Rock and Hard Places Read online

  “Hey!” he announces, gesturing at the television. “That’s, um . . . whatsit Square, we played there!”

  It’s a story from Moscow. Boris Yeltsin’s fallen over again, or something.

  “Red Square,” says Liam.

  “That’s what I mean,” says Keith. “I mean, you spend your life while you’re growing up watching these geezers with fur hats marching up and down it with guns and bombs, and then one day you find yourself playing in it, and it doesn’t really register at the time, but three months later, like . . . well, like this, you’ll see it on telly and think fuck me, did I really do that?”

  “We don’t get involved with the politics,” says Liam, “and we don’t get involved in the set-up of the gig, although I know this one has been a nightmare, and still is.”

  He isn’t joking. As he speaks, we don’t know if the show is going ahead. It had been called off for the first time three days before, after an argument about the suitability of the venue. Other arrangements had been swiftly made, and it was all on again. This morning, The Prodigy have seen these other arrangements for the first time, and are less than impressed. An open-air stage has been erected in a car park near the Green Line that divided Christian East Beirut from Muslim West Beirut during the war.

  “The power,” explains an incredulous Keith, “comes from the mains lead, which has been dug out of the ground, sawn through, and the bare wires from that are taped to the gear, no insulation whatsoever—I tell you, it’s fucking lethal.”

  The weather isn’t helping. We’ve heard reports that the fierce wind, which is currently turning Beirut’s formidable reserves of dust into a million tiny tornadoes of corrosive, eye-stinging grit, has also taken the canopy off the stage, exposing the dubious electrics to the rain which looks sure to follow.

  “I’d be betting against it, at this point,” admits Liam, glumly.

  AT ABOUT SIX o’clock, four hours before The Prodigy are due on stage, we get word that all systems are go. Paul Fairs, The Prodigy’s tour manager, explains that there has been a fair bit of telephone traffic this afternoon between The Prodigy’s lawyers, the promoter’s lawyers and the Lebanese Ministry of the Interior, and there is a general feeling that “if we don’t do this show, we may have trouble getting home.”

  Down at the venue, as the first punters begin to arrive, I speak to Philip Kfoury, the worried-looking twenty-three-year-old whose company, Power Productions, has brought The Prodigy to this unlikely destination. He reckons to have sunk US $250,000 in putting tonight on, and reckons he’ll lose most of it, though he’s hoping the kudos he accrues for getting The Prodigy this far will pay back his losses with interest in the future.

  His difficulties, he explains, have been manifold. Not the least has been trying to get publicity for the gig without bringing The Prodigy’s often contentious subject matter to the attention of the Lebanese authorities, who are not a rocking bunch. They have previously deepsixed proposed Beirut concerts by Pink Floyd and Aerosmith, and once turned Iron Maiden away at the airport. It is sadly unlikely that any of these have been purely aesthetic judgments.

  The Floyd, the Smith and the Maiden are three bands who, in their own countries, are rightly regarded by all bar the most demented wowsers as about as grave a threat to public morality as a seaside pantomime. The Prodigy, however, are nowhere near their artistic sell-by date, and are still capable of inciting genuine controversy. They quoted Josef Goebbels, albeit ironically, on the sleeve of their The Fat Of The Land album—though this may have been a ruse to distract attention from an even less forgivable inscription elsewhere on the same cover (“Guest vocals, Crispian Mills”). They recently had a hit with a single called “Smack My Bitch Up” (and, I thought, handled the subsequent controversy about misogyny and violence badly; Liam Howlett, instead of defending his view of women to every scandalised hack in pursuit of an easy why-oh-why story, should have issued a statement saying it was about feeding heroin to his dog).

  The really important thing about “Smack My Bitch Up” is that it’s a great way to start a rock concert. The Prodigy appear on time on their jerry-rigged carpark stage. Keith and The Prodigy’s other two rapper/dancers—the unfeasibly tall Leeroy Thornhill and the kilt-clad Maxim Reality—make up in presence and activity what the set lacks in The Prodigy’s usual volume, and the overwhelmingly teenage crowd, mostly children of Beirut’s wealthy, make up in decibles what they lack in numbers (the tickets were a distinctly uncharitable US $30 a go, which is why only 5,000 of 6,500 have been sold; also, about another 5,000 people have spotted that an excellent, and free, view of the show is afforded from a nearby highway flyover).

