As the band’s designated Organized Person, Oort St. Ultraviolet had chosen the Hope & Ruin for their debut because, despite their mind-smearingly cool sound, actual London venues had proven mystifyingly indifferent toward smashing rookie acts of unadulterated musical genius, as they were toward all bright-eyed, irresponsibly coiffed kids fresh off the home-editing software suite, a
nd really, anybody whose drinks they might have to comp for the night, if they could possibly pull it off without offending any particular glowering council housing castaway who might, by some horrible accident, turn out to be the future of rock-’n’-roll. As Musad Atallah, the talent manager for Robot Custard, the hottest indie stage in South London, told his interns: gatekeeping is a noble calling, much more delicate than fannish enthusiasm or hipster disdain. An uncurated open mic was as good as a neon sign blinking out: I AM A HELPLESS FUZZY DUCKLING WANNABE TASTEMAKER WITH NO TASTE TO SPEAK OF AND UNGUARDED TAPS, PLEASE ASSAULT MY EARS AND ABUSE MY GENEROUS NATURE AT YOUR EARLIEST CONVENIENCE. But velvet ropes that never opened would have to be replaced by video poker machines and a secondhand snooker table within the year.
Oort had to go all the way to Brighton to find an open mic that didn’t have a positively gladiatorial audition process and a waiting list as long as the M1.
This careful velvet aloofness of any scene accessible via London public transport was the third most significant factor in the meteoric rise and awkward, plummeting face-plant of Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros. They were all the cooler and more seemingly exclusive for being hard to find, hard to see, and easy to talk about to everyone you met. The second factor was a woman wearing a crochet dress and a mushroom-bob haircut while trying to chat up Archibald Arthur Gormley when Oort, Mira, and Dess started to tune up for their first real set at two p.m. on a Wednesday—a set that consisted of two songs they’d written on a series of increasingly moist Acme Arkable Gelato napkins and an upbeat champagne-bubble cover of “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath. The first was that, against all laws of interpersonal and artistic probability, the Absolute Zeros, once upon a time, were incredibly, irresistibly, downright irritatingly good.
If you’d looked up that afternoon from your admittedly absorbing IPA toward the stage of the Hope & Ruin, you wouldn’t have seen anyone you’d recognize as Decibel Jones. Not from those rickety singleton tables as ringed with pint-glass condensation as an Ent’s arse, not from Archibald Arthur Gormley’s cracked leather stool as he cringed away from the aggressively jolly Yorkshire bird hovering at him with her ginger 1970s mushroom-bob hair, so disturbingly unchic that it came around to being almost, if not quite, punk. Not even from the back of the joint, for whom standing room only was but a distant dream. There was no vintage McQueen then, no style consultants to tell them no. Mira Wonderful Star had cut and stitched and remixed the contents of their local Oxfam’s damaged/as-is bin like a garage mash-up track. In a deconstructed ballroom gown whacked up out of a spandex “Slutty C-3PO” costume, a silver brocade Christmas tree skirt, and a gauzy black shower curtain with metallic blue appliqué roses all over it, Mira Wonderful Star sat at a drum set the quality of which wavered between obnoxious child’s toy and legitimate rubbish, with a retrotrash white 1984 Casio mini keyboard propped up to her left on an empty Boddingtons keg. Her uncle Takumi had given the drums to her for Christmas when she was thirteen, purely to fulfill what he saw as a solemn duty to embody the Archetype of the Cool Uncle as depicted in the twentieth-century domestic comedies he lovingly annotated and catalogued the way some people catalogue exotic butterflies, his efforts having been made somewhat more difficult by the fact that Cool Uncle Takumi had raised his beloved embodiment of the Rebellious Niece from the age of four. Oort St. Ultraviolet, not yet the man of a thousand instruments, fiddled with a crappy plastic capo and his grandmother’s begrudgingly lent hundred-year-old concertina, in an alleged outfit consisting of a dismembered ladies’ red sequin blazer, low-slung, mercilessly tight trousers that had been a wine-stained wedding gown only a few hours before, and a cricket jumper with the name GEORGE embroidered lovingly on the hem in purple thread with a jaunty bat on either side.
Decibel Jones stood at the mic stand shirtless, petrified, in his own set of what Mira firmly believed was the only correct type of trousers for a rock star, treating hip bones on a boy like cleavage on a girl and choking off blood supply like a pre-suffrage corset. Dess’s pair had pretty clearly been someone’s mum’s idea of a formal St. Patrick’s Day frock in its previous life, all green satin paisley and vintage ’80s gold accent chains. Over it all, but under the black plastic bat wings, he wore the one thing you’d recognize from the Spacecrumpet album art, the one article of clothing that survived the transition from coming home smelling of potatoes and rancid oil to smelling of cigarettes and his own cologne brand and barely coming home at all, from Danesh Jalo to Decibel Jones: a long, flared, faux-fur-lined, lightly distressed rose-and-cream aristo-coat from a local community theater production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Mira had unstrung a heap of dollar-store fake colored pearls to edge the collar, sleeves, and hem, doused the fur with her corner chemist Apocalyptic Oil Spill #4 hair dye, and after that night, Dess never washed that Technicolor dreamcoat once.
