Rotten in Denmark

Jim Pollard

• Publisher: Smith|Doorstop Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781902382203
• eBook ISBN: 9781910367407
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

If you know there was more to the seventies than boogie nights and flares but can't quite remember what, then this is the book to fill in the gaps.Jim Pollard's first novel reads like a thriller, it has pace, bite and great humour. It turns the music industry, punk rock and growing up in the 70s inside out. But it's a book about frailty as much as fame; about a man coming to terms with who he is, with the values of friendship, his own vulnerability and search for selfexpression. Merciless yet honest.

Please allow me to introduce myself…

1

Nothing is subtle in the synthetic city. There is the perpetual scream of the house-lights rendering even a west coast tan, wan yellow. There are the jewels, flashing blades of brilliance, set in awkward billowing necks. There is the clatter and the rumble of the not-so-far-away fruit machines. And there is the smell - a smell where perfume ends and disinfectant and incontinence begins.

This could be a bingo hall. With a little imagination. They don’t play in tiara and fur in south east London but perhaps here. Big enough to house an aircraft. From the lighting balcony at the back, a technician sweeps the supertrouper across the vast stage like a searchlight.

The men are in dinner-dress: standing, civilised, easing back chairs. Big-shots or bouncers. It’s hard to tell. The women are plucked from the pages of a hundred magazines, the stuff of white dreams.

By a side-door, a young man with hair a cheerleader would kill for is playing his hunches. A doorman distracted by a lick of lamé, the young man marches in – adjusting his tie, nodding his hollow hellos with purpose. In his pocket are a handful of dollars. Tickets tonight cost hundreds. Anyone watching would see that he is an intruder and no master of disguises: hunched at the bar over another man’s bourbon; then standing at the door with a tip-me tug of his golden forelock; then crouched at the side of the stage scribbling into a notebook. Anyone watching could tell that he is an impostor but nobody watches. The crisp English cut of his suit is adequate, even appropriate. Cal Carter is wearing it for the first time, Elvis Presley his shimmering jumpsuit for the umpteenth. It is Las Vegas, it is 1976 and rock’n’roll has gotten fat.

Out of the darkness, a single spotlight targets the microphone. Presley appears. Applause. The lights lift as the orchestra clicks into a crisply concluded crescendo. Two bars. Cal has done it: gatecrashed the King. Imagine him glowing inside with a sip of Jack Daniels and a surge of pride.

‘I’m…’ The orchestra comes back as Presley sings: ‘…hurt’ – the word straddles a beat, a backbeat, a bar and another.

‘…to think that you lied to me.’

‘Hurt.’ Shorter this time. The first wiggle of the hip and shudder of the lip. ‘Way down deep inside of me.’

‘And that was it,’ Cal would say. ‘Down deep. Like a voice from a cave. Like buried treasure.’ Unless you really knew him and how fast his mind worked, my best friend’s sentences appeared to come in pre-packed, ready-to-speak slices. Whenever he told this story - and I heard him tell it several times to the band, to reporters, to fawning girls and buck-skinned boys - he always described the moment thus: like buried treasure. That was the moment Cal Carter believed he saw our future.

The first time I heard the story we were sitting five thousand miles away from Las Vegas in the far from glamorous public bar of The Roebuck, our special seats round the corner out the way of the dart board where we always sat when the information to be exchanged was serious stuff. He’d arrived back from America that morning and had jet lag scratched scarlet across his eyes.

I watched him standing at the bar. Shaking his head and waving his hand as he ordered bourbon and was offered scotch. We were neither of us whisky drinkers but Cal’s return was already working great changes in our lives. I was 18, a smoker of Players No.6 and a drinker of keg bitter. I was a member of Her Majesty’s Civil Service and a lowly one at that. Licensed to bill. Elvis Presley at the Hilton Hotel, Las Vegas was another world, another language.

