a butcher’s shop and she grew up in a house crammed with books, her childhood full of pony clubs and prep schools, her old man some sort of hotshot lawyer – that’s where the money came from. She was a bit vague about it all, but then you had to be embarrassed about it now, privilege was nothing to boast about in the summer of 1977.

But she didn’t need to spell it out. Terry knew they were different. She knew where she was going and he kept expecting to be sent back to where he had escaped from. It wasn’t as bad as it had been at the beginning. It wasn’t as bad as his first day at The Paper. But then nothing could ever be as bad as that.

The memory of his humiliation could still make his face burn. Even now – with a girlfriend like Misty, with a friend like Dag Wood, with his latest story on the cover – the thought of that first day made him cringe.

This is how raw Terry was – he tried to return a review record. One of the older guys gave him a month-old album that nobody else was interested in, pointed him in the direction of the review room and left him to it. And when Terry had finished, when he had come up with his 300 smart-arse words on Be Bop Deluxe, he walked into the office where a few of the older guys sat, and he tried to give back the album. How they laughed! And how his face burned and burned.

He knew that one of the reasons he had been hired was because of the way he looked – that On the Waterfront thing that was back in style. The music wanted to be tough again. And there he was on his first morning, a Be Bop Deluxe record in his hand, his face all red and tears in his ears. He wouldn’t have minded their amusement if they had been nothing to him, but these were writers he had admired for years. And they were laughing at him. They thought he was funny.

This was his dream job and it felt like he had just strolled into it. Desperate for new writers to cover the new music, The Paper had responded to Terry’s carefully typed and Tipp-Exed reflections on Born to Run and a review of the Damned at the 100 Club (Bruce Springsteen and Rat Scabies – a nice combination of old and new school). They invited him into the office, where he met Kevin White, the ex-Mod editor who had practically invented The Paper, and White was quietly impressed that Terry had already seen some of the new bands live, and he liked the way Terry looked in his cheap leather jacket – luckily the interview was immediately after Terry had just pulled a night shift in the gin factory, so he looked fashionably knackered.

They hired him as a trainee journalist to cover this new music that was just starting to happen, this new music that none of the existing writers liked all that much or could even get a handle on. But getting the job turned out to be the easy bit.

Terry had once had a girlfriend who broke it off outside a Wimpy Bar, so he thought he knew about women. He had once smoked a joint that was more Rothman’s King Size than Moroccan Red, so he thought he knew about drugs. And he had left school as soon as he could for a job in the local gin factory – a purely temporary measure until he became a world-famous writer – so he thought he knew about the real world. But Terry soon discovered that he knew nothing.

That terrible first day. He didn’t know what to say – this young man who had always loved books, who had always loved words -it was as if he had lost the power of speech. He couldn’t talk the way the older guys talked – the way they said everything with that never-ending cynical amusement, the ironic mocking edge that placed them above the rest of the world. Already he felt that he could write as well as any of them – apart from Skip Jones himself, obviously – but Terry didn’t know the rules. How was he supposed to know you kept review copies? Until today he’d had to save up for any record he wanted.

It was like everyone else was speaking a language he didn’t understand. He had a lot of catching up to do. Maybe too much. Maybe he would never catch up. And then he saw Misty’s face for the very first time. And then he really knew that he was out of his depth.

One of the older guys parked Terry in the office he was to share with Leon Peck and Ray Keeley, the other young writers. Neither of them were there – Ray was at a Fleetwood Mac press conference somewhere in the West End, and Leon was on the road with Nils Lofgren. So while Terry waited for one of the older guys to find him something to do after finishing Be Bop Deluxe, he played with his typewriter, and looked in the drawers of his empty desk. And then he heard her, explaining something to the picture editor, and climbed on his desk to see the owner of that cool, confident voice.

The office was divided by grey, seven-foot-high partitions that made up the individual offices. It looked like a corporate maze. But if you knelt on your desk you could see over the top of the partitions. Two offices down he saw her – shockingly gorgeous, although he could not work out why. It was something to do with the way she carried herself. But he felt it for the first time – the little swoon of longing.

‘I’ve gone for a look of emptiness and stillness,’ she was telling the picture editor. ‘I think you’ll find it’s redolent of the Gerard Malanga shots of Warhol and the Velvet Underground.’

She had been taking pictures of Boney M.

Together Misty and the picture editor were poring over her contact sheets, these glossy black sheets of paper with tiny photographs – Terry had never seen a contact sheet before – drawing lines in red felt-tip around the shots they liked, then finally choosing one image by placing a cross next to it. Like a kiss, Terry thought, knowing already that it was hopeless. She was way out of his league.

‘I know they’re ridiculous,’ Misty was saying. ‘But it’s like Warhol himself said, Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic.’

She looked up then and caught Terry’s eye and he attempted a smile that came out as an idiot leer. She frowned impatiently, and it just made her look prettier, and made him ache with hopeless yearning. And just then the two older guys came for him.

They loped into his office with no door, all faded denim and lank hair, untouched by the changes happening on what Terry and everyone else on The Paper thought of as the street.

‘Smoke, man?’ one of them said.

Terry was immediately on his feet, practically snapping to attention, and holding out a packet of Silk Cut. And the older guys looked at each other and smiled.

Five minutes later Terry felt like he was dying.

With the giant spliff still in his hand, Terry shivered and shuddered, the sweat pouring down his face, his back, making his capped T-shirt stick to his skin. He wanted to lie down. He wanted to be sick. He wanted it all to be over.

The older guys had stopped cackling with laughter and were starting to look concerned. Their faces swam in front of Terry’s rolling eyes. One of them prised the joint from Terry’s fist.

‘Are you okay, man?’

‘He’s really wasted, man.’

They were in the shadow of the monstrous grey tower block that was home to The Paper – an entire skyscraper full of magazines about every subject under the sun, from stamp collecting and hunting foxes and cars and football and knitting all the way to music, three titles on every floor – loitering in a scrap of wasteland that doubled as a makeshift car park, overlooking a silvery patch of the Thames and the mournful tug boats.

‘Don’t feel well,’ Terry croaked. ‘Might sit down. Until feel better.’

The older guys went, leaving him to his fate. It was…now what was the word? What was the word that people on The Paper had used all morning when something was even slightly out of the ordinary, like the lady who came round with the sandwiches running out of cheese-and-tomato rolls? Oh yes – Terry remembered the word. It was surreal.

His thoughts felt like they were being formed in quicksand. He could taste his stomach in his mouth. He pressed his clammy face against the tower block, moaning, and felt the entire skyscraper slide away from him. Surreal didn’t quite cover it. Terry had been poisoned.

And then Ray Keeley was standing before him.

Even through the thick fog of industrial-strength ganja, Terry knew it was him. Ray was wearing a Stetson, like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, and it made him look like a hallucination, a vision of the Old West glimpsed on the banks of the Thames.

Ray Keeley was only seventeen, but Terry had been reading his stuff for years. Every week Terry looked at Ray’s by-line picture in The Paper – he looked like those early shots of Jackson Browne, the open-faced matinee idol eyes peering out from behind the veil of long, lank, wheat-coloured hair – a teenage hippy heart-throb -and the envy came at Terry in waves, like a toothache.

Ray was the rising star on The Paper in the mid-Seventies, a pretty and precocious fifth-former rhapsodising about Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and the whole California thing that seemed so very far away now. And Ray liked the Beatles, especially the Beatles, even though they were further away than anything, even though they had broken up a full six years ago, and John was hiding in the Dakota and Paul was touring with his wife and Ringo was banging out the novelty records and George was disappearing up his own Hari Krishna.

You read Ray Keeley and you forgot about the three-day week and the miners’ strike and the streets full of rat-infested rubbish that no one was ever going to collect. All the grey dreariness slipped away when you read Ray Keeley on seeing Dylan at Wembley, reviewing Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark, even trying to give Wings the benefit of the doubt. You read Ray and suddenly it was yesterday once more, summer in the Sixties, the party that everyone under the age of twenty-five had missed. You forgot about Ted Heath and thought about making love to Joni in the dunes on the beach at Monterey.

But Ray wasn’t writing so much lately.

‘You all right?’ he asked Terry, with the expression of one who already knew the answer.

Terry shook his head, speechless, feeling as if his body was paralysed and his mind was broken and his tongue was the size of an oven glove.

Then Ray did something unexpected. He put his arm around him. ‘You’ve got to take it easy with that stuff,’ he said. ‘These guys are used to it. You’re not. Come on, let’s get you back to the office. Before someone shops us.’

‘How’d you know?’ Terry mumbled. ‘How’d you know me from The Paper?’

Ray grinned. ‘Not from Horse and Hounds, are you?’ Terry laughed. ‘Nah!’

Ray half-dragged and half-carried Terry back to the office, and sat him at his desk, and gave him orange juice and black coffee until the shivering and the sweating and the sickness began to subside. Ray took care of Terry when he had been left to melt in the dirt by a couple of the older guys, and it was a simple act of decency that Terry would never forget. He tried to thank him but his tongue was a dead weight.

‘Be cool, man,’ Ray told him. ‘Just take it easy now.’

