Juliet, Naked

rock ’n’ roll version.

Annie was still in the kitchen when he got home, reading the Guardian at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee. He went up behind her and hugged her, probably for longer than she was comfortable being hugged.

“What’s that for?” she said, with moderate but determined affection. “I thought you were annoyed with me.”

“I’m sorry. Stupid. Petty. What does it matter who hears it first?”

“I know. I should have warned you it was a bit on the dreary side. But I thought that would make you even crosser.”

He felt as though he’d been punched in the stomach. He let go of her, took a breath, waited for the impact to fade a little before he spoke again.

“You didn’t like it?”

“Well, it was all right. Mildly interesting, if you’ve heard the other one. I don’t suppose I’ll play it again. What did you think?”

“I think it’s a masterpiece. I think it blows the other one out of the water. And as the other one is my favorite album of all time…”

“You’re not serious?”

“ ‘Dreary’! My God! What else is dreary, according to you? King Lear? The Waste Land? ”

“Don’t do that, Duncan. You always lose your powers of reason when you get angry.”

“That’s anger for you.”

“No, but… We’re not having an argument. We’re trying to discuss, you know, a work of art.”

“Not according to you. According to you we’re trying to discuss a piece of shit.”

“There you go. You think it’s King Lear, I think it’s a piece of shit… Get a grip, Duncan. I love the other one. I suspect most people will feel the same way.”

“Oh, most people. We all know what most people think about everything. The wisdom of fucking crowds. Jesus. Most people would rather buy an album made by a dancing midget from a reality TV show.”

“Duncan Thomson, the great populist.”

“I’m just… I’m so disappointed in you, Annie. I thought you were better than that.”

“Ah, yes. That’s the next step. It becomes a moral failing on my part. A character weakness.”

“But I’m sorry to say that’s how it is. If you can’t hear anything in this…”

“What? Please. Tell me. I’d love to know what that would say about me.”

“The usual stuff.”

“Which is what?”

“Which is, I don’t know. You’re a moron.”

“Thanks.”

“I didn’t say you were a moron. I said you were a moron if you can’t hear anything in this.”

“I can’t.”

He left the house again, then, and went back to the bench overlooking the sea with his iPod.

Another hour or so went by before he even thought about the website. He’d be the first to write about the album, if he were quick. Better than that: he’d be the first to alert the Crowe community to its existence, even! He’d listened to Juliet, Naked four times, and he had already thought of a great deal he wanted to say about it; in any case, to wait any longer would be to risk his advantage. He didn’t think Paul Hill would have contacted anyone else from the message boards yet, but copies would have been pushed through all sorts of mailboxes this morning. He had to go home, however much hostility he felt toward Annie.

He managed to avoid her anyway. She was on the phone in the kitchen, probably to her mother. (And who wanted to speak to a member of the family, immediately on return from holiday? Didn’t that prove something? What, he wasn’t precisely sure. But it seemed to him that anyone still so connected to family—to childhood, essentially—was hardly going to be able to respond to the kind of stark adult truths spread generously through the ten songs on Juliet, Naked. She’d get it one day, maybe, but clearly not for a few years yet.)

Their shared office was on the half landing. The real estate agent who sold them the house was inexplicably convinced that they would one day use the tiny room as a nursery, before deciding to move out of town and buy a house with a garden. They would then sell this house to another couple who would, in time, do the same thing. Duncan had wondered whether their childlessness was a direct response to the depressing predictability of it all— whether the real estate agent had, inadvertently but effectively, made their minds up for them.

It was the opposite of a nursery now. It contained two laptops, placed side by side on a workbench, two chairs, a machine that converted vinyl into MP3s and about two thousand CDs, including bootlegs of every single concert Tucker Crowe had performed between 1982 and 1986, with the exception of the September 1984 show at KB in Malmo, Sweden, which, bizarrely, nobody seems to have taped—a constant thorn in the side of all serious students, given that this, according to a normally reliable Swedish source, was the night Crowe chose to do a never-to-be-repeated cover version of “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” He cleared away the bank statements and letters that Annie had opened and placed by his computer for his attention, opened a document and began to type. He produced three thousand words in just under two hours and posted it on the website shortly after five o’clock that afternoon. By ten o’clock that night, there were 163 comments, from fans in eleven different countries.

The next day, he would see that he’d overcooked it a little. “Juliet, Naked means that everything else Tucker Crowe recorded is suddenly a little paler, a little too slick, a little too digested… And if it does that to Crowe’s work, imagine what it does to everyone else’s.” He hadn’t wanted to get into arguments about the relative merits of James Brown, or the Stones, or Frank Sinatra. He’d meant Crowe’s singer-songwriter peers, of course, but the literal-minded hadn’t wanted to take it that way. “This version of ‘You and Your Perfect Life’ makes the one you’re familiar with sound like something off a Westlife album…” If he’d waited, he’d have found that the “Dressed” version (inevitably, Juliet came to be known as Dressed, for ease of distinction) reasserted its superiority quite comfortably, after its initial shock. And he wished he hadn’t mentioned Westlife at all, seeing as some crazed Westlife fan would come across the reference and spend a day posting obscene messages on the message boards.

In his naivete, he hadn’t really expected anger. But then he imagined himself checking the website idly for some tidbit of gossip—news of an interview with the guy who did the cover art for the EP, say—and discovering there was a whole new album out there that he hadn’t heard. It would have been like turning on the TV for the local weather forecast, only to find that the sky was falling in. He wouldn’t have been happy, and he certainly wouldn’t have wanted to read some other bastard’s smug review. He would have hated the reviewer, certainly, and he would probably have decided there and then that the album was no good. He began to worry that his ecstatic praise might have done Naked a disservice: now nobody—none of the real fans, anyway, and it was difficult to imagine that many other people would bother with it—would be able to listen to it without prejudice. Oh, it was a complicated business, loving art. It involved a lot more ill will than one might have suspected.

The responses that meant the most to him came via e-mail, from the Crowologists he knew well. Ed West’s e-mail said, simply, “Fuck me. Gimme. Now.” Geoff Old-field’s said (with unnecessary cruelty, Duncan thought), “That, my friend, was your moment in the sun. Nothing quite as good will ever happen to you again.” John Tay lor went for a quote, from “The Better Man”: “Luck is a disease / I don’t want it near me.” He created a mailing list and started sending them all the tracks, one by one. Tomorrow morning, a handful of middle-aged men would be regretting that they had gone to bed much too late.

three

Annie had thought she might be stuck teaching forever, and she’d hated the job so much