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massive ironwork of the Eisener Steg rose up behind Derek’s head, carrying pedestrians across the Main.
    The US tour had not ended well and, from my perspective anyway, there had been a feeling that the dumping was coming. This was our difficult third album and we had outsmarted ourselves. We had never been paid more, never had so much at stake. It was a long way from shopping demos around and hoping someone somewhere might take an interest.
    Third time around, we locked ourselves away in Malibu for weeks, months, racking up huge studio bills, hiring and firing session musos. Derek behaved like Nero. Maybe I did too. I had turned up with some songs that were mostly done and a few half there, but Derek – given to grandiose metaphor at the best of times – arrived with a pile of ideas straight from an ugly seventies acid trip. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had turned up one morning with a puffy shirt and a sword, and a Celtic princess he’d befriended the night before. But there were great ideas in there too, and glimpses of a vision that might be too epic to contain.
    After about six weeks of nothing getting back to New York but bad stories, we had a surprise visit from a few of the senior people at the music company. They turned up with boxloads of Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and played it as though they just happened to be in the neigh bourhood and thought they might as well drop in.
    â€˜Mind if we listen to some of what you’ve been doing?’ one of them said after his second decaf skinny latte, as if it was an afterthought.
    We played a few tracks and they listened studiously, and without moving. When they love you, you get some middle-aged-guy-type music-appreciation movements – the nodding head, the tapping foot, sometimes more – but they weren’t giving us any of that.
    â€˜We haven’t heard the single yet?’ It was somewhere between a statement and a question, and it came from the one of the three I had met before. His name was Karl. He was a vice president of something.
    â€˜We’re not about singles,’ Derek said.
    And Karl said, ‘I know that. But is there a big song? You owe a lot to one big song, remember. Still Water, Iris, Drops of Jupiter – those songs make bands. They sell albums, they book out arenas, commercial radio plays them until they’ve put your grandchildren through college. We’re budgeting for six million units with this album, but a big song could take it past twelve.’
    â€˜No pressure though,’ Paul, our drummer, said, and Karl said, ‘That’s right,’ and smiled. How many times had he, or someone like him, had the same conversation with the Goo Goo Dolls in the years after Iris had worked its big-song magic for them? He dusted doughnut sugar from his hand and asked where the bathroom was.
    â€˜I thought they were all big songs,’ Derek said quietly and only to me, once they had left.
    The last strand of that conversation unwound that evening in Frankfurt, almost a year later, when Derek took the call from our New York manager saying that he had had a meeting with Karl, and they were cutting us loose.
    We ordered another round of beers in tall half-litre glasses, and not a lot was said. The beer was cloudy and slightly sweet, and I could taste bananas and citrus and cloves. Around us people ate fat sausages and schnitzels. We were under an umbrella – an orange umbrella emblazoned with the Schoefferhofer name in a Germanic script, with three ancient-looking gold medals above it – but the sun had gone and the wind rushed in as a huge barge loaded with rusty scrap metal pushed by. Three of us – Derek, Darren and I – had been part of Butterfish since before the first US deal. Paul was from Melbourne and had joined after the first album. Then we added Ben – from Cambridge, Massachusetts – just in time for the This is Spinal Tap remake that was Written in Sand,