Rock and Hard Places Page 12

  But there are good questions from the floor afterwards, and some books are sold, and I head for Bristol two nights later suffused with an optimism which, it proves, is as hilariously misplaced as an air horn at a chess tournament. Despite the lengthy interview I’d done with the local BBC radio station, my audience at the Borders branch on Bristol’s handsome Clifton Promenade consists, in its entirety, of the parents of an ex-girlfriend. I add the entire populations of Somerset and Gloucestershire to the burgeoning list of people who’ll be sorry when I’m famous, sign all the copies of the book the store has in stock so they can’t send them back, and at least get taken out to dinner, and to meet my ex’s parents’ new dog, so it’s not a complete write-off.

  THE FOLLOWING WEEK, I head north, in neither hope nor expectation. An Australian, such as myself, who seeks triumph in Leeds, labours in a dauntingly long shadow. In July 1930, on his first tour of England, a 21-year-old batsman from Bowral, New South Wales, called Donald Bradman, piled up 334 runs at Headingley. “As to its extraordinary merit,” declared the venerable cricket annual Wisden of this titanic innings, “there could be no two opinions.” It is humbling indeed, then, to arrive for my reading at the Borders outlet on the shopping street of Briggate and discover that I have, in a very real sense, equalled Bradman’s accomplishment, at least if one values each attendee at a book reading as worth 55.66 runs, and doesn’t make any deductions for the fact that one is a member of staff, and another is a palpably insane transient seeking shelter from the astonishing rain, and who spends most of the time muttering into a mobile phone—a call which, I cannot help but suspect, has been going on for some while, possibly some years, and does not involve anyone else.

  Nevertheless, that leaves four honest-to-goodness members of the reading public whose presence has not been compelled by professional obligation or voices in their head, and I am genuinely pleased to see them (I am, following last week’s debacle in Bristol, genuinely pleased to see anybody). I give my explanation of myself, and my book. I Wouldn’t Start From Here is, I tell them, the first history of the 21st century: a publishing landmark. Given the tumultuous rain, the meagre attendance, and the ever-present, over-arching knowledge that I’m never going to sell a thousandth as much as Bill fucking Bryson, this feels pleasingly preposterous. I do a couple of brief readings: one I haven’t done before, about traipsing around some of the less glamorous reaches of Kosovo with soldiers serving with KFOR, then the reliable crowd pleaser recalling my first meeting with Edi Rama, the extraordinary mayor of Tirana, Albania. Afterwards, a pleasant young chap called Sean wants to argue about politics for a bit. As I have nothing better to do but ink my signature into the forlorn pile of books stacked on the table, in the hope that an “autographed copy” sticker will persuade someone to part with £8.99, I’m happy to argue back. Sean takes his leave, and my scrawling is interrupted by a tall, twitching, bearded apparition in a mouldy greatcoat and deerstalker hat.

  “Have I missed something?” he asks.

  Not really, I tell him.

  “Did you write this?” he continues, lifting one of the volumes.

  I did, I confirm.

  He—I swear I’m not making this up—whips a magnifying glass from a pocket, and regards the cover intently.

  “I’ve never heard of you,” he concludes.

  Him and everybody else in explored space, I reflect, as I plod out into the rain, back down a near ankle-deep Briggate, to tonight’s lodgings at the Malmaison hotel. I order room service, and watch a DVD of a recent Australian Rules football fixture which my folks have sent me. The forces of all that is good and righteous (Geelong) vanquish the evil empire (Hawthorn). I reassure myself that this is all going to be worth it eventually.

  “Eventually,” happily, turns out to mean “almost exactly twenty-four hours.” York is brilliant. Not just the event, but York itself. Beautiful, walkable, riddled with fantastic antique bookstores. I find a 1923 edition of Hilaire Belloc’s history of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. I decide that £30 asking price is worth it, on the grounds that it serves as both a heartening totem (it is, after all, a book about conflict by someone who liked to think himself funny) and a useful dose of perspective (in that it reminds that some journeys are a rather greater struggle than the one I am presently undertaking).