He named it Robert.
Unfortunately, pearls and sequins and metallic appliqué roses reflected almost none of the already miserly light from the Hope & Ruin’s deeply basic rig. Shadows loitered where no experienced stage manager would let them. An unkind white spotlight washed out those three terribly young and hungry faces, dappled by the corpses of a couple of spiders that’d gotten stuck between the gel and the lamp around the time when disco was cool. The air outside shimmered with muggy afternoon heat. The stage was wholly, utterly, indescribably black, crisscrossed with the stellar cartography of a thousand hopeful handsome smolderers all made of the same needy stuff, scraping their bootheels, dragging their guitar stands, and dumping their hearts into a sound system more suited to calling bingo than calling London. It was, to be perfectly honest, a depressingly bleak sight, far bleaker than a lifetime spent working in air-conditioned cubicles or watching a kebab slowly revolve in front of a space heater like a sweaty meat planet or ringing up an eternity of cough suppressants in your dad’s tiny one-location drugstore after he finally gives up the till, far bleaker than a mere total absence of anything to look forward to. They were a study in absurdity, a near-psychotic commitment to an aesthetic no one had had a chance to laugh at yet.
Decibel Jones wrapped his fingers around the shaft of the mic and opened his mauve-and-glitter-painted mouth.
“Er. Hiya. How’s everyone doing tonight? Er. This afternoon?”
The bartender blew his nose on the tail of his shirt. Six other open mic’ers sat in the front with six soda waters slowly decarbonating before them, all dressed in earnest, sincere, salt-of-the-stage flannel and jeans, an on-trend uniform of off-the-rack authenticity tailored perfectly to the current white-knuckle zeitgeist of homespun artisanal emotions strung on banjos of working-class vulnerability, all trying their hardest to look as though they’d have come even if they weren’t on the roster. A cashier from Ladbrokes chomped down a curry on his lunch break with one eye on his phone. Three or four unemployed twenty-somethings pranged darts into the wall without looking over or lowering their voices. Cool Uncle Takumi looked up from editing his new article on the quest for the divine in John Candy’s oeuvre and clapped with football-mum supportiveness from a respectful distance, in case a legion of front-row fans miraculously appeared, fashionably late.
“Yer holdin’ back on yer old Gormer,” a truly Stygian horror-drone buzzed out of Archibald Arthur Gormley’s tracheotomy valve, which his wife had called his “smoke hole” before she left him for that chap who ran all those marathons in his seventies. “Whaddoaye come ’ere for if ye won’t gimme a full legal pour?”
“We’re doing splendidly, darling,” called the lady with the ginger mushroom-bob, a music critic done in by the death of print journalism whose name was Lila Poole. “You all look a treat!”
“Right. Yeah. So . . . we are . . .”
Decibel Jones coughed, not himself yet, not twenty feet tall in Piccadilly, not praised to death by the Guardian, not flirting with Ruby the American waitress, nobody’s messiah, not anyone at all, not even properly Decibel Jones yet—last night, they’d been the Möbius Hips, t
his morning they’d definitely decided on the Things, and then Mira had chucked that one between, she said, a scotch to steel her nerves and a Midori to light her up insides. And suddenly, he couldn’t think of what they’d come up with instead, couldn’t think of the lyrics to “Raggedy Dandy,” still so new that they ached, couldn’t think of what train they were meant to take home or what time he had to be at the shop tomorrow, couldn’t think of anything but the unlovely mating honks of those twenty-something dartheads battering his cochlear well-being, honks that, if he was down a dark street or on a playground, usually meant he was about to get the shit kicked out of him for being a mincing little ponce or whatever vivid racial slur they had in stock that week. Words and phrases bobbed to the surface of their monotonous posturing pubstep drone: arsenal, piss-up, I know a bloke, it’s your round, it’s not mine, I don’t care what she says, fucking West Ham, mate.
Dess froze, and his whole life nearly threw an axle and tipped itself into a ditch full of Mr. Five Star’s fryer oil. He felt ridiculous. In these ugly green paisley trousers and stupid glitter bat wings and half a discontinued makeup rack. Not Robert, of course. Robert was fine. Robert was grand. Robert was right. But all he had up Robert’s perfect sleeve was two rubbishy songs that were more gimmick than the white-hot fire of real music, the sort of music people would play over and over in their bedrooms at night, the sort that scrambled up your senses so wonderfully that you laughed and cried into your pillow at the same time, the sort of music that felt like you’d always known it even though you’d never heard it before, the songs you’d put on a mixtape and press into someone else’s hand saying, This, this says how I feel better than I ever could.
