Show Me The Sky Read online

  ‘At your age, I lived in a village of sticks and stones. I collected firewood for my family, threw rocks at snakes, played cricket with a bat made from a banana tree. How could I imagine all this, right now, driving in this rain, this car, seeing these people, speaking this language. How am I here?’

  A white van cut dangerously in front of his bumper. He hit the horn with the heel of his palm.

  ‘Is this what I wanted? Driving in British rain thinking of Pakistan?’

  The motorway turned into a swirl of blue and yellow lights, mobile signs with flashing arrows. Policemen in fluorescent jackets were slowing and filtering traffic along the hard shoulder. Each space was contested and tight, and he slowed to nudge through.

  It was raining hard as they passed the first ambulance and fire engine. Three cars had piled into the back of a truck and lay crumpled like a buckled concertina. Firemen cut through the roof of a crushed Mini with hydraulic scissors. The trailer had been carrying a load of steel girders that now lay skewed on the mangled cab. Jimmy looked for the switch to put the window down. It was the same truck he thought had stopped for him an hour ago. When the driver had slammed on the brakes, the weight of the steel had slipped and cleaved off the cab. Twisted metal lay beneath the slant of toppled silver. Blood drained from the wreck and pooled thinly on the road. It seemed too much for just one man. Jimmy looked at the diluting pool, losing its colour in the rain.

  Paler than the life he had leaked from a man the previous night.

  The traffic fanned out and they drove on through pouring rain. The sky was lighter to the west and the sun fell bright and sudden on a new estate. It looked like some mirage of town that would disappear if they ever turned towards it.

  ‘We’ll be at the services soon.’

  The black clouds cleared. Sun blazed up from the road in a dazzle of watery reflections. The driver indicated to the slip road that led on to the services and turned towards the main car park.

  ‘I think you’re a good man, Jimmy.’ He pulled up before the entrance to the shops. ‘Listen,’ he said as Jimmy lifted the lock. ‘When you run from somewhere you never really leave. People hold us like ghosts in their memories. We hold people like ghosts in our memories. We’re forever haunting or being haunted.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘When you understand, then it’ll be true.’

  Jimmy said thanks for the ride and that he would try to remember his words.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ the driver called through the open window. ‘You’re a young man and can’t be stopped.’

  Missing Person

  MISSING IN ACTION

  A year on from the vanishing of Billy K, music journalist Connor Scott, long-time fan of the elusive singer and guitarist, looks back on the turbulent life of a rock prodigy, Missing in Action.

  I slide the vinyl from the sleeve, swivel the disc in my fingertips and carefully place Billy K and his band on the turntable. They hiss and crackle, come alive in the groove. I have goose bumps. I close my eyes and I’m there again, in the Dog and Gun, reporting on my third ever gig. When I hear his plaintive cry, my soul sails from my body. Billy K is alive. It’s as though he’s in the room, and I’m afraid to open my eyes until the record stops, afraid of what I might see. Then the grooves run out, a hiss and crackle, silence. A blow to my stomach. The abandoned car on a Cornish cliff top. If his ghost’s in the room, he must be dead. But I don’t believe in ghosts, life after death. I believe in songs, music after death. And who says he’s dead? I don’t know, and neither does anybody else. The only clue he left us was his life.

  The first time Billy K – plain Barry Fulton before the big time – felt the full weight of an electric guitar he was four years old. He toppled it from the metal stand in the lounge and dragged it by the neck across the kitchen floor. When his alcoholic father swore, Barry dropped it clanging to the floor. He ran screaming from the room with a scarlet handprint across his backside.

  Mick Fulton left and the guitar stayed. His mother kept it as a divorce trophy, letting dust settle on the polished gleam. The day her panel beater boyfriend carried his suitcase up the stairs, she tossed the 1962 Les Paul into the loft.

  Barry hated music class. He whistled ‘Three Blind Mice’ on the recorder at the pitch of screeching bats. The music teacher ordered him to play properly or leave the room. He kicked over a xylophone and walked out. His creative talent was spent playing football, or fighting. He often came home from school with cut knees and torn trousers. Reports noted he swayed between ‘moody self-exclusion, and demands to be the absolute centre of attention’.