  The security presence is considerable. Groups of camouflaged soldiers huddle at both sides of the stage, bearing the baleful expressions of people who feel that their current assignment is beneath them. A few songs in, they get bored enough to pounce on one of The Prodigy’s lawyers, who they have spotted taking pictures with his instamatic. He is hustled off to their makeshift command post, where they attempt to confiscate the camera. I push through the crowd after him, and try something that occasionally works in situations where people are basically confused and nobody speaks any English, which is waving my press card and barking drivel in a crisp, authoritative manner. I find Bob Dylan lyrics helpful: “Maggie comes fleet foot! Face full of black soot!” They give him back his camera and let him go with a warning.

  The Prodigy leave the stage suddenly after about forty minutes, and the mob applaud politely and start filing out. I haven’t seen The Prodigy for years myself, but something doesn’t seem quite right. It seems a short set to play, having come all this way, and they haven’t done “Firestarter,” either. Ten minutes later, they return, play another half dozen songs, and leave again.

  At the hotel afterwards, Liam explains that this gap was due to a light sprinkling of rain that was threatening to turn the stage into something that might have given new meaning to the phrase “live circuit.” They’d come back on when the cloud had passed.

  In the Lancaster’s bar, Liam decides that we should all go out and have ourselves a night on the town, or at least on the parts of it that aren’t being torn down or rebuilt. This notion is scotched by the hotel’s security staff, who seem concerned that we may end up staying in Beirut rather longer than we’d planned. “Not safe,” they say, making that Mediterranean finger-waving gesture beloved of Italian footballers disputing offside calls. By way of compromise, Giz is dispatched to reconnoitre a nightclub around the corner. “Not good,” he says, on returning. “Old blokes in suits with really young women, and everyone wearing lots and lots of gold.”

  Liam gets the drinks in. Keith goes to bed.

  BY BREAKFAST TIME on Sunday, The Prodigy have left the building, departing Beirut on the early flight. Mat from the NME, the lawyer type whose camera caused all the trouble at the gig and I have stayed, determined to do some sightseeing. This is less easy than it sounds. It could be said that Beirut has not yet come to terms with the idea of tourists wandering around it for its own sake, especially if you were trying to win some kind of award for understatement.

  We explain to a driver from the hotel that we’d like to see Beirut’s peace monument. He doesn’t appear to have heard of it, which is a surprise, as we’d have thought that a seven-storey high sculpture made of tanks and concrete would be a hard thing to miss. One of us has a picture of it in a guidebook, which we show him. He charges off into Beirut’s genially chaotic traffic.

  The peace monument, the work of a French artist called Armand Fernandez, was unveiled in 1996 outside the Lebanese Ministry of Defence complex on the outskirts of Beirut. It consists, as we’d explained to our driver, of a couple of dozen tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery pieces stacked on top of each other and held into place by a tower of concrete. It is every bit as bewildering, ugly and ludicrous as the civil war it commemorates.

  Naturally, we wish to photograph this monstrosity. Our driver asks some soldiers standing
nearby if this is permissible. Armies are supposed to operate according to a chain of command; the Lebanese military has a chain of indecision. The soldiers don’t know, or don’t want to decide, so they go and get their senior officer. He, in turn, goes and asks a completely different bunch of soldiers, who go and get their senior officer, who asks the first soldiers the driver had spoken to.

  After a lengthy discussion, a verdict is reached. We may take photographs of the monument, but only from one of three preordained angles, lest we accidentally get any of the MoD buildings themselves into our pictures. This is only reasonable, given the undoubted havoc my family and friends could wreak with underexposed, badly framed long-distance shots of a nondescript office block.

