The gambiarras master made a pneumograph to measure Canario’s heartbeat. During the experiment he asked Canario to drink some water and sing. Under the squiggly line made by Canario’s heartbeat he drew arrows: AGUA CANTOU
Jimmy had fourth grade piano and several years of choir practice; Renton who I was jealous of used to play the flute and had started learning the bass. The drummer, Simon Penderglass, was a friend of Wolff. Wolff who later on became quite a well-known and successful artist was living at the time with the Doc. A nurse friend of the Doc’s up at the hospital called Reedy was roped into to play harmonica. Renton and Jimmy had written just the four songs, Nitrate Girl, Hapless Boy, Smackhead and of course Rhinoceros. There was another in the pipeline – provisional title Egg Beater, but they did not have time to practice it before the gig, and anyway only Jimmy liked it. The name of the band of course had to be Rhinoceros (after the Ionesco play Jimmy and Renton had seen and failed to understand in spite of the exegesis (in French) by the self-same playwright). – What else? – Maggie, Wolff’s girlfriend made a huge poster of a Rhinoceros with a yellow horn. Wolff also had this idea for bulbous Rhinoceros medallions, but where were they going to get a metallurgist at the fifteenth hour? To their credit the audience did not walk away when Jimmy stepped up to the stage in the beer garden at the back of the Queen; he was wearing a pair of ripped jeans held together with a safety pin at the crotch. They opened with a cover as everyone always did at that time with Jumpin’ Jack Flash. The version was chaotic but held together by Jimmy’s Jagger swagger, somehow believable as well as having everyone in stitches. Then they did Nitrate Girl and Hapless Boy, which went down okay as punk and indie songs did at the time. They did a Little Walter cover with Reedy, and a Burning Spear track Renton hashed, two fingers running up and down his bass like little pigs on the way to market. Then they did Smackhead (on the chorus everyone smacked their heads) and finally Rhinoceros. The set was about thirty-five minutes. At around twenty minutes, I stepped up on stage and read my first ever four poems. All were very short. Nowadays I tend to write longer poems, but these were no more than three of four lines – inspired by Japanese haikus. I was grateful not to be heckled, as Jimmy launched into… Nitrate Girl, followed by a reprise of Smackhead.
The next step I suppose was when I was at university. Jimmy was down in London working as a painter and decorator. I had stopped going to lectures, but amused myself in the campus library with poetry. Through my reading of Keats, I had become interested in the troubadours and the Provencal poets. When I was not pretending to decipher Provencal French and dreaming about a troubadour life, I was dreaming about shagging Veronica. Veronica was a big-breasted lippy feminist, but I pursued her anyway. If we were always at loggerheads, to be honest Veronica was at loggerheads with everyone. There I would be sitting on the edge of her bed, wondering how I was going to take off her lumpy jumper – either that, or trying to persuade myself I was not a sexist rapist. All this, however, is beside the point. I remember, one day, I was with my mate, Scottish Andy who was also into poetry and Veronica. Who wasn’t on that campus! We had decided to go to the arts centre. The arts centre, which, needless to say, was one of our favourite haunts, was always putting on seasons of German and Japanese films. Through the arts centre we became acquainted with video installations, even though we – that is, Scottish Andy and I thought video was beneath our contempt.
One evening, the arts centre was closed; we were traipsing round the backstreets of the city when we came across a tiny bar that did steins. Scottish Andy said we had to have the steins; I had never tried a stein, so we ordered our steins and sat down at one of the tiny tables. At the back of the bar were two guys, both wearing cowboy shirts and cowboy boots. They called themselves the Rhinos, which for me was fortuitous. That evening, I got drunk on steins and started talking to the Rhinos, who were Charlie Drake and Joe Drummond. They played an acoustic set off one amp. It was all very sparse, and I loved the sparseness of it.