All that first morning people had been telling Terry to be cool and take it easy. The music had changed, and most of the haircuts, and people were throwing away their flares and buying straight-legged trousers, but the language was still largely the lexicon of the Sixties.

For all the changes, for all the new things, a different language had yet to be invented. All that old-fashioned jive about being mellow and taking it easy and loving one another was still around. Be cool. Take it easy.

All that first morning these worn-out old words had sounded empty to Terry Warboys. But he found himself giving his new friend a stoned, wonky smile.

Because Terry thought that when Ray Keeley said these things, they actually sounded as though they meant something.

Ray let himself into the house, and was immediately assaulted by the smell of home-brewed beer and the sound of the television.

‘Miss Belgian Congo is a nineteen-year-old beautician who says her ambition is to travel, end all wars and meet Sacha Distel.’

‘Back again, are you?’ the old man shouted, not stirring from his chair in front of the TV. ‘Like a bloody hotel…’

It was true. Ray treated his parents’ suburban semi like a hotel, coming and going without warning, never staying long. But the funny thing was he treated hotels like they were home. The last two nights, when he had been in the Holiday Inn in Birmingham and Travel Lodge in Leicester, he could not stop himself from making his hotel bed in the morning. It was as if his home was out there somewhere.

Ray ran upstairs to his room, hardly registering the presence of his younger brother sprawled on his bed, reading a football magazine.

After chucking his bag in a corner Ray knelt before the stereo on his side of the room. The pose made him seem like a religious supplicant, but when he ran his fingers along the spine of his record collection, it was like a lover – familiar, loving, taking his time, and knowing exactly what was there before he had even looked.

The records were alphabetically filed. The As were sparse and unplayed for years – Alice Cooper and Argent and Abba and Atomic Rooster – but B was for The White Album, Abbey Road, Revolver, Rubber Soul, Let It Be, A Hard Day’s Night…B was for Beatles galore.

He pulled out Abbey Road, and the boys marching in single file across that zebra crossing brought back twenty melodies. Ray knew that street in St John’s Wood better than he knew the road where he lived.

The white VW parked on the pavement, the curious passer-by in the distance, and the unbroken blue of a cloudless summer sky. And the four of them, all with a role to play. George in denim -the gravedigger. Paul barefoot – the corpse. Ringo in his long black drape – the undertaker. And John in white – the angel.

Ray replaced Abbey Road. Almost idly, his index finger fell upon the Ds – Blood on the Tracks by Dylan, Morrison Hotel and L.A. Woman by the Doors, The Golden Hour of Donovan, The Best of Bo Diddley and…For Your Pleasure. For Your Pleasure? Ray’s handsome face frowned at the cracked cardboard spine. What were Roxy Music doing among the Ds? Ray glared across at Robbie.

His twelve-year-old brother was reclining on his bed with a copy of Shoot! It was double games on Tuesday afternoons and there was a smudge of mud running right across the bridge of Robbie’s nose, like war paint on the face of a Red Indian.

‘You been touching my records again?’ Ray said.

‘No way, José,’ Robbie said, not looking up from a feature on Charlie George.

Ray furiously filed Roxy Music next to the Rolling Stones, where they belonged. Then he turned back to his kid brother.

‘Don’t touch my records, okay? And if you do touch my records don’t, but if you do – put them back in the right place, okay? You don’t put Roxy Music in with Dylan and the Doors.’

Robbie mimed a yawn. ‘I’ve got my own records,’ he said.

Ray laughed. ‘Yeah, Disney Favourites and Alvin Stardust’s Greatest Hits.’

Robbie looked up, stung. It was the brutal truth. Robbie only owned two records.

‘I’m getting In the City for Christmas.’ His brother had recently seen the Jam on Top of the Pops. It had been love at first sight. ‘Mum’s getting it for me.’

Ray ignored his brother. Bickering with a kid was beneath him. He pulled out Pretzel Logic by Steely Dan, the cover – that old man selling pretzels, that frozen American street – as familiar as the bedroom he shared with his baby brother. It was as if his record collection was the real world, and the place where he lived was the dream.

He loved the way that albums demanded your attention. The way you held them in both hands and they filled your vision and all you could see was their beauty. For a moment he thought of the girl last night, the Bouquet of Barbed Wire press officer.

There was a girl on the cover of Pretzel Logic, in the background, walking away, hair long and trousers flared, a girl that probably looked just like Ali McGraw in Love Story. He wondered about her life, and who she loved, and how he could ever meet her. Ray Keeley ached for a girl of his own. Holding that album was like holding that girl. Or as close as he would ever get.

‘Ray! Robbie! Your tea’s ready,’ his mother called up from the foot of the stairs. Ray sighed with appreciation as he closed the sleeve.

His father was sitting in his favourite armchair like some suburban sultan while his mum carried plates of bread and jam into the front room. Ray’s parents were an unlikely match – his mother a small nervous woman, jumping at shadows, his father as broad as he was tall, a bull of a man in carpet slippers, and these days always on the edge of anger.

Above the new fireplace – the real fire had just been ripped out and replaced with a gas job that had fake coals and unlikely-looking flames – there were photographs in silver frames.

Ray’s parents on their wedding day. Ray and his two brothers John and Robbie on a sightseeing junk in Hong Kong harbour, three little kids – Robbie small, Ray medium and John large – smiling and squinting in the blazing sub-tropical sunshine. Their father grinning proudly in the light khaki of the Hong Kong Police Force, looking like an overgrown boy scout in his shorts and woolly socks, his bony knees colonial white.

Somewhere in the middle Sixties the photographs turned from black and white to colour. And among the colour photos there was John, eighteen years old now, in the darker uniform of the British Army, taken just before he was killed when an IRA bomb went off on a country road in South Armagh. It was the most recent photograph. Nothing had been right since then.

On the television, young women in swimming suits and high heels were staring ahead with fixed smiles as Matt Monro moved among them singing ‘Thank Heaven for Little Girls’.

Ray and his mum sat on the sofa and Robbie sprawled between them on the floor. Everybody drank diluted orange cordial apart from his father, who had a cloudy glass of home-made beer by his feet.

‘Now how can you compare some tart from Bongo Bongo Land with some tart from England?’ he asked. ‘It’s not fair on them, is it? The darkies. Completely different standards of beauty.’

Ray rolled his eyes. The same old stuff, on and on, never ending. They said that travel broadened the mind. They had obviously never met his father.

‘I might marry a black woman,’ Ray said through a mouthful of Mother’s Pride and Robertson’s strawberry jam, the one with the smiling Golliwog cavorting on the jar. ‘Your grandchildren might be half black. Did that ever occur to you, Dad?’

A cloud seemed to pass across his father’s face. ‘What about the kids? The little half-castes? Did you ever think about them? Not belonging to any group. How do you think that feels?’

‘If we all got mixed up together then there wouldn’t be any more racism,’ Ray said. ‘Because then we would all be the same. Got any more blackcurrant, Mum?’

It was one of the things he argued about with his father. Along with the volume and value of his music, the length of his hair and John Lennon. It felt like they argued about everything these days. Ray wished he knew a black woman just so he could marry her and show his father that all men were brothers.

‘Birds of a feather,’ Ray’s father said, pointing his knife at Ray. ‘You don’t see robins flying about with crows, do you?’

‘Are you a crow, Dad? Are you a robin?’

‘She’s nice,’ his mum said. ‘Miss Korea. What one do you like, Robbie?’

‘I don’t like any of them!’ Robbie said, blushing furiously. Ray laughed. He knew that his brother liked all of them. He wasn’t fussy He had heard Robbie fiddling about in his stripy pyjamas when he thought that Ray was sleeping.

‘Enoch’s right,’ his father said. ‘Send them all back.’

‘What if they come from here?’ Ray said, pushing the last of his bread and jam into his mouth. ‘Where you going to send them back to, Dad?’

With his father still ranting about birds of a feather and beasts in the wild, Ray got up and carried his plate out to the kitchen and went upstairs to his bedroom. He knew what he needed, and put on the Who as loud as he dared – 5.15, sad and angry all at once, to match the way he felt.

Why should I care? Why should I care?

As he made sure that he had enough tube fare to get him back to the city, Ray remembered something he had heard at The Paper. Skip Jones had told him that taking heroin was like stepping into a golden bubble – your troubles melted away when you were in there. That was how Ray felt about his music. It made the world go away.

But from downstairs came the rank stench of home-made beer – bitter hops, liquid malt extract and priming syrup, the whole sorry mess fermenting in the huge metal vats for weeks at a time – and it almost made him gag. That was the problem with living at home with his parents.

Ray’s floor would always be his father’s ceiling.

Leon stood at the hermetically sealed windows of The Paper, watching the sun going down and the crowds leaving the tower block, scuttling to Waterloo station and home.

When he was certain that most of them had gone, he went to the washroom and stared into the mirror above the sink. He waited for a few moments, heard a cleaner clatter by, and then slowly removed his hat.

Leon’s hair was thick and wiry, like something you would use for scrubbing pans, but what was most striking about it was that a few hours earlier it had been dyed a virulent orange. Autumn Gold, it had said on the packet.

Leon winced as if he had been slapped. He quickly replaced his hat, gripped the brim with both hands and firmly pulled it down over his ears. It was a disaster. As always.