Additionally, standing up there in mascara and platform heels with plastic goldfish in the soles was no way to not get the shit kicked out of you for being a mincing little ponce. In his mind, he’d thought of them playing the witching hour at Robot Custard under magenta and ultramarine lights to a crowded dance floor full of yearnful students, not hipsters but tricksters, grooving on the wub-wub bassline of the whole throbbing universe, sucking MDMA and hope out of locally sourced glow sticks. What was magical at two in the morning was tawdry and cheap and dangerous to your general health at two in the afternoon. They were supposed to look like those acoustic-hearted flanneleers at the front tables, with their carefully stubbled jawlines, sipping their responsible preset soda waters, mentally calculating whether to soulfully close their eyes at the key change or at the big note so it really, really looked like they believed in love after layoffs at a mill they’d never known as anything but high-end lofts for lease. That was what was hot right now. That was what record labels wanted to hear. Those nice white boys with their pre-distressed jeans and pre-distressed hearts mumble-crooning artificial grit. Nobody understood what the Absolute Zeros believed so hard, they couldn’t even wedge it into their lyrics yet: The world had gotten gritty enough. The only thing left to do in all that dirt was to shine.
But Dess wasn’t shining. He was just a dumb tart in someone else’s frock staring down failure like you could ever make failure blink. Failure was here before you and she’ll be here after you and she won’t even notice you go.
Fucking hell, what was he doing? He was going to fail, right now, in front of Mira and Oort, the only people in his life who’d never seen him behind a counter, only like this, the way he wanted to always be, his Arkable Gelato nation, his Acme Brand Instant Tunnel to the Future. He was going to be little Dani forever, seven years old, wearing all Nani’s silk scarves at the same time, his face covered so proudly in lilac-lipstick doodles he’d drawn himself, standing in the middle of the lounge room singing along with Marvin the Martian like it was straight-up Wagner, so eager to please Nani, so thrilled to show her he really could sing like the people on TV, dying to be the utter focus of her attention.
And they’d all ignored him.
That old Blackpool flat was a dingy mirror of this Brighton pub. No one said anything. His sisters had snickered and whispered and texted furtively, most likely telling everyone they knew what fuckery was going down before their very eyes. His oldest brother had kicked a soccer ball expertly into the side of his big Danesh-head. The younger boys had wrestled obliviously in the kitchen. And in the end, Nani had looked up from some murder book or other, groped in the side table for her hearing aid, and said:
“Eh? Did you say a thing, my handsomest? Nani did not have her magic ear in. Why have you dressed like Creature from the Scarf Lagoon? What is happening to your face?”
She’d squinted at him, because her reading glasses turned the non–murder book world into a watercolor smear. Dani knew even at age seven and three quarters that she hadn’t meant the next bit to be cruel, that the poor old thing had only been startled out of the butler staving the mistress’s head in with a pipe by her grandson becoming Decibel Jones before her very eyes and who could ever be prepared for that, but Nani had laughed at him, and it was the end of his childhood. Nani had called out to his brothers and sisters, erasing any possibility that they hadn’t seen, that plausible deniability was maintained, and that none of this was really happening, and she’d announced to the capacity crowd at the Royal Jalo Hallway: “Look who has done an art on himself, our wee Mr. Tate of the Modern!”
He’d frozen. Just like now. Just like then. He was standing on that worn red rug and he was going to sing Wagner the Martian in a hundred scarves that smelled like home and love and safety and everyone was going to laugh in his face or, worse, ignore him like a stain on the ceiling, like he wasn’t even there, like he’d never existed in the first place.
Mira saved him. The first time of many times. She banged out a riff on her kiddie drums behind him, leaned into her mic, and yelled like they were already playing a sold-out arena, loud enough to blow a dart from 20 to 1, loud enough to stun your old Gormer sober:
“WE ARE DECIBEL JONES AND THE ABSOLUTE ZEROS!”
Oort St. Ultraviolet opened up the throttle on his gran’s concertina, and for the first time, in front of God and the dartboard and shrimp-flavored crisps and everyone, Decibel Jones began to sing.
No one ignored him. But Archibald Arthur Gormley did laugh. He laughed and laughed in total silence while bright-eyed, ambitious Lila Poole patted his shoulder and tears streamed out from under his glasses, down his booze-blooming cheeks, and into the soft darkness of his smoke hole, seeping toward the last part of him that remembered what it was like when he was young and everything in the world sounded just like that.
He wept into his single pint.