bugpowderdust

Not long to go now till showtime. He sits in the dressing room on his own -he hasn’t had to share a dressing room for years – and waits. Sometimes if the layout of the building is right he can hear the audience from here, a low hum of anticipation that feeds through from the auditorium, but tonight he’s far enough away down enough corridors and turns that he hears nothing but the sounds he makes. The room itself is soundproofed, thanks to worries about temper tantrums being heard where they shouldn’t be, or impromptu vocal warmups making it to minidisc and then the net. They invite people in here to sing, he thinks, and then they try to shut them up. He looks into the mirror, and stares into the eyes of the man in there, fenced in by the celebrity cliche bare lightbulbs. Where did it all go right? he wonders.
The boss is here tonight, come all the way from his home in Jamaica for this big show, the last of the tour, the last of he can’t even remember how many nights at this giant corporate sponsored barn. He’ll be coming to knock on the door in a minute, wishing him luck for the show and carrying on like they were great mates. But he remembers the other nights the boss was there, other nights in other years where the arguments went on into the small hours. He’d been getting into his echoplex, getting into the idea of trying out other music from round the world, but the record company had only wanted more of the same. Just give us one more album like the last one, they’d said, something we can work as the follow up while you’re still hot, a few more nice tunes for the radio, then you can do your experimental stuff. It wasn’t in his nature to listen to that kind of talk. He wanted to do his own thing and he wanted to do it now and sod the label, but they’d got him at a low time. He was still feeling guilty about making more money from a record about his friend’s death than his friend had made out of his entire career, the drinking wasn’t getting better and he’d lost his woman, despite all his pleas. So he said yes, knocked out another album of acoustic whimsy, and yes, it worked, all over the radio, triple platinum, encouraging noises coming from America, now we need you to tour and tour again. Somewhere in all that the “experimental” stuff had got lost, and he’d never started using that new drum machine, never worked with the famous reggae producer he’d planned to. Even the new records had dried up, once he’d realised that no one in the audience wanted to hear anything new. He’d got what he thought he wanted, playing to thousands of people every night, but they just wanted to hear the songs they knew from the oldies station, and smile at each other, gently tapping a foot while worrying about the babysitter. Sometimes you can get what you want and still not be very happy.
There was a folk club he used to play here, on a roundabout up the hill, the other side of the mirror and forty years ago. Eleven quid a night, and a knife in the pocket because there was always some ned who’d seen you get paid and decided to wait in the car park. Idly, he wonders what became of it. Probably not there anymore, he thinks as he takes a sip of his branded water – not rum anymore, not for a few years now. Then again, he muses, some of these clubs are like cockroaches. Every so often someone shines a light on them and everybody pays attention, but afterwards they just scuttle back to the dark and keep doing what they were doing all along. A thought starts to form, and before he knows it he’s up out of the chair, picking up his guitar, and leaving the room. Down the breezeblocked corridor, past someone trying to tell him it’s not showtime yet, barging through the fire door on his two good legs and standing outside sucking in the cold clean air, heedless of the alarm coming from the sundered door. He hoists the guitar onto his back and heads off towards…he doesn’t know where. Maybe he’ll head up the hill, you know, just to see if it’s still there, maybe sit in if they’ll let him.

[I might need to explain this one. John Martyn died last week. He was one of the most...alive characters in the music world, and hugely talented. After an early splash, he never really made it huge commercially though (and I don't know that he was too bothered about that). For the last decade or so, his records came out on tiny labels with ropey distribution, and a lot of worthy music probably went unheard by people who would have enjoyed it. News of his death set me thinking about an alternative history of John Martyn, one where he had all the success and fame, but maybe lost something else, and this what I came up with. It's in no way based on fact, or to be taken as any kind of wish fulfillment or commentary on a wasted talent. He lived the life he lived, and the man said it best himself in a recent interview in Word magazine: "I honestly believe no man who has ever lived has had more fun than me. The second is that living full on is the best fucking way to do it and I would absolutely do it all again in a fucking moment!"]