Nearing the studio, the rock superstar, hereinafter TRS, tells his driver Mick to find an off-licence. He need some brandy. He badly needs some brandy. Mic got his job only after first convincing TRS, and then, in turn, TRS’s lawyer and psychotherapist, that he was just the guy to keep TRS on the straight and narrow. When TRS longed for alcohol or one of the substances to which he’d been addicted over the years, Mick was to divert him, and to keep him sober and clean. “But we’ll be late if we do that, guv,” Mick says. “Let me deliver you on time, and then see if I can’t find you some Rémy.” In the back seat, TRS decides not to threaten Mick with the loss of his job, and reverts, with a vengeance, to a habit he finally managed to break at almost 27 — nail-biting. Mick’s never seen him so terrified.
He is to perform live this evening on In the Midnight Hour With Jewell Flanders, the highest-rated late-night music programme on UK television, but not with what’s left of the group with which he achieved global renown. Jewell’s producers read in TRS’s autobiography about how TRS’s clarinetist dad had led a popular jazz band in the first years of TRS’s childhood, and came up with the idea of dad rounding up as many of his old band as were still alive and getting TRS to play with it. They would perform the Benny Goodman-popularised Stompin’ at the Savoy from 1934.
TRS rejected the idea out of hand. Before he became a famous rock guitarist and the composer of two of Uncut magazines’s Classic Rock Top 5, Dad never gave him a syllable of encouragement — and eloquent paragraphs of discouragement. “Music isn’t what you’re good at, boy,” Dad had said, smirking, the night the 15-year-old TRS had played for Dad a Hank Marvin solo he’d worked on for weeks. “Think of something else to do in life.” TRS had always thought of it, with great bitterness, as his equivalent of Lennon’s aunt’s “A guitar is all well and good, but you’ll never earn a living with it.”
Within five years of that pronouncement, Dad had given up on trying to earn a living with music, and had opened an antiques shop, while TRS’s group had had a No. 3 hit and performed not only all over Britain, but also in France, Germany, and Scandinavia. In the intervening decades, two of them have died, but they died very rich, the group having been the world’s highest-grossing concert attraction through much of the early 1980s.
They arrive at the studio. An awed production assistant tells TRS, fast running out of fingernails to ravage, that he grew up listening to TRS’s music, and is thrilled to be working with him. TRS barely hears what he’s saying. He can think only of how desperately he wants a very large brandy. The production assistant will later tell his friends that TRS was cold and high-handed with hm.
TRS enters the soundstage on which his and Dad’s segment will be filmed. Dad, schmoozing with his musicians, loudly proclaims, “Enter the rock star,” and a couple of his lads snigger dutifully. But then Dad thinks better of it and comes over to embrace TRS. It’s all for show, of course — the two men have never actually embraced like this in private. It’s only in the past few years that even the closest fathers and sons have done more than shake each other’s hands manfully. There’s gin on Dad’s breath.
Jewell Flanders, who made his name playing boogie-woogie piano in a pub rock band of the late 1970s, comes over beaming and says, “I see you two have met.” Two production assistants and a camera operator chuckle dutifully. “Well,” Jewell says, “shall we make some magic?” He seat himself at the piano. As his custom, he’ll be sitting in.
TRS straps on the 1951 Gibson ES-175 he had his guitar tech buy for him especially for this performance. He has made a career of two-note power chords. Many of the chords Charlie Christian, Benny Goodman’s guitarist, played on the original version of Savoy were pretty much unknown to him when he agreed to the gig. He has practiced them twice as diligently as he practiced the Hank Marvin piece at which Dad scoffed all those decades ago, but as he and Dad’s band run through the song together so Jewell’s sound mixers can set their various levels, his fingers feel very thick, and he’s aware of occasional dead strings beneath their tips. Dad says nothing, though. It’s his band he addresses at the song’s end. “Have we still got it, lads, or have we still fucking got it?” They’re all delighted with themselves.
It’s time to record the performance. “I’m the one’s who fucking got it,” TRS tells himself, as he’s always told himself before going on stage, there to battle the flamboyant singer and maniacal drummer for the audience’s attention and love. He needs no brandy now. He has something to prove, and will bloody well prove it!
Or maybe not. He plays a wrong chord two bars into the first chorus and Dad glares at him. Jewell heard it and waves to stop the filming.
“Bit more demanding, real music, innit?” Dad asks TRS. He’s smiling. Two of his band snigger again.
“My music’s real enough to have sold 100 milion albums,” TRS says, “and for me to be worth £118 million, and for me to have been able to buy this fucking guitar just for this gig without batting an eye. My guess is it cost more than you’ve earned as a musician in the past 20 years. How are things in the antiques business then?” Having said all of which, he explodes in tears.
The soundstage has never been this quiet. It is full of statues. Jewell Flanders’ mouth hangs open. Mick is the first person to move. He steps between father and son. Having seen TRS takes his guitar off and hurl it at someone after swinging it around a couple of times by its neck, he is taking no chances. It is his heroism that keeps TRS from injuring Dad with his £4200 new guitar.
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