Back On The Road! Rest of the World dates TBA!!! #ResurgeTour #TheBlackOuts Jon Stryke – #5 Most Distinctive Voice In Rock History (Melody Maker); No 17 in the All-Time Guitar Hero Pantheon (Rolling Stone); and the presiding genius behind no less than three entries on Q Magazine’s Ultimate 200 Greatest Albums Ever Recorded List – squinted at these words just tweeted on his behalf, and threw his phone away in disgust. It skidded away over the artfully distressed white-oak floor, and came to rest under the door of the marbled en-suite. Screen side up. Too lucky as always. He sank back with disgust into the cooling folds of his breathable linen duvet. Around him, on the giant emperor island of his bed, four or five guitars lay discarded at odd, disrespectful angles, like beached flamingos in rigor mortis. Did they really look like flamingos? Well, the pink one did. Your first gat cost more than all the rest, he had sung on ‘Alt Babe’. He remembered choosing the word gat because guitar had too many syllables and he didn’t want to say ax, didn’t want to sound like a white American rock dude. (He didn’t actually remember this, of course; but he remembered recalling it for that tenth anniversary documentary back in 1990. Though even that may have been the memory of a memory: those were blurry times.) And it was true; he’d had to scrimp and beg to get that second-hand Fender Telecaster. Now the gats and axes were everywhere in the house, like discarded fag butts. He’d found one face down in the hot tub the other day. Mulling the idea of a scented soak, he became aware of splashes and cries wafting in gentle summer waves from the long, wide heated pool outside. The Envelopes were in there again with their three kids. He expiated his First-World unease at employing a married Filipino couple to look after his house and basically run his life for him by giving their kids the run of the place and paying for their education at a local private school. (He called them The Envelopes because they were from Manilla.) To be more completely honest, he also hoped to make them feel endebted enough not to run off with stories to the tabloids. (A lesson learnt the hard way with previous personnel.) Not that there was much to kiss and tell these days. But he was rich and famous enough, his music enough of a presence on the soundtracks of enough people’s formative years, to be worth hanging out to dry once in a while. Plus he looked like shit now. Not especially awful for his age, but his insistence on sticking with the trademark mascara, black nails and high-spiked orange hair would be the perfect visual accompaniment to any tale of evil rock-legend scandal. At least at the start, the look could be passed off as ironic, a deliberate undercutting of his obvious if conventional good looks. I never liked your face / You made beauty into a race, as he’d put it on ‘Plastic Icon’. Now he just looked like a pantomime nonce. But it was too late to be anything else. He’d tried going plain once, circa 1989, growing his hair long and foppish, stripping off the make-up and coming over all real and unplugged. There was even a song to go with the look, ‘And This Is Me’. It was about a TV impressionist who couldn’t remember who he was once he stopped doing the voices. Be yourself, they cry / But I just want to die! Instead of removing all his layers, as he’d done in that ridiculous video, he should have added 17 more masks. No one bought any of it. Soon Kat – officially The BlackOuts manager – would be on the phone, following up on her tweeted announcement. First world tour for 11 years! The album could be delayed no longer either. Not because it wasn’t finished; it had, in fact, been basically ready for over two years. He and Mosh had spent six months folding in all the extra layers of guitarry soundscapey wash the fans expected, putting to bed the tracks the band had laid down almost four years ago. The last time they’d all been together. ‘A Trilogy of Zeros’ was the title they’d all (dis)agreed on. No one liked it at all, and these days that counted as consensus. The title had a sort of wilful obscurity to it: there were no obvious threes on the album, either lyrically or structurally, and there was nothing zero-like about the content, which was, in fact, rich, intense and wildly vocal. It was the best thing they’d ever do, he was pretty sure of that. By the end of recording it, after 40 straight days of booze and drugs and fights in a converted farmhouse studio in the Camargue, no one was speaking. Always a good sign, musically at least. A notification pinged on another of his phones. Jon had been married in the 80s, divorced in the 90s, and become a Dad in the naughties, in circumstances which remained unclear to him. But unlike many of his ilk he was rather fond of science, and not one to seek to undercut the findings of a discreet DNA test. He was dismayed to read that his son Zak – whom he had only ever met a couple of times and who refused to have anything to do with him nowadays – was releasing an album with the band he fronted, Cradle Cap. No doubt Zak was proud to have got his musical career off the ground without leaning on the resources of Fortune Magazine’s #11 Highest-Earning Musician Still Performing Today. But you had to bet that his bandmates urged him to mention the old man at every opportunity. (Quite a good name for a band, Cradle Cap, Jon thought, especially when the prevailing view was that there were no good names left.) The father-son connection had got out anyway, of course, and the reviewers never missed a cheap shot. ‘Not, alas, much of a chip off the old rock block,’ wrote one, of Zak’s first effort. ‘It’s said that Jon Stryke has had little to do with his son’s vanity project,’ went another. ‘And more, frankly, is the pity.’ Comparisons are shite, as they say, and going down this road Zak would never be free of them. Jon didn’t think this out of vanity, only because he knew well the media’s lack of imagination. Sort of similarly, being called The BlackOuts had proved a hostage to press literalism. From the outset, music journos were affronted if the band didn’t live up to its name on every possible occasion. No one – on stage or in the audience – should still be able to stand at the end of a gig. Every concert should entail the emergency hospitalisation of at least one bloodied guitarist. And no tour should conclude without at least one band member ending up in rehab. True, this stuff all tended to happen. But it was tedious how people came to expect it. Rehab. Tours. Ugh. Jon had been clean for six years now – of which he remembered far more than the previous thirty – but he still woke from hungover dreams of life on the road. Months-long parties with Loz and Fargo and Trav. Orgies in Memphis. Fighting on a Rio skyscraper rooftop with Trav, and somehow neither of them dying. (When was he ever not fighting with Trav?) Death threats in Texas after ‘Mucous Messiah’ came out. Near-death experiences in Perugia (reading too much Burroughs) and the notorious dwarf-fishing incident in Amsterdam. (Not proud of it now, but every rock band needs a dwarf anecdote, don’t they?) The crowd-surfing slipped disc in Bruges, leading to the in-house doctor with a pill for every mood. The coke tour, the ketamine tour, the acid tour. The Beer-Only Tour (inspired by someone’s well-meaning fiancée) that had quickly descended into the Everything-But-Beer Tour, culminating in Trav’s coma in Tokyo. The light show that gave everyone panic attacks. That dreadful backing film they went out with on the Quantum Treachery tour in ’03. Watching that zombie mask morph into a cheetah’s face 83 nights in a row on a 60-foot screen, and still not knowing what it meant or who signed off on it. That weird black magic session in Madrid. No one will speak of it now, but he hadn’t slept for a year afterwards. And now: the album release that could surely be put off no longer. He’d been stringing the fans along for nine years now, ever since the band’s last release of original material, 2014’s double LP ‘Heaven Bent’. ‘This next one is going to be our darkest, bleakest, angriest one yet. A sort of fuck-you to existence.’ Really. Why did he say such shite? South America, where the international leg of the tour would kick off, scared him. It was a scary place in itself, of course, even if they tended to sweep through most of it in air-conditioned coaches and tinted limos. This time, in fact, he’d heard they’d be taking helicopters from hotel rooftop to venue each time. To hit the street was to risk starting a full-scale brawl. That time Loz set fire to his room in Buenos Aires, the hotel had been evacuated at 3am, and they’d still managed to get mobbed. There was something about their music that did something to the people in that part of the world. And the people, in their turn, wanted to meet you in person and thank you for it. Never mind if you got crushed to death in the process. Somewhere, the band had passed through the naff barrier and come out again on the cool edge of things. This could happen if you lived long enough. The recent R&B samplings of their early stuff and the appearance of now-iconic songs on arthouse movie soundtracks all seemed to help. The kids who loved them didn’t seem sarcastic about it. Not now anyway. But fame is a tightrope. Fans of the band persisted in calling themselves BlackHeads, which wasn’t a nickname that had aged well. And now social media and deep fakes could retro-choreograph any sins he’d failed to commit in reality: he was one trumped-up TikTok grooming scandal away from a bottomless fall. He liked making music still, liked scribbling down random thoughts on random bits of paper that might become songs. Like he was an artist, like he had… a process. Here was one, on the back of an envelope: I picked you up but you put me down / Pulled your punches with the same old frown. And another, scrawled on a till receipt: My mother and my father are the children of my pain / something something [unintelligible] gospel of disdain… He screwed that one up and threw it after his phone. The dark, traumatic childhood was part of the Jon Stryke myth. It had been news to his mum, who had given him a blamelessly bourgeois upbringing in a little village outside Southend-on-Sea. She died before she could ever forgive him. Another message. Time to get the band back together… followed by an unusual combination of emojis in which he saw false hope, fake enthusiasm and troubled ambiguity. Kat knew him well. He and Kat slept together, of course. It was easier that way. They didn’t have a name for what they did, what they were. Sometimes she went away for a while; he didn’t ask where. But they always found themselves back here together, doing the Suduko and eating blinis in bed, listening to the junior Envelopes splashing in the pool below. Like, perhaps, they could pretend they were theirs? He tore off the back page of a magazine and wrote: Together, alone | Absent, but home | Hear the cries outside | Say we never lied… On the flat sunroof alongside his bedroom, two pigeons chuntered through a formulaic mating dance. There were always pigeons. He’d circled the world five times and seen none of it. What he remembered from The BlackOut’s many