Cal returned with more pints and two whiskies which he pointedly and, I discovered only years later, inaccurately, referred to as ‘chasers’. Then he was off again, back there again. ‘At first it was just a bit of a fun. Seeing how many Bourbons I could lift. It was just a scam. You know, Presley, Christ…’ He paused over his beer. ‘It was four lines in, Frankie… Buried treasure.’

He shook his head and smiled again. ‘And I could barely hear it beneath the applause and rattling of jewellery.’

I probably smiled back. I certainly lit a cigarette. He shook his head when I offered him one and produced an American soft-pack from the breast pocket of his denim jacket. He tapped on the top and a cigarette emerged, sliding upwards, humbling gravity. Although Cal went on about it for another half-an-hour that, I think, was the moment when he convinced me. You could put it down to the power of Presley but those soft-packs were something else.

‘It was better than any amount of money.’

My eyebrows barely moved and he may have sensed my interest waning. ‘It was better than sex.’

I smirked. ‘Presley singing was better than sex?’

‘Better than sex.’

Cal and I had grown up together. He understood the expressions on my face, the way I fiddled with my hair. He smiled and pushed a tumbler of scotch towards me.

‘More than that.’ he said. ‘It was better than you thought sex would be when you were 14’. I looked up at him. Now that was a wholly different ball-game of soldiers. He was in the process of sitting. He leaned across the table, his eyes inches from mine, his breath flecked with whisky.

There was a pause before I shook my head. ‘I thought we’d finished with that schoolkids stuff. Isn’t that what Jon said?’

‘But you never had the vision before,’ said Cal. ‘I never had the vision. Any of us. It’s all very well to want to make money, shag women and take drugs, but…’

‘I thought there might be a but.’

‘But you have to see it, feel it. Take it and twist it.’ In his eye there was a twinkle like a safety pin in the sun.

I wasn’t too sure what he was talking about but I could feel a schoolboy’s grin tighten across my face, a sensation I hadn’t felt for at least a year. The grin Wendy Carter said was cute when she was 20 and I was 15 and a half.

Potential is just that. Unrealised. But I am as close to certain as it is possible to be that when Cal died his best moments were yet to come, his best songs were yet to be recorded. Today he stands next to me just a stage width away from Elvis in some rock’n’roll waxworks museum they’ve got for the tourists up in town. They’ve made Cal three inches taller than he really was. I’m the right height but I’m told my eyes are hollow, empty and robbed of the sparkle of life.

I knew him – the supposed new McCartney to his new Lennon. I can say, hand on my rock-hardened heart and without an ounce of the all-American sentimentality that once inspired us that my story is nothing without the story of Cal Carter.

And when I think of him now, it’s often of that cabaret moment. Not of any of the umpteen millions of moments when we were together but of that one in Las Vegas when Elvis Presley sent a chill down his spine. And sometimes, I can see it as big and as bold and as bright as Presley’s white sequinned suit. And sometimes I can hardly imagine it at all. Perhaps that is because I can’t imagine me there. Sore thumb me but Cal fitted.

2

Beech Park, 1969

So far as I can remember I’ve only ever seen a bowler hat on television. And Oliver Hardy has usually got his foot through it. Neither the white heat of technology nor the black hat of respectability ever quite made it to the bit of Beech Park where I grew up. Ours were neat but not noteworthy streets. Neither garden suburb nor concrete jungle. Halfway houses.

I spent much of my childhood, or so it seems to me now, sitting in the window of the railway station. Beech Park was a two platform affair, in and out of Charing Cross, every half-an-hour. ‘Charing Cross, in the heart of London’s West End,’ as it always said in the newspapers. At the age of ten I was well aware that I lived a full four stops away from where life was being lived. They never mentioned Beech Park in the newspapers. Not even the local one.