  Life changed course when he broke his leg. Dared to leap from the assembly hall roof before an audience of hundreds, he tied his coat into a cape and flew. The adrenaline surge from the screaming girls and awestruck boys enabled him to stand up and walk away with a shattered tibia.

  Home alone with his itching cast, he watched TV for days. On the hunt for hidden porn he opened the stepladder and hopped into the loft. When he hauled himself into the musty space, the ladder toppled. He found the electric guitar but no naked women. He sat with the cast leg on a beam, the guitar across his lap. He picked tunelessly, twanged nonsense through the empty house. From a cardboard box, he pulled out Frets and Folk Hits – Learn to play the guitar. He clawed his hand and arranged his fingers as instructed. He warbled ‘Michael row your boat’ before his stepfather came home and knocked him to the floor. Compared to the numb burn in his fingertips, the slap was nothing.

  Everyday for the next month he climbed into the roof and played the guitar. He flipped the guitar upside down, tinkled with the bridge, picked at a single note for hours. He struck chords and held the thrum a centimetre from his cheek, feeling the air ripple his inner ear, tuning his being to the sound of six, shivering strings.

  His first concert was for his first girlfriend, Michelle Brook. She sat on his bed, hypnotised by the bad boy in soft focus. ‘It was something magical,’ remembers Michelle. ‘Barry was so beautiful that day. We skipped school and ran across the fields to his house. Nobody had any idea he could play the guitar, he was seen as a bit of a thug really, well, until he started strumming.’ In his cramped bedroom, Barry felt the power of performance, the boy shaman and his first follower.

  Now sixteen, he stole every spare second of the day to practise. Riffs and licks turned to songs. His early lyrics were musical accompaniment rather than literary statement. He wrote ‘Chemical High’ before he’d taken anything stronger than an aspirin. Once the pariah of his music class, Barry was now its star pupil, a shining example of delinquent tamed by the power of song, composition and application. He acquired the beginnings of Spanish and Flamenco styles, learned how to read music, to decipher the dots, lines and bars into rhythm and sound.

  The night he slipped into his first gig at the Dog and Gun, he arguably discovered rock ’n’ roll. He stood next to the amps. His skin prickled in the surge of hissing current. The walls perspired with the heat of the simmering crowd. And the nerves, not of the band, but of the fans, the crushed bodies barging the barriers, levering out spaces and gaps to dance or sway, to be part of something bigger than themselves.

  And what a night he chose for a baptism of live music. Sets by the Fun House, then a scarcely known punk and ska outfit, had been described by journalist Harry Fenway as: ‘Nights of complete mind and bodily abandon, where crowd surfers hovered like coffinless icons’.

  Barry dropped out of school the next day. He got work in a record shop and glimpsed something of the future, the nature of obsession, how people lived through a leather-clad rock star or piano-playing diva. And that for some, a disc of grooved vinyl gave more meaning to existence than work, family, or God.

  No more than a pub with a backyard, the Dog and Gun was a venue with soul, jamming the crowd against the stage, the crooked redbrick walls of the adjacent brewery funnelling sound through the heaving audience. It was here Barry witnessed the conception of ‘Thunderstruck
’, ‘Fuck the Money’, ‘Stormy Monday’, and not forgetting the brief but sonic boom of ‘Snipers on the Roof’.

  Now approaching his eighteenth birthday, Barry was not just under the influence of music. He began experimentation with drugs that never reached a conclusion. Speed before the gigs, weed and whiskey on the comedown. It was during this clichéd apprenticeship of sex, drugs, and, yes, rock ’n’ roll, that Barry’s home life disintegrated.

  If not at work, listening to records and thumbing through stock for lost classics, he was busking on the street. But the pavement became his best friend. Kicked out by his stepfather, with just his beloved Les Paul and the clothes he was wearing, he slept in the storeroom of the record shop, on the floor between stacks of forgotten LPs by forgotten artists. Each morning he woke and looked at the faded sleeves, the dog-eared albums nobody listened to any more. He vowed never to end up a dust-covered singer at the bottom of a box.

