tell him thereâs nothing to say, and for a moment I thought he was going to hug me.
FOUR
THE three of us go to the Harry Lauder. Things are cool with Barry now; Dick filled him in when he came back to the shop, and the two of them are doing their best to look after me. Barry has made me an elaborately annotated compilation tape, and Dick now rephrases his questions four or five times instead of the usual two or three. And they more or less insisted that I came to this gig with them.
Itâs an enormous pub, the Lauder, with ceilings so high that the cigarette smoke gathers above your head like a cartoon cloud. Itâs tatty, and drafty, and the benches have had the stuffing slashed out of them, and the staff are surly, and the regular clientele are either terrifying or unconscious, and the toilets are wet and smelly, and thereâs nothing to eat in the evening, and the wine is hilariously bad, and the bitter is fizzy and much too cold; in other words, itâs a run-of-the-mill north London pub. We donât come here that often, even though itâs only up the road, because the bands that usually play here are the kind of abysmal second-division punk group youâd pay half your wages not to listen to. Occasionally, though, like tonight, they stick on some obscure American folk/country artist, someone with a cult following which could arrive together in the same car. The pubâs nearly a third full, which is pretty good, and when we walk in Barry points out Andy Kershaw and a guy who writes for Time Out. This is as buzzy as the Lauder ever gets.
The woman we have come to see is called Marie LaSalle; sheâs got a couple of solo records out on an independent label, and once had one of her songs covered by Nanci Griffith. Dick says Marie lives here now; he read somewhere that she finds England more open to the kind of music she makes, which means, presumably, that weâre cheerfully indifferent rather than actively hostile. There are a lot of single men hereânot single as in unmarried, but single as in no friends. In this sort of company the three of usâme morose and monosyllabic, Dick nervy and shy, Barry solicitously self-censoringâconstitute a wild and massive office outing.
Thereâs no support, just a crappy PA system squelching out tasteful country-rock, and people stand around cradling their pints and reading the handbills that were thrust at them on the way in. Marie LaSalle comes onstage (as it wereâthere is a little platform and a couple of microphones a few yards in front of us) at nine; by five past nine, to my intense irritation and embarrassment, Iâm in tears, and the feel-nothing world that Iâve been living in for the last few days has vanished.
There are many songs that Iâve been trying to avoid since Laura went, but the song that Marie LaSalle opens with, the song that makes me cry, is not one of them. The song that makes me cry has never made me cry before; in fact, the song that makes me cry used to make me puke. When it was a hit, I was at college, and Charlie and I used to roll our eyes and stick our fingers down our throats when somebodyâinvariably a geography student, or a girl training to be a primary school teacher (and I donât see how you can be accused of snobbishness if all you are doing is stating the plain, simple truth)âput it on the jukebox in the bar. The song that makes me cry is Marie LaSalleâs version of Peter Framptonâs âBaby, I Love Your Way.â
Imagine standing with Barry, and Dick, in his Lemonheads T-shirt, and listening to a cover version of a Peter Frampton song, and blubbering! Peter Frampton! âShow Me the Wayâ! That perm! That stupid bag thing he used to blow into, which made his guitar sound like Donald Duck! Frampton Comes Alive, top of the American rock charts for something like seven hundred and twenty years, and bought, presumably, by every brain-dead, coke-addled
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