  On the way back to the hotel, we pass the racetrack, where a meeting is in progress. We decide this looks like fun, and ask the driver to come back in a couple of hours. We stand amid the entirely male crowd in the crumbling grandstand and watch the horses go round the red dirt track a few times, admire the picturesque backdrop of shattered buildings for a bit, completely fail to decipher the betting system, get bored, and resolve to leave.

  “No,” says the guard at the gate.

  What?

  “No,” he repeats, indicating that we may not leave the course until after the day’s racing is complete. There are still four races to go. We’re bored now. We make to push past him.

  “No,” he says, again.

  “Don’t be silly,” says Mat, and tries to prise his hand from the gate.

  “No,” he says, again.

  We do a bit of standing around looking impatient, folding and unfolding our arms and stomping our feet. After a few minutes of this, the guard relents and asks us to follow him. He leads us back inside the course to the on-site police station. A policeman fills out a few forms and leads us to a sweaty man in an office, who directs us to another office with three other men in it. I wonder if this is what happened to Terry Waite. The three other men all sign one of the forms filled out by the policeman, and send us back to the last office, where the sweaty man stamps it and gives it back to the policeman, who then writes something in Arabic on a piece of paper and gives it to Mat. The process takes nearly twenty minutes.

  The piece of paper gets us through the gate where we’d been stopped the first time, but we get pulled up again on the other side of the course at the main entrance. Mat flourishes the paper with a triumphant cackle, but there’s a problem—the note gives permission for three people to leave the track early, and there are now four of us. An expatriate American, who has seen us going, is trying to sneak out on our ticket of leave. He apologises, sheepishly, and is led back to the stand while we’re waved out of the gate.

  “We’ll light a candle for you,” Mat calls after him.

  We spend the afternoon tooling about on the Corniche, the wide pedestrian promenade that winds along Beirut’s waterfront, and fills up every weekend with perambulating families, preening adolescents and kamikaze rollerbladers. Despite the fact that all present should have grown out of such things, we visit Luna Park, a rusty, melancholy little funfair. Mat and I take a couple of turns on the dodgems, though having now spent a couple of days running for cover from Beirut’s traffic, we suspect that preteen Lebanese regard these less as a sideshow ride, and more like the beginnings of driver education.

  Luna Park also boasts the world’s most pissweak ghost train, which could certainly be livened up with some local colour—they could replace the decrepit plastic skeletons and flaking rubber ghouls with animatronic keffiyeh-clad fanatics which throw blankets over the passengers, stick guns in their ears, handcuff them to a radiator and yell at them about Israel. Thrillseeking tourists would be round the block. As things are, the ghost train is a good deal less daunting a prospect than the ferris wheel, which looks to be on the verge of slipping its moorings and rolling out into the sea. Out the front of Luna Park, a street trader is doing a roaring trade in toy rifles.

  WE HAVE A night free. We have directions, thoughtfully provided by some journalists from Beirut’s English-language paper, The Lebanon Daily Star. We are going out. We flag a taxi. This is a mistake.

  “We want to go here,” says Mat, slowly and patiently, pointing at our hand-drawn map. “It’s a club called Zinc. Do you know it?”

  “Very good hotel,” confirms the driver. “I know very good hotel for you.”

  We have high hopes for Zinc. We have been told that it’s where all Beirut’s cool and happening people go. We have been assured that it is even more convivial than Che’s, the place we’d visited two nights previously, where the walls were covered in portraits of Senor Guevara, and people we didn’t know kept buying us drinks.

  “Very good hotel,” says the driver again.

  He plants his accelerator foot, and we head off in a cacophonous symphony of squealing tyres and honking horn. I suddenly realise what it is John Coltrane’s records have reminded me of all these years.

  “Very good hotel,” says the driver again, and again every five minutes after that. We ignore him until we begin to get the sinking feeling that he knows Beirut as well as we do. I am sure, for example, that we have been past this tank before.

  “Have you,” asks Mat, evenly, as we pass another checkpoint for the third time, “got any idea where you’re going? I mean, any idea at all?”