My bed-sit was in a tall old Victorian house on the Derby Road. We recorded those songs by which I mean Feminist Hussy, Guy’s Wake and Old Rhino Blade on a cassette player with cushions and pillows around the door and windows. When we played it back, it had I thought this remarkable fragile sound, punctured by the banging on the ceiling from my Moroccan (medic student) neighbour. Thinking about it, I wish I still had the cassette, but Veronica in a fit of pique threw it out the window onto the street where it was crushed by the passing cars. I remember this because it was the first time I had seen her fully naked, and I had a huge erection.
There you have it. After uni, Charlie came down to London (Joe was still living with his mum) I introduced Charlie to Jimmy. They formed the band called tentatively Quasimodo and then one evening when Jimmy had wax in his ears the Q-tips. – With a band, I believe, the alchemy is all-important. At that moment, it seemed to me, the alchemy between all three, Jimmy, Charlie and Joe, was about as good as you could get in a band in the middle of the nineties. They had this very cool, intimate acoustic sound, which was just what was required for those songs not yet born but waiting to be born in their alembic. – And, of course, there was Jimmy’s voice. How can you describe a voice like Jimmy’s? – He had a voice like an angel on crack.
Here I suppose I need to tell you about my old true colours notebook that I thought nobody would ever read, not even the academics in a hundred years’ time when I was pushing up daisies. In this notebook I would keep what I thought of as my fan’s lists. One of these lists was inspired by a Soviet theme… This list came to me when I was listening to Soldier’s Tale, Pictures at an Exhibition, Hungarian Dances. Through Mussorgsky and Stravinsky and so it would seem perversely Brahms I came by association to the Silent Prophet and City under Siege (for which read Stalingrad) and inevitably: Notes from the Underground:
Notes from the underground Silent prophet No more pictures at an exhibition No more Hungarian dances It’s just a soldier’s tale City under siege
If the others were amused by my working practices, in those early, fortuitous sessions, we came up with a new list: what we called the Old Timers’ List. We would think of an album and two tracks. The rule was two tracks per album: Sweet Black Angel, Torn and Frayed, Fascination, Win… Together with this would be snatches of song, Year of the dog, season of the bitch. Halloween Jack … real cool cat. It did not matter if we remembered them correctly, but one rule was that we would not include choruses. Then we would move onto pairs of suggested random images e.g. cherub fountain, big balls. This would produce:
Black angel drinking from a big-balled cherub fountain;
Such fascination for Halloween Jack!
The Q-tips did not record that track, or if they did, the tape got lost. My old true colours notebook, however, is testimony to the fact that we came up with it.
We also had another list that we called our Dada or Miro list, after Suzy’s coffee table book of Miro’s paintings. Those private symbols, lines and squiggles in private dream spaces were in themselves rich pickings, but we were also lured by the titles. One such title inspired a lyric called Big Dipper that the Q-tips actually did record later. Here you can see the influence of different lists:
Give me a line, Give me slack, See the lion stretching his paw into the big dipper See the virgin stripper on her back See the archer about to strike Mr. Jones’s made up under lights Dancing in the dark with his mike…
That Song! – It was an act of pure reverence!
Which I like to think is how Jimmy got the idea for what he called his Love Mixes. The love mixes he wrote everywhere: on the inside cover of books, beer mats, bus tickets and business cards… Later they were transferred into a black moleskin notebook Suzy had given him. Among those love mixes was one I particularly liked called Ghost Parting. When he showed them to the band, Charlie and Joe were enthusiastic. They wanted to get some money together, go into the studio and start recording. Joe, who was always luckier than Jimmy or Charlie, had met a producer, Giles Never Smiles at a party and given him the tape.