  When I report to York’s Borders store, things look unpromising, which is to say about like I expected them to look. Just two of the seats arranged in front of the table heaped with books are occupied. The staff tell me not to worry—they’ve been giving this plenty, printing their own posters, building displays, mentioning it to customers, and they’re quietly confident. They’re also absolutely right. By 6:30, all twenty-odd chairs are filled. I read the section about meeting Tirana’s mayor again, and a bit about talking to American soldiers in Baghdad just after they’d taken the city. When I solicit questions, there’s an intriguing contribution from an officer’s mess-sounding sort who explains that his interest was piqued because he’d also worked in the Middle East. I ask in what capacity. “I’d rather not say,” he beams (later, after everyone else leaves, he explains himself further, leaving me in no doubt that he’s genuine—however, were I to pass on what he relates, I’d be in the invidious and inconvenient position of having to kill all of you). Others want to know how I’d characterise my politics (“Increasingly bewildered,” I answer) and there’s a good discussion about the intersection of tragedy and comedy. Best of all, at least from the perspective of the author whose ego has, of late, endured a bit of a kicking, there’s an actual queue for signed copies.

  Nevertheless, as I contemplate the looming conquest of Scotland, I feel like I’d rather be me than Napoleon. Which is unusual.

  BY THE TIME my train from York pulls into Edinburgh’s Waverley station, I am ensconced in a not unpleasant fug of cheerful resignation. I’m already prepared for Scotland to go badly. A scheduled appearance at a Borders store in Glasgow has been cancelled. According to the email from the store’s management, this was for reasons beyond anyone’s control, but I was pretty sure I’d detected, between the lines, sentiments to the effect of “Who the fuck is he? He couldn’t pull a crowd if he was paying people fifty quid a time to take his book away. Why do you keep sending us these losers? Can’t you get us Paul Theroux, or Charley Boorman, or at least somebody we’ve ever heard of?”

  As for Edinburgh, I know I haven’t a hope. I’ve arrived in the middle of the city’s annual festival, without even any official attachment to the literary component of the event—and even for big names with bottomless resources, attracting attention in Edinburgh during the festival is difficult, for the fairly fundamental reason that in Edinburgh during the festival it often feels like there are more performers than there are punters. For the duration of the festival, the normally famously staid city goes, in the most genial and least pejorative sense of the word, crazy. By which I mean that if, after the previous Edinburgh Festival I’d attended, in 2006, I’d entered some hypothetical contest to find the most bizarre one-line reminiscence of the event, my own submission (“I hosted a three-night stand at the Underbelly by England’s greatest living songwriter, shook hands with Sean Connery, accidentally kidnapped a waitress and compared favourite Onion stories with a former Vice-President of the United States”), though no word of a lie, would have struggled to crack the top ten thousand.

  What minimal delusions of grandeur I may still be harbouring are vanquished by the experience of apprising myself of my accommodations. The only parts of the bedsheets through which it would be difficult to read a newspaper are the stains which are holding them together, the ventilator shaft outside the only window offers an intriguing suggestion of what life might be like inside a 747 engine, and the plumbing is obsolete and diabolical even by British standards. However, the festival is on, which means that they are charging my publisher for the night what they would probably, at any other time of year, be grateful to get away with charging for the freehold of the entire hotel, a
nd its indolent, surly staff.

  Still, I reflect, I shouldn’t complain. I should struggle, at moments such as these, to spare a thought for the millions for whom a published book, and a subsequent publicity tour, however ill-attended, are wildest dreams plus tax. I tell myself that, in some sense, I’m doing this not for myself, but for all those thwarted authors with yellowing manuscripts in the bottoms of their wardrobes, sheaves of rejection slips in a desk drawer—and probably, I reflect further, as I grimly roll up a newspaper in preparation for single combat with the moose-sized cockroach who presides over the bathroom, some semblance of a settled, functional, adult life.

