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Jimi Hendrix Played Here
Nottingham 1996 with support: Underground Honey and special guest We (Underground Honey) were the support. It was our first time on stage together. The Function Room was big, empty and crumbling. Posters going back ten years or more were peeling from the walls. A wrought-iron grille protected the yet-to-open bar from thirsty musicians. I dropped the amp next to my bass and went downstairs for a drink. The Smoke Room was a games room. Two old men sat at at table at the back in flat caps and ties, grey and grainy in threadbare tweeds, playing dominoes. Leather-jacketed bikers with long, thinning hair - arch-conservative descendants of the domino-players - inhabited the pool table. In the foreground, darts were being thrown with terrifying inaccuracy by the bikers' female cohorts. In the main bar I spotted two friends - a couple canoodling in the corner, in the first throes of what was to be a short-lived romance. Potential bums-on-seats. Pint in hand, I marched over to their table. "Hiya!" "Hi." "Come to see the show then?" "Erm... actually Jon, we were just..." "Great! See you up there. We're on at nine. OK, gotta dash. Bye." I grinned and nodded to an empty space across the room, then made my way purposefully in that direction. Only then did I wonder if I'd done the right thing. Did I want any of my friends to see us? The last rehearsal had been a nightmare. Jolene's timekeeping had gone to pieces. Her mathematical approach to drumming - counting every beat, right down to sixteenths - fascinated me in theory, and could in practice give the simplest song a wonderfully unsettling edge. But when it didn't go to plan it just sounded amateurish. Beats got lost and turned around, songs would fall apart. Glares of frustration were denounced as 'male bullying tactics'. Maybe. I had enough on my plate covering for Suzie without having to cope with an out-of-time drummer. Suzie's guitar was the group's weak link and she knew it. Privately she said that if we knew what was good for us, we'd sack her. No one had told her how good her songs were: intuitively melodic and tightly structured around minimal harmonies - usually featuring whatever new chord she'd managed to learn that week; without Suzie's songs there wasn't much of a group. Still, she was a lousy guitar-player, and I was having to play harder than I'd ever done in my life. At the last rehearsal she'd been a liability. Filled with self-loathing, she'd forgotten the most basic techniques for playing her own songs. "F-sharp minor seventh!" I'd shout. "Yer what?" Oh gawd. "Hold still," I'd say, then I'd manipulate her tiny fingers around the fretboard. "Oh that one ." "Yeah, that one." And the singer had a stinking cold. She was the next one to turn up. "Alright Katt, how's it going?" "Listen to this," she said. She took a breath and sent a high note ringing across the bar. A hundred pairs of eyes stared. Then she coughed. "Hmm," I said. "The cold's nearly gone," she croaked. The others arrived. We lugged the rest of the gear upstairs and set up. The stage was three feet high and the boards creaked. Kidding ourselves that we were leaving space for the other groups' equipment, we crammed everything into stage-centre and stood within whispering distance of each other. Then we ran through a song. As we played, Custer - the other band - loped into the room, casually sniffing the air. "Hi!" shouted Katt and I in unison. They gave a perfunctory wave in return. I glanced round to check Jolene's reaction to the intrusion. She was biting her lip. The tendons in her neck stuck out, taut as bridge cables. She was oblivious to anything beyond her drumkit. When the soundcheck was over, I lined the instruments up at the back of the stage, untwisted wires and sellotaped set-lists to the floor. Various Custers sauntered across the room to begin setting up their equipment. The 'special guest' had arrived. A huge, stumbling middle-aged acid-casualty called John; his piercing manic stare was aimed at Jolene, who was visibly backing away. We'd met him before, wandering into one of our rehearsals accompanied by his simpering girlfriend, announcing that he was putting his own group together and we'd be just perfect as his backing band like, y'know, the Robert Palmer video, the one with the chicks. Suzie frantically beckoned me over and we hurried outside into the corridor. John showed every sign of following, so we ducked into a disused office which served as a dressing room. "Christ," said Suzie, "who put him on?" "Someone who hasn't heard him sing," replied Jolene, who had. The downstairs bar was packed. One corner had been taken over by an alarming crowd of people, sickly and shifty, perched unsteadily on tables or leaning against the wall. Suzie grinned and headed straight for them. I approached tentatively. Suzie grew up in Hyson Green and liked to tell of how most of her childhood friends had ended up as crack dealers or prostitutes. But I wasn't prepared for the grim reality; this louche mob was for the time being our audience. One of them handed me