I came back to my room, put the key in the lock and turned it, then watched the door go flying across the room to smash through the window and follow the TV down the six floors to the flowerbeds. The edge of the swiftly retreating key took a chunk out of my thumb, which I did not find funny.
Another time I couldn't get my door to open at all; I was getting wary by then, so I had the night porter come up and remove the door. When we got the door off eventually, we were faced with a blank, off-white wall, like solidified fog, except it was warm. Davey had filled the entire room with expanded polystyrene; he'd got a couple of big drums of the two fluids required, brought them in through the window with him, and just let them slosh out all over the carpet. What looked like a huge mutant mushroom of foam had extruded itself from my window.
Hotel managers hated Davey, but he always paid for all the damages, and he treated it as such a joke it was difficult to get really annoyed with him. Even the time with the foam-filled room, he'd booked me a replacement and moved most of my gear into it before carrying out the prank.
How they gave him a pilot's licence I'll never know, but they did. Davey bought a light plane, made sure his mansion in Kent came equipped with a grass strip and a hangar, and even went to the length of having a simulator installed to help him with his technique. I suspected he bribed somebody for the licence, but everybody I've talked to says that isn't possible. Maybe giving Davey a pilot's licence was the CAA's idea of a practical joke.
Mickey Watson seemed fairly normal compared to the rest of us; he turned up, drummed, went away again. He'd got married to a girl he'd known since primary school (a whirlwind romance nevertheless, on one of our sporadic returns to Scotland), and they were starting a family — that was why he wouldn't be at Wes' party that weekend; his wife had just gone into hospital to have their first kid. Mickey was always there when he was supposed to be; in the studio, at the rehearsal suite, on tour... but at the same time he seemed to be living on a different plane from the rest of us. To him, despite all the money and the fripperies, it was still just a job.
We took it seriously, in our own ways. We worked at being Rock Stars; not musicians, not even Personalities or ordinary Stars, but Rock Stars. It was a way of life, like a religion, like becoming a totally different person. We believed; we had an obligation to our public to behave like Rock Stars, off-stage as well as on, and we did our best, dammit.
Mickey took a different view. Occupation: drummer. End of story.
He's a farmer now, in Ayrshire, raising potatoes and wheat and big healthy children.
Christine was Christine. She achieved by accident what Davey was continually planning and striving for but never quite managing; they compared the others to her. Her voice had developed in range and power, but that was the least of it; what got them bouncing off the seats was the sheer guts she put into her performance. She growled and breathed and screamed her way through songs; always in control, still note-perfect, but bending and twisting her voice and the words and the tune into shapes and sounds I'd certainly never thought of. Took my breath away, and I heard it every night on tour; God knows what effect it had on anybody else, hearing it for the first time. Must have been like crawling out of the desert and being hosed down with iced champagne.
I think Christine could have sung a toothpaste jingle and made it sound quiveringly erotic, tearfully tragic or side-splittingly funny, just depending on how she felt that night; in her mouth, my words sounded like poetry, even to me. Just by changing her phrasing and the tone of her voice she could switch from making you think of a koala bear in tears to a wolverine on heat. Stunning. That was the only word that fitted. And she never lost it; even after the End, the Fall, when the band broke up, she just kept on going, formed her own band and more or less never stopped touring; singing and singing and singing.
Wes MacKinnon, one-time Hammond king, had taken, when on stage, to surrounding himself with vast numbers of synthesisers and organs and electric pianos and assorted other keyboards; banks of them, whole staircases of white and black keyed machines with coloured switches and blinking lights and LEDs. I sometimes wondered if Wes might have been happier as a drummer; he seemed to want to hide himself from the audience behind these ramparts of electronics (Mickey was heading in the other direction. He'd switched to transparent drums so the audience could see him better).
Wes didn't restrict his technophilia to the stage; he had a fetish, I think, about buttons and Light Emitting Diodes. He owned a succession of scientific calculators which offered longer and longer lists of functions Wes couldn't even pronounce let alone use, and a whole string of home computers, each one faster and more capacious and cheaper than the previous one; he had to have the latest, so as a rule he'd only just finished learning how to use one machine when he threw that out and bought a newer one.
He had an obsession with sound purity too (he now runs his own CD manufacturing plant and I think he's already got a prototype DAT cassette machine, smuggled out of Sony by a well-paid mole). Putting on a record was a small ritual for Wes. At home, he wore white gloves when he handled an album.
He finally brought his computer fetish and his mania for perfect sound together when he got hold of a used IBM mainframe and had recording-studio tapes transferred directly onto discpacks; he could then programme an entire evening's listening from his computer terminal. No scratches, no rumble, no tracking errors. Cost him well into six figures just for the hardware, and he was temporarily sickened when CD came out, but it kept him happy for a few years.
The IBM machine was installed in his house on the north Cornish coast, along with frightening amounts of surveillance equipment and some very powerful all-weather strobe lights...
'We need a bigger sound system, man.' I breathed in hard through both nostrils and faced into the darkness. My nose was numb, the back of my throat felt thick. I felt faster than a speeding innuendo and sharper than a rad-fem's tongue.
Both barrels. Here it comes. Columbian nirvana. I felt like the top of my head had been blown off and replaced with a diamond. 'What?' I said instantly, glaring at Wes. 'Bigger? You want a bigger sound system than we've got already? Are you crazy? We could knock small buildings down with the one we've got. Get anything more powerful and it'll be covered by the SALT agreement. We're registering as low-yield underground weapon tests already. Right now we use more electricity than some African countries generate; what are you trying to do; cause blackouts? You cornered the market in candles or hurricane lanterns or something? Christ almighty, have you seen the size of our speaker stacks? They're like office blocks; people live in them. There's a ten-person squat going on in the stage-left bass stack, didn't you know? Been there for two years and the roadies only noticed because the squatters applied to put in main drainage. What...'
'Calm down, man. Stop exaggerating.'
'You want to saddle us with fifty thousand law suits from people with no eardrums and you accuse me of exaggerating? Shee-it.'
We were standing on the long front porch of the house along the coast from Newquay. Wes didn't have a name for it yet. He was still thinking about it. I'd suggested 'The Plumbers' because the place overlooked Watergate Bay, but Wes didn't seem to think much of this idea, and I'm not even sure he'd heard of Watergate, at the time or since. 'Dunbuggin' might have been another name for the place, except that it could not have been less appropriate.
It was long after midnight and Wes' party was just starting to hit the plateau phase. Music thumped out from the big drawing room on the far side of the house. It was a dark, close night; no sign of stars or moon. The air smelled sweet and fresh, alternately scented by the land and by the sea, which could be heard but not seen, beating and crashing against the rocks a hundred feet or so from the house.