Читать книгу Strange Things Happen: A life with The Police, polo and pygmies - Stewart Copeland - Страница 14

My first hit record was as an artist who hid behind a mask.The mask reveals the true identity.

I’m never going to make it home. I’m driving through the night and not getting anywhere. Lost somewhere in London, or maybe I’m not even in London anymore. No matter. My ears are glued to the speakers in my car. The music coming out has me transfixed because of course it’s my own. Really, really mine.

After years of home-recording my guitar riffs, today was the first time that I’ve had the chance to professionally record my guitars, bass, and piano over real drums—my drums!

In my car, lost in the night, I’m listening to a thrashing band that hangs together with unholy cohesion.

It’s been a busy day. At the crack of dawn (10:00 A.M. for my kind) I loaded my trusty Gibson SG guitar, Fender Telecaster bass, a tiny little Fender Champ amp, a cheesy drum box, and my real drums into my purple VW and drove down to Surrey Sound Studio. Nigel Gray is the owner and chief engineer. We’re working with state-of-the-art sixteen-track one-inch recording tape.

The first track that we lay down for each of the three songs is the cheesy drum box pattern, as a glorified metronome. This machine was designed to accompany lounge singers who are too cheap to hire a drummer. It has preprogrammed rhythms, of which most are rumbas, sambas, and the like. But it does have “Pop 1” and “Pop 2,” which gives me two serviceable rhythms that I can use.

Then I plug in the SG and work my way down the songs, chugging the rhythm guitar parts in time with the drum box. It’s already sounding amazing compared with my home recordings. Just having someone else to hit the record button for me is a big luxury. But I don’t get too carried away with the guitar yet. Next, Nigel puts up a microphone for me to quickly yodel out a guide vocal track, which helps navigation during the whole process. I have three songs on tape.

Now it’s time for the real recording, starting with the drums, which are the foundation upon which any modern music is built. Very carefully Nigel arranges the microphone tree around my drums and I lay down the beat, with the guide tracks in my earphones. It’s the easiest drum session I’ve ever done, since the guitarist has exactly my sense of rhythm. But drums are still the most demanding aspect of band recording—even if I am the band.

It’s about four o’clock, but I’m just getting started. It’s time to get serious with the guitars. My little Champ amp would never be big enough to play with a band, but for overdubs, with near and distant mics, we can get a big, raging guitar sound. After the slog of all that drumming now I’m in Guitar Hero heaven, and that drummer on the tracks is just the perfect guy…

All of the parts that I’ve been noodling over at home now come to life in full stereo studio sound. There is no greater joy than this. When I’m working at home, engineering my own sessions, I spend most of the time fussing over wires and connections so when I finally strap on my guitar, my head is still engineering. With Nigel at the controls I can spend all day getting deeper and deeper into the pocket. Music is like that. Inspiration and vibe gather momentum. Guitars, bass, piano, even a bit of wild kazoo as fake brass, and I’ve got three tunes thrashing. The band sounds pretty thick when you consider that there are just two guys in the building—and one of them is the engineer.

Tomorrow I’ll do vocals, but now I’ve got the backing tracks going around and around on the cassette player in my car. I don’t ever want to get home.

I CAN’T SEE VERY well out of this mask, but I’m enjoying very much the befuddled amusement on the face of the journalist before me. Most of my experience with interviews has been watching the artists that I have worked for stammering their way through boring responses to standard questions. Now it’s my turn, and I’m doing it a little differently.

I’m wearing a thick rubber mask, a long black coat, and thick gloves. On my way over to the record company press office I have

concocted another bogus persona, life story, and scam. This time I’m an escapee from a government scientific program involving radiation synapse crevulation—I hope you are wearing your lead diapers! Under this mask I’m still glowing…

Everybody wants to talk to the masked man of mystery, but the last thing I want is for anyone to identify me. How do you like that? My first brush with honestly earned fame, and I’m sneaking!

For one thing, my reputation in London right now is suspect, and I don’t want to taint this new brand that is working so well for me. I’m the chief mercenary behind that fake punk band The Police, and while the musicians here generally respect our chops, the rock press has already written us off as not cool. The Police is actually kind of dead in the water right now—which is going to change because Stingo, out of nowhere, has started writing some pretty incredible songs. Andy’s joining the band has really woken him up. There’s this one new song that we should record called “Roxanne.”