  Strut, a local support band playing covers in working men’s clubs, hadn’t even reached the stage of forgotten record. Barry heard them play in a Battle of the Bands and thought them nothing special, just another collection of young men clunking through the numbers. Then he realised in fact they were perfect, the foundation to launch more spectacular sounds, missing everything he possessed.

  On a rainy Monday evening, before an audience of nineteen, the Notorious was born. During the Strut soundcheck, while the Feeney brothers tuned up and Ronnie Strong adjusted his bass pedal, Barry took the stage and plugged in his guitar. He ripped their opening number into a scintillating burst of gravel and gold. The voice of a whiskey-beaten choirboy that would fill stadiums on every continent stopped them dead.

  ‘I was there,’ brags doorman on the night, Tony Mann. ‘And I thought, fuck, this kid’s something special. I probably should’ve been checking his ID, but once he started singing all I could do was stand there and listen.’

  Though younger than the rest of the band, with no experience of gigging, getting up before an audience, dodging bottles and pool balls, Barry naturally took the spotlight. He riffed zest into stale songs, put words to music as easily as he breathed.

  Only a week later, after three rehearsals in a garage, they debuted at the Dog. Gigs boomed exponentially. Fifty, one hundred, two hundred, four hundred fans outside in the cold, climbing fences and back walls, already a bootleg passing hands, all for the boy wonder and his band.

  Ronnie Strong nicknamed Barry, Billy the Kid, fastest fingers on the frets. This then shortened to Billy K, and the day he signed with Gecko Vinyl, Barry Fulton died. He never used his given name on a contract again. CEO Ricky Wise gushed to the press, ‘This is the sound discovery of the summer, the year, in fact the decade. I have nothing to do for this band. No delay-release strategies, no bartered playtime with tin god DJs or blowhard promoters. The music, Billy K and the boys will ride their own wave into rock ’n’ roll history.’

  ‘Fires and Lies’ shot straight to number one. TV, radio, festivals and talk shows shook with the Notorious. Billy K, still shy in interviews hiding behind his sunglasses, left the talking to Ronnie and Tommy.

  Dr Jekyll offstage and Mr Hyde performing, Billy K began the life of a rock god tentatively. On stage he transformed before the baying fans, twisting and thrusting, naked from the waist up, each and every muscle taut with the music and the screams. Behind the scenes he was the whirling dervish come to rest, energy drained and vulnerable.

  The Notorious, still only two singles and an imminent album old, were originally billed as support for the Saturday night at Reading when the Infantiles self-destructed in a Paris hotel room. Thrust before 100,000 sweltering festivalgoers, Billy K took the stage as though he’d walked into his own living room. He performed such a pitch-perfect set that even if it had rained the crowd could’ve walked on water.

  Billy K, the boy who’d played his first concert to an audience of one, who’d been kicked on to the street with just the clothes on his back and his electric guitar, who’d slept between the records of has-beens and dead singers, now found every second of his life, each breath he took and word he uttered, recorded and scrutinised, edited to a sound bite, set between the pages of a magazine above his picture, the curly haired Adonis of youth, adored by the men who wanted to be him, the women who wanted him, the schoolgirls and housewives, beating at the glass of the tour bus and limousine, rushing the stage to offer their bodies, to reach out and touch, transforming a boy with a guitar into a man with a legion of fanatics.

  For rock ’n’ roll stars barely in their twenties, young, good-looking, talented and virile, the Notorious were angels with instruments – apart from the occasional spliff and post-gig booze-up, hotel rooms and TV screens remained intact.

  But starved paparazzi had column space to fill. Billy K read about his fictional orgies and coke binges, recorded with such detail and clarity that he wondered if they’d somehow occurred without his knowing. His subsequent fall from grace was as though he’d decided he might as well become the rock demon press and public portrayed, that Billy K should jump off the stage into the fiery pit fans and journalists had tended for him.

  The louder the gig, the greater the rush of sound and screaming fans, the higher the crowd surfer rose above the stage, the lower the post-gig comedown. To upend his mood, Billy K, like his peers past and present, took drugs, smashed up rooms, had sex, and drank. He became the ultimate enfant terrible.

