Читать книгу A Multitude of Sins: Golden Brown, The Stranglers and Strange Little Girls - Hugh Cornwell - Страница 10

Ask most people what their impression of Sweden is and they’ll usually tell you it’s full of beautiful, sex-mad, blonde girls dying to roll around with anyone in the freezing snow after dashing out from a sauna on the edge of a lake … which is fine until you actually go there.

I first went to Sweden when I was offered a job in a laboratory at the University of Lund Hospital. I had stayed on at William Ellis after ‘A’ levels to apply for Cambridge University but had failed miserably. I accepted my place at Bristol University but beforehand got a job in the spring at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London in the Haematology Department, doing menial laboratory work. One day the doctor I was working with asked me what plans I had for the forthcoming summer. I knew it would be a good idea to do a bit of travelling before starting the first year of my degree, but I hadn’t seriously thought about it until he’d asked me. He suggested that I might consider Sweden, as he had contacts there. His laboratory was in almost daily contact with a Dr Kai Lindstrand in Lund, as their work shared the same field. On recommendation from St Bart’s, Dr Lindstrand was prepared to offer me lab work there for a few months if I was interested.

Was I interested in going to Sweden? Yes, please!

I readily agreed and headed over there. I stayed three months during the summer and had my first sexual experience (with a nurse, more later). So three years later when it came time to think about what to do after my degree at Bristol, it didn’t take me long to realize that, short of going back to London, which seemed to be what everybody else was going to do (boring) the options weren’t that many. In order to delay any serious decisions about what to do with my life, I hit upon the brilliant idea of heading back up to Sweden. But what was I going to do up there? I know, I’ll do a PhD! I rang Dr Lindstrand, my old boss at the hospital, and told him about my idea. ‘Great!’ he said, ‘Call me when you get your results in.’

A slight problem presented itself. I had only mustered a third-class honours degree and didn’t stand a chance of being given a research grant in the UK. I bumped into my professor from Bristol in a pub shortly afterwards and he told me that I’d lacked ‘diligence and discipline’. I rang Dr Lindstrand back in Lund.

‘Have you got your results?’ he asked.

‘Yes, but I only got a third,’ I replied.

He probed, ‘But you passed?’

‘Yes …’ I hesitated.

‘Well, that’s great news! When can you come and start?’

In England, Oxford and Cambridge are considered the oldest educational institutions. In Sweden, Lund and Uppsala are thought of in a similar way. Uppsala is north of Stockholm, approaching Lapland, whereas Lund is in the far south, just across the water from Copenhagen. I had been fortunate enough to get a room in a flat with a friend from my last trip there three years before. He had recently got married and they had acquired a flat in downtown Lund. It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, to be living with a married couple, especially as my friend had sobered up somewhat since my last trip there. In my previous time with him in Sweden, I had got used to taking home bottles of 100% alcohol for free from the laboratory, which warmed up as you diluted it down. It is used all day long to clean the glassware in labs and costs nothing to manufacture. Everybody was taking the stuff home and making very strong vodka and orange cocktails with it. Someone was even brewing his own gin …

Lund is an extremely ancient town with a cathedral dating back to 1100, and the beauty to match. Lots of little cobbled streets are jam-packed with buzzing student life. I was soon out and about finding friends. I remembered two brothers from my earlier trip – one was a musician and the other a playboy. The musician had recounted many stories of his living off of music and they had stayed with me. He told me once, ‘It doesn’t matter what happens at a gig as long as the beginning and the end are great. They’re the two parts that the audience remembers.’ This had saved him many times as he accepted gigs with bands that he had never played with before. Unfortunately, the brothers had moved on and I couldn’t find either of them.

I started busking in Copenhagen. I would take a pretty nurse from the hospital with me, whose job was to go round with a hat whilst I was playing. The prettier the nurse the more money she would collect. We would split the money between us and it was always enough to pay for the hydrofoil across from Malmö plus some duty-frees. I would hit the bars close to the port in the small streets, and there were plenty of them. Each bar would offer a drink on the house, so it didn’t take long to get extremely drunk and, of course, lost. I could never find the same bar twice.

