"Eternity is Temporary" by Bill Broady (review)

["Dennis Moore" <clayboy56>]

A shell-shocked night at the Roundhouse, with Patti Smith
editorial
07 August 2006

http://www.hamhigh.co.uk/content/camden/hamhigh/whatson/story.aspx?brand=NorthLondon24&category=whatsonbooks&tBrand=northlondon24&tCategory=whatson&itemid=WeED07%20Aug%202006%2010%3A22%3A13%3A550

Bill Broady's first novel is set in a sweltering, noisy, music-filled
Camden Town in the summer of 1976. For those who think not much has
changed, here is an extract

LIKE most of my work, writes Bill Broady, the novel Eternity is
Temporary has an autobiographical basis: in the summer of 1976 I was
living above the old Chess Cafi opposite the Royal Free Hospital and
doing agency social work in northern and central London.

As a bedazzled provincial, newly arrived in the capital, it was a
particularly intense and vivid time for me. Not only was I in love but
I'd just bought a beautiful pair of stackheeled snakeskin boots from
Camden Market.

Day after day the unprecedented heat persisted, while my friends and
colleagues seemed to be behaving in odder and odder ways. There was a
curious sense that some wonderful or terrible revelation was at hand,
as if we were about to burn through to another reality, as if the
doors of eternity were creaking on their hinges. This was particularly
apparent in the music we were hearing, with the first stirrings of
punk culminating in Patti Smith's appearance at the Roundhouse.

At the time I wasn't sure whether this gig was rubbish or the best
thing I'd ever seen and heard, and it's this vertiginous sense of
extremes meeting, of boundaries blurring and then dissolving like in a
heat haze that underlies the characters and action in the book.

Back in the Roundhouse the lights were already down. As they stumbled
back to their seats, Patti Smith came running on, breathless and
dishevelled, as if she too had been on the railway lines. She wore
skin-tight black Levis and an unbuttoned white grandad shirt over a
green T-shirt with a Gold Lion of Judah on the chest. Her dark hair
was in a ragged grown-out bob, framing a haggard, shadowed face. Her
glittering eyes swept the audience and Evan felt his ocular nerves
throb at the momentary connection. As the rest of the band appeared,
she dropped on to all fours and did a few press-ups, slyly pushing off
her left knee.

No one counted in the first number: they just threw themselves at it.
Not until the chorus did Evan recognise Lou Reed's We're Gonna Have a
Real Good Time Together. The guitarist gave the lie to the notion that
strapping on a guitar can make anyone look good. With lank,
side-parted hair and pebble glasses, he was like a stiff-jointed
puppet, clamped to the ground by diver's boots. If anything, he
sounded even worse. Although the pianist looked like Richard
Clayderman, his hands blurred like Cecil Taylor's over the keys: he
was, however, inaudible. Patti's jumping up and down left her too
breathless to sing. Although she was sparrow-thin, there was an
audible thud whenever her ballet-pumps hit the stage: the scaffolding
poles quivered. She kept on spitting: white and clotted like chewed
paper, it was not absorbed by the boards.

They ground to a halt. "And now Redondo Beach!" Patti shouted into the
silence. "It's a place where women love other women!" The feminists,
Adrea noticed, did not react: at least they weren't throwing the
tampons yet. The ban lurched into a broken-bagged reggae rhythm but
Patti's hooting was more Red Indian than West Indian. She continued to
spit: in front of the microphone a small white pyramid was beginning
to form.

"The guardians of history will be rewarded with history!" Patti began
to chant. Taking off her thick black belt, she lashed the stage. The
buckle came down hard on her left foot, and she tried to disguise her
subsequent hopping as a dervish dance. A roadie carried off the belt,
holding it between thumb and forefinger, as if it had been a poisonous
snake. Who were these guardians of history? Adrea wondered. The band?
The audience? And was it a good or bad thing to be? She had never seen
anything like this before. Patti was certainly different from Lulu or
Sandie Shaw. Adrea could swear that her nose kept changing shape: at
one moment like a potato, then like an awl, and when she threw her
head back it seemed to disappear altogether. It was hard to imagine
Lady Day flicking the snot off her fingers.

The whole thing was a shambles. And yet, Evan noticed, nobody had
left. There wasn't much applause but there was no booing either: the
audience seemed to be in shock.

"And now we'd like to do something for Keith Relf," said Patti,
slipping on a white Stratocaster that hung down to her knees. "He was
beautiful. He was a genius. He was one of the inventors of feedback."
There was no doubt that dying was a good career move, Evan thought. In
life, Keith had looked and sounded like a window cleaner but now death
had transfigured him. Patti began to scrabble with both hands at the
open strings, like a dog trying to dig up a bone. The guitarist
lurched towards her, like Frankenstein's monster. Presumably they
intended a howling threnody like Hendrix's Star-Spangled Banner but
unfortunately neither of them could get their guitars to feed back.
They held them in front of the monitors, twiddled the volume controls,
rammed the machine heads into the amplifiers: nothing worked. The
pianist still hammered silently away, while the drummer reverted to
Take Five from his Joe Morello tutor book. At last there came a faint
whistling, repeated three time: exactly the note and duration, Adrea
realised, of her old friend, the singing straw.

Patti decided to take it out on the microphone stand. As she shook and
kicked at it, a new sound started up: a deep sustained blare which
then broke into yelps and ululations that gradually took on a
comprehensible form. Leaning forward, knees together, she appeared to
be vomiting out the words.

At this moment, something unexpected happened. The skin of Adrea's
face suddenly felt hot and tight: the whole building seemed to buck
and her hands grabbed the seat in front. Evan could hardly breath: he
saw that the hairs were rising on his bare forearms.

Both felt as if, deep inside their heads, some connection had been
made or broken and, as the sound rushed into their previously blocked
ears, they understood this new language of raw need and pain.