Leon hated his hair. And Leon’s hair hated him right back.

There was a line from a Rod Stewart song, back when Leon was fifteen years old and Rod was still big mates with John Peel and playing the working-class hero – kicking footballs around on Top of the Pops, pretending he was fresh off the terraces, before he developed that embarrassing taste for straw boaters and blazers and high-maintenance blondes and Art Deco lamps, and everyone had to pretend that they had never liked him in the first place.

It was the first line of the first track on Every Picture Tells A Story – the line that rhymed ‘mirror’ and ‘inferior’. Leon always felt like that song had been written about him.

He knew there were battles to fight now. The middle ground was collapsing, and the Fascists were getting stronger. Not the public-bar bigots, the Alf Garnetts ranting on the sofa, but real Jew-baiting, Paki-bashing Fascists. Out there right now, getting bolder by the day, their numbers swelling, the hate spreading like a virus. Leon had seen their faces at Lewisham, clocked their proud Nazi salutes, and glimpsed what was inside them. There was nothing remotely funny about them, these dreamers of repatriation, these would-be builders of new ovens. Something had to be done.

So why the fuck, Leon asked himself, was he still worried about his hair? You didn’t need a good haircut at the barricades.

He slung his record bag over his shoulder. Inside it was the latest edition of his fanzine, Red Mist. Too valuable to leave lying around the office, Leon believed. Someone might steal it.

The fanzine – a Xeroxed mix of radical politics, new music and cut-up kidnapper’s graphics, hastily stapled together – had landed Leon his job on The Paper eighteen months ago, reminding some of the older guys of their radical youth. But there were sighs and rolling eyes when Leon tried to sell Red Mist in the office, and when he said they should have more politics and less showbiz.

‘We’re a music paper, man,’ they told him every day, as if the music could ever be separated from what was going on in the street, as if music wasn’t a part of the real world but just some playpen that they climbed into for light entertainment.

Leon believed that the new music could be a force for social change. The fire still burned. The audience just needed to be radicalised. And the musicians just needed to be educated. Basically all you needed to change was everything.

Most of the new groups just didn’t get it. They dreamed of the same old stuff – sexual opportunities, uncut white drugs and driving a Rolls-Royce into a swimming pool. They thought that anti-Nazism was just a cool brand name to be dropped in interviews, just another pose to be struck, as empty as Mick Jagger marching to Grosvenor Square to stop the Vietnam War in the Sixties.

But Leon knew this was real. The Labour Government wasn’t going to last for ever. Jim Callaghan wasn’t going to be around for much longer. And then what would happen? Fighting in the streets, Leon reckoned. Struggle. Civil unrest. More riots. Read your history books, he thought. Ask A. J. P. Taylor. See what happens when the centre is too weak to hold. A Lewisham every day of the year.

And when it was all over, from the ashes would rise a better world where racism was defeated and Leon’s hair did exactly what it was told to do.

Chapter Three

‘I tell you, Dag Wood is hung like Red Rum,’ Terry said. ‘When he gets it out, it’s like – I don’t know – an Indian snake charmer…or a sailor with a rope…he sort of has to unfurl it.’

This was one of the best parts of the job, Terry thought. Coming home and telling your mates what had happened, all the interesting stuff that you weren’t allowed to put in a magazine that they sold in sweet shops. He loved it. He looked over at Misty sitting on his desk and she smiled encouragement. He knew how to tell a story.

‘Now are you sure it was Red Rum?’ Leon said, slightly bashful in the presence of Misty. He had only recently learned how to be around her without blushing. He was sitting on his desk, knees drawn up to his chin, smiling as Terry paced their little office, holding his hands out like a fisherman measuring the one that got away. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t Arkle he was hung like?’

‘What’s Red Rum?’ Ray said, swinging back and forth in his chair, fiddling with his tape recorder, his hair falling in his face.

‘Famous racehorse,’ Leon said. ‘Won the Grand National lots of times. Despite being built like Dag Wood.’

‘Definitely Red Rum,’ Terry said. ‘I got a good look. We were standing at these traffic lights, right? Just me and Dag, in the middle of the night. And he’s asking me about the scene in London how good the bands really are, what the audience are going to make of him – and this VW Beetle pulls up at a red light, and Dag whips it out – unfurls himself – and then…takes a leak on the Beetle with this enormous thing.’ Terry shook his head. He still couldn’t believe it. The outrageous act had been done so casually, so naturally, that he still couldn’t work out if Dag had done it to shock him, or if he was truly that untamed. ‘I’ll never forget the look on that Beetle driver’s face.’

Misty slid off Terry’s desk and half-raised a hand in salute, leaving their office with a wry smile and a raised eyebrow, like a wife of twenty-five years who enjoyed the story, but who had heard it before: Dag taking cocaine until his ears bled, Dag reducing a woman reporter from Fleet Street to tears, Dag banging groupies two at a time after his girlfriend had left town.

There were things about Dag that had made Terry uncomfortable – the cruelty, the casual, almost gluttonous infidelity, the choice of drugs – everybody in London under the age of twenty-five believed that cocaine was the chemical equivalent of a feather cut. But Dag had been like every rock star that Terry had ever met – a great seducer.

Dag had gone out of his way to make Terry love him – giving him a book of Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo that Dag had been given by David Bowie – there was a neatly written inscription at the front – borrowing some instruments in a West Berlin jazz bar so that Dag and his band could play a few of their greatest hits, showing him his extraordinary cock – and so Terry did.

In fact, Terry loved Dag so very much that there was one thing he had left out of both his piece and the other story he told his friends. Dag looked old.

Really old. Horribly old. If you could imagine Rip Van Winkle as a porn star, then you were getting the general idea about Dag Wood and the way he looked.

Terry had been so eager to hero worship Dag, so desperate to lionise this man that all the new bands name-checked as a major influence, so hungry to be his best friend that he hadn’t had the heart to say how prehistoric Dag looked.

Dag’s body – which he showed off at every possible opportunity, habitually tearing off his shirt not just on stage but during interviews and at sound checks and at the hotel’s buffet breakfast – was still in great shape, lean and pumped, like one of those Charles Atlas ads at the back of DC and Marvel comics.

But the ravages of ten thousand nights of debauchery and depravity were in every deeply ploughed line of Dag’s face, like Dorian Gray in silver lamé trousers with his hair dyed white. Dag Wood looked like a recently deceased bodybuilder. But Terry kept that to himself. Because it didn’t fit his story.

The three of them looked up as the editor of The Paper appeared in their doorway. Kevin White was twenty-nine years old, and every inch a grown-up version of the Mod he had once been. The only man in the office who came to work in a suit. White was tall, powerfully built, with curtain-parting hair, like one of the Small Faces around the time of ‘Lazy Sunday’.

‘Can I see you in my office, Ray?’

Ray shoved his tape recorder in his desk and followed White to his office. Leon pulled a copy of Red Mist out of his shoulder bag and began thumbing through it. Terry sat at his desk, closed his eyes and sighed with contentment.

It was good, yes, telling his friends was good. Almost the best part.

But when Terry introduced Dag Wood to Misty later at the Western World, and they both saw just how much the other one loved him, then it would be perfect.

‘So how’s it going?’

Kevin White slumped into his chair and put his feet on his desk. The editor had the only corner office in The Paper, and Ray could see what seemed like all of London stretching out behind him.

‘It’s going okay,’ Ray said, making his fringe fall forward over his face. Even after three years, he couldn’t quite get over this shyness he felt around the editor. Ray had known White since he was fifteen years old, turning up in the reception of The Paper with a handwritten think piece on the Eagles when he should have been writing about An Inspector Calls for an English Literature paper. White had never treated him with anything but kindness. But somehow that only made Ray’s shyness worse. It was funny. Ray had never yet met a rock star that he felt in awe of, but he was in awe of Kevin White.

‘Your mum okay?’

She’s on the Valium, Ray thought. She cries in her sleep. Sometimes she can’t get out of bed in the morning. If you mention John she looks like she’s been given an electric shock.

‘She’s all right,’ Ray said.

White glanced at the photograph on his desk of two smiling toddlers, a small boy and a smaller girl. He was the only person in the office who had a photo of children on his desk.

‘I can’t imagine what she’s been through,’ White said, more to himself than Ray. ‘No parent should ever have to bury their child.’

Ray didn’t know what to say. Unless they were talking about music, he always felt tongue-tied around the editor. Like every other writer on The Paper, Ray thought that White was touched with greatness. Everybody knew the story. Even the readers.

In the early Seventies The Paper was a pop rag in terminal decline, called The Music Paper, if anything could ever be that corny – but then all music papers had corny titles, from Melody Maker to New Musical Express to Sounds to Disc, they all had names that had sounded groovy back when dinosaurs walked the earth – and Kevin White had saved it.

White had left school at fifteen, working on the print at the Daily Express with his father, his uncles, his brothers and his cousins until some bright spark above stairs asked the teenage Mod to write 500 words on a Motown revue – a dream ticket with the Four Tops, the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles all on one bill. White never looked back, and he was a junior reporter on The Music Paper when the big chance came. The suits upstairs gave White three months to increase advertising revenue and double the circulation, or they were going to put The Music Paper out of its misery.