Of course, I still have the first EP: Car Boot Sale – I’ve never played it but kept it in its original wrapper. I also have some old tapes, which do not always tally with the CD released of Assignations (After Eric Romer; Girl in The Green Dress; Tearoom des Artistes; Caveat Emptor; and Junk Aesthetique). Not just as a fan, but also from the point of view of a critic, I believe that it is my favourite Q-tips album. There is another song on the tape, Ninth Victim, which they put on Cold War Killer (that includes Sleeper, A nightclub in Hamburg, Dorian Gray, Dusseldorf Blues, the Wolverines, and Checkpoint Charlie Stomp). That song, of course, which is about the Yorkshire Ripper has nothing to do with the Cold War theme, but Charlie who was from Leeds I remember argued at the time it had a curious kind of serendipity with the title track, so it went in. I no longer have a copy of the long album they made afterwards but never released and never gave a title to. (It was recorded in 1993 and early 1994), but I remember some of the songs, because, as always, I was present at some of their sessions. Stretch limo, Scuttlebutt and Jism, Digger’s Blues, Country House (a very quirky electronic version of the old drinking song), Plonk and Calvados and of course Wild Rover, suggested by yours truly. I remember it was the last song they recorded in the studio after Country House. – It was just Jimmy’s voice and Joe’s guitar.
After that, my own life took a turn; I had had enough of London and markets and working for peanuts. I trained as an English teacher and I went abroad to France. From France I went to Greece and then to Italy and Spain; from time to time I heard what was happening to the Q-tips. They had sketched an album called Big Daddy Lawman; it was going to be a mixture of punk and country. In all they got it down to eight songs, only five of which were ever recorded because they fell out quite spectacularly over a song called Old Man Texas. I heard all this later from Joe, who was present for the slapping as he called the episode (Charlie slaps Jimmy/ Jimmy laughs in his face/Charlie storms off).
Jimmy and Charlie never spoke again. Not long after this, I heard from Joe that Charlie had got together a new band with his girlfriend called The Overwrought Harmonies. I heard they were a good or, as we liked to think, interesting band. They released a video produced by the traitor Giles “Never Smiles”. Charlie sitting in the back of a taxi, singing a very sarcastic and bitter love song, not what you would expect on MTV. The title if I remember correctly was Through the Shredder. It was very funny; Joe told me Jimmy loved it. He was pleased for Charlie, and he thought – in fact, he was sure Charlie was going to make it. Perhaps he was jealous, but not so jealous that he was going to lose any sleep about it.
Meanwhile, the Jimster wrote to me and told me he had embarked on a new project, based on some short stories we’d written together five years back and I had forgotten all about. The stories, which ran to around a thousand words, included Comfort Marsh, Pilot(!), Mister Wiseman and some others the titles of which I have forgotten. Jimmy had in mind an ambient record, rather Eno-esque silences punctured by glissandos and reverbs. But, having recently acquired a video camera, he also wanted to turn it into a multi-media experience. He wanted our mate Wolff to do some artwork. He wanted Joe to play his twelve-string over percussive piano. He wanted the listener to hear his voice – and I quote from memory – telling those old stories of ours at times hurriedly at times grotesquely at times dreamily.
Well, I did not hear anything more about that plan. Suzy told me once Jimmy cut himself, though – to be honest – I thought that was just her complaining about his artistic temperament till Jimmy slipped out of my orbit. Everyone’s for that matter.
After the Q-tips split, Joe found his niche as a session musician.
Joe never fell out with Charlie. In fact, he played on that album of his – Ghost Parting – the one that came out in 97 and made Charlie a pack of money. – We met once in a pub in Waterloo over Christmas 98 or 99 – I forget which. That was the last time for quite a while I heard anything from any of them till Charlie phoned me long distance about two weeks ago and reversed the charges. After that one success Charlie got shafted by Giles Never Smiles. He is married now and living back in Leeds. He says he wants to hook up with Joe, who has bought a flat in London Fields, and he said we must go and look for Jimmy…
He says he was always first and foremost a Q-tips’ fan. I don’t know if we ever will find Jimmy…. although sometimes, in idle moments, between sleeping and waking, I like to think of Jimmy singing and strumming into a tape-recorder in some pokey bedsit in the back end of nowhere.