On one such trip we were heading back to the hydrofoil and were walking down a street called Nyhamn, when the nurse I was with noticed a body on the ground. Being a nurse, she investigated and turned it over to expose a face covered in blood. Her professional instincts took over and she went into the nearest bar to call an ambulance. The bar owner knew the body was just a drunk Swede and refused to let her use the phone as Swedes are known to abuse the cheap liquor that is available in Denmark. To her credit, she persevered regardless and finally managed to summon an ambulance to help him. I wrote a terrible song after this night called, ‘Nyhamn Sandwich’.

In the early Seventies in Sweden, there was a state-run liquor store chain called Systembolaget (it still exists today), and each Swede had a liquor allowance, which they could not exceed. Sounds like the government thought they had a problem with drink abuse to me. So at the end of each week there would be a queue in the liquor store, as everyone stocked up for a good weekend guzzle at home. There was only one of these stores in each town. No wonder they would jump on the boats at the first opportunity to get hammered in the bars of Copenhagen! And the prices were hugely inflated with tax too. Why do the Swedes have or think they have a liquor problem? It’s probably got something to do with their low self-esteem. Why do they have low self-esteem? Well, for starters they remained neutral and allowed the Nazis to trundle through on their way to Norway and Denmark in the Second World War. Doesn’t exactly endear you to your neighbours.

Another interesting fact about Sweden. They decided to change over driving to the other side of the road and spent a year preparing for the changeover. On one particular night all the roads in the country were closed and all the signs were changed. Not one person (Persson?) broke the law and drove on that prohibited night. The whole procedure went without a hitch. Another interesting fact – when the weather is foggy everyone is warned over the radio to drive with their lights on. Sounds pretty obvious to me.

The first time I met Kai Hansson I was sitting in the café of Lund University. I didn’t know at that first meeting what an impact this man would have on my time in Sweden. It was around midday and, as usual, I’d taken an early lunch from my research reading at the University library. This facility was in the centre of town, thankfully, and not on the newer, bleaker campus site of the University at which I was doing my degree in the hospital. Don’t get me wrong, my working environment in the laboratories was great. Dr Lindstrand was a fantastic mentor and he had made quite a name for himself in biochemistry as the discoverer of a new form of vitamin B12. The result of this was that he had a free rein to run his research team, which consisted of beautiful SKANDINAVIAN GIRLS!!!

I didn’t get a chance to roll around in the snow or take saunas with any of them but they did love flirting with Dr Lindstrand and me, which sure brightened up the old laboratory. He would plan experiments and then the girls would set them up and run them whilst he supervised the results (when he wasn’t lecturing around the University). I had to do a lot of background reading before starting my PhD project, but I was getting distracted by the girls, who were indeed all gorgeous.

Autumn had arrived in Lund and the many shades of the yellowing leaves mixed with the fattening sunshine had put me in a melancholic mood. The trouble was I was taking lunch earlier and earlier. The University café was an enormous place and my people-watching from a table by the entrance was becoming an enticing obsession. I had recently met another fellow called Hans Warmling there one lunchtime and had gone back to his small studio flat, a minute’s walk away in a quiet courtyard, to commence my tuition in composing and songwriting. Hans was working as a male nurse at the hospital and, judging by the dozens of open reel tapes he had of songs and song ideas, was spending all of his waking hours when not at work playing his electric guitar into his tape recorder, which sat in the centre of the room. He was bouncing guitar track after guitar track across onto each other to create immense orchestral tapestries, all without any voices. He’d been in the last line-up of the group the Spotniks, which impressed me. I remembered seeing footage of them years before stepping off planes in their spacesuits, playing guitars linked by radio to the venue where they were due to play that night.