So, since I am nothing and no one, how about if I use a mask to suggest that I’m someone and something? When confronted by the mask folks might ask, “What’s he got to hide if he’s not somebody?” It’s what my sly father taught me: If you want to create a rumor, start by denying it, as in: “I swear that I never slept with Diana…”

Which would be academic of course if the BBC Radio 1 hadn’t picked up one of my Klark Kent songs, “Don’t Care,” and started playing the hell out of it all over the country, thereby anointing me with a bona fide (though modest) hit single—my first ever. I’m twenty-six and had almost given up hope that real mojo would ever be mine. Curved Air was a good first step out of college, but it was like being the last man to climb aboard the sinking ship. The Police right now is just another scabrous London band, albeit one with a secret nuclear weapon hatching.

THE BBC TV PRODUCER has that same look of befuddled amusement on his face, but he’s much redder. We’re all in masks. Even Miles, who has identified himself as Melvin Miltoss, my manager. He’s sounding a bit nasal through his pig snout, but he’s trying to reason with the TV people—who swear they have never seen anything like this.

Top of the Pops is the national television opportunity in the UK. Appearing on this show is an automatic five-point bump in the charts. I figured that bands look cooler than solo performers on TV, so I brought a band to mime along with me, comprised of Sting, Andy, Florian, and Kim Turner. None of us has ever been on TV before, this is the big one, and we’re all in masks.

Behind his disguise, Miles is unhinged. Released by anonymity and unburdened by his sterling reputation he’s having the time of his life, alternately blubbering, exhorting, and suavely negotiating. The thing is that they have a problem with close-ups of a singer in a rubber mask. The whole show is mimed to playback, but miming behind a mask is pushing it. Miles wheedles them into a compromise, which is for me to wear some kind of camouflage makeup. They escape from our dressing room just as Miles is winding into a sobbing flood of histrionic, clutching gratitude.

Up on the tiny TV studio stage we’re all clutching guitars that aren’t plugged in, and Florian is checking out the plastic cymbals that they put on his kit. Looking at them, they are not remotely realistic, but the crew assure us that under the lights and through the cameras they look “better” than real ones. The point of them, however, is that they make no sound other than a damp thut.

With drums it’s hard to pretend that you are playing without making a fearful racket—which makes it hard for the other players to stay in sync with the playback. The television viewer can see if a cymbal is struck, so the drummer pretending to play must actually strike something—and if he actually strikes, thut is better than CLANG!

Considering the enormity of the show, the stage is tiny. The cameras like us all to be pressed up close to one another so the screen always has multiple players. We each have a little spot marked on the stage beneath our feet. Behind their masks my buddies—even Sting, who is usually so cool—are jigging about in their little spots. Each one must boogie in his own square foot.

Up front I’m staring into the big camera lens facing, for the first time, the world on national TV. In front of me is a tiny dance floor with twenty or thirty fake groovy teenagers waiting glumly for their cue. They are pushed over to one side while the cameras work out their positions. It’s all business for the moment. I’m just standing there under the intense light. Over there I can see a monitor that is flitting from close-up to wide-angle shots of me in the dumb makeup that they made me wear. In the makeup room it looked like pretty deep camouflage, but on camera you can see right through it.

“OK…let’s try one…everybody on one please…PLAYBACK!”

The crowd directors wave up the fake teenagers who are suddenly whooping with joyous teenage hysteria and dancing like fury as the crazy lights swirl and the cameras are sweeping overhead. After three loud pops my track starts, and I’m dancing around pretending to sing my song. I’m jitterbugging, I’m gyrating and gallivanting. I’m hollering, high-rolling, and Holy Moly! I am ON TV!

Well actually, not yet. That was just a run-through, a camera rehearsal. The fake teenagers immediately droop off back to the side, and I stand inert once more under the lights while they figure more shit out. This time, I’m soaking wet. It’s not just my first time on TV, it’s also the first time I’ve ever thought of myself as a singer let alone pretended to be one in front of people. I have decades of youthful experience with air guitar, but singing? It feels like cross-dressing.

Miles sidles over. For years we have both been exhorting artists to be more animated, but he’s coaching me now to calm down. My brother with his pig mask is a reassuring presence. Behind me Andy and Kimbo are goofing off, freed from inhibition by their masks, striking outrageous guitar poses. Sting is biding his time. Just standing there he looks cool, even with the monkey mask.

