Espedair Street

'Sure, man.

I went to the toilet to cry.

Rick came and got me twenty minutes later, after the management became worried and sent people in to ask if I was all right.

So they all say; I don't remember. I just sat in the cubicle, silent, hearing nothing, until Rick's voice brought me back. The funny thing was, I didn't even cry. I got up from the table, where my tears had been welling, and on the walk from the table to the gents my eyes went dry, like there was some terrible sucking emptiness inside me, drawing it all back in, soaking down into some strange, awful pit inside me.

I was led from the toilets like a zombie. Rick wanted to get a doctor but I said I'd be all right.

He walked me back to the folly.

'You sure you'll be okay, Dan?'

'Yeah; I'll be fine. Really; fine. It's just, I hadn't heard. Thanks for telling me.'

'That's okay. Look; why not come back to the hotel; we'll get you a room. You don't want to sleep in this big old place by yourself.'

'I'm better here. I'll be okay.'

'You sure?'

'Yeah, positive.'

'Well, I'll see you for breakfast, at the hotel, all right? You promised. I don't leave until after eleven. Breakfast, okay? About nine.'

'Nine. Yeah.'

'Okay then; you sure you'll be all right?'

'Yeah. Fine. See you for breakfast.'

'Okay; good night, Dan.'

'Good night.'

TWELVE

Yes, it is like sex. Performance; the show, the live act.

We had never been bad at it, and by now we were very good. I always thought I was the weak link, standing there just playing non-virtuoso bass and occasionally tapping my foot, but according to some people I was the base, too; something the others could build on; a rock, a foundation. Well, so they say. I think too many things are over- analysed, and a lot of the effort's wasted, just unnecessary. We were popular; end of story and so what?

But it is like sex. Of course. Getting out there and doing it, under the bright darkness of the hiding lights, in the bowl or beneath the arch, after the build-up of tension and the slow engorging of the venue where the people sit and stand together, sharing that warmth and sweat and scent, sharing the same obsession, the same fixation and anticipation. Oh, you enter into it, you become part of it; secreted beneath, preparing nervously in some distant dressing room, you can usually hear, you can always sense; you can taste it.

And there, suddenly appearing, in the blaze and smoke and the crashing chords, or just drifting in, like we did once, pretending to be road crew, fiddling with the gear, then starting to play, one at a time, almost casually, so that people only realised slowly, and the roar grew slowly, swelling and filling the place around us.. the initial nerves evaporating, the beat setting in, taking over, governing. And the greater rhythm, the light and shade of slower songs and faster songs and the few spoken intervals, when either Davey or Christine could just stop, listening and gauging and feeling, and mumble or shout or scream or just talk reasonably, make a joke; whatever fitted the mood, whatever moved us on, whatever kept that unstated game-plan on course and sent us all forward again.

To the climax, to the big finish that was one of many, to the stamping, chanting, swaying recalls, the encores, and the anticipated fetishes of old favourites, the old textures everybody knew and could join in with and be part of. Finally, sweating, betowelled, the lights back on, a last, quieting, basically acoustic, two-person finale, to smooth the raw exhausted edges of that ecstatic energy away; a last scene of touch and tenderness, like a breathed post-coital stroking, like a hug, before the people go, drained, fulfilled, buzzing into the dark streets and home.

Sometimes you thought you could go on forever and never stop, sometimes you just wanted it all never to end; there were ten times like that for everyone of the few when you just weren't in the mood and it was done — though professionally, and to the insensitive, just as excitingly — mechanically, by rote.

But when it did seem you could keep going forever, time went odd, and it was as though it had stopped, or vastly extended, stretching out... yet when it was all over, when it had all gone and you were thinking about it, back in normality, everything within that singularity, everything about that unutterably different period of time seemed to have taken up only one single instant. Sometimes, whole tours were like that, as though it had all happened to somebody else and you were another person entirely and had only heard about it, second hand, third hand, at any number of removes.

You played, and you were part of it as it was part of you; you were no less you — in fact, you felt more alive, more alert and capable and... coherent — but, at the same time, though continually conscious of that differentiation, you were integrated too, a part not apart; a component in something that was the product, not the sum, of its constituents.

A sort of ecstasy, all right; a charging, pulsing sense of shared joy; a bodily delight felt as much in the brain as in the guts and skin and the beating heart.

Ah, to go on and on like that, you thought; to be at that level forever... Well, it was impossible, of course. It was light and shade again, the sheer contrast of the mundane and the fabulous; the dull grey weight of the endless workaday days, and the bright, startling burst of light in the darkness, as though the five or more of us on stage before those thousands, even tens of thousands, were a concentration of excitement, glamour, life; the very pinpoint place where all those ordinary lives somehow focused, and ignited.

I never did work out who took energy from whom, who was really exploited, who was, if you like, on top. Sure they paid, so that act might be called prostitution, but, like a lot of bands, we actually lost out on some tours. Playing live, we gave them their money's worth, sometimes more. The albums were where we coined it in, not the tours. You paid your pounds or your dollars or your yen for the particular wavy pattern of gouged, printed vinyl, for the hidden noise a diamond could bring out, or for a certain rearrangement of magnetic particles on a thin length of tape, and that was us making a living, thank you very much. Me especially, me more than the rest, even though we'd come to an agreement where the others got between five and ten per cent of the composition rights, as an arrangement fee (well, it was only fair).

But playing, touring, going up there and doing never quite the same thing each night, or every second night; that was the buzz, those were the times that made you feel you were really doing something different from everybody else, something worthwhile. God knows it got to me, and I always did stay in the background. What it was like for Davey or Christine, the binary stars of that focal point, standing at the ground zero of our self-created storm, I can't even imagine.

And it was addictive. You always thought you could give it up, but you always found you wanted more, and it was worth a lot of time and effort and expense to make sure you did. The applause, the screams, the shouts and yells, the stamping feet, the crowds and the ingenious, mad or pathetic attempts to make it through our layers of defence to get to see us individually, one-to-one, just to look, or to hug, or to gibber, or to pass on a tape and entreat.

For Davey and Christine, at the epicentre of it all, it meant more than it did to me, and, because they were different people from me, because they felt almost like a different species sometimes, they lapped it up, they revelled in it, they drank it deep. I tried, even with just the pale version of the fame that was my share, but I couldn't take to it naturally, the way they did.

It frightened me. For a long time it wasn't too bad anyway, and then for a longer time after that it was new, different and interesting and exciting, but then, after the first few tours, it started to get to me...

The crowds, the sheer weight and press of them. The invisible, besieging hordes out there in the darkness, baying and bellowing and stamping their feet. The way it took so many of them so long to recognise a track...