tours boiled down to a single, endlessly repeated moment: waking at dawn in an unknown city, staring out from a luxury cell on the 33rd floor across smog and skyscape to a distant freeway. A confusion of con trails, the airless hum of the aircon. A stranger in the bed. Heart plunging, brain drowning, soul sick. A fish in a bowl. And on the outside, looking in, as always, a gang of pigeons. Legs stunted, feet missing. Plumage like an industrial wasteland. Cooing and prancing and shagging in their own shit. Fucking pigeons. This time out, he thought, I’m going to visit an aquarium in every city. He was fond of seahorses and turtles and manta rays. Wanna look a shark in the face / Wanna feel my blood race. Want to be outside the bubble for once. ‘And this is me’. Trav hadn’t spoken to him for three years, but Jon knew he was waiting for the call. He’ll never call me, because he knows I’ll always call him. It was all slapstick between them; even their conversation was stylised combat. You twat the other with the frying pan, then brace for the reply. The only truly hurtful thing either could do would be fail to pass the pan back. Loz was loved-up in Helsinki, apparently. He’d resent this trip more than anyone, even though he was contractually obliged. (Jon, after all, had been paying him generously to stand by for this moment for several years now. It was time to activate him, like a sleeper spy.) Loz – who once forced The BlackOuts to add a date in Lima and make a 7000-mile detour, just so he could pop in on a Peruvian girl he fancied – was no one’s fool. He would know that no relationship survives a world tour. No normal relationship anyway. Mosh, who lived in the other wing of this house, said he couldn’t wait. He was like a kid… because he was a kid. Hard to know how the fans would take to a 25-year-old non-original band member in the line-up. (Then again, hard to know how the fans would take to learning that Mosh made most of the music these days.) Jon wasn’t sure if ligging with a bunch of old men with false hips, hearing aid, hair transplants and high blood pressure would quite live up to the younger man’s expectations either. But then, as he sang on ‘Older and Colder’: It’s not for me to accelerate your disillusion / You’ll get there soon enough. This tour, as always, Jon would spend most of his time on stage in tears. It was a badge of sensitivity; the fans loved it. It’s because Jon feels so much... An email vibrated in from a fan club president based in Iceland with a questionnaire Jon must have promised to take a look at. (No surprise this; he’d learned the hard way that you do not fuck with the fan club presidents). Question 1: ‘What are your songs about?’ He started typing a message he’d never send. Memories of memories of memories. I’ve lived in a big house, with too much money and too little contact with the outside world. When things get hard – a plagiarism accusation, a cancer scare, another love-child claim – I pay to make them go away. Or rather, I pay people to make them go away for me. I write shit on scraps of paper and pretend my seven-hectare bedroom is a run-down motel. I pretend the desperate quiet is quiet despair. A girl I loved who turned me down when I was sixteen. The Dad I never really knew. The time I cried at a bus stop. The people next door who were always rowing. A dog I Ioved. Our first pub gig. The old lady over the road who stared out of her window all day. Feeling sad. Thinking I was special, and different. Hangovers. Reading books and pretending my songs channelled the nausea of existence. Being real, becoming unreal, trying to fake reality again. Being held up as a tortured voice of a generation when you haven’t left the bedroom of your cramped soul for 30 years. Having nothing important or real to sing about. This is what my songs are about. Q: ‘What are you working on next?’ I try to write now about a self I never was. A self that didn’t become famous, who experienced things that other people do. A self with tender stories of a hard life well lived. Q: ‘And your favourite memory?’ One time, in Sydney or maybe St Petersburg, we played footie in the car park with all the crew. We ran and sweated and laughed and joked. No one tiptoed round me; we were all on a level. We played into the dark and nothing else mattered. We came back to play next day, but the fans had found out and we were forced back to the hotel. Jon picked up a pink gat and scratched at some chords. A song was forming: I am the victim of a victimless crime / I am a poet exiled from rhyme. / Ah let’s go to the bingo / My random flamingo. He rustled through a bedside drawer and found yet another phone. A quick text to Mosh: Get over here when you can mate. Think I’ve just written the next single. He slumped back on a dozen pillows. It was all so embarrassingly easy. But at least he remembered now why he would embrace this 103-venue, five-continent tour that would net him millions, force him to spend eight months cooped up with the people he hated most in the world, and subject him daily to the unthinking and utterly unjustified adoration of screaming multitudes wherever he went. Because he deserved no fucking better.
Dan Brotzel is the author of a collection of short stories, Hotel du Jack (Sandstone Press), and a novel, The Wolf in the Woods (Bloodhound, forthcoming). He is also co-author of a comic novel, Work in Progress (Unbound). His new book, Awareness Daze, is an account of his attempt to observe a different awareness day/fake holiday every single day for a year. Twitter: @brotzel_fiction. Bluesky: @danbrotzel.bsky.social More at www.danbrotzel.com