  “I know very good hotel for you.”

  Oh, God. Do you speak any other English at all?

  “Very good hotel.”

  There’s not much we can do but sit tight, see where we end up, and try not to dwell on what became of a few other visitors to Beirut who sat tight in the backs of Mercedes-Benzes, waiting to see where they’d end up, and trying not to dwell on what became of other visitors to Beirut who sat tight in the backs of Mercedes-Benzes, etcetera.

  “Very good hotel for you.”

  After blundering through another dozen dark, demolished blocks, apparently at random, we pull up in front of what does, we would normally be happy to agree, look like a very good hotel.

  “Very good hotel,” grins the driver, triumphantly. “Very good hotel for you.”

  Presumably he picks up tourists all the time who are wandering around Beirut of an evening with no baggage and no idea where they’re staying that night.

  “We don’t want a fucking hotel,” explains Mat, barely audible over the sound of his teeth gritting. “We’re quite happy with the one we’ve got. We want to go HERE,” he says, pointing forlornly at the map.

  “Very good hotel.”

  We pay him and head off on foot. We ask directions from the soldier at the checkpoint we’ve been driving past, from a variety of angles, for the last hour. He’s got no idea, and the streets around here look depressingly unpopulated. On a unanimous show of hands, we admit defeat. We stop another cab.

  “Do you,” we ask, broken men each, “know the way to the Hard Rock Café?”

  5

  EVERY WHICH WAY BUT MOOSE

  Green Day in Canada

  OCTOBER 1995

  THE PREMISE FOR this trip, originally undertaken as a cover story for Melody Maker, was that it was pretty weird that Green Day, of all people, were quite possibly the biggest band in the world at the time. The idea that Green Day might still have a plausible claim on that title fourteen years later would, at the time, have struck all parties concerned—including, doubtless, Green Day themselves—as entrancingly preposterous. While I don’t much care for Green Day’s recent umpty-platinum punk rock operas American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown, I don’t begrudge Green Day their success: I’m always able to recall meeting three people whose hearts, it seemed to me, were lodged in the right place with unusual unbudgeability.

  I’d like to conclude this introduction with an unreserved apology to the people of Fredericton, New Brunswick, for the fusillade of cheap shots taken at their town throughout this piece. They reflect far more poorly on the hapless assassin than his intended target, and while I did consider consigning them to
oblivion with repeated, rueful tappings upon the “delete” key, I decided to leave the passages in question, not only in the interests of maintaining the integrity of the original piece, but also by way of visiting richly merited self-inflicted punishment upon the author for having flaunted his twenty-six-year-old smart-arsery quite so egregiously.

  FREDERICTON IS THE capital city of the Canadian province of New Brunswick. When any place touts as its principal claim to fame the fact that it is the capital city of the Canadian province of New Brunswick, you’d guess that it’s not got much going for it, and in Fredericton’s case you’d be right. Fredericton consists mostly of the kind of wooden houses that have flagpoles in their front yards, and is populated largely by the kind of people who’d fly flags on those poles. The standard joke to make about a town like this is to suggest that it’s the kind of place where folks still point at aeroplanes, but there’s something stilted and slow-motion about the way people here talk and walk and think that makes me reckon they’d be more likely to fling themselves to the ground in supplication to whichever strange god has filled their skies with giant metal eagles. Older residents can probably still remember a time when local people ate hay and worshipped the sun.

  Other than its status as the administrative hotbed of New Brunswick, Fredericton also boasts a university: the imaginatively named University of New Brunswick. Inside the campus is the Aitken Centre, an ice hockey arena that serves as home ground for the Fredericton Canadiens, a nursery side for their infinitely more illustrious Montreal namesakes. This makes the Fredericton Canadiens roughly the hockey equivalent of Tottenham Hotspur reserves. Nonetheless, perhaps due to the—entirely plausible—possibility that there’s not a lot else happening around here on the long winter nights, at least not since witch-burning was outlawed, the rink provides seating for up to 8,000 of Fredericton’s population of 60,000.