  My only engagement in Edinburgh is at Word Power, an independent bookshop on West Nicolson Street. It is, of course, hopelessly cliched to become sentimental about independent bookshops, menaced as they are by the internet and by the chain stores I’ve spent the last couple of weeks visiting. It is also absolutely right and proper to become sentimental about independent bookshops, especially ones like Word Power, which compensate for their relative lack of shelf space by their surfeit of enthusiasm and knowledge. The rampant nature of their optimism is attested by the twenty-odd seats they’ve arranged in front of the lectern.

  Failing to pull double figures in Edinburgh at the height of the festival on a sunny Friday afternoon prompts, I’m pleased to discover, significantly less in the way of existential despair than tanking just as badly in Leeds on a rainy Tuesday night. After all, I can reassure myself, it’s Edinburgh during festival. If I didn’t have to be here, I wouldn’t be here either.

  8

  NO SLEEP TILL TRAVNIK

  China Drum in Bosnia

  JULY 1996

  MORE THAN ANY other piece in the book, this account of a little-known punk group’s attempt to be the first British rock band to play in post-war Bosnia requires a glossary. Not only does it contain cultural references which are specific to the English, it contains cultural references which are specific to the sub-group of the English who hail from the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in northeast England—or, as these folks are known, by themselves and by others, Geordies. The stereotypical Geordie is cheerful, funny, insatiably—if not occasionally wearisomely—sociable, utterly likeable, fond of a drink and distinguished by a rich accent and picturesque dialect all but completely baffling to outsiders (indeed, many of the words attributed to the band in what follows are not so much quotations as translations). It is intended only as the highest of compliments to the stout fellows of China Drum to observe that I remember them all, in every sense that matters, as hilariously stereotypical Geordies.

  So, some explanations are in order—many of which may make more sense after reading the piece, but anyway. Being Geordies, China Drum are all ardent supporters of Newcastle United Football Club, whose fans are known, en masse, as the Toon Army (Newcastle, unusually for an English conurbation of its size, is a one-club city, so Newcastle United are held to be representing “the town”—or, when rendered into Geordie, “the toon”). And, being from Newcastle or thereabouts, China Drum affect to dislike nobody in the world more than the people of Sunderland, just thirteen miles down the road—hence the gloating singalongs about Sunderland’s football team, who had, the previous season, come off the worse in the both of the Newcastle vs. Sunderland derby matches (Freud’s famous “narcissism of minor differences”—the syndrome which dictates that people tend to hate most intensely those most similar to themselves—will find a means of expression everywhere, and the recent history of the destination of China Drum’s journey demonstrates that there are far more destructive vents for it than football rivalries).

  Frequent reference is made, below, to attempts to recreate, in assorted carparks and forecourts along the way, key moments from something called Euro ’96. This was that summer’s European Football Championships, which had been held in England, and in which England’s team had acquitted themselves in the manner for which they have become justly famous, i.e., fumbling, fluking and flattering to deceive through the group stages before being knocked out in the semi-finals in a penalty shoot-out against Germany. The players referred to en route all took part in the tournament: England and Geordie icon Alan Shearer; England’s Paul Gascoigne, a player who might have joined the pantheon of all-time greats had his surging genius on the field been allied with the smallest soupçon of common sense off it; Gary McAllister and Colin Hendry, who had been members of Scotland’s characteristically hapless squad.

  England’s infuriating exit from Euro ’96 may have contributed to the anti-Hunnish sentiments which were expressed during the pertinent portion of our drive, but as the English rarely require much in the way of prompting to loudly remind Fritz who won the bloody war anyway, probably not (the admonishment not to mention the war, obviously delivered ironically, is a quote from the iconic 1970s BBC sitcom Fawlty Towers, and far from the only one of these coming up). The Dambusters March also mentioned in this context is the theme from the 1954 film about the heroics of the Royal Air Force’s 617 squadron, and their dashing assaults on the Ruhr dams in 1943: the tune is most often heard, these days, during the pre-match ceremonies of England vs. Germany football fixtures, when it is taken lustily up by the England faithful to drown out the playing of “Deutschland Über Alles.”