White dropped the Music from the masthead, fired all the old farts who were nostalgic for the days when the big news was the Tremeloes’ tour and Herman’s Hermits secret heartache and whether Peter Tork was going to leave the Monkees. In a daring last throw of the dice, White kept the title alive by hiring heads, freaks and hairies from what was left of the underground press, because the underground press was dead or dying too. It felt like everything was dying in the early Seventies.

Ray could imagine the looks on their faces at Horse and Hounds when the new writers started turning up for work, all those refugees from Oz and Red Dwarf and Friendz and IT who filled The Paper with tales of bands that all the other heads, freaks and hairies knew by affectionate abbreviations. Heep. Floyd. Quo. Lizzy. Tull. Zep. And those writers loved Kevin White, just as Ray loved him, because White had the guts and the vision to do something that nobody else in this entire tower block of magazines would ever do – he gave you your first chance.

‘You just got back, didn’t you?’ White said.

Ray nodded, on surer ground now the talk was moving on to bands. Thin Lizzy,’ he said. ‘Leicester and Birmingham. Two thousand words. Centre spread.’

‘Good tour?’ White said.

Ray nodded, smiling. Thin Lizzy had been the first band he ever went on the road with, and they would always have a special place in his heart. When Ray had been a bumbling schoolboy with absolutely no idea how to conjure a two-page feature out of forty-eight hours with a band, Phil Lynott, the band’s black Irish frontman, had taken care of him – showed Ray that on the road it was okay to drink screwdrivers at breakfast if they calmed you down, coached Ray on how to conduct an interview, and even turned on Ray’s tape recorder when it was time to talk.

‘You’ve written about them before, haven’t you?’ White said.

‘This will be the third feature,’ Ray said.

White sighed, and something about that sound sent a sense of dread crawling up Ray’s spine. For the first time since entering the editor’s office, he felt that this was going to be bad.

‘Yeah, you’ve been doing this for a while, haven’t you?’ White took his feet off the desk and looked out the window. ‘And that’s the big problem with this job. You can only do it for so long.’

Ray felt sick to his stomach. That was the flip side of White’s fresh-blood policy – it meant some guy at the far side of his twenties quietly being put out to pasture.

But surely not me, Ray thought. I’m young. And I’ve got nowhere else to go. Nowhere else I want to be.

‘It’s like this, Ray,’ the editor said, talking more quickly now, wanting to get it over with. ‘We can’t send you to interview the new groups.’

‘But – Thin Lizzy!’

White held up a hand. ‘Hardly new. And that’s different. We all love the first band we went on the road with. You can’t do that every week.’ Then White was leaning forward, almost pleading. ‘I need writers who I can send to interview Johnny Rotten and Elvis Costello and Dag Wood.’ White sighed with exasperation. ‘And that’s not you, is it? Look at your hair.’

Ray suddenly saw himself in White’s eyes and – beyond the paternal affection and friendly chitchat – Ray saw that he looked ridiculous.

The music had changed, as the music always will, and Ray had not changed with it. Suddenly The Paper didn’t need a young head who was still hung up on the flowers-in-your-hair thing. It was a joke, man. Ray still believed in the whole peace and love and acoustic guitars thing that everybody was sneering about now. How could you send someone like that to talk to John Lydon? What would the Clash think?

He was no longer the little star. The world had changed while he wasn’t looking. It was like Ray – Beatles fan, California dreamer, the hippy child who was born ten years too late – was a star of the silent era, and talkies had just come in. He watched the editor pick up a copy of The Paper and turn to the section for album reviews.

‘Listen to this,’ White said. ‘Another slice of New Nihilism for all you crazy pop kids, and it’s like staring into an abyss of meaning-lessness.’

Ray listened to his words being read. His mood improved. He had been reasonably pleased with it, especially the bit about the abyss of meaninglessness. That sounded pretty good. That sounded like something Skip Jones might write.

‘What’s wrong with it?’ Ray said mildly.

Kevin White scowled at him, and Ray flinched. The editor could be scary when he wanted to be. For five years he had bossed an office full of precocious, overgrown adolescents, all of them high-IQ misfits, many of them habitual users of illegal substances. He knew how to control a meeting.

‘The abyss of meaninglessness?’ White threw the paper on his desk. ‘It’s KC and the Sunshine Band!’ Then his voice softened. White had seen it all before. Writers who were once part of the Zeitgeist – a word that was freely bandied around in the offices of The Paper – but now belonged to yesterday, writers who had done their stint on The Paper, their bit for rock and roll, and didn’t realise that it was time to be moving on. Writers who had lived for music suddenly discovering that everything they heard disgusted them, suddenly discovering that the music didn’t live for them.

‘This new music…’ Ray shook his head, and a veil of yellow hair fell in front of his face. He brushed it away. ‘Tear it down, smash it up. No words you can understand, no tunes you can hear.’

‘Who are you?’ White said angrily. ‘My maiden aunt from Brighton?’

Ray hated it when the editor raised his voice. It reminded him of home.

‘What’s happening?’ Ray said. ‘I don’t understand what’s happening.’

But he understood only too well. He should have been writing ten years ago, when it really felt like this music was going to change the world. 1967 – summer of love, year of wonders, the year of Sgt Pepper, when music was still pushing back the boundaries, when people still believed in something. He should have been in London when heads and hearts were still open, when there was still the possibility of glimpsing the Beatles playing live on a rooftop in Savile Row. He should have been tooling around and taking notes when the world still believed in love, enlightenment and John Lennon. And he should definitely have been at Woodstock, chanting no rain, no rain in the mud, with flowers in his hair and a California girl in his sleeping bag, a mellow smoke on the go, good acid in his veins turning everything the colour of sunshine, and maybe Arlo Guthrie up on stage singing. Instead of having to wait until the film came out in the grey light of a colder, drabber new decade. Yes, those few days on Yasgur’s farm really summed it all up for Ray.

Were you at Woodstock?

No, but I saw the film with my mum.

Kevin White took a deep breath.

‘Maybe, Ray, maybe a move from the staff to freelance would be good for you, and good for the paper.’

Ray’s eyes were hot. ‘Would I still have my desk?’ he asked.

White shifted uncomfortably. ‘Well, probably we would have to give your desk to someone else.’

Ray could see it now. He would be like one of the freelancers who came into the office hoping to be tossed a bone – a minor album to review, a lesser gig to attend – while the stars of The Paper wrote the cover stories, while Terry and Leon flew around the world, and got their picture next to their by-line. No desk to call his own, never really belonging, on the way out.

‘This is the only job I want,’ Ray said, and it was true. Ray could not imagine his life without The Paper, without his friends, without the comforting routines and rituals of rock and roll – going on the road, doing the singles, having somewhere to come every day, somewhere that felt more like home than the house where he lived. He had loved it as a reader, and he loved it as a writer. On either side of the looking glass, it was in his blood.

‘Then you’re going to have to give me something fast,’ White said, embarrassed that he had to act like the boss of IBM or something. ‘Something I can use.’

At that moment Leon Peck burst into the editor’s office. ‘Let me read you something,’ he said. ‘Sorry and all that – this won’t take long.’

White and Ray stared at Leon. ‘Don’t you knock?’ White said. ‘And what’s with the stupid hat?’

‘The Nazis are coming back,’ Leon said, tugging self-consciously at his trilby. ‘So maybe we should worry a little less about bourgeois convention and a little more about stopping them.’ He cleared his throat and read from the copy of the Sunday Telegraph he was holding. ‘It is a disquieting fact, recognised by all the major political parties, that more and more people are giving their support to groups which believe in taking politics to the street’

‘What’s the point?’ White said.

Under the brim of his hat, Leon’s eyes were shining with emotion. ‘Boss, I was down there on Saturday. Look, look,’ he said, pointing at the bruise under his eye. ‘Look what they did to me.’

‘You’ll live,’ White said. Ray noticed he was a lot rougher with Leon than he was with him. But then Leon hadn’t been just a kid when he first walked into The Paper.

‘Let me write something,’ Leon begged. ‘Give me next week’s cover. Hitler said that if they’d crushed him when he was small, he would never have succeeded.’

‘This shower are just a bunch of skinheads, that’s all,’ White said, taking the Sunday Telegraph from Leon and looking at the picture of the flag-waving mob. ‘They couldn’t find their own arse without a road map, I can’t see them invading Poland.’ He handed back the newspaper. ‘And Elvis Costello is on next week’s cover.’ White thought about it. ‘But all right – you can give me 500 words on Lewisham. Anybody go to this demo?’

Leon smiled. ‘I’m assuming you don’t mean thousands of anti-Fascist protesters, boss. I guess you mean rock stars. Concerned rock stars.’

White rolled his eyes. ‘Anyone our readers might’ve heard of.’

‘No, they were all too busy doing photo shoots and getting their teeth capped to fight Fascism. But I hear John Lennon is in town.’

Ray’s jaw fell open. He stared at Leon, not believing a word of it. ‘Lennon’s in New York,’ he said. ‘In the Dakota with Yoko and baby Sean.’

