an hour – everyone’s a winner! Except…then I feel even more of a fraud. Me, teaching confidence. Hey, student, this is how I deal with my stresses: grab a knife, any knife, but it must be sharp, really sharp, then pull up a sleeve and find a bit of skin that isn’t already cut or scarred (obviously this gets more difficult the more you do it, but for a novice like you the world is your oyster), sink in that knife as if you were slicing bread, not too fast and not too deep (we don’t want to damage tendons if possible), just deep enough so that the pain blots out the stresses and the nerves. Some rock stars take copious amounts of cocaine to boost their confidence – OK if you can afford it, I suppose – but all you need is an everyday kitchen knife and you can manufacture your own drugs, your own anaesthetic, free of charge whenever you want.
That’s not what I tell the eighteen-year-old Mariah-wannabe fiddling with the edge of her lyric sheet, by the way! Because when it comes to teaching confidence in singing, really I’m selling myself short if I say I’m a fraud. If there’s one time in my life when I’m truly confident, when I don’t think for a second about cutting myself, or even so much as a little burn, then it’s when I’m on stage singing. One minute before I go on, maybe, as I pace the dressing room. Two seconds after I get off, probably, as I remember the tiny mistake I made that no one else noticed. But while I’m on stage…I’m in heaven, I tell you…If only the gig could go on for ever…And if only I could get a bloody gig these days.
So yeah, sometimes when I’m teaching I feel a right fraud. But when it came to Lola, I earned every penny.
‘What do you mean?’ She sat down again behind my flimsy metal music stand, which had seen better days since I bought it when I was learning the violin at school, and she rubbed her enormous calves, tired from the heels, I suppose, pursing her lips so hard that I thought the collagen would start oozing out any second from between the glossy too-brown-to-be-red-and-too-red-to-be-brown lipstick and the dark brown lip liner.
I called her ‘she’ because…well, she would kill me if I called her ‘he’, and because, although she was clearly a bloke dressed up like a woman, she did it with such conviction that you started to believe it yourself, I tell you. Lola needed no lessons in confidence. But she really needed them in singing.
‘I mean you’ll never make it to the ends of these lines with power unless you take a breath before each one, as I showed you.’
‘I was.’
‘Lola, if I can see your shoulders going up and down like they’re on strings then you’re not breathing from the diaphragm, you’re just taking shallow breaths.’
She started looking at her nails, looking out the window – you could just see her twenty years ago in the back row of a French class refusing to join in. Perhaps she would’ve paid more attention if she’d known she was going to be singing Edith Piaf songs and ‘Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir’ for a living by the age of thirty. She didn’t take well to criticism; I was going to have to tread carefully here.
‘The lamé dress you told me about for this number sounds…’
Grotesque.
‘…grrrreat; but it’s hardly going to show off your figure if it keeps riding up with your shoulders as you gulp for air, don’t you reckon?’
She looked back at me, down her long nose, fiddling with the crucifix around her neck. I was getting through.
‘It’s just a matter of practice, until it becomes second nature. And it will, I promise you.’
She uncrossed her legs and stood up, smoothing down her pink skirt.
Result!
I rewound the tape a little and pressed play. The music of Barry Manilow jumped with jazz-hands from my speakers and I felt my face get a bit hot. Lola pushed her fingers into her diaphragm, just as I had taught her, and breathed in so that the muscle pushed her fingers back out again.
‘Good!’ I felt a buzz, a flash of pride even, and in my moment of optimism I stupidly added, ‘And remember to tell me a story.’
‘What do you mean?’ Lola let her hands flop to her sides and her bum flop back into the chair.
You idiot, Ash!
‘Nothing,’ I shouted over Barry, ‘I mean, don’t worry about that yet. Just concentrate on the breathing this time round.’
‘But I don’t understand. Why do you keep asking me to tell you a story? If I’d wanted a job on fuckin’ Jackanory I would’ve gone to the BBC not COME TO YOU.’
I stopped the tape again just before she finished and her last few words boomed around the suddenly quiet room, sounding more aggressive than even she intended them to be. I think she even rattled herself a bit, so she patted her black bobbed hair in case her rant had knocked something out of place.
‘OK,’ I said, as if I was talking to someone suicidal on the roof of a high-rise, ‘it’s just that with Barry Manilow, probably more than any other singer, his lyrics are telling a story, taking you on a journey. And this song is probably the most…story-like of all. So let’s hear in your voice and see in your face the story of the showgirl, every man’s dream, top of her game at first; then, by the last verse, she’s a tragic figure, lost her love, lost her mind…’
Actually, underneath all the cha-cha-cha and brass fanfares this is a bloody depressing song, don’t you reckon?
‘Go for it and you’ll knock ’em dead, trust me. And who knows, if there’s anyone from the BBC in the audience you could be the first drag-queen presenter on Jackanory.’
She almost smiled, but she sucked it away like she was eating a sherbet lemon. She stood up, though, and smoothed down her skirt. Tapped each stiletto, the same colour as her lips, into threadbare bits of the carpet and pressed her finger into her diaphragm.
Result!
I rewound the tape to the beginning of the song – must get a new deck, it sounds like one of those crappy scooters the kids burn up and down the estate on thinking they’re the mutt’s nuts. I pressed play. It’s going to start chewing the students’ tapes up soon, by the sound of it, and I don’t need to drive any more away.
Lola started singing about Lola, a showgirl with her hair full of yellow feathers and a dress cut down to…somewhere. It sounded like a cross between Mr T and Cilla Black, but at least she was starting to breathe in the right places and in the right way.
Perhaps I should invest in one of these new minidisc things. It’s bound to take over the world and I’ll get left behind as usual. Ten years ago when Brothers in Arms came out on the first CD I dismissed them as a fad…derr! And now I wouldn’t go anywhere without my CD Discman.
Lola followed Manilow like an echo in a haunted house as he crooned about Tony and the showgirl, working late nights in this cheesy club, where at least they had each other…Whoopee.
‘Good, keep it up, this is great!’
Oh my God, I’m looking at Lola’s tits! Or bra full of socks, or whatever it is she’s got stuffed down there. Ash, you’ve really got to get out more. Yeah? And we all know what happens if I ‘get out more’ – I keep a journal of my social life on my arm, written with a cheese knife.
But Barry and Lola loudly suggested that I should get myself down to the Copa, Copacabana. Music and passion are apparently always in fashion there. As long as I don’t go and fall in love, they warned in suddenly sombre tones.
‘Don’t fall in love…Well?’
‘I agree,’ I said, then quickly realized I was not having a conversation with Barry about relationships. ‘I…think we’ve nearly cracked it. Seriously, there was much more power in that, right to the end of even the long lines.’
Lola stood there, arms folded across her…chest; she raised her eyebrows and the stud through her right one shot up in the air like an antenna searching for bullshit waves.