to be. He showed me his bass; in fact, he strapped it on and played a complete load of rubbish.
‘That was “Ladies Room”,’ he said.
‘I don’t play Kiss songs, I play original compositions only.’
Then he told me that he’d invited another friend over for the weekend, somebody called Luke, who also played the guitar.
‘But why did you invite him? I thought the band was just us.’
‘Luke plays lead guitar, you see? He’ll play lead guitar while you play rhythm guitar. And I play bass.’
I was crestfallen. ‘Yes, but is he actually any good?’
‘Yeah, he says he’s amazing.’
Before I’d had a chance to digest this properly, we heard Luke’s parents’ car pull up in the drive. Luke looked like a spotty cross between Jimi Hendrix and Phil Lynott and had a flashy Fender Stratocaster copy guitar with its own plush case lined with purple Afghan velvet. He wore a leather jacket and a bullet belt and had a high-pitched nasal voice.
‘Hello,’ he said through his nose.
‘Have you got an amplifier?’ I asked.
‘No, I was hoping to use your one.’
‘Russ Conway’s amplifier only has two input sockets, I’m afraid. One for me, one for him,’ I pointed at Paul.
‘I don’t mind,’ he said. ‘I’m here to play solos.’
‘But if you’re not plugged in then how—’
‘Just solos,’ he snapped.
We set up our gear – the three guitars and the amplifier with the speaker on a wire – in Paul’s straw-matted conservatory. Paul and I immediately got on with some pointless sonic jousting, playing random noisy chords while eyeing Luke as he sat on the floor fiddling with his tuning pegs. After an hour, bored with our racket, we sat down and constructed a proper song. Paul already had some epic war-like lyrics, and we attached them to some music I’d written. We practised it a little and then bang bang bang, off we went, noisy as hell, riffs clattering, dreadful, eager, high on it, whooping.
‘Right. Shall we record it then?’
‘Definitely.’ So we stuck Paul’s cheap tape recorder with its little condenser mic next to Russ Conway’s amp and hovered a finger over the record button. We were to yell out the vocals in tandem while we played, which meant we had to play our instruments kneeling down by the machine so it would catch our voices. The song was called ‘Armageddon’s Ring’, and its chorus went: ‘So can’t you hear the distant thunder / growling in the East / the war of good and evil / the righteous and the Beast.’
It was good.
We recorded pretty much everything we played; with hindsight, I don’t really know why. Maybe it was in case we came up with some spontaneous masterpiece, our own accidental ‘Stairway to Heaven’. As we played through ‘Armageddon’s Ring’, Luke sat on the floor hunched over his Strat. It was still unplugged, and he moved his fingers speedily up and down the fretboard. I watched nervously as we crashed along, knowing that sooner or later it was going to be his turn to be plugged in, and that what he was doing silently with his fingers was scaring the shit out of me.
When Paul and I were satisfied with our performance (take #2), Luke looked up from under his hair and said that he had a guitar solo worked out for the song. We were impressed – we didn’t even know how he’d managed to hear himself for the last ten minutes. But how were we going to record him?
‘Overdub me,’ said Luke.
Paul and I looked at one another and gestured towards the tiny cassette machine. ‘How? It’s just a tape player!’
‘Overdub.’
‘How?’
In the end we stopped the tape after the second chorus, plugged Luke in, let him do his solo unaccompanied, and then, when he nodded he had finished, pressed pause.
The solo was truly extraordinary. Paul and I sat open-mouthed while Luke attacked his axe like a man possessed – he even grunted loudly as he played it. The problem was that he couldn’t actually play the guitar at all. Not in the slightest. He just ran his fingers blindly up and down the fretboard, producing the sound of pigs being slaughtered. He couldn’t even tell how bad he was – that’s how bad he was. Maybe he’d just watched a lot of video footage of his heroes and believed that some vague speedy finger-aping would see him through. Perhaps I should’ve suspected something at the beginning of the session when he’d appeared to be having problems tuning. But I’d just thought, maverick axeman – respect. Halfway through the pertinent ‘Armageddon’s Ring’ (‘reminds me of Van Halen’ – my sister in the car on the way back to Winchester) comes a loud click and a pause, and then 30 seconds of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, a Situationist guitar solo. We had to leave it in because it appeared that Luke was in the band now. Well, three was better than two, I supposed, hating him and his stupid solos already.
We took a break and sat on the swings at the end of the garden and talked about gigging while I smoked and spat, my voice the only one yet to break. We agreed that our song ‘Armageddon’s Ring’ was sufficiently definitive to name the band after. Our logo was to the point: a ring that you’d wear on your finger, but with a nuclear explosion as the ‘jewel’.
The weekend recording with Luke had brought us to an edgy impasse. To recap:
Seb Hunter: Guitar & vocals. Can play bar chords. Can sing high harmonies. Speaks like a child. Short hair, but almost over eyes. Excitable. Prone to almost wetting pants if things are getting too overwrought.
Paul Bavister: Bass guitar & vocals. No sense of timing. Tone deaf. Tall. Bad skin. Deep monotone voice. Big house.
Luke Foster: Lead guitar. Voice like Kermit. Technique like Kermit. Also tone deaf. Everything deaf. Bad skin as well.
(NB – I had bad skin too, I just decline to mention it.)
Back in Winchester, my reputation fractionally increased after I told the other kids at school that I was now in a band, and a fucking good band at that. Dominic, who was still extremely aloof even though he secretly liked Kiss too, asked me who our influences were.
‘Heavy Metal,’ I said. ‘Heavy Metal generally, and Kiss.’
‘Well, you sound completely shit and it’s a shit name as well.’
None of this mattered. I was already cultivating a haughty rock-star attitude that included a cigarette wedged behind each ear and a pair of my father’s aviator sunglasses. Dominic said I should listen to some decent fucking music for a change, like UFO or Aerosmith. He played me some UFO on his Walkman, but two minutes into the track I wrenched off the fuzzy headphones.
‘It’s got keyboards!’
‘Yeah? What’s your problem? Don’t be such a prick.’
‘But you can’t have keyboards in Heavy Metal.’
‘You are a fucking prick.’
Actually, I thought to myself, you are the fucking prick, because UFO were absolutely rubbish – the syrupy washes of keyboards made the whole thing sound like the bloody Magic Roundabout.
‘Are Aerosmith as shit as this?’ I asked.
‘It’s pointless saying any fucking thing to you.’
‘Just tell me. Are they?’
A few days later he lent me Aerosmith’s fourth album, Rocks. What happened next can be anticipated.