Leon shook his head. ‘Lennon’s in London,’ he said. ‘For one night only. Someone at EMI just called me. Thought it might make an item in the diary. Passing through on his way to Japan.’ Leon cackled. ‘Give me McCartney any day of the week. At least Paul knows he’s a boring old fart who sold out years ago. Think Beatle John would fancy pinning on his Chairman Mao badge and coming to the next riot? Has he still got his beret? Or should we start the revolution without him?’

‘Well, he started it without you,’ Kevin White said. ‘Come on – what are you doing for us, Leon?’

Leon’s face fell. Ray knew that’s what they always said when they wanted you to get in line. What are you doing for us? ‘Well, mostly I’ll be working on this riot story,’ Leon said. ‘I thought we could call it Dedicated Followers of Fascism. Maybe – ’

White consulted a scrap of paper on his desk. ‘Leni and the Riefenstahls are at the Red Cow tonight. You can give me a review of that by first thing tomorrow morning – 800 words.’

Leon nodded. ‘So that’s 500 words for the fight against Fascism, and 800 words for Leni and the Riefenstahls – who less than a year ago were parading around the 100 Club in swastika armbands. Right.’

‘We’re still a music paper, Leon.’

Leon laughed. ‘That’s right. We’re doing the pogo while Rome burns.’

‘A good journalist can write well about anything. Look at that piece by your father this morning. You see that?’ White asked, turning to Ray. ‘A piece about the cod war – what could be more boring than the cod war?’

‘I didn’t see it,’ Ray said, still thinking about John Lennon. But he knew that Leon’s father wrote a column for a liberal broadsheet. He was one of the few journalists in Fleet Street that was read and respected up at The Paper.

‘It was about the decline of Britain as an imperial power,’ White told Ray. ‘About how we used to go to war to fight for freedom. And now we go to war to fight about fish. Brilliant.’ White shook his head. ‘Brilliant. Tell him how much I liked it, would you?’

‘Bit tricky that,’ Leon said, edging towards the door.

‘Why’s that?’ White said.

‘I don’t talk to my father.’

They were all silent for a bit. Leon caught Ray’s eye and looked away.

Oh; White said. Okay.’

Leon closed the door behind him. Ray realised that the editor of The Paper was watching his face.

‘So,’ White said. ‘Think you can get me John Lennon?’

Ray gawped, feeling the sweat break out on his face. ‘Get you John Lennon? Who do I call? How do I get you John Lennon?’

White laughed. ‘You don’t call anyone. There’s no one to call. No press officers, no publicists. EMI can’t help you – this is a private trip. You just go out there and find him. Then you talk to him. Like a real grown-up reporter. Like a real journalist. Like Leon’s father. Like that. Think you can do it?’

There was so much that Ray wanted to say to John Lennon that he was sure he would not be able to say a word. Even if he could find him among the ten million souls in that Waterloo sunset.

‘I don’t know,’ Ray said honestly.

‘If you find him,’ White said, his blood starting to pump, his editor’s instincts kicking in, ‘we’ll put him on the cover. World exclusive – John talks!’

‘But – but what about pictures?’

White looked exasperated. ‘Not Lennon the way he is now – he must be knocking on for forty! No, an old shot from the archives. Lennon the way he was in Hamburg – short hair and a leather jacket, skinny and pale. You know what that would look like, don’t you?’

Ray thought about it. ‘That would look like…now.’

‘Exactly! Very 1977. Totally 1977. Nothing could be more now than the way the Beatles looked in Hamburg. They were out of their boxes on speed, did you know that? I can see the cover copy: Another kid in a leather jacket on his way to God knows where…’

‘But Leon says he’s leaving tomorrow!’

White’s fist slammed down on his desk. ‘Come on, Ray. Are you a writer – or a fan?’

Ray needed to think about that. He had no idea if he was a real journalist, or if he would ever be. How could you tell? Who had ever dreamed that loving music would turn into a full-time job? He was a kid who had written about music because it was more interesting than a paper round, and because they didn’t give you free records if you stacked shelves in a supermarket.

‘I don’t know what I am,’ he said.

But Kevin White was no longer listening. The editor was staring over at the door, and Ray followed his gaze. On the other side of the rectangular pane of glass, there were men in suits waiting to see Kevin White. Men from upstairs, management, bald old geezers with ties and wrinkles who looked like your dad, or somebody’s dad. They were waiting for White to finish with Ray. Sometimes White had to smooth things out with them. One time a cleaner found a wastepaper bin full of roaches, and suddenly there were men in suits everywhere, all having a fit. But White worked it out. He was a great editor. Ray didn’t want to let him down.

‘I’ll try my best,’ Ray said. ‘But I don’t know if I’m a real journalist or just somebody who likes music.’

Kevin White stood up. It was time for him to face the men in suits again.

‘You’d better find out,’ the editor said.

Leon was gone. Terry was sitting on his desk, his DMs dangling, flicking through the copy of last week’s Paper that Misty had given him at the airport.

‘This is what you need, Ray,’ he said. ‘New! The Gringo Waistcoat. Get into the Original Gringo Waistcoat – the new style. You’d look lovely in a Gringo Waistcoat.’

Ray dropped into his chair and stared into space. Terry didn’t notice. It was an endless source of amusement to him that the classifieds in The Paper were always exactly one year behind the times. While the kid in the street was trying to look like Johnny Rotten, the models in the ads still looked like Jason King.

Cotton-drill loons – still only £2.80…Moccasin boots – choose from one long top fringe or three freaky layers.

According to the classifieds, the readers of The Paper were wearing exactly what they had been wearing for the last ten years – flared jeans, Afghan coats, cheesecloth galore, and, always and for ever, T-shirts with amusing slogans. Sometimes it felt like The Paper would not exist without T-shirts with amusing slogans.

I CHOKED LINDA LOVELACE. LIE DOWN I THINK I LOVE YOU. SEX APPEAL – GIVE GENEROUSLY. And that timeless classic, the fucking flying ducks – two cartoon ducks, coupling in mid-flight, the male duck looking hugely satisfied, the female duck looking alarmed.

Terry leaned back, smiling to himself, his spiky head resting against a picture he had torn from a library book and sellotaped to his wall – Olga Korbut, smiling sweetly, bent double on the mat. After the Montreal Olympics last year, a lot of people had switched their affections to the Romanian girl, Nadia Comaneci, but Terry was sticking with Olga.

They each had their own wall, facing their desk with its typewriter, a sleek Olivetti Valentine in red moulded plastic. On Terry’s wall were bands and girls – record company 8 × 10 glossies of the New York Dolls, the Clash and the Sex Pistols plus images pillaged from magazines of Debbie Harry in a black mini-dress, Jane Fonda in Barbarella and Olga Korbut at the Munich Olympics.

Leon’s wall was by far the most artistic – an undercoat of favourite bands had been almost obliterated by headlines cut from newspapers, with yet another layer of breaking news and advertising slogans pasted on top. So a record company glossy of the Buzzcocks had a headline about the death of Mao Tse-Tung running diagonally across it, while a yellowing picture from The Times of General Franco’s coffin was enhanced with an ad for the new Only Ones single. And as Ray swung round in his chair and took out his tape recorder, he was watched by pictures of John Lennon.

There were also dog-eared images of Joni Mitchell and Dylan and Neil Young, but Ray’s wall was really a shrine to Lennon. John gone solo, in white suit and round NHS specs, Yoko hanging on to his arm. John when he had just started growing his hair, that golden middle period of Revolver and Rubber Soul John during Beatlemania, grinning in a suit with the rest of the boys. And the leather-jacket John of Hamburg, all James Dean cock and swagger, too vain to wear his glasses…

This fucking, fucking tape recorder!

The problem was that one of the spools was slightly off kilter. Ray had probably bent it pulling out the cassette after interviewing Phil Lynott with one too many screwdrivers and half a spliff in his system. Now the spool described an erratic circle when it should be standing up straight. You couldn’t stick this thing in front of John Lennon.

Terry guffawed. ‘Listen to this,’ he said. ‘Couple of girls trying to get up a petition to get Roxy Music back on the road – they say, Roxy Must Rule Again!

Ray looked over his shoulder, smiling at his friend. The classifieds were a magic kingdom of musicians wanted, records wanted, girlfriends wanted, perfect worlds wanted, where ads for Greenpeace and Save the Whales were right next to ads for cotton-drill loon pants and Gringo Waistcoats.

But Ray saw that though there was derision in Terry’s laughter, there was also something that he could only identify as love.

This was their paper. This was their thing. This was their place. And soon he would be asked to leave. He didn’t know how he could stand it.

“Badge collectors read on,” said Terry, and then he looked up at Ray. ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you?’

‘Nothing.’ When you grew up with brothers, you learned you always had to come straight back at them. ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you?’

Ray turned his back to Terry, busying himself at his desk, trying to straighten the bent spool on his tape recorder, and letting his hair fall forward so that his friend couldn’t see the panic and pain in his eyes.

Chapter Four

Leon’s squat was in a large, decaying white house on a street of boarded-up buildings.

There was a kind of muddy moat around the perimeter of the house with wooden planks leading across it, like the ramshackle drawbridge of a rotting castle. On the ground floor the cracked and crumbling white plaster was almost obliterated by slogans.