“OK, Quiet Please! Everybody on one…thank you…and…Cue Audience!”

“WROUAGH!” shout the fake teenagers as the crazy lights swirl and the cameras sweep.

This time I’m trying the stillness-is-movement concept. I’m rigid while singing, with occasional twitches for punctuation. This is still only the second time ever in my life that I have been a singer. First time was ten minutes ago. But this is going to become a pattern. Living and learning right in front of everybody, on TV.

In their homes around the nation people are hearing the real deal—a music soundscape entirely created by just one hard-workin’ fool. But they’re watching a fake performance on fake instruments in front of a fake audience. Even the mask—which doesn’t hide anything—is fake. But the ever humble feeling in my heart is real, as I pretend to shout out the lyric into the fake microphone:

“I am the coolest thing that ever hit town…”

AUGUST 5, 1978

A Sounds magazine reprint of one journalist’s impression of the young cipher.

WHO WAS THAT MASKED MAN?

Goddamit, I knew I should have worn my Bazooka Joe mask—confronting me across the table in the A&M interrogation room is Klark Kent, who in spite of his biography isn’t a church organist from Wales or a bank clerk from Tyneside, nor even a computer programmer from Brooklyn. What he definitely is: blond, six foot three, American, around twenty-five to thirty years of age (he has too much time perspective to be younger) wearing white projectionist’s gloves, a black greatcoat, and this goddamn Jimmy Carter mask, none of which he removed in the incognito ninety-minute conversation, playing the secret identity trip to the hilt. What you will know about him is that he has a hot single out called “Don’t Care” with “Thrills” and “Office Girls” gracing the B-Side of his green vinyl wonder. First issued on Kryptone Records (get it?), an offshoot of the small independent Faulty Products, it has been snapped up and rush-released for mass purchase by A&M because, according to Mr. Kent, “I threatened to snap Tom Noble’s neck if he didn’t.” After all, you don’t fool around with Superman, do you?

The possibility of the single becoming a hit is actually pretty good, it has received suitable airplay, and was even Paul Burnett’s pick of the week a while back. “Don’t Care” is an incredibly catchy satire about this guy who knows (not believes, you understand) that he is the greatest thing in the universe, and its main message is not that he doesn’t care, but that everybody is the star of their own life and should act accordingly. Kent also plays all the instruments himself, with such a remarkable ability that it leads us to the main question: who the hell is he really?

Now there are several possibilities—he could be an extremely famous American superstar trying to find out if he can cut it without the instant status and having a good laugh at the same time, but this Klark sternly denies. The story he would have you believe goes something like this:

Born of English and American parents, who were archaeologists, he spent many years in Lebanon, where he became involved with a local religious group by the name of the Druze. He says he was accepted by them because of his “high intuitive matrix.” The Druze, he claimed, are particularly interested in the development of emotion and believe that God is a manifestation of art. He will not be more explicit about this religion other than to say his main interest was not the religion itself but their techniques for stimulating creativity in the individual.

Because of the civil war in Lebanon he was forced to move back to the States, where he worked for a private firm (probably computer electronics or communications) who paid him highly for his skills. He left suddenly in 1976 to come to England, where he felt the change in climate in the music scene, felt cold toward it, and immediately bought a Gibson SG, a Fender bass, a drum kit, and a couple of tape recorders, and within a month he had taught himself to play them, apparently using skills he developed from the Druze.

Ask why he persists with the masquerade, he tells you, “This is important for personal, creative, and business reasons, not to mention legal ones.” By which I infer that if the American firm knew where he was they would probably sue the ass off him, probably to give back any information he may possess that they don’t want on the loose. Still, becoming a rock star is an unlikely way to hide, isn’t it, so maybe he is just a rich prankster.

Klark Kent remains an enigma. During the course of conversation the topics included various aspects of art, religion, radio, the social security system, what Britain needs to do to survive, the sinister motive behind the Soviet arms buildup, expansion of human potential, and a thousand other nonmusical topics, and interesting as they are I can’t really go into them here. He’s a very erudite gentleman, he may or may not be a superman, but I’m sure we’re definitely going to be hearing an awful lot more of him.

—RAB