  On return from tour he bought the warehouse home in East London, paying in cash with a carrier bag full of fifty-pound notes. While the Feeney brothers headed north for a break from the scene, Billy K and Ronnie stormed the capital as though each night was the last of their lives.

  Gecko lawyers first defended Billy K on charges of public disorder and the breaking of an archaic byelaw: ‘Negligent animal husbandry within a mile of the Houses of Parliament.’ When Billy K and Ronnie released a lorryload of spray-painted sheep into Trafalgar Square, each one sheared and luminous green, bleating down Whitehall with pink earmuffs and an anagram of the Notorious as a mock brand on their rump, lawyers claimed ‘political statement’ rather than a puerile stunt, and Ronnie and Billy K escaped with cautions.

  Fines dealt with a soliciting charge in Rome, and arrests for cannabis and cocaine possession resulted in nothing more than a week’s stay at a rehab clinic. These ‘misadventures’ enhanced his reputation as the tortured artist – too talented and sensitive to play by the rules of us lesser mortals – and it was only his fleeting, but intense relationship with 48-year-old Czech born actress, Zdenka Vandova, that gave a brief respite for the Gecko lawyers.

  The press needed no Freudian experts to conclude the toy boy calmed in the company of a much needed mother replacement. Since the night he was cast out on to the street, he hadn’t spoken to or accepted a single phone call from any member of his family. Billy K was eight when his natural father was killed with a tyre iron in a pub car park. His stepfather beat him, and he’d never forgiven his mother for allowing her lover to throw her only son on to the pavement.

  It was during this hiatus of rock-star tomfoolery that Billy K penned ‘Love at the Speed of Light’. Many of the original drafts still remain on public display, as Billy K wrote, scratched, sprayed, carved and burned the words and music on to whatever surface was at hand when the muse called. The toilet door from New York nightspot the Confession Club has been suspended by steel cables in the domed reception, adorned by the lipstick-painted lyrics to ‘The Last Show on Earth’:

  On this night of dying light,

  your shadow on the floor like a stain

  or ghost,

  the book face down and

  streaming words,

  I watch you strip,

  see the universe blaze on skin,

  the runaway stars

  come home.

  Stadiums, concert halls and clubs packed out and pulsed with Billy K and the Notorious. New songs still jumped and jerked on the raw energy of youth, but now navigated the listen
er through deeper, more complex emotions.

  Until Zdenka appeared on the front page of Fame, massaging tanning oil into the corpulent body of her former husband, Gene Fontaine, on his Monaco yacht, Billy K had focused the band with the acumen of a master conductor.

  Little is known about his brief disappearance after the headline infidelity of his supposed lover. Ricky Wise cancelled dates in Barcelona and Madrid, covering up the vanishing of his star with a tonsillitis scare. Only a week later, a day after the attempted shooting of Fontaine in his swimming pool, did Billy K surface again, performing a subdued set for disappointed fans in Berlin.

  While the gendarmes questioned him about the ‘missing week’, no formal inquiries were pursued. However, Gecko lawyers issued writs and demands for retractions of tabloid speculation venturing on accusation.

  From Sydney to San Francisco, for a month after the split with Zdenka, Billy K played and sung for his very life. Performance was his raison d’être, and the world beyond the stage was nothing more than distraction between him, his guitar and a microphone.

  But tiffs and tantrums marred the post-gig comedowns. Billy K fired roadie Mitch North, then immediately rehired him as his personal drug mule, buyer and pimp. ‘He was just permanently wired,’ recalls Mitch. ‘Before he had a bit of peace after a concert, downtime. Then after Zdenka it went nuts. If he wasn’t singing, he was snorting, smoking, or having sex.’

  His guitar was his security blanket. No technician was permitted to touch his beloved Les Paul, let alone soundcheck. Then to watch him play, caress, and fan his fingers across the six strings, who would have dared come between Billy K and his object of desire?

  Thanks to Ricky Wise and an envelope stuffed with euros, Billy K dodged jail for his rented lover in Rome. Another time, against a charge of ‘Gross sexual indecency in a public place’, the state prosecutor of Oregon wasn’t about to be palmed off by a record exec in a tailored suit – though the saxophone-playing judge would later be spotted in a Chicago nightclub at the table of Wise.