WE ARE THE WRITING ON YOUR WALL. NO DRUGS IN HERE. CATS LIKE PLAIN CRISPS. Someone had changed a scrawled white NF into a bold black NAZIS OUT.

Leon slipped his hand into his leather jacket and felt for his key, glancing over his shoulder before he began negotiating his way across the planks. He had been in the squat for over a year now, ever since he had dropped out of the LSE and started full time on The Paper, but there was still a taste of fear in his mouth whenever he came back. You never knew when the bailiffs and cops would be coming. You never knew what was waiting for you.

As soon as he was inside the hallway a hairy unwashed face appeared at the top of the stairs, as Leon knew it would, as it always did. It wasn’t just Leon. There was a creeping paranoia about squat life that never really went away. It seemed strangely familiar to Leon, because he thought it was not so different to the suspicion lurking behind the net curtains of the rich suburb where he had grown up.

‘Someone’s waiting for you,’ said the hairy face at the top of the stairs.

Leon was amazed. Nobody was ever waiting for him.

‘Some straight,’ said the hairy guy. ‘Reckons he’s your father.’

I knew it, Leon thought, his stomach sinking. I knew something bad was going to happen.

‘The French guys don’t like it,’ said the face at the top of the stairs. ‘We nearly didn’t let him in.’

‘You shouldn’t have,’ Leon said, trying to keep his voice calm, trying to pretend he was in control. He began climbing the stairs.

The squat was meant to be some kind of democracy, but in reality it was run by the French and Germans, who were older, who had been doing this for years, who talked about adventures in places like Paris and Amsterdam with such authority that Leon always fell silent, and felt like a kid who had seen nothing of the world. Leon was furious that his father should embarrass him in front of these great men.

At the top of the stairs he heard the usual babble of languages and sounds. The floorboards of the squat were bare and everything echoed and seemed louder than it should have. The Grateful Dead, turned up to ten, an argument about the murder of Leon Trotsky, another argument about a borrowed bottle of milk, and a woman’s voice, apparently soothing a baby.

Leon wondered what his father would make of the overwhelming smell, for the squat was full of ripe scents, the trapped air behind the boarded-up windows reeking of dry rot, unwashed clothes, joss sticks and, seeping into everything, the odour of the vegetable soup that was permanently simmering on a big black stove.

The old man. Fuck it. Leon swallowed hard. When would it ever end? That fear of facing his father? That terror of seeing the disappointment in his eyes?

He was by the sash window, his hands behind his back like the Duke of Edinburgh about to inspect the guard, staring down at the street. He was a tall, good-looking man seven days from his fifty-third birthday, calm and regal in his crisp Humphrey Bogart raincoat. He was standing. There was nowhere to sit down. There was nothing in the room but a pile of rucksacks and a few sleeping bags, one of which contained two sleeping teenage girls, curled up like kittens.

‘What are you doing here, Dad?’

The old man turned to him.

‘Hello, Leon,’ he said, as if he could hardly believe their luck at bumping into each other. ‘I could ask you the same question, couldn’t I?’

The old man seemed perfectly relaxed. Leon had to hand it to him – how many of the boys he went to school with had fathers who could walk into a squat and not bat an eyelid? Leon remembered what his father had said to him when he was a boy, and delirious with excitement because his daddy had taken him to his newspaper office as a special treat during the long summer holiday. A journalist has to be at home everywhere, Leon. Remember that.

The old man smiled, and placed a hand on Leon’s shoulder, patting it twice, and then let it fall away when his son did not respond.

‘Good to see you. Are you keeping well?’

He looked up at Leon’s hat but said nothing. Leon’s parents had always been very understanding about the vagaries of fashion. Infuriatingly tolerant, in fact. None of his haircuts – the botched Ziggy Stardust, the failed Rod Stewart – had ever troubled them. That’s their problem exactly, Leon thought. They can understand a bit of youthful rebellion. But they can’t stomach the real thing.

Leon grimaced. ‘You really should have rung. This is not a good time. I’m going out – my friends will be waiting – at the Western World.’

His father frowned, lifting a hand to Leon’s bruised cheekbone, but not quite touching it. ‘What on earth happened to your poor face?’

Leon wanted to say – oh, please don’t fuss, I’ve had twenty years of it. But he couldn’t resist – he wanted his father to know. He wanted his father to be proud of him. And when the fuck would that ever end?

‘I was down there on Saturday. You know – Lewisham.’

Leon relished the frightened look in the old man’s face.

‘The riot? What – they beat you?’

Leon laughed at that. ‘I just got clipped. A cop’s knee.’

His father was wide-eyed. Everything amazed him. ‘His knee?’

Leon sighed with irritation. How could anyone know so little? ‘He was on a horse, Dad. He was a cop on a horse.’ Leon waited. He wanted some acknowledgement from his father. A bit of credit, that wouldn’t have gone amiss. Some small nod of recognition that Leon had done a good thing by going to Lewisham and standing up to the racists. But the old man just exhaled with frustration.

‘Why do you want to get mixed up in all that? A bunch of bower boys waving the flag, and another bunch of bower boys throwing bricks at them. What does that solve?’

Leon’s face reddened with anger. ‘You should understand. You of all people. They’re Fascists, Dad. They have to be stopped. Isn’t that what you did in the war?’

The old man raised his eyebrows. He almost smiled, and Leon blushed. He wished he could stop doing that.

‘Is that what you think it was like at Monte Cassino? A punch-up on Lewisham High Street? What a lot you have to learn, my boy.’

This is why I left home, Leon thought, his eyes pricking with tears. The constant belittling. The just-not-fucking-getting-it. The never being good enough. The being told that I know nothing.

‘I don’t care what you think,’ Leon said, knowing he cared desperately. ‘And why did you come? Why?’

‘Your mother asked me to,’ said the old man, and Leon felt that twinge of hurt. So it wasn’t his dad that was worried about him. It was her. His mother. ‘Your mother doesn’t get it. All your advantages and you end up living with a bunch of dossers.’

‘Listen to you,’ Leon said, mocking him now. ‘The great enlightened liberal – sneering at the homeless.’

‘I’m not sneering. I’m just – I’m just happy to see you.’

‘Can you keep your voice down, please?’ Leon said, indicating the sleeping girls, trying to show the old man that he was on his territory now. ‘They’ve been up all night.’

His father peered at the girls as if noticing them for the first time.

‘Who are they?’ he said, keeping his voice down. There was a natural curiosity about him, and Leon thought perhaps that was why he was such a good journalist.

‘Someone found them sleeping in the photo booth at Euston. They’ve come down from Glasgow.’

He wanted his dad to understand. He wanted him to see that these were Leon’s battles – fighting racism, finding a roof for the homeless, confronting injustice – and they were just as important as the battles that his father had fought.

But the old man just shook his head sadly, as if it was insane for children to be sleeping in photo booths, and it infuriated Leon.

‘Dad, do you know what happens to most of the homeless kids who sleep in railway stations? They end up selling their bodies within a week.’

‘They might be homeless, but you’re not, are you, Leon?’ He looked from the sleeping girls to his son. ‘You’re just playing at it.’

Leon was having trouble controlling his heart, his breathing, his temper. He was at that point in a young man’s life when every word from his father’s mouth enraged him.

‘I’m playing at nothing,’ Leon said. ‘They can’t leave good housing empty. We’re not going to stand for it any more. The homeless are fighting back.’

‘But you choose to be homeless, Leon. Where’s the sense in that? You give up your home for a slum. You give up your education for some music paper.’

Here we go, Leon thought. As if writing think pieces about the cod war is morally superior. As if sitting on your fanny and getting a degree somehow validates your existence.

‘I’ve got a friend called Terry. His parents think he’s done very well for himself by getting a job on a music paper.’

‘I am sure Terry didn’t have your advantages. I’m sure Terry wasn’t at the London School of Economics until he dropped out in his first year. How can you throw all that away? Your grandfather was a taxi driver from Hackney. Do you know what he would have given for the chances you’ve had?’

The taxi driver from Hackney, Leon thought. It always came back to my father’s father. The old man didn’t know how fucking lucky he was – all he had to compete with was a taxi driver from Hackney who never quite lost his Polish accent. And what did Leon have to compete with? Leon had to compete with him.

One of the girls in the sleeping bag stirred, opened her eyes and went back to sleep.

‘You shouldn’t have come here, Dad,’ Leon said.

‘I came because your mother’s frantic,’ the old man said, and Leon flinched at the feeling in his voice. ‘She’s worried sick. Where’s your compassion for her, Leon?’ His father looked around wildly. ‘You think whoever owns this place is going to let this last for ever? One night soon someone is going to kick you out – and kick you bloody hard, my son.’

Leon narrowed his eyes. ‘We’ll be ready for them.’

His father threw his hands in the air. Leon had seen that exasperated gesture so many times. It said the things I have to put up with!

‘Oh, grow up, Leon. You think these people are going to change the world? Take a good whiff. They have trouble changing their socks.’

‘They’re committed to something bigger than themselves. They care.’

‘They carel his father echoed. ‘One day you’ll see that the people who care, the people who profess love for the masses, are the most heartless bastards in the world.’ Then his voice was almost begging. ‘Look – I was like you. Thought I knew it all. You’ve got so much time, Leon. You don’t realise how much time you have.’