Hans had the idea that I could write and sing the words in English to all his five hundred unfinished songs. We would have a group together and become hugely successful. I liked Hans for his sincerity and enthusiasm and we very quickly became firm friends. But his confidence in my writing abilities had taken me a bit by surprise, as I’d never written a proper song before, and I was thinking along other lines …

At this time, I also met two other characters who would prove central to my time in Sweden. Lund at the time had become a centre for US draft dodgers offered amnesty from prosecution, a veritable safe haven for those refusing to go to Vietnam. The Swedish government were not only providing them and their families with accommodation, but those without a trade were being supported on social security. I had met two of them called Gyrth Godwin and Chicago Mike at the University café on one of my ‘breaks’ from the library. Gyrth was from Washington State, above Oregon on the US west coast, and he and his wife Cindy plus child were making a life for themselves in Lund. Mike also had a wife and child with him. Gyrth was a playful, Tolkienesque character full of poetry and a terrific wanderlust. He’d travelled on freight trains all over the States and had reams of poetry that he’d compulsively written, and was still writing when we met. He’d also lost a couple of teeth along the way. He seemed to be much better suited than me to writing the lyrics that the ex-Spotnik Hans needed for his music, so I talked Hans into entertaining the idea.

Initially, Gyrth’s and Hans’ personalities were completely opposed and their sharp corners jarred repeatedly. However, they slowly started to marry the music and lyrics together until the edges had been smoothed down. The trouble was that Gyrth was not much of a singer. His pitch was atrocious, his timing was almost as bad, but his enthusiasm for rock ‘n’ roll matched Hans’ and therefore I was happy to be playing second guitar behind Hans and to sing backing vocals. Chicago Mike, meanwhile, was a drummer of sorts: he had a drum kit and lots of experience playing ‘jazz’, which meant that he would occasionally drop a beat from a bar without telling anyone.

Another friend of mine, Jan Knutsson, had volunteered to learn to play the bass and we had started jamming the Hans/Gyrth songs in the basement room of a small detached house that Jan and I rented outside Lund in Södra Sandby. The landlord was a university lecturer who lived in the house next door. Hans persuaded me to buy a Fender Telecaster on hire purchase from a music shop in Malmö, on the coast half an hour’s drive away.

This was the stage that Johnny Sox – as Gyrth had christened the band – was at when Kai Hansson entered the picture. Kai had just arrived in Lund as another US refugee, we assumed, and had a Swedish mother who lived in Hawaii. I probed his musical knowledge and he was keen to jam. By the end of the day, Hans, Gyrth, Mike and Jan had all met Kai on my recommendation and he was accepted as part of the pack. Gyrth had, meanwhile, developed a neat sideline in testing hash in Lund and he and Mike spirited Kai off to do some serious sampling whilst Hans, Jan and I continued combing through Hans’ tapes for appropriate material.

I don’t recall much from the sessions in the basement room but the acoustics were truly awful. A lot of hash was smoked courtesy of Gyrth, a lot of wine was drunk courtesy of Kai, and we received a lot of complaints from our landlord, who was rapidly reaching the conclusion that he had found the wrong tenants for the house. Kai seemed to drift like a maverick through Lund life and no one quite knew what he was doing there. He was a big man in his mid-twenties, with a blond mane touching the collar of a dark-tan leather jacket which had tassels down the arms. A very authentic Midwest accent went perfectly with the jeans and cowboy boots. He was an accomplished guitarist and seemed to love the jamming sessions. He bonded well with Gyrth and they would frequently either turn up or leave together. Kai disappeared that winter to turn up later in a rather surprising fashion.

One afternoon the following early summer, I was in the café enjoying the awakening of the countryside from its long hibernation. The latitude of Lund meant that during winter there was actually only four hours of real daytime, so the summer was always more than welcome when it arrived. Johnny Sox’s jams had been replaced by more serious rehearsing; Hans and Gyrth were getting on much better now; and fully formed songs were finally emerging. I was also writing the odd song which I sang lead vocals on, Jan’s bass playing was progressing well, and we were all looking forward to perhaps playing our first gig that summer.