  China Drum split up in 2000, after three albums and around a million times that many road miles, most of them logged in vehicles even less sturdy and glamorous than the one we drove to Bosnia. According to an email from singer Adam Lee—announced with the Geordie salutation “Aalreet!”—it sounds like they’re all doing well. Bill McQueen teaches guitar, drives a truck and raises four children. Dave McQueen is also married with two kids and has what sounds like some species of grown-up job. Adam has his own landscaping company, a wife and a couple of children and a new band called Sickhoose (this translates into English as “Sick House”: www.myspace.com/sickhoose). Phil Barton, their former manager, is married with a baby daughter, and owns two excellent record shops—Sister Ray in Soho, London, and Rounder in Brighton. You should go to them, if you’re ever in the vicinity, and spend money.

  I occasionally bump into Max, The Serious Road Trip’s photographer, while wandering the London Borough of Hackney, where we both live. He remains a decent chap, for a Kiwi (this wholly gratuitous barb inserted by way of demonstration that we peoples of the South Seas are as prone to the internecine conflict fuelled by the narcissism of minor difference as the denizens of the Balkans, and of Tyneside).

  THE VAN PARKED outside the rental office in King’s Cross is a battered white Iveco that appears to be held together by rust and gaffer tape. The legend “Midnight Flyer” is written in purple above the front passenger door, indicating either that this van cut rather more of a dash in its heyday, or that a previous owner possessed an overdeveloped sense of irony. My first thought is that we’ve got roughly as much chance of flying it to the moon as we have of getting it, and us, to Sarajevo and back in one piece. In fact, I’m prepared to offer decent odds against it getting around the next corner without losing a wheel.

  There is a simple reason why we’ve had this four-wheeled cousin of the Raft of the Medusa foisted upon us.

  “I told them where we were taking it,” explains Phil Barton.

  Phil is the manager of Newcastle rock group China Drum. When Phil first spoke to me about this trip his band were planning, some weeks ago now, there was no mention of decrepit rattletraps with cracked windows and—oh, this is reassuring—a side door that won’t open from the inside. The idea was that China Drum were going to travel to the former Yugoslavia in style, in a Hercules cargo aircraft belonging to the Royal Air Force. The plan was that they would play one show for British troops stationed in the Croatian port of Split, another for the peacekeepers serving with the NATO-led United Nations Implementation Force (IFOR) in Sarajevo and, finally, one for Sarajevo’s public. This sounded like great fun, a good story, and I asked to be counted in.

  Days before lift-off, the Ministry o
f Defence contacted Barton, muttered something about “operational difficulties” and informed him that the trip was cancelled. China Drum, having announced their intentions, and having heard that people in Sarajevo were looking forward to it, and being men of their word, decided to go anyway. Feeling that I could hardly cry off just because I wasn’t going to get a ride in a cool camouflage-coloured aeroplane, I said I’d go too. I have been soothing myself ever since with visions of a gleaming deluxe tour bus, replete with tinted windows, comfortable bunks, televisions, stereos, sofas and microwave ovens (I felt I could live without the jacuzzi, if necessary).

  “It does have tinted windows,” observes Barton. “Well, one tinted window. And a video.”

  The man is as incurably, ludicrously optimistic as a Somalian travel agent. Even if this thing gets us as far as the Bosnian border, which it won’t, it’s going to disintegrate as soon as it hits the first shell-hole. We might as well be trying to take Cape Horn on a windsurfer.

  “Well, it’s all we could get.”

  Still, I take it the driver knows the roads well.

  “He’s never been.”

  Jesus. The truck is split into two parts: the band’s gear goes in the back, the people in the rest. There are seats for two in the front, and three rows of three seats in the back; the first of these faces backwards to allow space for a small table. It might be grudgingly conceded that half a dozen people could ride in relative comfort inside for a short distance. There are eleven of us labouring under the delusion that we’re going to Sarajevo: myself, Phil, all three of China Drum, China Drum’s tour manager, two crew, one driver and two photographers, on a round trip of about 2500 miles. This heap will be our home, more or less, for a week.