Round and round. Never ending. It had been just like this in the last days of home, Leon thought. Bossing him around, dressing it up as reasoned debate. Until one of them – always Leon, now he thought about it – slammed away from the dinner table and went to his room. But he wasn’t living at home any more. His father did not understand. That was all over.

‘You just want me to be what I was, Dad – a good little student you can boast about to all your friends.’

His father shook his head, and Leon felt a flicker of fear – he looked like he was in some kind of pain. ‘No – I just want you to have a happy life. Dropping out – that’s not the way, that can never be the way.’

Happiness! Now Leon had heard everything.

‘Life’s not just about happiness, is it? I can’t go back to my old life, Dad. I can’t sit around with a bunch of privileged middle-class kids when there are people sleeping on the street, when there are racists beating up Pakistani shopkeepers, when they are marching through the streets making their Nazi salutes. I can’t pretend it’s not happening.’

‘Come home,’ his father said.

That’s what it came down to in the end. Never hearing a word he said. Wanting things to be the way they were, when they could never be that way again.

Leon shrugged. ‘I am home.’

‘Oh, you stupid little boy,’ his father said, and Leon was shocked to see him filling up with tears, turning his face away, staring out the window at nothing.

Leon couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t stand to see the old man so upset. He felt like putting his arms around him, but just as he was about to do so a couple of the French guys appeared in the doorway and stood there with their arms folded, making it clear that this man was unwanted in this place.

Leon’s father felt their presence, glanced at them waiting in the doorway and nodded, as if he understood.

The old man hugged him and pulled away quickly. Leon felt like patting him, or saying something to reassure him, or telling him it had to be this way, but he didn’t know where to start.

Leon walked his father to the door in silence. They shook hands, as formal as strangers who had not really had a chance to talk, and Leon watched the old man turn up the collar of his Humphrey Bogart raincoat and carefully cross the muddy moat.

You were meant to keep the front door shut and locked, but Leon watched his dad as he walked down the boarded-up street, and he kept watching until he had disappeared round the corner, and by then all the anger had faded to this sort of flat, empty sorrow. Leon couldn’t see a reason why they would ever meet again.

He closed the door of the squat and began setting all the locks.

The office emptied and the big white clock by the reception desk seemed to get louder by the minute. But still Ray tarried at his desk, fretting over the damaged tape recorder, huddled over it, trying to straighten the deformed spool.

Pressing start. Watching the thing wobble. Straightening it with his thumb. Pressing stop. Pressing with his thumb again – pressing harder this time…and then the spool snapped.

It came away with a crisp, sickening sound and flew across the room. Ray gasped with shock, staring at the jagged black stump that was left behind. Bad, this is so bad. So much for tracking down John Lennon, Ray thought. I never even made it out of the office. Pathetic. I deserve to be given the boot.

His friends were gone now and Ray ached for their presence – for someone, anyone, to tell him what to do next. He stared helplessly at the useless tape machine and he realised that he knew this feeling. This feeling of being completely and totally alone.

He was eleven years old and standing in front of a classroom full of children who had already had time to make friends, form alliances and learn how to grin knowingly when they saw a new kid who was trying not to cry.

Too late. Always too late.

It was easy for his two brothers. John was four years older, tough, athletic, afraid of nothing. And his younger brother, Robbie, was only five and just starting school. He wouldn’t know anything but this strange new place.

But Ray was at that awkward age. He looked different to the other boys and girls. His hair was still cut in a brutal short back and sides, he was wearing grey flannel short trousers and a short-sleeve white nylon shirt, and he was still sporting the tie and blazer of his old school.

It was the summer of 1969, and Ray Keeley was dressed like Harold Macmillan.

Although his new classmates also wore a nominal school uniform, compared to Ray they were Carnaby Street peacocks.

Long hair curled dangerously over the collars of paisley shirts, or it was cropped to the point of baldness. School ties had knots thick enough for Roger Moore. Many of the girls had hiked their regulation skirts up to just below their knickers of regulation navy blue. And lounging right at the back of the class, there were boys in pink shirts.

Pink shirts! On boys! Flipping heck!

Ray had been in England for a month. Nowhere had ever felt less like home.

‘Ray is from Hong Kong where his father was in the police force,’ announced the teacher. She picked up a ruler and slapped it twice against a map of the world. ‘Now, who knows what Hong Kong is?’

The class chanted as one, making Ray jump. ‘One of the pink bits, miss!’ ‘And what are the pink bits?’ ‘The pink bits are ours, miss!’

But Ray felt that nothing belonged to him – not the Chinese place they had left behind, or the army bases in Cyprus and Germany where his family had lived before that, and certainly not this strange suburban town where the boys and girls were dolled up as if they were going to a fancy-dress party.

A skinhead child was assigned to look after Ray but deserted him as soon as the bell went for morning playtime.

On the far side of the playground Ray could see his big brother John kicking a ball around with some of the lads. His kid brother Robbie was running in circles with a pack of little fellows, giggling like crazy. Ray stood there, not knowing where to go, what to do, or even where to put his hands. But then something happened that changed everything.

Someone started singing.

It was the chorus from ‘Hey Jude’. On and on. Voices joined in. And then there was another chant – the opening bars of ‘All You Need Is Love’.

The children kept on playing. The football and gossip didn’t stop, did not even pause for breath. The conkers and hopscotch continued. But they sang as they played.

There were more tunes, more chants – yeah, yeah, yeah – ‘She Loves You’ – and more children raising their voices in these songs that they all knew better than any hymn, better than the National Anthem.

Songs they had grown up singing, the soundtrack to all those Sixties childhoods. It was only the Beatles. Always the Beatles. As if the times that these children grew up in began and ended with John, Paul, George and Ringo. And soon the entire playground was singing and Ray Keeley stepped out among them, his senses reeling, surrounded by the music, and a world unlike any he had known before. A world of shared feelings.

Years later he wondered if he had imagined it all – the first day at the strange school, the desperate attempt to hold back the tears, the sight of his big brother playing football with his new friends somehow underlining Ray’s loneliness, and then out of nowhere the playground full of children singing Beatles songs. Certainly he never saw it happen again.

But he knew that it was real. He knew that it had really happened. He had felt it. The magic that can set you free.

And sometimes Ray felt like his entire life was about trying to get back to that moment, to recover that day when suddenly it didn’t matter that he knew no one and his clothes were all wrong, that schoolyard in 1969 where the children sang, na-na-na, yeah-yeah-yeah and love-love-love, love is all you need.

The office wasn’t empty. Ray should have known. Their office was never quite empty.

Music thundered from inside the review room, making the panel of glass in the door rattle. Ray pressed his face against the glass and saw that Skip Jones was in there. He would probably be in there all night, writing the lead album review for next week’s issue. By hand.

Despite all the modern red plastic Olivettis in the office, Skip Jones always chose to write by hand. You would see him in odd empty corners of the office, or in the review room, his long giraffe like limbs hunched over a tatty notebook, and the fact that he was left-handed and had to wrap his hand around his leaky Biro made the process seem all the more awkward and tortured and strange.

Yet Skip Jones still wrote the pants off everyone else at The Paper, effortlessly constructing this cool, pristine, sceptical prose that seemed perfect for the age, and he was the closest thing The Paper had to a legend.

Ray hated to disturb Skip Jones. But if anyone knew where Lennon would be tonight, it was Skip. He paused, working up the courage. Then Ray let himself into the review room with a diffident smile, his hair falling forward.

Skip didn’t notice him at first. He was lost in the music, consumed by his writing, surrounded by a forest of dead cigarettes that he had half-smoked and then carefully stood on their filter tips, allowing them to burn down to a bendy cone of ash.

Ray watched him work, wondering what the music was – twin lead guitars, a world-weary nasal vocal that was completely contemporary, but with a dreamy quality that was out of step with what was going on.

Ray loved to watch Skip work. It restored his faith, it made him feel that they were doing something worthwhile and important. Watching Skip made Ray feel that the music hadn’t died.

Skip leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette and noticed Ray. He grinned and motioned him further into the room, not quite making eye contact for, while Skip Jones was the best writer at The Paper, he was the shyest man in the world. Looking you in the eye was Skip’s personal Kryptonite. Ray smiled gratefully and pulled up the room’s other chair.

‘Ray Keeley,’ Skip said. ‘Wild.’

Skip handed him the cover of the album he was reviewing. Marquee Moon by Television. Ray shook his head – never heard of it. Skip closed his eyes and nodded emphatically, indicating that this was the real deal.

‘Man, what’s the biggest selling album of the year?’ Skip said.

‘Don’t know,’ Ray said. ‘I guess it’s still Hotel California.’

‘Wild,’ Skip smiled, carefully standing his newly lit cigarette on its filter tip. ‘Laurel Canyon cowboys – cod country that the Byrds did first and harmonies that the Beach Boys did better.’ He chuckled, and Ray laughed along with Skip, even though he had always been quite fond of the Eagles, and it felt like a bit of a betrayal. ‘Well, sorry, boys – Television are going to kick your LA arses all the way back to the dude ranch.’