I saw Gyrth in the café and offered him a lift out to the house in Södra Sandby. By now, he and his family had also rented a house in the country and our place was in the same direction. Gyrth readily accepted the ride and we were exchanging gossip and enjoying the early evening sunshine whilst we drove. Once past the city limits, he said he had a surprise for me. He had a mischievous smile playing on his face that I couldn’t fathom at all. Recently he had been quite depressed and had been complaining a lot about his situation in Lund. No amount of questioning would make him explain his change of mood. He didn’t want to spoil the surprise, he said. We were just approaching the driveway to the house when he suddenly said:

‘You remember Kai?’

‘Of course,’ I replied.

‘Well, you know that post office that got robbed today?’

Some awful connection was dawning upon me.

‘It was Kai!’ he gleefully divulged,’… and he’s at your house now. He needs somewhere to stay tonight.’

I didn’t know what to say or think. Nothing Kai had done before had prepared me for this. I arrived at the house and Gyrth let me go in first ahead of him. I climbed the stairs and entered the first-floor kitchen to find Kai with a can of cat food in his hand and the two small kittens we had adopted rubbing their fur on his legs.

‘Hey, Hugh, where’s your can opener? These cats are starving,’ he reproached me.

I found him the opener and watched him carefully feed the two cats. Their purring filled the silence as they ate.

‘Hey, I’m sorry to bust in on you like this, but I had nowhere else to go.’

There had, indeed, been a robbery from a small sub-post office on the outskirts of Lund that morning. A lone, masked armed robber had held up the elderly couple and escaped with seven grand in cash. There were no witnesses and no one had been hurt. The couple had a vague description of the gunman but nothing the police could act upon. On weighing up the facts, it seemed reasonable to think that Kai’s whereabouts would not be known or found out, as only the three of us knew. Gyrth placated me expertly and I agreed to let Kai stay the night. He planned to leave at first light the next morning and head for mainland Europe with a girlfriend. Kai pleaded with me to let him have a small party to thank me for letting him stay, to which I reluctantly agreed. Not that I could take much part, as I was due in at the laboratory early the next day. My research had stumbled on to the stage where I was setting up experiments and had to be spending long shifts in the haematology laboratories. Sometimes I’d have to go in and check on the experiments in the middle of the night, not something you wanted to do when you were half-cut, and it played havoc with your social life.

Kai and Gyrth got on the phone and carefully invited some close friends over. By nightfall, takeaway food had arrived along with plenty to drink. Gyrth supplied the obligatory smoke and the atmosphere became very festive – even Christmas-like. Reluctantly, my thoughts turned to the next day and after saying goodnight to everyone, I tried unsuccessfully to sleep through the noise of the party, then relocated with my sleeping bag to the garden, as it was dry and the nights were now much warmer. I vaguely remember Kai saying goodbye to me while I was half asleep in the early morning light and people leaving, before I finally drifted off to sleep for a couple of hours prior to going in to work.

Johnny Sox stumbled along, securing the odd gig in and around Lund. Chicago Mike carried on dropping the occasional beat that would make the whole band jump, and it probably looked quite comical to an observer. Gyrth’s singing wasn’t really improving but his singing style was, and the songs we were writing were increasingly gelling into a distinctive style. I had started writing songs with Gyrth as well to complement those he was already co-writing with Hans. They were mostly very short, very melodic, up-tempo classics, so as not to put too fine a point on it. And it was very different from anything else that we had access to at the time. Sweden was not exactly at the cutting edge of contemporary music, but all the new releases did arrive and we got a lot of tours coming either to Lund, Malmö or Copenhagen. I once came back from a trip to the UK enthusing about Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust album, which seemed to me the nearest thing to what we were doing in terms of songwriting and energy levels.