a pint. "Oh... er, thanks." "No worries. S'been a long time since I was down here. Always like to meet the band if I can." "I see." "Oh yeah, I've seen them all - in the old days like, when it were a rockers' place - Nazareth, Thin Lizzy, Jimi Hendrix, Black Sa..." "You saw Jimi Hendrix?" "Yeah." "Here?" "Yeah." "Wow," I said. Then he tried to sell me a wrap of speed. The crowd in the bar was thinning out, and there was a steady flow climbing the stairs. I looked round for Suzie, but she'd gone. It was ten minutes to showtime. John sat behind a table at the top of the stairs collecting door-money and staring with unhinged intensity at the punters as they walked through into the function room. "Two quid," he said. "I'm in the band." "Gimme two quid!" The girlfriend patted his shoulder tenderly. "Stop it darling, he's in the band. Remember?" I scuttled away to the dressing room, avoiding the stare. Katt handed me a pale green zoot suit. "Stage gear," she said. They'd all changed into smart men's suits. Jolene and Katt looked much as they normally did. They were much given to dressing up and were usually mistaken for a lesbian couple with their short hair and coordinated costumes. Jolene wore a hat like Dr Seuss's cat. "Looks good," I said. Suzie looked magnificent. Less than five feet tall, of full-blooded Neapolitan stock, her features were dark and sinister with eyes like black holes. In the suit which Jolene had altered for her, she looked like a scaled-down hitman. "No muddah-lover gonna mess with Suzanna, eh?" she vamped, then added: "Hurry up love, we're on soon." I changed into the suit. Jolene drummed paradiddles on the window sill. Katt made strange noises in the corner, warming up her vocal chords. Suzie was reading through chord-sheets of the songs. "I bet Jimi Hendrix never bothered with that," I said. "What?" I repeated what her friend had said. "Oh right," said Suzie. "I'd better summon up his ghost or summat. Serious Jon, d'yer reckon we'll be OK?" "We'll be fine," I lied. "Yeah Suzie, it'll be great!" said Katt. Jolene carried on drumming. "OK," said Suzie, "here goes nothing." I buttoned up the suit, Suzie straightened my tie and we marched out in single file, past John and into the audience. Between Suzie's Hyson Green crew, one or two bikers and a large coterie of Custer fans, we had a fair-sized crowd - not a packed house but nonetheless a real audience. I wasn't expecting stage-lights. They blinked on straight in our faces and I stood, blinded, waiting for Katt to say something. She was standing motionless, as startled as I was. I spun round to Jolene and counted in the first song. We hit the first beat hard - together. Katt sang tentatively at first, cutting syllables off and holding onto the microphone stand as if it was trying to escape. We ploughed through the song at three-quarters speed with no mistakes but little spirit. By the instrumental coda, we were huddled together around the drums. There was scattered applause at the end. I counted the next one in without waiting. Jolene gave me an angry look and Katt regained her white-knuckled grip of the mike-stand. I cleared my throat for the chorus. We got the harmonies first time. Suzie looked across at me and winked. On the next chorus, Katt's voice took off. Someone moved the spotlights away from Suzie and me, and pointed them all at Katt. Now I could see the crowd. They were all staring at her and some of them had their mouths open. At the end of the song, she spoke to the audience. She said: "Hello, we're Underground Honey." Two songs later, she was telling jokes. Jolene was standing up and banging her drumsticks together. Suzie was bowing and accepting the accolades of her fan-club. Jolene and I stood in the crowd for Katt and Suzie's duet. With the spotlights on them I could see what all the fuss was about. The ragged rehearsals were forgotten. They looked like stars - Katt, tough and athletic; Suzie, tiny and menacing. Voices soared above the shaky guitar. For the next song I played the guitar while they sang. I said into the microphone: "Did you know Jimi Hendrix played here?" Suzie said: "Burn me guitar an' I'll break yer face." We got through the set. There were mistakes: Jolene missed a few beats, Katt missed a cue, and I spent the first verse of one song playing an entirely different song. But it worked. We left the stage wanting to do it all again. John was next on. He emptied the place inside five minutes with his insane ramblings and non-existent tunes. We took it upon ourselves to get people out of the bar and back upstairs to see Custer. They were worth it. We broke up a couple of months later - Suzie never really got the hang of playing guitar - so no one will be boasting of seeing Underground Honey at the Narrowboat. This was our night though. Custer might one day be the stars (or rather the Britpop anti-heroes) that they already think they are. Suzie is their manager. They won't be playing the Narrowboat though. Last August they played the last night there. Tears were shed. Then the bulldozers moved in. back to Dennis Hopper’s Party back to Jon Horne’s home page |