Ray’s eyes shone with admiration. He thought that Skip Jones looked like a buccaneer. A buccaneer who had been shipwrecked with Keith Richards and a big bag of drugs.

Skip was freakishly tall, alarmingly thin, deathbed white, and if you had seen him loping by, a stack of albums stickered with the words Promotional Copy Only: Not For Sale under his arm and about to be sold, you might have thought he was a homeless person, or a genius who could not live as mere mortals did. You would have been right on both counts.

On the rare nights when he actually went to bed, Skip Jones slept on a succession of sofas and floors across north and west London. Skip often lacked a home, but never a roof. Too many people worshipped him.

By day, Skip lurked in whatever spare corner of The Paper was free – he had no office of his own, and didn’t want one – that’s how totally rock and roll Skip was. He seemed to embody the very essence of the music. And on crumpled notepads, scraps of paper, the backs of press releases and the inside of empty cigarette packets, Skip wrote – by tormented hand, in laborious, cack-handed pencil – the most glittering words about music that anyone had ever read.

Skip was wearing the only clothes he seemed to own – torn black leather trousers, a red leather biker’s jacket and the kind of ruffled blouson that might be suitable if you found yourself fighting a duel with rapiers at dawn. He wore these elegant rags every day, in every kind of weather. Ray thought Skip looked like some kind of rock-and-roll cavalier, when everyone else was a roundhead.

Skip’s trousers were ripped at the crutch and sometimes at editorial meetings his meat and two veg were given an unexpected airing. Hardened rock chicks who thought nothing of giving head to a member of Dr Feelgood backstage at the Rainbow blushed to the roots of their dyed hair, but Skip was oblivious.

When he walked through the streets of London, rough boys with feather cuts and diamond-motif tank tops and flared jeans flapping above their steel-capped boots lobbed rocks at him. The wide world scorned him as a freak. But at the paper, Skip was revered. It wasn’t just Ray. Leon loved Skip. Terry loved Skip. He was the reason they all wanted to work for The Paper.

Skip Jones had started writing for The Paper when he was a bleary-eyed dropout from Balliol and the youngest writer on Oz, and his waspish reflections on the music’s glorious dead – Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Nick Drake – and walking wounded – Lou Reed, Brian Wilson, Syd Barrett, Iggy Pop, Dag Wood – did more than anything or anyone to help Kevin White drag The Paper from underground rag to mainstream music magazine.

‘You like the new bands?’ Skip said. ‘Not your thing, right?’

Ray smiled politely. He didn’t really have to explain anything to Skip. Skip understood.

‘I like them,’ Skip said. ‘Some of them. But what they’re doing, what they’re devoting their careers to, Eddie Cochran did in less than two minutes. Check it out, man. “Summertime Blues” – one minute fifty-nine. They want back to basics? Eddie Cochran did it first. And you can’t slag off the old guard when you’re stealing their riffs. I mean, where did the Clash lift the riff for “1977”?’

‘The Kinks,’ Ray said. ‘“You Really Got Me”.’

Skip smiled slyly. ‘So what are you into these days? Not Led Zeppelin?’

‘My brother liked all that. I liked – I don’t know – the folky stuff they did. You know, “Tangerine,” “White Summer/Black Mountain Side”’.

Ray didn’t say that his brother had died and the records were gathering dust in a bedroom that his parents had locked. He didn’t tell Skip Jones that. They didn’t talk about their lives. Every conversation they had was about music. Ray supposed that Skip must have a family somewhere. But he never mentioned them. Over the din of the music, what they talked about was music.

‘Big Joni Mitchell fans, Page and Plant,’ Skip said. ‘Everyone ignores that. But if you like that acoustic side of Led Zeppelin, you got to check out some of those folk boys. Davy Graham. Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, the Pentangle boys. Leo Kottke. John Fahey – a mad genius, the acoustic Hendrix. And John Martyn. You know John Martyn? He’s our Dylan. Don’t be put off because the guy’s got a beard, man.’

‘Beards don’t bother me,’ Ray said, struggling to commit the names to memory. He had to listen to these people. There was great music out there that he had never even heard of.

‘And then you have to go back further,’ Skip was saying. ‘To the blues. To the music that’s behind our music – if you know what I mean.’

Somehow Ray knew what he meant.

‘Check out Son House.’ A shy, sideways glance. Ray nodded. He would definitely check out Son House. ‘Charley Patton,’ Skip said. ‘Asie Payton. The Delta Blues. It all comes from the same source. That’s what the special ones understand. The blood knot. Where it all gets mixed up – black and white, the city and the country. They get it. All music comes from the same place. Elvis understood it. And Dylan. And Lennon too.’

Ray took a breath.

‘I need to find him, Skip. John Lennon, I mean. He’s in town. White wants me to find him and interview him.’

That shy, sly smile, looking at a point on the ceiling. ‘A world exclusive? A scoop?’

‘That’s it. Yeah. You know – like proper journalism.’

Skip nodded. ‘They’re all in town tonight,’ he said. ‘John Lennon…Dag Wood. It’s a strange vibe, man.’ He smiled, peeking at Ray out of the corner of his eye. ‘Spirits are abroad.’

Ray remembered that Skip had once discovered Dag Wood turning blue in an empty bath in Detroit. Or maybe it was the other way round. It was a bad scene, anyway. Skip knew everything. He had met everyone.

‘Where should I go tonight, Skip?’ There was urgency in Ray’s voice now. He saw he still had a faint chance. ‘If you were me – where would you go?’

Skip considered. ‘If I were you, and I was going out tonight, then I’d try the Speakeasy. Or maybe the Roundhouse.’

Ray was doubtful. ‘You really think that Lennon will be in those places?’

Skip frowned. ‘John Lennon? I doubt it, man. But you’ll be able to buy some great gear in the toilets.’

Ray sighed. He couldn’t help himself. He remembered that although Skip had met everyone and knew everything, it was said he had trouble boiling a kettle. The banalities of life eluded Skip. He was operating on some higher astral plane.

‘Yes, but where will he be? John, I mean?’

But before Skip could hazard a guess, the door to the review room burst open. A small, indignant woman in glasses glared at the pair of them. Ray recognised her, she was from the magazine across the floor, Country Matters.

She bustled over to the turntable and angrily pulled the needle from Marquee Moon, making the vinyl screech in protest.

‘Have some consideration for others,’ she said, red-faced with fury. ‘You’re not the only ones working late, you know.’ She strode back across the review room, pausing at the door. ‘And get some fresh air!’

When she was gone, Ray and Skip looked at each other for a moment.

And then they laughed until it hurt.

‘Get some fresh air!’ Skip Jones said. ‘Wild!’

Misty drove them to the place where they spent their nights. Terry felt his heart pounding with joy. He loved it here. He thought that it looked like the end of the world.

The old Covent Garden flower market had been torn down and carted away. Almost nothing remained. Now the area reminded Terry of the bombsites he had seen as a kid, all ploughed mud and smashed buildings and gaping holes in the earth. But every night, something stirred among the rubble.

‘Here they come,’ Misty said.

Terry and Misty sat on the roof of her dad’s car in a scrappy piece of wasteland, watching men in dinner jackets and women in evening gowns emerge from the darkness and carefully pick their way through the ruins. The opera-goers.

Terry and Misty liked to watch this swanky crew on their way to the Royal Opera House on Bow Street – the men suave in their dinner jackets and bow ties, looking all David Niven and James Bond, the women holding up the hems of their long dresses, dripping jewels, every one a Princess Grace of Monaco, and laughing as if crossing the ruins of Covent Garden was a great game.

A woman in a red dress and pearls waved at them, and Terry and Misty waved back.

The opera crowd had a friendly relationship with the feral-looking young people who flocked to see bands play in a basement club on Neal Street. Terry thought that it was because they were all there for the same reason. They were all there for the music.

‘This was a garden once,’ Misty said. She liked to lecture him. But he didn’t mind. He liked it when she told him things. ‘Did you know that, Tel? They grew fruit and flowers here. That’s where the name comes from. Covent Garden. It really was a garden.’

‘And now it’s a bombsite,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and see if Dag’s arrived yet.’

‘It must have been so beautiful,’ she said.

Terry let loose a Kung Fu cry and jumped from the roof of the car. Before he hit the ground he lashed out at some imaginary enemy with the side of his foot, and chopped the air once-twice-three times.

‘Bruce Lee,’ he said proudly, and his girlfriend smiled at him in the darkness.

Then they looked up as the sky cracked, the heavens opened and the rains came down.

Within seconds they were both soaked. A jagged bolt of lightning snaked across the skyline. It was not the weather of summer. The sudden storm seemed to herald something momentous, some elemental force being unleashed, a change in the universe.

Terry and Misty held hands, laughed out loud and turned their faces to the sky, delirious with life.

And five thousand miles away, behind the gates of a great house in Memphis, Tennessee, a forty-two-year-old man was taking his dying breath.

Chapter Five

The noise – the incredible level of sound – that was what Terry noticed first. It roared out of the basement of the Western World, blasted through the open door where a large bald man in black stood guard, and seemed to rattle the night air, shaking the NHS fillings of the soaked and bedraggled queue waiting to be let inside. Someone was live on stage. And Terry was suddenly aware of the beat of his heart.

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