Read Online Gimme More by Liza Cody - Free Book Online

watches contemptuously. ‘Stir it with a wooden spoon,’ he says, ‘or stay out of my kitchen.’ Karen looks down at her hands and sees that she is trying to play a large pot of soup.
    Sometimes, late at night, when she looks at the linear beauty of a piano keyboard, she thinks of the clean, logical progression of semitones which walk, step by step, ineluctably from low A in the bass across seven octaves to high C. Cool reason and symmetry. Each scale doing the same thing yet feeling so different to the fingers. The relationship of chords, inevitable, bound together in groups by a chain made of numbers. It’s all too perfect. It excludes her. She can’t imagine who invented this ultimate music machine. A mathematical genius? An acoustition? A nerd? She doesn’t think it could possibly have been a musician.
    She imagines the kind of musician she knows rolling a spliff one night and saying, ‘Yeah. I think what we need is a machine which will render the precise tonal relationship between eighty-eight notes at the touch of a finger. Yeah – but I can’t get my head around it tonight, man.’
    Now, here she is, playing a computer which looks like a piano keyboard but which can sound like a horn, a violin, a clavichord,marimbas, percussion or raindrops. It can remember sequences. It can split. It can do just about anything short of climb on a table and dance. In fact, it can do more than Karen can think of to tell it to do.
    And here is InnerVersions in a scraggy little rehearsal room in Fulham. They are fooling around with a number called ‘Howl’. Birdie Walker looks up from her notes and says, ‘Drop in a minor chord there.’
    Flambo says, ‘Fuck off, you can’t because …’
    Karen drops in the relative minor and it sounds right. It leaves more space for the lyrics which were always too dense. And Karen wonders, ‘It’s obvious. Why didn’t I think of that?’
    But she didn’t. Birdie did.
    Birdie takes Karen to a voice coach, which alarms the shit out of Sapper and Dram.
    Birdie takes Karen to a terrifyingly cool hairdresser in Mayfair, which alarms the shit out of Flambo.
    â€˜What’s she doing to you?’ he says. ‘More to the point –
why?
Are you being groomed for fucking
stardom?
Is that your game? Because if it is, I’m telling you right now, this ain’t a girl band. Never was, never will be.’
    Corky says, ‘We need a bit of colour.’
    â€˜Then Sapper can dress up like a drag queen for all I care. He’s the singer.’
    Sapper doesn’t say anything. In the last few weeks he’s noticed that Karen is singing a lot more harmonies than Dram. He’s noticed that whereas Dram’s harmonies are there or thereabouts, Karen’s are accurate. It makes him think he should be more accurate with the melody line. It’s an unnerving thought because he’s already turned down the offer of a voice coach and cut himself off from a chance of immediate and quick improvement.
    It seems as if two camps have formed, with Sapper and Dram supporting Flambo, while Karen and Corky support Birdie. Sapper is beginning to wonder if he chose the wrong camp.
    To begin with it was obvious: Flambo is a mate, Flambo likes Sapper’s voice, and his ideas. Flambo is the drummer and he isn’t in competition with Sapper. That threat always came from Dram. ButFlambo said it was creative to have artistic tension between singer and lead guitarist – look at Aerosmith, look at Oasis. There were a million examples. And Sapper agreed.
    Now, though, Sapper is confused. Yesterday he had a sudden insight, and he is often confused by his own insight.
    They were working on one of his songs – a song that neither he, Flambo nor Dram thought needed work. It just needed recording. But Birdie said it could do with a change of perspective.
    Why? It’s a song called, ‘Won’t Go Home With