The station was a simple concrete building, sufficient to accommodate the ticket office, Mr Parker, Mr Parker’s confectionery stand, a cantankerous old dog belonging to the ticket clerk and two wooden staircases down to the respective platforms. It was finished with a solid Victorian surety and discreet flourish. The circular window between the in-door, which said ‘To The Trains’, and the out-door, which said ‘Missing. Small Ginger Tom. Answers To The Name Of Rusty’, had a concrete window ledge that was at least a foot deep. That was where I sat: feet up, my school bag under my knees, my back nestled in the curve of the white ledge.

I used to sit in it on the way to school and chew watermelon flavoured bubble gum. Only when the flavour had all gone, well and truly, would I walk on. I had no idea what watermelon tasted like or even looked like but the gum, which came in green balls slightly larger than a marble, was my favourite. My father, a man who disapproved of so many things - a man, indeed, whose defining quality was disapproval - disapproved of gum chewing so I kept the stuff out of the house. Anyway, the station window was a more comfortable place to sit and chew than our garden wall: our garden wall being shaped like the battlements of a castle. It’s a shame that now that I have tasted watermelon, and even fished it out of a cocktail glass, I can no longer remember what the gum tasted like.

At first, it was all I could do to climb up into the window alcove. Gradually, it got more comfortable. I liked watching the people, the men, getting on and, more rarely, off the train. I was fascinated by their briefcases - full of things to do. Black ones and brown ones, pristine and battered ones. I used to imagine what was in them and where they were going with them. Didn’t know then that one day I’d be joining them with them a briefcase of my own and nothing more interesting inside it than a cheese and pickle sandwich.

At first, I only had sufficient gum for one ball on the way to school and another on the way back but then I started to get more pocket money and I started to hear the school bell ringing at the top of the hill with me still sitting in the window chewing. Ball two, ball three, like an American baseball umpire counting someone out.

It was at about this time that my parents paid their first visit to the school to see about, as my mother put it, quoting from my report card, my ‘lack of satisfactory progress’ or, as my father put it, to get them to ‘knock some bloody sense’ in to me. At home the word ‘comprehensive’ assumed the whispered status of a profanity like ‘bloody’ – muttered with stifled anger and not for my ears. Increasingly, the two appeared in tandem. As in ‘bloody unions’ or ‘bloody Alf Ramsey’: ‘bloody comprehensive’.

My father got quite excited over the eleven-plus which he made sound like an educational version of penicillin – the cure for everything. To me, sitting down at the station window, watching our insignificant little world go by, became ever more attractive.

One day I was sitting there on the way home. It was early and apart from that stupid dog yapping the station was silent, deserted. I was so bored that I was rooting through my schoolbag looking for something to do or even to read.

‘Want to swap bags?’ came a still-in-short-trousers sort of a voice.

I looked down. A little blonde haired kid from the posh school - the one where the teachers were called masters. ‘Masters because they’ve mastered their subject,’ my father had explained. ‘Not like those half -trained bloody monkeys down your place.’

I was chewing bubble gum. The titchy kid was eating a bar of chocolate.

‘Is it your birthday?’ I asked.

He regarded me for a moment as if I were mad. He was a good foot shorter than me and I could have flattened him had I wanted but there was an assurance and confidence in his piggy eyes that I found appealing. Desirable. I realised it was an absurd question even as I was asking it but to me, Mars bars were the stuff of special occasions – the pantomime, cinema or birthdays. He looked up, fixed his eyes first on mine and then lowered them steadily towards my bag. He seemed to find it more inter...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Editor’s note:
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Frankie Dane
• Chapter 3
• Pedal power pop
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• The sultan of Shakespeare
• Chapter 17
• Chapter 18
• Don’t talk to me about the next big thing
• Chapter 19
• Chapter 20
• The effortless ascent
• Chapter 21
• Chapter 22
• Chapter 23
• Chapter 24
• Chapter 25
• Chapter 26
• Chapter 27
• Chapter 28
• Chapter 29
• Chapter 30
• Chapter 31
• Chapter 32
• Chapter 33
• Chapter 34
• Chapter 35
• Police take possession of rock-star’s autobiography
• Missing musician’s final release breaks all records